12 of the Dumbest Rituals and Traditions of the British Royal Family

I’m Irish-American, so I should have disdain for the British monarchy from both sides of the hyphen. I had been indifferent my whole life...that is, until Queen Elizabeth II died and the incessant “the Queen is dead” coverage revealed what a bunch of fucking freaks the royal family is. Now I’m obsessed.

I’m fascinated with every weird detail of the royal family’s ridiculous lives, from their magical stone to their royal sex chairs, unicorn horns, and ludicrously lavish lifestyles. Below are only 12 of the roughly eight billion strange customs, details, and rituals that surround the deaths and lives of the British monarchy.

(Don’t be too mad at my if you’re “into” royals. I get it—the king and queen are mascots for a dying empire, like Gritty is for Philadelphia—but you have to admit that the royals are pretty bizarre.)

We’re into a 12-day period of mourning in which major events are canceled, bicycle racks are closed, condom machines stopped dispensing condoms, and TV channels switched to all-queen, all-day programming. All of that is amusing and weird (and I’m sure a lot of British people are happy to get a few days off work), but on the day of the queen’s funeral, everything shuts down, including food banks and hospitals. That’s not-so-amusing. There’s something end-of-the-world about a nation letting hungry people starve so they can properly mourn a ceremonial figurehead whose only claim to importance is the accident of her birth.

The Stone of Destiny (or Stone of Scone) is an unassuming red sandstone block that various kings and queens sat upon during their coronation ceremonies beginning in 841 A.D. That’s a replica of it pictured above. The new King, Charles III, will sit his royal hinder upon a special throne with the stone inside it when he becomes king in the coming days. As you’d expect from the British, the stone was stolen. It was Scotland’s magical king-stone until 1296, when King Edward I took it as a spoil of war and relocated it to Westminster Abbey. There it lay until 1950, when four Scottish college students stole the stone and brought it back to home. The stone’s liberation lasted four months, until the British police figured out where it went and retrieved it. No charges were filed to avoid a political firestorm. The coronation stone was broken during the heist, then repaired in Scotland, but not before the thieves inserted a note inside it. No one knows what the note says. It’s probably, “eff you.” All of these things happened on planet earth and involved grown-up people.

For hundreds of years, beekeepers across Europe have engaged in the folk-magic tradition of informing their bees of major events in the keepers’ lives like weddings, births, and funerals. Sometimes they make up little songs about the events; sometimes they just blurt it out.

The sad duty of informing the bees of Queen Elizabeth II’s death fell to royal beekeeper, John Chapple, who recently told the royal bees that King Charles III would be their new master.

According to Chapple, he knocked on each hive and solemnly said: “The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you.” Then draped black on their hives to show that the bees are in mourning—because the bees really give a shit.

Then I like to think that the bees misunderstood and assumed that Charles III would be their new queen, and thousands of drones lined up to penetrate him, feed him royal jelly, and await the bountiful larvae he would lay in the royal tradition.

It’s good that the bees don’t ask too many questions about how the new rulers of the United Kingdom (and their hive) are determined, because their tiny bee-minds would be overloaded trying to figure it all out. But here’s how the identity of the monarch is determined:

In 1688, James II fled England, and the English parliament flexed its political muscle and offered the throne to Jame’s daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, instead of his son. Since then, Parliament has basically decided who is king or queen, but they use a strict criteria. The new ruler must be a descendants of Princess Sophia, the Electress of Hanover and granddaughter of James I, and a protestant in communion with the Church of England who swears to preserve the Church of England and Church of Scotland. Roman Catholics are expressly forbidden from ruling.

The actual order of succession goes through Charles III’s family, and has been worked out down to the 23rd person, Queen Elizabeth’s a one-year-old great-grandson, Lucas Tindall. With each death, Lucas moves closer to the throne, and all the sweet, sweet swans that come with it.

According to the David Barber, the royal family’s royal swan marker, “The king has the right to claim any swan swimming in open waters, unmarked, if he so wishes.”

“Swan marker is my real-title,” Barber did not add. “It’s a job, not some made-up thing!”

The royal ownership of swans dates back to the middle ages, when the fowl was a delicacy, and the king wanted to make sure only he and his rich-ass friends could eat them. These days, the king’s power over swans is demonstrated in the annual “swan upping,” a swan census where the health and well-being of the nations swans is determined.

The head of the royal family also owns all of the dolphins in the UK, six royal residences, the biggest diamond in the world, Westminster Abbey, the British Seabed, the rights to all Scottish gold mines, and the best seat at Wimbledon.

Everything about the royal family is stupid and insane.

The royal family hasn’t announced Queen Elizabeth II’s cause of death, saying only that she died “peacefully,” but I’m assuming that she was murdered, because that’s what happened to King George V.

In 1936, George was comatose at Sandringham Castle, but he wouldn’t die fast enough, so his physician Lord Dawson sped up the process by injecting him with fatal doses of morphine and cocaine.

Dawson wrote that he only did it so the king would die in time for the announcement to be carried “in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals.’’

The whole thing is so strange: George V was well enough on the morning of his death to meet with his counselors and, according to Dawson himself, his last words were “God damn you” directed at Dawson as he fell asleep for the last time.

A magical stone isn’t the only “I can’t believe grown-adults take this nonsense seriously” aspect of royal coronations. There’s also the secret anointing ritual in which the new monarch does something unknown with a special, secret oil.

During her coronation in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II’s oil was reportedly a mixture of sesame and olive oil scented with civet, orange flowers, roses, jasmine, cinnamon, musk, benzoin, and ambergris (aka whale vomit). The details of the whale puke anointing ritual are secret. I would assume the monarch does something really weird and creepy with the royal, essential oil, but the royals are such dull, witless people, they probably don’t, which is worse.

The current crown jewels include the largest diamond on earth, presumably stolen, as part of a shiny scepter for the monarch to hold and when they want to look fancy. But back in the 16th century, the royal family’s treasures included a unicorn horn.

Queen Elizabeth I purchased the “Horn of Windsor” in the 16th century, and it was believed that drinking from the horn would neutralize poison in a liquid—although it doesn’t seem like anyone was ever convinced enough to try it.

Of course it wasn’t actually a unicorn’s horn; it was the horn of a narwal, a sea unicorn. It was thought back then that the ocean contained equivalents of everything on land, so a sea-unicorn’s horn was just as good as a real unicorn’s horn. Sadly, the horn of Windsor was lost during the English Civil War in the 1640s.

Back when the soon-to-be king was lowly Prince Charles, he cheated on his wife, Princess Diana, with Camilla Parker-Bowles, who was also married at the time. Bowles, the world’s poster child for hanging in there, is now the Queen-Consort of the United Kingdom.

I’m not bringing this up to shame these people for having affairs (shit happens, ya know?), but to point out that in 1989, a “rogue radio enthusiast” recorded phone call between the two that included this exchange:

CHARLES: Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!

CAMILLA: (laughing) What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? (Both laugh). Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.

CHARLES: Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck! (Laughs)

I’m not kink-shaming here, but come on. You’re the king—surely you have better game than this.

Charles should take a lesson from King Edward VII. “Dirty Bertie” was such a legendary debauched monarch, he had a special sex chair designed to get busy with French prostitutes. Kept at Parisian brothel, the “siege d’amour” was designed so the corpulent king could coordinate coitus with two courtesans, concurrently or consecutively. No one is really sure how it worked—it’s a weird two-level chair with handles and stirrups—but the speculation is that it held his massive belly out of the way during his trysts.

Check out this blog post for reader’s ideas of how the chair might have functioned. I agree with the reader who suggested it functioned mainly as a place for the cat to sleep.

Since the early 1900s, the royal family has been observing a holiday tradition where they weigh guests before and after Christmas dinner. It’s not a fat-shaming thing; it’s a fat-celebrating thing—guests who have gained three pounds are deemed to have had a really nice, festive meal. But leaving aside the inadvisability of eating any amount of British food, three pounds is a lot. What is wrong with these people?

On Christmas Eve, those hilarious royals gather in front of the Christmas tree to give each other novelty gifts. Past presents have reportedly included a spoon that reads “cereal killer,” a “grow your own girlfriend” kit given to Harry when he was single, and a singing “Big Mouth Bass” for the Queen mum.

In a way, it’s humanizing to think of the royal family giving each other gag gifts, but in another way, it’s troubling. First, because these are the most unfunny novelty presents I’ve ever heard of, but secondly, there’s a whiff of, “These are the kinds things the peasants give each other. My real gift to you is a unicorn horn and priceless artifacts my great grandfather stole from Egypt.”