Word: queen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When she was ten years old her father, having done his royal duty, died, and Wilhelmina became Queen of The Netherlands. She had a lonely time of it. Denied the companionship of other children, she lavished affection and attention on her dolls-scolded them, pampered them, admonished them that "if you are naughty I shall make you into a princess and then you won't have any other little children to play with...
...imperious girl ("Do all these people belong to me?"), she was also slim, proud, and pretty. The French dramatist Edmond Rostand called her "The little lily queen who rules over the kingdom of tulips...
...Luck & Good. Queen Wilhelmina's choice of a consort was Henry Wladimir, youngest son of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Henry was a taxidermist's dream of a German princeling, a beady-eyed, mean-spirited fellow, of whom the best that can be said is that he learned his place (considerably below the throne) and that, after eight years of marriage, he fathered Princess Juliana...
Juliana had better marital luck than her mother. Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was another German princeling, and vaguely suspected of Nazi sympathies to boot. But his record of intense loyalty to his Queen and adopted country during the war has made Prince Bernhard the most popular man in Holland today. In the last year of the war, he served as head of the Dutch resistance movement, later organized relief of stricken areas...
...keep on the safe side, King John bathed only three times a year (before the principal festivals) and Queen Elizabeth only once a month-"whether she required it or not." Medieval community baths were highly respected ("there could be no better [place] for ladies desiring children," remarked an old chronicler), but the Church was so lukewarm toward cleanliness that, says the author, St. Agnes was canonized for flatly refusing ever to bathe at all. Hot bathwater was still considered effeminate in the early 19th Century: when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Buckingham Palace contained not one tub, and the master...