Memory Mondays (Queen Crystobel I of Scotney)

It is November 1952 and a young woman of 30 years of age is woken by an elderly lady at 4am in the morning. “Chrissie, Chrissie! Wake up dear.” As the clearly exhausted woman opens her eyes and sits up, she is greeted by the old lady, now bowed over in a low curtsey, and the words; "The King is dead, Long Live the Queen.”

Very few ever face those words and all the heavy responsibility it implies from the receiving end. It’s always easy to criticise others but imagine waking up, not to a blue Monday, but to the weight of a nation being placed on your shoulders. This morning didn’t come to Chrissie, as she was affectionately known to her old nanny and then Lady of the Bedchamber, as a surprise. History would know her as, Her Majesty Queen Crystobel I of the Kingdom of Scotney and the news was expected but no happier than the death of a parent could make any person. The only difference was the incomprehensible burden of duty that came with it.

In her memoires, Lady Francis Hubert, the before mentioned, Lady of the Bedchamber, quoted the young Queen’s first words to her in the room that day as being: “Lady Francis, if I serve this Kingdom with half the love and devotion you have shown me all these years, then that curtsey you gave would not have been wasted.” Queen Crystobel was from a very practical generation and in such a climate became a Queen of practical efficiency. It was post war Europa and people had to buck down and rebuild and so they and this Queen got to work and the first “new era” a true golden age was sown into the fresh earth.

In her ascension speech to the Kingdom, made on the eve of her father’s funeral she said: “I come before you today with a heart welling with emotion, for I have lost a beloved father but gained his heart’s most cherished duty. In order to honour his memory I could only dedicate myself to love my husband as my mother loved hers and to serve my Kingdom as my father served all of us beginning with his family.”

She was crowned within 12 months of the funeral as Scotney tradition requires and so began what was to be an era of prosperity but which sadly ended in controversy, not due to scandal but due to mankind’s biggest enemy, greed and fear.

A rare photo of the coronation of Queen Crystobel I of Scotney wearing the Crown of St Christian, destroyed along with the other Scotney Crown Regalia.

A lot of Royal records were destroyed during the revolution. Almost no photographic reference exists of Queen Crystobel's reign as the government photographic archives burned down with Castle Roswind, where it was kept.

 It was thanks to this Queen's vision who had arranged with her Britanian counterpart King George VI to marry his son and heir to her daughter, that the eventual establishment of the Scot Britanian Empire came about, in 1993. The purpose of this was designed to benefit both nations but some saw an opportunity to serve other agendas and reamed a gap in the transition. This part of the story has not come to full light yet but time will tell all. Queen Crystobel died in 1985 and her daughter the new Queen Crystobel II ascended to the throne while yet unmarried to the Crown Prince of Britania. The second “new era” was set to begin.