Nº01
The Queen They Bolted Out of Her Own Coronation
32 min · March 2026
The film will be embedded here on release.
George IV had the doors of Westminster Abbey physically barred against Caroline of Brunswick on her own coronation day. She died three weeks later. The official record called it a coincidence.
- 00:00Cold open · the doors are barred
- 02:14I. The settlement and the warrant
- 08:40II. Westminster, morning of 19 July
- 16:22III. Three weeks
- 24:05IV. The official record
- 29:30Coda · what we have, and what we do not
The note in the margin
The document that opens this investigation is not, on its face, remarkable. It is a household memorandum, written in a clerk's hand, on paper bearing the watermark of a Westminster supplier. What makes it remarkable is that it should not exist. The order it records was issued under seal, and the seal was supposed to have travelled with the document to its destruction.
It survived because a copy was made — quietly, by another hand — and filed in a place no inventory mentioned. Two centuries later, a catalogue was re-checked. The note was found. This film is the account of what it says, and of what the official record had to forget in order to remain official.
- Westminster Abbey Muniment Room, MS WAM/45/12 (household memoranda, 1820).
- The National Archives, Kew, HO 44/3, ff. 112–119.
- British Library, Add MS 38566 (correspondence, May–August 1820).
- Hansard, House of Lords debates, 1820 (vol. II, cols. 401–438).
- Royal Archives, Windsor, GEO/MAIN/26/1 (warrants and counter-warrants).