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Caroline Shenton

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Westminster’s Throne on Wheels

17 September 2011 By Caroline Shenton

Last week I made a whistle-stop trip to the Museum of London to look at Adam Lee’s 1808 plan of the old Palace of Westminster in their Library.  This was a document I had been trying to track down for at least a year, thanks to a garbled footnote.  Job done, I headed for the exit via the galleries and passed the Lord Mayor’s Coach, which the Museum described – very memorably – as a “Throne on Wheels”.


The Palace of Westminster has its own “Thone on Wheels” in the form of the Speaker’s State Coach, last used in 1981 at the wedding of Charles and Diana.  Originally made for William III in 1698, it was presented to the Speaker by Queen Anne shortly afterwards.  We know that the Speaker’s residence in the old Palace of Westminster included an extensive range of stables, outbuildings and kitchens running along the riverside east of New Palace Yard.  It must have been there that the Speaker’s State Coach was parked at the time of the 1834 fire.  For some years it was on display in Westminster Hall, but earlier this year it was loaned to the National Trust’s Carriage Collection at Arlington Court, in Devon, fully conserved and put on view for the public alongside other fantastic chariots, broughams, landaus, barouches and phaetons.

The Speaker’s State Coach undergoing conservation

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Filed Under: Parliamentary History

About Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.

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About Caroline

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013. Read More…

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