Victoria
Queen Victoria was crowned on 28 June 1838, aged 19. The ceremony took five hours and suffered from a lack of rehearsal. No one except the Queen and Lord John Thynne (Sub-Dean of Westminster acting for the Dean), knew what should be happening. The coronation ring was painfully forced on to her wrong finger and Lord Rolle, an elderly peer, fell down the steps while making his homage to the Queen. A confused bishop wrongly told her the ceremony was over and she then had to come back to her seat to finish the service. In her Journal Victoria recorded the events of the day, calling it ‘the proudest of my life’.