The Ghost of Queen Adelaide

Do you associate witches with churches, chapels and abbeys, particularly Gothic ones?

Do you associate Queen Adelaide with royal palaces and/or burning landscapes, and possibly even with burning palaces?

Do you regard Queen Adelaide as a witch, a ghost or merely as the deceased consort of a deceased monarch?

Perhaps you do not regard these as burning questions in the context of today.

If you have any burning questions about Adelaide, what are they?

How do you usually attempt to authenticate your knowledge of people and places?

Perhaps you are suspicious of Queen Adelaide because she was brought up as a royal German, an educated princess and a devout Lutheran.

Perhaps you regard the Crown of Queen Adelaide to have been a powerful talisman against revolution, violence and chaos during and after the associated coronation.

Queen Adelaide has long had a distaste for theatricality, particularly in terms of ceremonies and costumes.  She continues to despise any sort of extravagance, including extravagant opinions.

Do you associate Queen Adelaide mainly with the remnants of the Age of Enlightenment or do you prefer to think of her in terms of Romantic political controversies and/or Gothic fiction? 

Do you know that Queen Adelaide was inappropriately blamed for the burning of the British Parliament in 1834?

She was not directly blamed for the burning of Hampton Court in 1986 or the burning of Windsor Castle in 1992.

Nor was she held to blame for the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, either.  Nor was Queen Adelaide to blame for the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

Groupthink is actually to blame when most disasters occur.  Yet scapegoats are usually blamed.  Scapegoats, such as whistleblowers, tend to be persons who refused to comply with groupthink.

Henry VIII probably tried to blame Catherine of Aragon for the Dissolution of the Monasteries, even though she died in 1536, the year the process began.  He may even have blamed her for the execution of Anne Boleyn in the same year.

Megalomaniacs blame everyone but themselves for their own policy decisions.

Fortunately, Queen Adelaide was not blamed for her own husband's extremist decisions, and especially not by him personally, even though she produced no male heirs, or any surviving heirs at all for that matter.

What do you know about the history of bushfires in South Australia, including the one at Marble Hill in 1955?

Perhaps you blame that fire on Queen Adelaide.

Who have you ever blamed for upheavals in your life, and why?

Perhaps you blame ghosts or other non-physical beings.

Perhaps you blame real witches and other people you have been unable to bully. 

Perhaps you define a real witch as someone who has long warned of dangers yet has consistently been ignored, or ridiculed, or silenced.

Are whistle-blowers the contemporary equivalent of witches?

Do the ghosts of dead whistle-blowers haunt you?

Perhaps you would rather read ghost stories than discover the truth. 

Do you think Queen Adelaide suffered from deracination if not racism?

Have you ever experienced deracination or racism, or both?

Have you ever attempted to uphold civility appropriately only to be rudely regarded as dull and inconsequential as a consequence, or thin-skinned, or prudish, or pretentious, or a précieuse, or a practitioner of virtue signalling, or an outsider?

Queen Adelaide has never had a reputation for grandstanding.  She has expressed no desire to visit any sort of sports facility, either.  She is not usually associated with hauntings at Hampton Court or real tennis.  She is not even regarded as particularly prominent in history.

She is, however, well aware that stories of ghosts, witches and members of royal families are frequently exploited for marketing purposes, whether as tourist attractions or as revenue-sources for tabloid propagandists or for political gain by various persons.

How do you distinguish between the fictional supernatural and the factually supernatural?

How do you define organised religion or any other religion?

What do you know about the occult and transcendence and immanence and eminence and spirituality and ineffability and the paranormal?

What do you know about the cultural aspects of fires?

How do you usually prefer to examine history?

If you regard yourself as a good person, how do you prefer to express your well-informed kindness?

Queen Adelaide had, and has, a reputation as a consistently charitable Tory.

Perhaps you do not know much about Tory ghosts, or High Tory witches.

You may regard ghosts and witches as disruptive social forces and threats to the social order, regardless of their location on a political spectrum.

What is your acquaintance with the social influence of various beliefs, including unreasonable ones? 

You possibly associate ghosts and/or witches with blackletter writing and/or Anglo-Saxon runes rather than the burnt remains of many-roomed mansions.

How do you compare English culture with German culture and Scottish culture and every other sort of culture?

In the 20th century, of course, the Germans attempted to burn down Britain while the British attempted to burn down Germany.

What is your acquaintance with natural and unnatural firestorms?

What do you know about the protection and destruction of historically important records?

How do you attempt to contribute to enlightenment in the world?

Perhaps you regard the ghost of Queen Adelaide as one of many mysteries.