Alandra L. Laine, Founding Editor
I was alive when Queen Elizabeth II died.
I want to begin there because it matters. Not as a statement of grief, though grief was certainly present, but as a statement of what that moment revealed to me about myself and about the world I was watching. I had lived alongside the longest-reigning monarch in British history without fully understanding what that meant until she was gone. In a hundred years, how many people will be able to say the same? How many will have stood, as we did, at the edge of an era, watching history close one chapter and open another in real time?
I have been watching royalty my whole life. Not casually, seriously. With the kind of attention that sends you down rabbit holes at midnight, that makes you order books about Tudor court politics and plan holidays around the location of medieval graves. The kind of attention that, once turned toward a subject, does not easily turn away. I have visited royal news sites and social feeds across the internet. I have read the gossip columns and the breathless headlines. I have consumed what passes for royal coverage in most corners of the press.
And I kept thinking: this is not enough. Not nearly enough.
The world has more than fifty royal families. Monarchies exist on every inhabited continent. There are royal houses in countries most people have never heard of, traditions that make the British court look positively straightforward, succession stories that would stop you cold if someone told them properly. Japan is debating whether a woman can inherit the world’s oldest throne. Bhutan measures its national success in happiness and its king turns up to remote highland festivals because he wants to. The Jordanian royal family contains two of the most compelling women in public life today. There are courts, there have always been courts, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives in the long shadow of extraordinary history.
Nobody was covering all of it. Not in one place. Not with the seriousness it deserves.
Crown & Court exists to change that.
This publication was built on a simple and rather unfashionable conviction: that royal coverage deserves the same prestige, rigour, and elegance as any other serious journalism. Not gossip. Not celebrity. Not the relentless recycling of the same peripheral scandals while the working institution goes largely unreported. The Financial Times does not chase rumours. Neither do we. We report on the institution, its history, its politics, its fashion, its culture, its future, with the depth and authority that subject demands.
We are genuinely global. British royalty is our anchor, as it is for most readers, but it is not our ceiling. Our correspondents range as widely as the world’s royal families do, from the Chrysanthemum Throne to the Hashemite Kingdom, from Scandinavian neighbourhood monarchies to the courts of Southeast Asia. The Western press has a habit of treating British monarchy as the standard against which all others are measured. We do not share that habit. Every crown tells a different story. We are here to tell them all.
We believe the institution matters. Not as a governing power, those days are largely history, but as something rarer and considerably more durable: a living connection between a nation and its own story. Where elected governments change with the seasons, the Crown endures. It carries the weight of centuries, the memory of wars won and lost, the accumulated identity of a people who have chosen, generation after generation, to keep it. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, rather extraordinary.
The institution of constitutional monarchy, where the Crown serves as a symbol of continuity, history, and national identity while elected government holds real power, is worth preserving, celebrating, and taking seriously as a subject. The history matters. The tradition matters. The culture, the pageantry, the human stories behind the palace walls, all of it matters. We are living through a remarkable period of royal history, succession laws rewritten, commoners crowned, ancient thrones debating their own futures, and the people watching it deserve a publication that understands the weight of what they are witnessing.
I think about Lady Anne Glenconner sometimes when I think about why this publication exists. Her memoir reminded me of something I already knew but needed to hear again: the court has always had stories. The Tudor court was extraordinary. The Victorian court was extraordinary. The court of today is extraordinary, if you know where to look and how to look properly. There is always something going on. There always has been.
I want Crown & Court to be the place where you come to know it all. The breaking news and the deep history. The fashion and the architecture. The succession crises and the highland festivals. The books worth reading and the programmes worth watching. Where to travel if you want to stand in the room where history happened, and yes, how to order an apron from the Holyroodhouse gift shop if the mood takes you.
I want you to feel, when you read this publication, that you are in the presence of something serious and something beautiful. That the subject is being treated with the respect it deserves. That you are, for the duration of your reading, a little bit royal yourself.
Welcome to Crown & Court. I am very glad you are here.
Alandra L. Laine Founding Editor crownandcourt.com
