20 Royal Traditions That Ended Quietly
Monarchies love to advertise their pageantry, but they are far less eager to announce what they have dropped. Most royal customs do not end with a proclamation.
They fade out over a decade or two, replaced by something more practical, until a historian or a journalist notices the gap and asks what happened to it. The traditions below all disappeared without ceremony, even though most of them lasted for centuries.
The Royal Touch for Scrofula
For roughly seven hundred years, English and French monarchs held public ceremonies in which they laid hands on subjects suffering from scrofula, a tubercular swelling of the neck glands known as the King’s Evil. Sufferers needed a signed certificate from their parish before they could queue at the palace, where a chaplain would read from the Gospel of Mark as the monarch touched each person and handed over a gold coin.
Charles II alone is thought to have touched more than 90,000 people during his reign. Queen Anne performed the last English ceremony in 1712, touching a young Samuel Johnson among others, and her successor George I refused to continue a ritual he considered Catholic superstition.
Presenting Debutantes at Buckingham Palace
For roughly two hundred years, aristocratic and upper-class families brought their eighteen-year-old daughters to be formally presented to the reigning monarch, curtseying before moving through the room to signal their entry into marriageable society. The custom had already been softened over the decades, but Prince Philip reportedly called the accompanying Queen Charlotte’s “bloody daft,” and Princess Margaret is said to have complained that the guest list had grown too indiscriminate.
Queen Elizabeth II ended the presentations after the 1958 season, replacing them with garden parties open to a far broader cross-section of the public.
The Groom of the Stool
English kings once employed a nobleman whose formal duty was to assist the monarch with private bodily functions, a position that sounds demeaning but was in fact one of the most sought-after jobs at court. Because the Groom of the Stool spent more unsupervised time with the king than almost anyone else, the role evolved into an intimate confidant and financial administrator with enormous informal power.
The post survived under changing names through the Tudor and Stuart periods before quietly dissolving into general bedchamber staff duties by the eighteenth century, its intimacy no longer matching the more formal, distanced monarchy that followed.
Purdah at the Mughal Court
Women of the Mughal imperial household lived under strict purdah, moving through palaces via covered walkways and Jharokas designed so they could observe court proceedings without being seen. Some royal women, like Nur Jahan and Jahanara Begum, wielded significant political influence from behind these screens, issuing edicts and controlling trade despite never appearing publicly.
The practice weakened steadily through the eighteenth century as Mughal central authority collapsed, and it disappeared entirely with the dynasty itself after the 1857 rebellion, when the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was exiled to Rangoon.
The Daily Rum Ration in the Royal Navy
Sailors in the Royal Navy received a daily tot of rum for more than three hundred years, a custom formalized in 1740 when Admiral Edward Vernon ordered the spirit diluted with water to curb drunkenness aboard ship. The ration survived two world wars and generations of naval reform, but by the 1970s the Admiralty Board worried that sailors operating increasingly complex machinery could not safely do so after a midday drink.
The tradition ended on July 31, 1970, a date sailors nicknamed Black Tot Day, marked on some ships with sailors wearing black armbands and staging mock funerals for the vanished ration.
Coronation Durbars in British India
Three times between 1877 and 1911, the British Crown staged massive Durbars in India, gathering maharajas, nizams, and colonial officials in Delhi to swear allegiance to a monarch who had never set foot in the country for the first two ceremonies. The 1911 Durbar was the only one attended by a reigning monarch in person, when George V and Queen Mary appeared before an estimated 100,000 spectators.
No fourth Durbar ever took place. Rising nationalist sentiment and the financial strain of the First World War made the spectacle increasingly untenable, and Indian independence in 1947 closed the door on the tradition permanently.
Royal Wet Nurses
For centuries, European royal infants were fed not by their mothers but by carefully vetted wet nurses, chosen for their health, temperament, and even the perceived moral character believed to pass through breast milk. The role came with genuine status.
Some wet nurses became lifelong confidantes of the children they raised and were granted pensions or land. As germ theory advanced and pediatric medicine developed safer alternatives through the nineteenth century, along with a cultural shift favoring maternal breastfeeding among the upper classes, the practice faded from royal nurseries across Europe without any formal announcement ending it.
Public Royal Executions
Convicted traitors and rivals to the throne were once executed in front of large public crowds specifically because the spectacle reinforced the monarch’s authority, from beheadings on Tower Hill to the elaborate scaffolds built for regicides after the English Civil War. Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey both died before invited audiences meant to witness royal justice being carried out.
Public executions in Britain continued into the 1860s for ordinary criminals, but the practice of using them as overt demonstrations of royal power had already faded by the eighteenth century as monarchs distanced themselves from the machinery of the law.
Sin Eating at Royal-Adjacent Funerals
In parts of Britain, a poor individual known as a sin eater was once paid to consume bread and drink passed over a corpse, symbolically absorbing the deceased’s transgressions so the soul could pass on unburdened. While the practice was mostly associated with rural communities rather than the monarchy directly, it lingered at the funerals of minor gentry and Welsh Marcher lords well into the nineteenth century.
The last documented sin eater, Richard Munslow, practiced the custom in Shropshire until his death in 1906, after which no successor took up the role and it disappeared from British funerary tradition entirely.
The Accouchement of French Queens
French royal protocol once required a queen to give birth in front of witnesses, a custom meant to prevent any suspicion that a stillborn child had been secretly swapped for a healthy one. Crowds of courtiers, and occasionally curious members of the public, packed into the birthing chamber, a practice that reached an infamous peak when Marie Antoinette nearly suffocated during the delivery of her daughter in 1778 because so many spectators had crowded in to watch.
The custom ended almost immediately afterward. Louis XVI decreed that future royal births would be witnessed only by essential officials, and the French Revolution eliminated the question entirely a decade later.
The Divinity of the Japanese Emperor
Japanese emperors were regarded as living descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, a status woven into state Shinto doctrine and taught in schools throughout the early twentieth century. The belief underpinned the emperor’s authority through Japan’s imperial expansion and the Second World War.
On January 1, 1946, under pressure from the Allied occupation, Emperor Hirohito issued the Ningen-sengen, a formal declaration renouncing the claim of divine status, a single radio broadcast that ended a doctrine that had shaped Japanese governance for generations.
Royal Mistresses Presented at Court
The French monarchy once maintained an official position for the king’s mistress, known as the maîtresse-en-titre, complete with apartments at Versailles, a formal household, and open acknowledgment at court functions. Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry both held the position with the tacit approval of the queen’s own household staff, wielding genuine political influence over appointments and policy.
The custom collapsed with the monarchy itself during the Revolution, and no subsequent French head of state, royal or otherwise, ever revived anything resembling the formal position.
The Ban on Royals Marrying Catholics
Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, any member of the British royal line of succession who married a Roman Catholic was automatically removed from the line entirely, a rule that cost several minor royals their place in succession over three centuries. The restriction survived essentially unchanged until the Perth Agreement, negotiated among Commonwealth realms in 2011 and brought into force in 2015, which preserved the bar on a Catholic monarch but removed the penalty for marrying one.
The change passed with almost no public ceremony, a quiet legislative correction to a rule most people had assumed was permanent.
The Swearing of Fealty by Vassal Lords
Medieval monarchs across Europe required their nobles to perform homage in person, kneeling before the king with hands clasped inside his own while swearing loyalty in exchange for land and protection, a ritual that bound the entire feudal system together. The ceremony gradually lost its practical function as centralized taxation and standing armies replaced the old system of land-for-service obligations.
By the time strong nation-states emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ritual survived only in symbolic coronation moments, its original binding legal weight long since transferred to written contracts and statute.
The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London
English monarchs kept exotic animals at the Tower of London for roughly six hundred years, a collection that began with three leopards gifted to Henry III in 1235 and eventually included lions, an elephant, and a polar bear that was allowed to fish in the Thames on a long chain. The menagerie was a genuine tourist attraction, and for a period visitors could gain free admission by bringing a cat or dog to feed to the lions.
Rising concerns about animal welfare and public safety led to its closure in 1835, when the surviving animals were transferred to the newly founded London Zoo.
The Ottoman Sultan’s Friday Selamlik
Ottoman sultans once processed publicly to Friday prayers in an elaborate ceremony called the Selamlik, riding through Istanbul in view of foreign diplomats and crowds who used the sight as one of the only chances to see the sultan in person. The procession functioned as a weekly demonstration of the sultan’s health, authority, and continued rule, which made its cancellation immediately significant to observers.
The tradition ended with the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate in 1922, when Mehmed VI departed Istanbul aboard a British warship and no successor ever performed the ceremony again.
The Confinement of Queens After Childbirth
European queens were traditionally confined to a darkened chamber for weeks after giving birth, a period known as lying-in during which male visitors, including the king, were barred and only female attendants provided care. The custom stretched across centuries and social classes, though royal confinements were the most elaborate, involving specially decorated rooms and rigid schedules for visitors.
Improved medical understanding of postpartum recovery and changing attitudes toward maternal health gradually shortened the practice through the nineteenth century, until it disappeared from royal households entirely by the early twentieth.
Hereditary Court Offices
Certain positions at European royal courts, from the Lord Great Chamberlain of England to various stewardships across German principalities, were once passed down within specific noble families regardless of individual competence or royal preference. These offices carried real influence over ceremonial access and, in some cases, revenue, making them valuable enough that families fought legal battles over inheritance rights for generations.
As royal administration modernized and merit-based civil services expanded through the nineteenth century, most hereditary offices were quietly reduced to ceremonial roles performed only at coronations, stripped of any genuine governing function.
The Prohibition on Royal Handshakes
British royal protocol long held that members of the family should not initiate physical contact, particularly handshakes, with members of the public, a rule rooted in older notions about the sanctity of the monarch’s person. The guidance was never written into formal law but was passed down through generations of courtiers and royal households as an unbending point of etiquette.
Younger royals in recent decades have shaken hands routinely, hugged well-wishers, and even accepted high-fives, quietly abandoning a distancing custom that had persisted for centuries without anyone formally rescinding it.
The Curtsey Hierarchy Among Royal Women
British royal women once followed a precise curtsey protocol dictating exactly how deeply each family member should bow to every other member, with blood princesses curtseying to the monarch and to the wives of higher-ranking princes according to a strict order of precedence. The system created genuine friction, most famously affecting how the Duchess of Cornwall and the Duchess of Cambridge were expected to curtsey to one another depending on who was present.
Buckingham Palace quietly relaxed the formal requirement following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, when the family agreed on simpler, less hierarchical greetings for private occasions.
Why Palaces Let the Small Things Go
None of these customs ended because a monarch stood up and announced their abolition. They ended because keeping them going stopped making sense, whether the reason was medical, financial, political, or simply that the people involved found them mortifying to perform in public.
Royal households are conservative institutions, but they are not static ones, and their history is really a long record of quiet retreats dressed up as continuity. What survives says as much as what disappears.
Coronations, state openings, and trooping ceremonies remain because they still serve a visible purpose, projecting stability and drawing crowds who want a connection to something old. The traditions on this list lost that usefulness long before they lost their name, and by the time anyone thought to mourn them, they had already become historical footnotes rather than living customs.
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