Duchess of Beaufort is a title held by the wife of the Duke of Beaufort in the Peerage of England. In 1657 Henry Somerset, 3rd Marquess of Worcester married Mary Capell and in 1682 the dukedom was created by Charles II, making Henry the first Duke and Mary the first Duchess of Beaufort.
The dukedom was named after Henry Somerset’s fifth great-grandfather Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, whose legitimized children held the surname Somerset. The name Beaufort refers to a castle in Champagne, France (now Montmorency-Beaufort) and it is the only current dukedom to take its name from a place outside the British Isles. The family seat is Badminton House near Chipping Sodbury in the unitary authority of South Gloucestershire. The principal burial place of the Dukes and Duchesses of Beaufort is St Michael and All Angels Church, Badminton. Traditionally a widowed peeress puts “Dowager” in her style. If a widowed peeress is also predeceased by the next Duke, any surviving widow of that Duke does not use the style of Dowager until the current dowager has died or remarried. The name Dowager, as in Dowager Duchess means a Widow of the last owner of the estate as opposed to being the wife of the son who now owns the estate after the death of his father, the Duchess’s husband. We still haven’t got a date for when Elizabeth Somerset, Dowager Duchess lived and died but we suspect that she was around in the 1780’s or thereabouts.

Light as a feather, stiff as a board is a game played by children at slumber parties. The phrase has also become established in popular culture as a reference to a levitation trick and has been referred to in various media accounts. In performing magic this effect is known as abnormal lift. One participant lies flat on the floor, facing upwards. The others space themselves around that person, each placing one or two fingertips underneath the participant’s limbs. The person closest to the head commonly begins by saying something like “She’s looking ill”, which is repeated several times, and followed by, “She’s looking worse”, which is also repeated several times. The general direction of the call-and-repeat describes how the person is looking worse and worse, followed by saying “She is dying”, and, finally, “She is dead” Variations of the spoken part of the game occur. In a common, modern version, the person being lifted is told a story about their death and asked to imagine it happening to them. This is intended to unsettle the participants and to convince them that something may have changed making it easier to lift the person than before. All versions of the game end with the phrase “light as a feather, stiff as a board” chanted by those standing around the “dead” player as they attempt to lift their companion’s body using only their fingertips. Some versions omit the story entirely and only the “light as a feather…” chant is used. After these repetitions, the person being lifted is described by the group as having become lighter or even entirely weightless. 

Mary was the only surviving child of Henry VIII by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. She was declared illegitimate and barred from the line of succession following the annulment of her parents’ marriage in 1533, though she would later be restored via the Third Succession Act 1543. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded their father in 1547 at the age of nine. When Edward became terminally ill in 1553, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession because he supposed, correctly, that she would reverse the Protestant reforms that had taken place during his reign. Upon his death, leading politicians proclaimed Mary’s and Edward’s Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as queen instead. Mary speedily assembled a force in East Anglia and deposed Jane, who was eventually beheaded. Mary was—excluding the disputed reigns of Jane and the Empress Matilda—the first queen regnant of England. In July 1554, she married Prince Philip of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556. After Mary’s death in 1558, her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in England was reversed by her younger half-sister and successor, Elizabeth.