Set into a pillar on the north side of Beaumont Street near the junction with Walton Street is a stone with the inscription:

Near this place stood the King's House in which King Richard I was born on 8th September 1157.

The King's House was part of Beaumont Palace (from which Beaumont Street takes its name), which was built by King Henry I about the year 1130 conveniently close to the royal hunting-lodge at Woodstock. As well as building Beaumont Palace, Henry I also founded a hospital for lepers, part of which still survives as St Birdlimes Chapel off the Cowley Road, safely outside the city boundary. In 1328, Oriel College acquired the Bartlemas site which it still owns and now uses as the college sports ground.

On Henry I's death in 1135, Oxford became involved in the succession to the throne. Henry I had persuaded his nobles (including his nephew, Stephen) to swear to support the succession of his daughter Matilda; but in spite of his oath, Stephen seized the throne on his uncle's death. Matilda made her headquarters in Oxford Castle from which Stephen tried to dislodge her in the winter of 1141. She withstood the siege for ten weeks before making her escape in the snow, dressed in white, over the frozen river to Abingdon and then to the safety of the castle at Wallingford. Matilda's son, Henry, succeeded Stephen as King Henry II in 1154, and it was his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who gave birth here in 1157 to the future King Richard I (Richard Coeur de Lion). Richard I's treacherous younger brother, the future King John, was born nine years later at Woodstock.

When King Edward II was put to flight at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, he is said to have invoked the Virgin and vowed to found a monastery for the poor Carmelites (the White Friars) if he escaped in safety. It was in fulfillment of this vow that he made over Beaumont Palace to the Carmelites in 1318, and it remained in their hands until the White Friars were disbanded at the Reformation. After the Dissolution, most of the buildings were pulled down to provide building-stone for Christ Church and St John's College. Those few parts that were allowed to remain standing survived until the 1820s when the present Beaumont Street was laid out. A surviving remnant of the Carmelites is the name Friars Entry, the passageway that leads from Magdalen Street to Gloucester Green.

In niches above the steps leading to the Hall in the Front Quad of Oriel College are two rather crude statues of crowned monarchs. One of these is supposed to represent Edward II who was titular founder of the college. Edward II was deposed in the year following the foundation of Oriel College, and in 1327, within a few months of his abdication, he was murdered in Berkeley Castle. The Abbot of Gloucester, with commendable courage, accorded him burial in the Abbey (now Gloucester Cathedral) after burial had been refused by the Abbots of Bristol, Kingswood and Malmesbury. His tomb is still to be seen on the north side of the chancel of Gloucester Cathedral. He is remembered in Oxford by the name of King Edward Street which connects High Street with Oriel Square

Oriel College was by no means the only one to be founded by, named after, assisted, or attended by royalty; but the colleges of Oxford, not being in the tourist trade, have no need to advertise their royal connections, and there are no plaques or inscriptions to vaunt the names of kings and queens. The outside observer may nevertheless glean a few scraps of information, mainly from portraits and statues which may be seen in colleges. A few examples must suffice:

- There is a portrait purporting to represent King Alfred (849-901) in University College of which he was the legendary founder.

- The gatehouse tower of Merton College has a statue of Henry III during whose reign (1216-72) the college was founded.

- The Queen's College (founded in 1341) is named after Edward Ill's wife, Queen Philippa (c1314-69), of whom there is a portrait and a coloured wooden statue in the College. The future King Henry V (1387-1422) is said to have studied there. The College has a particularly fine collection of portraits of royalty. (The statue beneath the cupola over the entrance is not of Queen Philippa but of a later royal benefactress, Queen Caroline, wife of George II).

- King Henry VI (1421-61) was nominally the co-founder, with Archbishop Henry Chichele, of All Souls College. Their statues, surmounted by a group of 'souls', are to be seen on the gate-tower of the College facing High Street. They are also depicted on either side of the crucifixion in the reredos of the chapel.

- Henry VIII refounded Cardinal Wolsey's 'Cardinal College' as Christ Church in 1546. The reigning monarch has been Visitor of Christ Church ever since. There are portraits of Henry VIII and of Queen Elizabeth I in Christ Church Hall where, by tradition, a bust of the current Visitor is also kept. (The tradition has resulted in the accumulation of a fine collection of royal busts which, after their sojourn in the Hall, are relegated to the Library in Peckwater Quadrangle). The bronze bust of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, now in the Hall, is by Oscar Nemon

- Queen Elizabeth I granted Jesus College its charter in 1571. The college Hall contains a portrait and (above the fireplace) a crowned bronze bust.

- The spate of building that took place in the reign of James I included the Schools Tower which completed the Schools Quadrangle of the Bodleian Library. High up in a niche on the Tower is a seated statue of James I surmounted by a canopy bearing the words Beati pacifici (Blessed are the peacemakers) and situated between two figures representing Religion and Fame. (The Latin inscription is quoted under Bodleian Library above). Another statue of James I is to be seen in the front quadrangle of Wadham College.

With so many royal connections, Oxford was an obvious choice for Charles I when the Civil War made London untenable for him. There can have been few other places in the land that owed so much to the monarchy and that would have had so much to lose from its demise.

There is hardly a corner of Oxford that does not have associations with the Civil War, when, for three years, Charles I used the city as the Royalist capital of England, descending on it with the court, the army, the Privy Council, the Court of Chancery, the House of Commons, to say nothing of the French Ambassador and a host of hangers-on. The King lodged in Christ Church, the Queen in Merton College, and the French Ambassador in St John's College; troops were quartered everywhere; New College cloisters and bell- tower were used as a powder-magazine; the Schools Quadrangle of the Bodleian Library became a store-house for corn, cheese, cloth and coal; Parliament met in Convocation House (at the west end of the Divinity School); the 'ordnance and great guns' were positioned in Magdalen Grove; and in New Inn Hall Street the Royal Hint was set up, where plate donated under duress by the colleges was melted down for coinage.

Oxford still retains some visible reminders of the Royalist occupation:

- In the south transept of the Cathedral (the St Lucy Chapel) are monuments to five men who died in the service of Charles I: Sir Henry Gage, killed at Culham, Sir William Jennyman, Lord Littleton, Viscount Brouncker and Sir John Bankes;

- In the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum are specimens of coins minted in Oxford, including the famous Oxford gold Crown on which a view of the city is depicted;

- In the Canterbury Quadrangle of St John's College are two fine bronze statues by Le Sueur of Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria.

- Portraits of Charles I abound in college collections including those of All Souls, Exeter, Jesus, Pembroke and Queen's. Duke Humfrey's Library in the Bodleian has a fine bust given by Archbishop Laud in 1636 Both Merton and Queen's have portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria.

- When Oriel College was rebuilt between 1620 and 1640 , the words REGNANTE CAROLO ('In Charles's reign') were carved in the parapet over the entrance portico of the Hall. Illustrations in nineteenth-century guidebooks show the portico without the parapet, but it was rebuilt -with the loyal inscription -in 1897.

- The statues on the Danby Gate, which include one of Charles I, are noted above, and the epitaph on William Stone's memorial, (also noted above), is also very much of the period.

The Museum of Oxford in St Aldates has a good exhibit of material on Oxford during the Civil War.

The loyalty of both Town and Gown towards the monarchy must have been severely strained by the long sojourn of Charles I's court during the Civil War, but it was to be put to a further test when Charles II imposed himself and his court on Christ Church and Merton yet again from September 1665 until February 1666 in order to get away from the plague then raging in London. Portraits of Charles II and of his Queen, Catherine of Braganza, (both by John Riley) are to be seen in the ground-floor corridor of the New Bodleian Library.

The statue of James II, in Roman armour and wearing a toga, which stands facing the quadrangle on the gate-tower of University College, serves as a reminder of the college's 'short-lived notoriety as headquarters of the Catholic movement in Oxford'. The statue was erected at the instigation of the then Master of the college, one Obadiah Walker (known as Ave-Maria Obadiah) to celebrate a royal visit to Oxford in 1687; but in the following year, the deposition of James II meant the departure of the Catholic sympathiser, Walker, as Master. In the years that followed, University College demonstrated its loyalty to protestantism and to the monarchy by erecting the statues of Queen Mary and later of Queen Anne on the High Street front of the college; but the Jacobite cause continued to have supporters in Oxford until the movement collapsed with the accession of George III in 1760. There are portraits of both James II and Queen Anne in the Assembly Room at the Town Hall, and a statue of Queen Anne on the east face of Tom Tower in Christ Church. In the hall of Pembroke College there is a portrait of Queen Anne by Sir Godfrey Kneller.

Although Victoria may have been taken round Oxford as a child, the only visit that she made as Queen was a private one, when she came with Prince Albert to see their eldest son, Prince Edward (the future King Edward VII) who was nominally attached to Christ Church in 1859/60. During his student days at Oxford, Prince Edward was restricted to his residence in Frewin Hall under the stern eye of his tutor who hardly left his side. His period at Christ Church is commemorated in the Hall by a window situated between the oriel window and the west wall.

There is a statue of Prince Albert in the University Museum, which was being built at the time of his visit to Oxford.

Victoria's youngest son, the haemophiliac Leopold, Duke of Albany (1853-84), was also at Christ Church, where there is a memorial to him (by F. J. Williamson) on the wall of the south choir aisle of the Cathedral. There is a marble bust of him (also by Williamson) in the entrance hall of the Examination Schools, and he is commemorated in the name of Leopold Street (off Cowley Road) which was named after him by virtue of his laying the foundation stone of St John's House in 1873. His name is also remembered in the E.N.T. department of the Radcliffe Infirmary, which now occupies what was formerly the children's block, where he opened a children's ward in 18'7'7. The children were transferred to a new children's block in 1936.

Queen Victoria's assumption of the title of Empress of India in 1877 may be thought to mark the zenith of the British Raj. Only six years later, the foundation stone of the Indian Institute (architect, Basil Champneys) was laid in Oxford on the corner of Holywell Street and Catte Street. The building has now become the Library and Office of the Faculty of History, but it still bears signs of its origins, including a weather-vane in the shape of an Indian elephant, and a memorial stone just inside the front door. The impressive stone has an inscription in Sanscrit, beneath which is a small brass plate with the text rendered into English:

This building, dedicated to Indian sciences, was founded for the use of Aryas (Indians and Englishmen) by excellent and benevolent men desirous of encouraging knowledge. The high-minded Heir Apparent, named Albert Edward, son of the Empress of India, himself performed the act of inauguration. The ceremony of laying the memorial stone took place on Wednesday, the l0th lunar day of the dark half of the month of Vaisakha in the Samvat year 1939 (Wednesday, May 2 1883).

[The word 'Aryas' would now be transliterated 'Aryans'. The bracketed explanation (which is included on the plaque) seems to have been inserted a little defiantly to stress that Indians and Englishmen come from the same original Indo-European stock - a conclusion drawn from the discovery by nineteenth-century comparative philologists that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, German and Celtic were all related languages.]

The letters VR (Victoria Regina) and the royal arms appear above the GPO in St Aldate's with the date 1879, but it was the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 that sparked off a wave of public building combined with popular enthusiasm for the old Queen. The date 1897 appears above the Market Street entrance to the Covered Market and on a post office at 258 Abingdon Road on the corner of Sunningwell Road. Here on the wall is a roundel showing Victoria in profile, surrounded by the four national emblems of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Victoria Fountain (opened by Queen Victoria's sixth child, Princess Louise, in 1899) is noted above.

The City's main tribute to the Queen was undoubtedly the building of the Town Hall in St Aldate's, where the letters VR are to be seen plastered all over the decorative stucco of the interior. On the corner of St Aldate's and Blue Boar Street is the foundation stone, whose inscription gives a hint of renewed popular support for the monarchy:

This stone was laid on the sixth day of July 1893, being the wedding day of HRH Duke of York: and HRH Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, by Thomas Lucas Esquire, Mayor, Thomas W Taphouse Esquire, Sheriff. John Parnell & Son, Builders. Henry T Hare, Architect.

The Royal Wedding that took place on that day was a particularly emotional occasion, since the bride had previously been engaged to the groom's elder brother, Arthur, Duke of Clarence, who would eventually have succeeded to the throne if he had not died in 1892. Princess Victoria Mary of Teck did not flinch from her duty: her destiny was to be Queen Mary, and to fulfil it she was prepared to marry the new heir apparent, the Duke of York, who became George V on the death of his father Edward VII in 1910. The royal family were clearly otherwise engaged on the day that the foundation stone of the Town Hall was laid, but they made amends on 12th May 1897 by sending the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) to perform the opening ceremony in the year of his mother's Diamond Jubilee.

The future King Edward VIII, who was born in 1893, attended Magdalen College as an undergraduate from 1912 to 1914. There is a sculpted marble head of him by L. Jennings in the foyer of the northern extension of the Taylor Institution, beneath which is a plaque:

Above the door of Hall Bros, Tailors, 119 High Street is a sign: By appointment to the late HRH Prince of Wales 1923-36.

Statues of King Edward VII and of George V are to seen on the High Street front of Oriel College '

Queen Mary visited Oxford in 1937 to lay the foundation stone of the New Bodleian Library which had been designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott who had been one of the chief architects of nineteenth-century Oxford. The stone is on the curve of the wall to the left of the steps leading to the Broad Street doorway:

(Queen Nary, mother of King George VI, laid this foundation-stone of the New Bodleian Library on 25 June 1937.)

The building of the new library was delayed by the Second World War, but it was eventually officially opened on 24 October 1946 by George VI, on which occasion the key broke in the lock.

Although no attempt has been made to produce a complete record of the large number of foundation stones and of inscriptions recording opening ceremonies on recent buildings, three examples are given to illustrate the continuity of the connection between the Royal Family and the City of Oxford.

- A plaque on the wall of the stairs in the main foyer of Oxford Brookes University records that HRH The Duke of Edinburgh opened the building (then Oxford College of Technology and later Oxford Polytechnic) on 15th November 1963.

- A plaque just inside the entrance of the Central Library, Westgate, records the opening on 31st October 1973 by Her Majesty The Queen Mother.

- A stone set in the wall near the back entrance of the offices of the Oxfordshire County Council records the opening on 5th March 1976 by Her Majesty The Queen.

One method of gauging the popularity of the monarchy is to count the number of public houses with royal names. Oxford has plenty of such titles as The King's Arms, The King's Head, The Queen's Arms, The Queen's Head, The Crown, The Rose and Crown, The Royal Standard, but there are others named after individual members of the Royal Family. The Royal Oak in Woodstock Road recalls Charles II's hiding- place after the battle of Worcester in 1651. As well as the Victoria and the Victoria Arms, Oxford has a Edward VII at New Hinksey, a Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria's second son, Alfred, 1844-1900) in St Clement's, four dedicated to the Prince of Wales and one to the Duke of York:.

There is a former pub, now a wine-bar, in Little Clarendon Street, named after George, Duke of Cambridge (1819-1904), the only son of George III's seventh son, a first cousin of Queen Victoria, and known as The Royal George. He is commemorated by a bronze equestrian statue in Whitehall, in which he is depicted in the uniform of a field-marshal - a reminder that he fought in the Crimean War and that he was commander-in-chief of the army. He is also remembered for having contracted a clandestine marriage with an actress, Louisa Fairbrother, by whom he had three children, brought up with the surname of Fitzgeorge. It was for one of Louisa's pet dogs that he founded the Dogs' Cemetery in Hyde Park.