4. Queen Victoria Insisted on a Completely White Funeral, Which Mimicked a Wedding
We tend to associate white with weddings and black with funerals. Queen Victoria is both responsible for some of the color tradition, as well as guilty of breaking it. She insisted on wearing white at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840, something that completely broke with tradition. The white was designed to signify that both the bride and groom were virgins on their wedding night.
However, the queen was known to have a voracious sexual appetite and even sometimes placed her physical relationship with her husband over her duties to the country as its monarch. During her ninth pregnancy, a doctor advised her to have no more children, but she famously complained that that physical relationship might as well be over.
Queen Victoria is often pictured as wearing completely black, in perpetual mourning for her late husband. However, in keeping with her fascination with the occult and unresolved grief over the loss of her husband, Victoria requested that her funeral, like her wedding, be entirely in white. She was even dressed in a white bridal veil. Possibly this was to signify that she intended to be eternally married to her prince and would be united with him in death. Whatever the case, the white veil indeed indicated that her relationship with her husband had honestly been the happiest relationship of her life.