mob from this bedroom, such state beds, with the elaborate etiquette they embodied, were already falling out of use. A state bed with a domed tester designed in 1775-76 by Robert Adam for Lady Child at Osterley Park and another domed state bed, delivered by Thomas Chippendale for Sir Edwin Lascelles at Harewood House, Yorkshire in 1773 are two of the last English state beds intended for a main floor State Bedroom in a non-royal residence. For sleep In Britain monarchs slept in a state bed in the Palace of Westminster the night before their coronation, a tradition started by William the Conqueror in 1066 and continued until George IV was the last monarch to sleep in the bed, in 1821. The state bed—an earlier one was damaged in a fire and replaced in 1859—remained in the Speaker's House until the 1940s, when it was moved out as too opulent to be there during the difficult times of the Second World War. It was probably sold during a government modernisation, somehow appeared in an auction in Northamptonshire, and was bought for a family for £100 in the 1960s. They used it for thirty years, recognising its importance but without knowing where it came from, until an interiors expert at the Victoria and Albert Museum published an appeal years later to try to find it; the bed was bought back from the family and returned to Speaker's House after restoration and with new hangings; it can be viewed during tours of the Speaker's House. St. Peter's Basilica Pope Urban VIII commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design and construct a large structure that would be placed over the main altar, believed to be above the tomb of Saint Peter, in the new St. Peter's Basilica. The canopy imitated cloth in bronze, as did many subsequent imitations. This famous and spectacular feature is generally called the "Baldacchino", though strictly it is a ciborium. Bernini's design for the Baldacchino incorporated giant solomonic columns inspired by columns that ringed the altar of the Old St. Peter's. These columns were originally donated by Constantine, and a false tradition asserts they are the columns from the Temple of Jerusalem. The lowest parts of the four columns of Bernini's Baldachin have a helical groove, and the middle and upper sections of the columns are covered in olive and bay branches, which are populated with a myriad of bees