The next important ceremony in which I was officially concerned was the Coronation of King Edward [VII, in 1902]. … Before the Coronation I had a remarkable dream. The State coach had to pass through the Arch at the Horse Guards on the way to Westminster Abbey. I dreamed that it stuck in the Arch, and that some of the Life Guards on duty were compelled to hew off the Crown upon the coach, before it could be freed. When I told the Crown Equerry, Colonel Ewart, he laughed and said, ‘What do dreams matter?’ ‘At all events’, I replied, ‘let us have the coach and the arch measured.’ So this was done; and, to my astonishment, we found that the arch was nearly two feet too low to allow the coach to pass through. I returned to Colonel Ewart in triumph, and said, ‘What do you think of dreams now?’ ‘I think it’s damned fortunate you had one,’ he replied. It appears that the State Coach had not been driven through the arch for some time, and that the level of the road had since been raised during repairs. So I am not sorry that my dinner disagreed with me that night; and I only wish all nightmares were as useful.

That’s from Men Women and Things, the 1937 memoir of William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland. An even more striking moment occurred 11 years later, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria visited England and the Portlands received him at Welbeck Abbey. During the weeklong visit, Portland and the archduke were shooting on the estate when “one of the loaders fell down. This caused both barrels of a gun he was carrying to be discharged, the shot passing within a few feet of the Archduke and myself. I have often wondered whether the Great War might not have been averted, or at least postponed, had the Archduke met his death then, and not at Sarajevo in the following year.”