Edward Ford

Sir Edward William Spencer Ford was a courtier in the Royal Household of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. He is perhaps best known for writing to the Queen's private secretary regarding the 40th year of the Queen's reign, having hoped that the Queen would experience an annus mirabilis but instead finding 1992 an annus horribilis. She used the phrase in a speech to describe a year in which one of her four children was divorced, two more formally separated from their spouses, and Windsor Castle caught fire.