Garden Tea Party Coloring Page for Young Princesses

Tea Parties: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• Afternoon tea was popularized in the 1840s by Anna, the 7th Duchess of Bedford, who began taking tea and snacks between lunch and dinner.
• Tea was first brought to England in the early 1600s and was initially so expensive that it was stored under lock and key.
• The three-tier cake stand was designed to keep sandwiches (bottom), scones (middle), and pastries (top) in the correct serving order.
• Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza helped make tea fashionable in Britain after marrying King Charles II in 1662.
• 'High tea' was actually a working-class supper served at a high dining table — not a fancy aristocratic affair.
• The Mad Hatter's tea party in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is one of fiction's most famous tea scenes.

Tea parties have been a beloved ritual in homes, gardens, and castle drawing rooms for nearly four hundred years. Tea itself arrived in Europe from China in the early 1600s, and within a few decades it had moved from a rare luxury to a daily habit across much of the continent. The elaborate afternoon tea tradition — with its tiered cake stand, fine china, sandwiches, and scones — was essentially invented in England in the 1840s and quickly became associated with elegance, conversation, and a certain unhurried gentleness that fits perfectly with the image of a princess in her garden. The spread on the table in this coloring page, from the curved teapot to the three-tier stand, reflects a real and surprisingly recent history.

The Duchess of Bedford and the Birth of Afternoon Tea

In the early 1800s, most wealthy English households ate a large midday dinner and then a late supper around nine or ten in the evening, leaving a long hungry gap in the afternoon. Around 1840, Anna Maria Russell, the 7th Duchess of Bedford, began asking for a pot of tea and a small snack to be brought to her room at around four o'clock. She started inviting friends to join her, the habit caught on among her social circle, and within a decade afternoon tea had spread from aristocratic drawing rooms to middle-class parlors across Britain. By the 1880s it was a fixed institution with its own etiquette, its own china, and its own architecture of sandwiches, scones, and pastries.

From China to Castle: The Journey of Tea

Tea has been drunk in China for at least two thousand years, where it was used both as a beverage and as a medicine. It reached Europe in the early 1600s when Dutch and Portuguese traders began importing it from their trading posts in Asia. In England, the first known public sale of tea happened at a London coffee house in 1657, where it was advertised as a cure for almost every ailment. The price was extremely high — a pound of tea could cost the equivalent of several weeks' wages — so early tea drinkers kept their supplies in locked wooden caddies. When Princess Catherine of Braganza of Portugal married King Charles II in 1662 and brought chests of tea as part of her dowry, she helped turn tea-drinking into a fashionable royal habit.

The Three-Tier Stand and Tea Party Etiquette

The three-tier stand visible in this coloring page is a Victorian invention designed to display and serve the classic afternoon tea spread efficiently and elegantly. The order matters: savory finger sandwiches sit on the bottom tier, plain and fruit scones with clotted cream and jam go in the middle, and sweet pastries and small cakes sit on top. The convention is to eat from the bottom tier upward. The stand became fashionable in the 1840s and 1850s alongside the rise of the afternoon tea ritual. Fine bone china cups and saucers — chosen for their delicacy and translucency — became part of the image of a proper tea table, and the decorated teapot in this picture reflects the ornate style that Victorian manufacturers perfected for the growing tea service market.