Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Edward William Spencer Ford, GCVO, KCB, ERD, DL (24 July 1910 – 19 November 2006) 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 it an annus horribilis. The phrase was later used by the Queen in a speech in November 1992 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.