One room at Windsor Castle is perhaps more associated with Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert than any other. This is what was called the Blue Closet, part of the private apartments. By a curious coincidence, Prince Albert would later die in another room of the same colour, the Blue Room at Windsor Castle, although this is of course, mere royal happenstance. It was in the Blue Closet…
On 25 October 1897, Queen Victoria drafted her last will, the manuscript of which is preserved at Windsor. Typically for the Queen, such a document existed outside of her journal and in her entry for that day – written up at Balmoral – there is no mention of her making…
The wedding ring of Queen Victoria has its special poignancy, a symbol of the passionate marriage she enjoyed with Prince Albert. Placed on her finger on the morning of 10 February 1840, her private instructions ensured that she would wear it in perpetuity. What do we know…
When the newly-married Queen Victoria returned with Prince Albert to Buckingham Palace, she was with the Prince ‘from 10m. to 2 till 20 m.p.2’, after which the couple went down for the wedding breakfast. During these thirty minutes, Queen Victoria gave Prince Albert his own wedding ring (Elizabeth Longford, Queen Victoria, 152). At this wedding breakfast was the royal cake. This cake, unlike…
Queen Victoria’s wedding veil was an object of singular poignancy because of the enormous sentimental value that it represented to her in personal terms and the context in which she last wore it. She wore in on the monumental day – 10 February 1840 – the day she…
In the summer of 1894, Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia came to stay at Walton-on-Thames, in the house which his fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse’s eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg and her husband, Prince Louis of Battenberg had rented. They would stay in…
Queen Victoria’s love for her dogs was lavishly recorded in paint and sculpture and not least, in her sketches and words. Lord Melbourne, the Queen’s Prime Minister, once commented dryly: ‘You’ll be smothered with dogs‘.
The Queen’s characteristic need to memorialise her friends and servants could also be why she wanted to create memorials to her dogs, for all these…
The earliest memories of a historical personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially, what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as they saw them. Of course, we know…
On 16 March 1861, Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore House, the private residence in Windsor Great Park which she had often used, living there for approximately two decades. After her death, the summer house she had planned during her lifetime…
Queen Victoria’s visited Balmoral in her beloved Scottish Highlands in the late autumn of 1900. The Queen could not know it, but it was the last time that she would see the new castle which Prince Albert had erected in her words as his ‘own work… as at Osborne’ and which had become a box of intensely personal memories. So deeply did the Queen feel her first visit to Balmoral after Prince…
