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'Ever your loving Nicky': A forgotten letter?

I first encountered this hitherto neglected and virtually ‘forgotten’ letter, categorised as by Tsar Nicholas II, within the volume The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra April 1914-March 1917, skilfully edited by Prof Joseph T. Fuhrmann. What immediately caught my interest was the fact that it was contained within the main body of the work, ‘The…
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Poetry and the Tsarina?

Included amongst the works read as a young woman by Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918), were – according to letters that she wrote to her eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg – Guizot’s Reformation de la Litterature, the Life of Cromwell and Raumer’s nine-volume set, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen(Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden…
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Returning to England with Victoria

The Duke of Kent was determined that his unborn child – history’s Queen Victoria – should not be born outside of Britain, to assure its right to succeed to the throne in the British mind. As a true Hanoverian, he was the fourth son of George III, the King who famously ‘glor[ied] in the name of Britain’. Clearly, it was a step forward from the reign of George I, who knew only faulty…
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Queen Victoria's Winter Sledge

Queen Victoria’s winter sledge became synonymous with the Windsor Christmas, at least during the lifetime of Prince Albert, who is rightly credited with popularising Christmas traditions in England, including that of the Christmas tree. The royal trees were decorated with…
FeaturesHistoryInsight

The death of Prince Albert - Part Two

In a continuation of our two-part series, our Historian, Elizabeth Jane Timms, looks back at the death of Prince Albert: The passing of the Prince Consort is, of course, synonymous with the Blue Room at Windsor Castle, where it took place, a room which I have researched for some six years. The room had been that in which Queen Victoria’s ‘Uncle King’ George IV had died on 26 June 1830. It…
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