‘You are entering a consecrated building, the burial place of a Queen and her Consort. Please be as quiet as possible’. These respectful words are what greeted any visitor before they entered the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park, when it used to be open to the public.
It was of course, not the only royal memorial to the dead Prince; England…
‘The Royal Family in 1846’ by the fashionable German painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73) is an extraordinarily important image.
Queen Victoria regarded it as the painter’s supreme achievement, although he painted the Queen on other occasions, most notably in…
Royal menageries became homes for the many animals that were given in previous centuries as political presents from their respective countries and thereby entered a life of exalted captivity, the nature of any zoo now being a controversial one.
The oldest baroque zoo was…
The imperial palace of Schönbrunn in the western suburb of Hietzing on the outskirts of Vienna, was the summer residence of the former Habsburg dynasty. It stuns with its magnificence, but then this, of course, was part of its purpose and is the power of its architecture. It has the glory of the monarch’s glare. The palace, like the great country house in an imperial form, was intended to…
One of the earliest names that occurs in the life of the future Queen Victoria is that of ‘Siebold’; although the name vanishes almost on the first mention. But no single name should be rendered insignificant just because it only occurs once.
This is undoubtedly the case…
The Swiss Cottage at Osborne is a capsule of successive royal childhood, which continued to hold a place in the affections of the first children that used it – the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – long after they had grown up, just as it would for…
On 20 June 1837, Princess Victoria of Kent was awoken in her bedroom at Kensington Palace, writing later in her journal entry for that day, in which significantly the proud new word ‘alone’ features intermittently (also underlined), we read: “I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma, who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of…
The artworks by the fashionable German portrait painter and historical artist Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1860-1920) of Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her elder sister, Elisabeth Feodorovna, ‘Ella’ Grand Duchess Sergei of Russia…
A portrait of the toddler Princess Alix of Hesse by the Austrian painter George Koberwein caught my attention back in 2004. Examining how it came to be painted was a source of great interest to me, not least because the picture that he produced of the baby princess, not…
Banbury Cross is of course, synonymous with local Oxfordshire folklore for many, because of the popular rhyme which has a ‘fine lady’ riding to it on her cockhorse. Indeed, this is the main reason why many people know of the existence of the Cross at all. Far less known is the fact that the Cross commemorates a royal marriage, a topical thought in the light of the recent royal wedding at…
