The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took
place 66 years ago today. The young monarch, who had succeeded to
the throne on the death of her father, King George VI, on February
6th 1952 was carried to this ancient ceremony in a golden coach
while the world watched. Millions of people around the world
celebrated with Elizabeth, then just 27 years old, at the start of
what would become a record…
Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The
question is a complex and fascinating one to answer. In the
immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to
be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth
century, and the age was accordingly…
The name of Miss M. Hope Robson belongs
to that both visible and invisible host of British royal nannies
and governesses which appeared at the royal courts of Europe in the
nineteenth century, known to their charges but in some cases,
almost forgotten to biography.
Aged 10 ¾ years old, Princess Victoria
composed a story. This delightful children’s tale, written by the
future Queen, survives in its own little red ‘Composition’ notebook
in the Royal Archives. To understand how it was made and the full
significance of it, we need only look at the age of the princess
when she wrote it. I surmise that if it was written at the age of
ten and three-quarter…
Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina
Alexandra Feodorovna, visited the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate
in 1894 to take a cure for sciatica, during which time she became
godmother to the Allen twins, born in the house where she was
staying, to her landlady, Mrs Allen. These…
Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold
(1788-1859), referred to in most biographies of Queen Victoria
simply as Madame Siebold, is a name often treated as a historical
footnote, but is in fact, one of quite astonishing importance. It
was Madame Siebold, the skilled German…
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born
whose birth would be of overwhelming importance but on whose
delivery it was by no means certain that she would succeed. This,
despite the proud boast of her father, the Duke of Kent, who was
determined in the royal marriage race that ensued on the death of
the Prince Regent’s heir, Princess Charlotte, that ‘the crown will
come to me and my children’.
Mrs Brock was the future Queen Victoria’s
nurse. Called by her ‘dear Boppy’ (op. cit., Christopher Hibbert,
Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 21), she remained Princess
Victoria’s nurse until the age of five, after which she passed into
the better-known hands of…
Soft, striking and above all, symbolic.
The wedding bouquet carried by the future Queen of Spain, Letizia
Ortiz, at her royal wedding on May 22nd 2004 was filled with
significance. From personal touches to nods to one of the oldest
ruling dynasties in Europe, Letizia filled…
Queen Victoria is for many, synonymous
with the notion of afternoon tea, probably because the social
ceremony became properly established during the later years of her
reign. The Queen’s evident love of tea, however, reaches back much
further than this elegant ritual. Indeed, the word occurs 7,587
times in the various typescripts or edited copies of her journal,
proving it was part of her…
