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'Darling Mama': The Tsarina and her mother, Princess Alice

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10th October 2019
Princess Alix of Hesse, sixth child and fourth daughter of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and her husband, Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, was six years old when her mother died on 14 December 1878, incidentally the seventeenth anniversary of the death of Albert, the Prince Consort. This effect of this singularly shattering event on the young Princess Alix can…
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A 'lost' letter from Ella?

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8th July 2019
In the Western manuscripts collection held at the British Library are what are known as the Boyd Carpenter papers, Vol. V, Add MS 46721: 1884-1917. This remarkable collection of documents contain letters written in English from or on behalf of various crowned heads of Europe…
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Princess Alix of Hesse's engagement ring?

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13th April 2019
In a recent life of Queen Victoria, (A. N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life, 2014) I stumbled across an illustration of one of the famous group photographs taken behind the Palais Edinburg in Coburg, showing Queen Victoria surrounded by a whole host of contemporary royalty – mostly members of her own family through blood or marriage, including five of her children and numerous grandchildren &#8211…
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Poetry and the Tsarina?

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27th February 2019
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…