History

Royal Windowpanes

The regal tradition of scratching signatures in windowpanes is long established and well known. The windows – particularly when in rooms of royal residences – formed a kind of living ‘guestbook’, often accompanied by the date the visit or signature, was made. These windowpanes are silent witnesses to vanished royal gatherings on long ago summers or essential occasions, represented today by…
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History

Alice in Eastbourne: A Royal Holiday in 1878

In the summer of 1878, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, came to Eastbourne, because she had been ordered rest. The sojourn on the East Sussex coast was the gift of Queen Victoria to her daughter, (David Duff, Hessian Tapestry, 177)…
FeaturesHistory

Princess Alix of Hesse's engagement ring?

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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A Pearl Earring and Imperial Russia

Displayed as part of the London Science Museum’s exhibition on the Russian Imperial Family, The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution is a pearl earring. This extraordinarily poignant object has its own silent story to tell, concerning the fate of the Romanovs. Believed to have belonged to the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, this single pearl earring is symbolic of the pieces of the Tsarina’s personal…
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Ever your devoted friend: Alix and Pollie

‘Where is Pollie?’ (Lotte Hofmann-Kuhnt, Briefe der Zarin Alexandra von Russland an ihre Jugendfreundin Toni Becker-Bracht, 2009). Princess Alix of Hesse paused to add these words, almost as an afterthought, to a letter to her close friend, Toni Becker-Bracht, from Balmoral, on 27 September 1892. With these words, Princess Alix most probably refers to her friend, Marion Louisa…
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