Queen Victoria kept her journals from the year 1832 up until around two weeks before her death in 1901. Her voluminous correspondence is well known; indeed, it was averaged by the author Giles St Aubyn that the Queen wrote up to some 2,500 words per day (Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, XV). Three volumes of her letters were edited by Arthur C. Benson and Viscount Esher…
‘Islay [a pet dog] is still plagued by him [Lord Melbourne] every evening—a thing which he much enjoys—and constantly begs for the spectacles. I forgot to tell you that Karl has given me a pretty little Rowley, who likewise lives in the house. The multitude of dogs is…
‘Never, never can I forget this brilliant year… so full of marvellous kindness, loyalty & devotion of so many millions which I really could hardly have expected’. (Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 379).
With these words, Queen…
Queen Victoria began her journal in 1832 at the age of thirteen and continued to keep it until old age, with the last entry made just nine days before she died, constituting, therefore, a remarkable royal record. She took her journal with her wherever she went on her travels, which was entrusted to the care of her Wardrobe Maids.
The one hundred and forty-one bound volumes of Queen Victoria’s…
Queen Victoria famously wrote of her wedding day – 10 February 1840: ‘“Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!”
The day – 10 February – became one which the Queen – so peculiarly concerned with dates and anniversaries – would ever refer to as having…
A bedroom gives a uniquely personal insight into any historical personality and a royal personage no less so. Many key moments in Queen Victoria’s life also took place in her bedrooms, which help in no small way, to tell the story of that life.
The furnishing of this most…
Queen Victoria’s love of dogs provided the inspiration for royal sculpture and painting, as well, of course, the Queen’s journal entries. References to her dogs abound throughout. Interestingly, her life may in one way, be charted through her dogs, because they were with her from her youth until literally the very end. It was a dog that was with her as a young princess at Kensington and a dog…
On 25 June 1900, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg – born Princess Victoria of Hesse – gave birth to a son at Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park, the erstwhile residence of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, until her death in 1861. Princess…
Biography is also made up of people in the background; so it is with William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The appearances he made in the life of the future Queen Victoria were of extreme significance, in a way that was unique, and whilst these functions formed a natural…
Princess Alix of Hesse – as the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna was known before her marriage to the young Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 – visited Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park on several occasions, as the residence of her maternal aunt, Princess Helena of Schleswig-Holstein and her cousins.
Cumberland Lodge made a circle for Princess Alix around this part of her English family. She was…
