Located in the beautiful Gothic church of St Mary’s at Bury St Edmunds,
is the tomb of a princess of England and a brief queen of France, the thirdwife
of Louis XII. The wife, daughter and sister of kings, she does not rest in the
same royal burial place as her brother, King Henry VIII, who is buried at St
George’s Chapel, Windsor – as is her husband, the Duke of Suffolk. Had…
As part of the ‘Great European Tour’ of the Mozart family, which began from Salzburg in June 1763 and extended across the Holy Roman Empire to France, the Netherlands and Switzerland until November 1766, there was a long visit to London from April 1764 until 1 August…
Outside of the traditional burial sites of Westminster Abbey and St George’s Chapel, Windsor, some English (and British) monarchs are missing. The tomb of King John resides in the chancel at Worcester Cathedral, not far from the chantry that contains the grave of the son…
The new memorial that has been erected in front of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula on Tower Green marks the spot ‘identified’ in the Victorian period as being the site of the scaffold, which may have been a misunderstanding of the Tower’s geography in proportion to the apartments where Anne Boleyn had been housed. The fact that Anne’s burial place of St Peter ad Vincula lay only behind…
The gallery of so-called ‘Windsor Beauties’ is the name given to the collection
of portraits painted by Sir Peter Lely (1618-80) of celebrated courtesans and
women of the nobility in Restoration England, which can be seen – and indeed,
still admired – in the…
A building in the Oxford suburb of Marston preserves a unique connection with the lost world of imperial Russia. Its typical late-Victorian exterior belies the remarkable nature of its hidden history. In this building for a period of time, personal possessions once owned by…
The Archduchess
Maria Antonia of Austria – Mariabeing an establishedHabsburg prefix
given to all the daughters of Empress Maria Theresia to mark the dynasty’s
special veneration for The Virgin Mary – was born as the 15thchild of
Maria Theresia on 2 November 1755 at around 8.30 in the evening, a ‘small, but completely healthy Archduchess’,
as the Court Chamberlain…
On 6 July 1893, another royal wedding was celebrated at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace, between Prince George of Wales – created Duke of York in 1892 – and Princess Mary of Teck, the future George V and Queen Mary. Princess Mary of Teck had been betrothed in…
The use of perfume can be traced back to the world’s most ancient civilisations, notably Mesopotamia and Egypt. It flourished during the Italian Renaissance and the personal perfumer of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici Rene the Florentine, brought his perfumes with…
Jane Seymour was the only one of Henry VIII’s queens to share a grave with him, but the tomb is not what Henry VIII originally intended. The King had planned an impressive monument, to include a recumbent statue of his most “entirely beloved” Queen Jane, a tomb which he would share with her in due course, overshadowing her to the last with all the straddling bravura of the Whitehall mural.
