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) and Alice visited the seaside town with her family in what would poignantly prove to be the last holiday that they would…
Queen Victoria’s love of Scotland and the Scottish Highlands is of course, legendary – immortalised in a wealth of artworks, souvenir albums, including the Queen’s own watercolours and not least of course, the Queen’s Highland journals. She praised…
But for the moving memorial that Queen Victoria erected to her and for a letter in which this is described, the name of Ida Bonanomi might have been completely forgotten in historical terms. Thanks to these, this is not the case.
It can be found in Edinburgh’s Rosebank…
An exquisite gold, sapphire and diamond brooch crafted in St Petersburg was consigned to auction in October 2018. I had first encountered it as a personal gift from Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) to the friend of her youth, Marion Louisa ‘Pollie’ Delmé-Radcliffe, Baroness Ungern-Sternberg whose touching connection I explored in a short article for my Royal Central blog back in…
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 –…
Aged sixteen, Princess Victoria made a pencil sketch of herself. Knowing the vividness of the watercolours that she made for her sketchbook and the skilled drawings she made during this time of other important figures in her youth, it is fascinating that she chose to apply…
Whilst researching for a forthcoming academic article on Louisa Louis, the devoted dresser to Princess Charlotte of Wales (1771-1838) who was deeply valued by Queen Victoria, I encountered the name of Mrs Brock. She belongs to that fascinating roll-call of characters that claim a connection with Queen Victoria, who have become all-but historically invisible and are normally banished to the realms…
Contained within the report made by Nicholas Sokolov, who was charged with conducting the official investigation into the fate of the Russian Imperial Family by the White Russian Government in February 1919, is an extraordinary set of four images, listed as ‘Nos. 15, 16…
I first encountered this hitherto neglected and virtually ‘forgotten’ letter, categorised as by Tsar Nicholas II, within the volume The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra April 1914-March 1917, skilfully edited by Prof Joseph T.
With the forthcoming exhibition of the Royal Collection George IV: Art & Spectacle set to open later this year, I want to take a brief look at the relationship between the future Queen Victoria and her paternal uncle, the Prince Regent, later George IV.
The Duke of Kent was deeply concerned that his unborn child should be born on British soil, so that its right to succeed would not be…
