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 him to France in the
16th century where the art was popularised under her patronage.
Catherine de’ Medici’s perfumers…
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…
Looking for the grave of Henry VIII’s
first wife, Catherine of Aragon in Peterborough, is an experience
both moving and affecting and remains a special reason why many
choose to visit the Cathedral today. Peterborough Cathedral hosts
an annual festival devoted to…
As Prince Albert reprimanded his second
daughter, Princess Alice, for telling her eldest sister the Crown
Princess, that their father’s illness had worsened, he said sadly
(but correctly): ‘You did wrong. You should have told her I am
dying’. The Prince’s fatalism was such that he acknowledged what
the Queen did not dare herself to admit. Indeed, Queen Victoria’s
letters to her uncle…
By October 1764 the Mozarts had once more
been at court, having been received at the Queen’s House in May as
Leopold Mozart wrote ‘within 5 days of arriving’. The young
Wolfgang played before George III and even accompanied Queen
Charlotte, who sang an aria. In…
Having given several royal performances
before George III and Queen Charlotte, the boy Mozart’s sonatas for
keyboard and violin K10-15 were engraved before the end of 1764,
dedicated to the musical Queen: ‘Six Sonates pour le clavecin que
peuvent se jouer avec…
Hair works like a symbolic thread
throughout a person’s life history. For Queen Victoria, this was no
exception. Indeed, for a royal personage, hair plays a massive part
in ceremonial display and formal dressing as well as private
ritual. The role of royal hairdresser is also one that enables
exceptional intimacy, thereby an indication of great privilege.
Today we can visit Queen Victoria’s…
For Queen Victoria, the number fourteen
held a terrible power. This date, the ‘14th’, could seem to haunt
the Queen like the shadow of death. Much as she later tried to
reclaim it as a sacred date, she beheld it with an almost mystical
sense of dark fascination and…
In Berlin, there is a missing queen. Her
burial place in the historic Hohenzollerngruft [Hohenzollern vault]
in Berlin Cathedral is disputed and may be lost. Elisabeth
Christine, Frederick II’s (‘the Great’) unloved queen was a victim
of historical banishment, in…
In 1888, a year whose numbering Queen
Victoria thought odd (‘Never can it be written again!’), her
daughter, the Princess Royal and Crown Princess of Prussia, had
become German Empress, prompting the proud words from her mother:
‘My OWN dear Empress Victoria… may God bless her!’ (cit., Elizabeth
Longford, Queen Victoria, 551). After a reign of a mere ninety-nine
days, her husband Emperor…
