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…
