When Tsarevich Nicholas visited Windsor
as a guest of Queen Victoria in the summer of 1894, he spent a
brief time with his fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse, at Marlborough
House, the London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales on
the Mall. As Nicholas wrote with glee to his mother, Empress Marie
Feodorovna, that following his short visit to Sandringham, the
Norfolk residence of the Prince…
Descending the hill at Windsor Castle
down towards St George’s Chapel, today’s visitor passes the Deanery
at St George’s. The upper level of this building, however, has a
hidden secret within its sacred architecture. Over the leads of the
Deanery was a constructed…
One room at Windsor Castle is perhaps
more associated with Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert
than any other. This is what was called the Blue Closet, part of
the private apartments. By a curious coincidence, Prince Albert
would later die in another room of the…
On 25 October 1897, Queen Victoria
drafted her last will, the manuscript of which is preserved at
Windsor. Typically for the Queen, such a document existed outside
of her journal and in her entry for that day – written up at
Balmoral – there is no mention of her making it, although
admittedly, this is the journal entry which survives in the copies
made by her beloved daughter, Princess…
The wedding ring of Queen Victoria has
its special poignancy, a symbol of the passionate marriage she
enjoyed with Prince Albert. Placed on her finger on the morning of
10 February 1840, her private instructions ensured that she would
wear it in perpetuity. What do we know…
When the newly-married Queen Victoria
returned with Prince Albert to Buckingham Palace, she was with the
Prince ‘from 10m. to 2 till 20 m.p.2’, after which the couple went
down for the wedding breakfast. During these thirty minutes, Queen
Victoria gave Prince Albert his…
Queen Victoria’s wedding veil was an
object of singular poignancy because of the enormous sentimental
value that it represented to her in personal terms and the context
in which she last wore it. She wore in on the monumental day – 10
February 1840 – the day she decided was in fact, had been the
‘happiest’ of her life. On the morning of her wedding, a day which
began with rain pouring…
In the summer of 1894, Tsarevich Nicholas
of Russia came to stay at Walton-on-Thames, in the house which his
fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse’s eldest sister, Victoria, Princess
Louis of Battenberg and her husband, Prince Louis of Battenberg had
rented. They would stay in…
Queen Victoria’s love for her dogs was
lavishly recorded in paint and sculpture and not least, in her
sketches and words. Lord Melbourne, the Queen’s Prime Minister,
once commented dryly: ‘You’ll be smothered with dogs‘. The Queen’s
characteristic…
The earliest memories of a historical
personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal
first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially,
what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as
they saw them. Of course, we know that all true biography begins
before birth and that event could hardly be expected to count
amongst any of even the very…
