On 16 March 1861, Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore House, the private residence in Windsor Great Park which she had often used, living there for approximately two decades. After her death, the summer house she had planned during her lifetime was converted into a mausoleum on two levels, built on a mound overlooking the lake. The lower level contains the burial…
Queen Victoria’s visited Balmoral in her beloved Scottish Highlands in the late autumn of 1900. The Queen could not know it, but it was the last time that she would see the new castle which Prince Albert had erected in her words as his ‘own work… as at Osborne’ and…
Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The question is a complex and fascinating one to answer.
In the immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth century, and the age was accordingly…
The name of Miss M. Hope Robson belongs to that both visible and invisible host of British royal nannies and governesses which appeared at the royal courts of Europe in the nineteenth century, known to their charges but in some cases, almost forgotten to biography. Correspondence sent to them in burgeoning childish scrawl and later in a mature script, chart the chronology in pen or pencil of the…
Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet will be on permanent display this year at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, as part of the museum’s 2019 bicentenary celebration to mark the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, to whom of course, the…
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)…
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 Scotland with both her paintbrush and her pen. Queen Victoria was entirely devoted to the romance of the country, as seen through…
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’…
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 – mostly members of her own family through blood or marriage, including five of her children and numerous grandchildren –…
