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 –…
