Queen Victoria began her journal in 1832 at the age of thirteen and continued to keep it until old age, with the last entry made just nine days before she died, constituting, therefore, a remarkable royal record. She took her journal with her wherever she went on her travels, which was entrusted to the care of her Wardrobe Maids.
The one hundred and forty-one bound volumes of Queen Victoria’s…
‘What sorrows this last year brought us, what endless anxieties, what worries and losses – God grant the new year may be a calmer and happier one for the whole of dear Russia. Sleep well and peacefully…’ With these words, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918)…
Queen Victoria famously wrote of her wedding day – 10 February 1840: ‘“Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!”
The day – 10 February – became one which the Queen – so peculiarly concerned with dates and anniversaries – would ever refer to as having…
A bedroom gives a uniquely personal insight into any historical personality and a royal personage no less so. Many key moments in Queen Victoria’s life also took place in her bedrooms, which help in no small way, to tell the story of that life.
The furnishing of this most private of spaces – usually the penultimate room in the sequence of rooms which defined through architecture, the level of…
Queen Victoria’s love of dogs provided the inspiration for royal sculpture and painting, as well, of course, the Queen’s journal entries. References to her dogs abound throughout. Interestingly, her life may in one way, be charted through her dogs, because they were with…
On 25 June 1900, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg – born Princess Victoria of Hesse – gave birth to a son at Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park, the erstwhile residence of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, until her death in 1861. Princess…
Princess Alix of Hesse visited Malta in 1890. Little would appear to have been recorded about it, although it is possible to piece together some details of the trip from surviving accounts, biographies by those that personally knew her and from extracts of letters she wrote herself. The following is the result of what I have managed to discover so far about this visit that she made, as part of a…
Biography is also made up of people in the background; so it is with William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The appearances he made in the life of the future Queen Victoria were of extreme significance, in a way that was unique, and whilst these functions formed a natural…
Princess Alix of Hesse – as the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna was known before her marriage to the young Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 – visited Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park on several occasions, as the residence of her maternal aunt, Princess Helena of…
Of the memorials in Kensington Gardens, many share a close connection with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the most important to the latter being the ornate Gothic masterpiece designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, known as the Albert Memorial, which was unveiled in 1872 and restored in recent memory. The statue to the great doctor Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was revealed by Prince Albert and has…
