Queen Victoria’s relationship with the railway began on 13 June 1842, when she drove from Windsor to Slough with Prince Albert, to make the historic first royal journey by train to Paddington. This relationship would continue throughout her life and endure, even beyond her death, as the Great Western Railway conveyed the Queen’s body in the Royal Train from Paddington to Windsor for her…
Queen Victoria wrote in 1867 of the peace at Frogmore, in Windsor Great Park, in ‘this dear lovely garden’. By this point, she was six years into the widowhood, which would last until the end of her life. The gardens at Frogmore had a particularly sacred meaning for…
In the northern end of the gardens at Frogmore is a small building, the so-called Gothic Ruin. We know that Queen Victoria used her brick and tiled Tea House in which to breakfast, write, sit and take tea. She often worked outdoors on her papers in a tent set up close to the…
Queen Victoria’s last journey by train took place on Saturday 2 February 1901. The Great Western Railway produced a beautifully illuminated train plan for the ‘Funeral of Her Late Most Gracious Majesty The Queen. Arrangement of Royal Train. Paddington to Windsor. 1.32 pm. Saturday 2nd February 1901’. That relationship, which had begun in life for the Queen only two years after her marriage…
“She was a rare flower, too delicate for this world, but rejoicing others with her fragrance and cheering them on the way…”
With these words, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia described the death of her friend, Julia, Countess Rantzau in a letter of 1901 to…
The ‘meeting’ between Marie Antoinette and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has a fabled quality, not least because of the oft-repeated folklore that has grown around it. From the point of view of posterity, it is a fascinating moment to contemplate, when two legendary…
A chance listing on the Public Catalogue Foundation Art UK, for an oil on canvas painting (35.8 x 30.7 cm) said to be of Russia’s last Empress, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, when she was Princess Alix of Hesse (1872-1918) led me to investigate this extraordinary artwork further. Because in the many years I had researched on Princess Alix, I had never seen anything like it. It does not resemble…
London has many plaques and memorials with royal connections but in fact, rather fewer statues. Some of these statues have interesting hidden histories of their own, of how they were made, how they came to be in the places that they are and why. Some of these statues may be…
It was not simply the wedding but also the welcome attending the arrival of a future royal bride in England which came to be the subject of public interest; it provided after all, the first glimpse of her in the country in which she would be princess and of which in some…
The Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace first and foremost is the name of the Chapel Royal, that establishment of the Royal Household intended to meet the spiritual needs of the Sovereign; the secondary term refers to the building itself – a royal peculiar – in which the monarch actually worshipped. The Chapel Royal is probably best remembered for the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince…
