The wedding dress worn by Princess Alexandra of Denmark, later Princess of Wales and Queen Alexandra is displayed as part of the current exhibition Royal Women, in Bath’s Fashion Museum.
Kept in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace, the dress is on loan from the Royal Collection by gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen. It is an appropriate highlight exhibit given…
Two little known royal weddings at St George's Chapel, Windsor
16th March 2018
In addition to the four weddings of Queen Victoria’s children which took place at St. George’s Chapel, two other marriages were performed at St. George’s within the Queen’s family during her lifetime, which are far less known – that of Princess Frederica of…
Windsor’s first royal wedding took place in the twelfth century. What do we know about this wedding and why exactly did it take place at Windsor Castle?
It was the second marriage of the third Norman King, Henry I (r. 1100-35). His thirty-five-year reign was one without…
“Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!”
With these words, Queen Victoria described her wedding day in her diary – 10 February 1840, writing up the event for the day’s entry from Windsor Castle. It marked the beginning of her marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The opposite date of this ecstatic exhortation of joy on behalf of the Queen was unquestionably 14…
In the magnificent twelfth-century Gothic cathedral church of Roskilde on the island of Zealand, thirty-nine Kings and Queens of Denmark are buried. One Danish queen, however, is missing – and by no mere accident or fluke of history. Members of the Royal House of Denmark…
On 1 August 1832, the thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria of Kent made her first entry into her diary; it was a diary, as she described it on its title page, which had been given to her by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, at Kensington Palace the day before. Bound in…
On 16 March 1861, the Duchess of Kent, born Princess Marie Louise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and by her first marriage, Princess of Leinigen, died at her residence of Frogmore House, in Windsor Great Park. Though she had been mother to Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Kent had never herself been Princess of Wales, because her second husband, Edward, Duke of Kent had been George III’s fourth…
Looking for a lost Queen in Berlin: Queen Elisabeth Christine of Prussia
31st January 2018
Today, Queen Elisabeth Christine of Prussia (1715-1797) enjoys a kind of historical exile, banished to footnotes and paragraphs amidst the mountainous body of biographical material which exists about her exalted husband, Frederick II, King of Prussia, already christened…
Animals given to royalty could, of course, become pets – but they could often be presented in the form of political gifts, adding therefore to the monarch’s personal sense of majestas. An example of this is the bay horse and three brood mares, sent to Henry VIII by…
Alongside the well-established royal love of dogs, cats are far less recorded as preferred pets, unlike their canine counterparts. They have, however, been no less loved by those that did own them. So revered were cats (“mau”) as sacred animals in Ancient Egypt that they were often mummified. Feline depictions of Egyptian deities date back as far as 3100 BC; the goddess Bastet often took this…
