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Two little known royal weddings at St George's Chapel, Windsor

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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 Hanover, Baroness von Pawel-Rammingen (1848-1926) in 1880 and Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein (1872-1956) in 1891. The…
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The first royal wedding at Windsor

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10th March 2018
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…
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Queen Victoria's wedding

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3rd March 2018
“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…
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The Queen of Tears? Caroline Mathilde: The British-born Queen of Denmark

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1st March 2018
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 that she knew, such as her formidable stepmother-in-law, Queen Juliana Marie, are at Roskilde, as is, of course, her one-time…
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Queen Victoria's Journals

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11th February 2018
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…
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Looking for a lost Queen in Berlin: Queen Elisabeth Christine of Prussia

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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 ‘the Great’ by contemporary Europe and whom she prided herself on having been married to. It is a sad echo of the type of…
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Cats and royalty

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22nd January 2018
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…
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Rooms that make history: Mary II and The Queen’s Bed Chamber at Kensington Palace

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18th January 2018
One of English history’s ‘forgotten’ queens, is actually one who was arguablyamong the most loved. This was Mary II, the joint monarch – not queen consort of William III. Forgiven by posterity for deposing her father, contemporary history seems to have accepted this as being something of a regrettable necessity to safeguard England as a Protestant nation. Known for her love of…
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