Features

'My dear Grandmama': Queen Victoria's memories of her grandmother

Who was Augusta Caroline Sophia, Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld? Born a Princess of Reuss Ebersdorf (1757-1831), she was Queen Victoria’s ‘dear Grandmother’. In 1872, Queen Victoria wrote down a short memoir which survives at Windsor, which was reprinted in the three volumes of Queen Victoria’s published letters, edited by A. C. Benson and Lord Esher (1908). We do not know…
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FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria's Saloon

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…
Features

Taking a look at Queen Victoria's Tea House

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…
Features

Taking a look at Queen Victoria's Gothic Ruin

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 Tea House. The gardens at Frogmore were of profound emotional importance to the Queen, not only for the peace and…
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Queen Victoria's Royal Waiting Rooms

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…
FeaturesHistory

When Mozart met Marie Antoinette?

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 (Austrian) figures were in the same room, their biographical futures lying still before them. I want to explore the facts…
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History

London’s Royal Statues: Queen Charlotte

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…
FeaturesHistory

Welcoming a Royal Bride to England

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 cases, she would be Queen, and therefore, the supposed mother of the continuing or new, royal dynasty. Catherine of Aragon…
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