After the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at 11:30 am in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947, the bridal gifts given to Princess Elizabeth were exhibited at St James’s Palace, numbering over 2,500. Like the gifts, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding dress, designed by the leading British couturier, Sir Norman Hartnell, was also put on display. It had been made up…
New findings on Queen Victoria and the midwife who delivered her
11th November 2019
I first encountered Marian Theodore Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold back in 2018 when I was researching the birth of the future Queen Victoria, ahead of this year’s bicentenary. Madame Siebold was the skilled German obstetrician who by an extraordinary circumstance…
The lost royal garden - on a roof: Ludwig II's Wintergarten
25th October 2019
Munich has a lost royal garden. As with so much that surrounds the legendary King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), the myth has its roots in reality. That King who once said of himself ‘I want to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others’ is now an established…
Inside where Marie Antoinette stayed on her way to Versailles
24th October 2019
On her bridal journey across the Holy Roman Empire to Paris and already travelling according to her new status of Dauphine due to her first marriage ceremony by proxy, Marie Antoinette took some two and half weeks to reach her illustrious destination. There is a poignancy about her departure from Vienna, for she was witnessed as stretching her neck out of the window of her carriage to snatch the…
Whilst researching on the correspondence of the last Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) of Russia and Princess Marie Bariatinsky, one of the Tsarina’s first maids-of-honour (freilina) in her early years in Russia and a later friend, I discovered a series of…
Whilst on one of her late holidays in the south of France, Queen Victoria made her only visit to Spain. It was a visit that aroused the Queen’s socio-historic curiosity in national culture and peoples, something she often gave expression to in watercolour sketches as vivid…
In the spring of 1873, Princess Alice of Hesse, second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, set out from Darmstadt to visit Italy. It was the fulfilment of a life’s dream. Certainly, it was a totally new experience of travel for her, in marked contrast to the type of holidays that she had made up until this point in her life. Due to the financial constraints of her family and the…
'Darling Mama': The Tsarina and her mother, Princess Alice
10th October 2019
Princess Alix of Hesse, sixth child and fourth daughter of
Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and her
husband, Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, was six years old when her mother died
on 14 December 1878, incidentally the seventeenth…
From Vienna to Versailles: the last, romantic days of Marie Antoinette's bridal procession
21st September 2019
All this week, Royal Central’s Elizabeth Jane Timms has been telling the story of Marie Antoinette’s bridal procession as she made her way to her new home in France. Today, she reaches the end of the story and that first, fateful meeting between Marie Antoinette…
Vienna to Versailles: inside the bridal procession of Marie Antoinette
20th September 2019
Earlier this week, Elizabeth Jane Timms took Royal Central readers into the heart of the story of how Marie Antoinette became a royal bride. Now she continues the story of her bridal procession, which took Marie Antoinette from Vienna to Versailles…..
The first stop was the great Benedictine baroque abbey of Melk above the Danube. According to Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie…
