On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born
whose birth would be of overwhelming importance but on whose
delivery it was by no means certain that she would succeed. This,
despite the proud boast of her father, the Duke of Kent, who was
determined in the royal marriage race that ensued on the death of
the Prince Regent’s heir, Princess Charlotte, that ‘the crown will
come to me and my children’.
Mrs Brock was the future Queen Victoria’s
nurse. Called by her ‘dear Boppy’ (op. cit., Christopher Hibbert,
Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 21), she remained Princess
Victoria’s nurse until the age of five, after which she passed into
the better-known hands of…
Queen Victoria is for many, synonymous
with the notion of afternoon tea, probably because the social
ceremony became properly established during the later years of her
reign. The Queen’s evident love of tea, however, reaches back much
further than this elegant ritual.
One of the primary things that shows a
member of the Royal Family’s status is their title and style. The
title is the part which precedes their name and the style is what
determines how one addresses the royal. Royal titles haven’t always
been as they are now. The title of Prince/Princess has meant
different things over the years too! It was during George I’s reign
that the title…
As the ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as Queen
Victoria was popularly termed, her very numerous grandchildren
could, of course, expect to receive a variety of charming presents
for their birthdays, just as we might treasure things sent to us by
our grandmothers. These presents…
To Queen Victoria, she was ‘dear Marie
Erbach’. That was what the Queen called Princess Marie of
Battenberg, later Princess zu Erbach-Schönberg, whose memoirs first
appeared in English in 1925, printed by London publishers George
Allen & Unwin. Princess Marie…
English Heritage celebrates the
bicentenary of the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
with a new exhibition, Royal Presents at Osborne, focusing on the
unique stories behind seven gifts exchanged by the royal couple.
Osborne itself was, of course, the Queen and Prince Consort’s
supreme present as a private retreat, for themselves and the royal
children. Its situation was ideal…
Queen Victoria’s use of perfume is a
subject of interest because of what it reveals about both her
personal toilette and tastes. An equivalent in scent perhaps, of
that distinctive signature we know so well on paper, adding an ‘I’
for ‘Imperatrix’ after she was…
The Balmoral Castle, Queen Victoria’s
beloved Highland home and still Scottish home to the British Royal
Family since 1852 when it was purchased for the Queen by Prince
Albert, having been leased in 1848, some six years after the Queen
and Prince’s first visit to…
In the German spa town of Bad Nauheim in
Hesse, hangs a present – by tradition – from Imperial Russia. It is
to be found within the solemnly beautiful church, the
Reinhardskirche, in the old town quarter, built between 1732/33.
Like many baroque churches whose outer exterior is plain and its
interior lavish with decorative detail, the simplicity of its
sacred architecture from the…
