The Princess Royal is often said to be the ‘hardest working’ member of the British Royal Family and has a reputation for being a formidable and forthright personality. Seen widely as very much her father’s daughter, Her Royal Highness is a popular character and a tenacious supporter of charitable causes.
Birth
On the 15th August 1950, just before midday, HRH Princess Elizabeth, Duchess…
On1
May 1876, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress Of India after discussion with
Prime Minister of the day, Benjamin Disraeli led to Queen Victoria wanting a
title boost after her daughter became Empress Of Germany. From 1876 until the
Empire Of India was disbanded…
Frederick II, accorded the epithet ‘the Great’ already during his own lifetime, had in fact, a whole other life after death, aside from his legacy. The great King’s legend stalks the eighteenth century like a gigantic historic shadow, much as the oversize silhouette of…
In the British Library five letters from Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia (1872-1918) are preserved. Initially, I thought there were seven letters of hers at the British Library, but further research has enabled me to establish that these are instead, two postcards in Russian, to her only son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich (1904-1918). These letters are…
Prince Michael (b. 4 July 1942) is the younger brother of the Duke of Kent and paternal first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. As a five-year-old, he was a pageboy at the wedding of the then Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. He was educated at Sunningdale School and Eton…
On the upper floor of the Swiss Cottage at Osborne, a rustic structure carved with Biblical texts in German and built behind the individual garden plots belonging to each of the royal children, today’s visitor finds this large room set as if for tea, with napkins turned to…
The first and only time that the boy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited London occurred between 1764-5, at about the half-way point of the Mozart family’s monumental European Grand Tour, which was to prove pivotal in Wolfgang’s developmental process as a composer, the beginning proper of those childhood travels he would make on his path towards musical maturity.
Over the fifteen months that…
As Royal Ascot approaches, horse racing fans begin to anticipate the winners and losers of the event. But one of the main features of Royal Ascot is, of course, the attendance of the Queen and members of the Royal family. As the name suggests, this competition has a rich…
On 29 May 1894, Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia wrote to his mother, Empress Marie Feodorovna, that he could see the sea from the room in which he was writing, in the imperial palace of Peterhof and that he had ‘such a longing for the yacht and want to fly there to join my…
During the time they were at Coburg, Princess Alix of Hesse and Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia became engaged, a date they would treasure for the rest of their lives – 8 April 1894. Whilst they were in Coburg, visited the theatre and saw an operetta of which they would become affectionately fond, Carl Zeller’s popular piece in three acts, Der Vogelhändler [The Birdseller].
Both recorded…
