The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place 66 years ago today. The young monarch, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of her father, King George VI, on February 6th 1952 was carried to this ancient ceremony in a golden coach while the world watched. Millions of people around the world celebrated with Elizabeth, then just 27 years old, at the start of what would become a record…
Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The question is a complex and fascinating one to answer.
In the immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth century, and the age was accordingly…
The name of Miss M. Hope Robson belongs to that both visible and invisible host of British royal nannies and governesses which appeared at the royal courts of Europe in the nineteenth century, known to their charges but in some cases, almost forgotten to biography.
Aged 10 ¾ years old, Princess Victoria composed a story. This delightful children’s tale, written by the future Queen, survives in its own little red ‘Composition’ notebook in the Royal Archives. To understand how it was made and the full significance of it, we need only look at the age of the princess when she wrote it. I surmise that if it was written at the age of ten and three-quarter…
Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, visited the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate in 1894 to take a cure for sciatica, during which time she became godmother to the Allen twins, born in the house where she was staying, to her landlady, Mrs Allen. These…
Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold (1788-1859), referred to in most biographies of Queen Victoria simply as Madame Siebold, is a name often treated as a historical footnote, but is in fact, one of quite astonishing importance. It was Madame Siebold, the skilled German…
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…
Soft, striking and above all, symbolic. The wedding bouquet carried by the future Queen of Spain, Letizia Ortiz, at her royal wedding on May 22nd 2004 was filled with significance. From personal touches to nods to one of the oldest ruling dynasties in Europe, Letizia filled…
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. Indeed, the word occurs 7,587 times in the various typescripts or edited copies of her journal, proving it was part of her…
