FeaturesHistory

Five royal brides who didn't wear tiaras

Royal weddings bring all kinds of expectations and among them is one filled with sparkle and glitter. For we all assume a royal bride will arrive for her marriage wearing a tiara and when the wedding will result in them becoming a consort or consort in waiting, the expectation is even higher. However, some of the most high profile royal brides of recent times have decided to ditch the diadem…
Read more
FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Statue at Windsor

‘Never, never can I forget this brilliant year… so full of marvellous kindness, loyalty & devotion of so many millions which I really could hardly have expected’. (Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 379). With these words, Queen Victoria made the final entry in her great journal for the year 1887 – that of her Golden Jubilee. She had written in her…
Read more
FeaturesHistory

An Imperial Russian summer at Windsor

The visit of the future Tsar Nicholas II to Queen Victoria in the summer of 1894 has a fabled quality; it took place a mere two months after his engagement to Princess Alix of Hesse in Coburg. This visit has a special poignancy when viewed through later eyes; we know of…
History

'Dearest Mary': Letters from the last Tsarina

‘What sorrows this last year brought us, what endless anxieties, what worries and losses – God grant the new year may be a calmer and happier one for the whole of dear Russia. Sleep well and peacefully…’ With these words, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) closed a letter on New Year’s Eve 1900 to Princess Marie Bariatinsky, one of the few close friends of her early years as…
Read more
FeaturesHistory

Looking inside the bedrooms of Queen Victoria

A bedroom gives a uniquely personal insight into any historical personality and a royal personage no less so. Many key moments in Queen Victoria’s life also took place in her bedrooms, which help in no small way, to tell the story of that life. The furnishing of this most private of spaces – usually the penultimate room in the sequence of rooms which defined through architecture, the level of…
Read more