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Queen Victoria's wedding shoes?

Northampton Museums own a pair of flat shoes, believed to be those worn by Queen Victoria on her wedding day, 10 February 1840. Of white satin, they certainly would have complimented the Queen’s own simple wedding dress of finely woven Spitalfields silk satin in her own words: ‘I wore a white satin gown with a very deep flounce of Honiton, imitation of old…’ Northampton Museum & Art…
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British RoyalsInsightRoyal WeddingsThe Edinburghs

The Countess of Wessex's nod to her wedding day on her 20th anniversary

As she celebrated her twentieth wedding anniversary with a day out at Royal Ascot with her husband, it appeared that the Countess of Wessex was paying her own tribute to her famous day as a royal bride. For Sophie was in white and black on her big anniversary, just as she was two decades ago when she said ‘I do’ at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Embed from Getty Images As she…
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HistoryInsight

Gifts from an imperial godmother: The Allen twins of Harrogate

In May 1894, Princess Alix of Hesse undertook a cure in the fashionable Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate for sciatica. She had become engaged to Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia at Coburg the previous month. Whilst she stayed at Harrogate, she regularly corresponded with her fiancé, who would later join her at the house her eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg had rented at…
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HistoryInsight

Queen Victoria's earliest memories

The earliest memories of a historical personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially, what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as they saw them. Of course, we know…
HistoryInsight

Was Queen Victoria a Victorian?

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 named after her. It begs then the further question of what a Victorian was if Queen Victoria wasn’t one, as well as…
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