This year it is 200 years since Carl XIV
Johan became king of both Norway and Sweden. But who was he? King
Carl Johan (1763-1818-1844), originally Jean Baptiste Bernadotte,
was born in the south of France and became a soldier at
17-years-old. During the French Revolution, he had a sparkling
military career and was appointed in 1804 to Marshal of France in
connection with the coronation of Napoleon…
‘You are entering a consecrated building,
the burial place of a Queen and her Consort. Please be as quiet as
possible’. These respectful words are what greeted any visitor
before they entered the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert, at Frogmore in Windsor…
The royal order of the Norwegian Lion was
a Norwegian and Swedish royal order that was instituted by King
Oscar II on 21 January 1904. It had the King as the Grandmaster,
and the order consisted of only one degree, similar to the Order of
the Garter. The intention was that…
On a summer’s day in 1818, a young German
princess walked into one of the most famous hotels in London to
meet a man twice her age. Just a year earlier, Adelaide of
Saxe-Meiningen and her suitor, William, Duke of Clarence, would
never have considered chatting let alone taking the step that would
inevitably follow this brief exchange. But after a short time
together, with chaperones, of…
On July 6th 1893, London woke to a
blazing hot morning after two days of rain. The streets were decked
with flowers and large crowds were already settled on the pavements
and lampposts as dawn broke. They had come for the royal wedding of
George, Duke of York, second in line…
It was a quiet country affair, far
removed from the pomp and ceremony we’ve come to expect from royal
weddings. The setting was an English parish church, the regal guest
list only filled a couple of pews, and the bride walked in several
minutes late carrying her own train…
It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s
coming…the tapestry is coming home. The Bayeux Tapestry is heading
back to British shores, for the first time in almost 1000 years,
and you need to put 2022 in your diary right now if you want to see
this famous piece of history up close and personal. OK, the opening
line might not have the ring or the emotion of the football song
we…
‘The Royal Family in 1846’ by the
fashionable German painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73) is
an extraordinarily important image. Queen Victoria regarded it as
the painter’s supreme achievement, although he painted the Queen on
other occasions, most notably in…
In 1938, 80 summers ago, twelve-year-old
Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) and her younger sister,
Margaret, looked forward excitedly to their annual holiday in
Scotland during August and September. Only the recent death of
their beloved maternal grandmother, the…
Royal menageries became homes for the
many animals that were given in previous centuries as political
presents from their respective countries and thereby entered a life
of exalted captivity, the nature of any zoo now being a
controversial one. The oldest baroque zoo was founded at the
Austrian imperial summer residence of Schönbrunn, in 1760, just as
there was a Royal Menagerie in the fabled…
