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…
