Currently displayed in the special exhibition at London’s Science Museum, The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution – exploring the role of medicine in the lives of the Russian Imperial Family as well as the use of modern science involved in the investigation concerning their murder – is a chandelier, but no ordinary one.
I first encountered this chandelier nearly twenty years ago, as a black…
Royalty is a world where the past is as much a part of the present as the future. The past seven days have seen the spotlight fall on celebrations and commemorations in equal measure – here’s the week in royal history.
Queen Victoria will be reigning supreme at…
Royal weddings, eh? You wait ages for one to come along and then two arrive at once. We’ve just had a double dose of regal matrimony with the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in May followed swiftly by the marriage of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank in…
World War One Centenary: the Royal Family's reflections on the Great War
3rd November 2018
Balcony appearances to boost morale and poignant messages to strangers they would never meet are just some of the memories being shared by the Royal Family ahead of the centenary of the end of World War One. As the 100th anniversary of the Armistice approaches, items from the Royal Archives linked to the conflict are being posted on official social media accounts, painting a picture of the…
The first thing that Princess Victoria did on the morning of 20 June 1837 was to reach for her dressing gown. This historic moment in the Queen’s life has always held a particular fascination for me, and I have regularly revisited it from various angles, from profiling the…
Personal items of Queen Victoria acquired by Historic Royal Palaces
2nd November 2018
Some personal items belonging to Queen Victoria have been acquired by Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity which maintains Kensington Palace, ahead of the bicentenary of the Queen’s birth in 2019, which the palace will celebrate with a new exhibition and…
The Royal and Military Order of Saint Ferdinand is a Spanish military order and Spain’s highest military decoration for gallantry. The Royal Military Order of Saint Ferdinand was set up by the Cádiz Cortes in 1811 to honour the heroic fight against the Napoleonic army.
The Cádiz Cortes was the first national assembly to claim sovereignty in Spain. It represented the abolition of the old…
It was a famous royal love story that shocked as much as it thrilled. John of Gaunt was the ultra-ambitious prince whose desire to be a king almost cost him his life, Katherine Swynford was the mysterious commoner who supplanted a queen in his affections. Their relationship…
‘Saw good Mrs Clark, returned from Darmstadt, who gave me an excellent account of Alice, the Baby & dear little Victoria’(Quoted in Charlotte Zeepvat, From Cradle to Crown, 13).
With these words, Queen Victoria recorded in her journal for 13 December 1864, that…
The white caps worn by Queen Victoria have – correctly – come to be regarded as a symbol for her widowhood. They represent one of the few contrasts in colour to the deepest mourning that she adopted after 1861, as a declaration in textile, of the colossal emotional significance to her of the Prince Consort’s death.
White had, of course, been symbolic of her wedding to Prince Albert…
