The Swiss Cottage at Osborne is a capsule of successive royal childhood, which continued to hold a place in the affections of the first children that used it – the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – long after they had grown up, just as it would for their own children, most of whom played there in the next generation. The Princess Royal, for example, returned to the Swiss…
Twice a year the Queen bestows upon the hardest working people an award of achievement. This award can be given to people from all walks of life, and is a formal recognition by the royal family of an individual’s achievements in their sector. A person can be awarded a…
Released in the United States on 1 June 2018 (and due to be released on 5 July in the UK), Jane Dismore’s Princess The Early Life of Queen Elizabeth II takes a look back, as the title states, at Her Majesty’s young life beginning before she was even born.
While…
On 20 June 1837, Princess Victoria of Kent was awoken in her bedroom at Kensington Palace, writing later in her journal entry for that day, in which significantly the proud new word ‘alone’ features intermittently (also underlined), we read: “I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma, who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of…
Catherine of Braganza has gone down in history as a rather nice lady who liked drinking tea. The Portuguese princess who arrived in Portsmouth in 1662 to marry Charles II has been portrayed as a gentle soul whose heart was broken by her inability to have children and who…
The artworks by the fashionable German portrait painter and historical artist Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1860-1920) of Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her elder sister, Elisabeth Feodorovna, ‘Ella’ Grand Duchess Sergei of Russia, provide, I think, a rare insight into these two princesses who would both marry into the Russian Imperial House of Romanov. Not…
