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 to the throne but what many
really wanted to see was the bride. And Princess Mary of Teck was
ready to step into the…
Sophie Helen Rhys-Jones was born on 20
January 1965 as the youngest child and only daughter
of Christopher Bournes Rhys-Jones and the late Mary O’Sullivan
at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. She has an elder brother,
David. One of her godparents was the late…
She’s the future queen consort, a mother
of three – including a future king – and one of the most famous
women in the world. But back in 1982, the future Duchess of
Cambridge was just another baby in the nursery at Royal Berkshire
Hospital. Catherine…
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 to protect it from the rain.
The marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, on 8 July 1972,
was a royal wedding with a…
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…
‘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…
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…
Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to
1901, laid out some very specific instructions for her funeral. Her
personal physician was with her in her final hours when she died on
the Isle of Wight. She was surrounded by her family, including
her son and successor King Edward…
Continuing our series, we are taking a
look at the life of Sofia Hellqvist before becoming Princess Sofia
of Sweden. The pristine lakes, forests, and mountains of Älvdalen,
Sweden look straight out of a Disney fairytale. It’s no wonder that
a future princess spent her…
It was a quiet country house, described
by several who knew it as ‘’little’’ and a ‘’pied a terre’, given
as a wedding present to a royal couple who were expected to linger
on the fringes of regal life. Yet on July 2nd 1903, it became the
birthplace of one of the most popular and celebrated monarchs of
the 20th century. For it was at Appleton House, on the Sandringham
Estate, that…
