History

Royal Pictures from History: A Queen is Crowned

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2nd June 2019
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place 66 years ago today. The young monarch, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of her father, King George VI, on February 6th 1952 was carried to this ancient ceremony in a golden coach while the world watched. Millions of people around the world celebrated with Elizabeth, then just 27 years old, at the start of what would become a record…
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Was Queen Victoria a Victorian?

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31st May 2019
Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The question is a complex and fascinating one to answer. In the immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth century, and the age was accordingly…
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Queen Victoria's Children's Story: The Adventures of Alice Laselles

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27th May 2019
Aged 10 ¾ years old, Princess Victoria composed a story. This delightful children’s tale, written by the future Queen, survives in its own little red ‘Composition’ notebook in the Royal Archives. To understand how it was made and the full significance of it, we need only look at the age of the princess when she wrote it. I surmise that if it was written at the age of ten and three-quarter…
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History

Revisiting the birth of Queen Victoria

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24th May 2019
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born whose birth would be of overwhelming importance but on whose delivery it was by no means certain that she would succeed. This, despite the proud boast of her father, the Duke of Kent, who was determined in the royal marriage race that ensued on the death of the Prince Regent’s heir, Princess Charlotte, that ‘the crown will come to me and my children’.
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Tea and Queen Victoria

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20th May 2019
Queen Victoria is for many, synonymous with the notion of afternoon tea, probably because the social ceremony became properly established during the later years of her reign. The Queen’s evident love of tea, however, reaches back much further than this elegant ritual. Indeed, the word occurs 7,587 times in the various typescripts or edited copies of her journal, proving it was part of her…
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