FeaturesHistory

The personal jewellery of the last Tsarina, Alexandra Feodorovna

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14th August 2018
The personal jewellery of the last Tsarina of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918) provides a living, tangible timeline of her private life, quite apart from the glittering jewels which she would have worn as a Romanov bride. Inevitably though, the public life and the private sphere overlapped into jewellery, where Alexandra would receive magnificent personal gifts from the Tsar, such as the…
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FeaturesHistory

An Imperial Russian summer at Windsor

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8th August 2018
The visit of the future Tsar Nicholas II to Queen Victoria in the summer of 1894 has a fabled quality; it took place a mere two months after his engagement to Princess Alix of Hesse in Coburg. This visit has a special poignancy when viewed through later eyes; we know of…
FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria in her letters and journals

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7th August 2018
Queen Victoria began her journal in 1832 at the age of thirteen and continued to keep it until old age, with the last entry made just nine days before she died, constituting, therefore, a remarkable royal record. She took her journal with her wherever she went on her travels, which was entrusted to the care of her Wardrobe Maids. The one hundred and forty-one bound volumes of Queen Victoria’s…
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History

'Dearest Mary': Letters from the last Tsarina

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6th August 2018
‘What sorrows this last year brought us, what endless anxieties, what worries and losses – God grant the new year may be a calmer and happier one for the whole of dear Russia. Sleep well and peacefully…’ With these words, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918)…
FeaturesHistory

Looking at the wedding of Queen Victoria in objects

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6th August 2018
Queen Victoria famously wrote of her wedding day – 10 February 1840: ‘“Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!” The day – 10 February – became one which the Queen – so peculiarly concerned with dates and anniversaries – would ever refer to as having been her wedding day, in her great journal; it formed the exact happy opposite to that grief-stricken 14 December, (the…
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FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria's dogs

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1st August 2018
Queen Victoria’s love of dogs provided the inspiration for royal sculpture and painting, as well, of course, the Queen’s journal entries. References to her dogs abound throughout. Interestingly, her life may in one way, be charted through her dogs, because they were with her from her youth until literally the very end. It was a dog that was with her as a young princess at Kensington and a dog…
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