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 famous piece of…
‘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…
The official announcement that King
Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands will make a
state visit to the UK this autumn is confirmation of a long-awaited
and hotly anticipated trip. The visit will run between October 23rd
and 24th and will see the Dutch royals…
The life of Diana, Princess of Wales was
never far removed from royalty even before she married into the
House of Windsor. A member of the influential Spencer family, she
counted King Edward III, King Henry VII and King Charles II among
her ancestors while she’d been named…
The imperial palace of Schönbrunn in the
western suburb of Hietzing on the outskirts of Vienna, was the
summer residence of the former Habsburg dynasty. It stuns with its
magnificence, but then this, of course, was part of its purpose and
is the power of its architecture. It has the glory of the monarch’s
glare. The palace, like the great country house in an imperial
form, was intended to…
