When the newly-married Queen Victoria
returned with Prince Albert to Buckingham Palace, she was with the
Prince ‘from 10m. to 2 till 20 m.p.2’, after which the couple went
down for the wedding breakfast. During these thirty minutes, Queen
Victoria gave Prince Albert his own wedding ring (Elizabeth
Longford, Queen Victoria, 152). At this wedding breakfast was the
royal cake. This cake, unlike…
Queen Victoria’s wedding veil was an
object of singular poignancy because of the enormous sentimental
value that it represented to her in personal terms and the context
in which she last wore it. She wore in on the monumental day – 10
February 1840 – the day she…
In the summer of 1894, Tsarevich Nicholas
of Russia came to stay at Walton-on-Thames, in the house which his
fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse’s eldest sister, Victoria, Princess
Louis of Battenberg and her husband, Prince Louis of Battenberg had
rented. They would stay in…
His birth secured the succession in a way
the British royal family had never known before. When Mary, Duchess
of York delivered a healthy boy on June 23rd 1894 she ensured that
her royal dynasty had three heirs in direct line to the throne. But
the baby who arrived that day would take the crown from ultimate
security to compete crisis. Today is the 125th anniversary of the
birth of Edward VIII…
It is the high point of summer and a high
point in the royal history books. For June 22nd, in the very heart
of midsummer, has seen some of the most celebrated and sparkling of
all regal events. And all of them are milestones in famous
reigns. Here are four special royal…
Queen Victoria’s love for her dogs was
lavishly recorded in paint and sculpture and not least, in her
sketches and words. Lord Melbourne, the Queen’s Prime Minister,
once commented dryly: ‘You’ll be smothered with dogs‘. The Queen’s
characteristic…
The earliest memories of a historical
personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal
first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially,
what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as
they saw them. Of course, we know that all true biography begins
before birth and that event could hardly be expected to count
amongst any of even the very…
On 16 March 1861, Queen Victoria’s
mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore House, the private
residence in Windsor Great Park which she had often used, living
there for approximately two decades. After her death, the summer
house she had planned during her lifetime…
Queen Victoria’s visited Balmoral in her
beloved Scottish Highlands in the late autumn of 1900. The Queen
could not know it, but it was the last time that she would see the
new castle which Prince Albert had erected in her words as his ‘own
work… as at Osborne’ and…
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 named after her. It begs then
the further question of what a Victorian was if Queen Victoria
wasn’t one, as well as…
