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…
Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold
(1788-1859), referred to in most biographies of Queen Victoria
simply as Madame Siebold, is a name often treated as a historical
footnote, but is in fact, one of quite astonishing importance. It
was Madame Siebold, the skilled German…
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…
Mrs Brock was the future Queen Victoria’s
nurse. Called by her ‘dear Boppy’ (op. cit., Christopher Hibbert,
Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 21), she remained Princess
Victoria’s nurse until the age of five, after which she passed into
the better-known hands of her governess, Baroness Lehzen. ‘Boppy’
was a periphery character in that childhood which Queen Victoria
later decided had…
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.
As the ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as Queen
Victoria was popularly termed, her very numerous grandchildren
could, of course, expect to receive a variety of charming presents
for their birthdays, just as we might treasure things sent to us by
our grandmothers. These presents…
To Queen Victoria, she was ‘dear Marie
Erbach’. That was what the Queen called Princess Marie of
Battenberg, later Princess zu Erbach-Schönberg, whose memoirs first
appeared in English in 1925, printed by London publishers George
Allen & Unwin. Princess Marie Karoline of Battenberg was born in
1852 and married in 1871 Gustav Ernst, Count, later Prince zu
Erbach-Schönberg (1840-1908). She…
English Heritage celebrates the
bicentenary of the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
with a new exhibition, Royal Presents at Osborne, focusing on the
unique stories behind seven gifts exchanged by the royal couple.
Osborne itself was, of course, the Queen and…
Queen Victoria’s use of perfume is a
subject of interest because of what it reveals about both her
personal toilette and tastes. An equivalent in scent perhaps, of
that distinctive signature we know so well on paper, adding an ‘I’
for ‘Imperatrix’ after she was…
The Balmoral Castle, Queen Victoria’s
beloved Highland home and still Scottish home to the British Royal
Family since 1852 when it was purchased for the Queen by Prince
Albert, having been leased in 1848, some six years after the Queen
and Prince’s first visit to Scotland, in 1842. The architect chosen
for the rebuilding of Balmoral was William Smith, City Architect of
Aberdeen and the…
