FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria's dogs

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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FeaturesHistory

Queen Victoria and the Archbishop

Biography is also made up of people in the background; so it is with William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury. The appearances he made in the life of the future Queen Victoria were of extreme significance, in a way that was unique, and whilst these functions formed a natural…
FeaturesHistory

Royal Cousins and Imperial Russia

Princess Alix of Hesse – as the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna was known before her marriage to the young Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 – visited Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park on several occasions, as the residence of her maternal aunt, Princess Helena of Schleswig-Holstein and her cousins. Cumberland Lodge made a circle for Princess Alix around this part of her English family. She was…
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FeaturesHistory

The Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

‘You are entering a consecrated building, the burial place of a Queen and her Consort. Please be as quiet as possible’. These respectful words are what greeted any visitor before they entered the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park, when it used to be open to the public. It was of course, not the only royal memorial to the dead Prince; England…
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FeaturesHistory

The lost royal 'zoo' at Windsor

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…
British RoyalsFeatures

Prince Albert's plaster hand and other contents of Queen Victoria's coffin

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 VII and her oldest grandson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. She requested that her favourite pet, a Pomeranian called Turi to…
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