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…
On 25 June 1900, Victoria, Princess Louis
of Battenberg – born Princess Victoria of Hesse – gave birth to a
son at Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park, the erstwhile
residence of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, until
her death in 1861. Princess…
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…
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…
Of the memorials in Kensington Gardens,
many share a close connection with Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert, the most important to the latter being the ornate Gothic
masterpiece designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, known as the
Albert Memorial, which was unveiled in 1872…
The most important monument built to the
memory of Prince Albert in London was the magnificent Gothic Albert
Memorial in Kensington Gardens, designed by George Gilbert Scott,
unveiled in 1872. Officially termed the Prince Consort National
Memorial, its location is…
‘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…
‘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…
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…
