‘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…
One of the earliest names that occurs in
the life of the future Queen Victoria is that of ‘Siebold’;
although the name vanishes almost on the first mention. But no
single name should be rendered insignificant just because it only
occurs once. This is undoubtedly the case…
The Swiss Cottage at Osborne is a capsule
of successive royal childhood, which continued to hold a place in
the affections of the first children that used it – the nine
children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – long after they had
grown up, just as it would for…
On 20 June 1837, Princess Victoria of
Kent was awoken in her bedroom at Kensington Palace, writing later
in her journal entry for that day, in which significantly the proud
new word ‘alone’ features intermittently (also underlined), we
read: “I was awoke at 6 o’clock by Mamma, who told me the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to
see me. I got out of…
At some point this summer, it’s likely
we’ll get another close up look of the best known replica
christening gown around. For when Prince Louis of Cambridge is
baptized, probably before the Royal Family’s summer break, he will
wear the intricate copy of the famous…
A portrait of the toddler Princess Alix
of Hesse by the Austrian painter George Koberwein caught my
attention back in 2004. Examining how it came to be painted was a
source of great interest to me, not least because the picture that
he produced of the baby princess, not…
Banbury Cross is of course, synonymous
with local Oxfordshire folklore for many, because of the popular
rhyme which has a ‘fine lady’ riding to it on her cockhorse.
Indeed, this is the main reason why many people know of the
existence of the Cross at all. Far less known is the fact that the
Cross commemorates a royal marriage, a topical thought in the light
of the recent royal wedding at…
