FeaturesHistory

'Darling Mama': The Tsarina and her mother, Princess Alice

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10th October 2019
Princess Alix of Hesse, sixth child and fourth daughter of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and her husband, Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, was six years old when her mother died on 14 December 1878, incidentally the seventeenth anniversary of the death of Albert, the Prince Consort. This effect of this singularly shattering event on the young Princess Alix can…
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FeaturesHistoryRoyal Weddings

Looking back at the wedding of George V and Queen Mary

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6th August 2019
On 6 July 1893, another royal wedding was celebrated at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace, between Prince George of Wales – created Duke of York in 1892 – and Princess Mary of Teck, the future George V and Queen Mary. Princess Mary of Teck had been betrothed in December 1891 to Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, eldest son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who had…
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FeaturesHistoryInsight

Queen Victoria: Her life through her hair

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18th July 2019
Hair works like a symbolic thread throughout a person’s life history. For Queen Victoria, this was no exception. Indeed, for a royal personage, hair plays a massive part in ceremonial display and formal dressing as well as private ritual. The role of royal hairdresser is also one that enables exceptional intimacy, thereby an indication of great privilege. Today we can visit Queen Victoria’s…
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FeaturesHistoryInsight

Two Empresses: Two Widows

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12th July 2019
In 1888, a year whose numbering Queen Victoria thought odd (‘Never can it be written again!’), her daughter, the Princess Royal and Crown Princess of Prussia, had become German Empress, prompting the proud words from her mother: ‘My OWN dear Empress Victoria… may God…
FeaturesHistoryInsight

Primroses for her Prime Minister: Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria

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11th July 2019
A fond tradition arose in the lifetime of Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, Queen Victoria’s two-time Prime Minister, namely that of his receiving flowers, often primroses from the Queen. To Disraeli, Queen Victoria was the ‘Faery’ – his endearing name for his Sovereign, whatever the intention of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem Faerie Queene. Disraeli told his friend, Lady Bradford, that…
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