As Prince Albert reprimanded his second
daughter, Princess Alice, for telling her eldest sister the Crown
Princess, that their father’s illness had worsened, he said sadly
(but correctly): ‘You did wrong. You should have told her I am
dying’. The Prince’s fatalism was such that he acknowledged what
the Queen did not dare herself to admit. Indeed, Queen Victoria’s
letters to her uncle…
As summer approaches, Queen Victoria is
the royal everyone is talking about. Even the descendant who
supplanted her as longest reigning monarch in British history has
been following in her famous footsteps in the past few days as the
woman who changed our concept of royalty…
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…
For Queen Victoria, the number fourteen
held a terrible power. This date, the ‘14th’, could seem to haunt
the Queen like the shadow of death. Much as she later tried to
reclaim it as a sacred date, she beheld it with an almost mystical
sense of dark fascination and dread. Her feelings for this day of
the month were well founded and can be traced back to the date of
the death of her beloved…
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…
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…
In the British Library five letters from
Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna of
Russia (1872-1918) are preserved. Initially, I thought there were
seven letters of hers at the British Library, but further research
has enabled me to establish that these are instead, two postcards
in Russian, to her only son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich
(1904-1918). These letters are…
The wedding cakes in Queen Victoria’s
family were magnificent examples of edible ceremony. Once they
reached the age of photography, they were faithfully recorded for
posterity. These images still have the power to enchant today, even
in long ago albums. Just looking at…
A charming photograph taken by Mary Steen
in the Queen’s Sitting Room at Windsor on 21 May 1895 shows an
elderly Queen Victoria knitting or crocheting, sat with her
youngest daughter, Beatrice, Princess Henry of Battenberg, who
dutifully reads the newspaper aloud to her…
Queen Victoria had twelve bridesmaids.
What do we know about them? What did they wear? Certainly the Queen
– as might be expected – had a greater number of bridesmaids than
her daughters would at their weddings, eight being a recurring
choice. We can see them clustered in pairs in Sir George Hayter’s
large painting The Marriage of Queen Victoria, 10 February 1840,
gathered respectfully…
