Queen Victoria’s love for her dogs was lavishly recorded in paint and sculpture and not least, in her sketches and words. Lord Melbourne, the Queen’s Prime Minister, once commented dryly: ‘You’ll be smothered with dogs‘.
The Queen’s characteristic need to memorialise her friends and servants could also be why she wanted to create memorials to her dogs, for all these…
The earliest memories of a historical personage are extraordinarily important, as not only do they reveal first consciousness of their world and circumstances but crucially, what they remembered first. They tell snippets of true events, as they saw them. Of course, we know…
On 16 March 1861, Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore House, the private residence in Windsor Great Park which she had often used, living there for approximately two decades. After her death, the summer house she had planned during her lifetime…
Queen Victoria’s visited Balmoral in her beloved Scottish Highlands in the late autumn of 1900. The Queen could not know it, but it was the last time that she would see the new castle which Prince Albert had erected in her words as his ‘own work… as at Osborne’ and which had become a box of intensely personal memories. So deeply did the Queen feel her first visit to Balmoral after Prince…
Was Queen Victoria a Victorian? The question is a complex and fascinating one to answer.
In the immediate response, Victoria would seem to typify what it meant to be ‘Victorian’ because her long reign straddled the nineteenth century, and the age was accordingly…
Aged 10 ¾ years old, Princess Victoria composed a story. This delightful children’s tale, written by the future Queen, survives in its own little red ‘Composition’ notebook in the Royal Archives. To understand how it was made and the full significance of it, we need…
Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold (1788-1859), referred to in most biographies of Queen Victoria simply as Madame Siebold, is a name often treated as a historical footnote, but is in fact, one of quite astonishing importance. It was Madame Siebold, the skilled German obstetrician who successfully helped to deliver the future Queen Victoria, born on 24 May 1819, at Kensington Palace. I recently…
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born whose birth would be of overwhelming importance but on whose delivery it was by no means certain that she would succeed. This, despite the proud boast of her father, the Duke of Kent, who was determined in the royal marriage race that…
Mrs Brock was the future Queen Victoria’s nurse. Called by her ‘dear Boppy’ (op. cit., Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria, A Personal History, 21), she remained Princess Victoria’s nurse until the age of five, after which she passed into the better-known hands of…
Queen Victoria is for many, synonymous with the notion of afternoon tea, probably because the social ceremony became properly established during the later years of her reign. The Queen’s evident love of tea, however, reaches back much further than this elegant ritual. Indeed, the word occurs 7,587 times in the various typescripts or edited copies of her journal, proving it was part of her…
