Queen Victoria’s use of perfume is a subject of interest because of what it reveals about both her personal toilette and tastes. An equivalent in scent perhaps, of that distinctive signature we know so well on paper, adding an ‘I’ for ‘Imperatrix’ after she was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. This perfume would have been part of the Queen’s daily dressing process. At Osborne, the…
The Balmoral Castle, Queen Victoria’s beloved Highland home and still Scottish home to the British Royal Family since 1852 when it was purchased for the Queen by Prince Albert, having been leased in 1848, some six years after the Queen and Prince’s first visit to…
Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet will be on permanent display this year at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, as part of the museum’s 2019 bicentenary celebration to mark the births of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, to whom of course, the…
In the summer of 1878, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, came to Eastbourne, because she had been ordered rest. The sojourn on the East Sussex coast was the gift of Queen Victoria to her daughter, (David Duff, Hessian Tapestry, 177) and Alice visited the seaside town with her family in what would poignantly prove to be the last holiday that they would…
Queen Victoria’s love of Scotland and the Scottish Highlands is of course, legendary – immortalised in a wealth of artworks, souvenir albums, including the Queen’s own watercolours and not least of course, the Queen’s Highland journals. She praised…
But for the moving memorial that Queen Victoria erected to her and for a letter in which this is described, the name of Ida Bonanomi might have been completely forgotten in historical terms. Thanks to these, this is not the case.
It can be found in Edinburgh’s Rosebank…
The Duke of Edinburgh has become a royal record breaker. Again. He is now the longest lived descendant of Queen Victoria.
Prince Philip, born on June 10th 1921 in Corfu, overtook Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone who was one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. She lived to the ripe old age of 97 years and 313 days and saw six monarchs, including her granny, on the throne. As the clock chimed…
In a recent life of Queen Victoria, (A. N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life, 2014) I stumbled across an illustration of one of the famous group photographs taken behind the Palais Edinburg in Coburg, showing Queen Victoria surrounded by a whole host of contemporary royalty –…
Aged sixteen, Princess Victoria made a pencil sketch of herself. Knowing the vividness of the watercolours that she made for her sketchbook and the skilled drawings she made during this time of other important figures in her youth, it is fascinating that she chose to apply…
Whilst researching for a forthcoming academic article on Louisa Louis, the devoted dresser to Princess Charlotte of Wales (1771-1838) who was deeply valued by Queen Victoria, I encountered the name of Mrs Brock. She belongs to that fascinating roll-call of characters that claim a connection with Queen Victoria, who have become all-but historically invisible and are normally banished to the realms…
