HistoryInsight

Gifts from an imperial godmother: The Allen twins of Harrogate

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10th June 2019
In May 1894, Princess Alix of Hesse undertook a cure in the fashionable Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate for sciatica. She had become engaged to Tsarevich Nicholas of Russia at Coburg the previous month. Whilst she stayed at Harrogate, she regularly corresponded with her fiancé, who would later join her at the house her eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg had rented at…
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History

A gift from Imperial Russia?

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11th May 2019
In the German spa town of Bad Nauheim in Hesse, hangs a present – by tradition – from Imperial Russia. It is to be found within the solemnly beautiful church, the Reinhardskirche, in the old town quarter, built between 1732/33. Like many baroque churches whose…
History

Royal Windowpanes

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9th May 2019
The regal tradition of scratching signatures in windowpanes is long established and well known. The windows – particularly when in rooms of royal residences – formed a kind of living ‘guestbook’, often accompanied by the date the visit or signature, was made. These windowpanes are silent witnesses to vanished royal gatherings on long ago summers or essential occasions, represented today by…
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History

Alice in Eastbourne: A Royal Holiday in 1878

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6th May 2019
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)…
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Princess Alix of Hesse's engagement ring?

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13th April 2019
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 – mostly members of her own family through blood or marriage, including five of her children and numerous grandchildren &#8211…
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Poetry and the Tsarina?

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27th February 2019
Included amongst the works read as a young woman by Princess Alix of Hesse, later Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918), were – according to letters that she wrote to her eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg – Guizot’s Reformation de la Litterature, the Life of Cromwell and Raumer’s nine-volume set, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen(Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden…
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