Last week I
posted about Queen Victoria’s revolutionary wedding dress, which broke with
tradition in 1840 by being white and featuring, not a diamond crown, but simply
a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair. I also included two photos and
comments about the crowns worn by modern royal brides Princess Diana and Kate
Middleton. I posted a photo of Diana and
wrote: “Princes Diana, at her
wedding on July 29, 1981, wore a much more visible and dramatic crown—the
Lover’s Knot tiara, which was made in 1914 using diamonds and pearls from the
royal family’s collection.”
Turns
out I was wrong. As my sharp-eyed
daughter Eleni pointed out, that was not a photo of Diana in the Lovers Knot
tiara at her wedding, although it did become her favorite crown and the Queen
did loan it to her for the wedding. But
at the last minute Diana decided to get married in the Spencer Family crown,
shown here.
According to People Magazine, “Like all good royal pieces, the Spencer Tiara is
actually made up of other pieces of jewelry... The current version – which is
constructed with diamonds shaped into tulips and stars surrounded by attractive
scrolls – was probably finalized sometime in the ’30s. It has become a popular
wedding tiara for the Spencer family: Diana’s sisters – Lady Sarah and Jane,
Baroness Fellowes – both wore the sparkler for their wedding days and Victoria
Lockwood, who was the first wife of Diana’s brother Charles, the current Earl
of Spencer, wore it when she married into the famed aristocratic family in 1989
(when little Prince Harry served as a pageboy). However, Diana’s mother,
Frances, did not wear the tiara when she married into the Spencer family in 1954.”
Back to Victoria and her famous wedding dress, which featured a flounce
of Honiton lace. As a mark of support for the Honiton
industry, Victoria insisted her daughters also order Honiton lace for their
wedding dresses. She also wore her wedding lace sewed on to the dresses she
wore to the christenings of her nine children and to the weddings of two of her
children, her eldest daughter, Victoria, in 1858, and her youngest son, Leopold
in 1882.
Victoria’s youngest and favorite
daughter, Princess Beatrice, was the only bride allowed to wear Victoria’s own
veil of Honiton lace, because her mother knew how much she loved it. Beatrice wore it as part of her wedding gown when
she married Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885. Her veil was crowned
with a circlet of diamond stars, a marriage gift from her mother. Here is Beatrice at her wedding.
(I found out, while researching this
post, that Beatrice was originally expected to marry Napoleon Eugene, the
French Prince Imperial, whose murder during the Anglo-Zulu war in June of 1879
I have already written about in an earlier post called “The Prince
Imperial—Murdered by Zulus” http://arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2012/06/prince-imperial-murdered-by-zulus.html?showComment=1396480676400#c7285588968167878773
The telegram announcing the Prince
Imperial’s death left Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice in tears. According to Victoria's journal,
"Dear Beatrice, crying very much as I did too, gave me the
telegram ... It was dawning and little sleep did I get ... Beatrice
is so distressed; everyone quite stunned."
Later, when Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg, she
told her mother she had decided to marry him and the Queen stopped speaking to
her for seven months, communicating only by written notes. Victoria had always said that her youngest
and favorite daughter should never marry, but stay by the Queen’s side as her
companion. Eventually Victoria was
cajoled into accepting the engagement and consented to the marriage on the
condition that Henry give up his German commitments and live permanently with
Beatrice and the Queen.
Twelve years earlier was the marriage of
Victoria’s son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, to Princess Alexandra
of Denmark in Saint George’s Chapel of Windsor Castle in March of 1863. This wedding produced a deluge of photographs
of the future King and Queen. Because
the court was still in mourning for Prince Albert, ladies attending the wedding
were restricted to wearing gray, lilac or mauve. The notoriously libertine
eldest son of Victoria did not do a very good job of hiding his affairs—more
than 50 by some estimates—which occurred both before and after the
wedding. In fact Victoria blamed
Edward’s loose ways for the death of her adored husband.
In September 1861, Edward was sent to Germany,
supposedly to watch military maneuvers but actually in order to introduce him
to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert had already decided that they should marry. They met
on 24 September thanks to his elder sister, Victoria, who had married the Crown
Prince of Prussia in 1858. Edward and Alexandra were friendly from the
start; and marriage plans got underway.
From this time,
Edward started earning his reputation as a playboy. He attended maneuvers in
Ireland, and spent three nights with an actress Nellie Clifden, who hid with
him in the camp. Prince Albert, though
ill, heard about his son’s adventure and went to visit Edward at Cambridge, to
read him the riot act. Just two weeks
after the visit, Albert died, in December 1861.
Queen Victoria was inconsolable.
She wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life and she blamed Edward
for his father's death. She
considered her son frivolous, indiscreet and irresponsible and wrote to her
eldest daughter, "I never can, or shall, look at him without a
shudder."
(Edward’s many mistresses included actress
Lillie Langtry; Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie Jerome, who became Lady
Randolph Churchill; actress Sarah Bernhardt, and Alice Keppel, who was the
great grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles—formerly mistress of Prince Charles
and now his wife.)
Finally, here is
Victoria’s secret, which I discovered while researching this post. Today we like to think of Queen Victoria as
being extremely prudish, but in fact, her marriage to Prince Albert was very
passionate, and in 1843, she commissioned her favorite artist Franz Xaver
Winterhalter, to painting an intimate portrait of herself, “for Albert’s eyes
only”. The resulting painting, which
Victoria wrote was “My darling Albert’s favourite picture” was kept in Albert’s
private writing room, where only he could enjoy it. After the death of the Queen, Buckingham
Palace kept Victoria’s “secret picture” a secret, revealing it to the public
for the first time in 1977.
You may wonder why
this painting was considered so intimate and erotic that no one was allowed to
see it. This is one more example of my
oft-repeated statement that what we in the 21st century see when we
look at an antique photograph or painting is far different from what
contemporaries of the image saw.
The erotic element
in Victoria’s secret painting is the hair (as well as the expanse of royal
bosom shown.) In Victorian days, a girl
became a woman at 18 and began to wear her hair up, piled on top of her head,
often in braids as Victoria did. No one
but her husband would be allowed to see her with her hair down and disheveled,
draped over her shoulders.
A woman’s long hair
was one of the most erotic parts of her body in those days; witness the advertisements
for hair products showing naked women with their floor-length hair protecting
their modesty å la Lady Godiva. ( If you want to know more about the history of “Older Women and Long Hair in
the Olden Days”, check out my December 2010 blog post on the subject: http://arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2010/12/older-women-and-long-hairin-olden-days.html .
By the way, the
heart shaped pendant on a gold chain held a lock of Albert’s hair which
Victoria wore “night and day” before their wedding. (Many times I’ve acquired a
daguerreotype from the 1840’s and removed the image from the case or pendant ,to
find a lock of the sitter’s hair inside.)
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