Satin, pearls and pleats

Yesterday we walked through Green Park and Hyde Park to Kensington Palace to see an exhibition about Queen Victoria's private life, which can be summed up thus: miserable, happy, miserable. She had a difficult childhood and adolescence. Her father, the Duke of York, died when she was very young. Her mother was overprotective and overbearing, she slept in a bedroom with Victoria until Victoria became Queen. She wouldn't let Victoria walk down stairs by herself in case she fell. Ever. The first thing Victoria did when she became Queen was to banish her mother from the bedroom and assert her independence. Victoria was blissfully married to Albert and completely distraught, hysterical and unmanageable when he died in 1861. He was a great loss, as he was highly intelligent and greatly respected.

Photo taken at the exhibition of Victoria and her four oldest children.

The exhibition covered Victoria's whole life and featured the room in which she was born, which was a room in a Grace and Favour apartment in Kensington Palace. Living in a palace might sound glamourous, but the reality was often quite different. The people who were granted accommodation were often cash-strapped and the apartments might be hopelessly antiquated or impractical. It was all very well having a gargantuan ex-state room at your disposal, but staring day after day at a fire-place that caters for three-foot logs you can't afford would become rather depressing, I would think. 

From Parker, S.E; Grace and Favour The Hampton Court Palace Community 1750-1950 Historic Royal Palaces

The photo above is of the Wolsey rooms in Hampton Court Palace during Lady Georgiana Peel's occupation in around 1926. Ms Parker writes, "Lady Peel disliked her apartment finding the large rooms difficult to heat". Another resident, who died in 1949, lived at Hampton Court for the whole of her 105 years. She never had a bathroom.

Victoria and Albert married in 1840.  Here is a link to a previous exhibition at Kensington Palace, of royal wedding dresses.  Victoria's dress was made from white satin woven at Spitalfields in London and exquisite English lace. It was a relatively simple dress befitting a personal occasion. 

Contrast this with the magnificence of her Coronation gown:

Yesterday we visited the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace and saw Queen Elizabeth's Coronation gown, complete with wattle emblems:

The gown was designed by Norman Hartnell and I have always thought his designs a tad dowdy, to be honest. 

I have wondered why ermine appears as it does and yesterday I discovered that ermine is made from the white winter fur of the stoat and the black dashes are actually the tails, pinned to the white fur. Not very nice. Then again, the ermines on her Majesty's train will be remembered a lot longer than the chicken I ate for dinner last night. 

Before our tour of Buckingham Palace we saw an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery of Tudor period costume. There were very strict rules about what you could wear to Court and dressing the part could be ruinously expensive, with one cloak costing as much as a house. The outfit may only be worn a few times, so the sitter would sometimes have a portrait made while wearing it, I suppose so they could laugh at themselves. Here is a link to a costume with gold spangly bits and a funny hat that a woman thought looked Turkish in 1590. This link is to a close up of a portrait of Anne of Denmark, Queen Consort of King James I. The close-up shows the waist and the top of Anne's skirt, which was draped over a frame known as a farthingale. Each pleat that you see had to be sewn when the wearer was in the dress!!! So dressing could take hours!!! Anne was wedded to her complicated skirts and farthingales, so all the women at Court had to follow suit (or skirt) and as soon as she died the ladies happily cast away the farthingales and the pleats.