I understand that Alicky was very shy and uncomfortable around people so it made her appear cold and aloof. I don't know if this is true, but it may have contributed to her being unpopular in Russia unlike her Aunt Alexandra in Britain.
Welcome back, JonnyDep! I was very disappointed to receive your goodbye because I had no means to contact you. I'm glad you returned and provided us with more information about Queen Alexandra. She was a fascinating woman and warm-hearted as well. Although I also admired Empress Alexandra, Queen Alexandra's niece by marriage, Alicky, or Sunny as she was called when a child, was distant and aloof compared to Queen Alexandra. This was probably caused by the deaths of Alicky's mother and sibling at a young age.
The relationship of Queen Alexandra and Oliver Montague is discussed earlier in this thread. There is no author or historian who regarded it as more than a platonic relationship. Queen Alexandra put her energies into her children, family and friends when her husband strayed from the marriage rather than pursue an extra-marital relationship herself.
Prince Albert Victor fell in love with Princess Helene of Orleans, daughter of the Count of Paris, but she was Catholic and both the Pope and her father didn't allow this marriage because she would have converted to the Anglicanism.
Oliver and Alix were together for
all those years without a physical relationship...
it goes against all the laws of nature...
Alix was extremely attractive ............ and neglected by her hedonistic, womanizing husband.
I think that Princess Alexandra and Elizabeth of Austria were the two outstanding
Royal beauties of the day and they actually
met up ..... (in Vienna I think ) .... when Alix and Bertie were en routeto Egypt..........
alexandra was not that interested in sex. she was a sexually cold person, (why else do you think that edward went elsewhere for his pleasures....after all he did have the sexual appetite of the hanoverians).....so taking this into account, it is very unlikely that alexandra and oliver had a sexual relationship !!
Most likely Alexandra's deep religious faith and therefore her respect for adhering to her wedding vows would be a greater reason for her not becoming physically involved with Oliver Montague than her being `sexually cold`.
Yeah, Mary of Teck really had a thin waist too.
I'm glad I wasn't a royal back then, because I would never have been able to pull that off.
About the Prince of Wales...
The italian Wikipedia has a page about a certain Lady Florence Trevelyan; it says that Lady Florence was a cousin of Queen Victoria, and in the 1870s she had an affair with the then Prince of Wales. According to wikipedia, after the scandal of this affair she was banned from the british court, she began to travel and finally married an Italian, Salvatore Cacciola. They settled in Sicily, in the town of Taormina, where they often hosted a lot of royals, included Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, King Edward VII, Queen Amelia of Portugal and King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy.
Does anyone know something more about this woman? I'm not sure that the article of Wikipedia about her is reliable, since I've never heard about these Trevelyan cousins of Queen Victoria.
It's unlikely that Mary did either - court photographers (just like fashion photographers now) were very adept at doctoring negatives to show what was wanted, and cleverly painted out shapes to create the silhouette they wanted to portray. If you get to see any original enlargements of this type of photo you can often see the carefully etched lines which were the equivalent to today's "airbrushing".
For a more accurate portrayal, take a look at the more "natural" photos of less formal occasions - walking outside with crowds in the background, for example. But never rely on this type of studio portrait as being "true". Maybe the camera never lies, but the photographers did (and do!)
yes i agree with you.
although it is slightly off topic, i will keep my post short....
it has been recently revealed that many of the classic photographs of the late queen elizabeth the queen mother taken by cecil beaton in the gardens of buckingham palace was often touched up or airbrushed to make it to appear she was much slimmer !!
from what i can gather from various websites (the entries are somewhat muddled) lady florence immedimate ancestors are the barons trevelyan and the wilsons.
i have yet to find any entry for her in burkes peerage, however if the barons trevelyan no longer extant, i will have to look to earlier editions to locate her.
What exactly was the problem? Why did she deliberately mislead Queen Victoria about her delivery dates?She also enjoyed hunting, to the dismay of Queen Victoria, who asked her to stop, without success. Even after the birth of her first child, she continued to behave much as before, which led to some friction between the Queen and the young couple, exacerbated by Alexandra's loathing of Germans and the Queen's partiality towards them. All of Alexandra's children were apparently born prematurely; she did not want Queen Victoria to be present at their births, so she deliberately misled the Queen as to her probable delivery dates.
Alas! Poor Holbein, we know it well!
It's one of those modern-day conceits that the doctoring of images of the fashionable and important is a relatively recent occurrence. The fact is that likenesses have been doctored for reasons of politics and vanity for more than a couple of thousand years. Sculptures, paintings and photographs have all been subject to their own methods of image enhancement. These days we have software programs to do the job.