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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Measured days and grand celebrations of the Widow of Windsor, September 14, 2007
This review is from: Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year (Hardcover)
One of my favorite authors on the subject of royalty continues to be Greg King. He has focused most of his work on Tsarist Russia, but now with Twilight of Splendor he has taken a look at one of the most pivotal years of Great Britain's Queen Victoria -- a monarch who set her mark on an entire century, and whose presence still lingers today.
King takes one year in the Queen's life, and explores her daily life, starting first with an outline of her childhood, and marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and then to some of the momentous events of the years 1896-1897, when she became Britain's longest reigning monarch, and the festivities surrounding her Diamond Jubilee year to celebrate sixty years on the throne. By this time Victoria was not just a queen, but also Empress of India, and the British Empire was indeed a land where the sun never set. Colonies and possessions sent emissaries and gifts, all building towards a grand festival in London to mark the occansion.
But King goes beyond a mere listing of Queen Victoria's children and grandchildren -- he explores the rather tempetuous relationships that she had with them, especially her daughters. Neither were her sons spared the maternal disapproval either -- her eldest son Bertie, the Prince of Wales, she blamed for his father's death and his social life brought further displeasure. He in turn, took out his frustrations at not having any sort of decision-making in political roles in hard living, mostly involving smoking, chasing women and sport. Nor was Bertie the only fast living Royal -- daughter Louise was notorious for her acid tongue and mischief making, and Helena developed a near crippling addiction to opium.
The most interesting section was an exploration of the various courtiers that surrounded the Queen. There was an enormous army of servants, from those who laboured in the royal kitchens, footmen who carried messages and opened doors, housemaids who swept and scrubbed and tidied, all the way up to the aristocratic men that oversaw their work. While these men would never be confidants or friends, they would form close bonds of trust with the Queen, working with her for years, until ill-health or death remove them from the office. Much more shadowy were the servants that worked more closely with the Queen, most notorious being a Scotsman by the name of John Brown, of whom it was said that the queen had actually married him, and after his death, two Indian servants who were arrogant scoundrels.
The Queen's court of servants, family and attendants moved in a predictible round of seasons and holidays. Springtime and most of summer were spent at the castle complex at Windsor, autumn in the Scottish highlands at Balmoral, and winter at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Buckingham Palace was a place that the Queen loathed to stay in, and it was only during the most formal of events that the queen would stay at the Palace for even a night. In addition, the Queen and her household would holiday on the French Riviera every two months in springtime, an activity that continued from 1890 to nearly the very end of her long life. Pilgrimages would be made to her beloved husband's tomb every year on the anniversary of his death.
And sometimes, relatives would visit from the far reaches of the world to visit. One of the more momentous occansions was when one of Victoria's favorite granddaughters visited during the autumn of 1897. Alix and her siblings had been raised mostly by the Queen after the death of their mother, Alice, and Alix had been wooed and won by Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia. Now Alix was Empress, and with her husband and child went to visit as the new couple toured Europe after their coronation. Another momentous occansion that is covered is the grand costumed affair at the height of the London season at Devonshire House. Royalty and aristocracy mingled, as much to show off their wealth, and to be seen and see. Several ladies managed to arrive as the same characters from history, accompanied by much glaring. Other little snippets included the rituals of garden parties and presentations, Christmas celebrations, and finally the Diamond Jubilee itself.
I have to say that this was a real eyeopener of a book. All too often authors skip over the people who kept the various castles and palaces running and livable. King also adds in plenty of gossipy details, little touches that help to make these stiff figures from formal portraits come alive as well. While King's narrative does get repetitous what with the same descriptive passages being used over and over, the story does move along crisply, with quite a bit of detail being given. There are several inserts of black and white photos and etchings as well. Along with the bibliography and footnotes, there is an appendix that list the various members of the Queen's hosuehold during the final years of her life.
For anyone interested in the details of how royals lived in the nineteenth century, this is a splendid read. I discovered that the royalty of the time were imprisoned as much as they ruled from a golden, rather spendid, cage. Days were carefully measured and plotted out, and oridinary people and the journalists were just as curious about them as they are now in the twenty-first century. While the reading does get a bit dull in spots, it's still enjoyable, and there's quite a bit of humor here and there to liven things up.
Recommended.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Glimpse Of A Vanished World, July 18, 2007
This review is from: Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year (Hardcover)
This is the story of Queen Victoria and the Court of St. James during her Diamond Jubilee Year, 1897. Victoria was a unique individual. Queen since the age of 18, she held vast power and oversaw enormous change. Her emotions were always raw and her opinions of others, especially of her own children and relations, usually set in stone. She was at once free thinking and hidebound, extremely old fashioned in some ways yet very modern in others. No one else was quite like her, as people acknowledged even during her own lifetime.
Greg King has chosen an interesting year as his focus for this portrait of the Queen and her court. The Diamond Jubilee is often considered the apogee of the British Empire. Even while the Jubilee was going on, some prescient Englishmen (Rudyard Kipling for one with his poem "Recessional") were aware that troubles lay ahead. The Queen herself was past her prime in 1897, blind, arthritic, and more querulous than ever. King has traced Queen Victoria's life through the Jubilee Year, following her from Windsor to Balmoral to Osborne to Buckingham Palace to Cimiez and back again. He describes each of her palaces in great detail, and traces the daily life of the Queen in each of them. He also traces the lives of the courtiers who lived with and supported her. I enjoyed reading about these ever patient and considerate men and women, who spent their days catering to the Queen's whims. Henry and Frederick Ponsonby, Sir James Reid, Lady Jane Churchill, and the others in the court must have been in a continuous state of aggravation and exhaustion, to say nothing of the poor maids who were expected to dance attendance on the Queen at any and every hour of the day and night.
King writes well but sometimes bogs down in his descriptions, particularly when he goes into needless detail about the position of the furniture or the details of those elaborate Victorian gowns and uniforms. Sometimes it seems as if he is quoting verbatim from newspaper accounts, with little first hand information from letters or diaries of some of the participants or from the Queen herself. Nevertheless I enjoyed this book because it let me see the Court pretty much as the Queen herself saw it in her last years. I also found the last pages, which describe the last days and death of the Queen, very sad but extremely moving.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The old Queen's death is profoundly moving, December 10, 2008
This review is from: Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year (Hardcover)
The last chapter of this potpourri of the last years of Victoria's reign allows us to glimpse the Queen as she was in her final hours and right after her death, and it's sensational, as I'll explain shortly, and worth the price of the book.
Massively selfish and massively privileged as she was, Victoria had to meet the Grim Reaper just like everybody else, of course, but the description of her physical and mental collapse can almost bring tears to your eyes. Less than five feet tall, she weighed 170 pounds, a victim of her own gluttony, was nearly blind and could hardly walk. With her personal physician, Dr. Reid, supporting her on one side of the bed, her grandson, Wilhelm II, the Kaiser, supporting her the on other, the 81 year old Queen's head dropped to her shoulder at exactly 6:30 PM on January 22, 1901 and she was gone after 63 years on the throne.
Her body was placed in the first of three coffins, each tightly encased one inside the other, but weighing together a thousand pounds in spite of the tiny size of the coffins, hardly bigger than those made for a child. Lilies were thickly arranged around her body, her wedding veil draped over her head. Under the thick lily blanket, Dr. Reid hid some amazing artifacts. (Hidden, because the new king, Edward VII, would have removed them).
On her right hand was placed the wedding ring of John Brown's mother (!) A lock of Brown's hair in a locket was placed around her neck as was another locket containing his picture. Victoria was never intimate with John Brown, but still waters run deep here. Many "legitimate" items were also placed with the body, such as a shawl embroidered by Victoria's long dead daughter Alice, the marble hands of Albert, pictures of the nine children. But the John Brown secret mementoes boggle the mind.
People who saw the coffin passing on its gun carriage on the way to the funeral at St. George's chapel, all commented on its tiny size. It hardly seemed possible that the Queen of the Empire and Empress of India could fit, given her immense presence in the world, in such a tiny place.
When Victoria was laid to rest beside her beloved Albert inside the great sarcophagus at Frogmore, observers must have been drenched in a kind of Gothic atmosphere that probably was downright eerie.The lid of the great tomb, supporting Victoria's recumbant effigy, now, beside that of Albert, had been rolled back, and Albert's oak coffin, covered with dust, was clearly visible. As Victoria's coffin was lowered into place, the top of her coffin was sprinkled with soil from the Mount of Olives. The lid with the effigies, heavy, heavy marble, would have made a fearsome noise as the workmen swung it down to enclose the royal couple forever.
Other reviewers of "Twilight of Splendor" have felt there is too much description in the book about every artifact in every one of Victoria's palaces as well as minute details of what people wore to famous balls and weddings, down to the last button, such as at the nuptials of Edward VII"s youngest daugher, Maud, and the Duke of Devonshire's famous fancy dress ball of 1895. But I enjoyed these details. And the food descriptions will set your taste buds a twitter!
However, the human elements of the book, such as Victoria's death and balanced insights into the characters of Victoria's children appeal to me the most. One amazing nugget concerns a visitor who was visiting the Queen at Balmoral at the same time as the young Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, and their first child, Grand Duchess Olga. The tsar at at the time was about twenty seven years old and Alexandra was twenty four. The visitor decribed Nicholas as a "weakling" and Alix as a "rabid, pathetic hausfrau." The seeds in the characters of Russia's last Emperor and Empress were already sown... two astoundingly inept rulers ill-fated by their personalities and thus doomed from the very start.
"Twilight of Splendor" covers the bases from many possible angles, and you'll have a very good feeling for what living was like in late Victorian England when you finish it.
Recommended, even if you don't like minute descriptive details.
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