Royal weddings

The 1863 royal wedding. Illustration in a book in the library at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. ©NTPL/John Hammond

As a modest tribute to today’s event I thought I would show a couple of historical royal weddings, to see if we can spot parallels and differences. This is the wedding of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, to Alexandra, Princess of Denmark, at Windsor Castle in 1864 (Princess Alexandra can also be seen, depicted twenty years later, in this post).

Admission ticket to the 1863 royal wedding, from the library at Anglesey Abbey. ©NTPL/John Hammond

And this is an admittance ticket to that event. The fact that it directs the bearer to the roof of the New Guard Room seems to indicate that they were expecting significant crowds.

Detail from a commemorative bioscope showing the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1840. ©NTPL/David Garner

And this was Queen Victoria’s outfit for her wedding to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840 – with a slightly longer train than we saw today.

As simple as ABC

The Library at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. Note the use of large sheets of mirrored glass. ©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel

Four times a year the National Trust publishes the ABC Bulletin. This is a free e-newsletter discussing the latest projects in the areas of curatorship and conservation. The Spring 2010 issue has just come out, featuring:

• The loan and restoration of the Londonderry state chariot
• The stories behind a Reynolds group portrait
• The restoration of a Dutch genre scene at Grantham House
• Anglesey Abbey’s bling books
• National Trust libraries online
• The wooden water mains of London
• King Charles I celebrated at Lyme Park
• Torcheres at Saltram restored
• Enhancing the visiting experience for blind and partially sighted people
• Speke Hall’s sensory trail
• Recent acquisitions

The article about the books at Anglesey Abbey, written by our libraries curator Mark Purcell, describes some of the treasures to be found there.

Lord Fairhaven with his mother, Cara Rogers, on board her yacht Sapphire. ©NTPL/John Hammond

Huttleston Broughton, 1st Baron Fairhaven (1896-1966), who was to inherit American-made fortunes from both his father and his mother, bought Anglesey Abbey in 1926. He created an important garden there and furnished the house in plutocratic style. He generously left the estate to the National Trust, together with an endowment for its upkeep.

Fairhaven’s collections are shown in settings of Holywood-style glamour. When James Lees-Milne stayed at the house in 1946 he was perturbed by the central heating in his bedroom, a rare and almost decadent luxury at the time.

One of the splendid bindings in the library at Anglesey Abbey. This is a copy of Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. ©NTPL/John Hammond

One of Lord Fairhaven’s hobbies was collecting rare books. Not only are there many books with beautiful bindings in the library, but there is also a very large collection of colour plate books from the Regency period, the heyday of such publications.

The opulent setting: some of the East Asian objets d'art collected by Lord Fairhaven's mother, in the Lower Gallery at Anglesey Abbey. ©NTPL/Dennis Gilbert

Mark is planning to publish an illustrated catalogue of the Anglesey Abbey library, written together with William Hale and David Pearson.