Ham House

Ham House, Richmond

Ham House, Richmond, was a revelation. I’ve often used 16th and 17th century houses for my characters. Sutton Place in Surrey became Camberley Place in all three books of the Difficult Dukes series. Northumberland House became Clevedon House in Silk is for Seduction. Holland House became Castle de Grey in “Lord Lovedon’s Duel” and My Inconvenient Duke.

I’m drawn to these houses because they tend to be complicated. They’re built around courtyards; they have great halls and long galleries and they’re loaded with nooks and crannies where my characters might steal a private moment or two. Over the years, they acquire accretions, and they tend to sprawl over vast acres.

But many of the houses I used in my books have either been demolished or converted into something that isn’t a house. Ham House is still very much a house, and very much a 17th century house. It’s seen some changes over the years, but not very many, considering its age. Wikipedia points out that “Ham House is unusual in retaining much of its original 17th-century interior decoration, offering a rare experience of the style of the courts of Charles I and Charles II.” This was what knocked me out. Apparently, I’m not the only one, as the interior was considered over-the-top, even in its time, when aristocrats were not shy about displaying their wealth. The ebony staircase is a good example.

If you are reading this post in an email, and the video does not appear, please follow this link to the blog.

The ebony staircase.

Because I have so much to show and tell, you can expect at least two blog posts.

Video of Loretta Chase in the Round Gallery of Ham House, Richmond

The Round Gallery was originally the Great Dining Room. Early in the 18th century, most of the floor was removed. The remaining room displays portraits, while the Great Hall was made grander, with better lighting.

The marble fire place is in the North Drawing Room, as is the Ivory cabinet. On the day we visited, the cabinets were open, which is not usually the case. The harpsichord is believed to have been made in England about 1730. The open doorway leads to the Long Gallery, which is lined with more portraits, of which I offer a sample.

Kensington Palace Part Two

Gates of Kensington Palace, 2017

My previous post focused on Queen Victoria’s childhood. Though she left Kensington Palace as soon as she could after becoming Queen, its displays do offer glimpses of her adulthood.

The portrait of her at the theater, in the year she ascended to the throne, was new to me, and I absolutely love it. This is not a shy and retiring young woman. Though she’s only eighteen, she absolutely knows who she is. She needed to be strong-willed to get to this point. As Gillian Gill puts it in We Two, “while the Princess Victoria was weak , feverish, and confined to bed, Conroy and the duchess tried to browbeat her into signing a document appointing Conroy as her personal private secretary in the event of her accession to the throne.” She was only sixteen at the time. She refused to do it.

If you’d like a sharper image, which you can zoom in on, the portrait of Victoria wearing the emerald set is here at the Royal Collection Trust.

Below are a few notes on the photos of other items on display at Kensington Palace.

Mourning dress had specific stages, with the later stages allowing for a few colors. For the rules in Queen Alexandra’s time, you might want to take a look at these pages of Manners and Rules of Good Society (1913 ed).

The diamond tiaras speak for themselves.

We’ve all seen so many photos and films of Queen Elizabeth in her girlhood, but it was an altogether different and enlightening experience to see her and Princess Margaret’s dresses, and to learn that they were altered in order to last a long time.

Court dress is something I’ve mentioned in a few books. It did not always keep up with fashion, or else did so with its own special rules and additions. The gentleman’s court suit of 1780 is a good example of the level of expenditure. Even the detail shots can’t fully convey the richness and sparkle. The men gathered at the Court of St. James must have been quite a sight, no doubt vying with the ladies for splendor. Not that the ladies faded into the background. Their dresses would be embellished with diamonds, pearls, and other precious gems. The Lord Chamberlain, on the monarch’s orders, would issue rules about court dress, and these could change. However, ostrich feathers, lappets (those lace things dangling from the back of the headdress), and trains continued into the 20th century, as the 1928 dress shows. This painting of Queen Adelaide’s 1834 Birthday Drawing Room gives a good idea of a Court gathering at the time of my recent stories.

I’ve included the short video of Lady’s Holcroft’s court dress because a still photo simply doesn’t do the job. You can find several photographs of Lady Holcroft in her court dress here at the National Portrait Gallery. If you are unable to view the reel in your email, you can view it here on my website blog.

A short video of Lady Holcroft’s court dress

Kensington Palace and Queen Victoria

A view of the bedroom in which Queen Victoria was born, in 1819.

My favorite book about Queen Victoria is Gillian Gill’s We Two, which is mainly about her marriage (the subtitle is Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals), but also does a wonderful job of telling the story of how she came to be heir to the throne and what her childhood was like. The best biographies read like good fiction, and this book falls into that category.

Kensington Palace, like so many other of my London destinations, has much more to offer than one can see in a day. I focused on Queen Victoria primarily: the part of the palace in which she was born and grew up—and from which she quickly departed when she became Queen of England. She couldn’t wait to get out of the place, and, aware of her story, one can’t blame her.

Still, her mother loved her dearly, as gifts and notes attest, and while the young princess rarely enjoyed the company of other children (not to mention many of her English relatives), she did have some nice playthings. For more information about her life, I highly recommend the book. For now, I’m just going to share some bits of the world she lived in. I believe that seeing items like these give us a little better understanding of Victoria as a human being, a little girl, an adolescent. I’ll touch on her later life in another blog post.

The cards explain the photos, for the most part, but I’ll add a couple of notes. Victoria’s Uncle Leopold had been married to the Princess Charlotte, King George IV’s only legitimate child. There’s quite a bit about him in We Two, and I often wonder if, had Charlotte not died in childbirth, he would have been the same sort of Prince Consort as his nephew Albert. In any case, Leopold became the first King of the Belgians in 1831. He married again in 1832. This picture of his bride, Louise of Orléans, appeared in numerous ladies’ magazines that year.

As I’ve mentioned before, photographing works of art in museums and historic sites can be challenging, mainly because of lighting conditions. You can get a non-glare view of the painting of thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria here at the Royal Collection Trust.