Dated 1858
Diameter: 26mm
Yellow gold guilloche enamelled Tudor rose pendant with miniature gold relief portrait of Queen Victoria, the reverse inscribed with date of the Queen’s ’s eldest daughter Victoria, Princess Royal’s wedding day - ‘HRH Princess Royal 25 Jan 1858’ around a glazed compartment containing a lock of hair.
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The present pendant gifted by the seventeen year-old Princess Royal possibly to one of her eight bridesmaids on the occasion of her marriage at St. James’s Palace in London to Prince Frederick of Prussia, with whom she went on to have eight children.
Princess Victoria’s bridesmaids were Lady Susan Pelham-Clinton-under (daughter of the Duke of Newcastle), Lady Emma Stanley (daughter of the Earl of Derby), Lady Susan Murray (daughter of the Earl of Dunmore), Lady Victoria Noel (daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough), Lady Cecilia Lennox (daughter of the Duke of Richmond), Lady Katherine Hamilton (daughter of the Duke of Abercorn), Lady Constance Villiers (daughter of the Earl of Clarendon), & Lady Cecilia Molyneux (daughter of the Earl of Sefton).
Victoria, Princess Royal (Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, later The Empress Frederick of Germany (1840-1901) was the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and was created Princess Royal in 1841. Educated by her father, whom she idoilsed, she grew up in a politically liberal environment, and shared much in common with the liberally minded Prince Frederick of Prussia. The House of Hohenzollern however shared none of their liberal values, and Victoria duly suffered ostracism by the Hohenzollerns and the Berlin court. This isolation increased after the rise to power of Otto von Bismarck, and in her widowhood. Victoria’s extensive correspondence gives a detailed insight into the life of the Prussian court between 1858 and 1900.