Royalty Magazine Vol. 24/05 (Extracts)
Mary’s Touch of Magic
Celebrating her twelfth wedding anniversary for Crown Princess Mary it was very much business as usual, with the bonus of the summer school break and some family fun to enjoy. For Europe’s royals summer holidays are usually combined with photocalls and the Royal Family’s annual holiday at Grasten Palace, in the Jutland region of southern Denmark, caught the mother of four at her glamorous but always down to earth best. The photographers’ chance for some family snaps came as Mary, along with three of her children – 10 year-old Prince Christian and his twin siblings Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine – cycled to the nearby riding school . . . (read the full article in Royalty Magazine Vol. 24/05).
Harry’s Future Past
Prince Harry’s appearance at the rehearsals for the latest Sentebale charity concert was a reminder of HRH’s good attributes, but also of his personal predicament when it comes to finding love, writes Janette Aldace. There is never any standing around on ceremony with Harry who turned up at the Brit School in South London to see the Basotho Youth Choir. The choristers, aged between seven to nineteen, were rehearsing with Sentebale Ambassador singer-songwriter Joss Stone as Harry bounded in unannounced, giving Joss a big hug. Harry and Joss are good friends and there is always a sparkle when they meet. On this occasion Joss was preparing the choir for its concert performance at Kensington Palace Gardens the following day . . . (read the full article in Royalty Magazine Vol. 24/05).
(Above left) June 2016. Just good friends as Prince Harry and Joss Stone meet during rehearsals of the Basotho Youth Choir at the Brit School ahead of a performance at the Sentebale Concert. (Below left) May 2014. Harry and Joss at the summer party to mark the 10th anniversary of HRH’s Sentebale charity. (Above right) Prince Harry looks at photos with Lesothan Relebohile ‘Mutsu’ Potsane at the Brit School. (Below right) March 2004. An iconic moment for Harry’s Sentebale charity as HRH and Mutsu, then aged 4, plant a peach tree together at the Mants’ase Children’s Home for orphans near Mohale’s Hoek, Lesotho.
Rasputin: The Holy Man
By the summer of 1904 Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna had finally celebrated the birth of a son after four daughters. On July 30, 1904, the canon of the Peter and Paul Fortress rang out with a 301 gun salute across the River Neva for the arrival of the heir who was christened Alexei. But the Imperial Couple’s joy had soon been overshadowed by the realisation that Tsarevich Alexei had been born with haemophilia, the royal disease that Alexandra carried from her grandmother Queen Victoria.
(Above left) An extraordinary photograph of Rasputin with his followers. (Above right) The French mystic Anthelme Nizier Philippe and (above right) Grand Duchess Stana of Montenegro, a devotee of both Philippe and Rasputin. (Below left) The Tsarina at Peterhof in 1911. (Below) 1906. Tsarevich Alexei aged two aboard the yacht The Standard.
In the early 1900s there was no effective way to treat the disease and, with so much depending on Alexei’s future, Nikolai and Alexandra decided that his condition must be kept secret. A moment of joy and hope, one that the proud parents saw as nothing less than a gift of God, had taken a darker turn and would drive them into a relationship with a Russian holy man and faith healer that would be a fateful, indeed ultimately fatal, decision in their lives.
Much of Grigori Rasputin’s life is the subject of rumour and speculation but the outlines are reasonably clear. His birth was recorded as January 21, 1869, and his death, at the hands of two desperate members of the nobility, on December 30, 1916. The future starets to the last Tsar was born in the remoteness of the West Siberian village of Pokrovskoye, in the Tobolsk Governorate, to a well-to-do peasant and postal coach driver. He was the fifth of nine children, of whom only two survived into adulthood, Rasputin and his sister Feodosiya. In 1887 he married Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina (1866–1936). They had six children, three of whom survived: a son, Dmitri, and two daughters Maria and Varvara . . . (read the full article in Royalty Magazine Vol. 24/05).
Royalty Magazine Vol. 24/05
