Prince Alfred, later Duke of Edinburgh,
was the second son of Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert.
His bride was Maria Alexandrovna, who was
the only surviving daughter of Alexander II
of Russia and his wife the Empress Alexandra
Feodorovna.
The marriage needed special permission because
it was a marriage between the Prince,
who was a member of the Anglican established
Church and the Grand Duchess, who was
Russian Orthodox, and whose father, just as
Queen Victoria was Supreme Governor of the
Church of England, so the emperor was effectively
the head of the Russian Church. So there needed
to be a compromise between the two faiths
for the ceremonies to take place.
Queen Victoria, of course, took a very active
interest in church matters. The Russian Orthodox Church
would have been very strange to her. She wanted
to know what was going on. I think she probably
wanted to know that her son was going to be safe
in the hands of these strange, foreign Christians.
So she asks one of her most trusted
clerical advisors, Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster,
to go on her behalf, with his wife who was one of her
ladies-in-waiting, and report back on the ceremony.
The Stanleys do this with great enthusiasm and report
in great detail. The Dean had traveled in the Middle East.
He knew something about the Orthodox Churches
and indeed had written a book on the Eastern churches.
He'd met Russian clergies, seen a Russian clergy,
he knew a bit about it. But you have the impression from
the letters that he was still, in some ways, pleasantly
surprised by what he found. He writes in one of his letters
that the ceremony in St Petersburg was 'much more
like a family gathering than anything in Western churches.
The bride and bridegroom were closed around by
four groomsmen, there were no bridesmaids, as if protecting them.
And the crowns are held over their heads so long
as to give the impression of a more than fugitive interest.
Walking round and round the altar with these four
youths pacing with them had quite the effect
of what originally must have been a wedding dance.
So the marriage taking place so far away in St Petersburg
meant that it was quite difficult for the British public
as indeed for The Queen to understand what had happened,
what the ceremonies were like, what Russia was like,
it was a distant, barbarous place that nobody knew
very much about. For The Queen, her one way
was a watercolour that she was sent by Chevalier
and was dispatched to her by Prince Alfred. This had
different flaps so that she could see the different
stages of the ceremony.
What Chevalier's done very ingeniously here
is to give us the whole scene and then two little insets,
as it were, rather like you might find in a toy theatre of the
time. The first one shows the Ceremony of Crowning
when the couple would have walked in and their attendants are holding the crown
over the bridegroom when the crowns have been blessed by the priest.
And then we have in the main picture the blessing of the
couple. Finally, labelled the third part of the ceremony,
we see the priest leading the couple and their attendants
around the desk where the Gospel is kept in the ceremonial dance
that concludes the sacramental drama of an Orthodox wedding.
So we have a very vivid way of representing the sequence of events here.
I have a feeling that Queen Victoria would very much have
enjoyed playing around with these.