Tiaras, Cigarette Cases, and the End of an Era: Inside The Edwardians

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If you are the sort of person who can identify a royal tiara at twenty paces (which, if you’re reading this, you probably are), then The Edwardians: Age of Elegance at The King’s Gallery is your idea of heaven: a world where every flat surface is either gilded, spangled, or sprouting ostrich feathers.

And for me, it wasn’t just a royal field trip – it was practically a family visit. King Edward VII was a close friend of the 8th Earl of Sandwich; his dazzling Queen Alexandra was godmother to Victor Montagu, the firstborn son of Alberta, our American Heiress, and her husband George, 9th Earl. So walking into Buckingham Palace to see their world laid out under glass felt a little like being let loose in a royal jewellery box. With very good security.

A cluttered green fever dream

The exhibition begins in a deep green room designed to evoke the gloriously over-furnished interiors of Marlborough House and Sandringham – the sort of spaces where side tables trembled under the weight of silver trinkets, framed photographs, ferns, more framed photographs, and possibly the odd forgotten Pekingese.

The star of this room, for me, was a gigantic screen made for Sandringham in the 1890s, bristling with cabinet card photographs of Edward and Alexandra’s world: politicians, generals, actresses, writers, and a whole forest of royal cousins. It is essentially the nineteenth-century equivalent of an over-stuffed Instagram grid.

Naturally, I went straight into archivist mode and began hunting for “my” people. Somewhere on that screen, I wanted to find Edward Montagu, the 8th Earl of Sandwich – Edward VII’s friend and my my husband’s ancestor, a few generations removed. I peered at every whiskered gentleman in frock coat and sash, but if he’s there, he successfully eluded me. It’s the most aristocratic game of Where’s Wally? I’ve ever played.