The Victorian Royal Family and the Body of Princess Elizabeth Stuart: Historical Culture and Heritage, Collection and Display

ABSTRACT This essay explores the afterlife of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the seventeenth-century civil war King, Charles I, and how her untimely death reverberated in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from newspaper and diaries to details of memorials and history genre paintings, it argues that the interest of the Royal Family, and Queen Victoria in particular, in memorializing this tragic story should not be siloed off as is often the case with royal histories, but instead be read as part of a wider cultural movement around the romantic past which the Royal Family both passively consumed, and were actively involved in shaping. Investigating this participation and the influence of Victoria and her family in marking and representing the life of Elizabeth Stuart offers fresh perspective on currents of historicism, visual culture, and traditions around mourning and commemoration in Victorian culture and society.