Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2016 | Page 63

Country life

FROM PRINCESSES TO TSARS
By Sam Biles, Managing Director of country Estate Agents Biles and co
It is easy for us to rush from one end
of the Island to the other without
realising what a historic place we are
occupying and how we are surrounded
by evidence of the past.

Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter and companion
Princess Beatrice lies, alongside her husband Prince
Henry of Battenburg, in St Mildred’s Whippingham
and much earlier Princess Cicely or Cecilia, the
beautiful youngest daughter of Edward IV married
an Islander, lived at Standen and was buried at Quarr
Abbey in the early 16th Century.

Of course everyone recognises landmarks such as
Carisbrooke Castle and assumes it is mainly Norman,
but how many realise that the site has Saxon and
indeed Roman origins and that the outer fortifications
were designed by an Italian - Federigo Gianbelli and
built to counter the threat from the Spanish Armada? It
is hard to realise that changes of sea level have lead to
an 8,000 year old Mesolithic village being submerged
under calm waters of the Solent off Bouldnor - the site
is of international importance.

There are various pillars and memorials around the
Island – the Yarborough monument on Culver Down
is a familiar landmark – it is not however in its original
location, it had to be moved eastwards to allow the
construction of Bembridge Fort in the 1860s. The
Hoy Monument at The Hermitage was erected by
Michael Hoy a merchant who traded with Russia to
commemorate the visit to Britain, in 1814, of ‘His
Imperial Majesty Alexander the 1st, Emperor of all
the Russias. Not without some irony the pillar also
bears a later plaque commemorating soldiers who
fought against a subsequent Tsar in the Crimea in
1857. The last Tsar, Nicholas II visited the Island in the
early 20th Century. His young family are said to have
experienced greater freedom and anonymity freely
swimming in the Solent and shopping in Cowes than
they ever had in their homeland.

Everyone knows the story of the incarceration of
Charles I in Carisbrooke and his ill-fated escape
attempts but not so many know of the arduous
negotiations of the Treaty of Newport centred around
the ancient stone Grammar School nor the later
death of his daughter Elizabeth at Carisbrooke and
her subsequent interment in Sts Thomas’ Minster in
Newport where her coffin lay for 300 years before
being discovered during the 19th Century re-building
of the Church when Queen Victoria commissioned
the beautiful marble memorial by Marochetti. Two
other Princesses are also buried within our shores -

That Keats, Swinburne and Dickens all spent time on
the Island is well known; less so is that Dickens based
Miss Havisham of Great Expectations on a Miss Dick
of Madeira Hall, Bonchurch who was similarly and
sadly jilted and subsequently retreated from society.

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