Hidden in the garden wall of Marlborough House, opposite St James’s Palace, the Queen Alexandra Memorial is a Grade I listed Art Nouveau bronze by Sir Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor behind Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and the story behind it is stranger than the monument itself.
Hidden in plain sight across the road from St James’s Palace, the Queen Alexandra Memorial is an elaborate memorial commemorating the much-loved wife of King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra of Denmark.
Located in the garden wall of Marlborough House, the house in which Alexandra and Edward lived until he was crowned king in 1901, the memorial is one of the city’s forgotten spots.
Like many royal marriages of the time, it was an unhappy one: Edward was an unashamed philanderer, with a number of mistresses including Lillie Langtry, who he famously used to entertain in the upstairs room at Rules before it became a public bar. That said, the Danish Queen was a popular figure and much-loved by the British public.
The memorial
Sheathed in black enamel, it’s a gorgeous Art Nouveau work by Alfred Gilbert, erected in 1932 and Grade I listed. At its centre is an allegorical figure of Love Enthroned, flanked by Faith and Hope, with an inscription below reading “Faith, hope, love, the guiding virtues of Queen Alexandra”, a composition chosen for a queen well known for her charitable causes and good deeds rather than a literal likeness of her.
Look carefully and you’ll find a direct reference to those charitable works in the depiction of Love sending a boy across the River of Life, running underneath the throne. Gilbert explained this symbolised the Queen’s constant work to better the lives of children, but it also doubled up as a nifty reminder that she came to Britain from across the water.
The memorial was unveiled on 8 June 1932, with the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance and Elgar’s own Queen Alexandra Memorial Ode, composed for the occasion, performed live.
Alfred Gilbert
The Queen Alexandra Memorial was the last major work by Gilbert, and its story starts decades earlier than 1932. As a child, Gilbert had cheered Alexandra’s own arrival in England in 1861, when she came from Denmark to marry the future Edward VII.
Their paths crossed again, far less happily, when Gilbert’s finances and personal life collapsed in the 1890s. He’d taken on too many commissions, run up serious debts, and left the tomb of Alexandra’s own son, the Duke of Clarence, unfinished after going wildly over budget, a loss she never really recovered from; she kept the room in which her son died as a shrine. In 1901, disgraced, Gilbert fled to Bruges to escape his creditors.
Alexandra never abandoned him. Through his years in exile, she pleaded his case to Edward VII, sent him financial support, and helped ensure his safety, despite her husband’s open dislike of the man.
The comeback
It was Gilbert’s biographer, Isabel McAllister, who finally brought him home in 1926, with a deliberate two-part plan: get him to finish the Duke of Clarence’s tomb at last, which he did by 1928, and then secure him the commission for Alexandra’s own memorial, who had died the previous year and reportedly wished for Gilbert specifically to design it. Gilbert called the result his swan song, and worked on it until 1932. Edward VII’s dislike of the sculptor didn’t stop him being knighted for it, at the King’s own hand, and readmitted to the Royal Academy that had shut him out for decades.
The London x London Take: Most people walk past this without a second glance, a bronze screen in a garden wall doesn’t announce itself the way a statue on a plinth does. But the actual story here, a disgraced sculptor rescued by the loyalty of the one royal who never gave up on him, is one of the better hidden narratives in St James’s. Pair it with a proper look at the Eros statue in Piccadilly to see Gilbert’s range, then walk on to St James’s Park.
Queen Alexandra Memorial, Marlborough Rd, St. James’s, London, SW1A 1BQ
