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Victorian beds might be so high off the ground that
special bed steps were needed. In Princess & The Pea
fashion Victoria’s bed at the Brighton Pavilion had
seven mattresses. The Queen didn't like that Regency
folly and sold it to buy her holiday home on the Isle
of Wight – Osborne House. Here the widowed Queen
fixed Albert’s pocket watch and a post-mortem
photograph of her beloved Prince to the head board.
Victoria died in this room but not in this bed, her doctor
having moved her into a single. Victoria was the last
Empress of India and if you visit Osborne House today
you can see royal treasures from the sub-continent, gifts
for her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, displayed in the
Anglo-India styled Durbar Room.
Oligarchs of the Empire
The Maharajahs and Nawabs of British India were
the wealthy playboys of the world. Victorian prototypes
of the oil sheiks or Russian Oligarchs if you will.
In 1882, Nawab Muhammad Bahawal Khan Abbasi V
of Bahawalpur, (in today’s Pakistan), 20 years old with
a definite eye for the ladies commissioned an erotic
musical rosewood and silver bed from top Parisian
silversmiths Christofle. At each corner and weighing
a combined 640 pounds of pure silver were four life
sized European ladies (France, Spain, Italy and Greece
apparently). When the young Nawab lay on the bed
his weight started a mechanism and to the strains of
Gounod’s Faust the ladies danced for him waving
and swishing their horse hair fans to cool his face and
whisk the flies from his feet. Oh and in a nice touch
the ladies also winked at him!
Nobody seems to know
where the bed is now - strikes me that you’ve got to try
really hard to misplace a bed like that! In 1953 the
playboy Nawab’s son
Sir Sadiq Muhammad Khan
Abbasi represented Pakistan at the coronation of Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey.
The Bed King
Henceforth beds for larger houses were elaborate
affairs stretching variously upwards and outwards
along with the architectural period. A truckle bed
for the servant could be pushed under the masters
bed during the day for the servant slept in the room
even on a wedding night – 24 hour room service
and living burglar and fire alarm. In the mid 1600s
Samuel Pepys who often ended his daily diary
entries with the words
And so to bed
wrote that
he hated a
naked bed
, meaning a cold draughty bed
with no curtains. Pepys’ century, the seventeenth
has been described as the century of magnificent
beds and once again the influence was all French.
History remembers Louis XIV who reigned for 60
years until 1715 as the Sun King but he might just
as well be dubbed the Bed King owning as he did
an incredible 413 beds. His grandest bed of all was
the Great Bed at Versailles, the velvet of the
crimson curtains barely visible so much gold was
used to embroider The Triumph of Venus. Louis
liked to hold court from his bed and even attended
parliament reclining on a ceremonial bed.
The Ups and Downs of Beds
In the time of William and Mary from the 1680s
bedsteads became very tall and narrow in keeping
with their taller rooms but by the reign of Queen
Anne they had returned to a more sensible height.
Possibly because of our rotten weather we Brits
held on to heavily curtained four posters and cosy
box beds for many years but in the 1750s
elaborately carved woodwork eventually replaced
the covered bed. Designers like the lauded Thomas
Chippendale published books of exotic patterns for
fussy beds but within 30 years they had gone out
of fashion.