Queen Victoria - The UK's Longest Reigning Monarch Queen Victoria Queen Victoria The Longest Ruling Monarch of the United Kingdom Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Original Artist: By T H Maquire. (1852). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) By Patricia Daniels, Contributing Writer Updated July 26, 2016. Who Was Queen Victoria? Ascending to the throne at only 18 years old, Queen Victoria ruled the United Kingdom for nearly 64 years -- the longest of any British monarch. During her reign, Great Britain became a powerful industrial nation and boasted an empire that stretched across the globe. Despite the early loss of her beloved husband, Queen Victoria provided a reassuring stability during much of the 19th century - an era of great social and technological change. The years of her reign are referred to as the Victorian Era.

Dates: May 24, 1819 - January 22, 1901 Reign: 1837 - 1901 Also Known As: Alexandrina Victoria of the House of Hanover; "the Grandmother of Europe" The Girl Who Would Be Queen Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on May 24, 1819 to Edward, the Duke of Kent (and fourth son of King George III) and German Princess Victoire of Leiningen. Although Victoria was fifth in line to the throne - unlikely to become monarch - the duke feared that any future claim to the throne might be challenged if she were born abroad. continue reading below our video Profile of Queen Victoria He ensured that his daughter was born on British soil, moving with his pregnant wife from Germany to England. Christened Alexandrina Victoria at birth, the child came to be called Victoria. Despite being born into royalty, she did not grow up surrounded by wealth. Edward's spendthrift ways had left him with many debts. The duke and duchess, in an attempt to reduce expenses, moved with their infant daughter to a modest home.

Not long after the move, Edward became ill and died of pneumonia on January 23, 1820 (Victoria was just eight months old). Six days later, King George III died as well, thus making George IV King of England. Victoria was now third in line to the throne behind her two uncles, who had failed to produce heirs. Victoria's Less Than Royal Childhood King George IV , whose only legitimate child had died in childbirth, was resentful of his brother's daughter. He begrudgingly allowed Victoria and her mother to move into an apartment at Kensington Palace, but would only approve a small allowance. The duchess’s brother, Prince Leopold (later King Leopold I of Belgium ), agreed to pay for Victoria's upbringing and education. Tutors were hired to school Victoria in history, math, drawing, and languages. Raised by a German mother who spoke little English, Victoria spoke mostly German the first few years of her life, but readily learned both English and French. In 1827, when Victoria was eight, her Uncle Frederick, the Duke of York, died, placing her one step closer to the throne.

A Scheming Pair When newly widowed, Victoria's mother had turned for advice to John Conroy, a colleague of her late husband. In the years following the duke's death, the self-serving Conroy convinced the duchess that she should have herself declared Victoria's regent (an agent acting on behalf of an incapacitated or underage monarch) in the event that Victoria became queen while still a minor. In this way, Conroy - through the duchess - could essentially control the throne. When King George IV (who loathed Conroy and the duchess) died in 1830, the pair believed they could easily persuade newly-crowned King William IV to name the duchess as Victoria's regent. But King William did not trust the duchess and refused her request. The duchess petitioned Parliament, winning approval as Victoria's sole regent in 1831. The regency proved unnecessary. On June 20, 1837, a month after Victoria's eighteenth birthday, King William died, making Victoria queen of England. The Young Queen Weeks after assuming the throne, Queen Victoria moved to Buckingham Palace , where she began the business of ruling the nation.

The young queen's composure and confidence impressed the prime minister and the Privy Council (a group of high government officials and advisers to a monarch). The official coronation was held on June 28, 1838 amid great celebration. The public was enchanted by the new queen, who seemed more eager to please them than her predecessors had been. A scandalous incident, however, would soon sway public opinion against her. The "Lady Flora affair," as it came to be known, was the product of the young queen's immaturity and lack of discretion. Victoria, among others, had noticed that her mother's lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings - an unmarried woman - appeared to have a bulging abdomen. Queen Victoria jumped to the conclusion that Lady Flora was pregnant, and began to make comments about her to various members of her staff. The rumor circulated beyond palace walls. Within months, Lady Flora was gravely ill. When she died of an apparent abdominal tumor, the queen was blamed for having started the rumors that had brought dishonor upon a dying woman. The public was outraged; many of her detractors actually booed the queen when she went out in public.

It would take an engagement and marriage for Queen Victoria to regain her reputation. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: Courtship and Marriage Victoria's Uncle Leopold had long favored his German nephew Prince Albert - first cousin to Victoria - as the perfect candidate for marriage to the queen. When the prince and Victoria had met two years earlier, she had been impressed by Albert's looks and demeanor. Upon meeting with him a second time in October 1839, Victoria seemed smitten. Within days, she proposed to him (protocol would not allow him to propose to her), and the engagement was announced. Even before the wedding a debate arose as to what title Prince Albert should hold. Queen Victoria preferred "King Consort," so that Albert could rule by her side, but members of Parliament were opposed to giving that power to a foreigner. Parliament decided to award the prince no rank or title whatsoever; he was simply made a British subject. Prince Albert was immensely disappointed, and the queen was furious, but could not oppose the decision. The wedding was held on February 10, 1840 . Despite rainy weather, large crowds lined the streets to watch the procession from Buckingham Palace.

Later, the crowd cheered as the newly-married couple rode past in their carriage. The Royal Offspring Queen Victoria and Prince Albert welcomed the birth of their first child, Princess Victoria in November 1840. However, the queen was not happy that she'd become pregnant so soon after the wedding, and often complained in her journal about the difficulties of motherhood. Queen Victoria gave birth to a male heir, Albert ("Bertie"), a year later. Between 1843 and 1857, the queen had seven more children, completing her family of five daughters and four sons . All survived to adulthood, a rare outcome at a time when many children did not survive infancy. The queen's fourth son, Leopold, born in 1853, was diagnosed at an early age with hemophilia , a genetically-transmitted bleeding disorder. He died in his thirties of the disease. Through the marriages of Victoria's children, hemophilia later re-emerged in several European royal families, most notably in the son of Czar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alexandra (Victoria's granddaughter).

It was later determined that Queen Victoria and two of her daughters (as well as Alexandra) were carriers of the gene, which was passed on to their sons. Prince Albert's Role Prince Albert enjoyed being a father and found that having children had necessitated that he take on more responsibilities in the royal household. Queen Victoria increasingly relied upon him for advice, and he welcomed this new role. The prince was widely praised for organizing palace finances and eliminating wasteful spending. Prince Albert earned the admiration of the British public following an assassination attempt upon the queen in 1840. When a gunman shot at the royal carriage, Albert acted quickly, pushing his wife to the carriage floor to avoid the bullet. (Queen Victoria would survive seven assassination attempts.) After initial reservations about Albert's capabilities, Parliament appointed him regent in July 1840 during the queen's pregnancy. As regent, Prince Albert would be in charge of the heir if Queen Victoria were to die in childbirth, or otherwise. The prince was not awarded the title of "prince consort" until 1857. War and Rebellion The British became involved in the Crimean War from 1854 to 1856.

Most of the fighting took place in Russian-held Crimea, where bitter cold and disease took as many lives as battle wounds. The queen, lacking any power in military situations, felt compelled to help. She organized relief efforts, knitted socks and mittens, and visited soldiers in hospitals. In her official capacity, Queen Victoria wrote letters of condolence to war widows. British presence in India stirred up a rebellion of Indian soldiers, called "sepoys," in 1857. The uprising resulted in the deaths of hundreds of European civilians. When the rebellion was finally subdued by British troops, all of India came under the control of the Crown of England. Queen Victoria proudly referred to India as a "jewel of her crown." She was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, when Parliament passed the Royal Titles Act. The Death of Prince Albert Queen Victoria endured the darkest year of her life in 1861, beginning with the death of her mother in March. Later in the year, her oldest son, Bertie - first in line to the throne - created a scandal by becoming romantically involved with an actress. Prince Albert traveled to Cambridge to chastise his son, despite feeling weak and feverish.

He returned to Windsor Castle, where his condition deteriorated over the next few weeks. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861 at age 42, from probable stomach cancer. A widow at 42, the queen was devastated. Faced with her official duties as well as the care of her children, she felt incapable of carrying on. Queen Victoria became a recluse, avoiding public events and social engagements and even refusing foreign visitors. Victoria's children suffered as well. They had lost their father; now their mother, too, seemed to abandon them in her grief. Some of the younger children became depressed and withdrawn, and Bertie became the object of his mother's anger. The queen blamed the 21-year-old prince for his father's death. She felt that her son's misbehavior had compelled Prince Albert to make the trip to Cambridge, worsening his illness. The public and Parliament began to lose patience with the queen, who neglected her duties and remained in mourning for more than three years. Queen Victoria and John Brown Desperate to help the grieving queen, the royal physician suggested that she go horseback riding to improve her health. He sent for the groom from the queen's stables in Scotland.

John Brown arrived in early 1865. The handsome 39 year old sported a kilt and had a straightforward, somewhat rough way of talking with the queen. She responded well to him and began venturing out in public for the first time in years. Although it was clear that the queen was in better spirits since Brown's arrival, he was unpopular with both the queen's family and the public. Rumors abounded that the two were having an affair, but no proof has ever been found to support that notion. John Brown remained the queen's servant until 1883, when he died of a streptococcal infection. Later Years Over the years, Queen Victoria regained her popularity by making more of an effort to attend public functions and by becoming involved in charitable causes. She kept close contact with an ever-changing roster of prime ministers, always ready with an opinion on the issues of the day. The queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, marking sixty years as monarch. She was proud of the many jubilee biographies that were written about her, several of which described her as a virtuous woman who set a good example.

Queen Victoria died of a stroke on January 22, 1901 at the age of 81. Her eldest son, Albert, succeeded her as King Edward VII . Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert And The Death That Changed The Monarchy | Daily Mail Online comments Prince Albert was King in all but name and when he died, the nation mourned like never before. Here – drawing on a wealth of contemporary papers, some buried deep in the Royal Archives – the acclaimed historian and expert on the Victorian era, HELEN RAPPAPORT, reveals for the first time the drama of his death, the Queen’s devastating grief, and the ‘lost’ decade that helped define the Royal Family as we know it today... Regal bearing: Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend as Victoria and Albert in the 2009 film The Young Victoria It was the coldest Christmas for 50 years, they said, a bitter winter hard on the heels of a sunless summer. In the final weeks of 1860, country people talked of birds frozen on trees and song thrushes dying in their thousands.

The week before, the Royal Family had transferred from Buckingham Palace to their private apartments at Windsor Castle, a medieval fortress that came into its own at this time of year. The silence along its Grand Corridor, muffled by the red carpets and huge damask curtains, was broken by the sound of laughter and children’s voices. Fires blazed with beech logs in the reception rooms – the Queen did not like the smell of coal – and the Royal apartments gave pride of place to a host of Christmas trees imported from Prince Albert’s native Germany. In the Oak Room, where presents were exchanged, large ornamental trees were decorated with little cakes, bonbons, gilt walnuts and gingerbread, the effect completed with coloured ribbons, wax tapers and a frosting of artificial snow and icicles. Outside, the castle rose up like a fairytale citadel in the dazzling white of the surrounding landscape. No matter that the aristocracy disliked Prince Albert and his ‘disdainful’, reserved German manner. Once he had been dismissed as a pauper prince; now he and Victoria, with their nine pretty children, were idolised by the respectable classes as the domestic ideal.

At the age of 42, Victoria had enjoyed 20 years of happy marriage. Britain’s Queen adored her husband with a fierce devotion that no one dared criticise and nothing could dim. He was everything to her: surrogate father, best friend and teacher – King in all but name. No one who was at Windsor that year could have failed to be impressed by the conviviality of the British Royal Family at home. But for the Queen, it would prove to be the last truly happy Christmas she would see. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share The detail of the unfolding tragedy to come, the astonishing national response and the depth of the crisis that followed can only be revealed here thanks to neglected and unseen correspondence from the time, much of it in diary form, including Queen Victoria’s moving – and unpublished – private account of her husband’s death. The festivities were approaching once again the following December, 1861, when the Prince Consort found himself labouring with ‘a nasty, feverish sort of influenza and a deranged stomach’, as Victoria described it. Albert’s health had been fragile for years and he succumbed regularly to stomach problems, fevers and chills.

The Royal doctors had seemed confident of a recovery, but by Friday, December 13 pneumonia had set in and by the following morning he was gravely ill. Loyal friend: The widowed Queen Victoria with her dog Sharp at Balmoral As the afternoon wore on, he became delirious. At 5.30pm, the Royal Household gathered. By 9pm, a telegram was sent from Windsor to London announcing Albert’s condition was desperate. In the King’s Room the Queen longed for some sign of recognition from her husband. She leant forward and in German, the language she had grown up speaking, whispered in Albert’s ear: ‘Es ist kleines Frauchen’ – It is your little wife – and asked for ‘ein Kuss’ – a kiss – but he could barely raise his head from the pillow. She retired to the anteroom, where she sank to the floor, her hair awry and her face buried in her hands. ‘Why?’ she asked plaintively, ‘Why must I suffer this? It is like tearing the flesh from my bones,’ she sobbed. Within half an hour a rapid change had set in; Prince Albert was now bathed in sweat.

The only sound in the King’s Room was the dying Prince’s struggle for breath. Their daughter Princess Alice recognised it: ‘That is the death rattle,’ she whispered. Victoria had heard Albert’s heavy breathing from the next room. ‘I’m afraid this takes away all our hope,’ Alice told her. Upon which, Victoria – as Alice later wrote – ‘started up like a Lioness rushed by every one, and bounded on the bed imploring him to speak and to give one kiss to his little wife’. Even now the doctors were fruitlessly trying to dose him with brandy on a sponge. Distraught, Victoria kissed Albert passionately and clung to him. His breathing became gentle. ‘Oh, this is death,’ she cried out, taking his left hand, which already felt quite cold. ‘I know it. I have seen this before,’ she sobbed as she knelt by his side. He was just 42. It took some persuasion to get her to leave the room; upon which she rushed straight up to the nursery, followed by the children, calling out as she went: ‘Oh! Albert, Albert! Are you gone?’ Midnight struck as the Queen, deranged by grief, still sat in the nursery.

According to one of the Queen’s dressers, Annie Macdonald, she was ‘gazing wildly and as hard as a stone’. The following morning there was a terrible tolling of bells. It had begun just after midnight when the great bell of St Paul’s Cathedral had begun sounding a long, slow lament across the wintry streets. Everyone knew what it signified. The Prince Consort was dead. A bulletin issued at 8am by the Mansion House confirmed the news. For most of Britain, the first intimation came with the slow tolling of more bells, many of them muffled, at intervals of half a minute, which rang out as people made their way to Sunday-morning service. The dark arts: Prince Albert's death in 1861 sparked a booming trade for jet jewellery, made in workshops such as this one in Whitby, North Yorkshire Across London the blinds of private houses were drawn, the brass plates on doors surrounded with black, and mirrors and lamps indoors also covered.

Omnibus drivers tied scraps of crape, a matt gauze of silk and cotton tightly crimped like the crepe paper named after it, to their whips; in the countryside even beehives were draped in the fabric, as part of the age-old superstition of telling bees of a death. The nation mourned as it had never mourned before. Many tradesmen either entirely or partially closed their businesses. London was like a city struck by the plague. At Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where she had retreated, the Queen was beyond consolation. The Royal Household was adrift, affairs of state abandoned. Since birth, she had relied on others. She had never acted alone until the first months of her reign, after which she had quickly accepted the guidance of her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Then Albert had come along and, as the children arrived, assumed many responsibilities of state. With Albert gone, Victoria’s courtiers and Ministers feared a catastrophe; there was no one to replace him in the day-to-day work of running the Monarchy. And the true extent of the Queen’s unquenchable mourning was only just beginning to make itself known. ‘They cannot tell what I have lost,’ she kept insisting.

She was obsessed with one thought: to die, to ‘join what was the sunshine of her existence, the light of her life’. Obsessive love: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, left, pictured in 1854 re-enacting their wedding ‘There is no one to call me Victoria now,’ she had wept, though the version she used with her German-speaking relatives was more wrenching: ‘I have no one now in the world to call me “du” [the friendly, intimate form of you].’ It was at night that she missed Albert’s presence most. She was still young and her ardour had been overwhelming. ‘What a dreadful going to bed!’ she wrote. ‘What a contrast to that tender lover’s love. All alone!’ She envied her eldest daughter Vicky, who had a husband ‘on whose bosom you can pillow your head when all seems dark’. Shortly before New Year, she gave instructions that the public mourning for the Prince Consort should be ‘for the longest term in modern times’; members of the Royal Household would not appear in public out of mourning for a year. The year 1862 was a very good one for Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse in Oxford Circus.

Thanks to the unprecedented demand for its ‘Noir Impériale’ black silks and its best patent crape, Jay’s was forced to enlarge its premises. Although general mourning had officially ended on February 10, there was no let-up in what had become an ‘almost incalculable demand’ for mourning goods. Drapers, haberdashers, milliners and tailors filled their shops with black. British manufacturing went into mass production of commemorative items: plaques and busts, plates, handkerchiefs, pot lids, jugs, bookmarks, even special mourning tea sets. HE NEEDS GERMANISING When Prince Albert died aged just 42 the public and the medical profession were shocked. But officials blocked the release of any details about his death. The Royal doctors were not certain of their diagnosis and the Queen refused to allow a post-mortem. So began 150 years of acceptance that typhoid had killed Albert. However, in 1993 an obscure article in a medical journal suggested the Prince may have suffered from Crohn’s disease, a gastric condition.

Albert’s worry over his wayward son Bertie might have provoked a flare-up leading to septicaemia and finally pneumonia, which killed him. Photographic dealers did a roaring trade in images of the late Prince Consort. Victoria had stated that ‘The Queen intends to wear her weeds (if she lives) at least till the beginning of 1864’ and such was the level of public sympathy for her that many of the middle classes decided to follow suit. Victoria soon determined she would remain in mourning for the rest of her life. The Victorian textile manufacturers were in overdrive, offering a vast range of fabrics. There was a huge demand, too, for the dye to make them black. As the trade in jet mourning jewellery expanded, so did the fortunes of a small fishing village, formerly a whaling port. Layers of shale around Whitby had long been a rich source of fossils and petrified wood, of which jet had been the most prized. Much of this jet was washed up on the beach, and, as demand escalated, it was also mined inland on the North Yorkshire Moors.

Jet jewellery manufacture rapidly extended to cover every aspect of Victorian mourning, including beading for bodices, hair combs and headdresses, as well as jet birds, insects and clasps for hats and bonnets. The business of government was increasingly under threat; Victoria refused to discuss matters of state with her Ministers, let alone perform her full constitutional duties. She increasingly spent time at her favourite homes: Balmoral in Scotland and Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Buckingham Palace was deserted. She was also creating diplomatic problems. Victoria flatly refused to entertain visiting royalty. The King of Sweden was obliged to stay at the Swedish legation on a visit to London. When Prince Humbert of Italy visited Windsor, he had to be entertained with a modest lunch at the White Hart Inn rather than at the castle. As time went on, the case for the Queen’s seclusion was becoming hard to argue; she looked well. Yet any disruption to her routine was a provocation and when a favourite lady-in-waiting decided to marry, she was beside herself with rage. Such had been the rising levels of Victoria’s perceived tetchiness that by the end of 1864, her doctors suggested a new form of therapy: pony rides.

It was recommended that Victoria’s Scottish ghillie, John Brown – indefatigable in his care of her – should be brought down from Balmoral with her favourite pony, Lochnagar, for the winter. A strong and protective male was needed who would look after Victoria as Albert had done. This role now fell to the blond-haired, blue-eyed Brown, who after his arrival at Windsor slowly began to break down the Queen’s incapacitating grief. His therapeutic effect was a simple one: like Albert, he brooked no nonsense, spoke his mind and treated her with a kind of male machismo she admired. Grief: Queen Victoria mourned the death of Bertie until her own death in 1901 Meanwhile, public sympathy was on the wane. Practical jokers tied placards to the gateposts at Buckingham Palace announcing: ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’ The British people had been patient for three years, but now the Queen was needed and missed. As spring turned to summer, rumours continued to circulate: the Queen was ill, or mad; she would never live in London again, and – according to French newspapers – was about to abdicate.

Victoria was mortified, but she did not want to look or feel better and was convinced that she ate nothing and never slept. She even hoped that her hair would turn a suitable grey. Victoria had very good reason not to wish to recover, for when this happened she would be expected to take up her ceremonial responsibilities as Monarch – a thing she dreaded. Her refusal to re-enter public life was throwing the Monarchy into crisis; republican sentiment was mounting. Victoria had been hissed and booed en route to the State Opening of Parliament in 1867. She saw at last the ugly faces of anger in the crowd. Yet still she failed to connect it with her own behaviour. She remained oblivious to the everyday realities of hunger, poverty and political unrest (while lauding the homely Scots as being infinitely superior to the English). Trade unionists and socialist-minded politicians began to call for the Queen to be deposed. Republican clubs were springing up in major cities across the country. By the late summer of 1871, even the Queen’s children were alarmed that their mother was prejudicing the future of the throne and composed a letter assuring her ‘that some danger is in the air, that something must be done . . .

to avert a frightful calamity’. A RIDDLE FOR 150 YEARS When Prince Albert died aged just 42 the public and the medical profession were shocked. But officials blocked the release of any details about his death. The Royal doctors were not certain of their diagnosis and the Queen refused to allow a post-mortem. So began 150 years of acceptance that typhoid killed Albert. However, in 1933 an obscure article in a medical journal suggested the Prince may have suffered from Crohn's disease, a gastric condition. Albert's worry over his wayward son Bertie might have provoked a flare-up leading to septicaemia and finally pneumoni, which killed him. Grave illness once again proved a turning point, this time the near-death of her eldest son Bertie (later Edward VII) from typhoid fever. He survived, and by February 1872 was well enough to attend a Service of National Thanksgiving in his honour at St Paul’s Cathedral that would prove a celebration of nationhood and Monarchy.

Victoria and Bertie – still very weak and haggard and walking with a limp (the result of a severe attack of gout) – traversed streets festooned with flags and bunting. And they were received with huge acclaim. The best vantage points were sold at a premium, from ten shillings to 40 guineas for a balcony view on Fleet Street. Many who climbed trees in St James’s Park for a better view ended up in hospital with broken limbs, as did others who fell from windows and scaffolding. Afterwards, gratified by ‘a most affecting day’, the Queen appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to loud cheers. It was from this point on, more than a decade since the death of her husband, that the Queen finally began to re-emerge. True, she continued to avoid Buckingham Palace at all costs. But now she understood how crucial her public popularity was. The lost years had seen a hardening of her (mistaken) image as the dour, prudish, humourless and repressive Widow at Windsor. But out of so much darkness there finally emerged a Monarch with great virtues – lack of vanity, human sympathy, absolute honesty and sound common sense.

The true Victorian age – of pageantry, pride and empire – was still to come. The Monarchy retained the affection of the middle classes, who could relate to the Queen’s motherliness. And through her, they felt related in some degree to something that was socially great – their very own Royal Family. © Helen Rappaport 2011. Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert And The Death That Changed The Monarchy by Helen Rappaport is published on Thursday by Hutchinson, priced £20. To order your copy at the special price of £16.99 with free p&p, please call the Review Bookstore on 0843 382 1111 or visit The stress of that 'stupid boy' and naughty Nellie 'Poor Bertie': Albert Edward, Prince of Wales Ever a martyr to self-induced stress, Albert was consumed with anxiety about his eldest son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. ‘Poor Bertie’, as his mother referred to him. He was a ‘stupid boy’ whose attention could not be fixed on anything useful, ‘even at a novel’.

In 1861, aged 21, Bertie, then finishing a training course with the Grenadier Guards, had attended a party at the Mansion House in Dublin. His fellow officers arranged a farewell present for the Prince, smuggling a ‘woman of the town’, Nellie Clifden, into his quarters. He ensured her surreptitious exit via the window of his hut and arranged further assignations back in England – right under his parents’ noses at Windsor. The gossips were quick to dub Nellie ‘The Princess of Wales’, for she bragged about her conquest. The scandal soon hit the London clubs and appeared in the papers on the Continent. Bertie’s parents were deeply shocked. His puritanical father’s stress levels went haywire: Victoria would ever blame her son for the devastating effect on Albert’s health. The episode had awakened Albert’s innermost fears of a return to the profligate habits of the British Royalty. This led to his suffering insomnia and nerve-related pain. On the morning of November 25, Albert managed to take a special train to Cambridge, where Bertie was studying, for a man-to-man talk.

Bertie had seemed oblivious to his father’s ill health, and his poor sense of direction had got them lost during their walk. When Albert returned to Windsor the following day, he was racked with pain. Three weeks later he was dead. Queen Victoria | Information Facts Summary Queen Victoria’s Childhood By M. Foster Farley The plump toddler watering the flowers in the garden of her home at Kensington Palace was to overcome her early difficulties to become Britian’s great Queen-Empress. The name “Queen Victoria” conjures up a picture of a small, plump old lady in a black gown and lace cap, querulous and exacting, “not amused” at the antics of the younger generation, yearning always to be reunited by death with her dear departed Albert. It is hard to visualise her as a child. Yet, of course, she was once young and not always the formidable matriarch and magnificent Queen-Empress of popular legend. In fact, her childhood did not really end until she was 18 years old, when she succeeded to the throne. Victoria was born on a bright spring day, 24th May 1819, at Kensington Palace, in the then quiet suburb of London.

“Plumb as a partridge” was her father’s description of the baby, and she certainly bore a marked resemblance to her sturdy and robust Hanoverian ancestors who had ruled Great Britain for little more than a century at the time of her birth. By 1798 Victoria’s grandfather, King George III, had reigned for nearly sixty years, but he was now old and ailing. The symptoms of his terrible illness, porphyria, seemed to his doctors to be those of madness, and for years the King had be confined in Windsor Castle while his eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, ruled in his stead. Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent, was the old King’s fourth son, but since his three elder brothers were without heirs, there seemed a good chance that he might one day himself become King. He had married late in life, when he was over 50, to supply an heir to the throne in the younger generation. Between the seven princes and five princesses of the royal family, not one of them had a legitimate child to carry on the succession, until 1819 saw three royal births within two months.

The Prince of Wales had one child, the Princess Charlotte, who in time would have become Queen, but she died in childbirth in the autumn of 1817. It was her death which drove her uncles into marriage, to beget heirs to replace her in the line of succession. Indirectly, Charlotte herself had found her uncle Edward his bride: the Princess had married a minor German princeling, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and, deeply in love with him, suggested to the Duke of Kent that he would find an amiable wife in Leopold’s widowed sister, Victoire. In fact, Edward and Victoire met in 1816, but then there seemed no urgency in the matter of their marriage, and there were too many difficulties in the way at the time for the Duke of Kent to urge his suit — not the least of them being that he was perfectly happy with his French mistress of some quarter of a century’s standing. But soon after Charlotte’s death, Edward proposed to Victoire, and the couple were married the following summer.

Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was 31 years old when she married the English Duke, a pretty woman with dark hair and sparking eyes, with a fine figure and lively ways. A German Princess of ancient lineage but little fortune, she had been first married at the age of 17 to Prince Emich Charles of Leiningren, a widower in his late thirties. Together they had weathered the storms of the Napoleonic invasions of Germany, their tiny principality impoverished by the wars. Emich Charles died only a few months after the first defeat of Napoleon, in 1814, leaving his widow with two small children and the manifold demands of noblesse oblige to tax her wits and strength. Her marriage with the Duke of Kent seemed to promise Victoire a brighter future, taking her away from her narrow existence in the village of Amorbach, with its careful economies and restricted social life, into one of the leading Courts of Europe, with the chance of one day becoming a queen.

In the summer of 1818 Edward brought his bride to England, but then, after a few heady months in London “society”, it was back to Amorbach and the familiar daily round, for the Duke was so burdened with debts that he could not afford to keep up appearances as a royal personage in England. But he was determined that his child should be born in his native land, and by dint of borrowing from his long-suffering friends, he managed to bring his wife back to England in time for the baby’s birth. Edward was not disappointed that the baby was a girl and not the long-hoped-for male heir: “I am decidedly of the opinion that the decrees of Providence are at all times the wisest and the best,” he wrote to a friend. A month after her birth, the Kent baby was baptised. After much debate in the royal family — in which not a little ill-feeling was aroused, she was named “Alexandrina Victoria”, after her chief godfather, the Russian Tsar Alexander, and her mother. The name “Victoria: was then completely unknown in England, though it had long been in use in the forms “Victoire” and “Victoria” on the Continent.

For the first few years the child was known as “Drina”, but in one of her first copy-books is limned the name “Victoria” by which she came to be known in later childhood. Despite the fact that the Kents had married “for convenience” their union proved remarkably happy. Edward had never known the comforts of a settled home in England, nor had he ever enjoyed so much approval from his family as this new domesticity brought. For Victoire, the change in her circumstances was delightful: with her new baby, and with a husband who doted on her, she was well content. Unfortunately, however, this happy state of affairs did not last long. The family moved down to Sidmouth in Devon in December 1819, and there, on 23rd January 1820, Edward, Duke of Kent, suddenly died. He, who had no serious illness in his life, caught a cold and took no special care of himself, so that it turned to pneumonia. In abject grief and almost penniless, the widowed Duchess allowed her brother Leopold to make all the arrangements for her return to London.

For months she remained in seclusion, at Kensington or at Leopold’s house at Claremont in Surrey. It was a testing-time for too, in that she had to decide whether to return to the familiar German countryside which had been her home for any or to remain in England, where she was still a comparative stranger. But the fact that her baby was now third in line to the throne (for George III had died only days after his son Edward) steeled her to her duty: for the sake of the baby’s future inheritance, she would stay in England and bring up her child as an Englishwoman, ready to succeed to the throne. The new King George IV had had very little affection for his late brother, so unlike him in character and principles, and he was not enamoured of the idea of having to contribute to the support of his widowed sister-in-law. Fortunately for Victoire, she had her own brother Leopold at hand, for he had decided to make his home in England after the death of his wife Charlotte, and out of his own allowance he provided most of the Duchess’s income. Many years later, Queen Victoria gathered together her earliest memories.

Her infancy was people with kind faces: her mother, always anxious and prudent for the child’s health; her half-sister Feodora, ten years her senior but her constant companion; old Baroness Spath, the Duchess’s German lady-in-waiting; the adoring nurse Mrs. Brock, replaced when Victoria was 4 years old by Fraulein Lehzen, Feodora’s governess. There were numerous aunts and uncles of the Royal family: her favourites were kind Aunt Adelaide, Duchess of Clarence, and her bluff husband William, struggling to hold back, in polite company, those rough seamen’s oath which he had learned in his roistering youth, as well as the devoted Uncle Leopold from Germany. On the other hand, there was “Uncle Sussex” who lived next door and who, it was always threatened, would be angry if his niece’s raised voice reached his ears; and the sinister “Uncle Cumberland”, next in line to the throne after the little Victoria, who, it was rumoured, was not incapable of “removing” so irritating a small rival to his aspirations to the crown.

“We lived in a very plain manner”, reminisced the Queen later, “breakfast was at half past eight, luncheon at half past one, dinner at seven – to which I came generally (when it was not regular large dinner-party) — eating my bread and milk out of a small silver basin. Tea was only allowed as a great treat in my later years.” A few pen-pictures of the young Victoria were written by contemporaries: the plump toddler attempting to water the flowers in the Palace gardens but pouring most of the contents of her watering-can over her shoes; a straight backed infant atop an ambling donkey, with a sweet-faced elder sister to guide her; a solemn little girl at church at Esher, so wrapped in her own thoughts that she failed to notice the threatening bumble-bee buzzing inside the rim of her bonnet. Victoria was no model child. She had her fair share of the royal temper, screaming and stamping when she was crossed, throwing a pair of scissors at Lehzen in a right royal rage. “When you are naughty, you make me and yourself very unhappy,” her mother rebuked her on one occasion.

“No, Mamma,” corrected the child, “not me, mot myself, but you!” All her life the future Queen would be stubborn and obstinate, but when she became calm after an uncontrolled fit of temper, she would always be contrite and wheedling for forgiveness. She was bright enough, quick at her lessons and shrewd in personal relationships: when her uncle George IV whisked her off to hear the band at Windsor one day, and gave her choice of a “number”, the artful child requested “God Save the King”. But Queen Victoria’s childhood was not idyllic by any means. As she grew up, she came to realise how narrow the circle admitted to Kensington Palace; she agreed with her half-sister that only at Claremont, on their holiday, had she been completely happy. The darkest shadow over her young life was one John Conroy, the Comptroller of the Duchess’s household at Kensington and the virtual controller of all the Duchess’s attitudes and aspirations. Conroy had been the Duke of Kent’s aid-de-camp, a military man who made more success of his social studies than he ever had of active service.

He was a flamboyantly good-looking Irishman, possessed of an ample measure of charm and an overweening ambition. The Duchess of Kent was no simpleton, but she was used to having her life ruled by men and could not accustom herself to having to make independent decisions. A better guide would have been her brother Leopold but, he, after a few years of carefully supervision of his sister’s affairs, took a mistress of whom she could not approve, which drove a wedge between them; then, as he tired of inactivity in England, he began to travel abroad more frequently. Finally, in 1831, he departed permanently to take up the crown of the newly-created kingdom of Belgium. Left alone in England, daunted by her responsibility as mother of a future Queen, Victoire of Kent relied increasingly on the soothing blandishments of her Comptroller. It was Conroy who insisted that Victoria should be strictly guarded, playing on her mother’s fear of a fatal “accident” at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland.

It was Conroy who urged a suitable match for Feodora with a German prince, when it seemed likely that the widower King George IV himself might offer for her hand (thus snatching the little Victoria’s chance of a crown by begetting heirs of his own). Conroy could see himself as the chief adviser to the future Queen Victoria, the father-figure who would be the girls éminence grise, the “power behind the throne” of her reign, and he did all he could to prepare his glorious future. Having made himself indispensable to the Duchess by his administration of her household and his advice to her as to the care of her child was not averse to a little more personal interest too: Conroy, a married man, never became the Duchess’s lover — she was far to circumspect and he was far too fearful of scandal for such a situation to develop, but he knew hot to make himself agreeable to a lonely widow. The child Victoria once witnessed “some familiarities” between her mother and Conroy and prattled of them to lady-in-waiting Spath.

When the horrified Baroness rebuked her mistress, she received short shrift and was sent packing by Conroy, of course, to the safe distance of Feodora’s new home in Germany. Sir John could not risk malicious gossip: if it were ever thought that the Duchess of Kent was an unfit moral influence on her daughter, the child might be swept off to other guardians. In 1827, the heir to the throne, the Duke of York, died, followed in 1830 by his brother King George IV. Now only the frail life of King William IV, already in his sixties, stood between the Princess Victoria and the Throne. By 1830 the Duchess of Kent — or rather, Conroy — had plans already in train in case the princess should succeed while still a minor. By proving to an invited committee of prelates that her child was well grounded in her education and religion, the Duchess of Kent won wide approval; it was a short step to gaining recognition, a few months later that she, Victoire, should be her daughter’s regent should Victoria come to the throne before she reached the age of eighteen.

In fact, by the modern standards of royal training, Victoria’s education was somewhat deficient. Lehzen, and the visiting tutors who were brought in, gave the child a good grounding in English, French and German (though her Latin, which she began at 8 years old, never progressed very far). More interesting to the Princess were her music and dancing lessons, and she actually chose to learn Italian from her passion for the Italian opera. Her reading in history, however, was prodigious: at 15 she was immersed in Clarendon’s dry History of the Rebellion and Sully’s Memoirs, so that though she was taught no political theory or philosophy, Victoria came to have a good appreciation of the mistakes and achievements of past rulers. Apart from her tutors, Victoria’s contacts with the outside world were few in her early years. Conroy induced the Duchess of Kent to discourage visits from the royal family, who might, he feared, either woo Victoria’s affections away from her mother or enquire too closely of his own influence.

Occasionally, the Princess might be allowed to attend a children’s ball or a little girl might be brought in to play with her (“You must not touch those, they are mine,” declared the Princess to a child who wanted to play with the royal toys, “and I may call you Jane, but you must not call me Victoria!”) but usually she had only the company of the Conroy girls, Jane and Victoire, and so much had she come to hate their father that they never became her friends. How soon Victoria realised how baneful was the influence of Sir John Conroy in her life is hard to say. But certainly, once she had come to realise her own significance and her destiny, it would not be too difficult for even a child to see through his wiles. It has often been affirmed that she never knew for years that she would one day be Queen, and did not understand why men stared at her in the Park, sweeping off their hats and bowing.

If so, there could well be a good deal of truth in the oft-told story of Lehzen’s slipping a family tree of the royal dynasty into the child’s history book in 1830: when Victoria realised the significance of her own place in the royal family, she pondered “I am nearer to the throne than I thought.” Then she said the memorable words, “I will be good.” As presumptive heir to William IV from 1830, Victoria became an important personage in the Kingdom. Her mother (that is, Conroy) was careful to keep the Princess’s name totally disassociated from that of the King; while William IV was reviled throughout the nation for his opposition to the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, the Duchess, via Conroy, courted the Radical and Whig politicians of the Opposition. While stones were thrown at the royal carriage in London streets, Victoire and Victoria were everywhere cheered as they made a summer “progress” through the provinces. As these journeys continued, every summer, the King became increasingly resentful. In petty spite, he forbade the firing of gun salutes at the appearances of his niece and her mother.

At first Victoria found these journeys enthralling, a wonderful escape from Kensington. When she first left London for a tour of Wales in 1982, she began a journal in a book which the Duchess had given her. So fascinating was the coach ride and so tempting the blank pages of the diary that for the first few days she would record the exact time of her arrival and departure at the stages along the route: “Twenty minutes to nine. We have just changed horses at Barnet, a very pretty little town. Five minutes past half past nine. We have just changed horses at St. Albans. The situation is very pretty and there is a beautiful old abbey there. Five minutes past ten. The country is beautiful here: they have begun to cut the corn; it is so golden and fine that I think they will have a good harvest . . . A quarter to eleven. We have just changed horses at Dunstable . . .” With these naive beginnings, the future Queen instituted the great disciplined life-work of her journals, in which, for the first time, a British monarch recorded conversations, impressions and feelings to the eternal benefit of her biographers. But by 1835 the strenuous journeys had lost their appeal.

Conroy had planned a series of visits to the great houses of the aristocrats very much to the advantage of the Duchess’s popularity. Victoria balked at the idea. So violent was the quarrel between the Princess and her mother over this issue that the Duchess had to resort to writing a letter to her daughter, for she could not control her anger in conversation. She demanded that Victoria recognise her responsibilities to show herself to “the people”: “I must tell you, dearest love, if your conversation with me could be know, that you had not the energy to undertake the journey, or that your views were not enlarged enough to grasp the benefits arising from it, then you would fall in the estimation of the people in this country.” Victoria conceded the victory, but throughout the “progress” she complained vehemently of head-ache and back-ache and other ailments. Only a few weeks after the family settled at Ramsgate to recuperate from the journey, Victoria fell really ill, most probably of a severe case of tonsillitis. Having recovered from a fever, she was still very week for more than a month, losing a good deal of weight and continually complaining of cold, through bad circulation.

Sir John Conroy was not the man to miss such a chance of taking advantage of the girl’s debility. The Princess’ antipathy to him was becoming ever more apparent, and he had by then given up the hope of obtaining future power through her affections. While Victoria was still weak from her illness, he put before her the demand that he should become her secretary when she succeeded to the throne. He actually produced a document for her to sign, binding her to the promise. Victoria firmly resisted. Despite her physical frailty, she had the strength of her hatred of Sir John to give her resolution. At the same time, she had the encouragement of Baroness Lehzen, her governess, who was always her ally against Conroy. For years this woman had attempted to shield her charge from him and to open the Princess’s eyes to the scope of his enormities. Despite Lehzen’s power over Victoria, which was grounded on sincere affection and bulwarked on common cause against the enemy, Conroy dare not act against the governess, to oust her as he had the lady-in-waiting Spath.

He knew only too well that Lehzen enjoyed the confidence of both King William IV and King Leopold of the Belgians, the Duchess’s brother. Infuriated by this impotence, he only made matters worst by continually sniping at Lehzen in Victoria’s presence. Nevertheless, the girl’s life was not completely unhappy, and for quite long periods Kensington Palace could be free of raised voices and sudden bursts of tears. Victoria would spend many quiet hours with Lehzen, dressing her large collection of dolls as characters from history or fabricating tiny trinket boxes from odds and ends of silk and coloured beads. There was a stream of letters from Feodora to cheer Victoria, with news of her growing family, or the screeds of advice from her Uncle Leopold, who fancied himself as mentor to the future Queen. Although the Duchess had not encouraged visits from her own German family in the early years, she had made sure that Victoria learned a large measure of devotion to her unseen aunts and uncles to make up for her deprivation of closer ties.

When the Princess was in her early teens, several of the German relations were invited to Kensington Palace, including, in the summer of 1836, her cousins Ernest and Albert, sons of Victoire’s eldest brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria was open to teenage enthusiasms (for years she went into raptures of the singing of the young and beautiful Giulia Grisi, who sang her favourite Italian operas so well) and she threw herself whole-heartedly into entertaining her cousins and could not sufficiently praise their looks and accomplishments. However, King William was not so rapturous. He had dark suspicions that the Duchess, or the King of the Belgians (whom he had never liked), was angling for a Coburg match for Victoria, which was certainly not to his tastes. His reception of the Prince of Orange and his eligible sons was timed to coincide with that of the Coburgs. For once, Victoria did not side with her English uncle against her mother, and she assured her Uncle Leopold that Ernest and Albert were perfectly to her taste while the Oranges were detestable.

By the middle of the 1836, relations between the King and his sister-in-law were at breaking point. Matters came to a head in August when William IV openly insulted the Duchess at a public dinner in honour of his birthday: “I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer [when Victoria would gain her majority], after which period, in the event of my death, no regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady . . . the heiress presumptive of the crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me [Victoire], who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed.” It was a bombshell. From that moment Conroy became desperate — and Victoria more resolute. Recognising that the future Queen would never willingly allow in him any power in her future government, Sir John began to make out a case for her unworthiness to govern and need for guardians. He was forever harping on her emotional instability and inciting her mother repeatedly to draw attention to her faults.

But though the Princess was certainly unbalanced in her emotions after such years of strain at home, she was by no means unfit to rule. And above all, she had the will to do her duty, to “be good.” On 24th May 1837 Victoria celebrated her 18th birthday. At last she was free of the impending regency. But she had had a narrow escape: by that date her Uncle William was already close to death. Conroy panicked. In the last days of William IV’s life, he stepped up his campaign. He tried to convince Lords Liverpool and Melbourne, the leading politicians of the day, that Victoria was totally unfit to govern — but they were not taken in. He put pressure on the Duchess of Kent and her son Charles of Leiningren, Victoria’s half-brother, to force the Princess into signing away her independence. But already it was too late. King Leopold, realising now how precarious was his niece’s position, sent over his own trusted adviser, Baron Stockmar, both to report to him on the situation and to attempt to hold it in check. At last Conroy ruined everything.

He told the Duchess, “if Princess Victoria will not listen to reason, she must be coerced.” Victoire was already becoming apprehensive: realising that she had lost her daughter’s trust, she was now hesitant to take any more drastic measures. Even Charles Leiningen, formerly a pawn of Conroy’s by his reliance on financial loans, saw that Sir John had gone too far and advised his mother not to obey him. For the last few days of King William’s life, Kensington was in a state of uneasy truce. At 6 o’clock on the morning of 20th June 1837 the Duchess of Kent woke her daughter with the news that William IV was dead. All her life Victoria had been used to receiving visitors in the company of her mother; now, for the first time, she went alone into the room where the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain were waiting. All through that day of mixed grief and triumph, Victoria undertook her first duties alone, emphasising that word in her account of the day in her journal with immense relish. That night, for the first time, she did not sleep in her mother’s bedroom. Victoria was no longer a child.

She was now a woman and a Queen. All her accounts were paid in full: Lehzen became her closest attendant, remaining her confidante; her mother, though treated with deference in public, was shunned at home — often, in reply to the Duchess’s request to see her daughter, Victoria would send a note with the one word “Busy”; Conroy was forbidden access to the Queen’s private rooms at Buckingham Palace. In the years to come, it was obvious to courtiers that Victoria had more regard for her former governess than for her mother, for the Duchess would complain of such treatment to all who would listen. Conroy stayed in her service and, in 1839, was involved in a scandal at Court which seriously threatened the Queen’s popularity in the country. It was suspected that he had made a young lady-in-waiting pregnant: Victoria hounded the unfortunate woman mercilessly — though in fact Lady Flora Hastings, an old enemy from Kensington days, was suffering from an incurable illness which merely gave her body the appearance of pregnancy. The ensuing furore gave Victoria’s advisers a chance to press for Conroy’s resignation.

It was to be many years, however, before the Duchess of Kent regained her daughter’s affection. When the Queen married her Coburg cousin Albert, in 1840, Victoire mourned that now she would never be “all in all” to her daughter. But gradually with her new emotional balance, Victoria would look more kindly on her mother and recognise the good intentions which had prompted her to such unwitting former unkindness. As a doting grandmother, the Duchess found her ideal role, and one which her daughter could grant without loss of dignity. By the time of her death in 1861, Victoire had Victoria’s complete devotion. The Queen mourned her mother in typically hysterical fashion, bitterly regretting the years of their estrangement. Many Kings and Queens of England have had unhappier childhoods than Victoria; Elizabeth I, for example, when she was repudiated by her father and left to live in poverty, when she first learned to fear the headsman’s axe and the marriage-bed; or Charles II, amid war and political intrigues, with fears for his life at the hands of his father’s enemies.

Perhaps it is a prerequisite of a great monarch to have a previous tempering in the fires of adversity. Victoria’s early misfortune certainly did not mar her suitability for the throne. [tabby title=’More Queen Victoria Articles’][srp widget_title=”Queen Victoria Articles” widget_css_id=”testing-grid” post_type=”post” post_content_type=”content” post_content_length=”50″ post_content_length_mode=”words” post_title_length=”12″ post_title_length_mode=”words” post_date=”no” category_include=”148″ post_offset=”2″ string_break=” More…” layout_mode=”multi_column” srp post_limit=”200″ display_thumbnail=”no” vf_everything=”no”][tabbyending] Copyright 2014 British Heritage. PBS : Empires : Queen Victoria : Her Majesty : Queen Victoria Portrait of Queen Victoria. The Royal Collection Windsor. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was not only born to be Queen of England: she was conceived to be Queen.

Once Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, died in childbirth late in 1817, her son stillborn, the nation was plunged into mourning and her unmarried uncles stirred into competition to sire an heir to the throne. With the Prince of Wales, Prince Regent for his insane father, George III, separated from the future (but uncrowned) Queen Caroline, no lawful successor would come that way. To solve the succession dilemma, the royal brothers, princes of the blood, most of them with mistresses and illegitimate progeny, were ordered to marry and beget, with their reward for success a promised cancellation of their heavy debts. Although William IV, the Duke of Clarence (1830-37), duly married a minor German princess, no child of his survived early infancy. Next in line, Edward, Duke of Kent, would jettison his mistress of many years and marry the widowed Victoire, Duchess of Amorbach, who had proved her fertility during her first marriage. When she became pregnant, it became necessary, once she could travel, to leave her small German dukedom and give birth on English soil to establish unquestionable credentials for the child's likely inheritance.

But beset by debt unresolved by the Regent, the Duke encountered delays in raising the money to get his entourage across the Channel. On 28 March 1819, in her eighth month, the Duchess set off, arriving at Dover on 24 April, barely in time for the accouchement. At Kensington Palace, in apartments reluctantly granted by the Regent, who disliked his improvident brother, the future queen was born on 24 May. The new princess was christened a month later, with none of the usual royal names available to her parents because of the Regent's refusal to permit another Charlotte or Elizabeth or Georgina. Since the Russian tsar, Alexander I, was godfather in absentia, his name was available, and even as late as the morning of her accession, at eighteen, on June 20, 1837, the public was unsure of the official name of the new queen. She had always been known as Victoria, however, and was so proclaimed.

Fatherless as an infant-her father had died on January 23, 1820, only six days before his own father, George III-she was dominated by her ambitious mother, who hoped for a Regency for herself if William IV died before Victoria's eighteenth birthday. Stubbornly, the ailing king held on just long enough for his niece to reign in her own right. But she proved wilful and difficult, creating embarrassments at Court that led her advisers, notably the avuncular Viscount Melbourne, the Prime Minister, to press her to marry. A husband might control her, and in any case the nation needed a guaranteed succession. Victoria's mother and her Coburg brothers arranged to keep the prospective marriage within the family. Yet they were assisted by the dearth of acceptable Protestant candidates among European royals, some of whom the young Queen interviewed to her disappointment. Late in 1839, however, when she met Prince Albert, the younger son of her uncle Ernest, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, for only the second time (three years earlier he had been a callow teen-ager), she was smitten.

A student at the University of Bonn, he was clearly her intellectual superior-and, she thought, beautiful. She proposed (he could not, as she was Queen), and they were married in February 1840. At first, Albert only wielded the blotting paper as she signed documents. He was uneasy about his lack of occupation and status; but he had been employed to ensure the succession. Biology thereafter ensured his role. When Victoria became so visibly pregnant that she could not appear ceremonially, Albert assumed her functions. Once she became heavy and listless, he also became, in effect, the senior partner (although five months her junior) in a dual monarchy. After nine children through 1856, he had established himself as her primary adviser, often drafting memoranda that she recopied in her own hand and signed. Impressed by his abilities, the aging Duke of Wellington, eager to retire, even invited him to become chief of the army, but Albert, an honorary field marshal, resisted the temptation, explaining that he had to subsume his personality and his ambitions in the interests of the Queen. Portrait of young Queen Victoria. The Royal Collection Windsor.

But for the period of the Crimean War (1853-54), when the couple, especially Albert, were suspected falsely of Russian sympathies, the dual monarchy worked efficiently. England in any case was evolving, after the first Reform Bill (1832), into a constitutional monarchy, with the sovereign's powers becoming more moral and symbolic than legislative. The authority of the throne now rested more and more in popular respect for its occupant. That situation ended abruptly when Albert, at 42 in December 1861, died of what was very likely stomach cancer. His incompetent physicians called it typhoid, but no other cases existed in the area, rendering that diagnosis suspect, and although Victoria knew nothing of his long-standing symptoms, and was prostrated by his death, Albert was aware that he had been suffering from something inoperable. The Prince Consort's death altered the monarchy irreparably. Victoria was inconsolable, out of shock, out of loss, and out of her realization that she had depended so long upon Albert's advice and support that she was unsure she could be sovereign alone. She went into purdah, for years failing to perform even her ceremonial functions on grounds that she was in perpetual mourning.

The monarchy accordingly declined in authority and in esteem, and public perception was summed up by a cartoon in the press that showed the royal robes draped over an empty throne. Twenty at Albert's death-the same age as were Victoria and Albert at their marriage, Albert Edward ("Bertie"), the Prince of Wales was given no compensatory duties to fill some of the void left by his father's death and his mother's disappearance into grief. Just before his father's last illness the young prince had been discovered in a liaison with a lady of the evening, and Victoria believed that the shock and the potential scandal had led to Albert's decline. Bertie was pronounced as unfit to be king, and unfit to assume any national role. Bertie's lack of anything to do, and his incapacity to invent serious work for himself led to his life as playboy prince, despite a marriage that was supposed to settle him down.

(Alexandra was beautiful but brainless, with no ability to rein in her husband.) His increasing notoriety as "Edward the Caresser" (in Henry James's phrase) and Victoria's invisibility as sovereign would lead to a decade of republican agitation that ended fortuitously in 1871 when Bertie came down with authentic typhoid fever, and nearly died. The weeks of public agitation over his possible demise, and his seemingly miraculous recovery, exploded the thin but widespread anti-monarchical sentiment in Britain. It did not make the Prince more moral or even more circumspect, but the second ministry of Benjamin Disraeli beginning in 1874 engineered the rehabilitation of the throne by drawing the queen back into public life and in finding acceptable roles for her heir. Victoria and Albert. The Royal Collection Windsor. The costly Indian Mutiny in 1856-57 had led to reorganization of imperial rule in the subcontinent, and on Victoria's return to visibility in the 1870s she began to yearn for a title that would prevent her eldest daughter, Vicky, married to the heir to the German throne, from-as empress--outranking her proud mother.

The Queen wanted to be Empress of India, and as part of the price for her increasing public role pressed Disraeli into arranging an imperial title representing the jewel in her crown. At about the same time, the Prince of Wales, eager for a junket to India with his cronies, to hunt elephants and tigers, convinced the Prime Minister to arrange a royal tour. Despite all likelihood that the princely progress would be a disaster, it was a triumph, demonstrating Bertie's diplomatic and impresario qualities, which he would employ with brio thereafter. As he was embarking home, news arrived that the Queen had indeed been styled Empress of India. Fortunately for the Queen's reputation, her Scots manservant John Brown had died early in 1883. For Victoria, Brown's much-lamented passing severed a link with Albert in life and in death. He had been the Prince's gillie, and to extricate the Queen from self-imposed purdah her doctors recommended importing Brown from Balmoral to care for her personal horses and get her out riding. The gruff, bearded Scot became her favorite, accompanying her publicly almost everywhere.

He also become a barrier -- as she wanted -- to intrusions from staff, and even from her children. (They despised him.) He sat in on table-turning seances in that heyday of spiritualism to help summon up a very dubious hint of the Prince. She despised smoking but Brown could appear before her in a haze of tobacco, and often tipsy as well with whiskey -- and he taught Victoria how to put a nip of Scotch in her tea. Class vanished. In an age of sentimental effusions, she sent him valentines by post, and awarded him a special medal for loyal service to the Queen. Rumor had it that he was sexually intimate with her, even that they were secretly married, and in 1869 a scandal sheet claimed that the Queen (in her 50th year) had gone to Switzerland to covertly bear his child. Her very openness about Brown belied such intimacies, but without a husband to embrace she seems to have savored being clutched by him as he helped on and off her horses, and in and out of her carriages. When he was dying, protocol forbade her to visit him (contrary to an episode in the film "Mrs.

Brown"), and in any event a fall had lamed one of her knees, and she could not have climbed stairs to his quarters. "If he had been a more ambitious man," said Sir William Knollys, the Prince of Wales's comptroller, of Brown, "there is no doubt . . . he might have meddled in more important matters. I presume the family will rejoice at his death, but I think very probably they are shortsighted." Yet Brown's disappearance from the Victorian scene helped restore the Queen's public image. She could better embody middle-class values and become the symbolic mother of her country. Victoria's Funeral Pathe The 1880s and 1890s were decades of Victoria's increasing visibility as symbol of Britain and of Empire, as-with the Prince of Wales often acting as impresario-she celebrated her Golden Jubilee as Queen, and then, turning it into an imperial festival, she marked her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

She had become an icon of Empire, ironically just as the Anglo-Boer War was about to erupt in South Africa, adding to the red areas on the globe but embarrassing the nation by showing how difficult it was to win and control colonies in a dawning age of nationalism. In her waning years, Victoria, calling herself a soldier's daughter, went out, although wheelchair-bound by age and frailty, to bid departing troops godspeed. The war was still ongoing when, incapacitated by a series of small strokes, she died in January 1901, the first month of the new century. But Victoria's world of simple values and simple loyalties, and her rigid view of the Crown, had preceded her in death. Loading Page...

Question: To within a year either way, in what year did Victoria’s husband Prince Albert die?
Answer: 1861