Victoria of the United Kingdom

Alexandrina Victoria was born on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace, London. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent (son of George III) and his wife, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duchess of Kent.

At birth, Victoria was only the 5th in line of succession. Before her, there was the Prince Regent; Frederick, Duke of York; William, Duke of Clarence; and her own father. The Prince Regent had no surviving children, and the Duke of York had no children. The Duke of Clarence's daughters died as infants, and Victoria's father died when she was not yet 1 year old. George III died a week after Victoria's father, and the Duke of York died in 1827. When George IV died in 1830, he was succeeded by his brother William (now William IV), and Victoria became heir presumptive to the throne.
The Regency Act of 1830 made special provision for the Duchess of Kent to act as regent in case William died while Victoria was still a minor. The King distrusted the Duchess and, in 1836, he declared in her presence that he wanted to live until Victoria's 18th birthday, so that there would be no regency.

Victoria described her childhood as melancholic. The Duchess was extremely protective, and Victoria was raised isolated from other children under the so-called Kensington System (an elaborate set of rules devised by the Duchess and her domineering comptroller, Sir John Conroy, who was rumoured to be her lover). The system prevented Victoria from meeting people whom her mother and Conroy deemed undesirable, and was designed to render her weak and dependent. Victoria shared a room with her mother every night, studied with private tutors, and spent her play-hours with her dolls and her spaniel, Dash.

By 1836, Leopold, King of the Belgians, hoped to marry his niece Victoria to his nephew, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Leopold, the Duchess of Kent and Albert's father were siblings). Leopold arranged for the Duchess to invite her Coburg relatives to visit her in May 1836, with the purpose of introducing Victoria to Albert. William IV disapproved of any Coburg match and instead favoured a match with Prince Alexander of the Netherlands. According to Victoria, she enjoyed Albert's company from the beginning. After the visit she wrote [Albert] is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful. On the other hand, she found Alexander very plain.

Victoria wrote to Leopold to thank him for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert... He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. However, at 17, Victoria was not yet ready for marriage. The parties did not undertake a formal engagement, but assumed that the match would take place in due time.

Victoria turned 18 in 1837, and a regency was avoided. Less than a month later, William IV died and Victoria became Queen of the United Kingdom. In her diary she wrote, I was awoke at 6 o'clock by Mamma, who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing gown) and alone, and I saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning, and consequently I am Queen.

At the time of her accession, the government was led by the Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne. The prime minister at once became a powerful influence on the politically inexperienced Queen, who relied on him for advice.

In 1839, Lord Melbourne resigned after the Radicals and the Tories voted against a bill to suspend the constitution of Jamaica (it removed political power from plantation owners, who resisted measures associated with the abolition of slavery). The Queen then commissioned a Tory, Sir Robert Peel, to form a new ministry. At the time, it was customary for the prime minister to appoint members of the Royal Household (usually his allies and respective wives). The Queen's ladies were wives of Whigs, and Peel expected to replace them with wives of Tories. In what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis, Victoria (advised by Melbourne) objected to their removal. Peel refused to govern under these restrictions and resigned; Melbourne returned to office.

Victoria praised Albert again after his visit in October 1839. They felt mutual affection and the Queen proposed to him on 15 October 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor.

Victoria and Albert were married on 10 February 1840, in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace, London. Victoria was besotted. She spent the evening after their wedding lying down with a headache, but wrote ecstatically in her diary: I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert...his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! ... to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!

Albert became an important political adviser as well as the Queen's companion, replacing Lord Melbourne as the dominant, influential figure in the first half of her life. Through Albert's mediation, relations between the Duchess of Kent and her daughter slowly improved.

Victoria became pregnant in 1840, in the first few months of the marriage. Her daughter, also named Victoria, was born on 21 November 1840. The Queen hated being pregnant, viewed breast-feeding with disgust, and thought new-borns were ugly. Nevertheless, over the following seventeen years, she and Albert had eight more children: Albert Edward, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice.

Lord Melbourne's support in the House of Commons weakened through the early years of Victoria's reign, and in the 1841 general election the Whigs were defeated. Peel became prime minister and, this time, the Whig ladies of the bedchamber were replaced.

In 1845, Ireland was hit by a potato blight. In the next four years, over a million Irish people died and another million emigrated in what became known as the Great Famine. In January 1847 she personally donated £2,000 to the British Relief Association, more than any other individual donor. The story that she donated only £5 in aid to the Irish, and on the same day gave the same amount to Battersea Dogs Home, was a myth generated towards the end of the 19th century.

By 1846, Peel's ministry faced a crisis involving the repeal of the Corn Laws. Many Tories were opposed to the repeal, but Peel, some Tories (the Peelites), most Whigs and Victoria supported it. Peel resigned in 1846, after the repeal narrowly passed, and was replaced by Lord John Russell. Russell's ministry, though Whig, was not favoured by the Queen. She particularly disliked the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who often acted without consulting the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, or the Queen. Victoria complained to Russell, but Palmerston was retained in office and continued to act on his own initiative, despite her repeated objections. It was only in 1851 that Palmerston was removed after he announced the British government's approval of President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup in France without consulting the Prime Minister.

On 25 January 1858, Victoria's eldest daughter married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in London. They had been betrothed since September 1855, when Princess Victoria was 14 years old but the marriage was delayed until the bride was 17. The Queen and Albert hoped that their daughter and son-in-law would be a liberalising influence in the enlarging Prussian state. Victoria felt sick at heart to see her daughter leave England for Germany: It really makes me shudder, she wrote to Princess Victoria, when I look round to all your sweet, happy, unconscious sisters, and think I must give them up too – one by one.

In March 1861, the Duchess of Kent died, with Victoria at her side. Through reading her mother's papers, Victoria discovered that her mother had loved her deeply; she was heart-broken, and blamed Conroy and Baroness Lehzen (her governess) for estranging her from her mother. To relieve his wife during her intense and deep grief, Albert took on most of her duties, despite being ill himself with chronic stomach trouble.

In November, Albert was made aware of gossip that his son, the Prince of Wales, had slept with an actress in Ireland. Appalled, Albert travelled to Cambridge, where his son was studying, to confront him. By the beginning of December, Albert was very unwell. He was diagnosed with typhoid fever, and died on 14 December 1861. Victoria was devastated. She blamed her husband's death on worry over the Prince of Wales' philandering. She entered a state of mourning and wore black for the remainder of her life. She avoided public appearances, and rarely set foot in London in the following years. Her seclusion earned her the nickname widow of Windsor.

Victoria's self-imposed isolation from the public diminished the popularity of the monarchy, and encouraged the growth of the republican movement. She did undertake her official government duties, yet chose to remain secluded in her royal residences. Her uncle Leopold wrote to her advising her to appear in public. She agreed to visit the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society at Kensington and take a drive through London in an open carriage.

Through the 1860s, Victoria relied increasingly on a Scottish manservant, John Brown. Slanderous rumours of a romantic connection and even a secret marriage appeared in print, and the Queen was referred to as Mrs. Brown.

In 1866, Victoria attended the State Opening of Parliament for the first time since Albert's death. The following year she supported the passing of the Reform Act 1867 which doubled the electorate by extending the franchise to many urban working men, though she was not in favour of votes for women.

In 1870, republican sentiment in Britain, fed by the Queen's seclusion, was boosted after the establishment of the Third French Republic. A republican rally in Trafalgar Square demanded Victoria's removal, and Radical MPs spoke against her.

In late November 1871, the Prince of Wales contracted typhoid fever, the disease that was believed to have killed his father, and Victoria was fearful her son would die. To general rejoicing, he pulled through. Mother and son attended a public parade through London and a service of thanksgiving in St Paul's Cathedral on 27 February 1872, and republican feeling subsided.

After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British East India Company and Britain's possessions and protectorates on the Indian subcontinent were formally incorporated into the British Empire. The Queen had a relatively balanced view of the conflict, and condemned atrocities on both sides. She wrote of her feelings of horror and regret at the result of this bloody civil war, and insisted that the official proclamation announcing the transfer of power from the company to the state should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious toleration.

In 1876 Benjamin Disraeli pushed the Royal Titles Act 1876 through Parliament, so that Victoria took the title Empress of India from 1 May 1876. The new title was proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar of 1 January 1877.

Between April 1877 and February 1878, she threatened five times to abdicate while pressuring Disraeli to act against Russia during the Russo-Turkish War, but her threats had no impact on the events or their conclusion with the Congress of Berlin. Disraeli's expansionist foreign policy, which Victoria endorsed, led to conflicts such as the Anglo-Zulu War and the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

On 17 March 1883, she fell down some stairs at Windsor, which left her lame until July. She never fully recovered and was plagued with rheumatism thereafter. John Brown died 10 days after her accident, and to the consternation of her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, Victoria began work on a eulogistic biography of Brown. The document was later destroyed.

In 1887, the British Empire celebrated Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Victoria marked the fiftieth anniversary of her accession on 20 June with a banquet to which 50 kings and princes were invited. The following day, she participated in a procession and attended a thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey. By this time, Victoria was once again extremely popular.

Two days later on 23 June, she engaged two Indian Muslims as waiters, one of whom was Abdul Karim. He was soon promoted to Munshi: teaching her Urdu and acting as a clerk. Her family and retainers were appalled, and accused Abdul Karim of spying for the Muslim Patriotic League, and biasing the Queen against the Hindus. Victoria dismissed their complaints as racial prejudice. Abdul Karim remained in her service until he returned to India with a pension, on her death.

Victoria's eldest daughter became Empress consort of Germany in 1888, but she was widowed within the year, and Victoria's grandchild Wilhelm became German Emperor as Wilhelm II. Under Wilhelm, Victoria and Albert's hopes of a liberal Germany were not fulfilled. He believed in autocracy. Victoria thought he had little heart or Zartgefühl [tact] – and...his conscience & intelligence have been completely warped.

On 23 September 1896, Victoria surpassed her grandfather George III as the longest-reigning monarch in English, Scottish, and British history. The Queen requested that any special celebrations be delayed until 1897, to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee, which was made a festival of the British Empire. The prime ministers of all the self-governing dominions were invited to London for the festivities. One reason for including the prime ministers of the dominions and excluding foreign heads of state was to avoid having to invite Wilhelm II of Germany, who, it was feared, might cause trouble at the event. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee procession on 22 June 1897 included troops from all over the empire. The procession paused for an open-air service of thanksgiving held outside St Paul's Cathedral, throughout which Victoria sat in her open carriage, to avoid her having to climb the steps to enter the building. The celebration was marked by vast crowds of spectators and great outpourings of affection for the 78-year-old Queen.

Following a custom she maintained throughout her widowhood, Victoria spent the Christmas of 1900 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Rheumatism in her legs had rendered her lame, and her eyesight was clouded by cataracts. Through early January, she felt weak and unwell, and by mid-January she was drowsy...dazed, [and] confused.

Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom died on Tuesday 22 January 1901, at half past six in the evening, at the age of 81. Her son and successor King Edward VII, and her eldest grandson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, were at her deathbed. Her favourite pet Pomeranian, Turi, was laid upon her deathbed as a last request.

In 1897, Victoria had written instructions for her funeral, which was to be military as befitting a soldier's daughter and the head of the army, and white instead of black. On 25 January, Edward VII, the Kaiser and Prince Arthur helped lift her body into the coffin. She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil. An array of mementos commemorating her extended family, friends and servants were laid in the coffin with her, at her request, by her doctor and dressers. One of Albert's dressing gowns was placed by her side, with a plaster cast of his hand, while a lock of John Brown's hair, along with a picture of him, was placed in her left hand concealed from the view of the family by a carefully positioned bunch of flowers. Her funeral was held on Saturday 2 February, in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and after two days of lying-in-state, she was interred beside Prince Albert in Frogmore Mausoleum at Windsor Great Park.

With a reign of 63 years, seven months and two days, Victoria was the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-reigning queen regnant in world history until her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II surpassed her on 9 September 2015.

Victoria of the United Kingdom

Franz Xaver Winterhalter

1842