Queen Victoria

• 1. Introduction

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  Queen Victoria was born at 4:15 am on the 24th of May 1819 at Kensington Palace, the only child of a duke who would die before she turned one. She grew up largely isolated, sharing a bedroom with her mother every night, her companions mostly dolls and a King Charles Spaniel named Dash. At 18, she learned she was Queen not from a grand ceremony but from two men who appeared at her door before dawn, still in her dressing gown, and told her that her uncle had died at twelve minutes past two that morning. She would hold that crown for 63 years and 216 days, longer than any monarch before her. How did a girl raised deliberately weak and dependent become the most powerful symbol of an empire? What drove her to extraordinary tenderness in private while projecting iron will in public? And how did she survive not only assassination attempts, but also deep personal grief, to be mourned by a world that had once laughed at her seclusion?

• 2. The Kensington Prison

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  Sir John Conroy designed the system that shaped Victoria's early years, and he designed it to keep her controllable. Under the so-called Kensington System, the princess was prevented from meeting anyone her mother and Conroy deemed undesirable, which included most of her father's family. She studied with private tutors on a fixed timetable, learned French, German, Italian, and Latin, yet spoke only English at home. At age ten, she wrote and illustrated a children's story, The Adventures of Alice Laselles, which was eventually published in 2015.

  Conroy's ambitions were not subtle. During a serious fever Victoria contracted at Ramsgate in October 1835, while she lay ill, Conroy and the Duchess pressed her to sign over the position of private secretary to him. She refused. As a teenager she resisted his persistent bids to join her official staff. Once she became queen she banned him from her presence entirely, though he remained in her mother's household.

  The tours of England and Wales that the Duchess and Conroy organised between 1830 and 1835 were ostensibly goodwill visits, but King William IV compared them to royal progresses and feared they presented Victoria as his rival. Victoria herself disliked the trips: the constant public appearances exhausted her and made her ill. Her mother dismissed the King's objections as jealousy and forced Victoria to continue. The resentment those years bred would resurface once she had the power to act on it.

• 3. Albert and the Proposal

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  On the 15th of October 1839, just five days after Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha arrived at Windsor, Victoria proposed to him. The convention at the time required that a queen regnant make the proposal herself, but the speed of it surprised everyone, including, perhaps, Albert. Victoria had first met him in May 1836, when her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, arranged a visit expressly to introduce them. In her diary she noted that Albert was "extremely handsome" with large blue eyes, fine teeth, and, most of all, "a most delightful" expression.

  They married on the 10th of February 1840 in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace. Victoria was love-struck to the point of illness; she spent the evening after the wedding lying down with a headache but wrote in her diary in capitals that she had never spent such an evening and that it was "the happiest day of my life".

  Albert quickly moved from companion to co-ruler in everything but title. He replaced Lord Melbourne as the dominant influence on the Queen. He managed household disputes, mediated between Victoria and her mother until relations slowly improved, and represented the Crown when Victoria was incapacitated by grief or illness. When Baroness Lehzen, Victoria's childhood governess who had run the household, clashed repeatedly with Albert over the care of their daughter, Albert won: Lehzen was pensioned off in 1842. Over seventeen years, Victoria and Albert had nine children.

• 4. Attempts on Her Life

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  Eighteen-year-old Edward Oxford fired twice at Victoria's carriage in 1840, during the first months of her first pregnancy. Oxford was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed indefinitely to an asylum, later sent to Australia. The immediate effect was a surge in the Queen's popularity that helped quiet lingering unrest over the Hastings affair and the bedchamber crisis.

  On the 29th of May 1842, John Francis aimed a pistol at her along The Mall, but the gun failed to fire. Victoria's response was striking: the next day she deliberately drove the same route, faster and with a larger escort, to bait Francis into a second attempt so plainclothes police could catch him in the act. It worked. Francis shot at her and was seized. On the 3rd of July, just two days after Francis's death sentence was commuted to transportation for life, John William Bean attempted a third attack with a pistol loaded only with paper and tobacco. Bean received 18 months in jail.

  In 1849, William Hamilton fired a powder-filled pistol at her carriage on Constitution Hill. In 1850, ex-army officer Robert Pate struck her with his cane as she rode in a carriage, crushing her bonnet and bruising her forehead; both Hamilton and Pate received seven years' transportation. On the last day of February 1872, two days after a public thanksgiving service for her son's recovery from typhoid, 17-year-old Arthur O'Connor waved an unloaded pistol at her open carriage at Buckingham Palace. Her attendant John Brown grabbed him. The final attempt came on the 2nd of March 1882, when Roderick Maclean, apparently angered by Victoria's refusal to accept one of his poems, shot at her carriage leaving Windsor station. Two Eton schoolboys struck Maclean with their umbrellas until police could intervene. Victoria was outraged that Maclean was found not guilty by reason of insanity, but wrote that the loyalty shown afterward made it "worth being shot at."

• 5. Widow of Windsor

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  Prince Albert was diagnosed with typhoid fever by William Jenner and died on the 14th of December 1861. Victoria was 42 years old and would live another 39 years, all of them in mourning dress. She blamed her son, the Prince of Wales, for Albert's death, convinced that Albert's distress over the prince's affair with the actress Nellie Clifden in Ireland had broken his health.

  She withdrew almost entirely from public life. The newspapers noticed. In March 1864, a protester fixed a notice to the railings of Buckingham Palace advertising the premises "to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant's declining business." Republican sentiment, fed by her absence, flared openly: a Trafalgar Square rally called for her removal, and Radical MPs spoke against the monarchy. In August 1871, Joseph Lister treated a serious abscess in her arm with his new antiseptic carbolic acid spray.

  The crisis broke in late 1871 when the Prince of Wales contracted the same typhoid fever believed to have killed his father. Victoria feared losing her son as well. When he recovered, mother and son attended a public thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral on the 27th of February 1872, and republican feeling fell away. Through this entire period, a Scottish manservant, John Brown, was her closest companion. Rumours of a romance and even a secret marriage spread widely enough to give her the nickname "Mrs. Brown". When Brown died in 1883, Victoria began work on a eulogistic biography of him; her private secretary and the Dean of Windsor advised against publication, and the manuscript was destroyed. She published More Leaves from a Journal of a Life in the Highlands instead, dedicating it to Brown as her "devoted personal attendant and faithful friend".

• 6. Empire and Power

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  In 1876, Parliament passed the Royal Titles Act at Benjamin Disraeli's initiative, and from the 1st of May 1876 Victoria bore the additional title of Empress of India. The new designation was proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar of the 1st of January 1877. Victoria saw the expansion of the British Empire as a civilising force and wrote that it was "not in our custom to annexe countries, unless we are obliged & forced to do so." She endorsed Disraeli's expansionist foreign policy even as it produced conflicts including the Anglo-Zulu War and the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

  Her relationship with her prime ministers was one of the defining features of her reign. She adored Disraeli, who famously said that with royalty one should lay flattery on "with a trowel." She despised Gladstone, who she felt spoke to her as though she were "a public meeting rather than a woman." When Gladstone retired in 1894, Victoria appointed Lord Rosebery as his replacement without consulting the outgoing prime minister.

  On the 23rd of September 1896, Victoria became the longest-reigning monarch in British history, surpassing her grandfather George III. She asked that celebrations be delayed until 1897 to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee. That celebration was made a festival of the British Empire at the suggestion of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. The jubilee procession on the 22nd of June 1897 followed a six-mile route through London and drew troops from across the empire. Victoria sat throughout the open-air service outside St Paul's Cathedral in her open carriage, unable to climb the steps, but surrounded by what one account called vast crowds and great outpourings of affection.

• 7. Death and What She Left Behind

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  Victoria spent Christmas 1900 at Osborne House, as she had throughout her widowhood. By then rheumatism had left her disabled, cataracts clouded her sight, and through early January she felt weak and unwell. By mid-January she was, in the words of those around her, drowsy, dazed, and confused. Her favourite Pomeranian, Turi, was laid on her bed at her request. She died at 6:30 pm on the 22nd of January 1901, aged 81, her eldest son Albert Edward and her grandson Wilhelm II both present.

  She had written funeral instructions in 1897. The service was to be military in character, as befitting a soldier's daughter and head of the army, and the colours were to be white rather than black. She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil. In the coffin, at her own prior instruction, was one of Albert's dressing gowns, a plaster cast of his hand, and, placed in her left hand and concealed from the family by flowers, a lock of John Brown's hair and a picture of him. Brown's mother's wedding ring, which Brown had given Victoria in 1883, was on her finger. She was interred beside Albert in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore.

  According to the biographer Giles St Aubyn, Victoria wrote an average of 2,500 words a day throughout her adult life. Her journal eventually filled 122 volumes. Her youngest daughter Beatrice, appointed literary executor, transcribed the diaries from the accession onward and then burned the originals. Lord Esher had transcribed the earlier volumes before Beatrice reached them, and parts of her correspondence have been published in editions by A. C. Benson, Hector Bolitho, George Earle Buckle, Lord Esher, Roger Fulford, and Richard Hough, among others. The haemophilia B that Victoria carried passed through her daughters Alice and Beatrice to royal houses across Europe, reaching the Russian Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich and two Spanish princes. Her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II surpassed Victoria's record on the 9th of September 2015.