Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria Victoria (1819–1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837, and Empress of India from 1876 until her death. Her reign of sixty-three years was the longest in British history until the twentieth century, and it gave its name to an entire age. The Victorian era was a period of extraordinary industrial, imperial, scientific and cultural expansion, and the queen herself became the emblem of a new kind of constitutional monarchy.

Childhood and Accession

Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, the only child of Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III. Her father died when she was eight months old, and she was raised under the strict supervision of her mother and the comptroller of the household, Sir John Conroy. The Kensington System isolated her from the court and was designed, she came to believe, to keep her dependent and to make her mother regent.

She succeeded to the throne on 20 June 1837, a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, so no regency was needed. Her first act was to move into Buckingham Palace and to distance herself from her mother's household. The young queen was determined to rule with dignity and independence, and she relied heavily at first on the Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne, whose advice and company she found congenial.

In 1840 she married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The marriage, initially arranged to secure the succession, became a genuine partnership of remarkable closeness. Albert took an active interest in public affairs, in the arts and sciences, and in the management of the royal household, and he helped to modernise the monarchy and to define the constitutional role the queen was to play.

The Monarchy and Political Life

Victoria's relations with her ministers were not always easy. She disliked some of them intensely, notably Lord Palmerston and later William Gladstone, and she quarrelled with Disraeli before growing to admire him. Yet she observed the conventions of constitutional monarchy with increasing care: she was entitled to be consulted, to encourage and to warn, but the government of the day, not the crown, made policy. Her long reign helped fix that convention in British practice.

The death of Albert from typhoid in December 1861 devastated her. She withdrew from public life for years, and her seclusion, while deeply felt, provoked criticism and a growth of republican sentiment. The disapproval of her subjects and the urging of her ministers eventually brought her back to public duties, and with Disraeli's help she was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, a title that raised the prestige of the crown at home and abroad.

Her later years saw the steady expansion of the empire and the transformation of the monarchy into a ceremonial and symbolic institution above party politics. She presided over the diamond jubilee of 1897, when troops and representatives from across the empire paraded through London, and the occasion became the most vivid demonstration of imperial reach and unity.

Family, Empire and Society

Victoria and Albert had nine children, and their marriages tied the royal houses of Europe together, earning her the nickname the grandmother of Europe. Her descendants eventually occupied the thrones of Germany, Russia, Greece, Romania, Spain and Norway. The family connections, however, did not prevent the great European war that broke out after her death, and her indirect influence on foreign affairs was more dynastic than diplomatic.

The Victorian era over which she presided was one of profound change. Railways and steamships bound the nation together, the factory system and the growth of cities transformed society, and a self-conscious middle class developed its own moral codes and domestic ideals. Victoria's own values of duty, family and respectability were widely shared and widely projected onto the age that took her name.

Britain became the world's leading industrial and financial power, its fleet supreme, its influence felt on every continent. Victoria was given the title Empress of India in part to emphasise the importance of the subcontinent to the empire, and the period saw the expansion of British rule over vast territories. Yet the same years produced debates over democracy, education, public health and the rights of women, debates that would shape the twentieth century.

Death and Legacy

Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 January 1901, at the age of eighty-one, after a reign of sixty-three years and seven months. Her son Edward VII succeeded her, and the reign of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later renamed Windsor, continued. Her funeral was a grand imperial occasion, and her grave at Frogmore was built according to her own instructions.

Her reputation has been revisited many times. She was a woman of strong feelings, sharp judgement and lively humour as well as of the solemn widow in black that memory often preserves. Historians emphasise that she took her duties seriously, worked hard over state papers, and used her moral authority to bind an expanding empire and a rapidly changing society.

The Victorian age itself remains a subject of fascination and debate, seen alternately as an era of repressive respectability and of extraordinary creativity and reform. What is beyond dispute is Victoria's personal role in giving her name and her image to a crucial century of British and world history. Few monarchs have shaped the imagination of their age so thoroughly.

See also

• Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
• Benjamin Disraeli
• British Empire
• Victorian era