Queen Victoria

Victoria was born at Kensington Palace in London on 24 May 1819, the only child of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Her father, the fourth son of George III, died in January 1820, before she was one year old. Raised under the tightly controlled “Kensington System” devised by her mother and Sir John Conroy, she was kept supervised and slept in her mother’s room. She became heir presumptive in 1830 after the death of George IV and accession of her uncle William IV, because William’s surviving children were illegitimate under British succession law.

On 20 June 1837, Victoria learned at Kensington that William IV had died and became queen at eighteen. She moved immediately to Buckingham Palace, a symbolic break with the dependence of her childhood. Her coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838. The early reign included the 1839 Bedchamber Crisis, when she resisted Robert Peel’s request to replace several ladies of her household linked to the Whigs. Her reliance on Prime Minister Lord Melbourne attracted criticism, but Melbourne helped her understand constitutional government. In 1840 she escaped an assassination attempt by Edward Oxford, the first of several attacks directed at her.

Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, at St James’s Palace on 10 February 1840. They had nine children: Victoria, Albert Edward, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. Albert became an influential private adviser, encouraging her interest in science, art, and the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Their children’s dynastic marriages connected the British royal house with European courts, later contributing to Victoria’s nickname, the “Grandmother of Europe.” Albert’s death at Windsor Castle in December 1861 devastated her. She withdrew from public life and wore mourning thereafter in black dress.

Her later reign saw Britain’s industrial and imperial power expand, while political authority increasingly rested with elected ministers and Parliament. In 1876, on Benjamin Disraeli’s advice, Parliament made her Empress of India. She became especially associated with her Highland servant John Brown and later with Abdul Karim, an Indian attendant who taught her Hindustani; both relationships provoked court hostility. Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and Diamond Jubilee in 1897. She died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 January 1901, aged eighty-one, after a reign of sixty-three years and seven months. Edward VII succeeded.