Victoria (queen)

A

The Royal Family

For Victoria, however, Albert represented perfection, and the two were very happy together. The royal couple offered an example of family life that contrasted sharply with the images of previous British monarchs. Between 1840 and 1857, Victoria and Albert had nine children. They took an intense personal interest in the upbringing of their children, and they did not leave them solely in the care of nannies and governesses. They increasingly enjoyed a private family life, particularly at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral Castle in Scotland, both of them rebuilt on the basis of Albert’s designs.

B

Early Victorian Politics

The royal couple took a sympathetic interest in the efforts of Sir Robert Peel in 1846 to abolish the Corn Laws (acts of Parliament that protected landlords and farmers against foreign competition) and to lead Britain toward international free trade, but in the process he divided his Conservative Party. During the 1850s, with the two-party tradition in temporary disarray, the influence of the monarchy on the formation of ministries reached a 19th-century highpoint. In 1851 royal initiative led to the dismissal of the popular Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, from his post as foreign secretary. He had failed too often to consult the queen before sending dispatches to British diplomats abroad.

Although Victoria and Albert were initially unhappy with the manner in which their country drifted into the Crimean War (1853-1856) against Russia, they became enthusiastic supporters of the conflict once fighting had begun, and in 1855 Victoria appointed Palmerston as wartime prime minister. The queen personally instituted the Victoria Cross as the highest British award for wartime valor.

V

Widowhood

Queen Victoria never truly recovered from Albert’s death in December 1861 at the age of 42. For almost a decade she remained in strict mourning. She rarely set foot in London, and she avoided most public occasions, including the state opening of Parliament. She made an exception, however, for the unveiling of statues dedicated to Prince Albert and, after a few years, for attendance at army reviews.

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Behind the scenes, she continued to correspond with and talk to her ministers, and she took comfort in the company of her favorite servant, a Scottish Highlander named John Brown. By the late 1860s, the queen’s absence from the public stage caused her popularity to decline, and there was talk of replacing the monarchy with a republic. In the course of the later 1870s and the 1880s, she gradually returned to the public arena, and her popularity rose once more.

A

Late Victorian Politics

Although in her youth she had been known as the “Queen of the Whigs,” in the course of the later 1860s and 1870s she came to prefer Benjamin Disraeli, the leader of the Conservative Party, to William Ewart Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party. Disraeli impressed Victoria as being more concerned with Britain's international prestige and with the strengthening of its empire. She strongly supported Disraeli's government from 1874 to 1880. In 1876, when Parliament made her empress of India, she showed her gratitude to Disraeli by opening Parliament in person and by creating him earl of Beaconsfield.

When Disraeli's government was defeated in the general election of 1880, Victoria made little secret of her disappointment in being compelled to name Gladstone prime minister for a second time. Gladstone impressed her as too much a popular demagogue and too ready to tamper with the kingdom's institutions. When in 1866 he proposed home rule (domestic self-government) for Ireland, the queen felt that he was undermining the British Empire. Despite Victoria’s dislike, Gladstone continued to treat the queen with courteous respect.

During the last 15 years of her reign, the Conservatives dominated Britain’s government most of the time under prime minister Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. Victoria was sympathetic to Salisbury’s views on foreign affairs and the empire. She strongly supported her government’s involvement in the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, even though the anxieties of the struggle and the criticism that Britain received from other European powers took their toll on the queen.

B

The Grandmother of Europe

During the years after Albert’s death, the queen remained concerned with her ever-growing family. All nine of her children married, and eight of them had children of their own. Some of Victoria’s children and grandchildren eventually married the heirs to thrones of Spain, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Romania. Because of her many descendents, Victoria became known as the “Grandmother of Europe.”

The most important of these marriages occurred when Victoria’s eldest child, also named Victoria, was married at age 17 to Crown Prince Frederick, the heir to the kingdom of Prussia (and, as of 1871, the German Empire). Victoria and Albert had hoped that the marriage would strengthen the bonds of Anglo-German understanding and would help transform Prussia into a constitutional monarchy like that of Britain. In the long run their hopes were disappointed as Frederick’s son (and the queen’s oldest grandchild) went on, as Emperor William II of Germany, to lead the anti-British coalition during World War I (1914-1918).

By the 1880s Victoria had again become the popular symbol of dutiful public service. She appeared in public more often. Excerpts from her private journals that she published in 1868 and 1884 helped to humanize her in the eyes of her subjects. Her personal identification with late-19th-century empire building and the sheer length of her reign also enhanced her popularity. In 1887 her Golden Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of her accession to the throne, was celebrated with great enthusiasm. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 brought representatives of all the different parts of the British Empire to London and led to the first meeting of the prime ministers of Britain’s colonies; it was then that Victoria’s popularity reached its peak. Four years later, after a reign of 63 years, she died on January 22, 1901, in Osborne House.

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