REAL QUEEN VICTORIA13
THE
Born Alexandrina Victoria on May 24, 1819, at Kensington Palace, London, she was named after her godfather, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I. A doctor said the baby was “as plump as a partridge”. Her father was Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III. A fortune teller once told him that his daughter would become a great queen yet at birth Victoria was just fifth in line to the throne. Victoria’s father died when she was eight months old and she was brought up by her domineering mother, the German Princess Victoria of Saxe-CoburgSaalfeld. She later described her ultra-strict childhood at Kensington as “melancholy”. Nicknamed Drina she spent much of her time playing with her 100-strong doll collection and doting on her pet spaniel Dash. Yet she seems to have quickly developed a regal air. On a rare occasion when another child was allowed in to play Victoria warned her off the royal toys, barking: “You must not touch those, they are mine.” She also told her: “I may call you Jane but you must not call me Victoria.” A series of premature deaths and lack of legitimate heirs eventually put Victoria in line to the throne. Aged 11, realising she might one day become sovereign, she promised her governess Baroness Lehzen: “I will be good.” A talented artist and pianist Victoria kept a regular diary from the age of 13. It’s reckoned she penned 60 million words during her lifetime. Victoria ascended to the throne aged 18 on June 20, 1837, when her uncle King William IV died. She learned that she was to be Queen at 6am while wearing her nightie. Announcing that she was to be known as Queen Victoria, one of her first demands was to have her own room. Until that point she had been forced to share with her mother. Victoria also immediately shunned her mother’s manipulative adviser Sir John Conroy. Hours after becoming Queen, Victoria held her first Privy Council of the nation’s senior politicians. She stood just 4ft 11in but the Duke of Wellington observed how “she not merely filled her chair, she filled the room”. The new Queen quickly moved into Buckingham Palace, the first monarch to make it their official residence. Victoria was crowned on June 28, 1838, at Westminster Abbey. Some 400,000 people lined the streets but a somewhat haphazard five-hour ceremony saw the Archbishop of Canterbury place the coronation ring on the wrong finger. The young Queen became heavily dependent on Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne (played by Rufus Sewell in the new series) and strayed into politics. She was accused of favouring him over Tory Robert Peel in the so-called Bedchamber Crisis. Victoria met her future husband and first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-CoburgGotha when she was 16, describing him as “extremely handsome”. Their union was encouraged by her uncle Leopold I of Belgium and it was Victoria who proposed to Albert while he was on a trip to Windsor in 1839. Married on February 10, 1840, at St James’s Palace the bride wore white – Victoria is credited with popularising the colour for wedding dresses. The couple’s wedding cake weighed 300lbs. Victoria had a headache on her wedding night but still described it as “gratifying”. Her marriage to Albert was passionate and together the pair would have nine children: Victoria, Albert Edward, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice. Victoria was not as prudish as her reputation. She gave Albert nude paintings as presents and, when her doctor warned her to have no more children after her ninth, she’s reputed to have complained: “No more fun in bed?” She was one of the first to use the new anaesthetic chloroform during birth but found the fashionable notion of princesses breastfeeding disgusting. Victoria labelled babies “nasty objects”. Controlling, with a famous temper, Victoria generally disliked children, branding her son Bertie, the future Edward VII, “idle”. Yet Victoria ended up with 42 grandchildren including Kaiser Wilhelm II, who led Germany into the First World War. Victoria was a carrier of haemophilia, a blood clotting disorder that she passed to many descendants and which killed her son Leopold. Victoria also outlived Alice and Alfred. During their marriage Prince Albert helped Victoria with affairs of state. When he died of typhoid fever aged 42 in 1861 she was plunged into depression. Rarely seen in public afterwards she was dubbed the Widow of Windsor and wore black for the rest of her life. Victoria began to spend a lot of time in her beloved Scottish estate Balmoral, bought by Albert in 1847. She developed a close friendship with Scottish servant John Brown, played by Billy Connolly in the 1997 film Mrs Brown – this was the nickname given to Victoria over the controversial relationship. There Thursday August 25 2016 were even rumours that the pair had secretly married. Victoria gained the title Empress of India in 1877, gradually recovering her popularity with the help of her favourite prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Her least favourite was William Gladstone, calling him “a ridiculous old man” and keeping him standing during audiences. Queen Victoria survived seven assassination attempts during her life, including being fired at in her carriage by crazed 18-year-old Edward Oxford in 1840 when she was four months pregnant. Legend has it that she coined the phrase “We are not amused” in response to a risqué dinner party joke. There’s no evidence she ever said it. Victoria actually had a good sense of humour. She also had a good appetite, ballooning from a 22-inch waist at 18 to a 50-inch waist by the 1890s. She loved cake, ice cream and eating boiled eggs in a gold egg-cup with a gold spoon. Her favourite tipple was claret with whisky. She became, according to her doctor, “more like a barrel than anything else”. Victoria spoke five languages including Hindustani – learned from her favourite Indian servant Munshi. Victoria hated smoking, had an irrational fear of bishops but loved pets. Her dogs won prizes at Crufts in 1891 and she trained a pet parrot called Coco to sing God Save The Queen. Victoria wrote a best-selling book about Scotland, helped popularise tartan and Christmas trees inside the home. She instituted the Victoria Cross for valour in 1856 during the Crimean War and was the first monarch to have her face on a stamp, be photographed, use the telephone and travel by train. Her Golden Jubilee in 1887 was marked by a banquet with 50 heads of state and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 by a parade with crowds pouring on to the street to see the Queen in her open-top carriage. Queen Victoria died on January 22 1901, aged 81, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, from a cerebral haemorrhage. A million people turned out for her funeral. She was buried in Windsor, dressed in white, along with Albert’s dressing gown and a lock of John Brown’s hair. Today thousands of places around the world are named in her honour including Victoria Falls in Africa, Victoria station in London as well as more than 50 British pubs. During Victoria’s long reign – only surpassed by her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II – Britain became the “workshop of the world”, developed an empire of 400 million people and made the transition to a modern constitutional democracy. Victoria starts on Sunday, August 28 at 9pm on ITV.