VICTORIA 1819 – 1901

                Victoria was queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1837-1901) and empress of India (1876-1901). Her reign was the longest of any monarch in British history and came to be known as the Victo­rian era.

                  Queen Victoria was the official head of state not only of the United Kingdom but also of the growing worldwide British Empire, which included Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and large parts of Africa. As the personal embodiment of her king­dom, powerful state and as a model of civ­ilization, Victoria brought to the British monarchy such 19^th-century ideals as a devoted family life, earnestness, public and private respectability, and obedience to the law. During the later years of her reign, the monarchy attained a high degree of pop­ularity among most of its subjects.

              Queen Victoria was born Alexandrina Victo­ria on May 24, 1819, in Kensington Palace, London. Her parents were Victoria Mary Lousia, daughter of the Duke of the German principality of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent and Strathern, the fourth son of King George III of Great Britain. When Victoria was eight months old, her father died. Victoria’s moth­er raised her in Kensington Palace with the help of German governesses, private Eng­lish tutors, and Victoria’s uncle, Prince Leopold (1790-1865) (who in 1831 became King Leopold I of Belgium). Victoria learned to speak and write French and German as readily as English. She also studied history, geography, and the Bible. She was taught how to play the piano and learned how to paint, a hobby that she enjoyed into her 60s. Victoria’s uncle King William IV*, had no legitimate children, Victoria became heir apparent to the British crown upon his ac­cession in 1830.

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* William IV (1765-1837) — King of Great Britain from 1830.

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                      On June 20, 1837, with the death of William IV, she became queen at the age of 18.

                  Immediately after becoming queen, Victo­ria began regular meetings with William Lamb, 2^nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848), the British prime minister at the time. The two grew very close, and Melbourne taught Victoria how the British government worked on a day-to-day basis.

                  Britain in the 19^th century was a constitu­tional monarchy, and the king or queen ruled through ministers who were members of, and required the support of the British Par­liament. This means that the monarch had some influence in government, but not a great deal of real power. In the course of her reign, Queen Victoria played a role in appointing some cabinet-ministers (and even a prime minister), as well as particular ambassadors and bishops of the Church of England, and she consulted regularly with her prime ministers by letter and in person. In private, Victoria was never afraid to speak her mind. Much of her time, how­ever, was devoted to ceremonial activities such as the official opening and closing of each year’s sessions of Parliament.

                    Victoria was very fond of Melbourne, and because he was the leader of the Whig par­ty (which later became the Liberal Party), Victoria began publicly to support the Whigs rather than the opposition party, the To­ries (later the Conservative Party). The Whigs were sympathetic to freedom of speech and of the press and favored greater religious liberty for those people who did not belong to the official Church of Eng­land. The Tories were more concerned with maintaining the country’s established insti­tutions and with making no further legal concessions to religious minorities.

                    The young queen hoped that the Whigs would continue to keep a majority of seats in the House of Commons (the lower house of the British Parliament) so that Mel­bourne could remain prime minister. When it appeared in 1839 that he might have to give up the post, the queen successfully used her influence to keep him. In the so-called Bedchamber Crisis, she refused to allow Tory leader. Sir Robert Peel* to change the ladies-in-waiting of her court, all of whom were Whig sympathizers.

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*Peel, Sir Robert (1788-1850) — British Conservative politi­cian. Founded modern police in 1829. Prime minister in 1834-1835 and 1841-1846.

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                       Peel then felt unable to form a government, and Melbourne continued as prime minister for two more years. A general election in 1841 resulted in a majority of Tory party mem­bers in the House of Commons, however, and Victoria was compelled to accept Peel as prime minister.

                 In 1839 Victoria fell in live with her first cousin, Prince Albert, of the small German principality of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They were married in February 1840, and Albert soon developed a keen interest in the gov­ernment of his new country. Albert was an unusually studious and serious young man, and he served as his wife’s private secre­tary. He was an active patron of the arts and sciences, and he was the prime organiz­er of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first true world’s fair, which was held in the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. Al­bert also favoured the expansion of educa­tion, and he served as chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He became a great champion of the strengthening and modern­izing of Britain’s armed forces. Though Albert was respected by most of his new countrymen, he was not loved; many resent­ed him because he was a foreigner, and his heavy German accent did not help.

                        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.

                      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 19^th-century highpoint. In 1851 royal initiative led to the dismissal of the popular Henry John Tem­ple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston*, from his post as foreign secretary.

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*Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) — Prime minister in 1855-1858.

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               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.

               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.

              Behind the scenes, she continued to corre­spond with and talk to her ministers, and she took comfort in the company of her favourite servant, a Scottish Highlander named John Brown (1826-1883). 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.

              Although in her youth she had been known as the “Queen of the Whigs,” in the course of the later 1860s she came to prefer Benjamin Disraeli, the leader of the Conserva­tive Party, to William Ewart Gladstone*, the leader of the Liberal Party.

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*Disraeli, Benjamin I^st Earl of Beaconsfields (1804-1881) — Prime minister 1868, 1874-1880.

Gladstone, William Ewart (1809-1898) — four times prime minister of Great Britain.

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                 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 1875, 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 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 14 years of her reign, the Conservatives dominated Britain’s govern­ment most of the time under prime minister Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury*.

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*Salisbury, Robert Arthur Gaskoyne-Cecil, 3^rdMarques of Salisbury (1830-1907) — Prime minister of Great Britain 1885— 1886, 1886-1892, 1895-1902.

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               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.

               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 Frederic, 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 (1914-1918).

                By the 1880s Victoria had again become the symbol of public service. She appeared in public more often. Excepts from her private journals that she published in 1868 and 1884 helped to humanize her the eyes of her subjects. Her personal identifica­tion with late-19^th-century empire build­ing and the sheer length of her reign also enhanced her popularity. In 1887 her Gold­en Jubilee, the 50^th 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.

                     The length of Queen Victoria’s reign gave an impression of continuity to what was ac­tually a period of dynamic change as Brit­ain grew to become a powerful industrial­ized trading nation. The queen sympathized with some of these changes-such as the cam­era, the railroad, and the use of anesthetics in childbirth. She felt doubtful about oth­ers, however, such as giving the vote to many more people, establishing tax-support­ed schools, and allowing women into pro­fessions such as medicine. During her reign, the popularity of the British monarchy un­derwent both ups and downs but ultimately increased. Victoria was important because she brought morality, good manners, and a devotion to hard work to her role as con­stitutional monarch. She took pride in her role as formal head of the world’s largest multiracial and multireligious empire, and her honesty, patriotism, and devotion to family life made the queen an appropriate symbol of the Victorian era.