Queen Victoria

AUTHORITY; Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India (from May 1 1876). Queen Victoria was the longest reigning of the British monarchs, coming to the throne at the age of eighteen. She was the daughter of the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George the third and of Princess Victoria Leiningen of Saxe-Coburg. It seemed likely from her earliest years that she would one day inherit the throne, and so was carefully brought up, under the care of a Hanoverian governess, Fraulein Louise Lehzen.

The two major influences in her first years as Queen were her uncle, Prince Leopold, and Lord Melbourne, her first Prime Minister. Both were sophisticated men of the world and politically wise. Their example and her own strong will formed the character of the later Queen. Her first tussle with the established order accured in May 1839 when Melbourne resigned, to be succeeded by the TorySir Robert Peel. The new Prime Minister insisted that the ladies of the Queen s Bedchamber should all be Tories, like the new government. The Queen refused to dissmiss the Whig women in her household and the affair quikly became a crisis, leading to vote in Parliament that Peel lost. Melbourne took up the prime ministership again.

By the autumn of 1839, a much more important influence on Victoria had been brought into her life by her mother and Uncle Leopold, both intent in marrying off the young Queen suitably. Their candidate for the role of royal consort was a relative, Prince Albert of the small German principality of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Albert was handsome, intelligent and well educated, and Victoria was immediatly attracted. They were married in the Chappel Royal, St James Palace in February 1840. Their first child, Victoria, was born in November, to be followed over the next 16 years by another 8 children, all of whom grew up to be married into royal families of Europe. That s why Queen Victoria is named the Grandmother of Europe. Victoria and Albert s close-knit family life set the pattern for the Victorian Age.

Albert was decisive and ambitious, and had to overcome much early criticism in Britain because of his German origins and comparative poverty. Albert s ambitions weren t for himself but for his adopted country; he wished to make Britain the greatest nation in the world. Victoria adored him and together they made an indelible impression on British life.

The Great Exhibition of 1851, which was Albert s ideea, icreased his popularity, as did his desire for change and improvement for the working people of Britain. This was a subject which Victoria had at first given little thought to, for Melbourne had nurtured in her the ideea that change was better left to itself and not encouraged. But Victoria had a more liberal and tolerant view of the world, more, it can be said, than many of her subjects. This became evident in her attitude, for instance, to the instigators of the Indian Munity in 1857, against whom, unlike the rest of her ...