There had been no sense in 1837 of such an outcome. There was curiosity about what an 18- year- old queen was and would be like, but uncertainty about what, if anything, she could achieve. As it was, she was sensitively guided politically and socially by the aged Whig prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, before on February 10, 1840, she married her first cousin Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Albert, Prince of Saxe- Coburg- Gotha. Albert had been given more guidance by his tutors, not all of it sound, about the role he should play as her husband, then she had been given before she came to the throne. She had been dependent most on her German governess, Baroness Lehzen, who was the first to tell her (at the age of 11) that she was Heiress Presumptive to the throne. Her father Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, youngest brother of William IV, had died in 1820, when Victoria was still an infant, and her German mother Victoria Mary Louisa had proved an ill- informed and difficult parent. Later in life, Victoria was to repeat many times that she was never happy until she was 18.
“Beloved Albert” brought her exceptional happiness until his early death on December 14, 1861. The marriage, while an affair of state, was a love match, and the royal couple were seldom apart. They offered an example of family life that contrasted sharply with the earlier royal images of George IV and his brothers. Victoria and Albert had nine children; the first, Victoria, future German Empress, born on November 9, 1841. They had limitations as parents, but their intentions were beyond reproach and they enjoyed their private lives, particularly at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, purchased in 1843, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland, acquired in 1852 and rebuilt on the basis of Albert’s designs. “God knows”, the Queen had written as early as 1844, “how willingly I would always live with my beloved Albert and our children in the quiet retirement of private life, and not be the constant subject of observation.” An aristocratic German visitor to Balmoral 11 years later, Helmuth Karl von Moltke, told his wife, “It is hard to believe that the most powerful monarch in the world can leave all court life so much behind. It is just plain family life here.”
Queen Victoria’s constitutional power was always limited, and while her personal like and dislikes influenced
The selection of the Cabinet and her views on political issues were forthright and shrewd, she never determined policy. Albert, who was always at her side whatever issues, particularly foreign policy, were being discussed, used his influence to persuade Victoria to accept his version of what a constitutional monarch should be. They both dislike Load Palmerston and his policies, but they could never undermine his political leadership. They had been deeply concerned about British foreign policy in the lead-up to the Crimean War- and Albert was very unpopular in the country- yet when it began they zealously supported British troops in action, as the Queen was always to do in all the “small wars” in which the country was involved. It was in 1856 that she instituted the Victoria Cross, the highest British award for military valour. Albert was given the title of Prince Consort in 1857.
Victoria was desperately lonely after Albert’s death in 1861 and retreated into a gloomy widowhood, undergoing a nervous breakdown and shrinking from the public. The result was a barrage of criticism as sharp as Albert had had to face at the worst moments in his lifetime. On the third anniversary of his death, The Times declared that “the living have their claims as well as the dead; and what claims can be more important than those of a great nation, and the Society of the first European capitals?” In these circumstances, it was the Queen’s strong sense of duty and the much- vaunted power of her will that kept the monarchy alive. By the end of the reign, with an experience that reached deep into the past, she had endowed it with a new magic.
In one of her prime ministers, the Conservative Benjamin Disraeil, who had done much to destroy Sir Robert Peel, one of Albert’s heroes, she found a leader who knew how to get the best out of her, and it was he who in 1876 persuaded Parliament (in face of Liberal opposition) to pass a Royal Titles Act adding to the Queen’s titles that of Empress of India. If Disraeli was adept in understanding the Queen, she was incapable of understanding or appreciating the most authoritative of the Liberal leaders of the late 19th century, William Ewart Gladstone, who in an age of increasing political party organization was to survive Disraeli by a quarter of a century.When he became prime minister for the fourth time in 1892 at over 80 years old, he described his interview with her as “such as took place between Marie Antoinette and her executioner”, and when he retired two years later she refused to thank him for his services to the country. She was shocked that Edward, then Prince of Wales, with whom she was on bad tsrms, acted as a pall- bearer at his funeral in 1897.
Despite her advanced age, Victoria continued her duties to the end- including an official visit to Dublin in 1900. The Boer War in South Africa overshadowed the end of her reign. As in the Crimean War nearly half a century earlier, Victoria reviewed her troops and visited hospitals; she remained undaunted by British reverses during the campaign; ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.
Victoria died at Osborne House on Isle of Wight, on 22 January 1901 after a reign which lasted almost 64 years, the longest in British history. She was buried at Windsor beside Prince Albert, in the Frogmore Royal Mausoleum, which she had built for their final resting place. Above the Mausoleum door are inscribed Victoria’s words; ‘farewell best beloved, here at last I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again’.
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