I | INTRODUCTION |
Victoria
(queen) (1819-1901), 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, Victoria was eager to ensure that her
country was held in high esteem throughout the world as an economically and
militarily powerful state and as a model of civilization. Victoria brought to
the British monarchy such 19th-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.
II | CHILDHOOD |
Queen Victoria was born Alexandrina Victoria
on May 24, 1819, in Kensington Palace, London. Her parents were Victoria Mary
Louisa, 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 (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. Because Victoria’s uncle, King William IV,
had no legitimate children, Victoria became heir apparent to the British crown
upon his accession in 1830. On June 20, 1837, with the death of William IV, she
became queen at the age of 18.
III | EARLY REIGN |
Immediately after becoming queen, Victoria
began regular meetings with William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, 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 19th 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 meant 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 session 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. 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.
IV | MARRIED LIFE |
In 1839 Victoria fell in love 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 favored 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.
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.
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.
VI | CONCLUSIONS |
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.
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