Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Queen Victoria

1819 – 1901 · Generation XXXIII · Queen of the United Kingdom (r. 1837–1901), Empress of India · House of Hanover

Portrait of Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days, longer than any British monarch before her, and the era of industrial and imperial expansion over which she presided still carries her name. She was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, the only child of Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, and his German wife, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She was christened Alexandrina Victoria, the first name after her godfather, Tsar Alexander I of Russia. The death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s daughter, had left George III without a legitimate grandchild, and his unmarried sons came under pressure to marry and produce an heir. Victoria’s father died in January 1820, before she was a year old, and because her three elder uncles left no surviving legitimate children, she became heir presumptive when William IV succeeded in 1830.

Her upbringing was strict and lonely. Her mother and the household comptroller, Sir John Conroy, raised her under the “Kensington System”, a set of rules that kept her apart from other children and from most of her father’s family. She slept in her mother’s room every night and later described her childhood as “rather melancholy”. She had private tutors, showed a gift for drawing, and from 1832 kept a journal that eventually filled 122 volumes. William IV died on 20 June 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, so no regency was needed. Once queen, she barred Conroy from her presence. Hanover, whose law excluded women from the throne, passed to her uncle Ernest Augustus, ending a shared monarchy that dated from 1714.

The Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne became her first political guide. She was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838, in a five-hour ceremony that had barely been rehearsed. Her inexperience showed in 1839, when she refused to let the Tory leader Robert Peel replace her Whig ladies of the bedchamber, and Peel declined to form a government, leaving Melbourne in office. That October she proposed to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and they married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, on 10 February 1840. Albert soon replaced Melbourne as her closest adviser. Between 1840 and 1857 they had nine children, and in 1845 they bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight as a private family home.

Albert died of typhoid fever on 14 December 1861, aged 42. Victoria wore black for the rest of her life and for years kept almost entirely out of public view, which earned her the name “the widow of Windsor”. Her absence encouraged a republican movement that was at its height in 1871. It subsided after the Prince of Wales recovered from typhoid that winter and the nation gave thanks at St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1872.

She was no neutral figurehead. In private she pressed her views on policy and appointments, disliked Gladstone and was charmed by Disraeli, whose Royal Titles Act of 1876 made her Empress of India. The title was proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar on 1 January 1877. After the rebellion of 1857 the Crown had taken over the government of India from the East India Company, and Victoria insisted that the proclamation announcing the change should promise religious toleration. In Ireland, where more than a million people died in the famine of the late 1840s, she was labelled the “Famine Queen”, although in 1847 she gave £2,000 to relief, more than any other individual donor. Over her reign, reform acts widened the vote and shifted power towards the House of Commons. In 1867 Walter Bagehot summed up what was left to the monarch as the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.

Her popularity returned in the second half of the reign. For her Golden Jubilee in 1887 she invited fifty kings and princes to a banquet and gave thanks at a service in Westminster Abbey. On 23 September 1896 her reign became the longest Britain had known, overtaking that of her grandfather George III, and her Diamond Jubilee on 22 June 1897 became a festival of empire, with troops from all over the empire in the procession. Her nine children married into royal and noble houses across Europe, which is why she was called “the grandmother of Europe”. Her eldest grandson became the German emperor Wilhelm II.

She spent the Christmas of 1900 at Osborne, as she had every year of her widowhood, and died there on 22 January 1901, aged 81, with her eldest son and Wilhelm at her side. She was laid beside Albert in the mausoleum she had built at Frogmore, Windsor. She was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover, and her son followed her as Edward VII.

Place in the family

  • Queen Victoria was a great-great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • The archive records 57 of her descendants, across 7 generations.

Images

One of 35 people of House of Hanover (from 1700) in this archive. Called from Germany by the Act of Settlement; the Georges, then Victoria.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria.

Read more on Wikipedia

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Children

Life

  • 1819 — Born
  • 1837 — Victoria succeeds her uncle, William IV
  • 1840 — Married Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
  • 1840 — Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
  • 1853 — Victoria uses chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold.
  • 1856 — The Victoria Cross is instituted for military bravery.
  • 1856 — David Livingstone discovers the Victoria Falls
  • 1876 — Victoria becomes Empress of India.
  • 1887 — Victoria celebrates her Golden Jubilee. She has ruled for 50 years.
  • 1897 — Victoria celebrates her Diamond Jubilee.
  • 1901 — Died
  • 1901 — Queen Victoria dies, aged 81.

Sources

  1. Queen Victoria · Wikipedia
  2. Victoria (r. 1837–1901) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Queen Victoria · Westminster Abbey

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