Word: victoria
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...drafty isolation cell of Kensington Palace, with only her beloved governess Lehzen to moderate Conroy's schemes, Victoria was the object of endless political intrigue between court factions who wanted to influence the future monarch. "I will be good," the 11-year-old Victoria exclaimed with fervor when Lehzen revealed to her that one day she would be Queen. But life, meanwhile, was cruelly tedious. "I am very fond of pleasant society," she complained when 16, "and we have been for the last three months immured within our old palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety." The princess...
...Victoria was incapable of compromise and deceit. Her honesty made her a formidable queen-empress. She was prone to take any political maneuver as a personal slight and made no secret of her dislike for such figures as Sir Robert Peel whom she once described as a "cold, unfeeling and disagreeable man" with a smile "like a silver plate on a coffin." Others benefited from Victoria's longing for a father: notably her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, a charming Whig and absolutist to whom she was deeply attached. Melbourne's indifference to reform may well have atrophied...
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was a careerist whose training and education had for years been directed toward one end: marriage with Victoria. How the union proceeded forms one of the most entertaining strands in Mrs. Woodham-Smith's book. Victoria had seen him before, but she first fell in love with this blue-and-blond Parsifal in 1839. "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert-who is beautiful," she observed in her diary. Their correspondence from the beginning was a model of Victorian decorum and devotion ("Never, never did I think I could be loved...
...Victoria's impulsive reach for a gunboat was as quick as Lord Palmerston's whenever the empire's prerogatives were challenged. Although Albert tried to assert the principle that the crown should be above politics, she remained, as one expects queens to be, a natural Tory. Thus she ignored the Chartist riots of 1839, largely because no minister could persuade her that the rabble mattered. Albert and Victoria concurred on one political principle, that a sovereign's duty was to save "her" people from the blunders of their elect ed representatives. By custom, the Queen ruled...
...Victoria was related to most of the crowned heads of Europe. She was also the last great British monarch presiding over the largest empire in history. Her personality-dominated by Albert-affected nearly all the great events of the 19th century, from the revolutions of 1848 to Britain's brave bungling in the Crimea. But when Albert died in 1861-of typhoid fever, from the fetid drains of Windsor Castle-she was left in an almost unimaginable isolation. "The words on all lips," runs the last sentence of Woodham-Smith's book, "the feelings in all hearts were...