Queen Victoria of Great Britain
Victoria reigned for sixty-three years, gave her name to an age, and spent nearly half of it in mourning. Born in 1819, she was fifth in line at birth and became heir when three uncles died without surviving legitimate children. She was raised under the Kensington System, a regime of isolation devised by her mother and her mother's adviser Sir John Conroy, under which she never slept alone, never went downstairs without holding a hand, and never met other children. She became queen at eighteen in 1837 and dismissed Conroy within hours. She married her cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg in 1840, proposing to him herself because protocol required it, and had nine children while disliking pregnancy and infants intensely. Albert took over much of the working monarchy — the Great Exhibition of 1851 was his — and she deferred to him almost completely. He died of typhoid or possibly a chronic illness in 1861, and she withdrew from public life for a decade, wearing black for the remaining forty years and keeping his rooms as they had been. The seclusion made her genuinely unpopular and produced a republican movement in the 1870s. She was brought back into public view by Disraeli, who made her Empress of India in 1876 and flattered her expertly, and she was thereafter the symbol of an empire that covered a quarter of the world. The monarchy's political power contracted sharply during the reign, and its ceremonial and symbolic role was invented to fill the gap. She died in 1901, and her descendants sat on most of Europe's thrones.
- Lived: 1819 CE – 1901 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: queen, empress_of_india
