Who was Queen Victoria? The queen who gave an era its name

Queen Victoria was the British monarch who reigned over the United Kingdom from 1837 until her death in 1901, and from 1876 she was also Empress of India. Her reign of 63 years and 7 months was the longest in British history until Elizabeth II passed it in 2015. It gave its name to the Victorian era, a time of industrial change, political reform and a vast empire, and during it the monarch's role settled into the largely symbolic one it has today.

In short

• Victoria came to the throne at 18 in 1837 and reigned until 1901, as Britain industrialized, widened the vote and expanded its empire.
• Real power moved from the Crown to Parliament and the prime minister during her reign; she kept influence, not control.
• Her nine children married into royal houses across Europe, so by 1914 her grandchildren sat on thrones on both sides of World War I.

Who was Victoria, in brief?

Victoria was born at Kensington Palace in London on 24 May 1819, the only child of Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. Her father died when she was eight months old. Her three uncles ahead of her in the line of succession had no surviving legitimate children, so she became heir. Her mother and the courtier John Conroy raised her under strict rules, the "Kensington System," which kept her almost never alone.

Year	Event
1819	Born at Kensington Palace, 24 May
1837	Becomes queen at 18 on the death of William IV, 20 June
1838	Crowned in Westminster Abbey, 28 June
1840	Marries her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
1845–52	The Great Famine in Ireland
1851	The Great Exhibition, Albert's project, in London
1857–58	The Indian Rebellion; the Crown takes over India from the East India Company
1861	Albert dies, aged 42; she wears black for the rest of her life
1867	The Second Reform Act widens the vote
1876	The Royal Titles Act makes her Empress of India, proclaimed in 1877
1887, 1897	Golden and Diamond Jubilees
1899–1902	The Second Boer War in South Africa
1901	Dies at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, 22 January, aged 81

She and Albert had nine children between 1840 and 1857. After his death she withdrew from public life for years, which made her unpopular for a time and fed a small republican movement. She returned to view in the 1870s, encouraged by her family and by the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, and her jubilees turned her into a symbol of nation and empire.

How did the monarch's role change during her reign?

Victoria began her reign with real political weight and ended it as a constitutional monarch who advised but did not decide. In 1839, when the Conservative leader Robert Peel asked her to replace some of her ladies of the bedchamber, who were married to his opponents, she refused, and he declined to form a government. That "Bedchamber Crisis" kept her favorite, Lord Melbourne, in office for two more years. No later monarch has kept a government in office that way.

Over the following decades, power moved to the House of Commons and to the prime minister, who answered to it. The Second Reform Act of 1867 and the Third of 1884 gave the vote to millions of working men, and the secret ballot came in 1872, the Royal Family's own history notes. Governments were made and unmade by elections and Commons votes, not by the queen's preferences. She disliked William Gladstone and said so in private, but she had to accept him as prime minister four times.

In 1867 the journalist Walter Bagehot summed up what was left. The sovereign, he wrote in The English Constitution, has "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Victoria used those rights energetically. She read state papers daily, wrote long letters to her ministers, and helped broker compromises between the Commons and the House of Lords over Irish church reform in 1869 and the 1884 Reform Act. The model of a monarch above party politics, with influence through advice, is the one Britain still has, and it is the core of the difference set out in parliamentary versus presidential systems.

What was the Victorian era?

The Victorian era is the name historians give to Britain during her reign, and it covers far more than the queen. Britain was the first industrial nation, and in these decades it became an urban one. Railways spread across the country from the 1830s, the telegraph linked cities and then continents, and factories made Britain for a time the world's leading manufacturer and trader.

Reform came alongside. Laws limited children's working hours in factories, the Corn Laws that kept bread prices high were repealed in 1846, public-health laws built sewers and clean water supplies after cholera epidemics, and an 1870 act began state elementary schooling in England and Wales. It was also an age of science and argument: Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The era's reputation for strict morals reflects the values of the middle classes and of Victoria's court, but it sat alongside deep poverty in the industrial cities.

What was the empire's record under Victoria?

The British Empire grew greatly during her reign, in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and its record includes both what its supporters celebrated, trade, railways, law and the suppression of the slave trade at sea, and violence and catastrophe. Britain had already abolished slavery in most of its colonies by an act of 1833, before her reign.

Several events of her reign remain central to how historians judge it:

• Ireland, 1845–52. When potato blight destroyed the main food of the Irish poor, between about 775,000 and 1.5 million people died of hunger and disease, and over a million emigrated. Historians have long criticized the government's relief as too limited and too tied to free-market ideas.
• India, 1857–58. A rebellion that began among Indian soldiers of the East India Company was suppressed with great brutality on both sides. Afterward the British government took direct control of India, and Victoria became Empress of India in 1876.
• India's famines. Droughts in 1876–78 and 1896–1900 led to famines in which millions died; estimates for 1876–78 alone run from 5.6 million to 9.6 million deaths. Historians argue over how much colonial policy, such as grain exports and strict limits on relief, turned crop failures into mass death.
• Wars of expansion. Britain fought the Opium Wars with China, in 1839–42 and 1856–60, to force open its markets, along with many colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
• South Africa, 1899–1902. In the Second Boer War, the British army moved civilians into camps; about 28,000 Boers, mainly women and children, died there, and around half that number of Black Africans died in separate camps, according to Britain's National Army Museum.

Victoria herself took a keen interest in India and the empire but did not set colonial policy, which was made by her governments. How to weigh the empire's record overall is a live argument among historians, covered more broadly in how history is written.

Why was she called the grandmother of Europe?

Victoria and Albert set out to strengthen Britain's ties through marriage, and their nine children married into royal and princely houses across Europe. They had 42 grandchildren. By the summer of 1914, many of them sat on or beside Europe's thrones:

Grandchild	Position in 1914	Descended through
Wilhelm II	German Emperor	Victoria, Princess Royal
George V	King of the United Kingdom	Edward VII
Alexandra Feodorovna	Empress of Russia, wife of Nicholas II	Alice
Victoria Eugenie	Queen of Spain	Beatrice
Maud	Queen of Norway	Edward VII
Sophia	Queen of Greece	Victoria, Princess Royal
Marie	Queen of Romania from October 1914	Alfred

Family ties did not keep the peace. Wilhelm II and George V were first cousins, and Nicholas II was George's first cousin through their Danish mothers. In the last days of peace Wilhelm and Nicholas exchanged telegrams signed "Willy" and "Nicky," and within weeks the three cousins' countries were at war. The real causes, alliances, rivalries and a crisis in the Balkans, are set out in what caused World War I.

Victoria also passed on something she could not have known about. She carried the gene for hemophilia, a disorder that stops blood from clotting. Her son Leopold had it, and her daughters Alice and Beatrice carried it into the Russian and Spanish royal families. The illness of the Russian heir, Alexei, drew his parents to the mystic Grigori Rasputin, whose influence damaged the Russian monarchy in its last years.

Check yourself

• Without looking back, explain how the Bedchamber Crisis shows what a monarch could still do in 1839, and why no later monarch did the same.
• What did Bagehot mean by the monarch's three rights?
• Name three of Victoria's grandchildren who held thrones in 1914, and explain why their family ties did not prevent war.

Sources

• Victoria (r. 1837–1901) — The Royal Family
• Queen Victoria (1819–1901) — BBC History
• The English Constitution — Walter Bagehot, 1867, Project Gutenberg
• The Boer War — National Army Museum
• Great Famine (Ireland) — Wikipedia
• Great Famine of 1876–1878 — Wikipedia