After Albert’s untimely death from typhoid fever in 1861, Victoria descended into depression, and even after her recovery she would remain in mourning for the rest of her life.Ĥ. When she became queen and moved to Buckingham Palace, Victoria exiled her mother to a distant set of apartments and fired Conroy. Instead, Victoria relied on the counsel of her beloved uncle Leopold, as well as her governess Louise (afterward the Baroness) Lehzen, a native of Coburg. Third in line for the throne (after the duke of York, who died in 1827, and the duke of Clarence, third son of George III, who would become William IV), the future queen became estranged from her mother, who was driven by the influence of her advisor Sir John Conroy to isolate the young Victoria from her contemporaries as well as her father’s family. Her father died of pneumonia in 1820, when Victoria was less than a year old, and she was raised primarily at Kensington Palace, where she lived with her mother, the German-born Victoria Saxe-Saalfield-Coburg, duchess of Kent. Victoria was the only child of Edward, duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III. She was raised by a single mother, and later became a single mother herself. On the other hand, Victoria was notoriously disenchanted by pregnancy and childbirth, calling it the “shadow-side of marriage.”ģ.
Their marriage was passionate - she wrote in her diary that “Without him everything loses its interest” - and produced nine children. Victoria enjoyed Albert’s company from the beginning, and with Leopold’s encouragement she proposed to Albert (as she was the queen, he could not propose to her) on October 15, 1839, five days after he arrived at Windsor on a trip to the English court. He was her first cousin, the son of her mother’s brother their mutual uncle, the ambitious Leopold, engineered the meeting with the idea that the two should marry. Victoria first met her future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, when she was 16. She proposed to her husband, Prince Albert, and not vice versa. Some accounts claim she had a 50-inch waist by the end of her life, a conclusion supported by the impressive size of a nightgown and pair of bloomers (underwear) belonging to Victoria that were auctioned off in 2009. In her later years, she also grew to an impressive girth. Queen Victoria’s outspoken nature and imposing reputation belied her tiny stature–the monarch was no more than five feet tall.
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