Queen Victoria

She was born Alexandrina Victoria in 1819, in a corner of a rambling old London palace, and for the whole of her childhood she was never left alone. Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother, together with an ambitious adviser, raised her under a strict set of rules known as the "Kensington System": she slept in her mother's room, was watched at every meal, and was forbidden to walk downstairs without a grown hand to hold. It was a lonely, closely guarded upbringing, designed to keep the small future queen dependent and controlled.

It failed. On the morning of 20 June 1837, the eighteen-year-old girl was woken before dawn and told that her uncle the King had died in the night. She was now queen. Her very first act was to ask for one hour entirely alone — the first she had ever been granted — and that same day she moved her bed out of her mother's room. The controlled child had become a sovereign, and she meant to rule as herself.

At first she leaned heavily on her clever, worldly Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who became a kind of political father to her. But a young, unmarried queen could not stand alone for long. The court, the country and her own family were all waiting for the same thing: a husband, a marriage, and above all an heir.

In 1840 she married her first cousin, a serious, handsome young German prince named Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Because she was queen, custom demanded that she propose to him, not the other way round — and she did. It became one of history's great royal love matches. She wore a simple white gown, unusual for a royal bride at the time, and unknowingly launched the fashion for the white wedding dress that endures to this day. Albert was her consort, her closest confidant and, in practice, her most trusted adviser; together they had nine children, whose marriages would eventually tie Victoria's blood into nearly every royal family in Europe.

Albert threw himself into public life. In 1851 he masterminded the Great Exhibition, a vast celebration of industrial invention housed in a glittering glass-and-iron building called the Crystal Palace; six million people came to marvel at the machines of the new age. These were the decades when Britain led the world in industry — railways spread like veins across the country, factories roared, and cities swelled with workers. Abroad, the empire expanded relentlessly, until it stretched across every continent and Victoria ruled, directly or indirectly, roughly a quarter of the people on Earth. In 1876 she was proclaimed Empress of India, the jewel of that empire.

Her own life was not without danger. Across her reign she survived several assassination attempts, most of them by lone men who fired at her carriage; each failed, and each seemed only to deepen the public's affection for her. For twenty years, queen and consort worked as a formidable partnership at the summit of the most powerful nation on earth.

In December 1861, Albert died of illness at the age of forty-two. Victoria was forty-two too, and the grief broke her open. She withdrew almost completely from public life, wore black for the remaining forty years of her life, and had Albert's rooms kept exactly as he had left them, with hot water brought each morning as though he might still return. For a decade she was so rarely seen in public that people began to grumble, and some questioned whether the country still needed a monarch at all.

Slowly she returned. A later Prime Minister, the charming Benjamin Disraeli, coaxed her back towards public duty and flattered her into the role of empress. In her long widowhood she also found unlikely companionship — first with a plain-spoken Scottish servant named John Brown, whose closeness to the queen set tongues wagging and caused no small scandal at court, and later with an Indian attendant, Abdul Karim, who taught her to write in Urdu. Both friendships scandalised her family precisely because they crossed the rigid lines of class and race that her age held sacred.

By the time of her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, she had become a beloved grandmother-figure to the whole empire, celebrated by cheering crowds who had never known any other ruler. She died in January 1901, aged eighty-one, after nearly sixty-four years on the throne — then the longest reign in British history. She had given her name to an entire era, and to the small, black-clad, iron-willed figure the world still pictures when it imagines a queen.