Queen Victoria was born on May 24, 1819. She was the daughter
of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, minor son of the reigning King George
III, and Victoire of Saxe-Coburg, a German princess. Both her father
and grandfather died in 1820, the year her uncle succeeded as King
George IV. When George died without issue in 1830, Victoria stood
to inherit the throne after the daughter of her second royal uncle,
King William IV, died in infancy. William himself died in 1837,
and the eighteen-year-old princess became Queen Victoria of Great
Britain and Ireland on June twenty that year.
Victoria was a virgin queen until February 10, 1840, when
day she married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
Victoria bore nine children within the next seventeen years, among them
the future King Edward VII. Albert was an avid patron of the arts,
sciences, and burgeoning industries, and he helped organize the
famous Great Exhibition of 1851 at the "Crystal Palace." Victoria
doted on her husband, who influenced her greatly and became her
most trusted adviser in matters of state. The other major influence
early in her reign was her first Prime Minister William Lamb, second
Viscount Melbourne, of the liberal Whig party. These early years
of Victorian rule saw major reforms in British education, with the
Grammar Schools Act of 1840 and the founding of Queen's College
for women in London in 1848.
When Prince Albert died in 1861, the queen was devastated
and went into deep mourning. She rarely appeared in public until
the end of the 1860s, and during this time Great Britain saw a
major movement in favor of republican government and for the abolition of
monarchic powers. However, with the help of the Conservative party's
Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to
1880, the queen eventually reassumed a more public and influential
role in the government.
Throughout the middle years of her reign, Victoria presided
over Britain's involvement in the Crimean War (1854–56), non-intervention
in the Prussia-Austria-Denmark war of 1864–1866, and the aversion
of a Franco- German war in 1875. She also presided over major domestic
reforms in the British government, including the Second Reform
Act of 1867 and the Representation of Peoples Act of 1884, both
of which greatly expanded the population of her subjects permitted
to vote in parliamentary elections. Victorian England also saw
great advances in commerce and industry, aided by the spread of
railroad lines throughout Great Britain and the laying of the first
trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866.
During Victoria's reign, the British overseas Empire achieved
its greatest size and power. The queen added the title Empress
of India to her crown in 1876. She was a strong supporter of empire,
which often pitted her against the Liberal party's William Gladstone, prime
minister from 1869–1874, 1880–1885, and again from 1886–1894. She
had better relations with her last prime minister, the Marquess
of Salisbury, also a strong supporter of empire and opponent of
Irish Home Rule, which was one of the most contentious issues of
the day.
Victoria lived to celebrate both her Golden Jubilee in
1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. These events were celebrated
as great public affairs, and by this time the queen had achieved
great popularity in Britain and she had come to be seen as the
great symbol of the British Empire. The last years of her reign
were preoccupied with the Boer War in southern Africa (1899–1902).
After sixty-three years as queen—the longest reign of
any English monarch—Victoria died on January 22, 1901. She was
eighty-one years old.
