Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria was the longest-lived British monarch before 9th September 2015, when she was overtaken by Elizabeth II.

Born 1819; succeeded William IV 1837; married Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 1840; died 1901.

Queen Victoria came to the throne aged 18, succeeding her uncle by virtue of being the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (1767–1820), the (4th son and 5th child of George IV) and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She ruled Britain at the time when it was Greatest, presiding over an Empire which covered around a quarter of the earth's land and ruling about a quarter of the earth's population. (In 1876, she formally adopted the title of Empress of India, being known as Victoria RI (for Regina Imperatrix, Latin for 'Queen Empress'). Her marriage with Prince Albert appears to have been a love-match, though fully appropriate in the conventional sense: they had nine children at the time of his death from typhoid fever in 1861. She was deeply affected by this, and became a virtual recluse ('the Widow of Windsor') until the 1870s; she continued to wear the black clothes of full mourning for the rest of her life. The name of the royal family was changed from Hanover to Saxe-Coburg on the marriage. Victoria was always conscientious - she had a keen sense of duty - and the two great Prime Ministers of the second half of her reign, the Conservative Disraeli and the Liberal Gladstone, managed to bring her more into the public eye. (She found Disraeli far more congenial.) Her own life was moral, even strait-laced - Victorian is still an adjective for living under a tightly limited and precise, even stifling, code of Christian morals and repression. She was undoubtedly serious and earnest about matters moral and political; but she was not a prude, and enjoyed good humour, although she preferred to be depicted without a smile. The remark often attribute to her (using the royal we) - "We are not amused" - appears to be apocryphal.