My Beloved Queen!

Miles gave me Christopher Hibbert’s book, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, for Christmas and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading it over the past few weeks. I don’t usually read Biographies, so when I reached page 502 this evening I felt both accomplished and exceedingly more intelligent and informed!  

There was certainly a lot of provocative information in this volume, but for the sake of brevity (and fear that no one would read further) I’ve only chosen ten things that stood out to me:

• Queen Victoria liked to eat a lot and to eat fast (I can relate). She was always prone to chubbiness and became quite corpulent in her old age. When she was younger, Lord Melbourne suggested that she might try eating only when she was hungry. She retorted that “she was always hungry . . . so, if she followed his advice, she would be eating all day long” (77).  
• She liked to keep rooms cold (58 degrees, to be exact) and once, when she noticed that the temperature in her room had reached an offending 60 degrees, she had the flames of the fire doused. She didn’t seem to care that everyone else was freezing to death. Visitors to Balmoral, her Scottish Estate, were almost always cold and uncomfortable. Tsar Nicholas II said that it was, “colder than the Siberian wastes” (181).  

Balmoral: I guess Castles are supposed to be cold...

• She hated long sermons and would glare at the preacher and/or tap her foot if they got long-winded 
• She had one of those personalities where if someone told her to do something, she wouldn’t do it, just for the sake of being stubborn. Though she was domineering, the people she liked best seemed to be those who stood up to her. 
• She was prone to uncontrollable bursts of laughing. 
• She was a walking contradiction: self-centered, strong-willed, decisive, determined and opinionated; yet she was often described as shy, charming and childlike. 
• She was prone to violent outbursts of temper that her calm and collected husband, Prince Albert, found quite alarming. Often she would lose her temper with him and then storm after him when he tried to leave the room. This resulted in Albert shutting himself up to write long letters to Victoria in which he would try and reason with her. Eventually, she would calm down and be penitent for her outbursts.
• She was madly in love with Albert and though not very attractive herself, she always liked to have handsome men around her. 
• Upon discovering that she had become pregnant so soon after her marriage she described it as, “the ONLY thing” she dreaded, she was “furious,” it was “too dreadful,” “she could not be more unhappy” and to the Dowager Duchess of Saxe Coburg-Gotha she said, “I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months . . . . I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage” (130). By the time she had child number nine she had warmed up to the idea of having babies (she never veered from her opinion that giving birth made her feel like a “rabbit or a guinea-pig” though), but Victoria’s maternal instincts seem to have been a bit wanting at times. 
• She loved her dogs so much that she had them properly buried and had monuments erected in their honor.

The thing I love most about Queen Victoria is that she was a woman who didn’t pretend and didn’t mind being excessive in her feelings. She said exactly what she thought and didn’t try to hide either dislike, impatience, or the great love she felt for her country, her husband, her dog, and anyone else she felt particularly close to.