THE QUEEN

May 6
7 min read

Updated: Jul 24

Other than the city of Victoria and a few other places being named after her, I realized I knew little more about Queen Victoria. Even just a cursory survey reveals a pretty interesting life.

Queen Victoria was born Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (named after her godfather, Russian Tsar Alexander I) on May 24th, 1819. Her father, as you would expect, was an Englishman, Edward, Duke of Kent, and her mother German, Princess Maria Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfald.

What really matters is that as a little girl she wrote and illustrated a book. The work, titled The Adventures of Alice Laselles “by Alexandrina Victoria aged 10¾”, centers upon a child, little Alice who “had brown hair and hated toast” and was sent away to boarding school. The book was only published for the first time in 2015. Though Victoria is said to have been a prolific diarist, this looks like her only work of fiction. That said, who knows what she may have published? In her own time, as with centuries prior, most texts were presented without attribution to an author or at least not their proper name. This was not merely the behaviour of women, clergy, or gentry pursuing modesty, privacy, or access to “male” domains. Nor was it only a defensive tactic for the hurried or inept writer. Publishing anonymously was also a common practice for many of the most skilled and famous authors from this period. Victoria certainly liked to write, did so, and had the time and means to publish whatever she wished. To my mind, it’s almost stranger to assume she didn’t author books anonymously than to wonder if she had…

Whatever the odds are that she published in secret, as the fifth in line to the crown, no one considered Victoria a likely candidate for monarch. And yet, in 1837, at just 18 years of age, she did in fact become Queen. Even with a long history of male inheritance, England and the United Kingdom had, by my accounting, six female rulers prior to Victoria: Empress Matilda, Lady Jane Grey, Queen Mary I, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary II, and Queen Anne. Though all of their tenures were relatively brief, in time Victoria would establish a new precedent.

Three years after her coronation, Victoria married Albert, her first cousin, which was not an unusual move for royalty at that time. What was unusual was that it was Victoria who proposed to Albert. Those who've read the Queen's diaries and letters tell us she was not particularly fond of children or pregnancy. Despite this, she and Albert had nine kids: Victoria, Edward, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice.

On the matter of blood and bloodlines, Queen Victoria was actually the first known carrier of haemophilia, that cruel blood clotting disorder that came to be known as the “Royal disease”, caused by a mutation on the X chromosome or, if you read the private diaries of the royals in this time, divine punishment for the sins of privilege. (Though this is posited all over the place, I don’t actually think that’s true. There are ancient rabbinical writings acknowledging an inherited bleeding disorder and proposing that it was unnecessary to circumcise a baby boy if his brothers had previously died of the procedure. And in 1803, a Philadelphia physician, John Otto, published an article recognizing a hemorrhagic bleeding disorder runing in certain families and primarily affecting males…) Regardless, Victoria’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany, suffered from serious joint pain his whole life, a common symptom associated with haemophilia. While staying in the south of France one winter, on orders from the royal doctor, Leopold took a bad fall and died from blood loss. He was only 30 years old. Three of Victoria’s grandsons, Friedrich, Maurice, and Leopold also had premature ends related to their royal inheritance.

Prince Albert died relatively young. Not of a rare blood disorder but an extraordinarily common bout of typhoid, Albert passed away in December of 1861, just days after being diagnosed. He was aged 42. It is said the Queen never really recovered from the loss and spent the rest of her days in mourning — which would turn out to be a great deal many more days, indeed. Unlike her ancestors and loved ones who so often lived rather short lives, Queen Victoria lived to see the year 1901, surviving to 81 years of age. This meant her reign of 63 years and 216 days was the longest of any of her predecessors. This was also the longest regnal period of any female anywhere in history. That achievement was only recently bested by her own great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II.

It is surprising Queen Victoria lived so long as she reportedly survived many assassination attempts (though different sources cite very different numbers.) Several of those attempts involved a gun, but all of those left the Queen unscathed. However, on an evening in June of 1850, as she was returning to Buckingham Palace, a man approached the royal carriage and struck Victoria on the head with his cane. The final attempt on her life was made in March of 1882, by a Scottish poet named Roderick Maclean. He shot at Victoria while the royal carriage was leaving Windsor train station and was apprehended. This was actually the poet’s eighth such attempt and Maclean was determined to be of unsound mind and sentenced to life in an asylum. This was the fate of most of the Queen's would-be assassins, though several were exiled to Australia and some other distant lands, as was the fashion. It has been said that in the wake of an assassination attempt Victoria’s popularity among the British public would soar. The Queen, known to have used herself as bait to catch one of her assassins, said of the violence directed at her, that, "It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”

Though her life and time as monarch was notably long, Victoria herself was rather short. Zing! She stood just 1.5 meters tall (a little shy of five feet). It is also said that folks were impressed by the speed with which Victoria was able to eat and that in later life she grew to an inspiring circumference. Good on her, I say. If I were the Queen, it’s likely that in my senior years I would have begun a strict diet of maple-walnut ice cream and whiskey. Certainly so if it was the 19th century. Some say she had a 45-inch waist. Other accounts offer numbers up to 52 inches. Why can't we agree on anything? That doesn’t sound superhuman to me. I mean, have you been to a waffle house? Still, however wide her waist, all these various accounts are supported by recent auctions including Victoria’s nightgowns and pairs of her silk bloomers.

Don’t you want to know who invests in royal underpants and what they do with them? On that note, I hereby formally petition the City of Victoria to scrap its appalling civic flag. If you go looking for it you’ll discover why it’s of unknown authorship. Adopted in 1966, the flag incorporates a pair of angels standing atop a cloud; between them is a shield and medieval helmet with a crown on it; all of this is overseen by a dove who is herself topped by an all-seeing eye. In the foreground there is a banner sporting the Latin phrase "semper liber" which translates to "always free". Barf! A suitable replacement, obviously, would be to adopt as its new banner not a flag at all but a broad-waisted pair of Victorian under-linens. I’ll write the ad campaign for the change. It’ll contain themes of eating well, comfort, intimacy, and feminine power. Come on, what better symbol? I wonder what Roman Mars would think of the idea? Just seems like good design to me. It would approximate the Statue of Liberty, only better. And surely winning the next underwear auction at Sotheby's is probably less costly than hiring a design firm to conduct a rebrand…

The Queen lived in the most interesting of times. She was born into the First Industrial Revolution and died around the start of the Second. Both were particularly transformative for Britain, leading to rapid and radical changes in people’s lives. Though the power of the monarch had diminished considerably by her time and her role was increasingly symbolic or at most advisory, with many in government not even fond of that, as sovereign Victoria did oversee the empire’s abolition of slavery and its attempt to coerce those under its influence to join them. Later she also endorsed and then signed off on a dramatic increase in voting rights. With the Second Reform Act, England and Wales saw a doubling of the number of eligible voters by enfranchising the ever-expanding middle class. Under her watch the British Empire also saw its greatest expansion, to include vast swathes of North America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Folks will also point to Victoria as someone who did not do enough to help prevent or ameliorate the terrible famines in Ireland and India. Others will argue that she turned a blind eye to those who manufactured these events or at least made an already terrible situation worse for religious, political, and/or financial reasons. So, as ever, it’s all rather messy and complicated.

Regardless, hundreds of locations around the globe, largely places within the Commonwealth during her time, were named for her and still bear her name today. Some of those include: the Australian states of Queensland and Victoria; Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour; the colossal inland sea in East African named Lake Victoria; as well as Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. More than 300 other locations carry her name all over the globe. Canada alone has around 50 such places. Some of the most prominent are: Victoriaville, Quebec; Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan; Victoria Island, which straddles the boundary between the Northwest Territories and Nunavut and is the eighth-largest island in the planet (oh, and the island is home to world's largest third order island: an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island!); and, of course, British Columbia’s capital of Victoria.