The Backstory: Queen Victoria: Drug Addict?

Queen Victoria, who ran the British Empire for 63 years, defined the buttoned-up, conservative era named for her… the Victorian Era. But it turns out… her many pleasures included opium, cocaine, and sex!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, we're talking about Victoria, Queen of England from June
of eighteen thirty seven until January nineteen oh one. She
was just eighteen years old when she took the throne,
and she defined the stuffy Victorian Era, which course was
named for her. I'm Patty Steele. But in private, Victoria
was a sexually charged attic who led the UK into

(00:21):
a drug war with China. Wow, that's next on the backstory.
The backstory is back. Her image is that of a
buttoned up, very proper lady. She was why it was
called the Victorian Era. Everything about that time was way
more conservative than the seventeen hundreds. Queen Victoria ran the

(00:45):
British Empire for over sixty three years. Her father and
all but one of her uncles had died, so she
inherited the throne when the last living uncle, King William four,
passed in eighteen thirty seven, Victoria was just eighteen. She
was kind of a dichotomy. On the one hand, she
had pretty much no personal warmth and was incredibly strict

(01:07):
about personal morality when it came to the people around
her and the people she ruled. But on the other hand,
she loved alcohol, drugs and sex. In fact, despite thoroughly
disliking children, she gave birth to nine of them. She
was furious that her first child came along exactly nine
months after she got married, since she just wanted her

(01:29):
husband all to herself before kids came along, not that
it mattered. She never spent much time with them anyway.
Her most telling comment about kids, she famously said, I
don't dislike babies, though I think very young ones are
rather disgusting. She felt repulsed by the idea of breastfeeding too.
But Victoria was madly in love with her husband, Prince Albert,

(01:52):
who happened to be her first cousin. She gave him
numerous nude paintings and relished every minute with him. When
he died after just twenty one years of marriage, she
spent the rest of her life over forty years in mourning,
wearing only black and never attending parties or any real
public functions. But in addition to several suspected lovers, Victoria

(02:15):
had some other private pleasures, one of which actually led
to war. She loved indulging in opium as well as cocaine,
and as was the custom those days, she mixed the
opium with alcohol to make a pain relieving tonic that
they called laudanum. Keep in mind, she had the best
doctor's money could buy, and it was probably a lot

(02:37):
easier to have a high as a kite clean rather
than one that was not amused. She was a definite grouch. Now.
If the opium was not working its magic and she
needed a little pick me up, she had sweets laced
with cocaine. Victoria was really enthusiastic about this treat and
even shared some of this with a very young Winston

(02:57):
Churchhill when he and his family came to stay with
her at her Scottish castle Balmoral. On top of that,
when she had monthly cramps or when she was pregnant,
which she was for most of the twenty years she
was married, the pain was sometimes unbearable, so what better
way to fix it than with a little bit of weed.
She was into that too, And also it was Queen

(03:19):
Victoria herself that was one of the first women ever
to use chloroform when giving birth. She said the chloroform
was delightful beyond measure. Of course, this was at a
time when there were no real drug laws in place,
so she wasn't exactly breaking the rules. After her husband died,
Victoria spent a lot of time at Balmoral and apparently

(03:39):
had a close, I mean really close relationship with her servant,
John Brown. He was as much of a character as
Victoria and would often refer to the Queen as woman.
The pair often isolated themselves from anyone else who was
staying at Balmoral at the time. No one knew much
about their relationship, but interesting the Queen's youngest daughter, Beatrice,

(04:02):
had all of her mother's diaries from those years destroyed
when Victoria died in nineteen oh one. When John Brown
died years before Victoria, she went into a state of
mourning for the second time in her life, and after
she died, she left instructions that a lock of John's hair,
his photograph, a handkerchief, and some letters should be placed

(04:24):
in her coffin, along with keepsakes of Prince albert Io.
The photograph was hidden from public view by a bunch
of flowers clutched in her hand, along with a family
wedding ring John had given her. So their secrets are
buried in the Royal creekt at Windsor Castle. So how
did Victoria's love of drugs lead to war. Well. China

(04:46):
at that time was one of the world's most important
economic powerhouses and fiercely protective of their ancient culture. They
were also deeply wary of foreign interference. For Britain, trade
with China was essential. The Britain loved Chinese tea, porcelain
and silk, and spent a fortune on it. Problem is,
China didn't want anything Britain had to offer. Enter opium,

(05:10):
a dark solution Britain came up with to balance the
scales of trade. England controlled India in those days, and
poppies were a massive crop there, which were processed into opium.
The opium would be loaded into trunks and onto ships
owned by the British East India Company. It was then
delivered to China, where it slowly began to change the culture.

(05:33):
Opium permeated every level of Chinese society, from nobles and
scholars to farmers and laborers. Social effects were horrifying. Family
structures eroded, communities collapsed, and productivity fell dramatically. Entire villages
were consumed by addiction, and corruption surged as officials bribed

(05:54):
by opium dealers allowed smuggling operations to continue even taking
part in it themselves, sometimes realizing the crisis. Chinese authorities
tried to crack down, but nothing worked, so Aha go
to the source. In eighteen thirty nine, they publicly destroyed
over twenty thousand chests of confiscated opium. Queen Victoria and

(06:17):
Britain were furious. It eventually led to the First Opium War.
Britain quickly won the conflict due to their superior naval
technology and huge amount of the best weaponry. By eighteen
forty two, the Treaty of Nan King was signed, forcing
China to seed Hong Kong to Britain, legalized the drug trade,

(06:38):
and opened five ports to foreign trade. Britain controlled Hong
Kong for the next one hundred and fifty six years
until nineteen ninety seven. It's really fascinating. History is rarely
straightforward or totally heroic. A lot of times, it's kind
of a tangled web of motives and consequences. The Opium Wars,

(06:59):
with their involving Queen Victoria's personal drug habits, shows just
how complex it can be. I hope you like the
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(07:19):
me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on
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production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and

(07:42):
Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer
Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
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Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't

(08:03):
know you needed to know.