July 6, 2011 • 27 mins
She's one of Britain's best-loved queens, but Victoria's parentage made her an unlikely heir. When she became queen at 18, she rebelled from her upbringing. But an early marriage to her cousin Albert changed the way she lived and ruled.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdie and I'm Delina Chalk. Rewarding and to me,
it really seems like Queen Victoria is our classic background
podcast character. We joked before that she just pops up
(00:23):
when you least expect her. She really does. I think
somebody even suggested once that we have some stock music
noise or whenever Queen Victoria appears, But until recently, she
hadn't gotten a podcast to herself. Earlier this spring, we
finally did an episode on Victoria focusing on her last
great friendship, which was a relationship with her Indian teacher
(00:44):
of Dual Kareem, And that was sort of a strange,
lesser known side of Victoria's life, and it was also
late in her life. By the time Kareem knew Victoria,
she was an elderly woman. In the period we focused
on was she was in her seventies and her eighties.
It was it was late in Victoria's rain. Yeah, but
listeners are usually more interested in the queen's early years,
probably largely because of the recent film Young Victoria, which
(01:07):
I'm sure, a lot of listeners have seen it's all
about romance, ribbons and no nine kids in the picture
yet for Victoria and Albert. So we're going to talk
about that side of Victoria's life, her romance with her
husband specifically, but we'll also revisit one of our common themes,
which is that of the sad royal childhood, and to
understand that, we have to first look at why Victoria
(01:29):
became a queen in the first place. Yeah, so it's
pretty remarkable that the throne went to Victoria because her
father was the fourth adult son of George the Third. Usually,
if you have that many kids, the throne isn't going
to go to the daughter of the fourth son. However,
George the third sons weren't that inclined to marry and
produce legitimate offspring at least, so consequently, this crisis developed
(01:53):
in eighteen seventeen. So George the Third and his wife
Charlotte had fifteen children, and for many years their eldest
son had acted as regent for his insane father. He
was known as the Prince Regent and later George the Fourth,
So the Prince Regent had a legit air of his
own a daughter named Charlotte, and for a long time
she was really the darling of the country, and it
(02:14):
really seemed like the succession was guaranteed when she married
the future King of the Belgians, Leopold. But in eighteen
seventeen and age twenty one, she died in childbirth and
her son was stillborn. So two generations right there wiped
out at one time and the country went into a
deep morning. Okay, so there's still Airs that it wasn't
like they're just are no children around. But the Airs
(02:36):
are mostly middle aged princes and they don't have kids,
so the race is off. The first prince of the blood,
the first son of George, the third um to make
an air, gets his debts canceled by the Prince Regent.
So a pretty good deal because a lot of these
guys are into gambling and that's living anyways. Yeah, but
(02:57):
it's not as easy as it seems, right, No, it's
not at all. So the Prince Regent will obviously start
with him. He's the eldest son. He was separated from
his wife, so there's no chance there of another air.
The same went for the next in line, the Duke
of York and after him, there's the Duke of Clarence,
the third son, so he took took this challenge up,
(03:17):
if you guys call it that, and he married a
German princess, but unfortunately none of their children survived infancy.
So the next son in line, it all came down
to the Duke of Kent and he dumped his longtime
mistress and married a woman who had already had children,
so he knew she was fertile, Victoria Mary Louisa, who
(03:39):
was the daughter of the Duke of Saxe Coburg Salfeld,
and she was also the widow of German prince So bingo,
we have our winners in this couple. Finally. Yeah, it
sounds so unromantic when you say fertile when you put
it that way, but that is what it was all
about going for. And once the Duchess became pregnant, the
(04:00):
Duke of Kent started making plans for the child to
be born on English soil. They'd been living in Bavaria
at the time, and he wrote that they need to
get back in order to quote render the child. My
wife bears virtually as well as legally English, but the
regent hadn't exactly followed through on that whole cancel your
debt steal, and the Duke couldn't find the funds to
(04:20):
move his entourage until March of eighteen nineteen, and so
by the time the Duchess actually got back on English soil,
she was already eight months along. Yeah, they had trouble
getting lodgings too, because these brothers, the Prince Regent and
the Duke of Kent, really didn't get along very well.
But the Prince Regent does grant them apartments in Kensington Palace.
And on May eighteen nineteen, Alexandrina Victoria was born, and
(04:44):
she was this big, healthy baby and things looked promising.
She got her name though the Alexandrina, apart from her godfather,
who was the Russians, are Alexander the first and the
story behind that is is kind of strange and also
further speaks to this feud between the brothers. Regent had
forbidden Victoria's parents to use any of the standard names
(05:04):
that royal baby girls were being called. Charlotte Elizabeth Georgina
can kind of see his rationale behind Charlotte not having
the new heir named the same thing as his deceased daughter,
but still a weird stipulation, and as a result, the
people of England still weren't entirely sure what her name
was even up to the morning of her accession at
(05:25):
age eighteen. Yeah, Alexandrina or Victoria, even though she had
actually always gone by Victoria as a girl in her home.
But the little Princess was really born just in the
nick of time though for this family, because only eight
months after her birth, her father, the Duke of Kent, died,
and so six days after that, George the Third died,
(05:47):
and that made the Prince Regent finally George the Fourth,
and that made Victoria third in line to the throne,
after her two uncles. But she gets even closer as
the years go by and these uncles to to die off.
When the eldest of the two uncles died in she
was obviously one step closer, and eventually, when George the
(06:07):
Fourth died and her uncle, the Duke of Clarence, became
William the Fourth, Victoria was next in line from the throne.
So from birth she was raised to be a likely queen,
although not a guaranteed queen. It it you still didn't
know if somebody might have a kid between her birth
and when she came to the throne. Yeah, but it's
(06:28):
interesting even though she was raised as a queen the
whole time, nobody really told her of her position until
she was about ten years old. Though. There's that classic
story where she had a family tree inserted into a
history book and studied it and suddenly pronounced I will
be good, And so that's probably likely untrue. Yeah, they're
two competing versions if that story's a pretty good story,
(06:50):
but it's a little hard to back up. And Victoria
herself remembered the realization as being a lot more dramatic,
and and that makes sense to me for this girl
who was not raised to to know she was going
to be queen. She said, I cried much on learning
it and even deplored this contingency. Yeah, but it seems
like a really natural reaction, as you pointed out, because
her life turned out to be pretty rigid because of
(07:11):
this future of hers um. She had lots of lessons,
languages like Italian and Latin, writing, history, music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, religion.
She learned all kinds of things. Yes, maybe that wasn't
so bad, but it did make her life pretty busy,
but she also didn't get a lot to eat. She
had bread and milk served to her in a silver bowl,
(07:31):
and she had a really early bedtime, lots of exercise,
and most notably strict isolation. Yeah, so we could we
could add the lessons and the not much food in
the early bedtime and the exercise into the that's kind
of standard for the lives of many British aristocratic children
at this time. But this strict isolation was something unique,
(07:53):
and it was the design of her mother's companion and adviser,
a guy named Sir John con Roy, and the Duchess herself,
and they called it the Kensington system, and it was
the way Victoria was brought up. It was a course
of rigorous private studies and isolation from her peers. And consequently,
Victoria's main companion during her early years was her elder
(08:16):
half sister, Fyodora, her her mother's daughter by her first marriage.
And after Fyodora left to Mary, so she was quite
a few years older than Victoria. Uh, Victoria was pretty
distraught and turned to her governess, a woman named Louise Latezon,
and she really became her her main companion and just
sort of heard her defense against her this conniving Conroy
(08:40):
character who was such a strong influence in her household. Yeah,
and she really needed it because Conra even kept her
away from her own family. He encouraged the Duchess to
keep Victoria away from her quote wicked uncles, and by
isolating Victoria from her paternal family, the royal family, right,
Conroy hoped to create a better position for himself should
(09:01):
William the fourth die before Victoria's majority, And that was
really the plan because hopefully, if hopefully her Conroy, if
William the fourth died, then the Duchess of Kent would
become regent, and because Conroy controlled the Duchess of Kent,
he would essentially rule England. So it was all a
play for power, definitely, And at one point, when Victoria
was sick with the serious illness, Conroy and the Duchess
(09:23):
even tried to pressure the sixteen year old princess into
extending her minority from aged eighteen to age twenty one.
She refused, though, yeah, with the help of her governess.
Actually that was something that really endeared the woman to her.
But the Kensington system obviously couldn't maintain this strict privacy
constantly I mean, she was a queen to be and
so in eighteen thirty the Duchess of Kent decided that
(09:46):
she wanted to sort of validate her own education system
but also show off her daughter to Victoria's future people.
So she set up this series of examinations by three clerics,
and Victoria performed really well. The Duchess was valid validated
because I think the cleric said, yeah, we we couldn't.
You couldn't do anything better. She's being educated just as
(10:07):
she should be. But the Duchess also arranged for Victoria
to travel some and see her country, and that was
pretty a pretty major event in young Victoria's life. Yeah,
And in eighteen thirty two, before Victoria toward the Midlands
and North Wales, she was given a journal by her
mother and she kept a journal for the rest of
her life. I think we talked about that a lot
in the Victoria a Dual Caream episode, so we know
(10:29):
that she eventually even starts die like journaling in Hindustani,
which is pretty impressive. Yeah. But what's interesting is when
you look at these early journals, sometimes the politely restrained
entries in Victoria's her journals of that time period contrast
with the quote behavior books that she kept from eighteen
thirty and on for her governess. And these books basically,
(10:51):
I mean, you told me a little bit about them, Sarah.
It's basically like her governess wanted her to judge herself
so right down on her her opinion, on her conduct,
on her how she performed in her studies for the day,
and do that every single day, So a real self judgment.
So just to illustrate some of the differences you'd see
(11:11):
between the two. Sometimes um in one behavior book entry
from September thirty two, she wrote that she had been
very very, very very horribly naughty with many exclamation points,
all caps to all caps. But on the same day
as the horribly naughty entry, all she wrote in her
own journal is that the heat was intolerable. Yeah, So,
I mean, I think this gives you sort of a
(11:33):
sense of victoria as a young girl. She's she's sort
of dramatic. She has this dramatic flare to her, maybe melodramatics,
and would say, but she's also good at at either
concealing things or or just sort of sort of playing
it cool, you know, not divulging everything in her journals,
maybe because I don't know, afraid a parent might read it,
(11:54):
or just practicing for the restraint she would need as queen.
So she had a only childhood, but not a completely
miserable one. She had a ton of pets. She liked
plain dress up, she liked writing. She wrote compositions inspired
by popular novels, and she also watercolored and would paint
costumes and poses after attending the theater or concerts. And
(12:16):
she was also strongly attached to her uncle Leopold, her
mother's brother and the one time husband of the Charlotte
who had died in childbirth, the one we mentioned earlier
in this episode. He lived in Surrey until becoming King
of the Belgians in eighteen thirty one. And it's through
Leopold's work that she meets her future match. Yeah, so,
only three months after Victoria's birth, her mother and Leopold's
(12:38):
other brother, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Saalfeld, also had
a child named Albert, and it's it's really kind of cute.
Victoria is born at the beginning of the summer and
Albert's born at the end of the summer. But Albert
was the second son with no fortune coming his way,
so all along from his birth, his family kind of
hoped for this match with cousin Victoria since she clearly
(13:00):
had some good things coming to her. So for Victoria's
seventeenth birthday, the plans there. The family starts to try
to put this plan into action, and Albert and his
brother Ernest and his father all visited England. But Albert
was kind of an awkward teen at this point. He
sounds really awkward. Actually, he had fainting spells, um, he
(13:20):
didn't really like dancing. And Victoria was was sort of
a vivacious young girl even though she was raised in
such strict isolation, and she really had more of a
crush on these three visiting Persian princes anyway, So we're
gonna put Albert on the back burner. He didn't make
a great first impression, but apparently she put him on
the back burner as well. She did too, but um,
(13:43):
we need to move on anyways, because Victoria had some
pretty big changes coming her way. Yes Early on June
twentie eight thirty seven, King William the Fourth died. He
had managed to stay alive just long enough for his
niece to reach majority. She was barely eighteen when he
passed away, and after being told of her new position,
Victoria met with the Privy Council and they were really
(14:05):
impressed with her. She carried herself well, she spoke well.
Plus it was sort of romantic to have this teenage
queen well. And she's really an unknown quantity at this
point because of the Kensington system and the way she's
been raised. But for Victoria it was just a total relief.
She was free at last, and she moved to Buckingham
Palace and for the first time she had a room
to herself, and she's sort of on bad terms with
(14:28):
her mother because of the way she had brought John
Conroy into her life and all of that, and pushed
her mother away into far away apartments in Buckingham Palace
and sent Conroy off entirely and really enjoyed her independence
and sort of lived it up as you might expect
a teenager too, but later said it was the least
sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life. So she
(14:52):
she clearly realized that she overindulged a little bit in
her newfound freedom, didn't maybe take her role as seriously
as as she wished. She had. Later and there were
some errors that she made. In that early period. She
started a close relationship, for example, with Lord Melbourne, then
Prime Minister. He boosted herself confidence but also shaped her politics.
(15:14):
She became a Whig at this time and taught her
to partly ignore social problems or write them off as
the issues of agitators. Yeah, and that partisanship, which of
course the Queen was not supposed to be overtly partisan
like that really led to trouble. And two crises broke
out in eighteen thirty nine, And the first was the
Hastings affair. And this is just sort of a scandals
(15:37):
would be pregnancy story, but basically Victoria forced Lady Flora Hastings,
who was a maid of honor with Tory connection so
divergent from Victoria's own politics, to undergo a pregnancy examination
and it turned out that Hastings was not pregnant. That
was sort of scandal number one. Then within a year
Hastings died of a tumor that hadn't been diagnosed by
(16:00):
Victoria's physician, scandal number two. While that's going on, though,
there's another another issue brewing. Yeah, the bed chamber crisis,
which occurred when Melbourne resigned in eighteen thirty nine and
was replaced by Conservative Sir Robert Peel, but Victoria wanted
to keep her old wig Ladies of the bed Chamber,
so Peel wouldn't take office, and this caused a huge scandal. Yeah,
(16:23):
so Victoria's desire to be independent, that's probably kind of
at root of the two scandals we just mentioned, but
independent as in single too, and that desire did not
go over well with Parliament. With her people, she needed
an air so Victoria reluctantly started to interview eligible Protestant
princes and it was kind of slim pickings. So in
(16:45):
eighteen thirty nine she invited cousin Albert back to England
from his studies at the University of Bonn. And he's
not an awkward teenagerney more. Victoria's smitten. She wrote in
her journal, Albert really is quite charming and so extremely handsome,
a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waste.
(17:05):
My heart is quite going. Yeah, he was the one
and she liked what she saw, and since he was
not allowed to, Victoria proposed marriage just a few days later,
and the couple were married that February February tenth, eighteen forty,
and it wasn't the most popular marriage match that could
have been. At least at first. Parliament wasn't pleased that
the Crown was about to get even more German. That's
(17:28):
how they saw it. The couple even spoke German at home,
so that was a big deal. And also the British
aristocracy found Albert to be overly moral, to academic and
to artistic. But the marriage also ironed out some of
Victoria's controversy before. We're happy at least that she was
married and there would be an heir in the future. Yeah,
and it's certainly changed the way Victoria planned to rule,
(17:49):
which we're going to look at as well. Yeah, and
this is about where the movie Young Victoria leaves off.
I think they have the conjoined desks and it's super cute,
but that's not exactly how things were going. So the
desks did exist, though I was pleased to want to that.
So for the first few months, Victoria was really determined
(18:10):
to stay independent. She she liked ruling on her own,
and so they did work at those conjoined tandem desks,
but Albert only got to block her signature, which for
a very ambitious and talented and educated man. This was
pretty frustrating, but of course we all know Victoria starts
to have lots of kids and biology really changed the
(18:33):
course of things for her. She got pregnant within weeks
of the wedding, and bit by bit, Albert started to
take on more important tasks. He would send dispatches, he'd
attend meetings with ministers, he even got the key to
the secret boxes. And over time he also started to
change the way Victoria thought about things and affect her politics.
(18:55):
Even her governess was dismissed, who had been the former
may influence in her life. And in eighteen forty two
there was an attempt on her life, and and the
kids just kept on coming too, right, well, there were
so many of them. Were just going to list off
their names really quickly. Princess Royal Victoria also known as Vicky,
Prince of Wales, um the later Edward, the Seventh, Princess Alice,
(19:19):
Prince Alfred, Princess Helena, Princess Louise, Prince Arthur, Prince Leopold,
and Princess Beatrice, and the grandchildren started arriving only two
years after her last child was born, so she did
not have a gap in mothering so to speak. No,
she really didn't, And because she was out of commission
so much of every year, every single year, Albert really
(19:41):
took on an almost regent like role, and he did
in fact get a regency bill that allowed him to
act in the event of Victoria's death. Are in capacity.
But by eighty five, an observer named Charles Greville wrote, quote,
it is obvious that while she has the title, he
is really discharging the functions of the sovereign. He is
the king to all intents and purposes. And Albert saw
(20:04):
his role though as adviser to the Queen. As he
later told the Duke of Wellington, his goal was to
quote to be the natural head of the family, superintendent
of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole
confidential adviser in politics, and only assist in her communications
with the officers of the government, her private secretary and
(20:24):
permanent minister. But he do all that at the expense
of his own identity, and pretty much working himself to
death in the process. YEA. So he wasn't going after
titles or or public recognition. He just wanted to play
this role and do it for Victoria and to to
hopefully do good at least that's that's how he saw it.
(20:45):
So their marriage, though, was generally considered to be a
happy one and something that really set a model for
people in the Victorian era. They focused heavily on educating
their children. They had these sort of middle class tastes,
especially if it Torria, because Albert did, after all, really
like science and technology and art and that sort of thing.
But Victoria liked reading Dickens novels and going to circuses
(21:08):
and seeing wax works that sort of thing. And the
couple also liked their privacy, and they're really famous for that.
Albert built residences at Osborne and Balmoral Castle for them
to escape too, and and as we I think we
mentioned in the Cream Abduel episode, those retreats really become
even more important maybe to Victoria in her in her
(21:30):
later life right. But Victoria also shouldn't be thought of
as a model Victorian wife and mother figure. She had
serious postpartum depression at times, and she did not like
being pregnant, and she really didn't like babies that much
in general. She didn't even really like kids. She called
pregnancy the quote shadow side of marriage and compared herself
(21:50):
to a cow or dog while she was pregnant. So
so that's kind of shocking, i'd say, coming from someone
who her identity is all hied. With these family portraits
of her and Albert and all of their little tiny
kids sitting around the Christmas tree or sitting around at
home relaxing, it does seem different. But I mean it's
just to show that this couple had an effect on
(22:13):
on their country, for sure, but they also led a
private personal life too. Yeah, but part of her dislike
of childbirth was that she wished she had gotten more
time with Albert alone. In late eighteen sixty one, Albert,
who was forty two years old at the time but
much older looking, raced off to Cambridge to chastise his
eldest son over an affair he'd had with a prostitute.
(22:35):
And after that, Albert pneumonia and took to bed. Doctors
diagnosed what he had as typhoid fever. But that was
probably a mistake, um modern analysis shows, and there hadn't
been typhoid fever in the area at all, right, and
so but at the time that's what they thought it was,
and they dosed him with Brandy until he died, and
though Victoria always blamed the death on their son, Albert
(22:57):
had known for some time that he wasn't feeling very well.
So it was probably stomach cancer, I think, is what
we now think he had. He had definitely been sick
with something. But Victoria, as as we talked about in
the last episode, and as most people know, went into
deep mourning after Albert's death, and she she said of him.
Without Albert, everything loses its interest. But we need to
(23:20):
talk about their legacy too, because the idea of the
happy couple of Victoria and Albert almost emerges more after
the fact because well alive, Albert had been often unpopular
and sometimes even used as a scapegoat because he was foreign.
Victoria's decision to name him as Prince Consort, for instance,
in eighteen fifty seven, had been terribly mocked. She tried
(23:43):
to justify it by saying, well, our adult children are
going to start to outrank him because he's a foreign prince.
But people just thought it was a ridiculous decision. But
over time it became clear that he had greatly assisted
Victoria and helped shape her monarchy, and that they're happy
and strong marriage had influenced the country's tastes and morals,
so people started to think on a couple fondly, especially
(24:06):
by the queen's old age and by the height of
her popularity, So the perception of them together definitely changed
over the years, and and looking back to they left
quite a legacy. Albert's grand achievement was, of course, the
eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and
even over the years that people looking back on that
realized what a high point it had been for England.
(24:27):
And another great legacy of theirs is the Victoria and
Albert Museum, which sort of originally came out of the
Great Exhibition, but was was named the Victoria and Albert
Museum really really late in Victoria's life, clearly a sort
of touching tribute for her. I'm sure. Yeah. I have
to say, I personally love this story. I think it's
(24:48):
a cool love story. It is. It is a nice
love story, and I mean, I feel like so many
of the royal couples we talked about just have kind
of miserable lives, so it's nice to find one that, um,
they really seemed happy together and they stayed together, talking
about love and relationships is actually a great way to
ease on into listener mail. We actually picked today's listener
(25:13):
mail because it goes along with our topic today and
also because it's kind of a first for us, don't
you think, Sarah, it's definite. It's a letter from Jim
in Akron, Ohio, and he writes, dear to Blein and Sarah.
I grew up on a romantic story of President McKinley's
proposal to his future wife Ida. They often took kara
drides together during their courtship, and after one such ride,
(25:36):
McKinley lamented how every one of these outings ended with
them leaving in opposite directions. When she shared the sentiment,
he said, quote, so what do you say we go
the same way from now on? And they were happily
married thereafter. I haven't been able to find any confirming
source for this story, so it may just be cherry
tree folklore. But I was wondering if you might be
(25:56):
able to let us know while you're at it, could
you please announced that I love Julie very much and
I want to go the same way with her for
the rest of my life. She's my best friend and
true soul mate, as proven by the fact that she'll
be impressed that I proposed to her via stuff you
missed in history class. Julie, will you marry me? So
a podcast proposal, and we are now all eagerly awaiting
(26:20):
a response. Find out what happened from Jim and Julie.
Definitely let us know, guys, and I guess, but I
mean that's all we have to say. That's the way
to end the podcast. I don't think anything we could
say would be cooler than that, so we might as
well just get out of here. Um, if you would
like to write us, um and tell us anymore about Victoria,
(26:41):
any questions that you have. If you have the answer
to the McKinley story, I was not able to find it, Jim,
I'm sorry, but if anyone else knows about McKinley's proposal
to Ida, please write in Where History Podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or you can look us up
on Facebook or on Twitter at Misston History. Yeah, and
if you want to see pictures and learn a little
bit more about other nice historical couples, we have a
(27:03):
great slide show on our home page. You can find
it by searching for historical couples At www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how st
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has a rise.
(27:27):
Download it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdie and I'm Delina Chalk. Rewarding and to me,
it really seems like Queen Victoria is our classic background
podcast character. We joked before that she just pops up
(00:23):
when you least expect her. She really does. I think
somebody even suggested once that we have some stock music
noise or whenever Queen Victoria appears, But until recently, she
hadn't gotten a podcast to herself. Earlier this spring, we
finally did an episode on Victoria focusing on her last
great friendship, which was a relationship with her Indian teacher
(00:44):
of Dual Kareem, And that was sort of a strange,
lesser known side of Victoria's life, and it was also
late in her life. By the time Kareem knew Victoria,
she was an elderly woman. In the period we focused
on was she was in her seventies and her eighties.
It was it was late in Victoria's rain. Yeah, but
listeners are usually more interested in the queen's early years,
probably largely because of the recent film Young Victoria, which
(01:07):
I'm sure, a lot of listeners have seen it's all
about romance, ribbons and no nine kids in the picture
yet for Victoria and Albert. So we're going to talk
about that side of Victoria's life, her romance with her
husband specifically, but we'll also revisit one of our common themes,
which is that of the sad royal childhood, and to
understand that, we have to first look at why Victoria
(01:29):
became a queen in the first place. Yeah, so it's
pretty remarkable that the throne went to Victoria because her
father was the fourth adult son of George the Third. Usually,
if you have that many kids, the throne isn't going
to go to the daughter of the fourth son. However,
George the third sons weren't that inclined to marry and
produce legitimate offspring at least, so consequently, this crisis developed
(01:53):
in eighteen seventeen. So George the Third and his wife
Charlotte had fifteen children, and for many years their eldest
son had acted as regent for his insane father. He
was known as the Prince Regent and later George the Fourth,
So the Prince Regent had a legit air of his
own a daughter named Charlotte, and for a long time
she was really the darling of the country, and it
(02:14):
really seemed like the succession was guaranteed when she married
the future King of the Belgians, Leopold. But in eighteen
seventeen and age twenty one, she died in childbirth and
her son was stillborn. So two generations right there wiped
out at one time and the country went into a
deep morning. Okay, so there's still Airs that it wasn't
like they're just are no children around. But the Airs
(02:36):
are mostly middle aged princes and they don't have kids,
so the race is off. The first prince of the blood,
the first son of George, the third um to make
an air, gets his debts canceled by the Prince Regent.
So a pretty good deal because a lot of these
guys are into gambling and that's living anyways. Yeah, but
(02:57):
it's not as easy as it seems, right, No, it's
not at all. So the Prince Regent will obviously start
with him. He's the eldest son. He was separated from
his wife, so there's no chance there of another air.
The same went for the next in line, the Duke
of York and after him, there's the Duke of Clarence,
the third son, so he took took this challenge up,
(03:17):
if you guys call it that, and he married a
German princess, but unfortunately none of their children survived infancy.
So the next son in line, it all came down
to the Duke of Kent and he dumped his longtime
mistress and married a woman who had already had children,
so he knew she was fertile, Victoria Mary Louisa, who
(03:39):
was the daughter of the Duke of Saxe Coburg Salfeld,
and she was also the widow of German prince So bingo,
we have our winners in this couple. Finally. Yeah, it
sounds so unromantic when you say fertile when you put
it that way, but that is what it was all
about going for. And once the Duchess became pregnant, the
(04:00):
Duke of Kent started making plans for the child to
be born on English soil. They'd been living in Bavaria
at the time, and he wrote that they need to
get back in order to quote render the child. My
wife bears virtually as well as legally English, but the
regent hadn't exactly followed through on that whole cancel your
debt steal, and the Duke couldn't find the funds to
(04:20):
move his entourage until March of eighteen nineteen, and so
by the time the Duchess actually got back on English soil,
she was already eight months along. Yeah, they had trouble
getting lodgings too, because these brothers, the Prince Regent and
the Duke of Kent, really didn't get along very well.
But the Prince Regent does grant them apartments in Kensington Palace.
And on May eighteen nineteen, Alexandrina Victoria was born, and
(04:44):
she was this big, healthy baby and things looked promising.
She got her name though the Alexandrina, apart from her godfather,
who was the Russians, are Alexander the first and the
story behind that is is kind of strange and also
further speaks to this feud between the brothers. Regent had
forbidden Victoria's parents to use any of the standard names
(05:04):
that royal baby girls were being called. Charlotte Elizabeth Georgina
can kind of see his rationale behind Charlotte not having
the new heir named the same thing as his deceased daughter,
but still a weird stipulation, and as a result, the
people of England still weren't entirely sure what her name
was even up to the morning of her accession at
(05:25):
age eighteen. Yeah, Alexandrina or Victoria, even though she had
actually always gone by Victoria as a girl in her home.
But the little Princess was really born just in the
nick of time though for this family, because only eight
months after her birth, her father, the Duke of Kent, died,
and so six days after that, George the Third died,
(05:47):
and that made the Prince Regent finally George the Fourth,
and that made Victoria third in line to the throne,
after her two uncles. But she gets even closer as
the years go by and these uncles to to die off.
When the eldest of the two uncles died in she
was obviously one step closer, and eventually, when George the
(06:07):
Fourth died and her uncle, the Duke of Clarence, became
William the Fourth, Victoria was next in line from the throne.
So from birth she was raised to be a likely queen,
although not a guaranteed queen. It it you still didn't
know if somebody might have a kid between her birth
and when she came to the throne. Yeah, but it's
(06:28):
interesting even though she was raised as a queen the
whole time, nobody really told her of her position until
she was about ten years old. Though. There's that classic
story where she had a family tree inserted into a
history book and studied it and suddenly pronounced I will
be good, And so that's probably likely untrue. Yeah, they're
two competing versions if that story's a pretty good story,
(06:50):
but it's a little hard to back up. And Victoria
herself remembered the realization as being a lot more dramatic,
and and that makes sense to me for this girl
who was not raised to to know she was going
to be queen. She said, I cried much on learning
it and even deplored this contingency. Yeah, but it seems
like a really natural reaction, as you pointed out, because
her life turned out to be pretty rigid because of
(07:11):
this future of hers um. She had lots of lessons,
languages like Italian and Latin, writing, history, music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, religion.
She learned all kinds of things. Yes, maybe that wasn't
so bad, but it did make her life pretty busy,
but she also didn't get a lot to eat. She
had bread and milk served to her in a silver bowl,
(07:31):
and she had a really early bedtime, lots of exercise,
and most notably strict isolation. Yeah, so we could we
could add the lessons and the not much food in
the early bedtime and the exercise into the that's kind
of standard for the lives of many British aristocratic children
at this time. But this strict isolation was something unique,
(07:53):
and it was the design of her mother's companion and adviser,
a guy named Sir John con Roy, and the Duchess herself,
and they called it the Kensington system, and it was
the way Victoria was brought up. It was a course
of rigorous private studies and isolation from her peers. And consequently,
Victoria's main companion during her early years was her elder
(08:16):
half sister, Fyodora, her her mother's daughter by her first marriage.
And after Fyodora left to Mary, so she was quite
a few years older than Victoria. Uh, Victoria was pretty
distraught and turned to her governess, a woman named Louise Latezon,
and she really became her her main companion and just
sort of heard her defense against her this conniving Conroy
(08:40):
character who was such a strong influence in her household. Yeah,
and she really needed it because Conra even kept her
away from her own family. He encouraged the Duchess to
keep Victoria away from her quote wicked uncles, and by
isolating Victoria from her paternal family, the royal family, right,
Conroy hoped to create a better position for himself should
(09:01):
William the fourth die before Victoria's majority, And that was
really the plan because hopefully, if hopefully her Conroy, if
William the fourth died, then the Duchess of Kent would
become regent, and because Conroy controlled the Duchess of Kent,
he would essentially rule England. So it was all a
play for power, definitely, And at one point, when Victoria
was sick with the serious illness, Conroy and the Duchess
(09:23):
even tried to pressure the sixteen year old princess into
extending her minority from aged eighteen to age twenty one.
She refused, though, yeah, with the help of her governess.
Actually that was something that really endeared the woman to her.
But the Kensington system obviously couldn't maintain this strict privacy
constantly I mean, she was a queen to be and
so in eighteen thirty the Duchess of Kent decided that
(09:46):
she wanted to sort of validate her own education system
but also show off her daughter to Victoria's future people.
So she set up this series of examinations by three clerics,
and Victoria performed really well. The Duchess was valid validated
because I think the cleric said, yeah, we we couldn't.
You couldn't do anything better. She's being educated just as
(10:07):
she should be. But the Duchess also arranged for Victoria
to travel some and see her country, and that was
pretty a pretty major event in young Victoria's life. Yeah,
And in eighteen thirty two, before Victoria toward the Midlands
and North Wales, she was given a journal by her
mother and she kept a journal for the rest of
her life. I think we talked about that a lot
in the Victoria a Dual Caream episode, so we know
(10:29):
that she eventually even starts die like journaling in Hindustani,
which is pretty impressive. Yeah. But what's interesting is when
you look at these early journals, sometimes the politely restrained
entries in Victoria's her journals of that time period contrast
with the quote behavior books that she kept from eighteen
thirty and on for her governess. And these books basically,
(10:51):
I mean, you told me a little bit about them, Sarah.
It's basically like her governess wanted her to judge herself
so right down on her her opinion, on her conduct,
on her how she performed in her studies for the day,
and do that every single day, So a real self judgment.
So just to illustrate some of the differences you'd see
(11:11):
between the two. Sometimes um in one behavior book entry
from September thirty two, she wrote that she had been
very very, very very horribly naughty with many exclamation points,
all caps to all caps. But on the same day
as the horribly naughty entry, all she wrote in her
own journal is that the heat was intolerable. Yeah, So,
I mean, I think this gives you sort of a
(11:33):
sense of victoria as a young girl. She's she's sort
of dramatic. She has this dramatic flare to her, maybe melodramatics,
and would say, but she's also good at at either
concealing things or or just sort of sort of playing
it cool, you know, not divulging everything in her journals,
maybe because I don't know, afraid a parent might read it,
(11:54):
or just practicing for the restraint she would need as queen.
So she had a only childhood, but not a completely
miserable one. She had a ton of pets. She liked
plain dress up, she liked writing. She wrote compositions inspired
by popular novels, and she also watercolored and would paint
costumes and poses after attending the theater or concerts. And
(12:16):
she was also strongly attached to her uncle Leopold, her
mother's brother and the one time husband of the Charlotte
who had died in childbirth, the one we mentioned earlier
in this episode. He lived in Surrey until becoming King
of the Belgians in eighteen thirty one. And it's through
Leopold's work that she meets her future match. Yeah, so,
only three months after Victoria's birth, her mother and Leopold's
(12:38):
other brother, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Saalfeld, also had
a child named Albert, and it's it's really kind of cute.
Victoria is born at the beginning of the summer and
Albert's born at the end of the summer. But Albert
was the second son with no fortune coming his way,
so all along from his birth, his family kind of
hoped for this match with cousin Victoria since she clearly
(13:00):
had some good things coming to her. So for Victoria's
seventeenth birthday, the plans there. The family starts to try
to put this plan into action, and Albert and his
brother Ernest and his father all visited England. But Albert
was kind of an awkward teen at this point. He
sounds really awkward. Actually, he had fainting spells, um, he
(13:20):
didn't really like dancing. And Victoria was was sort of
a vivacious young girl even though she was raised in
such strict isolation, and she really had more of a
crush on these three visiting Persian princes anyway, So we're
gonna put Albert on the back burner. He didn't make
a great first impression, but apparently she put him on
the back burner as well. She did too, but um,
(13:43):
we need to move on anyways, because Victoria had some
pretty big changes coming her way. Yes Early on June
twentie eight thirty seven, King William the Fourth died. He
had managed to stay alive just long enough for his
niece to reach majority. She was barely eighteen when he
passed away, and after being told of her new position,
Victoria met with the Privy Council and they were really
(14:05):
impressed with her. She carried herself well, she spoke well.
Plus it was sort of romantic to have this teenage
queen well. And she's really an unknown quantity at this
point because of the Kensington system and the way she's
been raised. But for Victoria it was just a total relief.
She was free at last, and she moved to Buckingham
Palace and for the first time she had a room
to herself, and she's sort of on bad terms with
(14:28):
her mother because of the way she had brought John
Conroy into her life and all of that, and pushed
her mother away into far away apartments in Buckingham Palace
and sent Conroy off entirely and really enjoyed her independence
and sort of lived it up as you might expect
a teenager too, but later said it was the least
sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life. So she
(14:52):
she clearly realized that she overindulged a little bit in
her newfound freedom, didn't maybe take her role as seriously
as as she wished. She had. Later and there were
some errors that she made. In that early period. She
started a close relationship, for example, with Lord Melbourne, then
Prime Minister. He boosted herself confidence but also shaped her politics.
(15:14):
She became a Whig at this time and taught her
to partly ignore social problems or write them off as
the issues of agitators. Yeah, and that partisanship, which of
course the Queen was not supposed to be overtly partisan
like that really led to trouble. And two crises broke
out in eighteen thirty nine, And the first was the
Hastings affair. And this is just sort of a scandals
(15:37):
would be pregnancy story, but basically Victoria forced Lady Flora Hastings,
who was a maid of honor with Tory connection so
divergent from Victoria's own politics, to undergo a pregnancy examination
and it turned out that Hastings was not pregnant. That
was sort of scandal number one. Then within a year
Hastings died of a tumor that hadn't been diagnosed by
(16:00):
Victoria's physician, scandal number two. While that's going on, though,
there's another another issue brewing. Yeah, the bed chamber crisis,
which occurred when Melbourne resigned in eighteen thirty nine and
was replaced by Conservative Sir Robert Peel, but Victoria wanted
to keep her old wig Ladies of the bed Chamber,
so Peel wouldn't take office, and this caused a huge scandal. Yeah,
(16:23):
so Victoria's desire to be independent, that's probably kind of
at root of the two scandals we just mentioned, but
independent as in single too, and that desire did not
go over well with Parliament. With her people, she needed
an air so Victoria reluctantly started to interview eligible Protestant
princes and it was kind of slim pickings. So in
(16:45):
eighteen thirty nine she invited cousin Albert back to England
from his studies at the University of Bonn. And he's
not an awkward teenagerney more. Victoria's smitten. She wrote in
her journal, Albert really is quite charming and so extremely handsome,
a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waste.
(17:05):
My heart is quite going. Yeah, he was the one
and she liked what she saw, and since he was
not allowed to, Victoria proposed marriage just a few days later,
and the couple were married that February February tenth, eighteen forty,
and it wasn't the most popular marriage match that could
have been. At least at first. Parliament wasn't pleased that
the Crown was about to get even more German. That's
(17:28):
how they saw it. The couple even spoke German at home,
so that was a big deal. And also the British
aristocracy found Albert to be overly moral, to academic and
to artistic. But the marriage also ironed out some of
Victoria's controversy before. We're happy at least that she was
married and there would be an heir in the future. Yeah,
and it's certainly changed the way Victoria planned to rule,
(17:49):
which we're going to look at as well. Yeah, and
this is about where the movie Young Victoria leaves off.
I think they have the conjoined desks and it's super cute,
but that's not exactly how things were going. So the
desks did exist, though I was pleased to want to that.
So for the first few months, Victoria was really determined
(18:10):
to stay independent. She she liked ruling on her own,
and so they did work at those conjoined tandem desks,
but Albert only got to block her signature, which for
a very ambitious and talented and educated man. This was
pretty frustrating, but of course we all know Victoria starts
to have lots of kids and biology really changed the
(18:33):
course of things for her. She got pregnant within weeks
of the wedding, and bit by bit, Albert started to
take on more important tasks. He would send dispatches, he'd
attend meetings with ministers, he even got the key to
the secret boxes. And over time he also started to
change the way Victoria thought about things and affect her politics.
(18:55):
Even her governess was dismissed, who had been the former
may influence in her life. And in eighteen forty two
there was an attempt on her life, and and the
kids just kept on coming too, right, well, there were
so many of them. Were just going to list off
their names really quickly. Princess Royal Victoria also known as Vicky,
Prince of Wales, um the later Edward, the Seventh, Princess Alice,
(19:19):
Prince Alfred, Princess Helena, Princess Louise, Prince Arthur, Prince Leopold,
and Princess Beatrice, and the grandchildren started arriving only two
years after her last child was born, so she did
not have a gap in mothering so to speak. No,
she really didn't, And because she was out of commission
so much of every year, every single year, Albert really
(19:41):
took on an almost regent like role, and he did
in fact get a regency bill that allowed him to
act in the event of Victoria's death. Are in capacity.
But by eighty five, an observer named Charles Greville wrote, quote,
it is obvious that while she has the title, he
is really discharging the functions of the sovereign. He is
the king to all intents and purposes. And Albert saw
(20:04):
his role though as adviser to the Queen. As he
later told the Duke of Wellington, his goal was to
quote to be the natural head of the family, superintendent
of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole
confidential adviser in politics, and only assist in her communications
with the officers of the government, her private secretary and
(20:24):
permanent minister. But he do all that at the expense
of his own identity, and pretty much working himself to
death in the process. YEA. So he wasn't going after
titles or or public recognition. He just wanted to play
this role and do it for Victoria and to to
hopefully do good at least that's that's how he saw it.
(20:45):
So their marriage, though, was generally considered to be a
happy one and something that really set a model for
people in the Victorian era. They focused heavily on educating
their children. They had these sort of middle class tastes,
especially if it Torria, because Albert did, after all, really
like science and technology and art and that sort of thing.
But Victoria liked reading Dickens novels and going to circuses
(21:08):
and seeing wax works that sort of thing. And the
couple also liked their privacy, and they're really famous for that.
Albert built residences at Osborne and Balmoral Castle for them
to escape too, and and as we I think we
mentioned in the Cream Abduel episode, those retreats really become
even more important maybe to Victoria in her in her
(21:30):
later life right. But Victoria also shouldn't be thought of
as a model Victorian wife and mother figure. She had
serious postpartum depression at times, and she did not like
being pregnant, and she really didn't like babies that much
in general. She didn't even really like kids. She called
pregnancy the quote shadow side of marriage and compared herself
(21:50):
to a cow or dog while she was pregnant. So
so that's kind of shocking, i'd say, coming from someone
who her identity is all hied. With these family portraits
of her and Albert and all of their little tiny
kids sitting around the Christmas tree or sitting around at
home relaxing, it does seem different. But I mean it's
just to show that this couple had an effect on
(22:13):
on their country, for sure, but they also led a
private personal life too. Yeah, but part of her dislike
of childbirth was that she wished she had gotten more
time with Albert alone. In late eighteen sixty one, Albert,
who was forty two years old at the time but
much older looking, raced off to Cambridge to chastise his
eldest son over an affair he'd had with a prostitute.
(22:35):
And after that, Albert pneumonia and took to bed. Doctors
diagnosed what he had as typhoid fever. But that was
probably a mistake, um modern analysis shows, and there hadn't
been typhoid fever in the area at all, right, and
so but at the time that's what they thought it was,
and they dosed him with Brandy until he died, and
though Victoria always blamed the death on their son, Albert
(22:57):
had known for some time that he wasn't feeling very well.
So it was probably stomach cancer, I think, is what
we now think he had. He had definitely been sick
with something. But Victoria, as as we talked about in
the last episode, and as most people know, went into
deep mourning after Albert's death, and she she said of him.
Without Albert, everything loses its interest. But we need to
(23:20):
talk about their legacy too, because the idea of the
happy couple of Victoria and Albert almost emerges more after
the fact because well alive, Albert had been often unpopular
and sometimes even used as a scapegoat because he was foreign.
Victoria's decision to name him as Prince Consort, for instance,
in eighteen fifty seven, had been terribly mocked. She tried
(23:43):
to justify it by saying, well, our adult children are
going to start to outrank him because he's a foreign prince.
But people just thought it was a ridiculous decision. But
over time it became clear that he had greatly assisted
Victoria and helped shape her monarchy, and that they're happy
and strong marriage had influenced the country's tastes and morals,
so people started to think on a couple fondly, especially
(24:06):
by the queen's old age and by the height of
her popularity, So the perception of them together definitely changed
over the years, and and looking back to they left
quite a legacy. Albert's grand achievement was, of course, the
eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and
even over the years that people looking back on that
realized what a high point it had been for England.
(24:27):
And another great legacy of theirs is the Victoria and
Albert Museum, which sort of originally came out of the
Great Exhibition, but was was named the Victoria and Albert
Museum really really late in Victoria's life, clearly a sort
of touching tribute for her. I'm sure. Yeah. I have
to say, I personally love this story. I think it's
(24:48):
a cool love story. It is. It is a nice
love story, and I mean, I feel like so many
of the royal couples we talked about just have kind
of miserable lives, so it's nice to find one that, um,
they really seemed happy together and they stayed together, talking
about love and relationships is actually a great way to
ease on into listener mail. We actually picked today's listener
(25:13):
mail because it goes along with our topic today and
also because it's kind of a first for us, don't
you think, Sarah, it's definite. It's a letter from Jim
in Akron, Ohio, and he writes, dear to Blein and Sarah.
I grew up on a romantic story of President McKinley's
proposal to his future wife Ida. They often took kara
drides together during their courtship, and after one such ride,
(25:36):
McKinley lamented how every one of these outings ended with
them leaving in opposite directions. When she shared the sentiment,
he said, quote, so what do you say we go
the same way from now on? And they were happily
married thereafter. I haven't been able to find any confirming
source for this story, so it may just be cherry
tree folklore. But I was wondering if you might be
(25:56):
able to let us know while you're at it, could
you please announced that I love Julie very much and
I want to go the same way with her for
the rest of my life. She's my best friend and
true soul mate, as proven by the fact that she'll
be impressed that I proposed to her via stuff you
missed in history class. Julie, will you marry me? So
a podcast proposal, and we are now all eagerly awaiting
(26:20):
a response. Find out what happened from Jim and Julie.
Definitely let us know, guys, and I guess, but I
mean that's all we have to say. That's the way
to end the podcast. I don't think anything we could
say would be cooler than that, so we might as
well just get out of here. Um, if you would
like to write us, um and tell us anymore about Victoria,
(26:41):
any questions that you have. If you have the answer
to the McKinley story, I was not able to find it, Jim,
I'm sorry, but if anyone else knows about McKinley's proposal
to Ida, please write in Where History Podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or you can look us up
on Facebook or on Twitter at Misston History. Yeah, and
if you want to see pictures and learn a little
bit more about other nice historical couples, we have a
(27:03):
great slide show on our home page. You can find
it by searching for historical couples At www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how st
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The houst Works iPhone app has a rise.
(27:27):
Download it today on iTunes
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