Hidden Meaning Behind Queen Victoria’s Life That Many Christians Never Noticed

Victoria blamed her sad childhood on John Conroy, her mother’s rumored lover, but once she was Queen, she got revenge. The Victorian era contains some of the most dazzling and darkest moments of English history, but who was the monarch behind the glorious name? Queen Victoria led a nation for longer than anyone before her, and it was a reign full of personal scandal, tragedy, and heartache. Born Alexandrina Victoria on May 24, 1819, Victoria’s rise to the throne was sudden and unexpected. Her father was the younger son of the king, and no one thought his line would get anywhere near the crown. Upon her birth, Victoria was a measly fifth in line for the throne, but when she was a child, all the royal heirs passed away one by one in just four short years. Three of Victoria’s cousins perished, then her father and her grandfather passed within a week of each other. By 1830, Victoria’s uncle William IV was king, and eleven-year-old Victoria was next in line for the throne. Victoria called her childhood melancholy, but it was even darker than that. Her mother, Duchess Victoria of Kent, was notoriously controlling, and along with Sir John Conroy, her close confidant, they developed the so-called Kensington system to raise her daughter.

This oppressive system forced Victoria to isolate herself from playmates and family alike, rendering her completely dependent on her mother. King William nicknamed John Conroy King John for his outsized influence, and he was a hated figure among the rest of the royal family. According to palace rumors from the time, Conroy wasn’t just the Duchess of Kent’s confidant, he was also her lover. For her part, Victoria disliked both of them, and she would eventually get her revenge. The Regency Act of 1830 stated that Victoria’s mother would assume the role of regent in case King William died while Victoria was still a child. But William despised Victoria’s mother and told her publicly that he hoped to live until Victoria was eighteen so that the duchess could never assume power. Life as the heir to the British throne isn’t all luxury and gallantry. In order to sell Victoria as the next monarch, the duchess forced her daughter to go on a series of exhausting tours around England. When she was sixteen, Victoria’s family started making plans to marry her off. There were two rivals for her royal heart, Prince Alexander of the Netherlands and Prince Albert, her first cousin. I know, I know, it’s gross, but this is royalty we’re talking about. It was clear to everyone that Victoria was immediately smitten with Albert, but her private diaries go into very personal detail. The future monarch was a lovestruck teenager, writing that Albert was extremely handsome. As for Prince Alexander, he was very plain, better luck next time. Victoria’s uncle King William IV succeeded in living until Victoria came of age and died just a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, making her Queen of the United Kingdom. When Victoria became Queen, she didn’t forget about the people who helped her, and she certainly didn’t forget about the people who hurt her.

The moment she accepted the crown, she did the Christian thing and used her power for revenge. One of her first acts as Queen was to dismiss Conroy from her household, and while it was expected that the young unmarried Queen would live with her mother, Victoria relegated the duchess to a remote, out-of-the-way apartment within Buckingham Palace and cut off contact with her. Let this be a lesson, always treat your children nicely if there’s a chance they’ll one day be someone you have to curtsy to. When Victoria started her reign, she was naive and desperate for any help. She found it in the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne himself. Childless Melbourne saw Victoria as a kind of adoptive daughter, and he quickly took the inexperienced Queen under his wing. Early on in Victoria’s rule, one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, fell ill. Her symptoms immediately pointed to a scandalous out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and the rumors swirled that the father was Sir John Conroy. It was an instant scandal, and Queen Victoria believed the gossip. After all, Hastings had conspired with her mother and Conroy in the Kensington system. Victoria made it clear she believed the rumors, legitimizing them even further. Lady Flora agreed to a medical examination, and the results shocked the Queen. The doctor confirmed that Lady Flora was actually a virgin, leaving Queen Victoria with a lot of egg on her face, but it was about to get worse. Lady Flora died soon after the scandal, her autopsy revealed that the swelling in her stomach had been a massive tumor on her liver. So now Queen Victoria was responsible for tarnishing the reputation of an innocent dead woman. Conroy, the Hastings family, and the opposition Tory party used the scandal to try to sway public opinion of Victoria and her ally, Prime Minister Melbourne. History often paints Victoria as a lovesick puppy when it comes to Albert, and while she was certainly deeply and eventually tragically in love, even as a young Queen, Victoria kept her wits about her. When Prime Minister Melbourne suggested that Victoria could get away from her controlling mother if she married the prince, Victoria dismissed it as a shocking alternative. In October 1839, Prince Albert came for his second and most important visit with Victoria in England. You might think the Victorian era is synonymous with conservative and backwards politics, but on October 15, 1839, Victoria was the one who proposed to him. Her personal diary spared no detail when it came to the wedding night, as she writes about their union, I never, never spent such an evening, my dearest, dearest dear Albert. He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again. Damn Albert, what’s your secret, bro?

When Victoria got married, she went the very unusual route and chose to wear a white wedding dress. At the time, most people wore colorful dresses for their nuptials, and although Victoria wasn’t the first person or even the first royal to wear white on her wedding day, she very much helped to popularize it as a concept, and most people credit her with the trend becoming ubiquitous in Western culture. Victoria found out she was pregnant mere weeks after her wedding, and her reaction was not what you might expect. She was actually furious, writing to her grandmother, it’s spoiling my happiness. I’ve always hated the idea, and I prayed to God night and day for me to be left free for at least six months. Oh well, I’m sure she felt better about her kids once they were born, right? She had never been fond of young Bertie, mostly because she thought he was a screw-up. Okay, never mind. When Victoria was giving birth to her eighth child and youngest son, Leopold, in 1853, she made use of a new scientific breakthrough, chloroform. She was actually so pleased with the effects of chloroform that she used it again when she gave birth to her daughter Beatrice. But Victoria’s decision to use the drug was controversial at the time.

Chloroform was seen as radical, and even medical professionals thought the Queen was off her rocker to go through with it. Most depressingly of all, the church believed that the pains of childbirth were a woman’s duty to suffer through and that Victoria was engaging in a heretical act. Did she care? No. Astonishingly, Albert and Victoria had a whopping nine children together. How they ever managed to produce their 112 children is quite beyond me. The bedchambers of Buckingham Palace must be copiously supplied with blindfolds. Despite all those kids, Victoria absolutely detested child rearing. Not only was she miserable about her pregnancies, not a whole lot after that pleased her, and she thought newborn infants were ugly. Ah, come on, they’re so cute. Okay, that looks like a frog. It’s very likely that after at least some of her pregnancies, the Queen suffered from postpartum depression. An admission to her uncle, she called her second pregnancy the heaviest trial I have ever had to endure. To make matters worse, during Victoria’s lowest periods, Albert was not a supportive spouse. In his own letters to Victoria around this time, he complains about her moods and her lack of self-control. Victoria was always a survivor, but in 1840, this was really put to the test. In the first few months of her marriage, a pregnant Victoria was riding in a carriage to visit her mother when a mentally ill teenager named Edward Oxford shot at her twice. The Queen was unharmed, and authorities immediately detained Oxford, but Victoria had a target on her back. Not literally. All in all, Victoria survived a mind-blowing eight assassination attempts, and by the time the second one happened in 1842, she was downright blasé about it. In May that year, John Francis aimed a pistol at her while she was driving along the Mall in London, though his gun failed and he ran away. Unfazed, Victoria came up with a plan. The next day, she took the very same route again as a ploy to draw out her assailant once more.

Francis took the bait. He shot at her again and was immediately taken in by the authorities. Victoria two, stupid criminals zero. During the lowest periods of her depression, Victoria was pushed further to the brink than most people can imagine. She reportedly began to hallucinate and soon feared she was losing her mind. Prince Albert had to take her to Scotland to recover. By far, Queen Victoria’s favorite child was her youngest, Princess Beatrice, yet this privileged position came with chilling obligations. As the baby of the family, Victoria intended for Beatrice to never marry and instead devote her life to taking care of Mummy. However, in 1884, Princess Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg. Knowing that her mother would never accept their union, the rebellious Beatrice got engaged in secret. When Queen Victoria finally did find out, she punished her beloved daughter by refusing to speak to her for six months. In the end, Queen Victoria agreed to let go of her daughter on one rigid condition, Beatrice and her husband would have to live at home so they could always attend to the Queen. Having no other choice, they agreed. One of Queen Victoria’s nicknames was the grandmother of Europe, because so many of her brood made advantageous marriages with monarchies all across the continent. If you were a royal in the twentieth century, chances are you were related to Queen Victoria. But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Though very few people realized it at the time, the royal family was hiding a rotten core. Today, we know that Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia, an often fatal disease that hinders blood clotting and causes many sufferers to bleed to death. Women are rarely affected by hemophilia, it’s far more dangerous in men. So while Victoria’s daughters, Alice and Beatrice, inherited the gene, her son Leopold was most at risk. When he discovered he had it too, it led to every mother’s worst nightmare. Leopold died at the tender age of thirty after a cerebral hemorrhage. Strangely, none of Victoria’s ancestors, including her father the Duke of Kent, suffered from hemophilia. This means she must have been the first of her line to have it. Some historians have used this to make the scandalous claim that Victoria was an illicit love child. The truth is a lot less salacious. Since most hemophiliac males don’t make it to adulthood, it’s unlikely that Victoria was the product of an affair. What probably happened was cosmically bad luck. In about thirty percent of cases, hemophilia is a random mutation, usually when one or both parents are older. And since Victoria’s father was over fifty when she was born, this is the likeliest explanation. In the spring of 1861, after a lifetime of strained relations, Victoria’s mother died.

When she went through the duchess’s letters, Victoria made a heartbreaking discovery. She found out that her mother had actually loved her deeply. This made her blame Sir John Conroy all the more for turning her mother against her during her youth. Although the Queen’s first son, Albert, or Bertie, was a long-awaited male heir, he proved to be Victoria’s greatest disappointment. For one thing, he wasn’t the brightest, and after a mediocre career as an officer, Bertie really went and broke his parents’ hearts by taking up with the actress Nelly Clifton. Prince Albert in particular was so angered by the news of his son’s promiscuity, he traveled all the way to Cambridge, where Bertie was studying, to confront him. Prince Albert was already in poor health before he traveled to chastise Bertie, but after he came back, he took a turn for the worse. His chronic stomach pains, which most people now believe he was suffering from Crohn’s disease, became fatal. He died just weeks after the confrontation, on December 14, 1861. Queen Victoria blamed Prince Albert’s demise almost entirely on her son, once even writing, that boy I never can or shall look at him without a shudder. She never forgave him and even denied him any political power or position until the day she died and he became king. To say Queen Victoria took Albert’s death badly is an understatement. Aside from blaming and all but disowning her son Bertie, she sunk into a deep depression and most infamously wore black for the rest of her life. This last habit earned her the mournful nickname the Widow of Windsor. Overcome with grief, Victoria retreated from public life. Eventually, she refused to perform all but her most essential royal duties, much to the displeasure of the British public. In the years after the death of Prince Albert, Victoria insisted that her servants keep his rooms continually prepared as if he was just going to walk through the doors one day. Aids always placed a bowl of hot water for shaving purposes on a side table and laid out a new change of clothes on his bed.

In 1878, Queen Victoria was due for another vicious tragedy. That year, her second eldest daughter, Alice, died of diphtheria when she was only thirty-five years old, and the cruelest part was that Alice had passed on December 14, the anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. By January 1901, Victoria’s other son, Alfred, had passed, and the Queen felt her own end coming too. She suffered from rheumatism and had nearly gone blind from cataracts. Queen Elizabeth II is famous for her love of corgis, but Queen Victoria had her own soft spot for pups too. As one of Victoria’s very last wishes, attendants brought her favorite Pomeranian, Turi, to her deathbed to keep her company. On January 22, the great Queen Victoria died at the ripe old age of eighty-one. She had ruled for sixty-three years, an overwhelming span of time that only her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, surpassed. One of the legends about Queen Victoria is her reportedly dry saying, we are not amused. This circulated even while she was alive, but she vehemently denied ever speaking it. In fact, when it came to her personality, nothing could be further from the truth. Many servants reported that their Queen was often immensely amused and roared with laughter. Victoria’s lifelong mourning of Albert is notorious, but most people don’t know that it extended to her own funeral. In contrast to her permanent black, Victoria requested that she wear a white dress and her wedding veil when she was laid to rest. Everybody knows today about Victoria’s love for Albert, but history tends to forget the illicit man in her life. In the 1860s, Victoria started relying on her Scottish manservant, John Brown. The press had a field day printing slanderous rumors that they had a secret marriage and calling Victoria Mrs. Brown. Victoria heaped praise on Brown both publicly and privately, and when he passed in 1883, she devoted much of her time to writing a biography on him. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because its contents were so juicy she destroyed them. Her private secretary read a draft and suggested she get rid of it or risk adding fuel to the rumors. In a letter to Brown’s sister-in-law, Victoria wrote that he was the best, truest heart that ever beat. And that’s not all. On the surface, Victoria’s funeral was a tribute to Albert. She had Albert’s dressing gown beside her. But on the third finger of her right hand, she wore John Brown’s mother’s wedding ring, and in her left hand, carefully hidden via a bouquet of flowers, Victoria clasped a lock of John Brown’s hair and a photograph of her strapping Scotsman. Vicky, you naughty girl.