Queen Victoria Dies: End of a 63-Year Reign

Queen Victoria became queen at eighteen, when a group of men woke her at five in the morning to tell her that William IV had died. She received them in her nightgown, alone. She ruled for 63 years and 216 days, longer than any British monarch before her, a record that stood until Elizabeth II surpassed it in 2015. Born Alexandrina Victoria at Kensington Palace on May 24, 1819, she was the only child of the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Her father died when she was eight months old. Her childhood was controlled by the Kensington System, a suffocating set of rules designed by her mother's comptroller, John Conroy, to make Victoria dependent on them. She slept in her mother's bedroom until the day she became queen. Her first act as monarch was to request her own bedroom. She married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. They had nine children and used them as diplomatic chess pieces across Europe. By the time she died, her descendants either ruled or would rule Germany, Russia, Greece, Romania, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. The hemophilia gene she carried spread through the royal houses of Europe and contributed to the suffering of the Russian Tsarevich Alexei, which helped drive the Romanov family toward Rasputin and, indirectly, toward revolution. When Albert died of typhoid fever on December 14, 1861, Victoria's grief became the defining fact of the remainder of her reign. She wore black for the remaining forty years of her life. She had Albert's clothes laid out every morning as if he might dress. She kept his rooms exactly as he left them. She withdrew from public life so thoroughly that republican sentiment grew in Britain. She was Empress of India, though she never visited it. She gave her name to an era. She held Albert's cast of his hand in hers as she died on January 22, 1901, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She was 81.