But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband….ĭrawing on Victoria’s diaries as well as her own brilliant gifts for history and drama, Daisy Goodwin, author of the bestselling novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter as well as creator and writer of the new PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria, brings the young queen even more richly to life in this magnificent novel. Perhaps he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria’s private secretary. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favour of Victoria insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother resolute about meeting with her ministers alone. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina - Drina to her family - had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria – sheltered, small in stature, and female – became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland.
To me, ma’am, you are every inch a Queen.” I have not known you long, but I observe in you a natural dignity that cannot be learnt. Lord Melbourne turned to look at Victoria. “They think I am still a little girl who is not capable of being a Queen.”
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