Imaginary World of Blinding Lights

The Baby Race and Detested Royal Dukes

The only reason Victoria existed at all is because her cousin, Princess Charlotte of Wales, died in childbirth, and her child did not survive either. While George III had many, many illegitimate grandchildren, he only had one legitimate one, Charlotte, and her death sent Great Britain into a succession crisis. (George IV famously hated his wife Caroline of Brunswick so much he didn't even bother with a "spare.")

As a result, George III's unmarried sons then set out to get married and produce an heir. These princes, the royal dukes, were collectively disliked by the parliament and the masses for their laziness, arrogance, entitlement, and exorbitant spending habits (the Duke of Wellington once called them "the damndest millstone around the necks of any government that can be imagined" (Ch. 1, Worsley)). They left their long-standing mistresses who financially supported them for years to get married in the hope that Parliament would grant them a higher stipend, now that they were married men.

Victoria's father, Edward of Kent, had left his mistress of 28 years to marry Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She supported him during that time because Edward was abysmal at handling money and racked up such terrible debts that a committee had to be formed to run his finances for him. (He still racked up debts. E.g. he never paid for the crib he bought Victoria, and the maker complained about the unpaid invoice for 18+ years (Ch. 4, Worsley).) In return, Madame Julie de Saint-Laurent found out about Edward's intention to get married from the newspapers...

George III had been a respected and well-liked king, but his sons had tainted the image of the royal family. Their unpopularity and the human cost of industrialisation nearly brought about a revolution to remove the royal family from any power. Victoria, thus, was not only a beacon of hope in regards to the succession crisis but to saving the image and existence of the royal family too. Her mother and advisor did their utmost to present Victoria as "a paragon of virtue" (Ch. 2, Gray) for that reason.

Edward and Victoire did end up having a loving marriage, and Edward adored his little daughter and proudly told everyone that she would be Queen of England one day. When Victoria was born in May 1819, this was still an uncertainty: Her uncle William IV and his wife Adelaide could have had (surviving) children, and her parents could have had a son who would have displaced her in the line of succession. Nonetheless, Edward was very sure his daughter would be queen and, thus, wanted her to be named "Elizabeth" or be given another "royal" name at least.

George IV (then still the Prince Regent) had to decide on her name though, and because he couldn't stand her parents and thought his niece was negligible, he picked "Alexandrina" after Victoria's godfather Tsar Alexander I. He only added "Victoria" when it was suggested that she might need more than one name.

"And so, the baby girl was given the English form of her German mother's name almost as an afterthought, and certainly with no inkling that it was a name that would come to define an age." (Ch. 2, Worsley)

Childhood and the Kensington System

Queen Victoria was born and raised in Kensington Palace which was a shithole palace reserved for royals no one wanted to have around, e.g. the slightly disgraced Princess Sophia (who may or may not have had a child out of wedlock).

"[Kensington Palace] was infested with black beetles. [...] The palace itself was in a 'general state of decay,' with bulging walls held up by props and iron bands, dry rot endemic, and damp making many of the rooms uninhabitable." (Ch. 2, Gray)

Edward died when Victoria was eight months old. He was holding his wife's hand as he passed away from a brief illness.

His untimely death and quickly drawn-up will left Victoria's mother, Victoire, in a unique position: That of being the sole guardian of the heir to the throne. If it had not been for that will, Victoria would have been raised under the guardianship of George IV and, later, William IV.

"A monarch had a right, indeed a duty, to control the person and education of his heir. Just a couple of generations previously, George I had removed his granddaughters from the care of their parents after a disagreement. Victoire now had enormous responsibilities. She would have to find untold strength to deliver them, and no one had ever encouraged her to have much confidence in herself." [...] "Edward's will gave Victoire sole control over his daughter. But he also left her a more malign legacy. On his deathbed, he'd begged her not to forget him, and she certainly would not. Yet he'd also recommended she place her trust in his friend and servant, John Conroy. The black-haired, theatrical-looking ex-army captain would now find himself the devoted, trusted servant of the lonely, isolated duchess, with almost unlimited opportunities for power and self-advancement." (Ch. 3, Worsley)

Victoire did not know any English when she had agreed to marry Edward and leave her native Germany and everything she knew behind. She still wasn't fluent by the time Victoria ascended the throne almost 20 years later. This, coupled with Edward's advice to trust him and her "previous form in relying on strong, but not altogether disinterested men, having formed a similarly close relationship with a male advisor in Germany after the death of her first husband" (Ch. 2, Gray), made Victoire become dependent on John Conroy.

That George IV could possibly still take her daughter away from her (which is something he often talked about because he disliked Victoire) or that Victoria could be killed at any moment instilled a deep fear in Victoire and made her rather anxious and overprotective of her daughter, e.g. they had to sleep in the same room, Victoria could not climb stairs on her own, etc.

Victoire, along with Conroy who designed the "Kensington System" with her, was more of a "prison guard" than a parent. I.a. she made Victoria keep a "Good Behaviour Book" to chronicle her daily conduct and survey her morally. Conroy and Victoire also continuously insulted Victoria, calling her "stupid" and "ugly" and "too childish to reign" even after she turned 18.

Victoire made sure her daughter would get a good education but she didn't know how to give her a good education as a queen (Victoria's tutor George Davys was a clergyman who only gave her the "standard education" of any other genteel girl - it was a "lightweight curriculum for a future sovereign" (Ch. 4, Worsley)), and kept her isolated. As a result, after her uncle William IV died, the 18-year-old Victoria was shoved into a position she had been insuffiently prepared for.

"Victoria was the youngest person to come to the throne since the Tudor boy king Edward VI, who had been ten, even younger than her grandfather George III, who had been twenty-two. She had received barely any preparation for becoming queen. The only person who had attempted to instruct her was Leopold [her maternal uncle, the later King Leopold of the Belgians]. He wrote often around the time of her accession, counselling her to remain cool and never to allow herself to be forced into making an instant decision. She knew very little about the monarch's political position." [...] "Before her accession, Victoria later confessed, she 'never could … take the slightest interest in Public affairs'. As a teenager, this was hardly strange; but what was extraordinary was the expectation that at eighteen – an age which made her a minor for all purposes except succeeding to the throne – she should be able to do the work of the crown unaided." (Ch. 2, Ridley)

"Her mother and Conroy had exposed her to society, but on their own terms, and they had always been keen to emphasise that she was gauche and unfit to rule without their support. She had developed the habit of keeping her thoughts firmly to herself, and she was under significant pressure to impress much older and more experienced people. It's no surprise that when she first became Queen, therefore, she stuck to "the smallest possible talk" on social occasions." [...] "She was described as, 'timid and embarrassed, [talking] of nothing but commonplaces.'" (Ch. 3, Gray)

In Kuroshitsuji, Victoria is taller than her real-life counterpart would have been at the same age. She shrunk as she got older: "In her later years, Victoria’s height also appears to have decreased slightly from when she was younger, so when she wore this dress [in 1892] she would have stood at approximately 4 feet 8 inches [142 cm] tall." She would not have reached up to Sebastian's (186 cm) shoulders or been taller than Ciel (152 cm) by then.

Her slight height possibly stemmed from malnutrition. She was also a stress eater and prone to binge-eating. Further, eating was one of the few things she could control in her life, and she would, e.g., refuse meals when she had an argument with her mother.

"Although [American artist Thomas] Sully's tape measure proves that she was 5 feet 1¼ inches [155.6 cm], Victoria's height was always stated in public to be 5 feet 2 [157 cm]. That imaginary extra three-quarters of an inch was important because height was much more affected by nurture, rather than nature, than it is in modern times. Diets for the very poorest in 1830s society had recently been declining in quality, and with this, the adult height of working people and paupers had shrunk. There was as much as a 4-inch difference, in some areas, between middle- and working-class children of thirteen. If Victoria was short, argues food historian Annie Gray, it looked like she had not been properly fed. [Which she was not.] This reflected badly on Conroy and Victoire. They made both their princess and themselves look a little bit better by adding a little bit on." (Ch. 6, Worsley)

"However, then as now, cultural ideas about foods played a large role in determining what was thought to be a 'good' diet. Meat was regarded as the mainstay of a healthy regime, especially mutton, along with eggs and vegetables. Sweet foods were reserved for bribery and treats. However, the Duchess and Conroy seem to have taken this to extremes. Victoria ate like a child, kept to the nursery and fed the most basic of meals, for much longer than most of her class. Even after the age of thirteen, when children would generally emerge from the nursery and dine with their parents, many of her meals were still taken in her room." [...] "It's clear that she developed a habit of eating too much, and very fast, whenever she got the opportunity." (Ch. 2, Gray)

"The close control exerted over her diet meant that the seeds of a dysfunctional eating pattern were being planted." (Ch. 4, Worsley)

Her height, while it frustrated her, also aided her:

"The difference in height between middle-class and working-class thirteen-year-olds in some areas was four inches. Being short carried a whiff of poverty about it. But in 1837, and in Victoria's case, it was not necessarily a bad thing. For her, short meant unthreatening; it meant feminine. However, it also added to the sense of her youth, and meant that people were prone to regard her as a child. After all, she was only eighteen, and largely surrounded by older (and taller) courtiers and politicians." (Ch. 3, Gray)

Victoria did not attend dinner parties until her mid-teens. Her mother did throw many before that though and "paraded her daughter through the room before dinner and again after" because "guests needed to be reminded of the reason they should support the Duchess, but that did not necessitate Victoria actually being present" (Ch. 2, Gray).

Victoria had not grown up alone, strictly speaking, as she had her maternal half-sister Feodore and Conroy's daughters as playmates. However, because the choice to find friends and companions on her own was taken away from her, Victoria felt rather lonely and isolated throughout her childhood.

"Throughout her life Victoria dreaded being alone; but childhood loneliness perhaps taught her how to cope with solitude." (Ch. 1, Ridley)

"She had had no real friends as a child, and now she had to accept that, even if she could bring herself to trust anyone enough to fill that role as an adult, she would struggle to keep them with her if they held an official, and therefore political, position in her Household." (Ch. 3, Gray) *This refers to the "Bedchamber crisis" in which Victoria refused to replace her ladies-in-waiting following a shift in power in Parliament.

Victoria's lack of knowledge and experience, her upbringing, her dread of being alone didn't allow her to stand on her own. It's no wonder that Victoria became emotionally dependent on many (men) throughout her life (e.g. Lord Melbourne, Prince Albert, John Brown).

Victoria was a very determined and strong-willed person despite or even because of her upbringing. She was also set on reigning alone and didn't even want to marry but nobody - her family, her parliament, the people of Britain at large - could stand her being an unmarried young queen.

Albert: The designer shit husband

Albert was born a few months after Victoria (they even had the same midwife, Charlotte Heidenreich von Siebold!). From that moment on, it was pretty much set for their family that they would be getting married. From birth, Albert had the "duty and destiny of extending the Coburg family's infuence in Britain" (Ch. 6, Worsley). He was their "chosen 'parish bull'" (Ch. 10, Worsley).

William IV did not want Victoria to marry a Coburg and suggested Prince Alexander of the Netherlands as a potential suitor. After their meeting, Victoria jotted down in her journal that he looked "very plain". Like the princess in the fairy tale King Thrushbeard, Victoria critically appraised and rejected a whole "parade of suitors."

When Victoria met Albert for the very first time, she was 16 and not overly impressed by him. Their uncle Leopold then set out "to groom Albert for the role of ruler" (Ch. 3, Ridley).

"A year at the university of Bonn followed by a tour of Italy transformed the fat teenager into a polished and studious prince who looked older than his age. He still yawned after dinner, but Stockmar somehow instilled into the motherless boy an astonishing sense of self-worth and entitlement. Aged nineteen, the prince told his uncle Leopold that if Victoria kept him waiting for more than three years 'it would ruin all the prospects of my future life.'" (Ch. 3, Ridley)

In real life, Victoria wore a tartan dress (which was goth back then!) when she first met Albert. Yana possibly used The Young Victoria as the basis for the dress she wears in the manga for this meeting (the dresses sure do look very similar!).

When they met again in 1839, Victoria was over the moon. That meeting was on Oct. 10. She proposed to him on Oct. 15, and even prepared a speech for him in German because "Albert was at a disadvantage in English" (Ch. 10, Worsley); Victoria herself was not very proficient in German then as her mother forbade her from speaking it (Ch. 4, Ridley). She was that attracted to him! Meanwhile…

"As for Albert, he had come to Windsor resolved to break off relations with his cousin, disgusted by reports of her stubbornness and late-night partying. The suddenness of Victoria’s proposal came as a shock. That evening he retired early with a nosebleed. But he was triumphant. Marriage to Victoria was Albert's career, the job for which he had spent his life preparing. The couple enjoyed a 'heavenly' month together at Windsor, and during that time they always spoke German. The language that Victoria had been forbidden to speak as a child at Kensington Palace was now for her the language of love." (Ch. 3, Ridley)

"Despite the long-standing agreement between their families, Albert felt he had been kept waiting for an intolerably long time. He'd only agreed to come to England now with the intention of putting an end to all the speculation. He climbed out of the carriage 'with the quiet but firm resolution to declare' that, exhausted by delay and hesitation, he was going to withdraw 'entirely from the affair'. "A proud man, Albert felt that he was becoming a laughing stock. Never mind that, as the second son, he wasn't the heir to his father Ernest, Duke of Coburg-Gotha. Never mind that Coburg – at 201 square miles – was merely half the size of the Isle of Wight. Never mind that its 40,000 inhabitants gave it a population comparable only to the town of Leicester. Albert still had a decent sense of his own worth." (Ch. 10, Worsley)

Albert really wanted to break off their "understanding"; he just never found the right opening to do so (Ch. 10, Worsley). Thus, they did end up getting engaged after all and were married in February 1840.

"Albert, the romantic lover who [...] was also a calculating, controlling careerist who had been trained for rule. By convincing Victoria that she was morally flawed and unwomanly, he persuaded her to surrender power. Victoria, the fatherless child, who as a thirteen-year-old had found an allegory of female submission in The Taming of the Shrew, was ready to comply." (Ch. 4, Ridley)

Truly, they were rather incompatible as they were very different people, and Albert just… didn't love and care for Victoria as much as she ever loved and cared for him. Hence, he could never accept that she was so different from him (more on that below).

"In Clark's view [James Clark, Victoria's physician], everyone at Windsor Castle could see that Victoria was 'doting and attached to him, and cannot bear him out of her sight'. In return, though, Clark believed that Albert only 'liked her'." [...] "There were other early signs, for those who took the trouble to see them, that Victoria and Albert had very different temperaments. He knew already that she was 'fearfully obstinate', and found it disturbing. He also hated the English habit of 'quizzing', or teasing. One of the maids-of-honour described Albert as having a ‘complete absence of that frankness which was such a charm' in Victoria's own manner when she was relaxed, and his 'jokes were heavy and lumbering'. "Historian Marina Warner correctly identifes a signifcant difference between their two characters. Victoria's greatest gift was transparency, honesty and communication: hence her journal. Albert, on the other hand, was a private person." (Ch. 10, Worsley)

However, the night of their engagement, Albert wrote Victoria a note because he could not express himself properly verbally (he preferred giving her gifts too). It was the first love letter Victoria ever received, and it moved her to tears. Notably, Albert composed it, as Worsley notes, when he "was still the supplicant, not yet the master, when everything still lay ahead of them":

"I hardly know how to answer you. How is it that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? … in body and soul ever your slave, your loyal ALBERT." (Ch. 10, Worsley)

As queen regnant, Victoria was the highest-ranking person in all of Great Britain and, thus, ranked above Albert, her husband. This was an "anomaly – in Victoria's eyes – that, as the husband of the queen, Albert's rank was inferior to hers, but in English law a husband enjoyed power over his wife" (Ch. 5, Ridley). Even after coverture laws were weakened and outright eliminated, the notion of "husband > wife" remained.

Victoria's tutor Davys and her governess Lehzen also taught her to behave demurely and live modestly and instilled in her "that it was man's province to be clever, and that it was best for woman not to intrude into it", disregarding her special position in society (Ch. 4, Worsley).

"There was the whole issue in a nutshell: Victoria, who lacked a father, had long sought mentors or alternative fathers in Uncle Leopold, Melbourne and then in Albert himself. Yet she couldn't get him to listen to her. It was, in any case, a vain hope. A Victorian man was failing in his masculinity if he failed to control his wife, and Albert could never quite control a wife who was also a queen. So they were doomed to clash." (Ch. 17, Worsley)

Albert was not the only husband of a queen regnant who was, to put it mildly, miffed to be "outranked" by his wife in such an absolute manner. Prince Philip (Queen Elizabeth II's husband) and Prince Henrik (Queen Margrethe of Denkmark's husband) are more recent examples. Unlike Philip and Henrik, Albert had a wife that outranked him who was very infatuated with him, inexperienced, and "malleable."

"Even as a very little boy, [Albert] had shown a 'great dislike to being in the charge of women'." (Ch. 10, Worsley)

Further, Albert had been transplanted into a country that viewed him as a "stud bull, good merely for the process of reproduction" (Ch. 10, Worsley). He was also ridiculed by Britons because Coburg was a small, insignificant place, and he had relatively little wealth for himself. Additionally, he was disallowed from appointing German staff to his household, and the Parliament granted him a far lower stipend than he (and Victoria) had desired and anticipated. His (and Victoria's) wishes for the wedding and honeymoon were steamrolled too. None of these things was something Albert could quietly accept or tolerate; he had been meant to be his wife's companion, to walk behind his queen in ever-present support, but that was not how he had been raised and how he knew his role as prince consort to be. As Worsley points out, "Albert swallowed the short honeymoon without making a fuss, but in fact he was merely biding his time before beginning to readjust the power balance between himself and his wife", and that with her wedding, Queen Victoria "had been shrunk down to wife" (Ch. 11, Worsley).

"Beneath his jewelled chain he wore the uniform of a field marshal, with white satin rosettes on his shoulders. Albert was wearing the clothes that 'no doubt he borrowed to be married in', sniffed Florence Nightingale, who was staying with her aunt in London. She was joining in a general disparagement of Coburg's relative penury, and Albert must have been all too aware that he was not particularly popular. His departure from Coburg had been an occasion of celebration: his people could see that their boy was going up in the world. But in Britain, Coburg hardly counted at all. One member of the congregation thought it would be diffcult not to laugh at the point in the ceremony when Albert was supposed to endow his wife 'with all his worldly goods'. As Albert complained to Victoria, all this mockery 'makes my position here no very pleasant one'." (Ch. 11, Worsley)

In 1850, Albert described his role as the queen's husband as such: "As the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of her government he is, besides, the husband of the Queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the sovereign, and her permanent minister." His words indicate that he understood his role "to being king in all but name, while Victoria was a merely ornamental sovereign" (Ch. 4, Ridley).

Victoria and Albert had nine children together within 17 years. Every time Victoria was pregnant and recovering from childbirth, Albert could take the reins even more than he did usually. Victoria famously didn't even like being pregnant and having babies.

"In the first ten years of her marriage, Victoria had seven of her nine children. Between 1840 and 1850 she spent effectively seven years either being pregnant or lying-in (this lasted about six weeks after the birth). Victoria had 'hated the thought of having children', and didn't want a large family. When she became pregnant with her first child, she wrote: 'I could not be more unhappy; I am really upset about it.' After the baby’s birth, she wrote to her uncle Leopold: 'You cannot really wish me to be the 'Mamma d'une nombreuse famille'.' Within weeks of writing this, she was once more pregnant with her second child. "Victoria's serial pregnancies suited Albert. He could get on with the business of ruling, and a large family fitted his idea of domestic monarchy - as well as offering opportunities for dynasty-building. Victoria, however, considered that the first two years of her marriage were 'utterly spoilt' by childbearing. Pregnancy, she wrote, was 'the shadow side' of marriage. 'Without that… if one has a husband one worships! It is a foretaste of heaven.'" (Ch. 4, Ridley)

Victoria would get nervous attacks, "throw tantrums," and struggle "to keep her emotions under control" during and after her last few pregnancies. Following the birth of their last child, Princess Helena, the doctor advised her not to have any more children for her mental well-being.

Albert responded to her pregnancy and postpartum struggles by icing her out, writing her passive-aggressive notes that he would only see her if she has herself "under control" again, and feeding into the talk that Victoria might have inherited her grandfather's, George III's, "madness."

"Whenever Victoria made a scene, Albert calmly walked away. Afterwards, he wrote her patronizing notes, reporting on her as if she were a patient. 'I am trying to keep out of your way until your better feelings have returned and you have gained control of yourself,' he told her. [...] The nervous attacks occurred distressingly often, even when Victoria was not pregnant. Albert noted 'four weeks of unbroken success in the hard struggle for self-control' as a mark of progress in 1855." (Ch. 4, Ridley)

"Their very worst rows stemmed from parenting disagreements, Victoria unable to express her concerns and Albert retreating into silence, supposedly to allow her space to 'calm' herself. She expressed distress, or at least tried to; he withdrew. 'I never intend or wish to offend you,' he wrote, 'I try to be patient.' But deep down he felt that listening to her 'recriminations' was 'the dreadful waste of a most precious time & of energies which ought to be turned to the use of others'." (Ch. 17, Worsley)

This wasn't something he just did under those specific circumstances: Albert was a control freak who did his best to reign through his wife. He would write her official letters which she only had to copy and sign. He would belittle her. He would try to suffocate her personality. He treated her like a child and student and not his wife (and sovereign).

"The basis of the marriage was Victoria's subservience to Albert. She was, as we have seen, his 'Child', his patient and his pupil, intellectually and morally his inferior. She must always agree with him, in order to avoid exercising her sovereign power over the man she had vowed to obey. In exchange, she demanded his constant, undivided attention. When he was away she felt 'quite paralysed'. […] "Far harder to change was her character. Victoria did her best to please Albert by attempting to teach herself self-control. She kept a notebook in which she charted her backslidings – the moments of misery caused by 'my foolish sensitiveness and irritability', giving 'annoyance to that most perfect of human beings my adored husband'. She confessed: 'Again and again have I conquered this susceptibility – have formed the best of resolutions and again it returns.' 'Have I improved as much as I ought?' she asked herself. 'I fear not… To my beloved and perfect husband, I fear also, I have been a great trouble, and this also, I pray to be helped and assisted in no longer being. I have great difficulties in my own poor temper, violent feelings, disposition and position, which tend to make one selfish.' "Albert perceived that Victoria's wilfulness had never been checked, and no one had taught her to control her temper. He issued her with a 'very good certificate' of ‘improvement': 'controlling your feelings is your great task, you say, in life'. By treating her as a pupil with himself as moral tutor or priest, he succeeded only in making her feel inadequate." (Ch. 4, Ridley)

In January 1842, Albert forced Victoria to let Lehzen, her former governess and close companion, go. The exact details of this incident were edited out of the queen's diary by Princess Beatrice, but what remained made it clear "that a flaming row ensued":

"Albert blamed Baroness Lehzen for neglecting the child [Princess Victoria/Vicky]. This was unfair – Lehzen was not responsible for the day-to-day running of the nursery – but when Victoria said as much, Albert stormed out and refused to speak to her for three days. He sent Victoria angry notes via Baron Stockmar [King Leopold's private secretary and Albert's mentor], accusing her of neglecting Vicky: 'take the child away and do as you like,' he wrote, 'and if she dies you will have it on your conscience'. Stockmar sided with Albert, and warned the queen that if she continued to make scenes such as this Albert would be obliged to leave England. At length Victoria capitulated, and agreed that Lehzen should go. She wrote an anguished letter to Stockmar:"'There is often an irritability in me which … makes me say cross and odious things which I don't believe myself and which I fear hurt Albert but which he should not believe; but I will strive to conquer it though I knew before I married that this would be a trouble; I therefore wished not to marry, as the two years and a half, when I was completely my own mistress made it difficult for me to control myself and to bend to another's will, but I trust I shall be able to conquer it.'" She added: 'Our position is tho' very different to any other married couples. A. is in my house and not I in his. – But I am ready to submit to his wishes as I love him so dearly.' "Victoria had changed. Never before had she spoken of bending or submitting. She had invented a new narrative for herself: she now claimed that her life as queen before Albert had been artificial and superficial, but she was redeemed by her love for him. Later, she destroyed letters from those early years: 'mere amusement, flattery, excitement and mere politics' made it, she wrote, 'the least sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life … But all changed after '40 … '. This new Victoria was the creation of Prince Albert." (Ch. 4, Ridley)

Albert was also a workaholic. This worsened his health (and made him age faster) and Victoria's too.

"Bruised by his unpopularity, depressed and lonely – he had no English friends – Albert took refuge in work. He complained that he was a donkey on a treadmill, but business had become a psychological necessity to him. His work was intended to protect Victoria and shield her from overtaxing her mind, but it had the opposite effect: it made her mental state worse, because it gave him reason for avoiding her company." (Ch. 5, Ridley)

Albert died in December 1861 after he had been ill for months (and ailing for about two years). Victoria did not notice (or, rather, pretended not to notice) his ill health because her mother also died in 1861. Albert was very charming about this. Not.

"He continued to accuse her of self-indulgence. In October, when she was still deeply grieving for her mother's death only seven months before, he told her, in one of his pitiless letters, to be 'less occupied with yourself and your own feelings'. 'If you will take increased interest in things unconnected with personal feelings,' he added, 'you will find the task much lightened of governing those feelings in general which you state to be your great diffculty in life.' Cold comfort, for a bereaved and lonely woman." (Ch. 17, Worsley)

Victoria was not particularly warm and sensitive when it came to Albert's ailment either despite knowing how frail his health would become whenever he was stressed (which he was significantly before his death): "On 9 December she was even still complaining that his sickness was a bore: 'you know he is always so depressed when anything is the matter with him … it is extremely vexatious." In her case, however, this was a result of the fact that "she could not bear to listen, and shut her eyes to the danger" (Ch. 17, Worsley).

"Taken from me without warning"... when their daughter Alice (the nurse of the family) told Albert that she wrote to her sister Vicky in Germany that he was sick, Albert replied that she should have written that he was dying. The signs were all there.

Tethered to his memory

"When her own husband died nine months later [after her mother], she was entirely overcome and unable to function." [...] "The depression she had suffered nine months before was nothing compared to her current state. She told her family and ministers that she was as good as dead." (Ch. 12, Flanders)

Albert's early death (he was only 42) plunged Victoria into a deep depression and a mourning period that would last until her own death. While she was not the only widow who chose to wear mourning attire forever, it was not commonplace. In her grief, Victoria also withdrew herself from the public.

"Victoria was stubborn in her grief, however. Those concerned with matters of state thought that she was using her loss as an excuse to do exactly what she wanted to do, and to not do whatever she did not want to do. At least in part, the queen herself knew this, as the confused reasoning in a letter she wrote to Lord Russell, the prime minister, shows. Five years after Albert's death, she continued to refuse to attend the state opening of parliament. She wrote, referring to herself in the third person, as was her custom: 'That the public should wish to see her she fully understands, and has no wish to prevent – quite the contrary; but why this wish should be of so unreasonable and unfeeling a nature, as to long to witness the spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow . . . dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show . . . to be gazed at without delicacy of feeling, is a thing that she can't understand.' As far as it can be untangled, Victoria was saying she could entirely understand the reasonable desire of the people that she should attend to matters of state, even as she could not understand how they could be so unreasonable as to expect her to attend to matters of state." (Ch. 12, Flanders)

"But Victoria could not 'take heart to do her duty.' Instead she channelled Albert, becoming the sole conduit for what he would have said, done or wanted. Before the marriage of the Prince of Wales, she took the couple to his tomb and said, 'He gives you his blessing,' joining their hands over his grave. She also participated in the contemporary pastimes of table-turning, rapping and other spiritualist practices." (Ch. 12, Flanders)

Victoria did indeed own this mourning charm bracelet in real life. Yana changed the open portrait though; the real bracelet shows someone else not Albert here. (If this sentence, "She wore other pieces, such as the bracelet containing Albert's portrait and his hair, every day" (Ch. 12, Flanders) refers to this bracelet here (I am unsure whether it does), one of the charm does indeed hold a portrait of Albert - albeit hidden within it.)

Her mourning paraphernalia did not end here though. She possessed a great amount of mourning jewellery fashioned from her late husband's hair and turned the Blue Room in which he had passed away into an altar for him (it is now known as "Albert's room").

"Victoria also established a secular shrine, one that supposed that the definitely dead man continued to be alive. It is commonly said that the queen had ordered Albert's bedroom to be preserved exactly as it had been in his lifetime, with the clock and his watch kept wound, hot shaving water brought up daily, his clothes laid out several times a day for him to change into, his gloves set out on the table as if he had just stepped in from outdoors. However, Albert had not died in his own bedroom. In his final illness he had frequently been delirious and he wandered at night from room to room, happening on his final walk to end up in the room where both George IV and William IV had died. This suited the queen's need to mythologize, and, having been unable to persuade the country or her ministers to make Albert a king, she could present to the court the status she had desired for him by virtue of his dying in the room where past kings had died. Even so, the decor was given additional elements of homage: regularly refreshed mourning wreaths were laid out on the beds; a portrait bust of Albert was installed; his personal items were transferred from his dressing room and laid out as if for use, even as new washstand china was ordered for the dead man's ablutions." [...] "But the currency of Albert worship was most visibly expressed through objects. Victoria had always had an intense connection to her own possessions, which became more extreme after she was widowed." [...] "All the rooms in her residences had small cards at the thresholds, noting that everything in that particular room had been selected and arranged by Albert. Hangings, curtains, carpets and other textiles were copied, so that when they wore out or faded, they could be replaced without any discernible change. "As many people did, the queen had numerous pieces of her husband's hair made into jewellery, of which nearly a dozen pieces are known. She also commissioned portraits for lockets and other jewellery, as well as copies of the casts of Albert's face and arm, and portrait busts, to be given away to friends, family and government ministers. Initially Victoria had had an ambivalent relationship with some of the objects, refusing to look at the death mask made immediately after Albert's death, even as she would not 'allow the sacred cast . . . to go out of the house.' She wore other pieces, such as the bracelet containing Albert's portrait and his hair, every day. More than thirty years after his death the bracelet one day snapped, and despite a jeweller being summoned immediately, in the few hours before it was repaired and back on her wrist, recorded one observer, she remained in a heightened state of 'unhappiness and anxiety.'" (Ch. 12, Flanders)

"These memorial lockets and jewels were a continuation of the virtual shrines that were her own suites of rooms in each of her residences. An anonymous member of the royal household described them in the 1890s. The queen's Windsor sitting room contained a life-sized portrait of Albert by one of her favourite painters, Franz Xaver Winterhalter; another by sentimental favourite Sir Edwin Landseer, with the prince dressed in shooting costume; a 'little' picture of him with his brother, and a portrait of him in historical costume for a fancy-dress ball. In her bedroom there were two portraits of the dead prince as a child, a sketch of the queen 'garbed as a nun' receiving a vision of Albert, a portrait of Victoria's mother, as well as 'a pictorial recollection of her [mother's] room, and the sofa on which she died.' There were, says this report, 231 portraits in the queen's private rooms, none of which depicted her daughters-in-law, her sons-in-law or her grandchildren." (Ch. 12, Flanders)

Victoria's obsession with death and dying did not just extend to her own family though:

"One of her ladies-in-waiting wrote that she took 'the keenest interest in death and all its horrors, our whole talk has been of coffins and winding sheets.' She enjoyed discussing the funeral of a servant ('overdone,' remarked the lady-in-waiting, and 'very trying for the Household'). At Balmoral she went to lay a wreath on the tomb of her old dresser. It was not even necessary that she have any acquaintance with the dead. One holiday in France saw her attending the funeral of a soldier who had died of consumption while she was staying nearby. '[T]he Queen really enjoys these melancholy entertainments,' wrote a bystander." (Ch. 12, Flanders)

Sources:

Victoria: Queen, Matriarch, Empress (2015) by Jane Ridley

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria (2017) by Annie Gray

Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow (2018) by Lucy Worsley