When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that every room and corridor in Windsor Castle should be draped in black crepe. As a result, the country’s entire stock of black crepe was exhausted in a single week.
One of the key factors of Victoria’s reign for Michael Dennison is that it was — not always consciously — a ‘performance monarchy’, in which the Queen sat in carefully fashioned stage-sets at Windsor, Balmoral or Osborne being discreetly ogled by the populace. This public posturing helped gloss over Victoria’s ‘dizzying’ contradictions, and the purpose of this short biography is to bring them back out of the shadows. To disinter them as it were, from yards and yards of black crepe.
Given her upbringing, it’s hardly surprising that Victoria suffered from a manic compulsion to move the goalposts every time she trotted onto the pitch. She wouldn’t have become Queen at all if it hadn’t been for the sudden death of her cousin Charlotte — a woman who Dennison tells us was very ‘slapdash in the cleanliness of her undergarments’, not that this seems to have been a factor in her death.
Although possessed of higher standards of hygiene, Victoria’s parents had little else to recommend them. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, was described by a contemporary as ‘the most mediocre person it would be possible to meet’. As for her father, the Duke, he was a sadistic oaf who, while Governor of Gibraltar, once sentenced a man to 900 lashes.
Growing up in Kensington Palace, Victoria was not permitted to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand. She also had to show her mother her diary ever night in case it contained evidence of mental slackness.
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