Following his death, Victoria's mother, Duchess Victoria, was prepared to rule alongside her daughter if Victoria's uncle died and she ascended to the throne before she was officially of age. For this reason, Victoria's mother used a strict code of discipline to shape the Queen-to-be. Later known as the "Kensington System," it involved a strict timetable of lessons to improve Victoria's morality and intellect.
This meant she rarely got to interact with children her own age because of the demands on her time. Princess Victoria was under constant adult supervision and was also made to share a bedroom with her mother until she became Queen. The young queen was an adept linguist, fluent in both English and German. Her mother and governess both had German roots, so Victoria grew up speaking the language and later used it frequently when speaking to her German husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
The Queen also studied French, Italian, and Latin. Toward the end of her reign, when servants from India arrived at Windsor Castle in , her attendant, Abdul Karim , taught the Queen many Hindu and Urdu phrases to better communicate with her servants.
During her reign, several attempts were made at Queen Victoria's life , all of them unsuccessful. Oxford was accused of high treason for his crime and was ultimately found not guilty for reasons of insanity, according to the History channel's website. Two men tried to shoot her in , and in , her carriage was attacked by William Hamilton, an unemployed Irish immigrant who later pled guilty to the crime and was banished for seven years, History reports.
One year later, Robert Pate, a former soldier, used an iron-tipped cane to hit the Queen in the head, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The final notable attempt took place in March of , when a Scottish poet named Roderick Maclean shot at Queen Victoria's carriage with a pistol while leaving the Windsor train station.
According to Time , this was Maclean's eighth attempt at assassinating the Queen. Maclean was tried for high treason and was found "not guilty, but insane," so Maclean was sentenced to live out his days in an asylum until his death in , the Guardian reports.
Despite the chaos and fear that followed the many assassination attempts, Queen Victoria became more and more popular with the public after each attempt. Four years later, Victoria, now the monarch, proposed to Prince Albert on October 15, and they were married on February 10, , in the Chapel Royal of St. James's Palace in London. Victoria was deeply in love with Albert and, once they were married, she claimed to be truly happy for the first time in her life.
After their wedding night, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary, "I never, never spent such an evening!! Tory Robert Peel stepped forward to become prime minister, on one condition: he requested that Victoria dismiss some of her existing household — who largely held Whig sympathies and were loyal to Melbourne — and replace them with Tory ladies. The queen had already been criticised for her over-reliance on Lord Melbourne, and now she was widely condemned for being not just politically partisan, but unconstitutional.
As her mother and governess both hailed from Germany, Victoria grew up speaking the language and at one stage reportedly even had a German accent, which had to be erased by tutors. Although Albert was fluent in English, he and Victoria could often be heard talking — and indeed arguing — in German when in private.
Later in life, Victoria also experimented with some of the languages from across her vast empire. Over the course of the six decades she sat on the throne, Victoria saw many prime ministers come and go. Yet while she established a remarkably close bond with some, others failed spectacularly to win her favour. Over the course of her reign, Victoria witnessed a mammoth expansion of the British empire.
The queen herself took a great interest in imperial affairs. The queen had pushed for the title for several years, but, concerned about its absolutist connotations, Disraeli had been hesitant to agree. By , however, Victoria had become so insistent he felt he could not resist any longer, for fear of offending her.
Over the course of their year marriage, Victoria and Albert raised nine children together. Kaiser Wilhelm reportedly remarked that had his grandmother still been alive, the First World War may never have happened, as she simply would not have allowed her relatives to go to war with one another. It is believed that the queen was a carrier of haemophilia and had unwittingly introduced the rare inherited disease into her bloodline.
Over subsequent generations the condition resurfaced in royal families across the continent. Listen: Deborah Cadbury shows how Queen Victoria sought to influence the future of Europe through the marriages of her descendants, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast :.
During the course of her year-long reign, Victoria came out unscathed from at least six serious attempts on her life, some of which were terrifyingly close calls. In June , while four months pregnant with her first child, Victoria was shot at while on an evening carriage ride with Prince Albert. For a moment it seemed as though the queen had been hit, but Albert spurred the driver to speed away to safety and the would-be assassin, Edward Oxford, was apprehended. Oxford — who was later acquitted on grounds of insanity — proved to be the first of many to target the queen while she was driving in her open-top carriage.
In , as the carriage slowed down to pass through the gates of Buckingham Palace, retired soldier Robert Pate ran forward and managed to strike the queen sharply on the head with a small cane. Although it transpired that the cane weighed less than three ounces, so could not have done much damage, the incident nonetheless unnerved Victoria. She escaped several more assassination attempts while riding in her carriage in , and As the prince was aged just 42 and generally enjoyed good health, his death from typhoid was highly unexpected.
It came as a huge blow to the queen, who had been intensely reliant on his support, practically and politically as well as emotionally. Consumed by grief, Victoria fell into a state of depression and began neglecting her royal duties. As she repeatedly refused to take part in public events, her popularity began to deteriorate. It was not until the s that Victoria was coaxed back into gradually engaging in public life once more. Despite the decades that passed, Victoria never fully recovered from the loss of Albert.
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