70 Fun Facts About Queen Victoria

Where in London was Victoria born on 24 May 1819?

Kensington Palace. Her hard-up parents had been living in Germany and hurried back to England weeks before the birth so that a possible heir to the throne would be born on English soil.

Which first given name did Victoria drop from official use on becoming queen?

Alexandrina. Her first state papers were drawn up for 'Alexandrina Victoria', but she had the first name withdrawn and never used it again; as a child she had been 'Drina' to the family.

Which Canadian place is named after Victoria's father?

Prince Edward Island. Prince Edward spent most of the 1790s soldiering in British North America, where the colony's assembly renamed the island in his honour; he never wore the crown, but his daughter did.

Right up to the day she became queen, where was Victoria made to sleep every night?

In her mother's bedroom. Under the regime her mother and Sir John Conroy devised she was hardly ever left alone, and one of her first orders as queen was to have her bed moved out.

What was the name of the young Victoria's King Charles Spaniel?

Dash. Home from her coronation in 1838, she hurried out of her robes to give him his bath; he had first come into the household as Sir John Conroy's gift to her mother.

On learning as a girl how close she stood to the throne, Victoria is said to have made which promise?

'I will be good.' Her governess told of slipping a royal family tree into the girl's history book to break the news; Victoria herself later doubted it had happened quite that way.

Which maternal uncle engineered Victoria's introduction to Prince Albert?

Leopold, King of the Belgians. He arranged for Albert to visit in 1836, while William IV, who wanted no Coburg match, pushed a Dutch prince instead; Victoria found the Dutchman 'very plain'.

William IV publicly hoped to live until Victoria turned 18 so that who would never rule as her regent?

Her mother. The king said so to her mother's face at his birthday banquet in 1836 and got his wish: Victoria came of age on 24 May 1837, and he died less than a month later.

What was Victoria wearing when the news came that she was queen?

A dressing gown. She was woken at 6 am: the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain had driven through the night to tell her, and she noted in her journal that she received them alone.

Why did Hanover's crown, shared with Britain since 1714, pass to Victoria's uncle in 1837?

Salic law excluded women. So her unpopular uncle Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, became King of Hanover, and he stayed next in line for her own throne until her first child was born.

Which Whig prime minister became a father figure to the young queen?

Lord Melbourne. The widowed premier, forty years her senior, became so constant a companion that, when scandal hit her court in 1839, hecklers jeered the young queen as 'Mrs Melbourne'.

Victoria was the first sovereign to take up residence in which building?

Buckingham Palace. She moved in weeks after her accession, but marriage showed up its lack of nurseries, so Marble Arch was shifted to Hyde Park to make room for a fourth wing.

Which household members did Victoria refuse to let Robert Peel replace in the crisis of 1839?

Her Whig ladies of the bedchamber. Peel asked that some be swapped for the wives of Tories; the 19-year-old queen refused point blank, so he declined to form a government.

Whose abdominal growth, wrongly rumoured to be a pregnancy by Conroy, damaged Victoria's early reputation?

Lady Flora Hastings. Court gossip had the unmarried lady-in-waiting pregnant until doctors cleared her; she died months later of a liver tumour, and the queen was hissed in public.

How did Victoria's engagement to Albert come about in October 1839?

She proposed to him. Nobody could propose to a reigning queen, so five days after Albert reached Windsor she summoned him and asked, later calling it 'a nervous thing' to do.

What relation was Prince Albert to Victoria?

Her maternal first cousin. His father and her mother were brother and sister, the same midwife delivered both babies in 1819, and the family linked the two as a match from the cradle.

How many children did Victoria and Albert have?

Nine. All of them reached adulthood, yet the mother of this model family hated pregnancy and childbirth and is thought to have suffered postnatal depression.

What nickname did Victoria earn from her descendants' marriages into royal houses across the continent?

The grandmother of Europe. Her grandchildren sat on or beside so many thrones that the First World War set first cousins against each other.

In 1842 Victoria became the first reigning British monarch to travel by which means of transport?

Train. She rode the Great Western from Slough to Paddington and enjoyed it so much that she took the railway again later that summer to begin her first journey to Scotland.

What did Victoria do the day after John Francis aimed a pistol at her carriage in 1842?

Drove the same route again. She meant to draw him out, saying she would rather run the risk at once than live with the dread; he fired, and plainclothes police seized him.

How did the ex-army officer Robert Pate injure the queen in 1850?

He struck her with his cane. The blow bruised her forehead as she left a visit to her dying uncle, and it earned Pate seven years' transportation to Van Diemen's Land.

Which of Victoria's childhood governesses was pensioned off in 1842 after a row between the Queen and Albert?

Baroness Lehzen. Albert blamed her mismanagement when their baby daughter fell ill; she retired to Germany on a pension and covered the walls of her house with portraits of the queen.

Victoria gave £2,000 in 1847 to the relief of which disaster?

The Irish famine. No individual gave more to the relief effort, yet Irish nationalists later branded her 'the Famine Queen'.

Which French king did Victoria visit in 1843 and 1845, the first such visit since 1520?

Louis Philippe I. In 1848 revolution toppled him; he was smuggled to England as 'Mr Smith' and lived out his exile at Claremont, a house Victoria put at his disposal.

On which island did Victoria and Albert buy the private estate of Osborne House in 1845?

The Isle of Wight. She found Windsor too stately and disliked Brighton's Pavilion, so the couple bought Osborne as a home of their own, and Albert helped design the new house himself.

Which foreign secretary was sacked in 1851 for approving Louis-Napoleon's coup without consulting Queen Victoria?

Lord Palmerston. She had long fumed that he sent off dispatches she had never seen, yet four years later the Crimean War left her no choice but to make him prime minister.

Which new anaesthetic did Victoria use for the births of her last two children?

Chloroform. John Snow, later famed for tracing cholera to a London water pump, gave it to her in 1853, and fashionable London soon followed the queen's lead.

On her 1855 state visit to Paris, Victoria paid her respects at the tomb of which old enemy of Britain?

Napoleon Bonaparte. Forty years after Waterloo she stood at his tomb as the guest of his nephew Napoleon III, on the first visit to Paris by a reigning English sovereign since Henry VI.

Victoria's eldest daughter married Prince Frederick William of which state in 1858?

Prussia. When Berlin expected the wedding there, Victoria retorted that it was 'not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England', and the couple married in London.

What did Victoria learn from the Duchess of Kent's papers in 1861?

That her mother had loved her deeply. Little books recording her babyhood showed 'such unbounded tenderness', she wrote, and she grieved that two people had 'wickedly estranged' them.

Which 1851 showcase of world industry in Hyde Park was masterminded by Victoria's husband, Prince Albert?

The Great Exhibition. Six million visits to its Crystal Palace left a profit large enough to buy the land for a permanent national museum, the start of London's museum quarter.

What nickname did Victoria's long seclusion after Albert's death earn her?

The widow of Windsor. She wore black for the remaining 40 years of her life and so rarely showed herself that her popularity sank and calls for a republic grew louder.

Which Scottish estate did Victoria and Albert lease in 1848 and buy in 1852?

Balmoral. They leased it in 1848, found that the hills reminded Albert of his German homeland, bought the estate in 1852 and built the present castle in place of the old house.

In 1864, with Victoria long in seclusion, a notice on her London palace's railings announced what?

The premises were to let. The joker's notice blamed 'the late occupant's declining business', mocking a queen who had hardly been seen in her capital since her husband died.

Which Scottish manservant became so close to the widowed queen that rumours spoke of a secret marriage?

John Brown. Her children resented him, but she would not give him up, and at her request a lock of his hair and his photograph were placed in her hand in her coffin.

Which prime minister said royalty should be flattered 'with a trowel' and told Victoria 'we authors, Ma'am'?

Benjamin Disraeli. The flattery worked: when he died she sent a wreath of primroses, 'his favourite flower', and put up a church memorial signed by his grateful sovereign and friend.

Which prime minister is Victoria said to have complained addressed her like 'a public meeting'?

William Gladstone. Authentic or not, the complaint fits a queen whose distrust of him only deepened; when he retired in 1894 she chose his successor without asking his advice.

Which surgeon lanced an abscess in Victoria's arm in 1871 using his new antiseptic carbolic acid spray?

Joseph Lister. When the wound refilled overnight he cut holes in a length of rubber tubing and slipped it in, improvising a surgical drainage tube on the queen herself.

Which group gained the vote under the 1867 Reform Act, a change Victoria supported?

Urban working men. The Act roughly doubled the electorate, but the queen drew the line at her own sex, calling women's rights a 'mad, wicked folly' three years later.

What additional title did Victoria assume from 1 May 1876 under the Royal Titles Act?

Empress of India. The bill was fiercely attacked in Parliament, and she thanked the prime minister who carried it by making him an earl a few months later.

In 1877 and 1878 Victoria repeatedly threatened to abdicate unless her government stood up to which country?

Russia. During the Russo-Turkish War she wrote that if she were a man she would like to go and give those Russians, whose word could not be believed, 'such a beating'.

Which of Victoria's daughters died of diphtheria on 14 December 1878, the anniversary of Albert's death?

Alice. She had worn herself out nursing her husband and children through the epidemic before she caught it herself, and she was the first of Victoria's children to die.

When a gunman fired at Victoria at Windsor station in 1882, a boy from which school struck him with an umbrella?

Eton College. Roderick Maclean missed and was sent to Broadmoor, but the 'not guilty' wording of his insanity verdict so angered the queen that Parliament changed it to 'guilty but insane'.

Victoria said the 1882 attempt on her life was 'worth being shot at' to see what?

How much one is loved. The shot missed, and the flood of loyal messages delighted a queen who, ten years earlier, had faced open calls for a republic.

What happened to Victoria's eulogistic biography of her Highland servant, begun after his 1883 death?

The manuscript was destroyed. Her private secretary, sent the draft, warned her that strangers would misread so intimate a tribute to her servant, and the project was dropped.

For whose death at the Siege of Khartoum in 1885 did Victoria blame her own government?

General Gordon's. She had urged a rescue for months, and when the news came she rebuked her prime minister in a message sent openly instead of in cipher, which soon reached the press.

What did Victoria wear instead of a crown to her Golden Jubilee service in 1887?

A bonnet. She refused a crown or robes of state for the Westminster Abbey service, prompting one statesman to grumble that the empire should be ruled by a sceptre and not a bonnet.

Which Indian servant, engaged as a waiter in 1887, became the 'Munshi' who taught Victoria Urdu?

Abdul Karim. She brushed off her household's complaints about him as prejudice, and she left orders that he should walk among the principal mourners at her funeral.

On 23 September 1896 Victoria overtook which monarch as the longest-reigning in British history?

George III. Her grandfather had reigned for 59 years; she asked that any celebration of the record wait until the following June, when she would complete 60 years on the throne.

How did Victoria send her thanks to every part of the empire on the morning of her 1897 Diamond Jubilee?

By telegraph. As she left the palace her message, 'From my heart I thank my beloved people', went down the wires to all parts of the empire, and she then drove six miles through cheering streets.

Why was Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee service held outside St Paul's Cathedral?

She could not climb the steps. Lame with rheumatism at 78, she stayed in her open carriage while the clergy held a short service around her at the cathedral's west front.

In 1889 Victoria crossed from Biarritz to become the first reigning British monarch to visit which country?

Spain. On holiday at the resort once favoured by her friend the Empress Eugénie, she crossed briefly to call on Spain's queen regent at San Sebastián.

Which foreign ruler, a grandson of Victoria, was at her deathbed in 1901?

Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser. Despite sour relations with his English family he came to her bedside and stayed for the funeral; thirteen years later he was at war with another of her grandsons, George V.

Which of her sons succeeded Victoria when her reign of more than 63 years ended in 1901?

Edward VII. He was 59 before he became king, having waited through four decades of a mother who blamed his youthful affair for hastening his father's death.

Victoria dressed in mourning for forty years; which colour did she order for her own funeral?

White. In instructions written in 1897 she asked for a white funeral in place of a black one, and she was laid in her coffin in a white dress and her wedding veil.

Where was Victoria buried beside Prince Albert in 1901?

Frogmore, at Windsor. Four days after Albert died in 1861 she picked a spot in its gardens for a mausoleum where the two could lie together, away from the traditional royal vaults.

Which of Victoria's children rewrote her journals and burned most of the originals?

Beatrice. Her youngest child, named literary executor, removed whatever might embarrass the family, but a courtier's earlier typescript of the first volumes survives to show what she cut.

What painful mistake did the Archbishop make at Victoria's coronation in 1838?

Jammed her ring on the wrong finger. She was ready to cry out with the pain, and in the same chaotic service the elderly Lord Rolle tumbled down the steps of the throne while paying homage.

Victoria's profile appeared in 1840 on the world's first adhesive postage stamp, known by what name?

The Penny Black. Its portrait of the young queen was never updated, so British stamps went on showing the same girlish head until she died at 81.

Which hereditary disease did Queen Victoria pass to the Russian and Spanish royal families?

Haemophilia. None of her forebears had it, so the mutation probably began with her; two of her daughters carried it into the families they married into.

Which inscription did Victoria choose for the Victoria Cross after rejecting the first proposal?

For Valour. She feared the first wording, which praised the brave, would imply that only the men who won the cross had fought bravely.

Which famous diamond from India was presented to Victoria in 1850 and later set in the Crown Jewels?

The Koh-i-Noor. Crowds who came to see it in London the next year thought it dull, so Albert had it recut for sparkle, and Victoria wore the smaller stone as a brooch.

Which Dame played Queen Victoria on film in both 1997 and 2017?

Judi Dench. The first of the two was shot for television and expected to air on the BBC, until an American film company bought it and released it in cinemas.

Which city did Victoria name in 1857 as the capital of the Province of Canada, ending years of rivalry?

Ottawa. Rival cities had made any choice politically dangerous, so the question was put to the queen, whose letter named the recently renamed town with effect from the last day of 1857.

Whose 1817 death in childbirth started the race for an heir that produced Victoria?

Princess Charlotte. She was the old king's only legitimate grandchild, so her death sent his middle-aged bachelor sons in search of brides, and Victoria was born to one of them 18 months later.

An 1840s engraving showed Victoria, Albert and their children around what, boosting a festive fashion in Britain?

A Christmas tree. The German custom was no novelty at court, where Victoria had trees as a child, but the published picture helped carry the fashion into British homes.

Which disease nearly killed the Prince of Wales in late 1871, at the height of the republican movement?

Typhoid fever. It was the illness blamed for his father's death ten years earlier, and the public thanksgiving for his recovery won back much of the support the Crown had been losing.

Which explorer named Africa's most famous waterfall after Victoria in 1855?

David Livingstone. The Scottish missionary named the falls for his sovereign, though they already had a name that is still in use: Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'.

Victoria's 1900 visit to Ireland, her first in 39 years, partly honoured Irish soldiers fighting in which war?

The Boer War. She also let Irish soldiers wear the shamrock on St Patrick's Day, an emblem until then forbidden in the army, and ordered a new regiment, the Irish Guards.

To which woman did Victoria send a jewelled brooch in 1855, in thanks for her care of the army's wounded?

Florence Nightingale. No medal or decoration then existed for a woman civilian, so Albert oversaw the design of a brooch to stand as a badge of royal thanks.