Queen Victoria Trivia
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70 free Queen Victoria trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Queen Victoria trivia quiz covers the woman who gave her name to an age: the sheltered girl of the Kensington System, the 18-year-old woken at six in the morning to be told she was queen, the wife who proposed to her cousin, the mother of nine who hated being pregnant, the widow of Windsor, the Empress of India, the matriarch of two jubilees, and the grandmother of Europe who died at Osborne with a Pomeranian on her bed. The easy questions cover the outline: her husband, her children, her nickname, her title, her jubilees, her successor. The harder half is for readers of Longford and Weintraub: the tsar she was named after, the spaniel called Dash, the story she wrote at ten, the uncle who became King of the Belgians, the bedchamber crisis, the assassin acquitted by reason of insanity, the anaesthetic she championed, the surgeon who lanced her abscess, the man who laid flattery on with a trowel, the Munshi who taught her Urdu, the five threats to abdicate, the poet who shot at her at Windsor, the 122 volumes of journal her daughter burned, and what was hidden in her left hand in the coffin. Every answer was checked against Queen Victoria's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our British monarchs, Victorian era and Elizabeth II quizzes next.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where in London was Victoria born on 24 May 1819?
Kensington Palace
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.
Q 02Which first given name did Victoria drop from official use on becoming queen?
Alexandrina
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 Her first state papers were drawn up for 'Alexandrina Victoria', but she had the first name withdrawn and never used it again; as a child she had been 'Drina' to the family.
Q 03Which Canadian place is named after Victoria's father?
Prince Edward Island
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.
Q 04Right up to the day she became queen, where was Victoria made to sleep every night?
In her mother's bedroom
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.
Q 05What was the name of the young Victoria's King Charles Spaniel?
Dash
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.
Q 06On learning as a girl how close she stood to the throne, Victoria is said to have made which promise?
I will be good
'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.
Q 07Which maternal uncle engineered Victoria's introduction to Prince Albert?
Leopold
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'.
Q 08William IV publicly hoped to live until Victoria turned 18 so that who would never rule as her regent?
Her mother
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.
Q 09What was Victoria wearing when the news came that she was queen?
A dressing gown
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.
Q 10Why did Hanover's crown, shared with Britain since 1714, pass to Victoria's uncle in 1837?
Salic law excluded women
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.
Q 11Which Whig prime minister became a father figure to the young queen?
Lord Melbourne
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'.
Q 12Victoria was the first sovereign to take up residence in which building?
Buckingham Palace
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.
Q 13Which household members did Victoria refuse to let Robert Peel replace in the crisis of 1839?
Her Whig ladies of the bedchamber
Q 21How did the ex-army officer Robert Pate injure the queen in 1850?
He struck her with his cane
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.
Q 22Which of Victoria's childhood governesses was pensioned off in 1842 after a row between the Queen and Albert?
Baroness Lehzen
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.
Q 23Victoria gave £2,000 in 1847 to the relief of which disaster?
Irish famine
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.
Q 14Whose abdominal growth, wrongly rumoured to be a pregnancy by Conroy, damaged Victoria's early reputation?
Lady Flora Hastings
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.
Q 15How did Victoria's engagement to Albert come about in October 1839?
She proposed to him
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.
Q 16What relation was Prince Albert to Victoria?
Her maternal first cousin
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.
Q 17How many children did Victoria and Albert have?
Nine
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.
Q 18What nickname did Victoria earn from her descendants' marriages into royal houses across the continent?
The grandmother of Europe
The grandmother of Europe. Her grandchildren sat on or beside so many thrones that the First World War set first cousins against each other.
Q 19In 1842 Victoria became the first reigning British monarch to travel by which means of transport?
Train
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.
Q 20What did Victoria do the day after John Francis aimed a pistol at her carriage in 1842?
Drove the same route again
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.
The Irish famine. No individual gave more to the relief effort, yet Irish nationalists later branded her 'the Famine Queen'.
Q 24Which French king did Victoria visit in 1843 and 1845, the first such visit since 1520?
Louis Philippe I
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.
Q 25On which island did Victoria and Albert buy the private estate of Osborne House in 1845?
The Isle of Wight
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.
Q 26Which foreign secretary was sacked in 1851 for approving Louis-Napoleon's coup without consulting Queen Victoria?
Lord Palmerston
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.
Q 27Which new anaesthetic did Victoria use for the births of her last two children?
Chloroform
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.
Q 28On her 1855 state visit to Paris, Victoria paid her respects at the tomb of which old enemy of Britain?
Napoleon Bonaparte
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.
Q 29Victoria's eldest daughter married Prince Frederick William of which state in 1858?
Prussia
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.
Q 30What did Victoria learn from the Duchess of Kent's papers in 1861?
That her mother had loved her deeply
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.