She Was the Most Powerful Woman in the World, but She Didn't Think Women Should Be Allowed to Vote?

Queen Victoria, current thinking suggests, is as susceptible to multiple interpretations as the Bible. In her lifetime Britain’s longest-serving monarch wrote an estimated 60 million words, including, on occasion, 2,500 words a day in the Journal she kept throughout her adult life. Candor and vehemence are invariably the keynotes of this voluminous output, underscored by a deep-seated conviction that her opinion merited attention. In letters, memoranda and her diary she expressed herself on subjects as wide-ranging as women’s education, race relations, breastfeeding (a particular bugbear) and the honesty of the Highland tenantry she encountered on her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire. Inevitably, such extensive primary sources appear to offer historians clues about the woman herself.

And what a wealth of clues.

Enough, in fact, to support almost any interpretation the historian wishes to impose. As she emerges from her own writing, Victoria is by turns progressive and reactionary, modest and assertive, thoughtful and blinkered, emancipated and hidebound. She believed in racial equality but was a stranger to ecumenicalism: religious intolerance was as the bread of life to this robustly low church woman whose Christian belief was a cornerstone of her life and her (frequently lugubrious) thinking. She loathed the idea of female education, even more any idea of a female vote, but was mulish in defense of her own prerogatives as sovereign, apparently unaware that she was not only the most prominent working woman of her time but one who repeatedly sought to interfere in the political processes of Britain and its vast empire.

She was devoted to the idea of family and proud of her status as the mother of nine children, but unable to treat those children with straightforward maternal affection uncolored by her role as sovereign. She disliked belligerence but was invariably bombastic. The diminutive daughter of an impoverished younger son, she described herself in later years as ‘the Doyenne of sovereigns.’ The dominant characteristic identified by those who met Victoria was her charm.

She was, in truth, a tangle of contradictions. For the biographer it is the very complexity of Victoria’s psychology that contributes to her compulsive interest.

I had encountered Queen Victoria before I wrote my most recent book. Her presence is ubiquitous in my biography of her youngest daughter Beatrice, The Last Princess. Theirs was a strongly loving relationship which revealed in stark terms both the generosity and selfishness of Victoria’s nature. She adored Beatrice but exacted in response a kind of thraldom from her daughter. Victoria was an emotional empiricist: she needed to see and feel evidence of love. When it proved unforthcoming, she was not above demanding that evidence.

In writing what is intentionally a short biography of this much-discussed figure, it was necessary to reach a conclusion about who and what Victoria really was. In 45,000 words, there simply isn’t room to offer any sort of blow-by-blow chronology of Victoria’s long life and reign. What was necessary was a distillation of Victoria, like a pungent cordial. My conclusion, after a decade of reading Victoria’s letters and Journals, was that only the Queen herself was able to reconcile the contradictory impulses in her nature – and that was something she rarely felt the need to do.

The glory of Victoria’s huge written output is that we can readily see her for herself. So often the life stories of even the most prominent women emerge from the linked stories of the men closest to them. Not Victoria. Granted, much of what she tells us about herself is inadvertent and not at all what she probably intended, but it is triumphantly her own story. Over and again men influenced her – her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians; her husband Albert; prime ministers Melbourne and Disreali; her Scottish servant John Brown. Although Albert came close to overwhelming Victoria, and certainly did his best to remake her in line with his own image of the ideal constitutional monarch, Victoria stubbornly retained her sense of self. More than a century has passed since her death: to read Victoria’s writing is to encounter a life force.

I chose to revel in her unfathomableness. She usually described herself with splendid swank as ‘the Queen,’ reverting to the third person. For Victoria that label was all-embracing and all her conflicting impulses and instincts could be rationalized via the title that became for her a self-definition. She was a sincere woman who struggled always to be honest, both with herself and those she encountered. I admire her sincerity and her honesty. And as her biographer, I am delighted by her multi-facetedness. I can never meet Victoria, but I can feel her charm. I hope my readers will share that experience.