Queen Victoria's Hindustani diary

Osborne House has a fascinating display focusing on Queen Victoria's relationship with Abdul Karim, the munshi, who tutored her in Hindustani. You can view it here.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria in 1859
by Winterhalter
Public domain

Why Victoria?

Victoria would never have existed but for the death in childbirth of her cousin, Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent, in November 1817. Her totally unexpected death created a succession crisis. One by one the Prince Regent's brothers discarded their mistresses and looked for wives in an effort to provide a legitimate heir.

In 1817 Edward duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, abandoned his long-standing mistress, Julie de St Laurent, and began to pay court to Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Victoire was the thirty-year-old widowed elder sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Princess Charlotte's widower. She already had two children, Carl, Prince of Leningen, born 1804 and Fedora, born 1807.

When Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, her birth went virtually unnoticed. It was by no means certain that she would inherit the throne, as her father had three elder brothers and her parents’ next child might be a son. She was baptised Alexandrina Victoria after her godfather, Tsar Alexander I of Russia and her mother, and in her early childhood was known as ‘Drina’. For a while both names were thought unacceptably foreign.

When she came to the throne with the death of William IC in May 1837, Britain had its first female sovereign since the death of Queen Anne in 1714. One immediate and significant result was the severing of the link with Hanover, which did not allow female succession.

Albert: uncrowned king?

In February 1840 Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The engagement had brought into the open the problems of defining the status of the consort of a reigning queen. The precedents were not happy: Philip of Spain, the husband of Mary I, had been deeply unpopular, and George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s husband, had been a nonentity. The queen reluctantly accepted the advice of her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, that Albert should not receive the title of King Consort.
It was not until 1857 that he was given the title of Prince Consort.

Victoria and Albert in 1854

Faced with the discouraging precedents, Albert had to carve out a role for himself. He proved a highly interventionist consort. Victoria's nine pregnancies gave him the opportunity to take on many of her duties, and the two of them worked together at their despatches at adjoining desks. When Sir Robert Peel was struggling for his political life in January 1846, Albert went to the Commons to lend him moral support – retrospectively, a very partisan gesture. He was never popular, and even his key role in the Great Exhibition was controversial.

Had he lived, his political role might have created problems for the monarchy.