QUEEN VICTORIA, PRINCE ALBERT AND THE ROYAL FAMILY.
From the Picture by F. Winterhalter.

QUEEN VICTORIA

BY

LYTTON STRACHEY

LONDON

CHATTO & WINDUS

1921

TO

VIRGINIA WOOLF

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

QUEEN VICTORIA, PRINCE ALBERT AND THE ROYAL FAMILY.
    From the picture of F. Winterhalter, at Buckingham Palace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

PRINCESS VICTORIA IN 1836.
    From a print after the picture by F. Winterhalter

LORD MELBOURNE.
    From the portrait by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., in
    possession of the Earl of Rosebery

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1838.
    From the portrait by E. Corbould

PRINCE ALBERT IN 1840.
    From the portrait by John Partridge, at Buckingham Palace

QUEEN VICTORIA AND THE PRINCE CONSORT IN 1860

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1863

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1876.
    From the portrait by Von Angeli, in possession of
    Coningsby Disraeli, Esq. Presented by Her Majesty to
    the Earl of Beaconsfield

QUEEN VICTORIA IN 1897

For facilities afforded in regard to the reproduction of certain of the above, thanks are due to Mr. John Murray.

Authority for every important statement of fact in the following pages will be found in the footnotes. The full titles of the works to which reference is made are given in the Bibliography at the end of the volume.

The author is indebted to the Trustees of the British Museum for their permission to make use of certain unpublished passages in the manuscript of the Greville Memoirs.

QUEEN VICTORIA

CHAPTER I

ANTECEDENTS

I

On November 6, 1817, died the Princess Charlotte, only child of the Prince Regent, and heir to the crown of England. Her short life had hardly been a happy one. By nature impulsive, capricious, and vehement, she had always longed for liberty; and she had never possessed it. She had been brought up among violent family quarrels, had been early separated from her disreputable and eccentric mother, and handed over to the care of her disreputable and selfish father. When she was seventeen, he decided to marry her off to the Prince of Orange; she, at