Queen Victoria and her love, lust and leadership

Saturday: Queen Victoria: Love, Lust & Leadership; (Channel 5, 9.30pm)

Queen Victoria is often portrayed as a stuffy, buttoned-up monarch – and in her later years, a short, jowly and humourless humourless dowager always dressed in black.

But is this image fair? Or do the recent, more fun and glamorous TV and film portrayals by the likes of Jenna Coleman and Emily Blunt better reflect what she was really like?

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Using her diaries, journals, letters and archive treasures, this new two-part series, reveals an emotional, difficult, complicated, but above all very human queen.

Victoria was once very vibrant, with an arresting personality and huge amounts of energy for music, painting, singing, dancing and staying up late.

The programme, narrated by Miriam Margolyes, also reveals a woman of tremendous passion, who battled personal demons, but nevertheless broke new ground being a global ruler, a devoted wife and matriarch all at the same time. Her diaries also reveal the truth about her everyday life, the food she loved, her ever-expanding waistline, the clothes she wore, and her vicious battles with her children and her husband.

In this episode, we see how she struggled to reconcile her different roles. Victoria knew that her duty meant that she must marry, but she wasn’t going to make the wrong choice – she was a romantic at heart.

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She first met her cousin Albert in 1836, but he didn’t make too much of an impression, so a tutor was hired to coach him. “I may like him as a friend, and as a cousin and as a brother, but no more,” she confided in a letter to her uncle, Leopold I of Belgium.

However, she would soon change her mind: “Albert really is quite charming, and so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes… my heart is quite going.”

Victoria and Albert’s wedding in 1840 brought the nation together and the Queen kick-started the tradition of the white wedding dress as the nation enjoyed its first taste of a public royal wedding.

The couple spent their wedding night at Windsor Castle and Victoria told all in her journal, revealing a side that would have made many Victorians blush.

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“When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! “He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.”

However, the couple’s honeymoon didn’t last long as Victoria told Albert her role as monarch was too important and she could only spare a few days away from the palace.

Victoria was a queen, a wife and soon a mother, for within a year of marriage, she gave birth, the first ruling British monarch to do so.

Incredibly, tradition of the time dictated that she had to give birth in front of the leaders of the day, including the Prime Minister!

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Victoria had eight more children, but her private writings reveal mixed maternal feelings, referring to being a new mum as ‘being like a cow or a dog’ and ‘an ugly baby is a very nasty object’.

Eventually, Victoria and Albert built their dream home, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight.

But with their ever-expanding family, the Queen was forced to rely on her husband to help with her royal duties, and their marriage was tempestuous.

After the Great Exhibition showcased Victoria and Albert as a global power couple, the prince fell seriously ill with typhoid fever and died unexpectedly in 1861, aged just 42.

His death shook Victoria to the core.

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And with revolutions sweeping across Europe during the 19th century and royal dynasties overthrown, the British monarchy was in a precarious position.

In short, Victoria’s inconsolable grief would nearly cost her the crown.

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