An Introduction In June of 1837, less than a month after coming of age, a naïve, young 18-year-old princess who had slept every night of her life in her mother's bedroom ascended to the throne of the most powerful nation on earth. No novice destined for religious orders could have been more cloistered in her upbringing; none less versed in the worldly responsibilities that would become hers to discharge. And while she appeared unprepared to rule, the British monarchy also appeared to be on the wane. Tarnished by decades of dissolute, erratic behavior on the part of its two previous occupants, her uncles George IV and William IV, as well as the periodic bouts of insanity that had plagued their father, George III, the throne of England seemed well on its way to irrelevance. England's constitutional government had obviously learned how to function quite well despite it. Napoleon had been defeated in 1815 by Wellington, the Reform Bill of 1832 successfully passed by Parliament, and the danger of a bloody civil revolution on the French model averted. Yet despite this trend, Victoria as Queen would preside with authority over the zenith of the richest empire in human history, define afresh its moral center, and become, in effect, its spiritual icon. In the Company of Men How did such an untutored innocent come to exert so profound an influence over her subjects during her long reign? In a culture as patriarchal as 19th-century England, the answer was, in some respects, an age-old one: through her relationships with men. Raised almost entirely in the company of women and under their control, it was to men Victoria turned for intimacy, guidance, and scope once she assumed the throne. And in the political arena, it was men who, quite naturally, became both her allies and her most significant adversaries. On the evidence in her biographies and her own diaries, two repeating patterns tended to characterize her relationships with strong men who were significant in her life. Those whose manner and character she admired, she tended to idealize and develop a dependency upon. Among these were Lord Melbourne, Prince Albert, John Brown, and Benjamin Disraeli. Those whose manner she disliked, she seemed barely able to tolerate and would resist their counsel, no matter how well reasoned or clearly presented. Into the latter category fell Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, and William Gladstone, able men both, but not to Victoria's taste. Very occasionally, as with Robert Peel, she would change her mind, but that would require the influence of another strong male in whom she had invested trust. Politics aside, this psychology may well have had its roots in her childhood. She had never known her father, who died within weeks of her birth. She may have often been looking for him. She would have been the first to admit that she had a lifelong need for a strong, reliable arm to lean on, and a lifelong need to be loved by someone she really looked up to. Common human needs both, and, in many ways, Victoria was a most ordinary human being. It's one of the secrets of her enormous appeal to this day. Contrary to the popular stereotype, Victoria was emotionally passionate by nature. As she explained in a letter to her eldest daughter, Vicky, written in her late 30s, "I had led a very unhappy life as a child; had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection -- had no brothers and sisters to live with -- never had a father -- from my unfortunate circumstances was not on a comfortable or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother (so different from you to me) -- much as I love her now -- and did not know what a happy domestic life was!" From the Inside Looking Out Multiple quirks of fate, combined with the English rules of succession, had determined that among all the progeny of George III's 15 children, Victoria would be the sole surviving heir to the English throne. From a very early age, therefore, her life was extremely precious to the state, but in an almost clinical way. She remained in the care of her mother, Victoire of Saxe-Coburg, a foreign-born princess who felt very much an outsider, having been treated rather shabbily from the start by the rest of the Royal family. Now a widow, Victoire quite understandably sought to protect her child from the dissolute Regency atmosphere at court. Unfortunately, while maintaining her distance, she herself fell under the sway of an unscrupulous courtier who was also a swindler, Sir John Conroy. He was a loathed fixture of Victoria's upbringing who wished to isolate her to serve his own very different agenda: that of becoming Victoria's Regent through his influence over her mother. This never came to pass. Odd as it may seem, Victoria was also raised very frugally. "Tea was only allowed as a great treat in later years," she wrote. Having shared the Hanoverian tendency to be a spendthrift, her father was perpetually in debt by the time he died, and Parliament did not feel inclined to lavish excessive resources on his surviving family, princess or no princess. Living in such constrained and disciplined isolation and starved for real emotional relationships in a real world, young Victoria substituted the imaginary world of the theater, opera, and ballet instead. These she was allowed to attend frequently in the company of Mama; her governess, Baroness Lehzen; and the Conroys. Trained to draw and paint from the age of 8 and to keep a diary from the age of 13, she recreated scenes from these performances on the pages of her sketchbooks and journals. Through them she animated her lonely world through words and pictures. Apart from portraits of her immediate family circle and academic studies assigned by her art teacher, the vast majority of her early drawings and paintings are of these fictional heroes and heroines -- sung, danced, and acted upon the stage, or read about in books. A Dream Come True When she came to the throne in 1837, insecure as she may have been, these fantasies had probably kept her personal hopes alive. She was still an idealist at heart who believed in "the good," with a romantic faith in her own possible personal happiness -- in partnership, she dreamed, with a truly admirable man. And in that regard her dream came true. Of the men who were important to her, first and foremost in her own heart and mind was always Prince Albert, her husband. From her perspective at least, theirs was a true royal love match. Deeply principled and devoted, Victoria maintained an absolute fidelity to Albert throughout their married life. Together they had nine children, who, through marriages and offspring of their own, soon occupied royal thrones across Europe with unexpected results. Victoria's own grandson by Vicky, for example, became Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, England's most hated adversary in the Great War of 1914-18. But there were other men before and after Albert who exerted as great or greater an influence on Victoria's entire sensibility and outlook. Of these John Brown was but one; many others, Disraeli among them, were the greatest political luminaries of the age. Victoria's relationship with her own eldest son, Edward (Bertie, as she called him), who would become the future King of England, is another sort of tale, all its own. Written Portraits To meet some of these other men Victoria chose to admire, love, or despise during her long life, explore this gallery of All The Queen's Men The profiles you'll read are primarily drawn from Victoria's well-known biographers, particularly Lytton Strachey. Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and friend of Virginia Woolf, is considered by many to be the inventor of the modern, informal biography as we know it today. He first made his name with the irreverent portraits he penned in Eminent Victorians, but it was his curiously sympathetic biography of Victoria herself, first published in 1921, that really broke the mold and set a new standard. If the cameos you find in Who's Who whet your appetite for more, the complete text of Strachey's Queen Victoria is available online. Check our Links and Bibliography section to find out where.