The Project Gutenberg EBook of Queen Victoria, by Lytton Strachey

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Title: Queen Victoria

Author: Lytton Strachey

Release Date: February 18, 2006 [EBook #1265]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUEEN VICTORIA ***

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger

QUEEN VICTORIA

By Lytton Strachey

New York Harcourt, Brace And Company, 1921

CONTENTS

I. ANTECEDENTS
II. CHILDHOOD
III. LORD MELBOURNE
IV. MARRIAGE
V. LORD PALMERSTON
VI. LAST YEARS OF THE PRINCE CONSORT
VII. WIDOWHOOD
VIII. MR. GLADSTONE AND LORD BEACONSFIELD
IX. OLD AGE
X. THE END
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 first,
acquiesced; but, suddenly falling in love with Prince Augustus of
Prussia, she determined to break off the engagement. This was not her
first love affair, for she had previously carried on a clandestine
correspondence with a Captain Hess. Prince Augustus was already married,
morganatically, but she did not know it, and he did not tell her. While
she was spinning out the negotiations with the Prince of Orange, the
allied sovereign--it was June, 1814--arrived in London to celebrate
their victory. Among them, in the suite of the Emperor of Russia, was
the young and handsome Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. He made several
attempts to attract the notice of the Princess, but she, with her heart
elsewhere, paid very little attention. Next month the Prince Regent,
discovering that his daughter was having secret meetings with Prince
Augustu