Queen Victoria: The first Royal Rebel and her Struggle for the Throne

We tend to see Queen Victoria as a staid, dreary, and morally strict, granite faced monarch, who lived according to strict moral codes and was never ‘amused’. In her youth, however, she was very different.

Kate Williams’s Becoming Queen explored Victoria’s passionate youth. The book was widely acclaimed, a Book of the Year in the Tatler and Spectator, serialised in the Sunday Telegraph, and the basis for Kate’s BBC 2 Timewatch documentary on ‘Young Victoria’

'The amazing untold story of Victoria before she was Queen...Kate Williams reveals a passionate young woman beloved of her future subjects but at war with her family', Sunday Telegraph
‘Kate Williams has excelled herself. One is engaged from the very first line’, Alison Weir

In this beautifully illustrated talk, Dr Williams uncovers the truth about Queen Victoria, showing how she was a wild, vibrant girl, with passions that often got her into trouble. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent was determined on power and she would do anything to achieve it. The two struggled for the throne – in what became the biggest mother-daughter battle in history.

Dr Williams also explores Victoria’s first years on the throne and her marriage to Prince Albert. As she shows, Victoria’s childhood was unhappy, but it formed her as a great Queen. She grew up determined, able to hide her feelings, and with a penchant for hard work. The country was feeling beleaguered after George III and his reactionary, playboy sons. When Victoria ascended the throne at just eighteen, her sense of duty and most of all her awareness of the importance of image made her the first modern Queen, and, in a very real sense, the saviour of the monarchy.

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