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Unexpected and Surprising Facts About England’s Iconic Queens

Khalid Elhassan February 13, 2022 38 min

15. Queen Victoria Arrived as a Breath of Fresh Air When She Ascended the Throne

Coronation portrait of a young Queen Victoria. Wikimedia

An unfortunate feature of today’s world is the proliferation of celebrity stalkers who plague the famous, and sometimes the infamous, alike. Such fame fiends are not a new phenomenon exclusive to the modern era: they have been around for some time, a statement with which Queen Victoria, if she was still around, would wholeheartedly agree. Britain was enamored by the young Victoria when she ascended the throne. Her two predecessors, her uncles, had been old, ineffectual, and corrupt, while their predecessor, the Mad King George III, had been, well… mad.

So when Alexandrina Victoria ascended the throne on June 20^th, 1837, she arrived as a breath of fresh air: a young, pretty, innocent, and clean new slate for her realm. Admirers tossed letters into her carriage, the bolder ones visited the palace with marriage proposals, and the creepier ones dedicated themselves to stalking the young queen. The latter’s quest was made easy by the ineptness of Victoria’s staff. Britain’s royal household bureaucracy was a mishmash of inefficiency, ineptness, and outright incompetence.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.