Creator of hit ITV show Daisy Goodwin explains why we’re all still fascinated by Queen Victoria

Next Friday, 24 May, it will be 200 years since the birth of a strapping baby girl, described by her proud father as ‘an infant Hercules’, who would grow up to give her name to an age.

My first image of Victoria was the grumpy-looking matriarch sitting atop the marble wedding cake outside Buckingham Palace. 

I would pass her every day on my way to school and wonder idly why she looked so cross. 

Now as I approach the age that she appears to be in the statue (give or take 20-odd years), I quite understand her grumpiness. 

Daisy Goodwin created the hit ITV series Victoria. Pictured is Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the show

Victoria, pictured in her Coronation Robes in a portrait by George Hayter, c.1838-40, wrote about her life in diaries and put down  about 62 million words in her lifetime

Victoria, pictured in her Coronation Robes in a portrait by George Hayter, c.1838-40, wrote about her life in diaries and put down  about 62 million words in her lifetime

She had a prolapsed uterus, nine ungrateful children and a prime minister (Gladstone) who liked to mansplain. 

It’s not easy being the most powerful woman in the world.

Victoria has become my meal ticket, since I’m the creator of the ITV series about her, but she is much more than that. 

She is my heroine, not just on screen but in the messy business of reality. 

From the moment I discovered her diaries as a student, and found the teenage queen writing rapturously about her fiancé Albert ‘looking so handsome in his white cashmere breeches (nothing underneath)’, I knew that I had found a girl after my own heart.

As a working mother, she never felt a shred of guilt

Here was a woman who was afraid of nothing, who never worried about what she looked like or what people said about her behind her back, a woman who could speak without fear of being interrupted, a woman who commanded respect as well as inspiring affection, a working mother who never felt a shred of guilt, the wife of a great man who never surrendered her own identity. 

She was a woman who had to go through all the human rites of passage – falling in love, marriage, motherhood, bereavement, loss of faculties – in the public eye, but without the phalanx of minders and press officers that surround the Royal Family today.

Somehow she managed to be true to herself throughout. 

Daisy, pictured, said Victoria is her heroine and that she admires how Queen Victoria didn’t feel the need to masquerade as a man to be powerful in her role

Daisy, pictured, said Victoria is her heroine and that she admires how Queen Victoria didn’t feel the need to masquerade as a man to be powerful in her role

Unlike her predecessor Elizabeth I, who famously said that she had the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman but the heart and stomach of a king’, Victoria never denied her femininity. 

She was the first and only of our queens regnant – that is, a queen reigning in her own right as opposed to a consort – to both marry and have children while already on the throne. 

She didn’t feel the need to masquerade as a man to be powerful. 

As someone who started work in the 1980s when women wore suits to work in order to be taken seriously, I took heart from the fact that Victoria could be powerful in a crinoline.

We haven’t always been as close as we are now, but in an almost eerie way Victoria has been behind me at every crucial point in my life.

When I got the call in 2015 saying my house was on fire, I was in the Victoria section of the London Library reading about the queen’s disputes with the Buckingham Palace builders. 

Daisy explained how she thinks young women watching the show have identified with a girl who liked men, parties and dogs but also wanted to be a successful monarch. Pictured is Jenna Coleman as Victoria in the ITV series

Daisy explained how she thinks young women watching the show have identified with a girl who liked men, parties and dogs but also wanted to be a successful monarch. Pictured is Jenna Coleman as Victoria in the ITV series

Victoria, pictured in a painting by Grant Francis in 1843, was the first and only of our queens regnant to both marry and have children while already on the throne

Victoria, pictured in a painting by Grant Francis in 1843, was the first and only of our queens regnant to both marry and have children while already on the throne

The queen was suitably imperious: ‘I want to move into the palace Next Week!’ It took me almost a year to get back into my house, but like Victoria I didn’t skimp on the chandeliers.

About five months later I went for a mammogram and saw the radiographer making that face you never want the radiographer to make. 

It wasn’t so bad, just a very small tumour, but I felt rather dizzy. At another time I might have brooded, but thankfully I found that brooding was incompatible with writing about the gloriously unintrospective Victoria. 

After baby number 9 she feared no more fun in bed

As I wrote about my young spirited heroine asserting herself against the forest of old men trying to mansplain her into submission (a phenomenon I knew something about, having worked at the BBC in the 80s), I felt my spirits lift. 

Victoria herself had bouts of hypochondria (usually when there was something she didn’t want to do) but she was astonishingly stoic about her prolapsed uterus, which her doctor only discovered when he examined her after her death.

One of the things I have noticed since I started my Victoria journey, and this is borne out by the audience demographics, is how many young women turn up to my talks about Victoria, or engage with me on social media. 

I think that Victoria, a show about that still very rare thing – a young woman who is in charge – has resonated with a generation of millennials who didn’t associate the Queen Victoria they learnt about at primary school with the passionate teenager making her way in a man’s world.

Victoria, pictured is Jenna Coleman playing the role, was a passionate woman who saw children as the price she had to pay for the pleasure she found in bed with her husband Albert

Victoria, pictured is Jenna Coleman playing the role, was a passionate woman who saw children as the price she had to pay for the pleasure she found in bed with her husband Albert

At a debate on the relative merits of Elizabeth I and Victoria with historical novelist Philippa Gregory, I was pleased to see that I swayed the mostly young audience in my favour by portraying Victoria as a queen who wasn’t afraid also to be a woman – unlike Elizabeth I. 

Young women identify with a girl who liked men, parties and dogs, but who also wanted to be a successful monarch and who was not going to be told how to do it by a bunch of old men.

Victoria was a person of contradictions – her name conjures up visions of shrouded piano legs and prudery, but she was a passionate woman who saw children as the price she had to pay for the pleasure she found in bed with Albert. 

One of the things that makes her so easy to write about is her unabashed delight in sex. 

When her doctor Sir James Reid suggested that, after baby number nine, it would be wiser for the queen not to have any more children, Victoria looked at him in horror, ‘Oh doctor, are we to have no more fun in bed?’

After being widowed Victoria became inseparable from her servant John Brown, pictured together, and  courtiers at the time would call her Mrs Brown behind her back

After being widowed Victoria became inseparable from her servant John Brown, pictured together, and  courtiers at the time would call her Mrs Brown behind her back

Victoria was only 42 when Albert died in 1861. Pictured is a Victorian chromolithograph of the death of Prince Albert with Queen Victoria and several of his children at Buckingham Palace

Victoria was only 42 when Albert died in 1861. Pictured is a Victorian chromolithograph of the death of Prince Albert with Queen Victoria and several of his children at Buckingham Palace

It’s easy to forget looking at the photos of her in later life that Victoria was only 42 when Albert died. 

We will never know the exact nature of her relationship with her ‘Highland servant’ John Brown, with whom she became inseparable in the early years of her widowhood, but I find it hard to imagine that such a sensuous woman would be content with the occasional hand clasp. 

After all, if the roles had been reversed and King Victor had been hanging out with his maid Jeanie Brown, everyone would assume she was his mistress. 

BOOM YEARS 

The population of the UK more than doubled in the Victorian era, from 16 million to 37 million. 

The Press and the courtiers at the time certainly thought their relationship was an intimate one, calling her Mrs Brown behind her back.

I have always been struck by the queen’s heartfelt cry after Albert’s death, ‘Now there is no one left to call me Victoria.’ 

Losing her husband meant she had lost the last person who could treat her (almost) as an equal, the last person who could touch her spontaneously. 

No wonder that she looked for someone to fill that gap in her life (courtiers were horrified by the way that John Brown used to call Victoria ‘woman’, and almost fainted when he picked her up to put her in her pony carriage). 

Perhaps in some ways Victoria’s relationship with Brown was a relief after her life with Albert. 

After Queen Victoria, pictured, died her daughter edited her diaries to remove unflattering references to her children

After Queen Victoria, pictured, died her daughter edited her diaries to remove unflattering references to her children

Albert was always trying to improve her, but John Brown offered a brisk but nevertheless unconditional love.

The reason that we know so much about Victoria is that she was an indefatigable chronicler of her own life – there was the diary she kept from the age of 11 and the endless letters she wrote, sometimes as many as ten a day. 

In all she wrote about 62 million words in her lifetime. 

Although her diaries were ‘edited’ after her death by her daughter Beatrice (every unflattering reference to her children and compromising material about John Brown was removed), it is impossible to read them and not come away with a very vivid sense of who she was.

There was terrible poverty in Victoria's reign and widespread malnutrition among the working classes. Pictured is the Queen on the future King Edward VIII's christening day, 16 July 1894

There was terrible poverty in Victoria’s reign and widespread malnutrition among the working classes. Pictured is the Queen on the future King Edward VIII’s christening day, 16 July 1894

No other monarch has left such a record of their inner thoughts and feelings. 

She was also an accomplished artist, and the first monarch to publish a book – Leaves From The Journal Of Our Life In The Highlands, which was an international bestseller.

Victoria’s reign began with carriages and candles, and ended with motor cars and electric light. 

The Victorian era was one of unparalleled prosperity and power for Britain, but it was also a time of terrible poverty and deprivation – the average height in Britain in the 19th century dropped by two inches, evidence of widespread malnutrition among the working classes.

Victoria never lost her eye for a handsome man

Looking back, Victoria’s reign seems impregnable, a beloved matriarch commanding the pink bits on the map as Queen Empress, but in fact Victoria’s popularity waxed and waned throughout her reign – there was booing as well as cheering. 

In the 1840s and the 1860s Britain came as close to full-scale Republicanism as it ever has, before or since. There were seven attempts on her life.

Victoria was the first media monarch. Her accession coincided with the birth of photography and her entire adult life is recorded in still and, later, moving pictures. 

The politicians complained about her self-imposed seclusion after the death of Prince Albert but she took care to keep her image always in the public eye.

Although an unlikely role model for today, Daisy said she finds Victoria's sense of brand, her absence of vanity and glorious lack of guilt a beacon of hope. Victoria is pictured with Albert

Although an unlikely role model for today, Daisy said she finds Victoria’s sense of brand, her absence of vanity and glorious lack of guilt a beacon of hope. Victoria is pictured with Albert

Rather like Diana posing in front of the Taj Mahal, Victoria would pose dressed in widow’s weeds looking up at a bust of the late Albert for photographs that were displayed in shop windows throughout the country – both mute appeals for the nation’s sympathy.

In her reign Britain became the greatest colonial power on earth, but although she despised the Irish and hated any religious practice that smacked of popery – happily signing a law that sent Anglican clergymen who burnt incense to prison – Victoria was no racist. 

Two of her favourite godchildren were from the Punjab and Nigeria respectively, and the last love of her life was her Indian servant Abdul Karim, known as the Munshi – in the last years of her life, after John Brown’s death, Victoria grew increasingly isolated but she never lost her eye for a handsome man, and to a modern eye it is rather splendid that Victoria’s last crush was Abdul.

He taught her Urdu, but even more importantly he treated her not just as a queen but as a woman. 

ROYAL INK

On a visit to the Holy Land in 1862, Victoria’s son Albert, Prince of Wales – later King Edward VII – had a Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm. 

It started a trend, with 100,000 Britons said to have got their own inkings

Victoria was surrounded by courtiers who were terrified to break protocol by touching her but Abdul would settle a shawl about her shoulders or lift her out of her bath chair with infinite tenderness. 

He may well have been exploiting his position, but Victoria simply didn’t care, he brought her pleasure and that was enough.

Her sense of style was idiosyncratic and unique. At the beginning of her reign she wore whatever she fancied – on a state visit to France she surprised the court with her lilac cravat and large white handbag embroidered with a golden poodle. 

After Albert’s death, Victoria wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her life. At her Golden Jubilee, her prime minister pleaded with her to dress in a more regal way, ‘On this great occasion Ma’am, your subjects will expect to see you wearing something that befits your great rank. You have so many magnificent jewels, surely this is the time to wear a crown?’

She replied, ‘After 50 years, I feel quite sure that my dear people will want to see me as I am – a poor widow in a bonnet. 

‘They don’t need to see me decked out in diamonds to know that I am their queen.’

A woman who inherited power and who was horrified at the idea of female suffrage might seem like an unlikely role model for a woman today, but as a guilt-ridden working mother who grimaces every time she looks in the mirror I find Victoria – with her keen sense of brand, her absence of vanity and her glorious lack of guilt – a beacon of hope. 

In a world where we are all urged to perfect ourselves inside and out, I take comfort from Victoria’s unshakeable self-belief. 

Of course, as queen she had a distinct advantage in the self-belief stakes, but I think her refusal to be defined by other people is inspiring, and judging by the reaction to the TV series, that independence of spirit has touched a chord with women all over the world. n

Victoria Series 3 is available on digital download, Blu-ray and DVD now. Series 1-3 Blu-ray and DVD box set is also available.

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