Doug Speirs’ top five: Queen Victoria trivia

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This article was published 15/05/2015 (4170 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prepare to be extremely excited, kids, because there are only two more sleeps until the big day arrives.

As patriotic Prairie folk already know, we’re talking about Victoria Day, the statutory holiday celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday and — most importantly — the unofficial start of summer in the True North.

As proud Canadians, most of us are well aware we celebrated Victoria’s birthday (May 24, 1819) long before Confederation, with the first legislation approved by the legislature of the Province of Canada in 1845. After Victoria died in 1901, Parliament established a legal holiday on May 24 each year (or May 25 if May 24 falls on a Sunday, or the preceding Monday if neither worked) dubbed Victoria Day in honour of the late Queen, considered the “Mother of Confederation.”

But, like we said, you already knew that, right? We suspect you also realize that Victoria is the longest reigning monarch in British history — or at least she will be until Sept. 9, when Queen Elizabeth officially eclipses the record set by her great-great-grandmother.

“Queen Elizabeth II will enter the history books when she overtakes Victoria during Sept. 9, 2015,” according to Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. “This takes into account 63 years plus 16 leap days, additional months and days and the timing of George VI’s death.”

So this is the perfect time to ponder what we really know about the woman behind our May long weekend holiday. As you prepare to fire up your barbecues and flee for the cottage, here are the Top Five Things You Didn’t Know About Queen Victoria:

 

5) She gave the U.S. president a desk job

You know that famous 19th-century desk in the Oval Office? The fancy furniture that became a plot device in the cheesy 2007 adventure-thriller National Treasure: Book of Secrets starring Nicolas Cage?

Well, that desk was a gift from Queen Victoria. Seriously, it was made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, one of the ships sent to search for missing British explorer Sir John Franklin in 1852. The Resolute was abandoned when it became locked in Arctic ice, but the ship broke free and was spotted by a U.S. Navy ship and towed to the U.S. before being returned to Britain, where Victoria was so grateful she had an ornate desk fashioned from its timbers and shipped to the White House as a gift to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880.

It was Jackie Kennedy who first had it brought to the Oval Office in 1961. When Lyndon Johnson became president after John Kennedy’s assassination, the desk was allowed to go on a travelling exhibition with the Kennedy Library, likely because Johnson discovered he was too large for the desk, and had a plainer replacement built by the Senate cabinet shop.

The desk has been modified twice: Once when Franklin D. Roosevelt had a panel built for the knee-hole opening to hide his leg braces; and a base, called a plinth, was added during the Kennedy administration.

Other desks were made from Resolute’s timbers, but none as famous as the one sitting in the Oval Office, which caused Barack Obama a bit of grief on social media recently when he was photographed resting his large presidential feet on its highly polished surface.

 

4) She was a little teapot

By which we mean she was most definitely short and stout. You’d expect someone so famously imposing and outspoken that an entire era was named after her (clue: The Victorian Era) would have an equally imposing physical stature.

In reality, Victoria, swathed in yards of lace, was famously dumpy. She was barely five feet tall, whereas her hubby, Albert, was a towering 5’10”.

For the record, at six-three, Prince William is poised to become the tallest monarch ever, one day topping the record held for seven centuries by 6’2″ Edward 1, who inherited the throne in 1272 and was nicknamed “Longshanks” because of his long legs.

As for Victoria, it seems she was as wide as she was tall in her later years, with a waist of at least 50 inches, compared to the average British woman’s 33-inch waist today. Her impressive girth became clear when a selection of Royal undergarments, preserved for decades by the family of one of the Queen’s servants, were auctioned off in 2009.

“The size of the underwear supports the theory that the Queen had become morbidly obese towards the end of her life,” noted Britain’s Daily Telegraph at the time.

Auctioneer Charles Hanson was quoted as saying: “It’s hard to imagine, say, a likely future Queen such as Kate Middleton wearing these. Some accounts claim Victoria had a waist measurement of up to 60 inches by the 1890s, and these items certainly suggest a fair girth.”

Well, tip us over and pour us out!

 

3) She got down on bended knee

OK, that didn’t actually happen, but she was definitely ahead of her time in the sense that she was the one who proposed marriage to her future husband.

Technically, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was Victoria’s first cousin, the son of her mother’s brother, couldn’t propose to her because, well, she was the monarch.

It was their mutual uncle, Leopold, who brought the happy couple together. With Leopold cheering from the sidelines, she proposed to Albert on Oct. 15, 1839, just five days after he arrived at Windsor. They were married the following year and produced nine children between 1840 and 1857.

By all accounts, Victoria was totally besotted with her new beau, although on the night of their wedding, Feb. 10, 1840, she reportedly spent the evening lying down with a headache.

Still, here’s what she gushed in her diary: “I NEVER, NEVER, spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert … his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness — really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband!”

It goes on and on, which explains why when he died, in 1861 at age 42, she sank into a deep depression and, for the remainder of her lengthy reign, wore only black.

 

2) The “Royal disease”

It may surprise you to learn Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia, a genetic disease that prevents blood from clotting. In fact, the affliction became known as the “Royal disease because so many of her descendants were victims of the condition.

According to Sciencemag.org, the Queen’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany, died from blood loss after he slipped and fell; her grandson Friedrich bled out at age 2; and two other grandsons, Leopold and Maurice, died of the affliction in their early 30s.

As Victoria’s descendants married into royal families throughout Europe — earning her the nickname “the grandmother of Europe” — the Royal disease spread from Britain to the nobility of Germany, Russia and Spain, decimating their thrones.

“The traditional view is that there was a mutation in either her or in a sperm of her father, Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent. From there it spread through the Royal houses of Europe as monarchs arranged marriages to consolidate political alliances,” notes a paper prepared for the National Centre for Case Study Teaching in Science.

Victoria’s daughters Alice and Beatrice passed the disorder on to several of their children, the National Hemophilia Foundation notes. Alice’s daughter Alix married Tsar Nicholas of Russia, whose son Alexei had hemophilia.

According to History.com: “Recent research involving DNA analysis on the bones of the last Russian royal family, the Romanovs… revealed that Victoria’s descendants suffered from a subtype of the disorder, hemophilia B, which is far less common than hemophilia A and now appears to be extinct in the European royal lines.”

 

1) A bad mother (shut your mouth)

While she was madly in love with husband Albert — “Without him, everything loses its interest,” she told her diary — she was a domestic tyrant of a mother who hated her nine children.

That’s the surprising picture that emerged from a recent three-part BBC documentary, Queen Victoria’s children, which explored the monarch’s relationships with her husband and kids. According to the BBC, the series revealed “a story of manipulation, conflict, intimidation, emotional blackmail and fevered attempts by her children to escape the clutches of their domineering and needy mother.”

Author Helen Rappaport, who contributed to the documentary series, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were “pretty awful parents.”

Victoria openly conceded pregnancy and childbirth were the “shadow-side of marriage.”

Noted Rappaport: “She hated being pregnant. She had prenatal and postnatal depression. She didn’t breastfeed her children who she thought were horrible, dribbling little things. She was not in the least bit maternal. Queen Victoria liked sex, but she didn’t like the result.”

In a letter, Albert haughtily sniped to his spouse: “It’s a pity you find no consolation in the company of your children.”

For some reason, the phrase “No Wire Hangers!” just popped into our head.

 

So now you know the real story behind the woman behind Monday’s holiday. If we had room, we’d tell you how Victoria was also the first monarch to live in Buckingham Palace, the first to have electric lights, and the owner of a pet African grey parrot named “Coco” that could sing God Save the Queen.

But, hey, you already knew that, didn’t you?

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca