A Curious Tale About Queen Victoria That No One Knew Until After She Died

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Probably, the most popular ruler in British history was Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Queen of England, Empress of India. Yes, she had many titles and the “Victorian Age” was named after her. She ruled for sixty-three years. She had one of the happiest marriages, to Prince Albert and they had NINE children, four sons and five daughters. And she became a beloved Queen by the British population. Queen Victoria began to rule when the British throne was not loved or respected, but she changed all that, it was said, “by being herself, above reproach.” During the sixty-three years that she ruled, a tremendous amount of history passed. The Opium War in China, the Crimean War and the Boer War and many other smaller conflicts with the Afghans, the Zulus, and the Abyssinians and through all that she held the British Empire and its people together. Prince Albert, her husband, died in 1861, and Victoria never stopped grieving. She kept his picture by her bedside, no matter where she slept. And she had several mansions in which to sleep. Kensington was where she was born. Buckingham was where she ruled and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was her winter home and where she died in the winter of 1901. She often visited the darkened rooms upstairs at Osborne House and only she knew what was up there. After she died, her son, Edward, became king and he went up those stairs to see what it was that she kept secret from the world. What he discovered was a room full of photographs. There were hundreds of photographs of four generations of relatives and friends, his mother’s private collection. But, the faces of all the photographs were corpses, taken at their funerals. The king was shocked, and now he knew the sadness that his mother must have felt all those years, when she visited that room.