‘Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.’
LETTER FROM VICTORIA TO LEOPOLD,
KING OF THE BELGIANS, 4 APRIL 1848
IN THE WINTER OF 1840 at Buckingham Palace, only a few weeks after the 21-year-old Queen Victoria had given birth to her first daughter, Victoria (‘Vicky’), the Queen was taking tea by the open fire with her husband, Prince Albert, and some of her ladies-in-waiting. It was clear that Victoria was upset; there were red patches on her cheeks and her eyes were glassy. Those in attendance knew that the couple had argued and the Queen had been crying, but nobody said a word about it. Victoria had a temper and was prone to outbursts, so her ladies were used to treading on eggshells to avoid getting on the wrong side of her.
Suddenly, overcome by fury, Victoria snapped. Eyes blazing, she took up her cup and threw the hot tea all over her husband. Albert sprang from his chair. ‘What do you think of that?’ he said irritably, drying his face with a handkerchief. The tea had stained his silk cravat and jacket – he was lucky not to have been burned. Albert never rose to his wife’s temper tantrums and, instead, he stalked out of the room. This did nothing to alleviate Victoria’s anger and left her ladies squirming with discomfort.
VICTORIA:
I just remembered how awful it was, at Kensington. I never knew what it meant to be happy.
MELBOURNE:
But you knew it was possible.
VICTORIA:
I always knew that I would make my own way, one day.
VICTORIA HAD ONLY just discovered that, even before her first child, the infant princess, had been christened, she was pregnant again. She hated the idea of being tied to ‘breeding’. For a woman who had escaped a suffocating childhood and cast off her ambitious mother and her mother’s insidious advisor, Sir John Conroy, to take the throne in her own right, child-bearing felt like a trap that took her away from the life she really wanted. As far as Victoria was concerned, it was too soon to get pregnant again and it felt desperately unfair. She clearly blamed Albert, and much preferred the challenges of ruling the country to the job of securing the succession.
‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king.’
~THE TIMES ON THE DEATH OF GEORGE IV, VICTORIA’S UNCLE, 16 JULY 1830
When Victoria came to the throne on 20 June 1837, the British royal family was not popular. The House of Hanover, of which she was the sixth successive monarch, was viewed as foreign and corrupt. There hadn’t been a woman on the throne for more than a century – not since the death of Queen Anne in 1714 – and many questioned whether a woman as young as Victoria could do the job. At under five feet tall, she was tiny, didn’t have the formidable presence of Elizabeth I, and had only inherited the throne because her many uncles had failed to produce a legitimate male heir.
Victoria did not believe in votes for women. She was furious with her daughter, Princess Alice, for supporting the suffragist cause. But then, if you are the most powerful woman in the world, you don’t need the ballot box to make your voice heard. My feeling about Victoria is that while she liked to portray herself as a devoted wife, who left all the important stuff to her husband, this could not have been further from the truth. Victoria may have said that women were not suited to politics, but that didn’t stop her from taking a view on (and some would say meddling in) the affairs of state for the whole of her sixty-three years on the throne. Victoria may have looked up with submissive adoration at Albert in family photographs, but in reality she had strong views about everything. I particularly like the letter that she wrote to the Home Secretary in 1889 with her advice on the best way to catch Jack the Ripper: had he, she enquired, ‘searched the seamen’s hostels for bloody clothing?’
One of the most empowering aspects of Victoria’s character for a modern woman is her total lack of guilt. As a working mother I have spent my entire working life agonising over whether I was giving my children enough attention. Victoria was refreshingly free of this modern malaise. She was also wonderfully free from vanity; she loved good looks in others, but didn’t spend hours in front of the mirror agonising about her own. Her fashion sense was idiosyncratic; when she visited France the courtiers laughed at the bag she carried around, which was embroidered with a golden poodle. It had been made for her by her daughter Vicky and Victoria didn’t care what the French thought.
What makes Victoria so interesting is that instead of pretending to be a man like her celebrated predecessor Elizabeth I, who famously made a speech declaring that she had the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king’, Victoria found a way of ruling as a woman, not as a surrogate man. She did not don the Victorian equivalent of a power suit, but kept her bonnet on throughout her reign. Victoria showed the world that it was possible to be a wife, a mother and the most powerful woman in the world. That is why, to me, she is the most surprising and inspiring heroine. Her position meant that she didn’t have to wait for a man to make the first move – she proposed to Albert – and no man was allowed to interrupt her. And she loved sex. Victoria was fallible and often infuriating, but she never doubted her own worth. How many women can say the same?
THE QUEEN’S DRESSER, SKERRETT:
No one here will have jewels like yours, Ma’am.
AT FIRST VICTORIA had been seen as the ‘bottom of the barrel’ and there had been publicly aired concerns that she would never be able to manage the duties required. The young Queen had a lot to prove. Immediately issues were raised, including a royal family feud, when Victoria’s uncle, Ernest, became King of Hanover and claimed that the Hanoverian Jewels were, in part, his inheritance. While this issue rumbled on, Victoria quickly established herself as queen, and in less than three years she had married, given birth and established herself as a competent political operator. But pregnancy took her away from public life and it also altered her fledgling relationship with her handsome new husband. Both of them were still finding their feet within the relationship and, indeed, at court.
WHEN VICTORIA CAME to the throne of Great Britain she could not inherit the throne of Hanover, as the law in Germany excluded women from the succession. The two kingdoms were separated for the first time in 123 years when the Duke of Cumberland, Victoria’s Uncle Ernest, was crowned King of Hanover. Ernest demanded a portion of the jewels in the royal collection as part of his inheritance – the monarchies had been invested in the same person for over a century so the jewels, he said, could not belong solely to the British Crown. But Victoria flatly refused, arguing that the collection had been bought with English money.
Ernest was furious and bitterly complained to a friend, ‘I hear the little Queen is loaded with my diamonds, which made a very fine show.’ The wrangling continued for years and a commission was appointed to investigate the matter. Victoria referred to the dispute as ‘the diamond question’, and even after King Ernest died in 1851 his son continued the claim until 1857 when the matter was finally settled and Victoria had to hand over some items to the Hanoverian Ambassador in London.
PRIMOGENITURE IS THE CUSTOM or law of the first-born legitimate son inheriting the throne in preference to daughters or older illegitimate sons. According to this practice, a female member of a dynasty can only succeed to the throne if she has no living brothers and no deceased brothers with surviving legitimate descendants. A dynast’s sons and their lines of descent all come before that dynast’s daughters and their lines. Older sons and their lines come before younger sons and their lines. Older daughters and their lines come before younger daughters and their lines. Britain, unlike France, Russia and Hanover, did not have Salic law, which prevented women from inheriting the throne. Victoria’s predecessor, William IV, had been King of Great Britain and Hanover. However, Victoria, as a woman, could not inherit the throne of Hanover, so the crown went to the male in succession – the Duke of Cumberland.
Victoria became the heir apparent upon the death of her father in 1820 for this very reason – she was his only child, and the uncles who were older than her father had no legitimate heirs who survived childhood, and although two of the younger uncles did have legitimate sons, Victoria’s claim took precedence because her father was the next in line. It was a different story for Victoria’s own daughter, of course. Princess Victoria, though the first-born of the Queen’s nine children, was passed over in favour of her younger brother, Bertie, who became King Edward VII in 1901 on Victoria’s death.
Princess Victoria, the first-born of Queen Victoria’s children, was passed over in favour of her younger brother, to become monarch
THE ALLIANCE VICTORIA had made with Albert was key to her success as monarch. The young couple were very much in love – Victoria wrote reams about Albert in her diary, sometimes multiple times a day. She idolised her handsome cousin and set down her happiness at their life together in the pages of her journal, sparing few details about the sexual nature of their relationship. ‘We didn’t sleep much,’ she admitted smugly the morning after their wedding. Albert’s style in his (less frequently kept) diary is less effusive, but in his letters to his wife he often declared his ardour, signing himself ‘in body and soul ever your slave’ in one of 1839.
The future of the monarchy rested on the shoulders of these two young people – still in their very early twenties – yet all was not entirely well at the start. Victoria was nervous at first of Albert encroaching on her position as Queen. The Prince declared he only wanted to help his wife undertake her duties, but Victoria didn’t entirely trust him. On matters of state in the early days she often turned for advice to her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne (see here–here), and to her childhood governess and confidante, Baroness Louise Lehzen (see here–here), before consulting Albert, if she consulted him at all.
VICTORIA:
You couldn’t beat me even with a head start.
ALBERT:
Maybe I know how happy it makes you to win, Liebes.
‘Series Two gives us the opportunity to explore Victoria and Albert’s early years – their honeymoon effectively. We see how Victoria learns to balance a marriage, motherhood and being Queen. How Albert copes with not being master of his own house. The tectonic plates of their marriage behind the scenes and in a political sphere are constantly shifting and leads to a thunderous clash of wills and a burning passionate fire between them.’
‘I’m trying to play this impulsive young girl that’s full of passion and vitality squeezed into the role of queen … She finds controlling herself difficult.’
JENNA COLEMAN (VICTORIA)
THE YEARS COVERED in the second series of Victoria were in some ways the heyday of Victoria’s young life. She had broken free from the influence of her mother, escaped the confines of the Kensington System (the restrictive set of rules she had to live by as a child) and was starting married life with the man she loved. However, these years also had their challenges.
The loss of her beloved Lord Melbourne as prime minister in 1841 was difficult, and though Sir Robert Peel slowly proved himself a worthy replacement, she struggled to let go. Across Europe the old royal regimes were being challenged. While there were some gains in British military action, there were also losses, and as a national figurehead it was down to Victoria to maintain national pride and optimism.
Victoria’s greatest challenge during this period, however, was undoubtedly that of motherhood. She bore four children in five years while also ruling the country.
Ultimately, Victoria came through with flying colours and the period can be seen as her coming of age and the years in which her marriage established itself. She was, above all else, a passionate young woman, discovering her own sexuality and exercising power over her world in a way that no other woman of the era could. Her achievement was to maintain a sound public face while enjoying the private family life she craved. As the constraints of her childhood fell away and with her young family established, the trials and tribulations of these years form the foundation of one of the longest and most successful reigns in British history.
VICTORIA:
Albert, Lehzen said your father was propositioning one of the ballet dancers last night. He should go back to Coburg.
THE TASK VICTORIA faced should not be underestimated. All across Europe, in the 1830s and 1840s, new philosophical movements were developing and in the early years of Victoria’s reign there were huge social and political upheavals. The Chartist movement, which began with Victoria’s reign, demanded universal suffrage, secret ballots and votes for women. The stage was set for rebellions Europe-wide by the end of the 1840s and in Britain it was no different. It’s easy to forget the unpopularity of the monarchy in Victoria’s early days on the throne and that on seven occasions there were attempts on her life. If Victoria wanted the British monarchy to survive, she would have to make changes to how it was viewed.
‘It is worth being shot at – to see how much one is loved.’
~LETTER FROM VICTORIA TO HER ELDEST DAUGHTER, VICKY, 6 MARCH 1882
As her consort in this endeavour, Albert was a good choice. Victoria’s uncles who had previously sat on the throne had been louche, lavish and egotistical. They were not loved or, indeed, widely respected. Together, Victoria and Albert quickly began to change the way British royalty presented itself, updating the public persona of the royal family and gradually winning supporters to their cause. Big decisions were taken on the comfortable sofas of their drawing rooms, but often the changes the young couple made were small. They were both shrewd publicists and well aware of the anti-German sentiment that had been levelled at the House of Hanover for more than a century, so while they spoke German in private, they stuck to English in public.
Their relationship became an important tool for Victoria – a young couple very much in love proved a great rallying point for public attention. She and Albert, despite early apparent differences in interests, grew to have a lot in common, both loving the open air, music, books, history and art, and they were almost unique as a royal couple in their loyalty to each other.
LEOPOLD:
I had just lost my beloved Charlotte and your father had left her all alone here with your brother, and … well … we comforted one another.
GENERATIONS OF PREDECESSORS in both of their families had been mired in infidelity and marital scandal, and the young couple’s devotion was a breath of fresh air that left many subjects feeling inspired. Albert claimed to feel nauseous at the very thought of sex outside of marriage, and there is no doubt that the young Queen felt a huge physical pull towards her husband. She was passionate about him and referred to their time in bed as ‘fun’.
The flipside of this, however, was her temper. For Albert’s part, he was a steady character – loyal to his wife and skilled at not rising to her provocations. This serious young German had a world-class political mind, and although Albert was disliked in some quarters simply for being a foreigner and for not enjoying sport or taking part in small talk, he soon impressed the likes of Lord Melbourne with his intellectual abilities, which would – once she let him use them – prove a boon for his young wife.
‘I walked out with my precious Angel, all alone – so delightful, on the Terrace and new Walk, arm in arm! Eos our only companion. We talked a great deal together.’
~VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 11 FEBRUARY 1840
But the bond between Victoria and Albert wasn’t only social and sexual; they had one other thing in common. Both were the products of broken homes. In addition, rumours persistently circulated that Albert was illegitimate. Albert’s mother, Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, separated from her husband when Albert was only five years of age. She was exiled from the Saxe-Coburg court at Rosenau, and when she went she handed both her sons into their father’s care. Albert had been the Princess’s marked favourite, leading some historians to conclude that he was, indeed, a love child.
ALBERT:
At least Ernst knows who his father is.
IF HE WAS, there were two candidates for Louise’s attention at the relevant time. One was the Baron von Mayern, the court chamberlain. Mayern was musical (like Albert) and sophisticated, but he was much older than the Princess and essentially a member of her household staff. The second candidate visited the Princess’s home at the time when Albert would have been conceived – Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (who was both Victoria and Albert’s uncle) spent several weeks at Rosenau over the winter after his wife, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth. Louise wrote of his visit and of his being a widower, ‘He still feels, with fervour, what it means to be happy and to be loved,’ she said. She also asked a friend to tell her if she considered her husband or Prince Leopold to be the more handsome, saying, ‘I love them both, only in different ways.’
There are no records to show whether or not Victoria was aware of the question hanging over Albert’s legitimacy, but gossip at court was certainly always rife. The lives of all courtiers depended on the monarch and any such questions were the subject of excited interest. This threat of illegitimacy sheds light on Victoria and Albert’s marital devotion and their horror of infidelity – an unusual attitude at the time in their circle. They took each other seriously and together faced the job in hand. Victoria was in frequent contact with Uncle Leopold – in fact, he helped arrange her marriage to Albert – so if she was aware of the rumours, she didn’t hold them against him. She was also kind about Albert’s mother, naming her fourth daughter Louise after her. Whether she did this because she adored her husband or because she simply didn’t know the rumours about the Princess’s behaviour, we just don’t know.
‘Victoria and Albert were young, passionate, idealistic; they both had the verve of youth and that was slightly scary for the Establishment that went before. Like any youth movement, it ruffled feathers. Coming into this position at such a young age would have brought challenges – Victoria would have been relatively isolated as a young woman and added to that Albert was in a foreign land. As a unit, it forces them to have this relentless drive to survive.’
‘He has a passion, a verve … I’m enjoying delving into them.’
TOM HUGHES (PRINCE ALBERT)
LIKE VICTORIA, ALBERT’S childhood was not an entirely happy one. His parents’ marriage was no love match and his father was a serial philanderer. Albert was more serious than his father or his brother, Ernst, did not indulge in heavy drinking (he took water with his meals) and showed no interest in any woman other than his wife. While Victoria was a night owl who loved to stay up dancing, Albert found much about court life tiresome, admitting, ‘The late hours are what I find most difficult to bear.’
As the Queen’s Consort, Albert was initially unpopular with the public and was disliked for being a foreigner. There was also opposition to Albert from within the Establishment, as his forward-thinking ideas were seen as a challenge. He was a competent political theoretician who pioneered the idea of a responsible and effective constitutional monarchy.
Albert also backed scientific and technological development, overhauled the management of the royal palaces and estates and influenced the contemporary English music and art scenes. However, in aristocratic circles these things mattered less than fitting in. Apart from a select few activities, such as stag hunting, he found most traditional upper-class pursuits boring, including riding, which Victoria loved. She convinced him to allow her to teach him to ride in the English fashion, and in 1843 when he rode with the Belvoir Hunt he acquitted himself well and was surprised at how much more accepted he was afterwards by the English upper classes.
Within a few years of his marriage, and after a deal of great political manoeuvring, Albert gradually won the Queen’s trust. He had access to all royal papers, drafted the Queen’s correspondence and attended ministerial meetings with her. A powerful figure in his own right, he was a formidable hard worker and a dedicated family man.
AS A CHILD, when Victoria first realised her proximity to the throne, she famously announced her intention ‘to be good’. Her bravery in the face of repeated apparent assassination attempts inspired public confidence. In this vein, Victoria made it her business to put her royal weight behind several good causes, organising the Plantagenet Ball in support of the Spitalfields silk weavers (see here–here), for example, and donating £2,000 towards Irish Famine Relief. Although her efforts weren’t always successful, the fact that the Queen kept supporting causes she believed in meant that the public came to respect her engagement with what was going on in the country. Educated for the role from a young age, Victoria had a lively, enquiring mind and was well versed in history, religion and the arts, as well as popular novels – all of which may have strengthened her ability to understand and engage with the social issues of her day. Given Albert’s fascination with science and innovation, the couple’s education and interests complemented each other, and undoubtedly they made use of them, working much harder than the previous generations of royals to rule the country to the best of their abilities.
VICTORIA:
There were many people in my country who did not think that I could be Queen, but I never doubted it.
WHILE ALBERT HAD a full scientific education, the curriculum for Victoria when she was growing up was classical and arts-based, with a focus on languages. As a child under the Kensington System, Victoria had a reading list of 150 works. In a record dated 1826, the books include twenty religious texts, twenty-seven French books, thirteen volumes of classical Latin and grammar, the poetry of Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Shakespeare and Goldsmith, treatises in business and astronomy, Blackstone’s classic Commentaries on the Laws of England and compendiums on geography, natural history and moral teachings.
When she became Queen, Victoria also became Head of the Church of England, and so, in preparation, by the age of nine she had learned the catechism of the Church of England by heart. By sixteen she had read Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid , Pope’s Iliad , Voltaire’s History of Charles XII in the original French, and was studying Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion , Goldsmith’s histories of England, Greece and Rome and Magnall’s Historical and Miscellaneous Questions.
Throughout her life, Victoria loved to read. As well as the classical books in her library, she enjoyed poetry and contemporary novels, especially those about the lives of ordinary people. Among her favourite authors was Dinah Craik, whose novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, was a particular favourite. Victoria recommended Mrs Craik to her daughter, Princess Victoria: ‘Have you ever read two pretty, simple but very pleasantly written novels called A Noble Life by the authoress of J. Halifax and Janet’s Home ? They have both been read to me of an evening and I like them so much. Not sensation(al) novels but pretty, simple stories, full of truth and good feeling.’
Mrs Oliphant was another of the Queen’s favourite authors, and with her love of all things Scottish, she greatly enjoyed her 1850 novel Merkland , which she described as ‘an old but excellent Scotch novel’. In 1868 the Queen met Mrs Oliphant, whom she said was ‘very pleasant and clever looking’. She also read Sir Walter Scott’s novels and took at least one with her when she visited Scotland in 1842, later using his novels as inspiration when she and Albert set up Balmoral, their retreat in the north of Scotland. Victoria particularly enjoyed the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was Poet Laureate for over forty years during her reign.
Marie Corelli – a writer of popular novels – also appealed to the Queen. In conversation on one occasion, a courtier who disliked Corelli’s work was mortified when the Queen came to the novelist’s defence. Victoria was also a fan of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, regardless of the latter’s scandalous cohabitation with a married man.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, one of the Queen’s favourite authors. One of the titles on Victoria’s childhood study list, Commentaries on the Laws of England.
October 1839
‘While I shall be untiring in my efforts and labours for the country to which I shall in future belong, and where I am called to so high a position, I shall never cease ein treuer Deutscher, Coburger, Gothaner zu sein.’
LETTER FROM ALBERT TO HIS STEP-GRANDMOTHER, PRINCESS KAROLINE AMALIE OF HESSE-KASSEL, UPON HIS ENGAGEMENT TO VICTORIA, ON 15 OCTOBER 1839
ON ALBERT’S PART, sound financial management of royal affairs stood his reputation in good stead when he had previously been portrayed as a German interloper who only wanted to get his hands on British power and money. ‘I shall never cease to be a true German,’ he said to Lord Aberdeen, and British cartoonists and satirists never let him forget it! Victoria’s clear insistence that she was the Queen and her refusal to be entirely subsumed into the more traditional roles of wife and mother meant that she and Albert, despite ongoing criticism, quickly became viewed as a very modern couple. They were in love, they worked hard and tried their best, and as a result they were increasingly taken seriously by their subjects. During the early part of Victoria’s reign, the advent of the pioneering medium of photography meant that day-to-day royal life in the palace was more accessible to Victoria’s subjects than it had ever been before, and this contributed to the public goodwill that the couple earned over time.
1841
: Robert Peel becomes prime minister
: New Zealand becomes an independent colony of Britain
: Victoria gives birth, aged twenty-two, to Albert, Prince of Wales
: Thomas Cook opens his travel agency
: The first issue of Punch hits the newsstands
1842
: Chartist strikes
: The end of the Opium War: Hong Kong ceded to Britain
: British defeat at Kabul and retreat during the First Afghan War
: The first peacetime income tax is brought in
: The term ‘dinosaur’ is coined by Richard Owen
1843
: William Wordsworth becomes Poet Laureate
: Britain annexes the southeastern African colony of Natal
: Victoria gives birth, aged twenty-four, to Princess Alice
: The News of the World and The Economist are first published
: Nelson’s statue is erected in Trafalgar Square
1844
: Victoria gives birth, aged twenty-five, to Prince Alfred
: The YMCA is founded in London
: Ninety-five are killed in the Haswell Colliery explosion
: Victoria opens the Royal Exchange in London
1845
: The Irish Potato Famine begins
: ‘Railway mania’ takes hold as investment booms in railroad expansion
: Peel resigns as prime minister and is reinstated
: The last fatal duel in England is fought
: The First Anglo-Sikh War begins
: Building starts on Osborne House
1846
: Victoria gives birth, aged twenty-seven, to Princess Helena
: The railway line from London to York is begun
: The planet Neptune is first observed
: The first operation under anaesthetic takes place
: Peel resigns as prime minister in favour of Lord John Russell
: Waverley Station opens in Edinburgh
: Albert Dock opens in Liverpool
WHILE THE VICTORIAN era was a time of horrifying poverty for many, over the course of Victoria’s reign there was also an increase in employment and human rights across the board, including for women and children. As its empire expanded, Britain became wealthier and social mobility increased. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and to new markets opening up overseas, land was no longer the only source of wealth and the middle classes swelled. Literacy rates steadily rose – despite the fact that the Queen herself resisted compulsory education for the working classes. Cheap rail travel, huge improvements in housing for the majority and impressive events that focused the public’s attention on the benefits of being British meant that many of Victoria’s subjects enjoyed better lives than their forebears. They identified with their country and, in turn, identified their country with their queen.
Which is why, even though the direct political control that could be exercised by the royals dwindled throughout Victoria’s reign, the public perception of royalty was revolutionised – without a revolution actually taking place. While the passionate love affair and family values Victoria and Albert demonstrated were genuine, it could be argued that it also saved the British monarchy from the fate of the many European royal houses that fell in the late 1840s. With grit and determination, together Victoria and Albert stood up for what they believed in and presented a shining example of a happy family life.
SIR ROBERT PEEL:
You don’t need a crown, Sir, to do great things for this country.
‘There are some very famous paintings of Albert, one of which is him in his wedding outfit, which is a red army uniform, a version of which still exists in Kensington Palace … After his death, Victoria had it embroidered with “my beloved Albert” and doves and hearts. There is also a famous Winterhalter painting of him in this beautiful dark blue long coat, and I had a version of that made for actor Tom Hughes and he looked spectacular in it.’
ROSALIND EBBUTT, COSTUME DESIGNER
Series two of Victoria runs from 1841 to 1846, and Rosalind Ebbutt, the series costume designer, has meticulously researched all costumes of the period, from children’s dress to Victoria’s state ballgowns, military uniforms (English, French and German all feature in the series) and servants’ attire. Victoria also has several children during this period, so the team has a set of prosthetic bumps to cover all stages of pregnancy.
On the set in Yorkshire, the costume department is housed in a brick warehouse that covers around 3,500 square feet. There is a laundry and a sewing room in the building, which is frequently filled to capacity with costumes, looked after by a permanent staff of eight, which can swell to twelve for busy sequences. While starring actors dress in their own trucks, crowd scenes are fitted in the costume store, so on some days there might be large numbers of people passing through this brick building. The costume rails are crammed with labelled hangers, with ‘French soldier’ or ‘Victoria – nursery scene’ written in stickers on the stem, while numerous boxes contain piles of trimmed bonnets or military helmets.
Meticulous historical detail is important with every costume, so even the kitchen maids wear corsets and two petticoats under their dresses. Jenna Coleman, who plays Victoria, has several corsets made to measure for different purposes – including a riding corset that stops high enough on her ribcage to allow her to ride sidesaddle on location. For her designs, Rosalind Ebbutt consults paintings and prints from the era as well as surviving dresses, uniforms and accessories from the period. At a nearby museum she discovered a Victorian lady’s maternity dress that she was excited to replicate. While some outfits are made to measure, costumes are also hired from different specialist sources and will then be fitted to individual actors. Turnarounds can be very quick, and it’s not unheard of for a dress to be commissioned, designed, tailored, fitted and completed within a week.
On set, Buckingham Palace has been newly kitted out with its own costume department of sorts – a bonnet room, a dresser’s room and a boot room, all based on the real ‘behind-the-scenes’ areas of Victoria’s life. Hundreds of people were employed at the palace to make clothes, polish boots, trim accessories and keep the royal family’s linen in good order. An embroidered cape might take weeks of painstaking expert work to complete by hand.
