Heart of a Queen: Queen Victoria’s Romantic Attachments
By Theo Aronson
‘My nature’, wrote Queen Victoria, ‘is too passionate, my emotions too fervent, and I am a person who has to cling to someone in order to find peace and comfort.’
To Queen Victoria, the love, attention and protection of a man was all but indispensable. During her long life, there were six men with whom her emotions were romantically involved: her first prime minister, the urbane Lord Melbourne; her husband, the idealistic Prince Albert; her fellow sovereign, the fascinating Napoleon III; her ghillie, the rough-hewn John Brown; another prime minister, the silver-tongued Disraeli; and her Indian servant, the exotic Munshi.
The main appeal to Queen Victoria of these six apparently disparate characters was that they were men of distinctive personality: there was something exceptional about each of them. And they all treated her as a woman first, a queen second.
By focusing on the Queen’s romantic associations and making full use of recently revealed material, Theo Aronson has painted a fresh, intriguing and startlingly different portrait of Queen Victoria. With his talent for narrative and characterization, he has produced one of the most incisive and readable of his many royal biographies.
