Victoria & Disraeli: The making of a romantic partnership

By Theo Aronson

It was an extraordinary relationship between Queen and Prime Minister — this intimacy between the dowdy, unsmiling Widow of Windsor and the flamboyant, honey-tongued politician whom, in earlier days, Victoria had condemned as ‘unprincipled, reckless and not respectable’.

By the 1870s this seemingly incompatible couple were hand in glove. But they were not so very different. Both needed the intimate support of someone of the opposite sex, and both were lost when their beloved spouses died. Brought close to the Queen by his part in the government of the country and by their mutual sympathy, Disraeli instinctively discerned the streak of romance that lay hidden behind Victoria’s stern exterior and coaxed it into response. 

This latest book by Theo Aronson in his series about the European royal houses of the nineteenth-century is a new departure. Here the author deals not with relationships confined within royal circles, but with that rarer phenomenon — the relationship between a queen and a commoner, whose story, moreover, is as bizarre and romantic as that of many a novel.