The Queen Empress was actually less Victorian than her name connotated; she had many qualities of the Regency era into which she was born, although her sense of protocol was unrelenting and she played the "bourgeois monarch" role expected of her with all due propriety. Victoria was not very intelligent, but she was shrewd, stubborn, self important, and with a strong will and a mind of her own. She came to the throne when the prestige of the British monarchy was at a low ebb, and as a girl queen she leaned heavily on the tuition and advice of Lord Melbourne, the leading Whig grandee. Victoria's marriage to Albert of Saxe Coburg Gotha marked the beginning of her real independence, and together they forged a new public role for the Throne which won the respect of the upper and middle classes and the hero (or heroine) worship of the masses. Yet the Prince Consort's death, from which she never entirely recovered drove her for years into virtual seclusion during which she seemed to have shrunk to the merest figurehead, so that people talked about abolishing the monarchy in Britain altogether. Her Jubilee Year in 1887 marked the beginning of a swing back in her favour after which she gradually became a revered symbol of Empire, morality, stability and conservatism. Victoria's relationship with her various surviving children was an uneasy one, and when she was on her death bed Edward, the Crown Prince, remarked that his mother was reluctant to go to heaven because the angels would have precedence there. She appears to have hated Gladstone, who refused to flatter her, and was devoted to Disraeli who laid on flattery with a trowel (his own phrase). A very readable biography, by a genuine historian who can also write easily and accessibly.