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Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and aestheticization of violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004) and Death Proof (2007). In 2007, Total Film named him the 12th greatest director of all-time.

His films have earned him Academy, BAFTA and Palme d’Or Awards and he has been nominated for Emmy and Grammy Awards. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival. That film earned Tarantino and Roger Avary Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. In 2005 Quentin Tarantino won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards. On August 15, 2007, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presented Tarantino with a lifetime achievement award at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.

Tarantino worked in a video rental store prior to becoming a filmmaker, paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent, and has cited that experience as inspiration for his directorial career. Tarantino has been romantically linked with numerous entertainers, including actress Mira Sorvino, directors Allison Anders and Sofia Coppola, actresses Julie Dreyfus and Shar Jackson and comedians Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho. There have also been rumors about his relationship with Uma Thurman, whom he has referred to as his “muse”. However, Tarantino has gone on record as saying that their relationship is strictly platonic. He has never married and has no children.

Tarantino often uses unconventional storytelling device in his films, such as retrospective (Reservoir Dogs), non-linear (Pulp Fiction), novelistic, “chapter” format dramaturgy (Kill Bill, Four Rooms), or time-twisting (Jackie Brown in the sequence showing what all the main characters did at the money drop in the mall or in Death Proof when he shows the car accident one time for every character involved). He guest directed a scene in Sin City which used a similar layout. (In the Reservoir Dogs DVD commentary with Quentin Tarantino, he mentions that he hates it when people say that most of his methods are “flashbacks”. Flashbacks are recollections of an individual person, but the non-linear style he uses is just a different way of telling you the story and giving you the information, like a book.)

  

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“Do the British still treat Queen like gods?” an American fan once asked their English friend. And how. When Mercury passed away in November 1991, a victim of AIDS, the local pub jukebox played “Bohemian Rhapsody” like nothing really mattered again and again. Except when some rogue insisted on the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead.” Queen were indeed treated as Gods. With their crested insignia, they were one of the last vestiges of the “Rule Britannia ethos. Although America slipped from their grip once Wham! came along, Queen stayed huge everywhere else.

It was impossible to imagine Freddie apart from his beloved stadiums, leading South Americans, Africans and Japanese in note-perfect renditions of “We Are the Champions.” The band never apologized for their ambition. It was the reward of both sweat and Freddie Mercury’s strange marriage with guitarist Brian May. Mercury was a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast who lived in post-Raj India before moving to the more prosaic English suburb of Middlesex. May was good with his hands – building his first guitar from the remains of an old fireplace – and always kept one eye on the stars, abandoning a dissertation on space dust to form Queen. They met in 1969 but had unwittingly grown up streets away from each other.

The duo combined innovation and imperialism in equal measure. They refused to play live until they were signed. Their self-titled 1973 debut was recorded using David Bowie’s studio downtime. When an American tour was called off because of May’s hepatitis, the band went back to the studio to record their breakthrough album Sheer Heart Attack. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” from their next effort, A Night At The Opera, was an intentional monolith: a six-minute opus so grandiloquent the backing vocal tape was rendered virtually transparent in the studio, so un-performable Queen filmed a video to promote it, and so dramatic that its final gong crash can still raise the neck hairs.

Heavy metal couldn’t handle its effete slap in the face of taste, which is why “Stairway to Heaven” still tops best song lists and Queen eventually fell from grace in the United States. The follow-up A Day at the Races coasted on the success of “Rhapsody” and A Night at the Opera, while Queen quietly forged a reputation for excess with their promotional satyricons.

Bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor came into their own after turning their backs on epics like “Somebody to Love” for three-minute pop. The American No. 1 “Another One Bites the Dust” saw Deacon co-opting a Chic bass line to create an excellent slice of white disco. He’d do the same for “Under Pressure” squeezing soul out of Bowie and putting the ice in Vanilla.

Taylor’s art was more suited to Thatcher’s parochial Britain. In the Eighties his “Radio Ga Ga” lamented the loss of old values in a video age, unashamedly accompanied by a recreation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in one of the most lavish clips ever made. But while Queen alienated Little Steven with their bank account-pleasing performance at Sun City, they wowed a global TV audience at Live Aid in 1985. “It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world,” noted Bob Geldof.

Queen coined that vibe into the hits of 1986′s A Kind of Magic, and capped their career with an enormous gig at England’s Knebworth. By then, Mercury’s ailment had set in, but morality only inspired Mercury to loftier heights. Innuedo and its accompanying album set new heights of ostentation – gypsy guitar solos, songs to Freddie’s cats, Noel Coward tributes – but it was hard not to hear May’s “The Show Must Go On,” and not feel the neck start to tingle again.

When Jimi Hendrix died, a young Freddie Mercury closed down his market haberdashery as a mark of respect. When Freddie Mercury died, the world they rocked kept turning. Somewhere in England, that same jukebox still plays Queen. And somewhere a fan looks back on songs like “Who Wants to Live Forever” and wonders if Queen always knew that something this big had to end in a whimper – commemorated in the abiding images of Wayne’s World. After all, the important thing is that nothing really matters. Except pretending that it doesn’t.

“Do the British still treat Queen like gods?” an American fan once asked their English friend. And how. When Mercury passed away in November 1991, a victim of AIDS, the local pub jukebox played “Bohemian Rhapsody” like nothing really mattered again and again. Except when some rogue insisted on the Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead.”

Queen were indeed treated as Gods. With their crested insignia, they were one of the last vestiges of the “Rule Britannia ethos. Although America slipped from their grip once Wham! came along, Queen stayed huge everywhere else. It was impossible to imagine Freddie apart from his beloved stadiums, leading South Americans, Africans and Japanese in note-perfect renditions of “We Are the Champions.”

The band never apologized for their ambition. It was the reward of both sweat and Freddie Mercury’s strange marriage with guitarist Brian May. Mercury was a Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast who lived in post-Raj India before moving to the more prosaic English suburb of Middlesex. May was good with his hands – building his first guitar from the remains of an old fireplace – and always kept one eye on the stars, abandoning a dissertation on space dust to form Queen. They met in 1969 but had unwittingly grown up streets away from each other.

The duo combined innovation and imperialism in equal measure. They refused to play live until they were signed. Their self-titled 1973 debut was recorded using David Bowie’s studio downtime. When an American tour was called off because of May’s hepatitis, the band went back to the studio to record their breakthrough album Sheer Heart Attack. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” from their next effort, A Night At The Opera, was an intentional monolith: a six-minute opus so grandiloquent the backing vocal tape was rendered virtually transparent in the studio, so un-performable Queen filmed a video to promote it, and so dramatic that its final gong crash can still raise the neck hairs.

Heavy metal couldn’t handle its effete slap in the face of taste, which is why “Stairway to Heaven” still tops best song lists and Queen eventually fell from grace in the United States. The follow-up A Day at the Races coasted on the success of “Rhapsody” and A Night at the Opera, while Queen quietly forged a reputation for excess with their promotional satyricons.

Bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor came into their own after turning their backs on epics like “Somebody to Love” for three-minute pop. The American No. 1 “Another One Bites the Dust” saw Deacon co-opting a Chic bass line to create an excellent slice of white disco. He’d do the same for “Under Pressure” squeezing soul out of Bowie and putting the ice in Vanilla.

Taylor’s art was more suited to Thatcher’s parochial Britain. In the Eighties his “Radio Ga Ga” lamented the loss of old values in a video age, unashamedly accompanied by a recreation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in one of the most lavish clips ever made. But while Queen alienated Little Steven with their bank account-pleasing performance at Sun City, they wowed a global TV audience at Live Aid in 1985. “It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world,” noted Bob Geldof.

Queen coined that vibe into the hits of 1986′s A Kind of Magic, and capped their career with an enormous gig at England’s Knebworth. By then, Mercury’s ailment had set in, but morality only inspired Mercury to loftier heights. Innuedo and its accompanying album set new heights of ostentation – gypsy guitar solos, songs to Freddie’s cats, Noel Coward tributes – but it was hard not to hear May’s “The Show Must Go On,” and not feel the neck start to tingle again.

When Jimi Hendrix died, a young Freddie Mercury closed down his market haberdashery as a mark of respect. When Freddie Mercury died, the world they rocked kept turning. Somewhere in England, that same jukebox still plays Queen. And somewhere a fan looks back on songs like “Who Wants to Live Forever” and wonders if Queen always knew that something this big had to end in a whimper – commemorated in the abiding images of Wayne’s World. After all, the important thing is that nothing really matters. Except pretending that it doesn’t.

  

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Born in 1986, from Srinagar. This dude from Srinagar loves to seek attention. And he gets it in ample measure. His mom is a teacher and his dad a lawyer. He loves acting and has been part of many stage shows.

  

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Qc. AD 35-95), Roman rhetorician, was born at Calagurris (now Calahorra) in Spain.

Concerning his family and his life but few facts remain. His father taught rhetoric, with no great success, at Rome, and Quintilian must have come there at an early age to reside, and must have there grown up to manhood. The years from 61 to 68 he spent in Spain, probably attached in some capacity to the retinue of the future emperor Galba, with whom he returned to the capital. For at least twenty years after the accession of Galba he was at the head of the foremost school of oratory in Rome, and may fairly be called the Isocrates of his time. He also gained some, but not a great, repute as a pleader in the courts. His greatest speech appears to have been a defence of the queen Berenice, on what charge is not known. He appears to have been wealthy for a professional man. Vespasian created for him a professorial chair of rhetoric, liberally endowed with public money, and from this time he was unquestionably, as Martial calls him, “the supreme controller of the restless youth.”

About the year 88 Quintilian retired from teaching and from pleading, to compose his great work on the training of the orator (Institutio Oratoria). After two years’ retirement he was entrusted by Domitian with the education of two grand-nephews, whom he destined as successors to his throne. Quintilian gained the titular rank of consul, and probably died not long before the accession of Nerva (AD 96). A wife and two children died early.

Such is the scanty record that remains of Quintilian’s uneventful life. But it is possible to determine with some accuracy his relation to the literature and culture of his time, which he powerfully influenced. His career brings home to us the vast change which in a few generations had passed over Roman taste, feeling and society. In the days of Cicero rhetorical teaching had been entirely in the hands of the Greeks. The Greek language, too, was in the main the vehicle of instruction in rhetoric. The first attempt to open a Latin rhetorical school, in 94 BC, was crushed by authority, and not until the time of Augustus was there any professor of the art who had been born to the full privileges of a Roman citizen. The appointment of Quintilian as professor by the chief of the state marks the last stage in the emancipation of rhetorical teaching from the old Roman prejudices.

During the hundred years or more which elapsed between the death of Cicero and the birth of Quintilian education all over the Roman Empire had spread enormously, and the education of the time found its end and climax in rhetoric. Mental culture was for the most part acquired, not for its own sake, but as a discipline to develop skill in speaking, the paramount qualification for a public career. Rome, Italy and the provinces alike resounded with rhetorical exercitations, which were promoted on all sides by professorships, first of Greek, later also of Latin rhetoric, endowed from municipal funds. The mock contests of the future orators roused a vast amount of popular interest. In Gaul, Spain and Africa these pursuits were carried on with even greater energy than at Rome, The seeds of the existing culture, such as it was, bore richer fruit on the fresh soil of the western provinces than in the exhausted lands of Italy and the East. While Quintilian lived, men born in Spain dominated the Latin schools and the Latin literature, and he died just too soon to see the first provincial, also of Spanish origin, ascend the imperial throne.

As an orator, a teacher and an author, Quintilian set himself to stem the current of popular taste which found its expression in what we are wont to call silver Latin. In his youth the influence of the younger Seneca was dominant. But the chief teacher of Quintilian was a man. of another type, one whom he ventures to class with the old orators of Rome. This was Domitius Afer, a rhetorician of Nîmes, who rose to the consulship. Quintilian, however, owed more to the dead than to the living. His great model was Cicero, of whom he speaks at all times with unbounded eulogy, and whose faults he could scarce bring himself to mention; nor could he well tolerate to hear them mentioned by others. The reaction against the Ciceronian oratory which had begun in Cicero’s own lifetime had acquired overwhelming strength after his death. Quintilian failed to check it, as another teacher of rhetoric, equally an admirer of Cicero, had failed the historian Livy. Seneca the elder, a clear-sighted man who could see in Cicero much to praise, and was not blind to the faults of his own age, condemned the old style as lacking in power, while Tacitus, in his Dialogue on Orators, includes Cicero among the men of rude and unkempt antiquity. The great movement for the poetization of Latin prose which was begun by Sallust ran its course till it culminated in the monstrous style of Fronto. In the courts judges, juries and audiences alike demanded what was startling, quaint or epigrammatic, and the speakers practised a thousand tricks to satisfy the demand. Oratory became above all things an art whose last thought was to conceal itself. It is not surprising that Quintilian’s forensic efforts won for him no lasting reputation among his countrymen.

The Institutio Oratoria is one long protest against the tastes of the age. Starting with the maxim of Cato the Censor that the orator is the good man who is skilled in speaking, Quintilian takes his future orator at birth and shows how this goodness of character and skill in speaking may be best produced. No detail of training in infancy, boyhood or youth is too petty for his attention. The parts of the work which relate to general education are of great interest and importance. Quintilian postulates the widest culture; there is no form of knowledge from which something may not be extracted for his purpose; and be is fully alive to the importance of method in education. He ridicules the fashion of the day, which hurried over preliminary cultivation, and allowed men to grow grey while declaiming in the schools, where nature and reality were forgotten. Yet he develops all the technicalities of rhetoric with a fulness to which we find no parallel in ancient literature. Even in this portion of the work the illustrations are so apposite and the style so dignified and yet sweet that the modern reader, whose initial interest in rhetoric is of necessity faint, is carried along with much less fatigue than is necessary to master most parts of the rhetorical writings of Aristotle and Cicero.

Quintilian’s literary sympathies are extraordinarily wide. When obliged to condemn, as in the case of Seneca, he bestows generous and even extravagant praise on such merit as he can find. He can cordially admire even Sallust, the true fountain-head of the style which he combats, while he will not suffer Lucilius to lie under the aspersions of Horace. The passages in which Quintilian reviews the literature of Greece and Rome are justly celebrated. The judgments which he passes may be in many instances traditional, but, looking to all the circumstances of the time, it seems remarkable that there should then have lived at Rome a single man who could make them his own and give them expression. The form in which these judgments are rendered is admirable. The gentle justness of the sentiments is accompanied by a curious felicity of phrase. Who can forget the immortal swiftness of Sallust?, or the milky richness of Livy?, or how Horace soars now and then, and is full of sweetness and grace, and in his varied forms and phrases is most fortunately bold? Ancient literary criticism perhaps touched its highest point in the hands of Quintilian.

To comprehensive sympathy and clear intellectual vision Quintilian added refined tenderness and freedom from self assertion. Taking him all in all, we may say that his personality must have been the most attractive of his time more winning and at the same time more lofty than that of the younger Pliny, his pupil, into whom no small portion of the master’s spirit, and even some tincture of the master’s literary taste, was instilled. It does not surprise us to hear that Quintilian attributed any success he won as a pleader to his command of pathos, a quality in which his great guide Cicero excelled. In spite of some extravagances of phrase, Quintilian’s lament (in his sixth book) for his girl-wife and his boy of great promise is the most pathetic of all the lamentations for bereavement in which Latin literature is so rich. In his precepts about early education Quintilian continually shows his shrinking from cruelty and oppression.

Quintilian for the most part avoids passing opinions on the problems of philosophy, religion and politics. The professed philosopher he disliked almost as much as did Isocrates. He deemed that ethics formed the only valuable part of philosophy and that ethical teaching ought to be in the hands of the rhetoricians. In the divine government of the universe he seems to have had a more than ornamental faith, though he doubted the immortality of the soul. As to politics Quintilian, like others of his time, felt free to eulogize the great anti-Caesarean leaders of the dying republic, but only because the assumption was universal that the system they had championed was gone for ever. But Quintilian did not trouble himself, as Statius did, to fling stones at the emperors Caligula and Nero, who had missed their deification. He makes no remark, laudatory or otherwise, on the government of any emperor before Domitian. No character figured more largely in the rhetorical controversies of the schools than the ideal despot, but no word ever betrayed a consciousness that the actual occupant of the Palatine might exemplify the theme. Quintilian has often been reproached with his flattery of Domitian. No doubt it was fulsome. But it is confined to two or three passages, not thrust continually upon the reader, as by Statius and Martial. To refuse the charge of Domitian’s expected successors would have been perilous, and equally perilous would it have been to omit from the Institutio Oratoria all mention of the emperor. And there was at the time only one dialect in which a man of letters could speak who set any value on his personal safety. There was a choice between extinction and the writing of a few sentences in the loathsome court language, which might serve as an official test of loyalty.

The Latin of Quintilian is not always free from the faults of style which he condemns in others. It also exhibits many of the usages and constructions which are characteristic of the silver Latin. But no writer of the decadence departs less widely from the best models of the late republican period. The language is on the whole clear and simple, and varied without resort to rhetorical devices and poetical conceits. Besides the Institutio Oratoria, there have come down to us under Quintilian’s name no longer (ed. Lehnert, 1905) and 145 shorter (ed. Ritter, 1884) Declamationes, or school exercitations on themes like those in the Controversiae of Seneca the elder. The longer pieces are certainly not Quintilian’s. The shorter were probably published, if not by himself, at least from notes taken at his lessons. It is strange that they could ever have been supposed to belong to a later century; the style proclaims them to be of Quintilian’s school and time.

  

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Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., known to his friends as “Q,” was born on Chicago’s South Side. When he was ten he moved, with his father and stepmother, to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He first fell in love with music when he was in elementary school. and tried nearly all the instruments in his school band before settling on the trumpet. While barely in his teens, Quincy befriended a local singer-pianist, only three years his senior. His name was Ray Charles. The two youths formed a combo, eventually landing small club and wedding gigs.

At 18, the young trumpeter won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out abruptly when he received an offer to go on the road with bandleader Lionel Hampton. The stint with Hampton led to work as a freelance arranger. Jones settled in New York, where, throughout the 1950s, he wrote charts for Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley and his old friend Ray Charles.

  

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Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria Wettin, nee Hanover) (24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom from 20 June 1837, and Empress of India from 1876 until her death. Her reign lasted more than sixty-three years – longer than that of any other British monarch. As well as being queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she was also the first monarch to use the title Empress of India.

The reign of Victoria was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. The Victorian Era was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a period of great social, economic, and technological change in the United Kingdom. Victoria was the last monarch of the House of Hanover; her successor belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

Early life

Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent was born at Kensington Palace in London in 1819. Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent and Strathearn, was the fourth son of King George III. The Duke of Kent and Strathearn, like many other sons of George III, did not marry during his youth. The eldest son, the Prince of Wales (the future King George IV), did marry, but had only a daughter, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales. When she then died in 1817, the remaining unmarried sons of King George III scrambled to marry (the Prince Regent and the Duke of York were already married, but estranged from their wives) and father children to provide an heir for the king. At the age of fifty the Duke of Kent and Strathearn married Princess Viktoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the sister of Princess Charlotte’s widower Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield and widow of Karl, Prince of Leiningen. Victoria, the only child of the couple, was born in Kensington Palace, London on 24 May 1819.

Although christened Alexandrina Victoria, from birth she was formally styled Her Royal Highness Princess Victoria of Kent, but was called Drina within the family. Princess Victoria’s father died of pneumonia eight months after she was born. Her grandfather, George III, died blind and insane less than a week later. Princess Victoria’s uncle, the Prince of Wales, inherited the Crown, becoming King George IV.

Though she occupied a high position in the line of succession, Victoria was taught only German, the first language of both her mother and her governess, during her early years. After she became three years old however, she was schooled in English. She eventually learned to speak Italian, Greek, Latin, and French. Her educator was the Reverend George Davys and her governess was Louise Lehzen.

When Princess Victoria of Kent was eleven years old, her uncle, King George IV, died childless, leaving the throne to his brother, the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews, who became King William IV. As the new king was childless, the young Princess Victoria became heiress-presumptive to the throne. Since the law at that time made no special provision for a child monarch, Victoria would have been eligible to govern the realm as would an adult. In order to prevent such a scenario, Parliament passed the Regency Act 1831, under which it was provided that Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent and Strathearn, would act as Regent during the queen’s minority. Ignoring precedent, Parliament did not create a council to limit the powers of the Regent.

Princess Victoria met her future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, when she was sixteen years old. Prince Albert was Victoria’s first cousin; his father was the brother of her mother. Princess Victoria’s uncle, King William IV, disapproved of the match, but his objections failed to dissuade the couple. Many scholars have suggested that Prince Albert was not in love with young Victoria, and that he entered into a relationship with her in order to gain social status (he was a minor German prince) and out of a sense of duty (his family desired the match). Whatever Albert’s original reasons for marrying Victoria may have been, theirs proved to be an extremely happy marriage.

While Albert was of the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, it was not clear what his surname was, because like most imperial, royal, princely, and ducal families, his family did not use theirs. Victoria asked her staff to determine what Albert’s and now her own marital surname was. After examining records from the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha archives, they reported that her husband’s personal surname was Wettin (or von Wettin).

Queen Victoria’s papers record her dislike of the name. Though rarely publicly used, Wettin remained the Royal Family’s personal surname until 1917, when Victoria’s grandson King George V merged the Royal House name and family surname, replacing both with one deliberately English sounding name, Windsor. (In the early 1960s an Order-in-Council partially reversed the decision by granting Queen Elizabeth II’s descendants a separate family surname, Mountbatten-Windsor.)

Early reign

King William IV died at the age of seventy-two on 20 June 1837, leaving the throne to Victoria. As the young queen had just turned eighteen years old, no regency was necessary. By Salic law, no woman could rule Hanover, a realm which had shared a monarch with Britain since 1714. Hanover went not to Victoria, but to her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, who became King Ernest Augustus of Hanover. As the young queen was as yet unmarried and childless, Ernest Augustus was also the heir-presumptive to the British throne.

When Victoria ascended the throne, the government was controlled by the Whig Party, which had been in power, except for brief intervals, since 1830. The Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, at once became a powerful influence in the life of the politically inexperienced Queen, who relied on him for advice. (Some even referred to Victoria as “Mrs Melbourne”.) The Melbourne ministry would not stay in power for long; it was growing unpopular and, moreover, faced considerable difficulty in governing the British colonies. In Canada, the United Kingdom faced an insurrection (see Rebellions of 1837), and in Jamaica, the colonial legislature had protested British policies by refusing to pass any laws. In 1839, unable to cope with the problems overseas, the ministry of Lord Melbourne resigned.

The Queen commissioned Sir Robert Peel, a Tory, to form a new ministry, but was faced with a debacle known as the Bedchamber Crisis. At the time, it was customary for appointments to the Royal Household to be based on the patronage system (that is, for the Prime Minister to appoint members of the Royal Household on the basis of their party loyalties). Many of the Queen’s Ladies of the Bedchamber were wives of Whigs, but Sir Robert Peel expected to replace them with wives of Tories. Victoria strongly objected to the removal of these ladies, whom she regarded as close friends rather than as members of a ceremonial institution. Sir Robert Peel felt that he could not govern under the restrictions imposed by the Queen, and consequently resigned his commission, allowing Melbourne to return to office.

The Queen married Prince Albert on 10 February 1840 at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace; four days before, Victoria granted her husband the style His Royal Highness. Prince Albert was commonly known as the “Prince Consort”, though he did not formally obtain the title until 1857. Prince Albert was never granted a peerage dignity.

During Victoria’s first pregnancy, eighteen-year old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate the Queen whilst she was riding in a carriage with Prince Albert in London. Oxford fired twice, but both bullets missed. He was tried for high treason, but was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. His plea was questioned by many; Oxford may merely have been seeking notoriety. Many suggested that a Chartist conspiracy was behind the assassination attempt; others attributed the plot to supporters of the heir-presumptive, the King of Hanover. These conspiracy theories afflicted the country with a wave of patriotism and loyalty.

The shooting had no effect on the queen’s health or on her pregnancy. The first child of the royal couple, named Victoria, was born on 21 November 1840. Eight more children would be born during the exceptionally happy marriage between Victoria and Prince Albert. Albert was not only the Queen’s companion, but also an important political advisor, replacing Lord Melbourne as the dominant figure in her life. Having found a partner, Victoria no longer relied on the Whig ladies at her court for companionship. Thus, when Whigs under Melbourne lost the elections of 1841 and were replaced by the Tories under Peel, the Bedchamber Crisis was not repeated. Victoria continued to secretly correspond with Lord Melbourne, whose influence, however, faded away as that of Prince Albert increased.

On 13 June 1842, Victoria made her first journey by train, travelling from Slough railway station (near Windsor Castle) to Bishop’s Bridge, near Paddington (in London), in a special royal carriage provided by the Great Western Railway. Accompanying her were her husband and the engineer of the Great Western line, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Three attempts to assassinate the Queen occurred in 1842. On 29 May at St. James’s Park, John Francis (most likely seeking to gain notoriety) fired a pistol at the Queen (then in a carriage), but was immediately seized by PC53 William Trounce. He was convicted of high treason, but his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Prince Albert felt that the attempts were encouraged by Oxford’s acquittal in 1840. On 3 July, just days after Francis’ sentence was commuted, another boy, John William Bean, attempted to shoot the Queen. Although his gun was loaded only with paper and tobacco, his crime was still punishable by death. Feeling that such a penalty would be too harsh, Prince Albert encouraged Parliament to pass an act, under which aiming a firearm at the Queen, striking her, throwing any object at her, and producing any firearm or other dangerous weapon in her presence with the intent of alarming her, were made punishable by seven years imprisonment and flogging.

Bean was thus sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment; neither he, nor any person who violated the act in the future, was flogged.

Peel’s ministry faced a crisis involving the repeal of the Corn Laws. Many Tories (by then known also as Conservatives) were opposed to the repeal, but some Tories (the “Peelites”) and most Whigs supported it. Peel resigned in 1846, after the repeal narrowly passed, and was replaced by Lord John Russell. Russell’s ministry, though Whig, was not favoured by the Queen. Particularly offensive to Victoria was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who often acted without consulting the Cabinet, the Prime Minister, or the Queen. In 1849, Victoria lodged a complaint with Lord John Russell, claiming that Palmerston had sent official despatches to foreign leaders without her knowledge. She repeated her remonstrance in 1850, but to no avail. It was only in 1851 that Lord Palmerston was removed from office; he had on that occasion announced the British government’s approval for President Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in France without previously consulting the Prime Minister.

The period during which Russell was prime minister also proved personally distressing to Queen Victoria. In 1849, an unemployed and disgruntled Irishman named William Hamilton attempted to alarm the Queen by discharging a powder-filled pistol in her presence. Hamilton was charged under the 1842 act; he pled guilty and received the maximum sentence of seven years of penal transportation. In 1850, the Queen did sustain injury when she was assaulted by a possibly insane ex-Army officer, Robert Pate.

As Victoria was riding in a carriage, Pate struck her with his cane, crushing her bonnet and bruising her. Pate was later tried; he failed to prove his insanity, and received the same sentence as Hamilton.

Middle Years

In 1851, the first World Fair, known as the Great Exhibition of 1851, was held. Organised by Prince Albert, the exhibition was officially opened by the Queen on 1 May 1851. Despite the fears of many, it proved an incredible success, with its profits being used to endow the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum).

Lord John Russell’s ministry collapsed in 1852, when the Whig Prime Minister was replaced by a Conservative, Lord Derby. Lord Derby did not stay in power for long, for he failed to maintain a majority in Parliament; he resigned less than a year after entering office. At this point, Victoria was anxious to put an end to this period of weak ministries. Both the Queen and her husband vigorously encouraged the formation of a strong coalition between the Whigs and the Peelite Tories. Such a ministry was indeed formed, with the Peelite Lord Aberdeen at its head.

One of the most significant acts of the new ministry was to bring the United Kingdom into the Crimean War in 1854, on the side of the Ottoman Empire and against Russia. Immediately before the entry of the United Kingdom, rumours that the Queen and Prince Albert preferred the Russian side diminished the popularity of the royal couple. Nonetheless, Victoria publicly encouraged unequivocal support for the troops.

After the conclusion of the war, she instituted the Victoria Cross, an award for valour.

His management of the war in the Crimea questioned by many, Lord Aberdeen resigned in 1855, to be replaced by Lord Palmerston, with whom the Queen had reconciled. Palmerston too was forced out of office due to the unpopular conduct of a military conflict, the Second Opium War, in 1857. He was replaced by Lord Derby. Amongst the notable events of Derby’s administration was the Sepoy Mutiny against the rule of the British East India Company over India. After the mutiny was crushed, India was put under the direct rule of the Crown (though the title “Empress of India” was not instituted immediately). Derby’s second ministry fared no better than his first; it fell in 1859, allowing Palmerston to return to power.

The Prince Consort died in 1861, devastating Victoria, who entered a semi-permanent state of mourning and wore black for the remainder of her life. She avoided public appearances and rarely set foot inside London in the following years, her seclusion earning her the nickname “Widow of Windsor.” She regarded her son, the Prince of Wales, as an indiscreet and frivolous youth, blaming him for his father’s death.

Victoria began to increasingly rely on a Scottish manservant, John Brown; and a romantic connection and even a secret marriage have been alleged. One recently discovered diary records a supposed deathbed confession by the Queen’s private chaplain in which he admitted to a politician that he had presided over a clandestine marriage between Victoria and John Brown. Not all historians trust the reliability of the diary. However, when Victoria’s corpse was laid in its coffin, two sets of mementos were placed with her, at her request.

By her side was placed one of Albert’s dressing gowns while in her left hand was placed a piece of Brown’s hair, along with a picture of him. Rumours of an affair and marriage earned Victoria the nickname “Mrs Brown”.

Victoria’s isolation from the public greatly diminished the popularity of the monarchy, and even encouraged the growth of the republican movement. Although she did perform her official duties, she did not actively participate in the government, remaining secluded in her royal residences, Balmoral in Scotland or her residence at Osborne in the Isle of Wight. Meanwhile, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the nineteenth century – the Reform Act 1867 – was passed by Parliament. Lord Palmerston was vigorously opposed to electoral reform, but his ministry ended upon his death in 1865. He was followed by Lord Russell (the former Lord John Russell), and afterwards by Lord Derby, during whose ministry the Reform Act was passed.

In 1868, a man who would prove to be Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister, the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, entered office. His ministry, however, soon collapsed, and he was replaced by William Ewart Gladstone, a member of the Liberal Party (as the Whig-Peelite Coalition had become known). Gladstone was famously at odds with both Victoria and Disraeli during his political career. She once remarked that she felt he addressed her as though she were a public meeting. The Queen disliked Gladstone, as well as his policies, as much as she admired Disraeli. It was during Gladstone’s ministry, in the early 1870s, that the Queen began to gradually emerge from a state of perpetual mourning and isolation. With the encouragement of her family, she became more active.

In 1872, Victoria endured her sixth encounter involving a gun. As she was dismounting a carriage, a seventeen-year old Irishman, Arthur O’Connor, rushed towards her with a pistol in one hand and a petition to free Irish prisoners in the other. The gun was not loaded; the youth’s aim was most likely to alarm Victoria into accepting the petition.

John Brown, who was at the Queen’s side, knocked the boy to the ground before Victoria could even view the pistol; he was rewarded with a gold medal for his bravery. O’Connor was sentenced to penal transportation and to corporal punishment, as allowed by the Act of 1842, but Victoria remitted the latter part of the sentence.

Disraeli returned to power in 1874, at which time an imperialist sentiment was espoused by many in the country, including the new Prime Minister and the Queen, as well as many in Europe. In 1876, encouraged by Disraeli, the Queen assumed the title “Empress of India”, which was officially recognised under the Royal Titles Act 1876. Victoria rewarded her Prime Minister by creating him Earl of Beaconsfield.

Lord Beaconsfield’s administration fell in 1880 when the Liberals won the general election of that year. Gladstone had relinquished the leadership of the Liberals four years earlier and the Queen invited Lord Hartington, Liberal leader in the Commons, to form a ministry. However Lord Hartington declined the opportunity, arguing that no Liberal ministry could work without Gladstone and he would serve under no-one else, and Victoria could do little but appoint Gladstone Prime Minister.

The last of the series of attempts on Victoria’s life came in 1882. A Scottish madman, Roderick Maclean, fired a bullet towards the Queen, then seated in her carriage, but missed. Since 1842, each individual who attempted to attack the Queen had been tried for a misdemeanour (punishable by seven years of penal servitude), but Maclean was tried for high treason (punishable by death). He was acquitted, having been found insane, and was committed to an asylum. Victoria expressed great annoyance at the verdict of “not guilty, but insane,” and encouraged the introduction of the verdict of “guilty, but insane” in the following year.

Victoria’s conflicts with Gladstone continued during her later years. She was forced to accept his proposed electoral reforms, including the Representation of the People Act 1884, which considerably increased the electorate. Gladstone’s government fell in 1885, to be replaced by the ministry of a Conservative, Lord Salisbury. Gladstone returned to power in 1886, and he introduced the Irish Home Rule Bill, which sought to grant Ireland a separate legislature.

Victoria was opposed to the bill, which she believed would undermine the British Empire. When the bill was rejected by the House of Commons, Gladstone resigned, allowing Victoria to appoint Lord Salisbury to resume the premiership.

Later Years

In 1887, the United Kingdom celebrated Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Victoria marked 20 June 1887 – the fiftieth anniversary of her accession – with a banquet, to which fifty European kings and princes were invited. On the next day, she participated in a procession that, in the words of Mark Twain, “stretched to the limit of sight in both directions.” At the time, Victoria was an extremely popular monarch. The scandal of a rumoured relationship with her servant had been quieted following John Brown’s death in 1883, allowing the Queen to be perceived as a symbol of morality.

Victoria was required to tolerate a ministry of William Ewart Gladstone one more time, in 1892. After the last of his Irish Home Rule Bills was defeated, he retired in 1894, to be replaced by the Imperialist Liberal Lord Rosebery. Lord Rosebery was succeeded in 1895 by Lord Salisbury, who served for the remainder of Victoria’s reign.

On 22 September 1896, Victoria surpassed George III as the longest-reigning monarch in English, Scottish, or British history. In accordance with the Queen’s request, all special public celebrations of the event were delayed until 1897, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, proposed that the Jubilee be made a festival of the British Empire. Thus, the Prime Ministers of all the self-governing colonies were invited along with their families. The procession in which the Queen participated included troops from each British colony and dependency, together with soldiers sent by Indian Princes and Chiefs (who were subordinate to Victoria, the Empress of India). The Diamond Jubilee celebration was an occasion marked by great outpourings of affection for the septuagenarian Queen, who was by then confined to a wheelchair.

During Victoria’s last years, the United Kingdom was involved in the Boer War, which received the enthusiastic support of the Queen. Victoria’s personal life was marked by many personal tragedies, including the death of her son, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the fatal illness of her daughter, the Empress of Germany, and the death of two of her grandsons.

Her last ceremonial public function came in 1899, when she laid the foundation stone for new buildings of the South Kensington Museum, which became known as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Following a custom she maintained throughout her widowhood, Victoria spent Christmas in Osborne House (which Prince Albert had designed himself) on the Isle of Wight. She died there on 22 January 1901, having reigned for sixty-three years, seven months, and two days, more than any British monarch before or since. Her funeral occurred on 2 February; after two days of lying-in-state, she was interred in the Frogmore Mausoleum beside her husband.

Victoria was succeeded by her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who reigned as King Edward VII. Victoria’s death brought an end to the rule of the House of Hanover in the United Kingdom; King Edward VII, like his father Prince Albert, belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. King Edward VII’s son and successor, King George V, changed the name of the Royal House to Windsor during the First World War. (The name “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” was associated with the enemy of the United Kingdom during the war, Germany, led by her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II.)

  

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Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor), styled HM The Queen ( born 21 April 1926) is the queen regnant and head of state of Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

She is also Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Commander-in-Chief of the UK Armed Forces and Lord of Mann; she has reigned in these positions since the death of her father, King George VI on 6 February 1952. She is the longest serving current Head of State in Europe, Africa, The Americas, and Australasia, and is the second longest-serving current head of state in the world, after King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.

About 125 million people live in the countries of which she is Head of State. Her reign has seen ten different Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and numerous Prime Ministers in the other personal union nations of which she is or was Head of State. She is married to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and is the mother of the heir-apparent to the British throne, Charles, Prince of Wales.