Becoming Queen Quotes

“Albert liked to play the stoic, and he embraced the opportunity to do over the negotiations about the marriage. He insisted that Uncle Leopold know what a great sacrifice he was making for the Saxe-Coburg family and Germany. As he gloomily lectured his uncle, 'troubles are inseparable from all human positions and…therefore if one must be subject to plagues and annoyances, it is better to be so for some great or worthy object than for trifles or miseries.'

Unfortunately for Albert, Leopold was deaf to self-pitying emotional blackmail and remained determined on his course.”
― Kate Williams, Becoming Queen

“It is calculated that George III had an astonishing fifty-six grandchildren. He did not have one legitimate heir. The vision of Charlotte had sustained the people through the direst years of the regency. Without her, all hope seemed gone.

From "Becoming Queen Victoria”
― Kate Williams, Becoming Queen

“Victoria liked music full of high passion and drama. “I am a terribly modern person,” she decided.”
― Kate Williams, Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch

“Government worried that the parishes could not cope with such demands, and there was a widely held notion that the able-bodied were indolently living on handouts.”
― Kate Williams, Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch

“I was born into a unique conjunction of female prime minister and monarch. To a child growing up in the 1980s, women ruled. Female heads were on coins and notes, criminals were incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and the queen’s armed forces fought a female politician’s wars. Accustomed”
― Kate Williams, Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch