Heart of a Queen

To Queen Victoria, the love, no less than the guidance, attention and protection of a man, was all but indispensable. In the course of her long life, there were six men with whom her emotions were romantically involved. These were her first prime minister, the urbane Lord Melbourne; her husband; the idealistic Prince Albert; her fellow sovereign, the fascinating Napoleon III; her gillie, the rough-hewn John Brown; another prime minister, the silver-tongued Disraeli; and her Indian servant, the exotic Munshi. It is with these six romantic associations that this text is concerned. The appeal to Queen Victoria of these six apparently disparate characters was that they were men of distinctive personality. There was something exceptional, something "outre" about each of them and they all - and this was probably their greatest attraction in the eyes of Queen victoria - treated her as a woman first, a Queen second. By focusing on the Queen's romantic associations and by making full use of recently revealed materials, the author has attempted to produce a fresh intriguing and startlingly different portrait of Queen Victoria.