15 Pieces of History That Victoria Did Differently

Jenna Coleman as Victoria and Rufus Sewell as Lord Melbourne

(C) ITV Plc

Lord Melbourne and Victoria (Probably) Weren’t a Thing

Though Victoria goes out of its way to portray the relationship between the queen and her first Prime Minister as romantic, it probably wasn’t. (No matter how much some of us might wish otherwise.) At least not in any way that we’d recognize today. Melbourne was forty years Victoria’s senior when she came to the throne. (If you do the math, Rufus Sewell is only 18 years older than Jenna Coleman, so the gap doesn’t seem nearly as large.) And Victoria was quoted as saying she thought of Melbourne as a father-figure to make up for the one she’d never had.

However, it is true that the young queen wrote about Melbourne in her diaries All. The. Time.  Not in a drawing hearts around “Mrs. Melbourne” kind of way, of course. But he appears all over her journals from that point in her life.  Whether it’s lines about how he liked her dress or whether he thought earrings were barbarous as a general thing, Melbourne is kind of everywhere. And the two were virtually inseparable for the first few years of her reign. He helped her find her feet as a monarch and they obviously shared a deep affection for one another.

And it is true that Victoria was deeply upset at the possibility of Melbourne leaving office in 1839. She nearly caused a constitutional crisis afterward when she refused to replace Whig members of her personal household with Tories at the behest of Sir Robert Peel (who was to replace Melbourne as Prime Minister).  The so-called Bedchamber Crisis eventually ended with Melbourne canceling his resignation and resuming his post as Prime Minister.  (So maybe they were a little codependent, too?)