In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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How was Queen Victoria influenced by her closest male ministers, relatives, advisers and servants? John Van der Kiste is the first to explore this aspect of Victoria’s life; focusing on four roles – mentors, family, ministers and servants. A soldier’s daughter, Victoria lost her father at the age of eight months. Although her uncle Leopold did his best to be a substitute father, the absence of her real father probably influenced her throughout her life, not least in choosing her husband. Her close and faithful relationship with Albert is one of the great royal love stories but her relationships with her sons were much more stormy. However, with most of her heads of government she enjoyed relatively cordial relations – in widowhood she showed a decided partiality for Disraeli, who acquired for her the title Empress of India, but disliked Gladstone, complaining that he “speaks to me as if I were a public meeting”. Queen Victoria’s relationships with her servants are also explored, from the liberal influence exerted over the increasingly conservative queen by her private secretary, Ponsonby, to the outspoken John Brown and the Indian Munshi, who both antagonised those around her.

Review: Mr van der Kiste’s book on the men accompanying Queen Victoria during her life and reign is an interesting attempt at writing history of people on the sidelines. As the title would imply the order of their importance for the queen, the disposition of the book states the reverse. The Prime Ministers are followed by the servants and, at last, the sons and sons-in-law. Family, are thus relegated to the lowest order of importance of the personalities around Queen Victoria who thus, in the author’s view, becomes foremost a political person, a ruler of kingdom and empire. As she owes her position in her nation’s public life to exactly that group of men, – no Margaret Thatcher here -, from Lord Melbourne who taught her the basics of statecraft to Prince Albert, the secret “king” of Britain during his life time, to Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, who made her Empress of India, this order is well justified. Her private secretaries, mainly Sir Henry Ponsonby, also would merit a more systematic description of their importance on the political being that was Queen Victoria. As a woman, however, her life was overly concerned with her family where she was the true boss. I venture to claim that on a day-to-day basis she spent more time and thought on her wide-ranging family than on politics. By virtue of its chosen subject matter this book cannot take into account the attention she gave to herself and her well-being, her basic egotism. For that aspect, we have to turn to biographies devoted principally to the Queen, such as Mr Weintraub’. Her choice of personal servants bears witness to her concentration on herself.

To the reader, Mr van der Kiste’s book presents a somewhat irritating anomaly in that the sequence of events in time is being disregarded. Whereas this feature is of lesser significance in the chapters on prime ministers, it becomes apparent when sons and sons-in-law are discussed. Here the reader is taken on a tour throughout the century that demands his firm anchoring in history. We are helped by a genealogical table of the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and a good index.

John Van der Kiste read Librarianship at Ealing Technical College, where he edited the student librarian journal Stamp Out. The author of about a hundred books, including historical and royal biography, popular music, true crime, local history, plays and fiction, he has also contributed articles to and reviewed books and records for local and national publications, was a consultant to the BBC documentary ‘The King, the Kaiser and the Tsar’, and is a contributor to ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’ and ‘Guinness Rockopaedia’. He lives in Devon, and his spare time interests include reading, music and painting. His latest titles are ‘1970: a Year in Rock: The Year Rock Became Mainstream’, ‘Mott The Hoople and Ian Hunter in the 1970s’, ‘Free and Bad Company in the 1970s’, ‘Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the 1970s’ (all Sonicbond), and ‘William IV’ (Pen & Sword). Due in 2023 are titles on Queen Victoria’s daughters-in-law, and Eagles, the US band. He has also edited an English translation of ‘Ena and Bee’ by Ana de Sagrera, previously published in Spain in 2006, published in summer 2022, and looks forward to another busy year with further projects in mind.