The Reign of Queen Victoria

At six o'clock on the morning of June 20, 1837, an 18-year-old princess was woken in Kensington Palace. The Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury had come to tell her that her uncle, King William IV, was dead. She was now Queen. Receiving them in her cotton dressing gown with her hair falling over her shoulders, her first act was to demand an hour of solitude, something she had never been allowed before. Later that morning, she wrote in her diary, "I am Queen." To assert her new independence, she immediately ordered her bed to be moved out of her mother's room, ending the strict system that had controlled her childhood. The Victorian era had begun.