Was the young Queen Victoria incredibly beautiful or nay?

[MorrisZapp]

Movies and TV suggest she was stunning as a young woman, but all the pictures of her that are widely familiar today are of a plain fizzog.

Was she hot or not?

It's a commentary on us, those of us alive today. Our netflix adjusted eyes don't do ugly.

And......................... she was born in to the job. No application, no verbal or numeric tests, no interview, no competencies et cetera.

I was sure I’d read he had a whole host of stds which resulted in infertility issues for his wives.

my history is exceptionally sketchy and you sound like you know what your talking about

Are you thinking of Mary Tudor? Philip arrived from Spain to find he had been somewhat catfished by a flattering portrait. He’d agreed to marry the much older cousin of his father on political grounds. She turned out to look much now older than he was expecting (@ 40), badly dressed and a bit fat, plus he just didn’t like her. He legged it back to Spain as soon as he’d done his conjugal duty.

Anne Boleyn was viewed as unattractive by her contemporaries, but, as we all know, Henry was obsessed with her (for a while).
Aoc's problem was that was unattractive (possibly) AND dull.

She was well liked at court and after retiring as the King's Beloved Sister, had a reputation for treating her staff extremely well.

I was sure I’d read he had a whole host of stds which resulted in infertility issues for his wives

I've been reading a biography of Catherine Howard which examines these questions. Henry had a couple of known mistresses - Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn - and you can't rule out the odd encounter, but the fact that no-one contemporary mentions a lot of women in connection with him seems to rule out a sex life on, say, the Charles II scale. Henry actually seems to have rather liked married domesticity.

What he probably was, was periodically impotent. The infertility of the wives might have been stress - everyone looking at you every month to see if your periods have stopped (foreign ambassadors bribed servants to tell them the state of the royal bedsheets and royal menstrual flow), and in Katherine of Aragon's case, there's a theory that she was anorexic through fasting as her religious practice. Plus, of course, knowing the outcome if you didn't produce an heir.

It's a fascinating topic.

And along with Katherine Parr, she survived Henry. Pub quiz questions never know that. 😅

I don't know if she was considered unattractive as much as unfashionable. Her dark colouring wasn't in vogue.

She wasn't considered beautiful, but she was beguiling. She had grown up at the French court, so she spoke fluent French and dressed in the French style, including the more daring French hood that showed off some hair while the English gable hood was much more conservative. She was also known to be intelligent, sharp tongued and quick witted.

Wow - where do you get all of that from?! I’ve never heard that she believed she was beautiful - from what I’ve read, she didn’t feel it was that important because she was the queen and therefore ultimately important, and her image was based on being wholesome and family-oriented, not beautiful, which I think she would have considered quite shallow.

She didn’t ‘reject’ her children - she was a bit fed up and frustrated with some of them, especially Bertie, who was pretty awful and would piss off most parents. She didn’t stand any nonsense and was no doubt less indulgent than modern parents, as was the social norm - but why do you think she rejected her children?

Indeed!

She was almost as rich as his sister as she was as Queen. I love the story of a courtier going to visit her and reporting back on how she was doing. He said she spent her days hunting and playing games, had new dresses every week and her staff loved working for her.

What a shit life!

But she wasn't allowed to marry anyone (no man must enjoy what the king had discarded), she couldn't have children and her servants reported back on her. So not all wonderful.

I know...but she was pretty well compensated!

Although I thought the reason she couldn't marry was because of the pre-contract thar obviously rendered her marriage null and void.

She didn’t ‘reject’ her children - she was a bit fed up and frustrated with some of them, especially Bertie, who was pretty awful and would piss off most parents. She didn’t stand any nonsense and was no doubt less indulgent than modern parents, as was the social norm - but why do you think she rejected her children?

Judging by what I've read she was what we'd call emotionally abusive. She criticised her children to their faces, she demanded that one daughter live with her even though that daughter was married and had her own family, she moaned when the daughters told her they were pregnant and she played favourites to a marked degree (Princess Louisa and Bertie were invariably not the favourites). And that's before demanding every grandchild be named in some way after dear Albert.

Was that the Lorraine one? I'm never sure if that existed or was a diplomatic ruse to dump her.

Why does anything matter?

It’s impossible to diagnose Henry in retrospect. It’s not true that syphilis has been ruled out. He was never treated for it at the time. But syphilis was known as the “Great Pretender” as it can manifest in a wide range of organs with a multitude of different symptoms, which can confuse doctors even today.

It’s possible that he was a dormant carrier and passed it to his wives - which may be why so many of his children died. However it must be said post-natal care in Tudor England was fairly dire.

Syphilis cause pancreatitis which in turn causes diabetes. So if he did have diabetes syphilis could have been a source.

I thought the gigantic codpieces were to prevent clothing irritating/hurting his syphilitic cock?

The biography I'm reading reckons it was a subconscious rebuttal to his periodic impotence. 'Impotent? me? with a codpiece THIS big?' no 16c man is going to admit to that, a king least of all. As the man says, you don't have to be a disciple of Freud to see the message here.

Now if you'd been talking about Francis I, I could believe it.

This thread is history gold!

I genuinely did not know that V&A were first cousins, or 'cousins germain' or even 'German cousins' as the term sometimes appears on Scottish birth certificates.

How weird royal families are.

Well I wouldn’t call any of that abusive. Criticising your children is not abusive, expecting daughters to be a lifelong support to their parents was standard in that period. Playing favourites with children when young can be abusive but as adults there will be some you get on better with than others - Bertie was not a favourite because he behaved appalling and caused endless stress to his parents and threatened to undermine all her work reestablishing the Monarchy.

Im not suggesting she was a perfect parent - I’m sure she was flawed in many ways and massively distracted by her work as queen, and judging her by modern parenting methods she would probably be quite shit. But to say she rejected her children and to call her narcissistic on that basis is hyperbole.

How weird royal families are.
check out the Hapsburgs if you want weird

Well by all accounts her children loved her and were terrified of her. To me that suggests a rather complicated relationship with them.

If you wouldn't call any of her behaviour abusive I wonder why, but that's your issue.

Uncles marrying nieces for a couple of hundred years does produce special effects.

First cousins marrying was actually pretty common in the period and wasn’t thought weird. Genetically, it’s not likely to be too much of a problem, unless it happens repeatedly over many generations so the gene pool gets really small. This happened in the Spanish royal family as they had a specific policy of doing this. The British royal family more or less got away with it as although it happened fairly often there was enough new blood to scrape by …

I read a theory that the haemophilia in the royal family was evidence that Victoria was illegitimate- it never occurred in the family before her, and was common in the family of someone her mother was very close to (her secretary maybe?). Also, the disease George III had happened many times in the family before her, but never after …

You can still marry a first cousin now in the UK! Can't imagine it's very popular though