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Gregory King is the author of the UK bestseller The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson, as well as several books on Russia's Romanov era, including The Court of the Last Tsar and The Fate of the Romanovs (with Penny Wilson). A frequent on-screen commentator for royal television productions, he has worked with the BBC and ITV in the UK, the CBC in Canada, and with National Geographic, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and A&E in the United States.

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Queen Victoria wore a somber gown of black silk, enlivened with delicate embroidery of sparkling jet and offset by layers of contrasting white lace.  On her gray head a veil of Honiton lace, carefully arranged in cascades to frame her wrinkled face and sagging shoulders, was held in place by a small crown of 1,300 diamonds. The faint hint of her favorite orange-scented perfume hovered in the air as her lady in waiting adorned her widow’s weeds with the blue silk moiré sash and diamond star of the Order of the Garter; large diamond drop earrings and a matching collet necklace of twenty-eight immense, gleaming stones; and a diamond-fringe brooch. Her pudgy wrists and fingers glistened with gold and diamond bracelets and an array of precious rings.

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Queen Victoria wore a somber gown of black silk, enlivened with delicate embroidery of sparkling jet and offset by layers of contrasting white lace. On her gray head a veil of Honiton lace, carefully arranged in cascades to frame her wrinkled face and sagging shoulders, was held in place by a small crown of 1,300 diamonds. The faint hint of her favorite orange-scented perfume hovered in the air as her lady in waiting adorned her widow's weeds with the blue silk moiré sash and diamond star of the Order of the Garter; large diamond drop earrings and a matching collet necklace of twenty-eight immense, gleaming stones; and a diamond-fringe brooch. Her pudgy wrists and fingers glistened with gold and diamond bracelets and an array of precious rings.

On the eve of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the tiny, rotund, seventy-eight-year-old queen was a study in contrasts. And, much like the immense realm that was her domain, she was at the pinnacle of her authority and nearing the end of her days. Twilight of Splendor leads you on an extravagant tour into the heart of history's last and greatest royal empire: the court of Victoria Regina et Imperatrix?Queen of England and Empress of India. You'll meet the people, witness the pageantry, and feel the power that circled the globe.

Author Greg King takes you exploring through the queen's elegant residences at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, cruising the English Channel aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert II, and tramping the Scottish highlands at her beloved retreat, Balmoral. You'll also attend the spectacular ceremony in honor of Victoria's sixtieth year on the throne and marvel at the Empire's splendid diversity, as represented by her parading armies?scarlet-coated Canadians and turbaned Sikhs, Egyptians in red fezzes, khaki-clad Australians, and galloping Bengal Lancers, their deadly pikes glittering in the sun like the queen's own jewels.

Most compelling of all is Victoria herself. Groomed from infancy to assume the crown and adhere to a strict moral code, she was a proud, forceful, and imperious sovereign who remained personally humble, good-humored, and keenly intelligent. King reveals that Victoria's dislike of the British nobility led her to market herself quite purposefully to the middle class, even as she suppressed news of scandals involving her children and embarked on enigmatic relationships with the notorious John Brown and her personal servant Abdul Karim.

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Twilight of Splendor

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Queen Victoria came to the British throne through a series of tragedies and a conflux of familial dereliction. She was born in 1819, in the last full year of the tumultuous reign of her grandfather King George III; his illness had placed his son George at the center of power when the latter assumed the title prince regent for his father in 1811. In 1785 Prince George, a man of insatiable appetites and thoroughly disagreeable reputation, had married his mistress, the Catholic Marie Fitzherbert, in a morganatic union; the marriage was also illegal under the Act of Settlement, which forbade any heir to the throne to enter into a union with a Roman Catholic. Perpetually in debt as a result of his extravagant building schemes, George eventually-and bigamously-married Princess Caroline of Brunswick in hopes of gaining a large monetary settlement from Parliament. Their union was a disaster from the very beginning: George complained that he found his wife ugly and common, and spent his wedding night passed out on the floor; Caroline, in turn, was scarcely enraptured with the licentious, grossly overweight prince, who flaunted his continued affair with Lady Jersey before the eyes of the court and his spouse, and both husband and wife proved wildly unfaithful.

As time dragged on and relations grew worse, George increasingly humiliated his wife in a series of deliberate acts that won her much sympathy; Caroline, in turn, carried on her own affairs, although the public continued to side with her, even through her husband's unsuccessful attempts to divorce her. She reached the height of this humiliating martyrdom when she was turned away from the door of Westminster Abbey at her husband's coronation as King George IV; much to his relief, his hated consort died in August 1821. The couple's only child, Princess Charlotte, born in 1786, married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and was an immensely popular figure as the heiress presumptive to the throne. Her death in childbirth in 1817 left the succession to the throne in a tangled, dynastic mess.

With Princess Charlotte's death, the court suddenly realized that George IV had no direct heir: in the event of his death, the throne would pass to his brothers in order of primogeniture, yet none of these men had any legitimate children who might inherit after them. The Duke of Wellington once described these princes as "the damnedest millstone around the necks of any government that can be imagined." Corrupt, dissolute, and perpetually broke, they caused scandal after scandal, tainting the image of the British monarchy in the eyes of the public.

In 1791 Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the next in line to the throne, had married his cousin Princess Frederica, daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who found her new husband so disagreeable that she promptly retired to a house in the country, leaving her husband free to carry on with his numerous mistresses. One of these women attempted to ruin the duke when their affair ended by claiming that she had influenced military appointments; although an inquiry conducted by Parliament found the prince innocent, his reputation was irreparably damaged, and he died in 1827 with no legal issue.

For George III's other sons, however, Charlotte's death meant a mad marital dash to provide legitimate heirs to the throne. Prince William, Duke of Clarence, had lived with his mistress, the actress Dorothy Jordan, for more than two decades, and she bore him ten children; these royal bastards, christened with the surname of Fitzclarence, were ineligible for the throne, and William, in exchange for a large grant from Parliament to pay off his debts, agreed to marry a suitable bride, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg and Meiningen, twenty-seven years his junior. The couple's hopes to provide an heir to the throne were dashed, however; both of their daughters died in infancy.

Prince Ernst August, the Duke of Cumberland, was a thoroughly disreputable man, called "the Hanoverian Ogre," with no living children by his equally disagreeable wife, Princess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was popularly believed to have murdered both of her previous husbands. Society whispered that the duke himself had murdered his own valet in a fit of rage after a homosexual affair, and that he had fathered his own sister Sophia's bastard child.

In 1793, another brother, Prince Augustus, had married Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the fourth Earl of Dunmore, while on holiday in Rome, in direct contravention of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which decreed that those in the line of succession had to obtain the prior consent of the sovereign and of the Privy Council before entering into any union. Although two children were born of the marriage, George III had it annulled when he learned that Augustus was amenable to abandoning his wife and offspring in exchange for the title Duke of Sussex and an increased allowance from Parliament. Thus styled, the prince promptly fathered an illegitimate daughter with a young woman whose parents owned an inn near Windsor Castle; in 1831, Sussex again contracted a morganatic marriage, this time with the daughter of the second Earl of Arran. Only George III's youngest son, Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, had contracted an equal marriage, with Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, but no children had as yet been born of the union.

This left George III's third son, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. A military man of no great distinction, he was a martinet whose love for corporal punishment and even executions earned him the animosity of his men. For three decades he had lived with his mistress, Thrse-Bernadine Mongenet of Besanon, a woman seven years older than he, who went by the name of Julie de St. Laurent. On learning of Princess Charlotte's death, the Duke of Kent reluctantly abandoned his mistress and sought out a suitable wife who would provide him with a legitimate heir. At forty-nine years of age, corpulent and balding, the duke was no longer a prize catch, and his opportunities were thus considerably reduced. Eventually he settled on Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen, whose husband, Duke Emich Karl, had died in 1814 after eleven years of marriage. At thirty-one the widowed Victoire had two young children, Karl and Feodora, to raise; she spoke no English and was something less than an ideal consort, but she was of equal rank and had produced healthy children, the two factors seemingly most important to the Duke of Kent. She was also the sister of the late Princess Charlotte's husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a tenuous tie that seemed redolent of fate, and the Duke of Kent married her in May 1818.

A year later, on May 24, the new Duchess of Kent gave birth to a girl at Kensington Palace in London. "Look at her well," her father presciently commented, "for she will be Queen of England." Christened Alexandrina Victoria, the baby knew nothing of her father, who died of pneumonia seven months after her birth and just six days before his father, King George III. With the accession of the prince regent as George IV, the infant Alexandrina Victoria was suddenly second in line to the throne.

This marked a sharp downturn in the fortunes of the Duchess of Kent. Her husband's death had left her saddled with debts, and she was forced to rely on George...