“
Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!”
With these words, Queen Victoria described her wedding day in her diary – 10 February 1840, writing up the event for the day’s entry from Windsor Castle. It marked the beginning of her marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The opposite date of this ecstatic exhortation of joy on behalf of the Queen was unquestionably 14 December 1861; the day of the death of the Prince Consort at Windsor Castle, after which there was a hiatus of two weeks, before the grief-stricken Queen could even bring herself to record the event of the previous fortnight in a journal entry. Twenty-one years had preceded this date, during which the Queen had given birth to nine children, five daughters and four sons.
Spitalfields
Tower-hamlets
United-kingdom
Honiton
Devon
Denmark
Dover
Kent
Buckingham-palace
Westminster
Belgium
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