Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days, the longest of any of her predecessors, constituted the Victorian era, a period of industrial, political, scientific and military change marked by a great expansion of the British Empire, and in 1876 Parliament granted her the additional title Empress of India. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III, and inherited the throne aged 18 after her father's three elder brothers died without surviving legitimate issue. In 1840 she married her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and their nine children married into royal families across the continent, earning her the epithet grandmother of Europe; after Albert's death in 1861 she withdrew from public life for years, briefly strengthening republican sentiment before her popularity recovered in the later part of her reign. She died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in 1901, the last monarch of the House of Hanover, and was succeeded by her son Edward VII.