The letters of Queen Victoria Author:Victoria Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 10 POLITICAL POSITION OF THE QUEEN [chap. i able to exercise any influence over her character or opinions. This was partly due to the fact that from an ear... more »ly age she had imbibed a respect for liberal views from her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, to whom she was devoted from her earliest childhood, and for whom she entertained feelings of the deepest admiration, affection, and confidence; but still more was it due to the fact that, from the very first, the Queen instinctively formed an independent judgment on any question that concerned her; and though she was undoubtedly influenced in her decisions by her affectionate reliance on her chosen advisers, yet those advisers were' always deliberately and shrewdly selected, and their opinions were in no case allowed to do more than modify her own penetrating and clear-sighted judgment. chapter{Section 4CHAPTER II MEMOIR OF QUEEN VICTORIA'S EARLY YEARS Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, was born on Monday, 24th May 1819, at Kensington Palace. Her father, Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (1767-1820), the fourth son of George III., was a man of considerable ability, humane, pious, punctual, with a strict sense of duty and enlightened ideas. He was a devoted soldier, and, as Queen Victoria once said, " was proud of his profession, and I was always taught to consider myself a soldier's child." He had a wide military experience, having served at Gibraltar, in Canada, and in the West Indies. He had been mentioned in despatches, but was said to be over-strict in matters of unimportant detail. His active career was brought to an end in 1802, when he had been sent to Gibraltar to restore order in a mutinous garrison. Order had been restored, but the Duke was recalled under alle...« less