A century ago Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – her reign having provided 60 years of stability at the height of Britain’s imperial power. Dorothy Thompson profiles the woman at the heart of the Empire. More than any other British monarch, with the possible exception of her one-time model, the Virgin Queen, Victoria imposed her personality as well as her name on the sixty years of her reign. At her accession she presented a total contrast in terms of age, gender, and political outlook to her Hanoverian predecessors. When she died she was succeeded by a son who represented in almost every aspect of his life both a reaction against the canons of respectable behaviour which prevailed during the later years of his mother’s reign, and a rejection of most of her values and her way of life. The throne, alienated and under threat at her accession was so firmly fixed at the time of her death as a major institution of the British state that in spite of the growth of republicanism throughout Europe, no modern British political party has dared put its abolition as a serious item on an electoral programme.