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70 free Queen Victoria trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Queen Victoria trivia quiz covers the woman who gave her name to an age: the sheltered girl of the Kensington System, the 18-year-old woken at six in the morning to be told she was queen, the wife who proposed to her cousin, the mother of nine who hated being pregnant, the widow of Windsor, the Empress of India, the matriarch of two jubilees, and the grandmother of Europe who died at Osborne with a Pomeranian on her bed. The easy questions cover the outline: her husband, her children, her nickname, her title, her jubilees, her successor. The harder half is for readers of Longford and Weintraub: the tsar she was named after, the spaniel called Dash, the story she wrote at ten, the uncle who became King of the Belgians, the bedchamber crisis, the assassin acquitted by reason of insanity, the anaesthetic she championed, the surgeon who lanced her abscess, the man who laid flattery on with a trowel, the Munshi who taught her Urdu, the five threats to abdicate, the poet who shot at her at Windsor, the 122 volumes of journal her daughter burned, and what was hidden in her left hand in the coffin. Every answer was checked against Queen Victoria's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our British monarchs, Victorian era and Elizabeth II quizzes next.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where in London was Victoria born on 24 May 1819?
Kensington Palace
She was the only child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent and was christened in its Cupola Room.
Q 02Which first given name did Victoria drop from official use on becoming queen?
Alexandrina
It honoured her godfather, Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
Q 03Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, was which son of the reigning king?
The fourth
His three elder brothers all died without surviving legitimate children, clearing her path to the throne.
Q 04What was the strict regime under which Victoria was raised by her mother and Sir John Conroy called?
The Kensington System
It was designed to make her weak and dependent; she later called her childhood rather melancholy.
Q 05What was the name of the young Victoria's King Charles Spaniel?
Dash
Her last pet, the Pomeranian Turi, was laid on her deathbed at her request.
Q 06At age ten Victoria wrote and illustrated a children's story that was finally published in what year?
2015
It was called The Adventures of Alice Laselles.
Q 07Which maternal uncle, first King of the Belgians, engineered Victoria's introduction to Prince Albert?
Leopold
She called him her best and kindest adviser; William IV preferred a Dutch prince she found very plain.
Q 08How old was Victoria when she became queen on 20 June 1837?
18
William IV had publicly wished to live until her 18th birthday so that her mother would never be regent; he died 27 days after it.
Q 09How was Victoria dressed when told at 6 am that she was queen?
Only in her dressing gown
She saw them alone, she wrote proudly in her diary.
Q 10Why did Victoria not inherit the throne of Hanover, which Britain had shared a monarch with since 1714?
Salic law excluded women
Her unpopular uncle Ernest Augustus became King of Hanover, and her heir presumptive until she had a child.
Q 11Which Whig prime minister became a father figure to the young queen?
Lord Melbourne
Charles Greville thought the widowed, childless Melbourne was passionately fond of her as of a daughter.
Q 12Victoria was the first sovereign to take up residence in which building?
Buckingham Palace
She was granted a civil list of £385,000 a year and, financially prudent, paid off her father's debts.
Q 13Which household members did Victoria refuse to let Robert Peel replace in the 1839 crisis that restored Melbourne?
Her Whig ladies of the bedchamber
Q 21How did the ex-army officer Robert Pate injure the queen in 1850?
He struck her with his cane
He crushed her bonnet and bruised her forehead, and got seven years' transportation.
Q 22Which of Victoria's childhood governesses was pensioned off in 1842 after a row between the Queen and Albert?
Baroness Lehzen
Albert thought her incompetent and blamed her for their daughter's poor health.
Q 23How much did Victoria personally donate to the British Relief Association in 1847?
£2,000
The story that she gave only £5, and the same to Battersea Dogs Home, is a late-Victorian myth.
Peel refused to govern under her restrictions, and Melbourne returned to office.
Q 14Whose abdominal growth, wrongly rumoured to be a pregnancy by Conroy, damaged Victoria's early reputation?
Lady Flora Hastings
The post-mortem found a large liver tumour; the queen was hissed in public over the affair.
Q 15How did Victoria's engagement to Albert come about in October 1839?
She proposed to him
As sovereign she had to do the asking; it was five days after he arrived at Windsor.
Q 16What relation was Prince Albert to Victoria?
Her maternal first cousin
They married in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace on 10 February 1840.
Q 17How many children did Victoria and Albert have?
Nine
She hated being pregnant, viewed breast-feeding with disgust and thought newborns ugly.
Q 18What nickname did Victoria earn from her descendants' marriages into royal houses across the continent?
The grandmother of Europe
Thirty-four of her grandchildren survived to adulthood.
Q 19Who made the first attempt on Victoria's life, firing at her carriage in 1840 during her first pregnancy?
Edward Oxford
Found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was committed to an asylum and later sent to Australia.
Q 20How did Victoria respond the day after John Francis aimed a pistol at her in 1842?
She drove the same route again to bait him into a second attempt
He fired again, was seized by plainclothes police, and his death sentence was commuted to transportation.
Q 24Which French king did Victoria visit in 1843 and 1845, the first such visit since 1520?
Louis Philippe I
He fled to England after the 1848 revolution; Victoria retreated to Osborne during the Chartist scare.
Q 25On which island did Victoria and Albert buy the private estate of Osborne House in 1845?
The Isle of Wight
She spent every widowed Christmas there and died there in 1901.
Q 26Which foreign secretary was sacked in 1851 for approving Louis-Napoleon's coup without consulting the queen?
Lord Palmerston
Four years later she was forced to appoint him prime minister after the Crimean fiasco.
Q 27Which new anaesthetic did Victoria use for the births of her eighth and ninth children?
Chloroform
Clergymen called it against biblical teaching; she was so impressed she used it again in 1857.
Q 28Victoria's 1855 Paris trip was the first by a reigning British monarch in how long?
Over 400 years
They visited Napoleon I's tomb and attended a 1,200-guest ball at Versailles.
Q 29Victoria's eldest daughter married Prince Frederick William of which state in 1858?
Prussia
Their first child, born a year later, became the last German emperor, Wilhelm II.
Q 30What did Victoria discover on reading the duchess's papers after her death in 1861?
That her mother had loved her deeply
Heartbroken, she blamed Conroy and Lehzen for wickedly estranging them.