For Queen Victoria, the personal and the political were closely intertwined, and this affected her relations with her ten prime ministers. An astonishingly large proportion of their time had to be devoted to handling their demanding and opinionated sovereign, who had pronounced views on state affairs that she expected to be heeded. Her relationships with some of her premiers were notable for their warmth. She had a girlish adoration for her first prime minister, the urbane and charming Lord Melbourne, while the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli enchanted her with flattery, filling her life with ‘poetry, romance and chivalry’. With others, things went less well.  She conceived the strongest antipathy to the great Liberal William Gladstone, whom she dubbed a ‘half-mad firebrand’. Driven apart both by political differences and temperamental incompatibility, by the time he became Prime Minister for the fourth time, they mutually detested each other. Join Anne Somerset, author of Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers, as she shares a fascinating new perspective on Victoria’s reign through the bitter clashes—sometimes comic, sometimes shocking—and affectionate interactions she had with her prime ministers.

Anne Somerset has written seven books, including an acclaimed biography of Elizabeth I, and The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. Her book, Queen Anne: the Politics of Passion was awarded the Elizabeth Longford prize for historical biography. Anne Somerset lives in London. Her most recent book is Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers.