She did not find this second task as difficult as that of safeguarding the constitution against what she considered to be "ambition" and "faction". While showing distaste for theological argument and what she regarded as religious cant, she had strong views on Church appointments and Church order. In 1869, during her period of seclusion, she complained to one of her ministers that "the Government and many people in the country seem ... to be totally blind to the alarming encroachments and increase of the Roman Catholics in England and indeed all over the world. The Pope was never so powerful and the Queen is quite determined to do all in her power to prevent this."

She might have also underlined, a favourite habit, the word "determined". Albert's death added to her sense of determination. She would never give in. One of her favourite words, as the author of the Jubilee book recognised, was resolve". This quality had been missing in Albert in his last illness when, as Baron Stockmar, his adviser on the British constitution, had noted, he prove disturbingly fatalistic. "I do not cling to life. You do", Albert had told his wife just before he contracted the typhoid which killed him. "You do, but I set no store by it." Victoria had to set store by it for nearly forty years, although throughout 1862 and many times later her thoughts were on the next world rather than on this. She once described her crown as a crown of thorns, just as Albert, more melancholy by disposition than she was, thought of his own life as a passage through thorns.

Thus, on the first anniversary of Albert's death she was comforted by the fact that the room where he had died was full of flowers, "emblems of his happiness and glory", and when she told Dr. Stanley that it seemed like a birthday he made exactly the right answer for her, "It is a birthday in a new world". "Oh! to think of my beginning another year alone" was her next thought. She had already made it her "firm resolve", however, in days of deep grief, her "irrevocable decision", that in the future "his views about everything" were to be "her law. And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished." She had also resolved, with equal determination, that no one person among those serving her, however good or devoted he might be was ever "to lead or guide or dictate to me".