In language even more agreeable to the Queen, if more convoluted, he had described her husband as "the only person who realised the ideal ... the union of the manly grace and sublime simplicity of chivalry with the intellectual splendour of the Attic Academe". Disraeli knew how to flatter the Queen herself, and it was a remarkable gesture of belief in him as a man as well as a politician that when he left office in 1880 the Queen told him that she hoped they could continue to correspond: "you can be of much use to me about my family and other things and about general public questions".

It was a key to much that happened in the years afterwards, as at the time, that Victoria's marriage with Albert had been supremely happy. It was she who had proposed to him, but it was he who very soon established a personal ascendancy. From the time of their marriage they shared their lives. They were already close relatives. Albert's father, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was the brother of her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Leopold, the Duchess's brother, who had married the daughter of George IV, Charlotte, who died in 1817, was uncle to both Victoria and Albert and guide to both of them on constitutional and domestic issues: it was he who warned Victoria in 1838 that "all trades must be learned, and nowadays the trade of a constitutional sovereign, to do it well, is a very difficult one." So, too, was raising a royal family. There were nine children of Victoria and Albert's marriage and many of them made dynastic marriages which linked the British monarchy with most other European courts, in time making Victoria "grandmother of Europe". The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha connections were far more wide-reaching in their consequences than the Hanoverian connection which Victoria had to abandon. Contemporaries and historians seized on their importance. Thus, in 1896 Bishop Randall Davidson, later to be Archbishop of Canterbury, told Victoria that she wielded "a personal and domestic influence over the thrones of Europe without precedent in the history of Christendom". In terms of British constitutional history and, in particular, the history of the monarchy this European aspect of the marriage between Victoria and Albert was less significant than the example the royal pair set in national life. The Duke of Wellington had described the Queen's uncles as "the damnedest millstone about the necks of any Government that can be imagined. They have insulted, personally insulted two-thirds of the gentlemen of England". Victoria and Albert wanted government to work, and they appealed through their home life to most of the middle classes and considerable sections both of the working classes and of the aristocracy. The Queen was more politically partisan than Albert, but both knew that if there were limits to their power there were none to their reputation.