When his brother succeeded George IV in 1830, there was little expectation of much change: although the bluff, short-tempered William IV had given up his mistresses for a respectable and apparently amicable marriage to Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen in 1819, he had no legitimate children and kept the children from his liaison with Dorothy Jordan about him at court. On Victoria's accession, then, the court was barely respectable. By her death in February 1901, the British court had undergone a series of transformations to become a national and imperial showcase and a vital passport into high society.

A Whig Court

Victoria's accession was widely hailed as the dawning of a new era for the nation and for the court itself. The queen's youth and sex, and the care with which her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had kept her from association with the corrupt courts of her uncles, raised hopes that the court would once more become the focus of aristocratic society, and that it would set a new moral tone more in keeping with the demands of the now dominant evangelical movement. Furthermore, the opening of a new reign offered irresistible opportunities to re-invent a political significance for the court: for the first time in generations the Whigs were in power at an accession, and it fell to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to make up the queen's household. Traditional accounts of the declining political power of the monarchy make William IV's capitulation to Lord Grey in 1834 the final attempt by the throne effectively to wield political power, whose failure set the precedent for the removal of the crown from politics; but this precedent was only three years old when Victoria came to the throne, and precedents become binding only with time and reiteration. Melbourne created for the queen (whose reliance on him in the first three yearsof her reign was notorious) a household composed entirely of Whigs, among them relations and associates of some of his most powerful colleagues. This was a sure sign that an attempt was to be made both to reinstate the court into the political realm, and to align the court with one political faction, as had been the case in the previous three reigns. The only difference was that Victoria's uncles and grandfather had, as kings, unanimously supported the Tories; for the first three years of her reign, Victoria was a violent Whig.