Before Prince Albert, there was another decidedly less suitable admirer who stole Queen Victoria’s heart: handsome, scandalised and 40 years her senior.
The history books record Lord Melbourne, who mentored the teenage Queen through the first, uncertain years of her reign, as the man who was her first prime minister.
With Downton Abbey done and dusted, however, and a primetime period drama slot to fill on Sunday night schedules, a new ITV series suggests that there was much more to it than that.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, as a young man in a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1805
ALAMY
Victoria, the eight-part drama starring Jenna Coleman, Tom Hughes and Rufus Sewell, focuses on the love triangle between the young queen, her German cousin and the man described in his obituary in The Times as an “indolent . . . man