Download or read book Queen Victoria written by Michael Ledger-Lomas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown is the first comprehensive account of its subject's intense religiosity. This thematically structured biography explains how events in Victoria's life and reign - from her coronation to her marriage and many bereavements - changed and enlarged her faith. It portrays a woman with simple convictions but a complex identity, which suited her multinational kingdom and religiously plural Empire. Victoria was the Supreme Governor of the Church of England but preferred to worship with Scottish Presbyterians; she was an ardent Protestant, yet sympathetic to Roman Catholicism and Islam. Drawing on British and German archives, Michael Ledger-Lomas illuminates not just Victoria's beliefs, but also her efforts to implement them as a monarch, offering vivid sketches of the people - from archbishops to poets and Prussian kings with whom she worked to do so. This biography sets Victoria's religion in a global context, showing how leaders in different churches and world religions invoked it to embody their relationships to her Empire. Victoria once wrote of her 'thankfulness for God's help & protection through the many years that I have worn this thorny crown, & carried a heavy cross.' As she looked to God for support throughout her life, this biography deepens understanding not just of that life, but of the alliance between monarchy and religion in the nineteenth century. A metaphor for her private sorrows, the 'thorny crown' was also an emblem of her spiritual sovereignty. Book jacket.