Queen Victoria

My dear, it seems we were cut off rather abruptly. I do appreciate you picking up our conversation. It is quite important. Now, where shall I start?

Well, let’s start with me, shall we? The Queen. Until dear Lizzie came along, I was the longest reigning British monarch in history. Quite a thing for my time, don’t you agree? Especially when you think of how many women died in childbirth. And I, of course, had nine children, many of whom went on to be monarchs all through Europe.

Now, this is something that bothers me still – people go on about the Victorian era being marked by prudishness. Well! If Victorians were prudes they certainly did not get it from me, dear one. I was a whisky-swilling queen who loved a good roll in the sack. A doctor once advised me to stop having babies and I replied, “What? No more fun in the bedroom?” Poor Albert. I couldn’t get enough of him.

But maybe you haven’t come here to hear of all my lewd adventures, though I do appreciate the opportunity to set that record straight.

Let’s put my reign into a bit of context, shall we? Picture it. I was just 18 when my uncle King William passed and I became Queen. When I was born, I was seventh in line to the throne, so a lot of unfortunate circumstances had to pass for me to be crowned in 1837.

You would not think me a racist if you watch the film Victoria and Abdul, the story of my friendship with my Indian Muslim servant. Oh, I do love it when Judy Dench portrays me. That is a woman after my own heart!

And you know that the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. So there were moves towards more equal footing. But we did hold tight to the idea that our culture was superior – a sort of social Darwinism. And this is why it made sense to bring our culture around the globe.  In fact, the Governor of the New Zealand Company, John Lambton, the Earl of Durham took it a step further. He declared that lands across the seas, such as New Zealand, were in fact “the rightful patrimony of the English people, which God and Nature have set aside in the New World for those whose lot has assigned them but insufficient portions of the old.”

We were equally disdainful of the French. In Canada, Durham had been busy proposing legislation that would “settle the question of races” between English settlers and the inferior French.

You know it was the Magna Carta (1215) and the Bill of Rights (1688) that gave citizens the right to petition the monarch. In addition to letters, delegations of rangatira often travelled to meet me in England in 1882 and again in 1884 and again in 1898. I never gave them an audience, of course, but I do understand why they felt in necessary. There was certainly not adequate representation in the New Zealand Government for them to affect any change, and the authority of own committees and their own parliament was not recognised by the settler government, despite Te Tiriti o Waitangi clearly stating that Māori would have authority over their own people and lands.

When I died in 1901, this square was renamed from Market Square to Victoria Square and three years later this statue was erected. Thousands of people came to the unveiling. I suppose there wasn’t much else to do. The photos of that even show that the streets of Christchurch were being dug up in order for the new electric trams electric trams going in – very progressive, don’t you think? In 1903, Christchurch had a population of 57,000. Auckland was just 67,000.  London, by contrast had 6.5 million.

In 2020, I was joined in Victoria Square by Mana Motuhake, the two sculptures on either side of me. The figures in the upturned waka represent some of the chiefs who signed Kemp’s Deed. I wonder what they would like to say to me now?

Yours sincerely,

Queen Victoria