Associated with sexual repression and the proverbial stiff upper lip, Britain’s Queen Victoria comes across as a dowdy and matronly but forbidding figure. Now a Channel 4 film presents her in a dramatically different light. Based on an analysis of her diaries and letters, the documentary Queen Victoria’s Men, to be telecast on June 2, reveals that when she wasn’t glowering away from the camera, Victoria loved men and needed to be loved by them in return, not only as a queen, but as a passionate woman who revelled in her sexuality.

The film charts her relationship with the five most important men in her life. Prince Albert, her husband; two prime ministers, Lord Melbourne and Benjamin Disraeli; and two servants, Scott John Brown and, most unlikely of all, Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim from Agra.

Portraying Victoria’s relationship with her German husband as volatile and intense, the documentary attempts to show how Albert, although deeply fond of his wife of 21 years, could be exceedingly controlling—perhaps as a reaction to his unpopularity with the British public and the Parliament’s dismissive stance towards him. Denied the role of King, and painfully aware of being an outsider, he was determined to be master of his house. Their fiery quarrels could drag on for hours, even days. At the same time, their marriage—which spawned nine children—was also filled with blissful highs to combat the desolate lows. When Prince Albert suddenly died in December 1861, his 42-year-old wife refused to appear in public for years, and imposed punishing mourning rules for herself, even as she hoped for an afterlife reunion.

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