Queen Victoria in Mourning

Following the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria entered a period of deep mourning that would last for the remainder of her life. As a symbol of her enduring grief, she adopted the traditional mourning veil and continued to wear somber, black attire until her own death in 1901—four full decades later. Her commitment to mourning was so profound that she never again wore the Imperial State Crown, as doing so would have required her to remove the mourning veil that had become an essential part of her daily dress and identity as the grieving widow of the Prince Consort.

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