There have been numerous studies of Queen Victoria, some in the context of Victorian attitudes to death and focusing on her cult of her deceased consort Prince Albert. The work of Walter Arnstein, David Cannadine, A. N. Wilson and John Wolfe stand out in biographical treatments of Victoria. Cannadine in particular has drawn attention to the sheer complexity of Victoria's character and makeup. This complexity is nowhere more marked than in Victoria's religion. Yet, as Ledger-Lomas rightly points out, discussion of Victoria's religion in even the most substantial recent biographies and articles tends to be thin, lacking contextualisation, and often unsympathetic.

Ledger-Lomas breaks new ground in his reframing of the story of Victoria's long reign and the place of religion within it. While the impact of a long succession of bereavements is a crucial element in any biography of her, this is the first comprehensive study of Queen Victoria's religiosity on its own terms, taken as a whole and in global context. As such it is a perfect fit for the Spiritual Lives series edited by Timothy Larsen which features biographies of prominent men and women whose eminence is not primarily based on a specifically religious contribution. This study more than meets the series’ projected aim of recasting important figures in fresh, innovative and thought-provoking ways.

The author relates the story of Victoria's religious life within the wider context both of European monarchy and a religiously plural British Empire. He analyses not only Victoria's own personal religious beliefs, an idiosyncratic but unique blend of liberal Protestantism, but also her efforts to implement them as a monarch, thereby revealing the evolving linkages between religion and monarchy. Ledger-Lomas uses a rich and wide range of primary British and German sources including the pictorial and the print sermon as well as manuscript correspondence, through a series of highly informed and subtly interlinked essays. These are primarily thematic and analytical and arranged in only loose chronological order, given that the themes recur over a long period of time.

The first chapter sets out the religious expectations of Victoria held by the nation on her accession in 1837. The second chapter (‘Meine zeite Heimat’) shows how Victoria's marriage to Albert instilled an affinity for German Lutheranism and provided her with a medium for the building of religious, political and dynastic ties between Britain and Germany. In particular, she had hoped through the Anglo-Coburg connection to further the ‘sacred task’ of a liberal unification of Germany, hopes that were to be dashed by Bismarck. The third chapter explores the extent to which, for Victoria and her consort, the home, hearth and family almost supplanted the Church and liturgy and became the primary locus of lived religious faith. In particular, the celebration of Christmas took on a heightened domestic dimension. The pivotal fourth chapter (‘A darkened earth) explores Victoria's reaction to death as visited upon her household and her decades-long reaction to that of Albert in 1861. During this protracted period she piled up glowing memorials to her late husband to such an extent that David Cannadine has aptly referred to Victoria's ‘mummification of Albert’. The fifth chapter (‘Supreme head’) moves beyond consideration of Victoria's domestic religion and its influence, to her role as constitutional head of the Church of England and Wales and her increasingly fractious relationship with it. Her personal preference for and worship in the Church of Scotland when north of the Border antagonised Tractarians and Ritualists whom she opposed and despised. Her efforts to promote Protestant consensus in support of establishment also alienated some Protestant Dissenters. The sixth chapter (‘Disunited kingdom’) contrasts her affection for and affinity with the ruling religion in Scotland, Presbyterianism, with a failure to build bridges with Catholic Ireland in spite of her respect for Roman Catholicism as a lived religion which extended even to admiration for certain Roman Catholic devotional practices such as the cult of St Francis.

It was from here on that this study breaks new ground in terms of methodology. A. N. Wilson has highlighted the understated German diplomatic endeavours of the widowed Queen on behalf of her sainted deceased Albert, thereby questioning the caricature of her as a complete recluse no longer interested in the world around her. However, most other biographers of Victoria tend to regard her long widowhood as a withdrawal from the world and thus a mere epilogue to be briefly related. In contrast, complementing Wilson's emphasis on her behind-the-scenes attempted contribution to European diplomacy, the author's last three chapters stress the importance of the later period of her reign as one of religious innovation. Chapter vii (‘The crown of sacrifice’) gives meaning to the book's title, itself a direct quotation from Victoria herself. It is persuasively argued that while the whole host of bereavements, some of close family, turned Victoria into a gloomy and backward-looking monarch and even for a time encouraged republican feeling, they also sharpened her religious credentials, turning her into ‘the Empire's mourner in chief’. On the other hand, she was by no means a religious pacifist, but rather, ‘a warrior Queen’, who because soldiering was not an option, ‘regretted not being a man’. Chapter viii (‘Colonial carnivals’) explores the notion that in the late part of her reign the Jubilees and attendant ceremonial both articulated an imperial ideology and helped sacralise her rule on a global scale. The final chapter ix (‘A completed life’) conveys the emotions unleashed by her death, with imperial and international as well as national voices mourning her passing in sermons and other literature. Great deaths of course helped ‘to consecrate imperial manliness’. However, the author here provides welcome historical context. For a point too often overlooked in some current critiques of the British Empire and its legacy is a recognition of how British imperialism helped to give world religions a distinctive voice – Victoria by the end of her reign was a Christian monarch presiding over a cosmopolitan and religiously very plural empire. While always doggedly committed to the Reformation and Protestantism, she increasingly interpreted this in a liberal and European rather than national and sectarian sense. Her sorrows and bereavements actually over time broadened and widened her religious appeal among her subject peoples.

This book, full of shrewd and penetrating insights, deserves to be widely studied and reflected upon. The story it tells holds lessons for our own times when colonial and imperial history are under a hostile spotlight and scrutiny for sometimes present-day ideological reasons. The author ends on a highly relevant and timely note of warning. The breadth of Victoria's appeal at the end of her reign may soon have been forgotten with her statues surviving as ‘fossil shells from a lost British world’ across Canada, Australia, New Zealand as well as Britain. The desecration of some of them during the Black Lives Matter protests certainly showed that for these activists their existence discouraged ‘the pursuit of truth about her Empire today’. Such a view pays too little attention to nuance and context. For example, whether true or not, state-sponsored memorialisation of Victoria in the empire advanced the claim that Victoria fostered racial and religious harmony. Even if the statues themselves might be regarded as ‘dour and cumbrous monuments to her cult’, the author fairly concludes that Victoria's religious position, both private and public, was more complex and eclectic than is sometimes recognised. It deserves to be understood within the wider context of her times without the condescension of hindsight and present-day fashionable political agendas. In short, analytical distance is needed. In his evaluation of Victoria's religion and religion's place and role in her rule, Ledger-Lomas provides this. Hers was indeed a thorny crown.