Albert is dead and the queen is preparing to spend the rest of her life in mourning. Yet the last years of her reign are to be momentous years. Palmerston, then Gladstone and Disraeli, govern her empire through the high noon of its heyday. The court at Windsor, Balmoral, Osborne or Buckingham Palace is perpetually shocked by the Prince of Wales, forever in pursuit of horses, women and scandal, the heady harbinger of Edwardian years to come