ONE hundred years on, Queen Victoria is regarded as a prude who was never amused. She coldly glowers out of grainy old photographs, a miserable matriach forever in mourning, sexually repressed and grimly passionless.

Yet little of the popular image is fair, and it overshadows her true achievements. She was the power on the throne which put the Great in front of Britain. She embraced the technologies that her people were inventing and encouraged them to thrust forward on to a worldwide stage.

And although the Empire might have gone, her way of life is still, in many respects, our way of life a century later. From our familiar townscapes to our political processes right down to our customs and traditions, like Christmas, we still live a Victorian way of life. Just the fact that we still are a monarchy - and one that is strong enough to survive the turbulence of the last two decades - is a testimony to Victoria herself.

Because when Victoria was born, the monarchy was in crisis. In fact, she was born out of that crisis. Her grandfather, George III, had gone mad. His court was corrupt, dissolute and very expensive. His 15 children had failed to produce a single legitimate heir - although there were plenty of bastards milling about - and by the 1810s there was a real chance that the line would just peter out.

Desperate measures were required. His third son, William, suddenly jettisoned his mistress - an actress with whom he had had ten children - and married a German princess. But both their daughters died in infancy.

His fourth son, Edward, had mistresses all over court but suddenly met Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. She was 19 years his junior and, although initially repulsed by her, Edward saw her potential as breeding stock and married her. On May 24, 1819, Princess Alexandrina Victoria was born in Kensington Palace. Even though Edward died eight months later, the problem of the succession had been solved.

Drina, as the heir to the throne was known, was a dumpy German girl with sharp teeth. Growing up alone with her German mother in Kensington Palace, she didn't attempt an English word until she was three. At the age of ten, she discovered that she would one day be Queen and burst into tears. Through her sobs she promised her mother: "I will be good".

But even before she could take the throne, the race was on to find her a partner so that the monarchy would never be heirless again. All the houses of Europe were scoured, and when she was just 16 she was presented to her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

He had had a similarly unsettled life to Drina. He'd last seen his mother when he was five as she was ejected from his life for her infidelities - even though there was nothing her father liked more than a good philander.

But before the young couple could get beyond the formalities, Drina's uncle, William IV, died in 1837. The monarchy was now desperately unpopular, and its future rested on her short 18-year-old frame (Victoria never quite reached 5ft in height).

Naturally, at first she was uncertain about her role and she soon plunged herself into more difficulties when, in 1839, she met Prince Albert for a second time. Within five days, she'd proposed to him, and now the British taxpayer had another bloody foreigner in the Royal family to support - their wedding in 1840 was greeted with nothing like universal acclaim.

But Victoria truly loved him. She thoroughly enjoyed making babies with him - they had nine. After their first night together, she emerged from their chamber enthusing about what she had experienced; after their first night apart she wrote forlornly in her diary: "What a dreadful going to bed! What a contrast to that tender lover's love! All alone!"

Gradually, Albert won over sceptical British hearts and became a driver of technological advancement. The Royal couple supported Britain's imperialist conquering of the world because it would bring greater trade, and Albert's greatest achievement was the 1851 Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, which boasted to the world how wonderful and powerful this country was.

Ten years later, Albert died of typhoid caught from the Balmoral drains. Victoria was distraught. Albert was everything to her. Her advisor, her lover and the head of her happy family. Her rock.

She wrote: "The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the broken-hearted and crushed widow of 42. My life as a happy one is ended!"

She had been a vivacious soul, often full of jokes and quick to laugh. Once at dinner she bored of a deaf old admiral's stories and asked how his sister was. The old boy misheard, and replied: "I am going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it scraped." Victoria was hysterically amused - the only words that anyone remembers her saying, "we are not amused", were spoken when she heard that a wounded soldier had been abused in the street.

She had also been a fancy dresser, choosing flouncy, flowery dresses in the latest Paris fashion.

But after Albert died, she forgot how to laugh and adopted the black widow's garb that is now her trademark.

She became a recluse, shut away in Balmoral with only her ghillie, John Brown, for company. By 1870, with the public getting no sightings of the Queen who cost them £400,000 a year, the monarchy was again deeply unpopular.

However, her eldest son, Bertie, urged her to get out and about more and gradually she re-surfaced, John Brown constantly at her side.

In 1877, when she was made Empress of India, she found a new passion. She learnt Hindustanii, decorated her rooms with Oriental colours and started eating spicy curries - Victoria always enjoyed her food which meant she was regularly on a diet and suffered from indigestion and flatulence.

But then in 1883, Brown died at Balmoral and Victoria was plunged back into mourning. Within four years, though, he had been replaced in her affections by a 24-year-old Hindu servant named Abdul Karim - perhaps one of the greatest compliments to Victoria was that she was ahead of her time in her non-racist and non-classist approach to her choice of companions.

So she entered her Golden Jubilee brimming with confidence. She was the Grandmother of Europe - until, that is, she sat through the night with her grand-daughter, mopping her brow, as she delivered her own great-grand-daughter - and a quarter of the world's population looked up to her as their Queen.

It was in this high esteem that she died 100 years ago on Monday. At the time of her death, The Northern Echo said: "In her home life we see her as a model of an English wife and mother, making the English court an example of all that is pure and good.

"It is at least possible that her young life saved the monarchy.

"There have been times when criticism of her was keen. But that is long past. The Bedchamber squabbles (about the cost of the monarchy), the discontent with the alleged undue interference of Prince Albert in Cabinet affairs, the grumbling at her majesty's seclusion after the death of that gifted Prince are forgotten except by historians.

"We see in the Queen now only one of the ablest and, in the moral sense in its widest application, the best of all our sovereigns."

She was also the longest reigned of all our sovereigns and, 100 years after her death, probably the most misunderstood.

l On Monday: The Queen is dead, the North-East mourns.