Our Madonna was Queen Victoria

Remember that for most of the last century this country’s iconic woman—our Madonna, as it were (in both the Catholic and the American senses)—was Queen Victoria. She might have been sex-on-a-stick for poor Prince Albert, and maybe that funny Scottish chap, but not for anyone else. For the rest of us, sex—unless practiced furtively, hypocritically or illegally (or often, all three)—began on the other side of the Channel.
Nicholas Lezard, In Praise of British Women, GQ, December 1996, p.174