Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things

Queen Victoria would give her name to an age, but she was never really supposed to be Queen at all.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams go back to the chaotic royal family of George III and the unexpected death that triggered a desperate race to produce an heir, a contest that eventually produced the baby Alexandrina Victoria.

Her childhood at Kensington Palace was anything but happy. Controlled by her mother and the domineering John Conroy, Victoria was rarely allowed to be alone, couldn't even walk downstairs without someone holding her hand and grew up knowing that others expected to rule through her.

Then, just weeks after her 18th birthday, two men arrived at Kensington Palace with the news that changed everything: William IV was dead, and Victoria was Queen. Her first requests? An hour completely alone – and to have her bed moved out of her mother's room.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

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An unusual Royal connection to the Nuremberg Trials that prosecuted members of the Nazi leadership.

Eighty years after the trials, we know the names of the Nazi leaders in the dock and the MEN who prosecuted them. But what about the extraordinary women who helped bring them to justice?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams are joined by Natalie Livingstone, author of The Nuremberg Women, to uncover the forgotten female stories behind one of the defining legal events of the 20th century.

One of these women was Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky, an aristocratic refugee with links to today’s Royal Family, who found herself running an extraordinary 'witness house' where Holocaust survivors lived under the same roof as members of Hitler’s inner circle as they waited to give evidence at the trials.

Above all, there is Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the French Resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück before confronting the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg with an unforgettable eyewitness account of the horrors she had witnessed.

From castles and courtrooms to concentration camps, this is the remarkable story of the women who witnessed history, helped make history, and were then too often written out of it.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

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Welcome to the dastardly world of Victorian medicine.

What connects Queen Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, a gruesome Victorian merman and a surgeon who could diagnose a patient with a single glance?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams are joined by medical historian Dr Lindsey Fitzharris, author of Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, to explore the extraordinary world of Victorian medicine and its surprising royal connections.

At the heart of the story is Joseph Bell, the brilliant Edinburgh surgeon whose uncanny powers of observation inspired his student Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. Bell could read a human body like a crime scene, and in 1881 his remarkable talents brought him face-to-face with Queen Victoria herself.

There are bloody surgical aprons, operations on dining-room tables and terrifying Victorian treatments. But this was also an age of extraordinary medical progress. We discover how Joseph Lister helped save Victoria’s life, why the Queen’s use of chloroform during childbirth was revolutionary, and how royal enthusiasm for medicine helped usher in a new era.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Grace Kelly had it all: beauty, an Oscar, Hollywood stardom and a glittering career ahead of her. Then she married a prince.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams revisit one of the great celebrity fairy tales of the 20th century: the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. But behind the wedding-of-the-century photographs lay a rather more complicated story.

From Grace’s battles to make it in the decidedly sleazy world of 1950s Hollywood to an extraordinary royal courtship – involving Aristotle Onassis, Marilyn Monroe and even a young JFK – they explore how an American movie star found herself transformed into a European princess.

There was also a price. Grace was required to give up acting, provide a $2 million dowry and even undergo a fertility test before the marriage could go ahead. Yet the woman who surrendered her Hollywood career would ultimately transform Monaco itself, bringing glamour, money and international respectability to the tiny principality.

So was Grace Kelly’s marriage really the fairy tale the world was sold or did becoming a princess cost her far more than anyone realised?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

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The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most famous works of art in the world: nearly 70 metres of kings, battles, betrayals and bloodshed. But how much of the story it tells can we actually believe?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary 11th-century embroidery that turned the Norman Conquest into a medieval propaganda epic. Who commissioned it? Why was it probably made by English women? And did Harold really die with an arrow in his eye?

There are mysteries in the margins too, including the enigmatic Aelfgifu, Halley’s Comet and a surprisingly large number of naked men.

And then there’s the remarkable survival of the tapestry itself. From revolutionaries who nearly used it as a wagon cover to Napoleon and the Nazis, it has repeatedly come within a whisker of disappearing altogether.

Nearly a thousand years after the Battle of Hastings, what can the Bayeux Tapestry really tell us about 1066, and about the people who wanted history to remember their version of it?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

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We’ve had the Boleyn girls. Now meet the Aragon girls: two sisters born into perhaps the most powerful royal family in Europe, whose lives would take very different but equally extraordinary turns.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams head to Renaissance Spain to meet their formidable mother, Isabella of Castile: warrior queen, patron of Christopher Columbus and, with Ferdinand of Aragon, architect of a new Spanish superpower.

Her youngest daughter Catherine would become Henry VIII’s first wife, an educated, politically astute queen who proved considerably harder to get rid of than Henry expected. But Catherine’s elder sister Joanna faced an even darker fate. Married to Philip the Handsome and heir to Castile, she was declared insane and shut away while first her husband, then her father and finally her own son ruled in her place.

So was “Joanna the Mad” really mad at all? Or was one of Europe’s most powerful women simply the victim of the men who wanted her throne?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

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Wives, bloodshed, war: the end is approaching for Henry VIII, but England’s most notorious king is not going quietly.

In the final part of our epic journey through Henry’s life, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams meet his doomed fifth wife, Catherine Howard, and discover how a convenient change in the law helped send another queen to the scaffold.

Then comes wife number six: the clever, glamorous Catherine Parr, who proves more than capable of managing the increasingly ill-tempered king, but still comes perilously close to becoming wife number three to lose her head.

There’s war with Scotland, another invasion of France and catastrophe at sea as Henry watches his beloved Mary Rose sink before his eyes.

So, as the curtain finally comes down on Henry VIII, what are we left with: Renaissance prince, murderous tyrant or a king whose desperate obsession with producing a son changed England forever?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Henry VIII finally has his longed-for son. So why isn't he happy?

Continuing our Tudor season, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore one of the most dramatic chapters of Henry's reign. Within days of Anne Boleyn's execution, he's married Jane Seymour. At last, the Tudor dynasty has its male heir, but the triumph is heartbreakingly short-lived.

Then comes Henry's next great gamble: the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves, the humiliating first meeting that became the stuff of legend, and the spectacular downfall of Thomas Cromwell. Along the way, discover why the Dissolution of the Monasteries transformed England forever, how Henry's relentless pursuit of power reshaped the nation, and why his search for the perfect wife was becoming ever more desperate.

By the end, another teenage bride is waiting in the wings, and Henry VIII's most tyrannical years are only just beginning.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He broke with Rome. He defied the Pope. He turned England upside down to marry Anne Boleyn. Just three years later... he sent her to the executioner's block.

In this gripping third episode of our Henry VIII series, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary rise and devastating fall of England's most fascinating queen, Anne Boleyn.

From the birth of the future Elizabeth I and the execution of Sir Thomas More to Henry's wandering eye, Anne's disastrous miscarriages and the ruthless conspiracy that sealed her fate, this is one of history's greatest political thrillers.

Was Anne really guilty of adultery and treason? Or was she simply the victim of a king who had already decided she had to die? Join us as we explore the evidence behind one of the most shocking Royal stories in British history.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One king. One controversial romance. One decision that would change England forever.

In the second episode of our Henry VIII series, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams chart the extraordinary rise of Anne Boleyn, the brilliant, charismatic courtier who refused to become the king's mistress and instead demanded a crown.

As Henry's obsession deepens, Catherine of Aragon fights to save her marriage, Cardinal Wolsey's world begins to collapse, and England edges towards an unprecedented break with Rome. Was this really a love story? Or was Anne Boleyn simply the catalyst for a revolution Henry had already begun to imagine?

From glittering Tudor pageantry and secret courtship to political intrigue, religious upheaval and one of history's most consequential marriages, discover how the pursuit of one woman transformed the English monarchy forever.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini 

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.