Encounters With Victoria

Charming, saturnine, worldly-wise and interested in sadistic sexual practices, Lord Melbourne appears in Queen Victoria's journal at 9am on the day she becomes Queen. He will guide her through the day's ceremonies and controversies, fending off on her behalf her disliked mother and former guardian, John Conroy. Lord M., as she called him, was soon half in love with his 18-year-old mistress, but this could be politically dangerous to the young Queen who was too stubborn and headstrong to listen to what her mother, wiser and more loving that she's given credit for, had to say. With historian Philip Ziegler.

Reader: Sarah Ovens, Michael Bertenshaw, Sabine Scherek & Rhianna Warne

Producer: Mark Burman

Lucy Worsley explores Queen Victoria's reign beginning with her accession in 1837.

The new Queen's greatest weakness was her close political association with the powerful Whigs. One of the ways their Tory enemies capitalised on this was through Lady Flora Hastings. A young, unmarried, lady-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace, Lady Flora was observed in the spring of 1839 to have a swelling in the stomach. Victoria, suspecting that she was 'privately married' (i.e. pregnant) insisted that Lady Flora be brutally examined by her own doctor. The Tories stoked rumours that the young Queen's court, ruled over by the cynical Lord Melbourne, had become a scandalous, debauched place. And when Lady Flora died of what turned out to be liver disease, Victoria was roundly criticised as heartless. With this story of wombs and misunderstandings, the gloss had come off the young Queen's crown.

With the historian Kathryn Hughes.

Readers: Michael Bertenshaw, Susan Jameson & Sarah Ovens Producer: Mark Burman

1839. Scandal and crisis embroil the young queen.

Welshman Thomas Phillips, Mayor of Newport, was not the usual sort of person who got invited to dinner at Windsor Castle, a point that Victoria's courtiers made very clear. But in 1839, he was invited to the castle to receive a knighthood. A month earlier, he'd been wounded while helping to put down an armed rebellion of 10,000 Chartist sympathisers. Many of them coal miners, they'd marched on Newport, many furious about the recent rejection of the People's Charter calling for Universal Suffrage. This was the last large-scale armed uprising against the state in mainland Britain, and it became a massacre as hidden troops opened fire. Phillips, the Mayor, was wounded in the fracas and now became lionised for quelling the revolution. After receiving his knighthood at Windsor Castle, and after a good deal of muttering from her courtiers, he did indeed sit down to eat with the Queen. It was her way of dealing with the demands - to which she would lifelong be deaf - for widening the electoral roll. But the Chartists so spooked the Royals that they fled for the 'safety' of the Isle of Wight.

With historians Les James, Rhian E. Jones & curator Oliver Blackmore .

Readers: Sarah Ovens, Michael Bertenshaw & Kenny Blythe

Producer: Mark Burman

Lucy Worsley explores Victoria's reign via significant encounters.

An important event is missing from Victoria's diary entry for 23 September 1842. It was actually only her mother's diary which tells us that this was the way that Victoria's old governess, Louise Lehzen, slipped away from Windsor Castle without saying goodbye. Lehzen, who had been a second mother to Victoria, and who instilled her with her stiff - possibly inflexible - standards, had fallen out with the increasingly powerful Prince Albert, who'd taken over the running of the Royal Household. 'I could pardon wickedness in a Queen but not weakness', Lehzen had told her princess, and now her former pupil now showed no weakness in dismissing her former governess without a word. A last sad glimpse of Lehzen comes from the years of her retirement to her native Germany, where she compiled a scrapbook of memories of the girl she loved. Lehzen even went to the station to wave as Victoria steamed past on a royal tour. The train did not stop.

Readers: Joseph Ayre, Bea Behlen, Sarah Ovens & Sabine Fischer

Producer: Mark Burman

1842: Victoria's old governess, Louise Lehzen, is dismissed from Windsor Castle.

Victoria was a global celebrity, adept at exploiting her image. And she learned a few tricks from some of the extraordinarily popular entertainers who proved that her Majesty was often very amused indeed. In 1844, the diminutive American performer whose stage name was Tom Thumb made a side-splitting appearance at Buckingham Palace. In a parody of court etiquette, he said 'much obliged Mama' when he shook the Queen's hand, and fought her dog with a sword. Like Victoria herself, Tom Thumb's manager, showman P.T. Barnum, knew the power of brand management. Having Tom Thumb to the palace made the queen look human, while Barnum got a lucrative Royal endorsement. By 1887, the biggest show in town was again American: Buffalo Bill's Wild West: a whooping, tootin', gun-firing maelstrom of action, and Victoria commanded a private performance. It was thrilling and dangerous, but also a celebration of the guns which would allow Western Europe to ‘conquer' the unknown. Tom Thumb and Buffalo Bill gave the queen who'd become an empress both entertainment - and education.

With historian Helen Davies, V&A curator & writer Nicholas Rankin

Readers: Sarah Ovens, Kenny Blyth

Producer: Mark Burman

1844 and 1887 - Victoria meets Tom Thumb and Buffalo Bill.

Queen Victoria found her personal staff - the ‘invisible people' who kept her household running - through recommendations from her German relatives, and this is how Frieda Arnold, from Karlsruhe, entered her service. When Frieda arrived at Windsor Castle in 1854, Victoria would have found her new dresser quiet and efficient, and wouldn't have suspected that she was sending detailed reports back to Germany revealing exactly what it was like to live at Windsor Castle. Frieda spent years in the closest of daily contact with the Queen whose clothes she cared for, garments including the beautiful dressing gown with mauve bows featured in this episode. The Queen's wardrobe, sumptuous in quality but un-showy in style, formed a big part of her middle-of-the-road appeal. Women like Frieda, who saw the queen both in and out of her clothes, grew very intimate with her, and became almost her friends.

Readers: Michael Bertenshaw, Sarah Ovens, Sabine Schereck

Producer: Mark Burman

Miss Florence Nightingale and her nurses had put the British Army to shame with their exposure, in Crimea, of the shockingly poor medical treatment given to the soldier. Florence became a celebrity, and Queen Victoria was a huge fan, admiring Miss Nightingale's modesty and her apparently tender care for her men. In reality, Florence was an ambitious, tenacious and entirely un-Victorian woman, who had the trick of maintaining the self-effacing manner that powerful men would respect. In 1856 Florence accepted an invitation to Balmoral, not because she admired the Queen, but because she wanted to argue the case for medical reform. At Balmoral, the cool veteran of Crimea found Victoria shallow: 'the least self-reliant person' she'd ever known. Florence also though that queen, pregnant for the ninth time, was too fond of dancing at the whiskey-fuelled Balmoral balls. During their time together in the pseudo-Scottish fantasy land of Balmoral, no one had a very good time, and each of the two very different women failed to understand each other.

With the historian Mark Bostridge

Readers: Susan Jameson,Sarah Ovens

Producer: Mark Burman

A time of awful anxiety, but still all full of hope. It was a crisis, a struggle of strength.' So wrote Victoria in her journal for 13 December 1861, thankful that her husband Albert had passed through the worst of his mysterious illness (today it seems possible it was Crohn's Disease). But there is no entry for 14 December, which turned out to be the worst day of her life because Albert relapsed and died. Victoria, perhaps the most powerful woman in the world, could not stop her husband from slipping away from her. As everyone noticed, he hadn't really wanted to live. Using the account book of the royal pharmacist, this episode examines what was wrong with Albert, explores Victoria's grief, and begins to probe how eventually she would get her confidence back and manage without him.

With the historian Helen Rappaport

Readers: Susan Jameson, Sarah Ovens

Producer: Mark Burman

Lucy Worsley explores Victoria's reign via significant encounters. Death 1861.

The elderly Queen Victoria enhanced Osborne House, her holiday home on the Isle of Wight, with an Indian-style party room called the Durbar Room. Its attendant gallery of portraits reveals Victoria's passionate identification with her role as Empress of India. Amongst the paintings, Abdul Karim, her favourite servant (and teacher of Urdu) stands out. This last significant relationship in the twilight of her reign had deep ramifications for her court. Abdul became the royal ‘favourite', and the old-fashioned jealousy that this position had always attracted was made worse, in his case, by racism. A plot to get rid of Abdul grew to a crisis in a second holiday location, the huge luxury hotel with a private wing built for the queen for her holidays in Nice on the C䀀te d'Azur. Racial prejudice, social snobbery, accusations of treason and eventually the claim that the queen had ‘gone mad' all played their part in the conspiracy against Abdul.

With the historians Priya Atwal and Shrabani Basu.

Readers: Kenny Blyth, Susan Jameson, Abdul Wahab Rafique

Producer: Mark Burman

Lucy Worsley reveals Queen Victoria's rule via significant encounters.

The Queen had reigned for so long that few could remember the protocol for the passing of a monarch, but now Victoria's last days were drawing near. On 22 January 1902, a crowd of family and servants, two emperors and numerous nurses, gathered at the dying Queen's bedside at Osborne House. Among them was Bishop Randall Davidson, one of the few people towards whom Victoria had friendly feelings even if their relationship had begun with a tremendous row over her desire to publish a eulogy to John Brown.

Summonsed on the eve of her death Davidson deeply felt the weight of history, he recorded every step of his journey across the sea to the island, and every family feud that broke out in the room where the queen died. His journal, now in the Lambeth Palace Archives, is a revealing on-the-spot history of exactly what happened as Britain's longest reigning monarch breathed her last. Most of the people present had their own very different ideas of what she was thinking about when she died, as she'd lived, under the hungry gaze of other people.

With the writer and historian A.N. Wilson

Readers: Michael Bertenshaw, Susan Jameson, Sara Ovens

Producer: Mark Burman

Lucy Worsley concludes her exploration of Victoria's reign via significant encounters.