Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Royal Sex: Queen Victoria

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

With NINE children, it can probably be assumed that Queen Victoria was no stranger to the sheets, but what do we actually know about her love (and sex) life?To examine Victoria's diaries, her passionate relationship and her society's attitude to sex, Kate is joined for this special episode by Royal Historian Kate Williams and journalist Robert Hardman. Kate and Robert are cohosts of 'Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things', a podcast from the Daily Mail.Listen to find out why bicycle porn was all the rage!This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy. The producers were Sophie Gee and Benedick Devlin. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kane Lister. You are you, I am me, and this is Betwix the sheets. And thank goodness you've decided to pop by once more to have me whittering into your ear holes. But before we can go any further together, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things

and an adulty way covering around adult subjects and use being adult too. We call that the Fair Do's Warning, because Fair Do's, we didn't tell you it was going to get rude. Right on with the show. A 20-year-old woman writes feverishly in her diary. She's recollecting the night before, her cheeks, neck and bosom are flushing as she does so. Her heartbeat is racing. Her breath is shallow. She writes by gas lamp alone at night. These words are for her and her alone. Except that they're not, because this 20-year-old woman is a queen and these pages will be poured over by historians, royal experts and, well, nosy bitches like me.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I've been careful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and

with me, Kate Lister. Queen Victoria gave birth to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 children during her lifetime. That's right. One woman, one vagina, nine children. Over a span of 17 years. Now, I'm sure by this point I don't need to tell you how babies are made, and with nine children, it seems that, well, Vicky didn't need to be told either. But what do we know about Queen Victoria's sex life?

Was she really as frumpy and prudish as everyone likes to make out? Did she live up to the Victorian values? And do Victorians in general conform to the stuffy stereotype we have them down for? Well, today I am going to find out, and to do so I will be cosying up with the hosts of kings, queens and dastardly things. Royal historians, Kate Williams and Robert Harding. Hello, Kate. Hello, thank you so much for inviting me on. Well, it's certainly going to liven things up.

Well, I think we're about ready to tiptoe into Queen Victoria's bedroom. Sounds good to me. So we know quite a bit about Queen Victoria's attitude to sex through her voluminous diaries. She kept meticulous details on all manner of things, including, I mean, it's not graphically explicit, but she does talk about her darling husband quite a lot. Yes, Kate, the word for Victoria's diary is, you coined it voluminous, 62 months. million words in her lifetime, anything that Victoria experienced, she wrote it down in her diary. And we see in it, as you say, this outpouring of love for Prince Albert. She'd had a pretty miserable childhood. So had he. And so when they get married at this very young age, it's just

all this devotion comes really streaming out of Victoria and all this physical affection as well. So in 1839, when she watches him climb the steps of Windsor Castle, she writes, he is the most handsome prince in Europe. You know, sometimes she does write a few little details. She did say in also in 1839, so these are younger years. My dear Albert came in today from the rain. He looks so handsome in his white cashmere bridges with nothing on underneath. She's absolutely thirsty for him, isn't she?

She can't get enough of this man. She really can't. She is totally thirsty for him. And the wedding night, you know, they say quite a few couples these days don't do much on their wedding night, apart from collapse in bed with a cup of tea. but that's not what happens here. She writes after her wedding night. She didn't think it would be possible to be so happy.

She talks about the bliss of watching him shave and how wonderful it is when he helps her put on her stockings. And she says, I never, never spent such an evening, my dearest, dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I could never have hoped to have felt before.

He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again. Oh, this was the happiest day of my life. I'm so pleased she's getting some, though. I know that it's proper teenage girl heart throb. Like, oh my God, I love him so much. But she had such a rotten time in childhood, so strict and controlled. There must have been a sense for her of just like, wow.

Yeah, I mean, this is someone who wasn't even allowed to walk up and down stairs together. I had to share a bedroom with her mother or with a nurse for her. entire life. Finally, she's in the room with someone other than a chaperone or her mom. I mean, you know, how exciting is that? And I do think, I mean, I think she writes very nicely. I mean, let's not forget, she did have a talent for writing. I mean, she wrote a book when she was just 11, sweet little sort of children's book. And she was a prolific diary writer. And, I mean, Kate, you're a historian. I mean, can you think of, or I should say both Kate's, can we think of other royal journals, British royal journals, that are quite so not necessarily explicit,

but certainly as intimate. I mean, I would say there's nothing to be Queen Victoria's journal. And as you say, she's a very talented writer. I mean, Hyland leaves her book when she's a lot older. It's a bestseller. I mean, it would be at the Sunday Times list now for weeks, the equivalent of it. And she is very effusive, very affectionate. And I think, I think, you know, this level of intimacy you get into the life of a queen, into the thinking of a monarch, but also into the thinking of a Victorian woman. And I think she's just, as you say, she's had this very miserable upbringing.

And this is her first moment to really be herself. And initially she was unsure about marrying because I think she felt she were the ones to be a bit more of Elizabeth I first for a little bit longer, a bit more single. But she was told very firmly that either you marry or you have Mama in the palace. And she and Mama in no way.

So Albert is like her rescuer. He's the rescuer of her from Mama and her court. And she really thinks she's finally got someone as a best friend and a supporter. And I think she also really does buy the Victorian vision of the companion at marriage. So the Georgians, the door is closed. It's now a new era. And it's about, you know, middle class companion marriage. You're happily ever after.

You have the children. Your husband would never want to go to any frequent place of the night. And this is their future. And she actually writes about the wedding night. And she says, we both went to bed. To lie by his side and in his arms and on his dear bosom and to be called by names of tenderness, I have never heard you to me before, was bliss beyond belief. Oh, so it's marvellous.

Probably explains why she was so furious just three months later when she discovered she was pregnant. What a surprise. I'm surprised it was three months. You would have thought it was the next. She was pregnant very swiftly. But I think that's also part of it in the sense that everyone is watching the marriage like a hawk that Victoria gets pregnant. This is her big job. It's her big job.

She has to secure the throne because her naughty uncles by 1800 had between them managed 56 of legitimate children and one legitimate child and then poor Charlotte died in childbirth. So you can see why Victoria, I think, really is sort of, I think she kind of loves the joys of the marriage bed. But also she sees it as her duty because she has to start producing these airs. Although she didn't, as Robert said, she wasn't expecting to get pregnant quite so quickly. There was a long-standing belief as well. I've been around for centuries that once you got pregnant, you couldn't have sex. That that would somehow damage the baby.

And I think that's why Henry VIII was allowed to stray, or at least he thought he was allowed to stray, when Anne Boleyn became pregnant. She did not like that. But if they'll do it with you, they'll do it to you. Moving on. In the case of Victoria, is this a recurring theme with all her pregnancies? because, I mean, she gets pregnant again very quickly, doesn't she? She does, yeah. I mean, she was clearly eager to get back in the sack with Albert.

And, yeah, it probably would have been for her as well. As soon as that's it, as soon as you knocked up, then there's no more. Particularly in upper-class circles because it's perfectly acceptable. In fact, it's the norm to hire a wet nurse. Yep, yeah. So you lose that contraceptive potential that breastfeeding gives you. So you're going to get pregnant straight away. And I think it might be the case that often you're more first.

fertile quite soon after you've had a baby because sometimes the body believes the baby's no longer there. So you are more fertile. So Victoria was pregnant again three months after she had her first child. Kate, would Victoria have known that breastfeeding would have extended her window of opportunity with Albert? I don't think she would have done. I don't think that was common knowledge at this point because in order to know that, you need to know about hormone levels, regulations. And hormone theory didn't come in until into the 20. century. So, I mean, there might have been some received wisdom, old wife's tale that was actually spot on, but I don't recall this being medical advice anywhere. If only Victoria had named that, I mean, right away after her first born, Vicky was born,

she hired Mrs. Ratsy, the wife of a sailmaker from cows, to step in and serve as a wet nurse. But I think if Victoria had known, she might have been able to... Would she be able to break that taboo? Because it's obviously, it's a very important... It's totally a taboo to breast feed your own children. Although Victoria's mother did try to do it. She felt she wanted to be close to her baby. But it is absolutely a taboo to feed your own children. You give them to a wet nurse.

And I think the theory also is that you recover faster. And of course, Victoria is queen. She wants to get back to work swiftly. What she also hates about being pregnant is that she's pushed out of power. That when she's pregnant, it is a time when the ministers are saying, not so much dear. On top of that, she has to give birth in front of her ministers with a just a scream. separating them.

When they talk about confinement, they actually mean proper confinement. I'm not if they were still doing it as much up to the 19th century. If it was all no windows were ever opened. You were just locked in this darkened room with no sunlight and no nothing and almost no contact with anybody because this idea you can't startle the mother, the baby will come out, I don't know, scared or something or whatever it was that they thought was going to happen. See, it really is quite a debilitating thing to be pregnant at this particular period. All of Victorian culture has the vision that when a woman is pregnant, you know, she can do nothing.

Can do nothing. And her head is overwhelmed. So Victoria is confronted by this. And although she adores Albert, there is a power struggle between her and Albert for power because he does want to be a joint monarch. His vision is William and Mary all over again. And hers is Victoria plus consort. But when she's pregnant, this starts to be the moment when he takes a lot more power. And of course, if she dies, he will be regent for the baby.

And dying in childbirth was something that did happen to her poor cousin, Princess Charlotte. who had this nearly 50-hour labor and no one intervened because they were too scared to do so to the heir to the throne. So she has that fear and on top of that she loses so much power and she finds the physical difficulties of pregnancy particularly annoying. Correct me if I remember. I mean she's the first maybe not just mono, but one of the first women to use some sort of relief in the form of...

That's for Prince Leopold, yes. So it's not now. Yeah, it's much further on. And she is the first one to do this. And I think that part of the reason why she uses it is because there is this archaic, practice that she has to give birth in front of her ministers. So obviously that was seen as fine for the consort, but as a woman who has to deal professionally

with these men, and they're just separated by this tiny screen. And I think one reason why she does it is because she feels very strongly that, you know, why should they listen to her going through this pain? But it's very controversial that Victoria uses chloroform because the principle is that pain in childbirth brings a woman closer to understanding the evil of Eve. So if Eve brought down the entirety of culture by giving Adam the apple, she committed the first sin, that sin is what you must encounter by childbirth, by pain in childbirth. And if you don't have pain, it's like cheating. Pretty Thomas Aquinas in the 19th century, isn't it?

People still believe this. Absolutely. You've got to pay penance for the fall. It's really fascinating. I saw this even said 10 years ago that if a woman doesn't have a natural birth, if she has a cesarean, she'll find it harder to love and bomb with her baby. And which is totally crazy, isn't it? That possible idea, see, but there still is this overhang that if you don't suffer, obviously not all childbirth is hugely painful, but if you don't suffer the pain of childbirth,

you can't love the child, you're cheating, you're a cheat. Just getting back to Victoria there, I mean, her enthusiasm in the bedroom, I mean, it continues right the way to, till Albert's death, am I right? It really does. I mean, she is head over heels, devoted in love with this guy, writing obsessively about how beautiful his face is and how beautiful his shirt is and his body is and she's lying next to him. And it's real like teenage girl crush stuff. They have arguments and there's a real power struggle because you've got this weird dynamic of she's the queen.

She's the monarch but she's also attempting to adhere to this very Victorian morality of submitting to your husband. But she can't because she's the queen and it all gets very tense, tense. She promises to obey, even though the ministers tell her not to. And they put all these pictures, don't they? Victoria's like serving Albert and being the subservient housewife. But really, she's also telling him what to do. And she definitely fancied him the whole way through. I've no doubt about that.

So we're talking about attitudes to sex in Victorian times. We all have a very clear view of the Victorians as this sort of buttoned-up breed of repressed, hypocritical, nymphomaniacal, straight-laced people who might sit there in church on a Sunday and be ostensibly god-fearing, but beneath the surface, they're lurked raging passions. Were they really any different from the Georgians or from 20th, 21st century Brits? No, not really. We've always enjoyed sex and having sex with each other and talking about sex and gossiping about it.

And they were no different at all. What changes are the social attitudes, what's taboo, what's not, taboo. And if you look with a very long length at history, what you tend to get is that each generation tries to rebel in some way against the one that came before it. And for the Victorians, a big part of that was distancing themselves from the Georgians who had been notorious for putting it about and for enjoying themselves very, very much. And just monarchs that were leaving litters of illegitimate children all over the place. And recognising them as well, aren't they?

giving them titles and palaces. And mistresses were openly at the theatre with you. Yeah, absolutely. It was a way into high society to be a mistress. It was. And if you could play that game well, then you had access to an awful lot of power, actually. But the Victorians come along,

and they're trying to define themselves against all of that. So part of that comes with their attitude towards sex, which is that we're now going to become quite reserved about it. But there are a few things we need to know about that. First of all, that's largely a middle-class morality. that we're seeing there. The 19th century saw a huge expanse of the middle class. And there have been historians who've suggested that what we see with this, you can't talk about sex. I won't talk about sex. Oh, it's absolutely awful. That is the middle classes attempting to be better than the

upper classes and the lower classes. They can't beat the upper classes in terms of money, but they can be morally better than them. And the working classes, they had their own morality, but space is something that that is a really modern concept. If you were a working-class Victorian person, you almost certainly would have grown up in the same room as your entire family. You wouldn't have space and privacy the way we have it. You would probably have seen your parents having sex. You'd be aware of this, so you'd have a very different attitude to it.

You need a lot of money to have that kind of, well, I'm not going to talk about stuff. So a lot of what we're seeing here is the middle-class Victorian morality. But we also need to remember, these are the people that invented pornographic videos and pornographic photographs. So they're not as buttoned down and prudish as people like to think. In fact, what tends to happen when you repress something is it just explodes somewhere else. What develops is this very seedy underworld of the 19th century if you knew where to go. And it's the industrial revolution as well. So we've industrialized sex in many ways. So you get this weird situation of middle class, middle to upper class people, denying that

We're not going to talk about it. It's absolutely shocking, but of course people are still having sex. And there's a lot of sex to be had as well. And all those myths about people sort of covering up table legs and all that. Is that true? That's not true. That was said a little bit later on in a way to sort of make fun of the Victorians for being as prudish. There have been historians who've suggested that actually the Victorians are obsessed with sex.

Make the argument that if you walk around talking and thinking about something that much, you can't possibly be not interested in it. Like if I turned up and went, who's got a banana? If you got a banana, I'm not thinking about a banana. Why do you want a banana? Who's got a banana? You would not think this is a person who has no issues at all with bananas.

You'd think, oh my God, this person's obsessed. That's the Victorians. And they were, of course, running an empire at the same time, weren't they, Kate? This is the Victorian empire and the vision of upright, non-sexual behaviour, the domestic idyll. They're exporting it, aren't they? is what is used to be exporting. It's on the biscuit tins.

It's the image of Victoria in the perfect family and the companionate marriage. And this is all based on the vision of this upright man who's going to rule the world, who's going to rule over a court of the empire because he's Christian, he's moral, he's straight, and he would never indulge in any sexual practices. And these kind of practices have to be stamped out

across the empire. And this is justifying why the white man gets to rule. So it's all the ideology, the confidence. And as you say, Kate, the industrialisation of morality, This is all part of the sort of ideology that allows the Victorians to say we should govern the world. But meanwhile, back in the real world, okay, let's know if I could ask, as you said, the Georgians were from Nell Gwynn up to the sort of courtesans and sort of free range. And then along come the Victorians. But what's going on with, you've suddenly got all these repressed men.

One hears quite a lot about scandals going on behind the scenes, aren't there? I mean, these sort of houses of ill repute don't go away. did they, just because the Victorians have come on. Oh, no, no, no. In fact, they were really, really worried about what they termed the great social evil, which is people selling sex. They were completely panicked that sex worker just exploded during this period and all these women had gone on the game and isn't it awful?

It's terrible. And there were moralists who were estimating that there was 200,000, half a million people selling sex in the capital of London. And that gets written up as fact. But it was complete nonsense. We don't actually have accurate statistics for that to this very day, let alone how the Victorians were working out. I think William Acton was one guy,

and he estimated the number of fallen women in London by looking at the illegitimate birth records and then timesing them by 10, because he figured that they would also be, and it just gets very bizarre. But all of that shows you how big a problem they thought that this was. Really what's going on here is you get increasing urbanisation. At the beginning of the 19th century, London has a population of, I think it's 1 million.

And by the end, it's nearly 7 million within a hundred. So it explodes. And what you get with that is increasing poverty. And you need an infrastructure to help support people. And wherever you get poverty, you will get people who are going to sell sex, especially if you also create an environment where no one's supposed to be having sex. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because if we look at the penal code, if you steal something, you will be severely punished. I mean, it's still possible you could be hanged.

And we might say now, if I was desperate for money, I'd steal. But in those days, you are much better off. You're much safer selling sex because the authorities will turn a blind eye. And there are a lot of people who have a job and also doing it by the side. And there's a word. That's exactly how. Dolly mop, isn't it? Dolly mop.

A dolly mop is somebody who has employment but tops up their income with selling sex from time to time. So maids and clerks and. Women couldn't earn. men as well, couldn't earn very much money. So you would occasionally turn to a much more lucrative industry to top up your income. And that was known as dolly-mopping. And there's all the grey area, isn't it, that we might call sugar daddying and a lot of grey areas between sex work and marriage. And I think, you know, until you get to the situation which you have with W.T. Stead and underage girls,

if you're an adult sex worker, blind eyes are normally turned. They are. It was legal. You could be charged for prostitution under the... 1824 vagrancy act. So if you're causing a nuisance and you are looking like a vagrant person, so if you're out on the streets trying to sell it basically, you could be prosecuted for that. You could be prosecuted for keeping a disorderly house. So again, it's noise offences, really. But by the most part, people were willing to just turn a blind eye because it was so usual for men to be visiting these establishments.

You hear so many stories of famous men who lost their virginities in these kind of establishment. Vincent Van Gogh was one I was reading about quite recently. It just seems to have been a really common thing. And it's a really strange situation because we know that these establishments were there, but we have so little records of them. Sometimes we have guides to the city of London. There was something called the Swell's Guide to London, and it gives you some addresses.

There was one in the 18th century called Harris's List that gives you the names and addresses and expertise of some sex workers in the city. But one that we do know that was in the 19th century was, a flagellation house, a lady who specialised in BDSM. She wouldn't have called it that. That was Teresa Barclay. Don't know an awful lot about her. She crops up in a few texts here or there.

Arthur Henry Ashby, who compiled the bibliography of obscene books. He talks about her. She dies in 1836 and she has her house on Charlotte Street. And she's specialised in spanking, whipping and generally humiliating upper-class men who are paying awful lot of money for that privilege. It's funny how the literary canon books and subsequently films, dramatizations, it's always portraying upper class men as going to these places. And it goes right the way through the Victorian era.

I mean, probably the most famous sort of example of that is anything to do with Jack the Ripper. It's always the East End, these poor sex workers of Bethnal Green and Myel N. And it's always a sort of chap in a top hat coming in, you know, is it? it the Prince of Wales? Is it Bertie? Is it Lord Sir and so? That seems to be, I think, the way that we've come to stereotype the 19th century sex worker scene. But that's probably just an extreme example, isn't it? It's one example. That certainly existed. There were very, very wealthy men who were taking advantage of much poorer people, the Cleveland Street scandal would be a good example of that. That was in 1889 when it turned out that Telegraph,

boys, and they were boys, they were between 15 and 20 years old, had been selling sex to very wealthy men in a brothel on Cleveland Street while using the telegraph system as a sort of a cover for it. And some very, very well-to-do, highfalut and fancy names were mentioned. Well, there was a rumor that the Duke of Clarence and with the seventh's eldest son was one of them. But I mean, there's no, I don't think it was ever any proof of that. But I think, you know, people were rather like that. He was the one, of course, that people thought was Jack the Ripper as well. Prince of Wales Equiry, I think the Prince of Wales Equiry had to rush away the board before anyone started asking him too many questions about where he'd been. But it's interesting, though, is that the press were clearly colluding and covering this up at the time.

They didn't want to report it. Trying to get information around it is quite difficult. They obviously just stop talking about it. You can't imagine that happening today, can you? Conspiracy of silence to protect upper class mores because we can't let. It makes me think a bit about how. lesbianism was not outlawed because you don't want women to find out about what they could possibly do, and the law would make that clear. So we don't want the working classes to find out what is really happening,

even though it's working class boys who are being used in these brothels. But Teresa, she catered to the upper classes. This is Charlotte Street. This is Mrs. Teresa Berkeley, or Berkeley, I should say. It's written about in quite graphic detail about some of the punishments that she could administer. One of the things she was said to do was keep nettles in a long vase of, water, so she would keep them pliant, and that she would whip her paying clientele with that. Don't get any ideas, anybody. Don't be writing his angry letters about this. She also invented something called the Berkeley Horse, which is an implement for you to be strapped over while you're being whipped, and she had a lot of women working for her as well.

She was well-known enough and good enough at this to have cropped up in various memoirs of people from the time. But as always with this subject, she herself disappears. We don't know anything about the boys in the kids. Cleland Street scandal. We don't know anything about Teresa. Just we know they were there. So women's freedom of movement was being controlled, but we also see a craze for this new fangled thing, the bicycle. And Queen Victoria was a bit of the fan of the bicycle. Yes, Kate, Queen Victoria deserves a place, I think, in the Hall of Fame of British cycling.

Although she never actually got on a bicycle herself. She did get on a tricycle. She was known to find this rather innovative and exciting mode of transport. She was in the Out of White in 1881. So by this stage, long widowed. And her carriage was suddenly overtaken by a girl riding a tricycle called a salvo. And the Queen thought, well, that's very impressive. So she asked to have a look at one of these things. And so the inventor duly brought one to Osbourne House. And Queen Victoria had a go and thought this is very exciting. And so once the Queen Empress had effectively endorsed this new mode of transport with the royal imprimata, then of course that opened the way for everybody to do it. And then we went from

tricycles to bicycles. And I believe, Kate, that led to a whole new strand of Victorian erotica. Am I right? You are right. It's a strange, straggled route from Victoria on the Isle of White on a tricycle to cycling porn a little bit later on. But there is dots to be joined up here. The first thing we need to know about the bicycle is that it played a really unacknowledged, huge part in the women's liberation movement. Because do you remember when you were a little kid and the first time you got on a bicycle and it meant that you could go and see your friends and you could cycle, you could go far away? So when you first get a car for the first time, my God, I can go anywhere. The bicycle did that. It made people geographically closer than they have been before.

That's huge. That women, so many women had these really, almost be boring. because that's not fair, but kind of boring lives. But there was that famous Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice that said it's just a bunch of people going to each other's houses. There's a reason for that is because geographically they're kind of limited. Put Lizzie Bennet on a bicycle and what could have happened? Right?

So you get this. So now all of a sudden it's associated with the women's liberation movement. Blue stockings loved a bicycle. And the other thing that we've got to contend with is the saddle. Now you can't really ride side saddle on a bicycle, the same way that you can do with a horse. So all of a sudden, you've got an acknowledgement that women have crotches. Oh, my God.

And that you're going to have a saddle rubbing up against that area. And that did lead. I'm glad to say, not in the UK, we seem to have kept our wits about us. But in America and Canada, you do get a lot of doctors absolutely panicking that women are going to be riding bicycles so they can orgasm. And they're just going to keep going down the street. And now one's going to be able to stop them. Or that sexual pleasure.

all that sexual pleasure. They won't need a man anymore if they can just get it on a bicycle. That's exactly. And there was another line of thought that it might damage their reproductive organs. Lose their virginity on a bicycle. You could lose your virginity. That rumour was still doing the rounds when I was at school that that was possible. That it might somehow disrupt their reproductive organs.

There was a really ridiculous concern for a while called bicycle face, which was that if women were riding bicycles, they'd suddenly lose their looks and get this really pinched, old, awful. expression. They tried everything to wore women off bicycles, didn't they? To get women off bicycle. It was going to ruin your internal organs, probably ruin your chance of getting pregnant, and ruin your looks. And also, you have to wear different clothes.

A corset, a tight-fitting corset isn't much good to you when you're on a bicycle. Voluminous skirts with loads of petticoats, hopeless on a bicycle. And then we get the bloomers. Then we start to get more loose dress. The rational women's dress society comes along. And all of this is linked to the bicycle. The rational women's dress society. I love that.

That was this idea that, you know, we're going to dress more sensibly. You don't need corsets and huge petticoats and all this stuff. We can wear bloomers and more loose-fitting clothes. We're going to free-boob it on a bicycle and all of that stuff. But because it's associated with women and them finding a new freedom and new, slightly daring, sexy clothes, and because the discussion is already around, well, I think the saddles rubbing on some rather intimate areas,

it suddenly becomes quite an erotic implement as well. And also, it does allow lovers to meet up in a way that perhaps they wouldn't have been able to do before. They can cycle off together. They can lose their chaperone, can they. They're emancipated, you know, the old maid or the maiden aunt who's expected to go with them everywhere. Can't keep up, off the go. Exactly. So the bicycle suddenly becomes quite a weirdly sexy object.

And you do get, when they first start, producing pornographic photographs, which must have been all of five minutes after they started producing regular photographs. I don't know what the time frame is on that, but it must have been very swift. In some of the earliest ones, you do get this reoccurring motif of a bicycle. And it's not just the fact that visually you have to sort of bend over a bicycle, you know, you get a good shot. Sometimes they're just stood next to a bicycle, like leaning on it completely new. That's all it takes. That's all it takes. And they're just smiling away. You're just like, this is me on my bicycle. and it does seem that it was an erotically charged item.

I don't know if Victorian knew that at the time. I'm going to say, no, I'm not going to link her with this madness. Yeah, who would be responsible for actually telling her about this? I can't think anyone. So I just leave her happily peddling up and down the driveway at Osborne House on her salvo tricycle. But you can see some of this stuff. I mean, if you're feeling very daring, you can Google Victorian erotica bicycle. Do clear your history afterwards.

but you can see some of this stuff. They're in archives all around the world. It's just amazing how often, well, they've got another bicycle. There's a bicycle in the background. Why is there so many bicycles? So, Robert, now that we're dipped into the realms of erotica, often what comes to people's mind

when they think about Victoria and Albert and their sex life is a certain appendage, isn't it? Oh, I thought you might chuck that subject my way, Kate. I have no intimate knowledge of this subject at all, but it does as you say it recurs and it's become one of those sort of urban myths I think that Prince Albert allegedly

who knows where it came from it's not in any you can assure you it's not the Royal Archives It's impossible to know where this myth came from isn't it? It's this idea that he had a piercing in a particularly sensitive part of his anatomy I'm being all Victorian here aren't I? I might throw this over to Kate

List of Kate what is the genesis and what is the proof that if any, that Prince Albert had a piercing down below. This is still very much a thing to this very day. If you wandered into a piercing establishment right now at this very moment and asked them for a Prince Albert, they would pierce you through the shaft of your penis with a ring in it.

There is a lot of debate as to why on earth is it called a Prince Albert? We can put it to bed right now that Prince Albert himself did not have a piercing like this. I've found zero record of it. I'm sure Victorian would have mentioned it. She would have told us. She would have said, my Albert's jewelry was very fine tonight. She would have just been in Paul.

We don't have Albert's diaries, do we, to know how he felt about his relationships with Victoria. Some of his letters home to his, I mean, he would write to his uncle quite a lot. I'm not sure he'd necessarily go into that sort of detail. He was delighted by the love affair. He talked about how, you know, he was loved and adored because his childhood wasn't great either.

And so he did love that adoration that she, gave him. But certainly as we see as a relationship progresses, he becomes, I think, more more exhausted by the levels of demands that the court makes on him, that she makes on him, that the family makes on him, and becomes sort of more exhausted under the weight of Victoria's sort of, she is an inexhaustible little person. Victoria is inexhaustible in every way. And I think Albert is much more tired. So certain... But there's no reference to any sort of... It is, it is, it is so many TV programmes have asked you about it and I just say it just doesn't exist. Listen to what you've said out loud with your own words.

Did Prince Albert have his penis pierced? No, he didn't. I've done as much digging around this as I possibly can for you. And all I've been able to find out is that the actual, to call it a Prince Albert piercing dates to the 1970s. That's as early as we've been able to find it. So I don't even know where it started. I've also heard it said that, oh, well, this has come from a dressing trend

where he would have had a dressing ring, which would have been sort of a ring that he would have put into his penis to keep it off to one side as he was dressed. I can't find any evidence for that. Flattening. And it's interesting because I read an interesting theory that someone was saying this is actually the opposite of Victorian male dress. Victorian male dress,

you have the shorter waistcoat, don't you? So the crotch part is available to be seen, not quite like the cod piece, but pretty like it. And that Victoria, of course, compliments that saying, Oh, Albert's got white trousers with nothing underneath them. And so I think they wouldn't have hidden it away. No. And the Victorian Albert Museum have a wonderful article on the history of male underwear.

Nowhere do they mention a ring that was used to keep a penis to one side. I mean, do you need a ring to keep a... How big was it? You don't need a... That's just not a thing. I don't believe that that's ever happened. I'm sure fashion historians can write in and correct me if I'm wrong. But I don't believe that there's ever been a dressing ring that would keep a penis off to one side.

I'd put my life on the fact he didn't have that. It appears. I'm joining you. I'm very glad to hear that we can clear this one up. I think we can just say that if anywhere was going to know about it, it would be the museum he founded, the Victoria, he endowed. Oh, Robert. It would be the museum that bears his name, the Victorian Albert.

And if they've got nothing on this, then... Nothing. Good. Well, there we are. It's always nice to clear up the odd myth on this podcast. But while we're on the subject of myths, Kate Williams, Professor Kate Williams, let me turn to another one of those sort of, well, it's not quite an urban myth because it's not in the city, it's another Isle of White myth. Can we talk about Queen Victoria's Sex Button? Well, Robert, we've said the Prince Albert was a myth and here's another one. This idea that in their beloved Usborne house on the beautiful Isle of White, this country residence that they bought, they hugely renovated Italian its style,

Albert's design dream that in this house, which was their country house for them and their family, they had a sex button. And the purpose of this button was that when they felt like enjoying some marital Congress, they'd press the button, the doors would lock and none of the children or servants would interrupt them a bit like a modern day panic room. So in the same way that you might hear a burglar and press a button, Victoria and Albert did this when they felt like getting down to some more baby making. Well, it's not. not true at all. Now, Usborne House has a lot of innovations. Victorian Albert were great adopters, the telephone, the gramophone, and there is no sex button, there is no truth to this. But we can say

that Usborne House does show us a lot of the intimacy that they had because they bought each other for birthdays, sort of nude paintings, gorgeous paintings, statues of nude paintings, these beautiful modern paintings. So in 1852, Victoria bought Albert Floreinda, which is in Usbourne House over his desk, some semi-naked women around a pool, and it's from the legend of Roderick, who was watching Maids of Honour. And Victoria, you know, loved looking at it. And she gave him another nude, and she thought it very beautiful. And at one point, Albert himself commissions a sculpture of him posing as a Greek warrior. And he's got bare legs and feet, his left hand on his sword. And Victoria thought it very beautiful. Of course, you get him out, oh, marvellous. Here's a fake

Albert I can look at when he's not here. But Albert had second thoughts. He thought he'd gone too far, with these naked feet. And he hid the sculpture before commissioning a second, more modest version. And so, you know, Victoria Albert, they did exchange this art, which really, I think, goes to the heart of this intimate relationship that they have. And there's even a painting of Victoria that is Albert's favourite. And I think it's the Victorian equivalent of a Boudoir picture. It's her with this loose hair, this sort of nearly off the shoulder dress.

She's looking in the distance. Obviously, we imagine thinking about our husband. I mean, that's the portrait he like, not the queen ones, not the crowns, not all the sort of done-up portraits. That's his favourite. It's very intimate. When you look at it now, when you first hear that, oh, Victoria had a saucy portrait done for Albert, and you think, oh, really?

And then you look at it and you go, oh, that's not very saucy. But for a queen, that it was unbelievably erotic. The exposed shoulders, the languid look, the loose hair. that was really spicy for her to do that. Who would have seen that portrait? I can't imagine the average visitor. No. It was in the private writing room in Windsor.

Only the servants and the very intimate family would have seen any of these works of art because most of them were in their private studies, their private rooms. And Albert kept this portrait in his private writing room at Windsor, which would have been really his zone to be his man cave, really. It's the equivalent of Albert's man cave. I mean, this is a time when institutions like the British Museum are putting on show sculptures of, I mean, there's always there are three or four large depictions of a come in which goddess it is, but she's sort of naked bathing in a pool.

You know, there's quite a lot of that sort of classical imagery, which is being kind of presented to the public. I mean, Kate, is that the equivalent of a carry-on film or sort of soft porn for the Victorians? You know, what you can find in your museum or your art gallery. They did worry about that a lot, you know. And you still get that argument today. When does it stop being art and when does it start being erotica? Female nudity is very tolerated, naked women. So I'm just thinking now of the Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame,

his memorial embankment gardens which is put with this half-naked woman worshipping him and that's for musical composer and that's put up in 1993 so a bit after the Victorian period but there is this tolerance of naked women, naked sculptures of women but when it comes to a naked man

it's seen as shocking. Call them a muse or call him a goddess and it's fine isn't it? It's fine and this is one of the great feminist arguments how few statues there are women who aren't Queen Victoria or naked. You do actually get a couple of art scandals where there has been a nude exhibited and the woman in it does not look enough like a goddess. That happens that she looks too much like just a regular woman.

So they clearly have it in their heads that as long as it's conforming to being a muse, a goddess, then that's okay. Young and beautiful. That's okay. But as soon as it steps outside of that, they get very upset. Or if a woman painted it, they don't like that very much. There was a big fight on at the time for women artists to be able to access life model. within the academy, eventually they had to let women artists in. And then for a long time, they wouldn't let them sketch nude people.

It was just too unseemly. And apparently the first time they did it, some woman fainted. Really let the side down there. Damn it. Yeah, we just shouldn't get the box of penises out for the back group of artists. Just thinking of Victorian curios in one of my favourite places, which is the repository for the Science Museum. So all the stuff that's not on display in the Science Museum has until very recently been kept in Blythe House and Olympia.

It's a fascinating collection of all sorts of scientific instruments and implements and bits of old plane crash and models of royal yachts that never existed, you name it. But in there, there's also a rather terrifying glass case full of chastity belts. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Terrifying, actually, through the ages and not just through the Middle Ages, but, you know, right. happen to the 19th century. So, I mean, the Victorians, they were certainly interested in, I think, all aspects of what they would have called prurient, irreverent behaviour. But I mean, it's still there on display, or just not on public display. Heavens above, well, maybe one day we'll see it out there in the shows. I feel like I should jump in here. It's said that the Victorians invented the

Chastity Belt. Ah, so they are Victorian. There we go. Carry on. The Victorians created them and then they said, well, that was the medieval people who did that. We've never found one. We've never found a medieval chastity belt. The only ones that exist are Victorian imitations of what they think the medieval chastity belt would look like. They're a saucy bunch, honestly. Kate, you're writing this brilliant book about the history of the female orgasm. So tell us at this period, how understood is the female orgasm?

How understood was, say, a woman like Victoria? And I was just wondering, because we have it in the 18th century, don't we? The overhang that for a woman to pop out an egg, she needs to have an orgasm. Yes. There's that the feeling. And do we think, we'll still think that in the Victorian times? You do actually have this. It's a lego. Legover.

It's a leftover from very ancient Greek thought that it's called the two seed theory. So a man would have to release his seed, fairly self-explanatory. And a woman would have to release her seed. And we're not entirely sure what that means. But they thought that a woman would have to orgasm, just like a man has to orgasm for this seed to be released. And then they would mingle and then poof, there would be a baby and everybody's happy. This stays with us for a remarkably long time. It was actually being dispelled in the 17th century.

It was William Harvey of heart and blood pumping fame who actually wrote pretty conclusively. No, he gives a bit too much way, actually. He says, I've known plenty of women who got pregnant and did an orgasm going, William, you've just told on yourself rather spectacularly there. But they knew about this, but it stays in force as this. And at least they're still debating it by the 19th century. You get entire medical journals dedicated to this. Mostly people going, it's not true. But yeah, so it's still in force, but they certainly understood orgasms.

And it's fascinating, isn't it? Because lie back and think of England, a phrase that we associate with the Victorian period and even with Queen Victoria, that doesn't come into much later. That's not Victorian. No, that was a joke that was much, much later. That is, I think the earliest they've been able to find that is the 19th. 1950s that joke to lie back and think of England. So we have the chastity belt, the albert penis, the penis ring, all these are acro-anachronisms.

So if you have still got this overhang of the belief that you have to enjoy sex to get pregnant, then some of that I think perhaps is it may be impacting on Victoria's attitude towards it. It's another myth that they thought that women were entirely sexless. I mean, you can find one or two Victorian quack doctors who say something like, I think again William Acton said, thankfully for them women are not much troubled by sexual pleasure of any kind but you only have to read through Victorian erotic literature to realise that they knew perfectly well or not even don't have to go that far

read Victoria's diaries that knew that sexual pleasure was very important but they did have a very clear idea that sexual pleasure should be between a man and a woman and it should be married and they should be trying to make babies those were their grand rules yes that's what it's for

not just for fun but it's all right to enjoy it It's been such fun to hang out with you both. Thank you everyone for listening. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello,

you just fancied a chat, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. For listeners who want more royal shenanigans, join Kate Williams and Robert Hardman over at Kings, Queens and Dastly Things. Otherwise, join me back on this podcast, wherever it was that you found us today for more sex lives of queens and, well, everybody else. This podcast by History Hit and The Daily Mail was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Benedict Devlin and Sophie G. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.

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