Empire: World History - 145. Victoria & Albert (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

It is one of the great love affairs of history. Upon meeting again shortly after her 18th birthday, Victoria and Albert became smitten with each other and within 5 days Victoria asked him to marry her. Whilst initially an unpopular match, the spectacle of the Royal Wedding dispelled some of the public’s misgivings about Albert. However, all was not well in the first decade of Victoria’s reign. The turbulence of 1840s Europe is ripping through Victoria’s nation. Listen as William and Anita discuss the first years of Victoria’s reign as she deals with assassination attempts and the Irish famine. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. And this is part two of our epic mini-series on Queen Victoria's epic rain. I mean, it's a long time that she is in power. Long to rain over us.

Long to rain over us. But, you know, we left you at the last episode with the coronation, which was just massive. You know, just 400,000 people lining the streets, a non-rehearsed coronation, which sort of has a ring put on the wrong finger, which has to be yanked off after hours. But, you know, it is a hopeful time for Victoria, thinking this is going to be my glorious reign, the strong-willed, headstrong nursery girl, who's like, finally I have power and agents. I was very intrigued by the Sunita because I'd always assumed that Queen Victoria was very popular that you thought that, you know, the Victorian era would be the absolute apex of the British monarchy. But I was very surprised to discover that quite quickly into her reign, she becomes very unpopular. Well, she smashes headfirst into a massive avoidable controversy, doesn't she? This is what they call the bedchamber crisis, I think. Is that right?

That's exactly right. Exactly right. Now you should tell the listeners what this is not about. some sort of, you know, interior design choice that she makes. It is a political crisis. Having been to Osborne last summer, I have to say that her choices of interior design left much to be desired, but we'll come to that later. Yes, you went to all got quran in the last episode as well. Who knew you had such strong feelings? I can't take these Victorian interiors. They make me queasy. Okay. So tell us about this crisis. This is a sort of strange story. This is the bedchamber crisis, and it's all about Lady Flora Hastings, a lady in waiting to her mother who spent some time alone in a carriage with our villain that despised Sir John Conroy. To remind people who may not remember, Sir John Conroy is the man who sort of tyrannised little Victoria's childhood and had a cut off from everybody.

And who she tried to get rid of at the first possible opportunity and of whom she believed anything malicious that she would. here. Because not long after this, Lady Hastings' stomach begins to swell, and a rumor sweeps the palace that it's Conroy's child. In fact, it turns out later that she's developed a swelling due to an abdominal growth, and it's a terrible medical catastrophe for this poor woman. But because Victoria already disliked Hastings and because she'd been part of Conroy's Kensington system, I think she assumed the worse too quickly. And there's this terrible business when poor Lady Flora Hastings has to undergo a medical examination to see whether or not she's a virgin. I mean, just gas even to think of it.

And this somehow gets out into the papers and there's a press campaign aided by the friendly Tories who oppose the Whig government of Lord Melbourne. We should say something a little more about the politics of this. Yeah, Lord Melbourne is a very important character to her, isn't she? Enormously important. So, I mean, first of all, you know, nobody wants to start their reign being painted as the mean cheerleader, you know, the mean girl. And that's exactly what Victoria crashes into with her hatred of Conroy and believing anything that is bad of anyone who impose the Kensington system on her. She doesn't quash the rumours. And indeed, everyone starts to blame her for being the origin of the rumours.

she has also got a new wig government installed under Lord Melbourne, who is this dashing, handsome, tall, forehead of, you know, that kind of crazy, clever hair? Quite liberal. He's trying to emancipate Catholics, which is a good Catholic I recognise as a positive aspect to anyone. Well, he's got your vote. But, you know, he doesn't have half the country's votes because, you know, the Tories hate him. And they also hate the idea that Victoria is somehow in his thrall. And she does certainly, you know, talk about his handsome good looks.

And, you know, when they're sitting around table, you know. She's still writing these very intimate diaries that you can read all her private thoughts about Lord Melbourne. Well, and people just, they comment on her demeanour that every time he speaks, she's just silent. She blashes. She's like, oh, like a puppy, you know, like a puppy wagging a tail. And so Conroy finds a really easy way to slide what is a personal slur into a political crisis. So he enlists all the Tories who hate the wigs and hate Melbourne. So Conroy actually mobilises the politicians against Queen Victoria.

Yeah. And, you know, she takes a battering. No wonder she doesn't like it. Apart from anything else. You know, so Conroy and the Tory start saying this horrible bitchy queen is the one who has maligned poor Lady Hastings, poor Flora, you know, who's undergone this humiliating virgin test because of the bitchy queen. Is that in the papers? Surely in the Victorian period, you couldn't have had that detail. I mean, you tell me when the newspapers are the ones to carry the most malicious gossip in royal circles, it is whispering. It is whispering at doors, along corridors, into the ears that matter. And it therefore turns, you know, your entire sort of apparatus of state, or at least a large part of it, against you.

And then it gets worse, because in July 1839, Lady Hastings dies. And they do this post-mortem on her, and they do this huge sort of big hullabaloo about pulling out. a massive tumour from her abdomens. And not only was she maligned. She wasn't pregnant. She had a tumour. She was dying. And so, you know, they start really taking it out on Victoria. You know, they start hissing when she appears in public, which was, you know, the equivalent of a boo. This is her getting the sort of Megan treatment from the Daily Mail. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but in among the common people, this is awful. They start calling her behind her back and so she can hear Mrs. Melbourne, as if there's something, you know, you wanted to start a

scandal about poor flora, Mrs Melbourne. We know what's going on between you and your prime minister. So it is a disaster. It is a crisis. And at the end of the year, Melbourne's forced to resign after losing a bill in Parliament because there was so much feebrile hatred of him and their chamber crisis. And the reports of the Queen weeping when he resigns and all this. Right. But actually, the person who replaces him is, you know, the leading Tory who will become an enormous figure in Victoria and more than that in her future husband's lives, Sir Robert Peel. But, you know, when the new government comes in, again, this is sort of the naughty, naughty Victoria, again, this sort of character of, I will not be told by men. And, you know, we started off this whole series saying people are complicated.

And this I admire hugely about it. She's, you know, the same little four-foot 11 girl who's surrounded by 97 privy councillors, old men who are bigger than her, older than her. With whiskers. Whiskerier than her. You know, but they tell her this. new government, change your ladies in waiting, because they have the power to do that. And it's common practice. Change in government, shuffle the positions at court.

What does Victoria do? And this is expressing patronage. Why does Peel want to do this? Because you don't want a person to be surrounded by your supposed political enemies. You want to know what's going on with Queen. And you don't have that if you're surrounded by Whiggish ladies and waiting, which Victoria is deemed to have. So you put your own sort of chums and spies it? Yeah.

You stick your own people in who are going to come home and tell their husbands exactly what she's up to and what she's thinking and what she's writing. Because, you know, being a queen, you are not alone. One is never alone. And so, you know, Peel tries to push these wives of Tories unto her and she says, no. God, you can't she? Well, of course I do. Stepford wives being shoved on. What she says, you know, she's sort of complaining to Lord Melbourne about the way she's been.

She says this. I think this is so interesting. They wish to treat me like a girl, but I will show them, I am queen of England. And she tells Peel to bugger off. That reads like such a made-up line. It's pure soap, but it's true. Yeah, but it's in a letter to Lord Melbourne, you can read it for yourself. I will show them I'm Queen of England.

That's more like it, isn't it? Yeah. So, you know, what this is, though, I mean, it's a high-stakes little gamble, because now you have presumably pissed off your prime minister. you're also sort of doing something that is unconstitutional. People don't do this. They haven't done this in the past. It is understood that you swap round your household with the new government. But I think in some way, and eventually we will see this, a little bit of respect is kindled in Peel's heart for this too, because he will end up being an enormous ally. So this is all happening in 1839. Another epic thing happens, though, this year in 1839, with all of this sort of constitutional crisis sort of unfolding around. her and a new government. And it's love. It is love.

It's Albert. Albert. His dysentery's all better. He no longer has diarrhea. He's all right now. Poor Albert. He's taken some fibre and he's okay now. He's had a creative emodium.

Yeah. And actually, you know, on the second meeting, William, you know, the first meeting, she wasn't that impressed and he kept falling asleep when she was around. Well, you can understand that she might be a bit pissed off and she's in mid-flow telling stories when suddenly Albert snores at her back. Yeah, but actually, when she meets him again and he's fully stopped up, he's all right. She actually really is a little bit crazy about it because he is handsome. He is quiet.

He's awake. That's helpful. He's awake but quiet. That's two very important qualities. And she sort of says... I've got an entry here. I'll read. Albert is extremely handsome.

His hair is about the same colour as mine. I don't love that detail. His eyes are large and blue. He has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth. But the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful. It's lovely. That's a proper crush, isn't it? She's properly crushing on Albert.

And actually, let's talk about Albert, because we haven't really done service to who he is, apart from the fact he had dodgy guts. Please, I'd like to be here, because I don't know any of this stuff. Where is Albert from? He is the Duke, no less, of Sax, Coburg, Gotha, Gotha, which sounds like sort of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but it's in Bavaria. It's Bavaria. Modern-day Bavaria. It's not a 60s folk band. Yeah. And he is, you know, he's sort of grown up unusually, somewhat unusually, because he's grown up with a deep hatred of infidelity, because his life has been,

his dad has never been faithful to his mother. He is a lonely boy. Like, she's a lonely girl. He's a bit of a lonely boy as well. I mean, he has a brother close in age. Neither of them have had happy domestic backgrounds. They both crave it. They do. And he's also like a little tiny mini Darwin, which I find very sweet. He collects shells. He likes, you know, drawing birds.

He writes sort of lyrically about nature and about leaves. I will tell you a story by Aunt Anita. She fell in love with her very quiet, rather beautiful military husband. When he arrived to stay and my grandfather picked up his suitcase and it was 10 tonnes heavy and my grandfather said what on earth is inside this suitcase and he said stones I came across some beautiful stones they had to keep them in here and at that moment apparently my art fun enough in rather than the same way Victoria falling in love with his shell collecting yeah and beautiful Darwinian tendencies yeah reintroduced it because obviously those around are saying you know what you're deeply unpopular lady what we need what we need right now is a royal wedding because people need to support the monarchy we cannot have a britain that turns against it It's monarchs. That is dangerous. That is the way that all chaos lies. And as we know from our own times, nothing appeals more, oddly, to this nation, than a good procession up the mall and a wedding in Westminster Abbey. Absolutely right. So they're reintroduced to each other in October 1839. She now, you know, actually has a, you know, her first impressions of him.

It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert, who is beautiful. So excessively handsome, she writes the next day. And as you say, you know, she comments on his, she's always actually attracted to a man's eyes and nose. She writes about him such beautiful eyes, an exquisite nose and such a pretty mouth with delicate mustachios, a very slight whisker. Funny thing to fall in love with a nose. Why would you fall in, anyway? It's a very pretty nose.

What constitutes a lovable nose? No, distinguished nose. I like a nose. Don't you notice a nose? I notice a strong nose. So does she. So we're right. Anyway, but she also comments on his figure.

which I also love about her because she is sort of like a, she's a red hot, beating hot in a woman. And she says, you know, beautiful figure in the shoulders and a fine waist. So she is properly checking him out. And she thinks that, you know, actually, second time round, you know her uncle Leopold who wanted her to marry him, she's like, okay, maybe that would be okay. It does actually end up being her who proposes to him.

Did you know that about Queen Victoria? I didn't know that. Isn't that amazing? Do we know the story? Well, so, you know, they've been invited to sort of sniff about each other as you do in sort of these royal introductions. And everybody seems for it. Just like in contemporary Delhi, people are invited to sniff around each other, as you put it. Yes.

Although, I don't know, Delhi's a lot raced here than I remember it. It's all those things that supposedly are arranged marriages, but they're actually sort of firmed up at the local club. like sort of without the parents knowing but she sort of sits with him this is only like days after meeting him and this is a Tuesday afternoon in case you're interested she summons him

he's been out hunting she summons him over she not only proposes to him she summons him to be proposed she summons him over she isn't nervous so she's a little bit shaky but she says

and she does admit that maybe she was talking very quickly at the time I said to him I thought he must be aware why I wish him to come and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished, in brackets, namely to marry me. We embraced each other over and over again and he was so kind, so affectionate, oh! exclamation mark, to feel I was and am loved by such an angel as Albert

was too great a delight to describe. He is perfection, perfection in every way, in beauty, in everything. That's quite cute, no? It's particularly cute when you consider an utterly miserable childhood she had, locked up by Conroy and not allowed to meet other children, and suddenly she falls in love with this handsome chap, and collect shells.

And it's of her choice, you know, what she sort of bridled against the first time they were introduced to each other with his unfortunate dysentery episode two years earlier. She doesn't want anybody, because nobody, you know, why should anybody suddenly take her freedom away from her? Oh, do you want to know what Albert says, I've got his entry as well.

Yeah, give me an album's reply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, he writes about this whole thing. He's writing to his grandmother about the same thing where it's beauty, his eyes, his perfection. And he writes, the queen sent for, I'd love to do a German accent for this, but I won't. Oh, you've got to do a German accent? No, no, I can't, I can't, I can't. But the queen sent for me, imagine this in a thick German accent.

The queen sent for me alone. The queen sent for me alone. A few days ago. And declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart and that we would make her intensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life with her, for which she said she looked upon it as a sacrifice. The only thing which troubled her was that she did not think she was worthy of me. The joyous openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me and I was quite carried away by it. She really is most good

and amiable. And I'm quite sure heaven has not given me into evil hands and that we shall be happy together. That's not quite as excited as she is. She's German. It's bloody quite a lot. It's quite a lot. I think we will be quite happy together. It'll work nicely.

But I think it's quite nice. I mean, he's not outraged by it. He's not checking her out, though. He's not saying she, you know, she's four. I mean, they do have nine children together. There is a bit of war that goes on. Do you know what George Bernard Shaw says about this infatuation of Queen Victoria? It's very, very cute.

Queen Victoria, even when she was most infatuated in love with Prince Albert, always addressed him exactly as if you were a boy of three, and she was as governess. That feels rather like this podcast. Go to your room, Darryl. Think about what you've just said. I'm in it. Think about what you just said. Okay, so the proposal has gone very well.

So then we have the wedding. The wedding. Yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about the wedding? Because the wedding is quite fabulous, as you'd expect. The wedding is quite something. So our old friend, Lord Melbourne, is back and involved in the planning. But at this stage, Prince Albert, not at all. And it's entirely done on the London side of the planning. And of course, in future occasions in years to come, Albert will be very much the detail man for all royal ceremonies.

But at this point, he's entirely the passenger. And they marry in London at the Chapel Royal in St. James. Palace. Yeah, but at least they have a dress rehearsal thanks to Melbourne after the ridiculous coronation where nothing worked and nothing fit. I mean, it does get a little bit of planning thanks to Melbourne. He's learned from that. And she has, she dresses in white with an 18-foot long train. And I didn't know this, but apparently this is the beginning of the white wedding. Yeah, people didn't marry in white. I didn't know that. I didn't know that, did you? As I mean, no, I didn't. Not. People just get married in multicoled, all their nice, nice colours.

No, this is where that trend starts. White weddings start here, 10 February, 1840 in St. James Palace. And they have an enormous royal feast to celebrate, over 100 dishes of sort of fatty, lardy, Victorian food. With vast amounts of meat, birds, alcohol. And I read somewhere that the chief chef quits a month later because of this. You get a mental breakdown. It's too many things to cook. And then there's this enormous wedding cake.

Nine foot in circumference. It's a sort of building. A cake is a building. 300 pounds in weight made in three tiers. And it's so big has been made in sections and put together. And they had a lot of food. But apparently, do you know this story? Apparently the Victorians used to put mustard in their years,

which they believed stopped the message getting to the brain that you're full and allowed you to gorge all the more. Stop it. This is what I've read. I don't know if it's true or not. Oh, my. Word. I mean, honestly. It explains a lot about sort of Victoria's. They've got Coleman's down there. Poor Victoria. Do you know, I feel so bad of her because she always has had, I mean,

from what I can see, a hang up about her weight, but she loves food. I mean, I really get her. I think you're upstaffed where she's coming from. Both of us are on her side by this one. Oh, totally. But you know what? People, newspapers are so still bitchy. I mean, you know, it's okay to have a coronation, but they kind of transfer their dislike of him. they worried about a German at this stage? They are. They are. They are.

They are. They are. Maybe after two world wars are very anti-German. What do they think about it in 1840s? No, they are worried about a German controlling Britain. That's what it is. What are stereotypes of Germans at this point in Britain? Well, just, you know, flexing.

We have such a rich selection of anti-German stereotypes following two world wars. But what about 1840s? Maybe not. Flexing and not, again, some of them still last to this day, not very humorous, wanting to be in control of everything. And the British papers don't like it. I'm going to read something from the British newspapers at the time. He comes to take for better or worse, England's fat queen and England's fatter purse.

So what the feeling is, is that, you know, he is a poor royal from a poor part of Germany, which is not as sophisticated as England. That sounds a bit like Farage, doesn't it? It's not very nice. Although, you know what, Nigel Farage was married to a German woman? Did you know that? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, there we are. The government, you know, they didn't like him either. So there was also this idea that, you know, he was a little bit of a chancer and, you know, he'd married up. He'd certainly, you know, lucked out by getting Victoria. They didn't give him a peerage. Sacks Coburg Gotha did not compare to the British Empire. No. And, you know, they gave him an allowance of £30,000 a year, which was measly by royal standards. So already this poor bloke comes into his married life without the respect of the people.

But none of this in any way dappins victorious enthusiasms. She writes this wonderful letter. They raptures. She said, I never in capitals, never in more capitals, spent such an evening. And then again in capitals, my dearest, dearest, dear Albert. His excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness. I could never have ever hoped to have felt before. He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again.

his beauty, his sweetness, his gentleness, really, how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband with a capital H? To be called by names of tenderness. I have never yet heard to be used before. What bliss beyond belief, oh, this was the happiest day of my life. So she's had a good time. Yeah, well, it's nice, isn't it? Do you know, some people sort of say, they kind of poke fun at her as being the lusty queen, in particular, because she has appetites of the table variety, that they sort of put her down for that, why shouldn't she like sex? I just never understood it. You know, so that is a criticism of her. I was a good on it. Was it a criticism at the time? Yeah, I mean, you know, that she was a little bit too, you know,

sort of led around by her passion for him. You know, so, you know, I think that's pretty awful. But there we are, she's in love. As we've seen in our own time, that royal weddings seem to kind of get the British to edit or sense of criticism immediately out of the picture. Is there a sense that the wedding solves the problem of the German husband? Did everyone fall in love with him at that point? Or is it not so? I mean, it's a gradual thing. I don't think it's immediate, but it certainly is a...

Pi-a-ku. It's certainly a distraction. It is a, yeah, it's a PR, it's definitely, you know, worthy of the great PR gurus of our day. Get them talking about something else. Because up until that point, people made a joke about being. Victoria's husband-stroke squire. Because they never assumed that, you know, Victoria, just a mere woman,

forgetting about Elizabeth I first, forget about all of that. But they never assumed that she would be a meaningful monarch. Even people like Charles Dickens joked about it with his friends, that, you know, he'd been sort of dumped. He writes, society is unhinged by Her Majesty's marriage, and I'm so sorry to add that I have fallen hopelessly in love with the Queen. It's not meant to be sort of slightly scorning. This is Dickens.

Three days after the wedding, Dickens. writes a letter to a friend pretending to have been one of victorious suitors, saying, on Tuesday we sell it down to Windsor, proud about the castle, we saw the corridor and private room, nay, the very bedchamber, lighted up by such a ruddy, homely, brilliant glow, bespeaking so much bliss and happiness that I, your humble servant, lay down in the mud at the top of the long walk and refused all comfort. And then he writes, but he was consoled because he left with a pocketful of portraits.

So, you know, they kind of made a joke of, you know, the fact she wasn't attractive, but anyone who had her left with their pockets full of portraits. And that's from Dickens himself. What does that mean that she was drawing? No, just nicking stuff. Jodgis and things. Fill your boots on the way out, which is what they sort of thought Albert was doing. You know, that he was a chancer.

Why on earth would this marriage be anything other than him getting his hands on the wealth of Britain? and also his sway over the queen of Britain. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, it does give them something else to talk about. And he is happy and she is happy. And word of that spreads. And do you know what really sort of makes a difference is that they start having children, lots of children. And people love a baby. And that goes very well down at this period.

They like a good, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sort of sways from, you. you know, him being sort of nothing but this sort of grasping nobody who just wants, you know, money. And it suddenly shifts after, you know, some time. Charles Greville in 1845 starts mocking her again, saying she's not really queen. It's a dual monarchy. He calls her Queen Albertine instead, as if saying, you know, she has no agency.

And she must be hearing all of this, all of it. But Albert is busy sort of organising the household, doesn't he? He's actually listed formally as head of the household. Yeah. And he's busy sort of organising stuff. And he's quite sort of meticulous in that German way. Yeah, he's meticulous. He is also aware of his position in the court.

And he sort of writes about it. He's, you know, whatever the horrible gossips might say about what his intentions are. He knows what's happening in his life. But also says it is difficult. He says, you know, in a letter to Prince William of Lowenstein, he says, This is a year after they're married. In my home life, I am very happy. I am contented with the difficulty of filling my place with proper dignity

is that I am only the husband. I am not the master in my house. Lips syndrome, isn't it? You're coming in from outside. You haven't got anything. You're marrying the big woman. And she's dottie about you, but the people don't necessarily take you in quite the same way.

Luce so change, in it? Plus so change. But as I said, he's been into organise things. So he has a very sort of accountant's eye about the household expenses. He sells the Royal Pavilion, and he thinks it's too ostentatious and not at all right for the image of the new sober Victorian royal family. It's too extravagant and showy. You know, it's also the work of a deeply unpopular monarchs. If you, you know, eject or sell that, you're not associated with him.

And this is the period they buy Balmoral. Which is her haven. She will love Balmoral. I mean, we take it for granted that the Royal Family. family go to Scotland every summer. But this is a new thing. And the idea, I mean, remember that the Balmoral is in the middle of the area cleared by Butcher Cumberland after Culloden. There's a scene of terrible rape and pillage in the Highlands. And yet now, a hundred years later, the royal family have got their own place in the Highlands, and that's where they spend a bit of the summer. But they also

have Osborne, which I thought was hideous, but you like better than me. Well, I mean, I love the Darbarum and I love what it represents. I love its part in the history of the Duleep Singh story. I absolutely love it and I'm fascinated by it. But I know what you mean about decor. A lot of Victorian decor was a little OTT, shall we say, for my taste. But look, with his sort of management of the household, he also is studying. You know, he has the humility to sit down and study English constitutional law and English history

to make sure that he's on top of all this. And that actually starts impressing the men in suits around him. So they start giving the poor bloke a break. You know, they've all pretty much either underestimated him or disliked him from the start. And then the babies come. Oh, tell us about, I mean, because 1840 to 1857 is. Yes, this is not something she enjoys it so much. She calls this the Shattensiter, the shadow side.

Shattensiter, shattensighter, the shadow side of marriage. Tell us more about that. And she says the pregnancy makes her feel like a cow. And she can't stand breastfeeding. But obviously, she likes having children because she has a huge number of them. And she is innovative in that she takes chloroform to have her children, age 33, as an anaesthesia. Yeah, sort of our version of an epigural. And as an anesthetic.

Yeah, it's like an epidural. Can I just say what she says about babies? I think this is so funny. An ugly baby is a very nasty object, writes Victoria, and the prettiest is frightful when undressed. So how we have, is that the image we have a Victorian? We think of Victoria's loving babies. I think they love children in cameos,

but they are often sent to the nursery. Nursery quarters for all the important bits. I don't think it's ever such a hands-on affair parenting in the Victorian area, do you? And also they did send lots of children up chimneys. Come on. How child-friendly was it? I mean, the thing that did strike me at Osborne, and which I was very taken with, is when you go up to the top, to all the bedrooms, they've got an incredible display of how all Victoria's children and grandchildren colonize the royal families of Europe. And they're related to everybody. They marry into every royal house. So that whenever there's any diplomatic tension in Europe, it's a matter of cousins. And the Russians, all the various different Germans, the Greeks, go through it.

Shall we run through the family tree? Let's run through it. Because she does eventually get known as the grandmother of Europe. So, you know, the first one to marry. And we're sort of jumping ahead a little bit with the children. But look, this is all you need to know. Princess Victoria, her oldest daughter, is married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia when she's 17.

Victoria's not very happy of this. The grandchild in 1859 is Wilhelm, who will become Kaiser Wilhelm I, Wilhelm I, and lead Germany into the First World War. And that's Victoria's grandson. Kaiser Bill is Victoria's grandson. Yes, absolutely. Her direct family will sit eventually on the thrones of Britain, Germany, Spain, Russia, Norway, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Sweden and Denmark. And also she has.

Connections to Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Austria and Italy. Yeah. So there we are. So, you know, the marriage has done something. It's extraordinary. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, we jumped ahead with what the children become. But look, let's go, you know, so there's the glow of the marriage. It looks as though he's trying to sort things out, but there may be trouble ahead.

Join us after the break and find out what the people who did not like Victoria did to make their dislike felt. Welcome back. So we've been depicting for you this sort of happy image of Victoria after miserable childhood finally meets the man of her dreams. Albert is the man of her dreams. She's absolutely dotty about him. and they dive into domestic life and have hundreds of children who populate every royal house in Europe. Hundreds of children. Nine. Nine.

That feels like hundreds, particularly when they're young. Oh, my God, darling. Two feels like hundreds some days. But anyway, as you were, carry on. No, I know that feeling. We had three. I've never been more exhausted in my entire life than after children's parties when you've got other people's children at that young age.

And they're running loose in your house. Sweetheart, you're describing my husband. life right now. Anyway. So what we haven't depicted, though, is you've got to remember that we've been sitting in Osborne, we've been sitting in Balmoral, we've been looking out over the Scottish Highlands. What we have not depicted for you is the fact that this is Dickens's London. This is London as the largest city on the planet, teeming with both opportunity but real poverty. This is a city full of refugees from other parts of the world, because we're recording

this the week that Rishi Sunak is sending all the asylum seekers off to Rwanda, but the Victorians had the opposite policy and very consciously took in refugees and exiles from other parts to the world, which meant that early Victorian London was an astonishingly cosmopolitan place, more so than anywhere else on the planet. You had people from all over the world coming for different reasons, Indians getting their estates back from the East India Company, people from the Caribbean, people from Australia, people from Canada, and amid all this, you get the Dickensian poverty of London. This is high peak of urbanisation. This is the era of child chimney sweeps and urban deprivation and the overwork of Victorian factories with smokestacks, billowing,

pollution into the London air, probably the Thames at its most polluted, but boats arriving from all over the world in it. And in this turbulent, vibrant, rich and poor city, there are any number of discontents who see Queen Victoria as the symbol of everything that upsets them. Absolutely right. And actually, in sort of a rather short space of time, You have a number of attempts on the Queen's life. Now, you know, we'd just find that unthinkable. Again, I didn't know this. I had no idea that there were all these.

Well, one of them's in our book. It's actually in the... One of them's in our going to book. I knew there was one. That's multiple attempts. I'll remind you of that in a moment. But let's start with attempt number one, which is... It was a bit you wrote, not me.

No, it's a bit high rate, so, yes, so you'd be forgiven for not reading a word of half of your book. But 10th of June, 1840. A man called Edward Oxford takes a shot at the Queen on Constitution Hill. Well, I mean, this is Constitution Hill, for those who don't know, listening from abroad, is a road next to Buckingham Palace. He actually fires a gun at her, fails to hit her. He's put on trial for high treason, but acquitted due to insanity and put in hospital instead.

You've got attempt number two, two years later, 29th of May, 1842, a man called John Francis. Helpfully, it says 25 years old, 5 foot 5. We're seen to draw a pistol. I love Calla's little note about this. Seen to draw a pistol but didn't fire again on Constitution Hill as the Queen was on her afternoon ride around Hyde Park. And then something extraordinary happens. They decide to use her as a sort of bait to catch this guy.

Well, isn't this amazing? Yeah. So, you know, they go on. Why don't you? You've trailed this baiting thing. Well, they send for the Prime Minister Robert Peel, who of course has instituted the Peelers, who are the police, the first police. and in order to catch the killer, they tell her to go out and do the same ride. But this time surrounded discreetly by soldiers and policemen, effectively using her as bait.

I'd love them to be in trench coats and hats over their faces. I mean, talking into their sleeves, although that doesn't connect them at all, but, you know, I see him. He's approaching constitutional health. And at 6.45, on Monday the 30th, the following day, he tries again. This time firing the gun, which he didn't manage to do the first. time, but Mrs. Victoria. And the man is seized, and there's multiple claims by all the different soldiers that they are the one who have caught him. But a high-risk strategy, you'd have thought. Really high-risk. It's a high-value target or dangling there. It's not the last one at all.

The one that's in our book, which... That memorable one in your chapter. That you can't remember them. It's, again, this is 1849. So it's just as the Coenor Diamond is approaching Britain, because we've sort of taken our our eye off all of that. This is when Duleep Singh has been forced in India, in the Punjab, the place where the British have not been able to get a foothold

until his father, Ranjit Singh, dies. I should say that we are definitely coming back to the empire. We've rather gone into sort of domestic life and we've been off at Balmoral for a while, but we are coming back to the empire. But unapologetically, because you need to know the people behind the stories. And as

we have, with all our other empresses, you know, this sort of rich life gives you context. But look, 1849, She is, the Konaura is just days away. It's about to enter British territorial waters. Having been given by Lord Dalhousie without consulting his masters at the East India Company, they're a bit pissed off, as you might well be. But she goes to visit Uncle Leopold, who may or may not be in his feather boa at the time.

But she's on her way back. I've got to know more. Will someone please write it and tell us what Uncle Leopold did with his feather boa? Somebody will know. But anyway, she's sort of on her way. What was his other weirdo things? What did he have? High heels and he slept with gold wedges in his mouth.

Nobody knows why. Nobody knows. I don't know. I just know he did. Do he have mustard in his ear too? I don't know. Someone will know there will be an expert. But she's going to her carriage or having visited her uncle.

And this sort of nutter comes out of the crowd and hits her over the head with a steel-dipped cane. And it clocks her. It goes sort of through her bonnet. She gets a black eye, doesn't she? I remember this bit in the book. Thank you. The book, what we wrote. But she does sort of have a, you know, a welt over her eye, which takes, you know, days and days to go down.

And she does receive from, you know, the Honourable East Ender Company, the Ledenhall Street comes and with great ceremony presents to her because they've taken the credit from Dalhousie, the Komenaw Diamond. They can't change their mind and not give it to her. They have to give it to her, but they can cut him out of the deal. And she's got a Shiner. At the time. So she really does write quite a measly entry about receiving the going on, because she's got other things on her mind and above her brow. Anyway, we should actually, this is a good time to talk about what is going on in India because, you know, this sort of change in government has got. It has sort of also changed who is running the show in India as well. Tell us more about that. So we haven't been in India since 1837 when Queen Victoria comes to the throne, the same year. as the last Mughal emperor, Baha'adishar Zha, Zhafer. And in that time, the British have gone into overdrive annexing kingdoms, left, right and centre, all over India, they find these little kingdoms

that they have their eyes on and they want to gobble up. And they use a new law called the doctrine of lapse, which means that if any royal in India dies without an air, that they're no longer allowed to adopt, which is the usual Indian system, but they have to have biological children at themselves, or it goes to the East Indy company at their death. And this leads to a great rash of annexations, which causes enormous upset and will lead in time to the vicious outbreak in luck now after Wajad Ali Shah is shunted off into exile in Calcutta. It will lead to the Rani of Jansi, who we must do herself a whole episode on in time to rise up against the company. But there's also been, and most significantly, the defeat of the single remaining army

capable of really taking on the East Indy Company, and that is the army of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh state. Ranjit Singh has died. The Sikh state falls into internal dissension, and the company takes its opportunity to fight not one but two Sikh wars. And in 1849, they annex the Punjab and they take the Kohinur as part of that deal. And this is the last army which can really have a possibility of defeating the company. And now that that has gone, it looks like the company is going to be in sole charge of India forever. India is going to be effectively given over to a for-profit corporation. Yes, and also, you know, you asked at the beginning of all of this, when we, you know, she feels like 100 years ago when we were talking about doing Victoria, that there is sort of this

duality of her. So on the one hand, you know, under her watch, a corporation is taking over a country. And you said, look, what is the morality of this? Well, primarily, you know, she has a belief that Christian salvation will save the ever-living soul of an individual. So for her, it kind of makes a normal natural sense that she is a Christian queen and she is bestowing upon her subjects and these people are subject to her because what they see is the benefit of Christianity. The Christianity. She will save their souls.

And nowhere does this become sort of clearer than, you know, you just talked about the Sikh Empire and the annexation of the Punjab. Then her relationship with this young prince, Dulip Singh, you know, like she pours over when they first meet Albert and his beautiful nose and his lovely eyes. She does the same about Dilip, you know, who's still taken away from his family and everything he knows. Is Albert no longer the apple of her eyes? She only got eyes for... No, no, they're still crazy. They're still having children. But no, Albert also loves Deleap as well. You know, to the point where, when he says he wants to come to England, they say let him come.

You know, he comes in 1850, but after the Coenor, he comes here. With 1851, I think. And then he, you know, Albert designed. finds his coat of arms, by his own hand, you know, draws it for him and gives him the motto, which is in Latin, you know, be not conspicuous, which I think is always just such an extraordinary telling moniker, isn't it, a motto for somebody, be not conspicuous. But that again, that says everything, doesn't it? Because what they're saying is we'll integrate you happily into our system. It's some heraldry, but be invisible.

Yeah, be invisible. Sponkers. Most of all, ask for your kingdom back. Well, yes, and that does go hideously wrong as we know. But I think this is the major thing that we have to struggle in a sense to understand is that today we have these very clear ideas that invading other countries or holding them in subjugation is just completely wrong. From the point of view of Victoria, who regards herself as a very benign ruler,

who's trying to do the right thing, she thinks the right thing is to convert and to encourage Christianity. So what you get at this period in India is missionaries being given for the first time a completely free reign and even given stipends and places to stay and operate from by the East India Company. And the East India Company itself has been taken over by a board of evangelical directors who are quietly discussing among themselves the hope that India may be converted. And it is this that leads us in the next episode to the 1857 uprising, the large just anti-colonial revolt in colonial history. But in the meantime, you're getting so many mixed messages from Victoria and Albert about, you know, what their attitude is towards, you know,

the world and to dominion. It almost seems as if it's unquestionable that Britain should be at the apex of the world and it should have dominion. From their point of view. From their point of view. And there's the Christianity is one thing, but also there is a racial superiority aspect of this. I am sure because otherwise you couldn't justify this. No, this is, we should say, is the period when people are measuring skulls and you're getting for the first time a hierarchy of different shapes of noses or brows and these terrible sort of eugenics ideas are being born at this period. Yeah, and also slavery is abolished before Victoria comes at the throne. And you've got, you know, in 1840, in June 1840, you have Prince Albert presiding over the anti-slavery society's meeting. So you have, so you see reconcile that.

And yet the scramble for Africa will still happen. Yes, because, because the reason, as we discussed in our slavery series, the reason that the slaves are given their freedom and the reason that Albert is presiding over it is so that the slaves can be free to choose Christ. Right, because that is not Christian. And it's all part of this world where everything is seen through a very, very Christian prism that's very difficult for us to try and understand today. So it says freedom, but freedom to do what we say. You have freedom to do what we say and live as we like. and also, you know, to be seen by many as inferior and just, you know, lump it. The other thing, which is really interesting, you know, we talked about the transfer of power from Melbourne to Peel.

Peel introduces his own people into, you know, the high offices of India. Included among those is Charles Canning, undersecreture of State of the Foreign Office. So Canning is given this really high profile position in India. And Lady Charlotte Canning is then, therefore, given quite a high position and high sort of knowledge, of what's going on in India. And Victoria does something which Melbourne never gave her, which is she opens a channel of communication of what is going on in India. And so that's why people often sort of struck by,

why was she so particularly fascinated in all of her empire? And it's a vast empire. There's a huge amount of conquering empiricism going on. Why India in particular? Well, Cunning, you know, Charlotte Canning provides her with this window into a world that she's never going to visit as well. So this picture we have of the evangelicals in charge of the Empire and of the East India Company, missionary activity going ahead all around the world and with it, the annexation of territory,

with this sort of double aim of both enlarging the empire and allowing the access of missionaries and what is seen to be the benefit of Christianity by the Christian British. at the heart of the Empire in London. But closer to home, we have another major imperial crisis growing. And I'm well aware that one of the things that we have failed to do on Empire Pod so far is to talk at all about Ireland, which is the first victim of British colonialism. And this now is we're heading into the period of the great famine, the great hunger, that begins in 1845 and lasts for four years.

And this is a seismic event in Irish history. Shall we put some numbers on this? Approximately 1 million people died from starvation and disease. Around 2 million people emigrated from Ireland leading to a significant population decline. Families, you saw families just torn apart. Communities devastated. Villages emptied out.

It's like the very fabric of Irish society is altered beyond recognition. To this day, the Irish population has not yet recovered. Before the famine, the population of Ireland was over 8 million. And today it's just 7 million. Extraordinary thought. And it is, I mean, it's two governments who fail to really recognise the threat of what this failed potato crop is going to do. One is sort of the man who does become the beloved Prime Minister of Queen Victoria, so Robert Peel, and then also Lord John Russell. You know, they don't understand how severe this crisis is. They deal with this famine, with this policy of laissez-faire, which is let market forces dictate what will happen here. And market forces allow this many people

to starve. And it's a kind of successive thing. It doesn't happen in one go. Does it? Half the potato crop is lost in 1845. You have the stink of rotting potatoes with this potato blight across Ireland. And that's bad enough. But the following year, the whole crop is lost. Yeah. Then in 1847, there is a little improvement, but there's so little seed available that there's precious little potato being produced. And it's not until 1849 that you get back to normal levels of potato production. And what we've got to understand is that potato is not just, you know, one crop among many. Over the previous 20, 30 years, with the explosion of the population and the subdivision of land, the potato has spread to be the principal crop.

in Ireland. And most of the good farming land is owned by the Protestant Anglo-Irish landowners and the peasantry are wholly reliant on the potatoes. So when the potato crops basically fails for four years, the whole peasant population is suffering. And I'd love to do is maybe paint a portrait of what the famine actually looked like on the ground. There's so many incredibly moving eyewitness accounts of it. Workhouses overflowed, evictions, multiplied and crime rates, sword. Starving men saw transportation as deliverance and prison as a reprieve. Some even tried to break into jail. You have reports at this period in all the papers from Mayo and Cork of the countryside swarming with what they call human scarecrowes, scavenging for blackberries, cabbages, leaves,

nettle and bark. Even a government inspector was quote, unmanned by the intensity and extent of the suffering I witnessed, more especially among the women and little children. At Clare Abbey on Christmas Eve, he saw crowds of them scattered over the turnip fields like a flock of famished crows, devouring the raw turnips, mothers half-naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair while their children were screaming with hunger. Then came the reports of mass mortality. The hovels in Sligo were dotted with emaciated. corpses, partly green from eating docks, partly blue from cholera and dysentery. The hamlets of Westcork contain the population of famished and ghastly skeletons.

Naked adults huddled in a filthy straw like doomed animals, children with wasted limbs and shrivelled faces of premature old age. In Clare, the dead were buried in mass graves without sheet or coffin. In Roscommon, seven cadaver. were found in a hedge half eaten by dogs. As late as May, 1849, 57 wretched paupers at the cholera hospital in Parsons Town breathed their last on the same day. And it's something they'll never forgive, they'll never forgive the British monarchy. There are large parts of Ireland which will always remember that they were left to starve to death. And there's some sort of half-hearted attempts, aren't there, at soup kitchens in 1847.

by the spring of 1847, one out of 12 people are in these soup kitchen schemes. And they're feeding three million a day. But the government gives up this scheme at the height of the famine because they say they can't afford it. And the only provision is provided by workhouses. So people have to sort of put their families into workhouses in order to survive. By the way, this is what the British will do in India as well. I mean, I'm just writing about a famine that takes place in the Deccan, which is, you know, they sort of intervene in a famine that takes place in Bihar, where they,

not one person starves, by the way. You know, they have soup kitchens and they import a lot of rice from Burma so that people don't go hungry. But when it comes to the Deccan, two years later, they, again, employ this laissez-faire policy, which is whatever will be will be, and millions die again in the Great Famine. And it's the same thing, isn't it? There's the export in both cases of meat and other products, even as the family is taking place. So it doesn't that there's no food is that there's no affordable food for the poor. And so you have massive beef exports

out of Ireland, even as these people are lining, dying at the docks. It is that, you know, you sort of walk through this hellscape of people just starving to death, you know, the distended stomachs of children and their bones sticking out. And reports of cannibalism. This is the weird thing, though, because Victoria then sort of don't donates, and she

goes on this sort of fundraising and some might say, look, you're the queen, do something sort of on a governmental level, pressure your ministers. But she does, make a big thing, you know, of donating when there are these terrible disasters and trying to sort of raise money and get others to come and donate money. It's a really peculiar thing. And you have the same thing going on very much at the same period in India. 1849, two years after this, there is a massive famine in Uttar Pradesh. And we have all the diaries of Emily Eden and Lord

Auckland, and they are all progressing up to similar through scenes of abject starvation and famine. And you have the same thing, rather than a proper government organisation to sort this out, which is incidentally what the Indian rulers were doing. They organised soup kitchens, and you get things at this period, such as the building of the imambaras in Lucknow as work schemes put on by the noabs in order to provide funds for people to buy food. But instead, what does Lord Auckland and Emily Eden do? They give a generous donation of whatever it is, £200. Which is just, isn't it potty?

Not the same. Charity is not the answer. You need a proper anti-starvation. Charity doesn't fix the problem which is ongoing. So, I mean, like in 1847, you know, Victoria donates £2,000 for the British Relief Association. This makes her the single largest donor to famine relief in Ireland and publishes two letters, the Queen's letters in March and October 1847. You're basically saying relieve Irish distress, you know, churches band together, get your Christian blood flowing and give money. But the Irish see it for what it is, and she is known as the Queen of Famine.

You know, and that's a name that sticks to her in Ireland. And the comparison is with the United States, where rather than 170,000 in charity being given, donations in America have passed $1 million. So the Americans are completely getting what's going on and donating. But the British are just importing beef from Ireland and carrying on as normal with giving a, you know, a village fate or raising a little money for a flower stall. So it's a rough period. And it's difficult to know, you know, do we criticize Victoria for completely failing to understand what was going on? She herself would have thought herself virtuous for having raised this money and being the largest single donor. But it looks entirely inadequate to us.

She thought herself to be good. She thought herself to be good. She thought she was the apex of a good and benign empire, and yet all of these people die. Look, these are the turbulent years of the 1840s. We're going to end the episode here. Do join us next week as we discuss one of the great moments of Victorian history, the great exhibition. If you are a member of Empire Club, you can hear that episode and the whole of our series on Victoria right now. This second, all you need to do to join our club is EmpirePod UK.com and you can sign up there.

Till then, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durhampool.