Forbidden History - Queen Victoria: The Woman Beyond the Crown

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Behind the image of a stern monarch, Queen Victoria lived a deeply emotional life marked by personal tragedies, private struggles with grief and the quiet use of laudanum. This episode explores Victoria’s intense relationships, from her devotion to Prince Albert to her rumoured bond with John Brown - alongside the assassination attempts and hidden vulnerabilities that shaped the woman beneath the crown. Cast List: Tracy Borman: Chief Curator, Historic Royal Palaces  Dr. Rosemary Leonard: General Practitioner & Journalist  Tony McMahon: Author & Journalist  Hallie Rubenhold: Author, ‘The Scandalous Lady W’ Dominic Selwood: Author & Journalist  Rebecca Rideal: Author, ‘Plague, War & Hellfire’ Dai Davies: Retired Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Dr. Matt Green: Historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Queen Victoria. She was the overseer of Britain's golden age. An expanding empire. The most rapid industrialization ever known.

Unprecedented technological advancement. And the founding of the modern world. The classic impression of Victoria is this woman that's removed slightly from the empire that she presides over, but actually she was a very passionate woman. She was witty, she was intelligent, she was a curious person, she was interested in people. Queen Victoria was very much a young woman of her age. She enjoyed herself. She went to balls and dances and she flirted with men.

She wanted to do what her passions dictated. She was a drug-taker. She would take Laudanum. She was partial to a bit of cocaine chewing gum and marijuana, and she enjoyed being queen. We all grew up knowing the old Victoria a lot better. You know, this stout Germanic woman with her white veil and little crown and oyster eyes and big tummy.

But there's a completely different Victoria, who's vivacious, who's flotaceous, who likes to party, he likes to have affairs, completely the polar opposite of what we were led to believe Queen Victoria was. In this episode, we explore the life of the young Victoria. Was Prince Albert really her only love? Was her relationship with a young Indian servant more than just a friendship? Was she really the straight-laced figure who defined the Victorian age?

We're joined by royal historian Tracy Borman, who will take a look behind closed doors, revealing a darker side of the Victorian era, involving drinks and even drugs. The future Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace in London on the 24th of May 1819. She was brought up and schooled by her mother, Princess Victoria, of Saxe-Coburg-Salfeld, and by all accounts it was believed to be a mostly happy childhood. But her position as heir to the throne meant that many in her immediate circle saw her as a ticket to power. And she put her overbearing mother in this category. As a young heir to the throne, she did lead a very closeted life, and she was kept cocooned in Kensington Palace by her mother and her mother's close friend.

So this frustrated, this passionate young woman, she was witty. She was intelligent. She was a curious person. She was interested in people. The very young Victoria, the girl, she's brought up in Kensington Palace in a deliberately restricted system. The Kensington system, it was called, by her mother and her mother's advisor, John Conroy. And they were doing it deliberately to control her. Victoria's mother instructed her to begin keeping a diary. In reality, this was a method of control. Victoria wrote down her thoughts, and in turn, this meant that her mother could read them.

It was a ritual she would stick to for the rest of her life, writing an average of 2,500 words per day. Victoria's early diary entries were not yet the fountain of sorrows they would later become. For example, on her birthday in 1833, she wrote, Today is my birthday. I am today, 14. How very old? I woke at half-past five, and got up at half-past seven. I received from Mama a lovely hyacinth brooch and a china pen tray. From Uncle Leopold, a very kind letter, also one from Aunt Louisa and Sister Fedora. She goes on to write about the ball held in her honor. I danced first with my cousin George Cambridge, then with Prince George Leaven,

then with Lord Brooke, then Lord March, then Lord Athlone, then Lord Fitzroy Lennox, then with Lord Emlyn. We then went to supper. She enjoyed herself. She went to balls and dances and she flirted with men,

and most importantly, she was absolutely desperate to break free from her mother's control, and so she was, She had this rebellious spirit, this rebellious streak in her. She wanted to do what her passions dictated, probably because her mother had been raining her in so tightly for so many years. On the 20th of June 1837, Victoria became queen at the age of 18. Suddenly, she had power and could do as she pleased. She fell in love with and married her cousin Albert and dismissed her domineering

mother from Buckingham Palace. She did enjoy spending time with men, and she did flirt. She was a little bit promiscuous or cheeky at the very least. This changed when she met and fell in love with head over heels in a way with Prince Albert. She met him once, and that was fine in 1836, and then she meets him again in 1839, and it's suddenly like, wow, it sticks this time. And she just, basically, she writes in her diary, he's beautiful, you know, he has beautiful blue eyes

and he has beautiful nose. She could think of nobody else other than Albert. That was it. Albert was the one for her, and she asked him to marry her. This is surprising in some ways because he was quite a reticent figure. He wasn't particularly charming or loving.

He was this sort of hard-headed, no-nonsense German. Perhaps that was part of the appeal. But certainly he said, seemed to be a stabilizing influence upon her, and she derived a certain kind of security from him as well. She derived strength to rule what was not just a country, but an entire empire that spread across the entire globe. Victoria dedicated herself to her role as queen and had a genuine concern for the welfare of her subjects. She came into contact with a young Winston Churchill, who she liked, and it was said that the pair would chew gum together.

But this chewing gum had a difference. It was laced with cocaine, and this wasn't the only drug she was partial to. Dr. Rosemary Leonard is an expert on Victorian medicine and has agreed to meet Tracy Borman to tell her about some of the paraphernalia that would have been used by Queen Victoria. So, Rosemary, we have a delight of medical paraphernalia here.

Can you talk us through it? Well, in the 19th century, most people smoked opium, and this is a wonderful contraption, which is like a Victorian hooker pipe. So you would have your pellet of opium in the top there. You put water in there, then you lit here, and then... Oh, it would turn into beautiful fumes, which you would then get your morphine, opium hit. And would Victoria herself have been sat there puffing on this amazing opium pipe? No, she didn't like smoking. So she took her opium as a tincture, more delicate.

The tincture, however, the opium was dissolved in 90% alcohol. Oh, gosh. Okay, so a very potent mixture then. Very potent mixture. So she wakes, she's got period pain, she's got a headache. First thing in the morning, she has a swig of her lordsum tincture. which gives her not only her hit of opium, but also gives her a hit of alcohol first thing in the morning. Wow, so she would actually be probably quite drunk at the beginning of the day

if she needed to take this. Yes, and of course, like morphine today, laudanum, opium, highly addictive stuff. Queen Victoria seems to have had a rather racy medicine cabinet. I mean, there was opium, there was laudanum, which was a mixture of opium and alcohol, which people believe could cure anything. She took chloroform during childbirth,

which she said was hugely enjoyable. And she's even supposed to have written an anonymous review for a newspaper for a product called Van Mariani, which was a mixture of cocaine and alcohol. So Queen Victoria, I think by any standards, she loved her drugs. In the Victorian era,

they were moving on to anaesthesia. The drug that was used was chloroform. Good old chloroform. It could be given via, a mask. Wow. And so would Victoria have taken this? No, she did hers in a more delicate way.

She had her chloroform for the birth of her last two children. So she would have her chloroform dropped on her handkerchief there, which she gently placed over her nose and breathed in the vapours. I'll just have a very

delicate smell of this. Yes, even from here. You can smell it's very strong. But what did Victoria has think to this new drug. She wrote in her diary that this wonderful drug was soothing, quieting, and delightful beyond measure. Well, the young Victoria was a drug-taker. She would take Laudanum.

She was partial to a bit of cocaine chewing gum and marijuana and all the rest of it. And she enjoyed being queen. She wasn't this kind of detached figure that we have a mental picture of later on in her reign. So in that sense, sense the secret Victoria, if you like, is as important as the later more restrained one. Perhaps the young queen was known to enjoy life a little too much.

But the reality was that these were turbulent times, and threats to not just the monarchy, but world leaders, were very real. Being head of state in the 19th century was a very dangerous occupation. During Victoria's lifetime, assassination attempts were made on nearly every major European ruler and head of state, including the high-profile murder of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Across the pond in America, Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head at point-blank range. This surge in political murder meant security was top priority. On the first attempt on her life in June 1840, Victoria wrote in her,

diary, As we had just left the palace about halfway up the road, I was deafened by the loud report of a pistol, and our carriage involuntarily stopped. We looked around and saw a little man on the footpath with his arms folded over his breast, a pistol in each hand, and before half a minute elapsed, I saw him aim at me with another pistol. I ducked my head, and another shot equally loud instantly followed. Victoria's reign went through a striking number of phases. In the very early days, she wasn't popular. The public wanted to know what she was doing with her money, who she was,

why she was marrying Albert, though many things people weren't happy with, and the politics was very turbulent. And this gave rise to hostility, and there were seven assassination attempts on her life, all of which she survived. Few people know more about royal security, than Di Davis, a retired chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the elite Royal Protection Squad, whose job was to guard the royal family.

So, Dai, there were quite a few assassination attempts on Victoria, weren't they? Well, they were indeed at least seven, to my knowledge, but of course she was stalked by many, many more. In that first year, when she came to the throne as a young 18-year-old, they were, to my knowledge, at least 30. Different kind of incident stalking, we call it now. But men were obsessed with her looks. They were obsessed with the young queen

after all those Hanoverians that came to the throne who weren't really liked. So this was a fresh start when she was 18. Now, can you talk us through? Obviously, you're an expert in royal security. What were the security measures like in Victoria's Day? Well, frankly, they were pretty poor. And that's evidenced by the fact that Edward Jones, boy Jones, or In We Go Jones, who's 14, actually got into Buckingham Palace at least three times.

But in truth, he got in about a dozen times at least. And, of course, he was caught first time in 1838. Victoria wasn't there that time, and on December the 3rd, he was caught by the Knight Watchman. and he was covered in Greece. He had stolen some items from the master of the household, and it's alleged, her knickers. Oh, really? Now, whether that's true or not,

but he wasn't charged with that. And you know, up until very recently, it wasn't an offence to go into royal premises. So Boyd Jones eventually came back and he did it again. This time he got three months hard labor. Edward Jones is one of the big tabloid stories of Queen Victoria's reign. He gets into Buckingham Palace and he's caught basically stealing Queen Victoria's underwear and a regimental sword.

He's then sent to prison and then the moment he gets out, he's back in again. And he's found actually underneath the sofa skulking and then he's sent to prison again. And then he makes his way back and this kept going on and on. Edward Jones was this very peculiar character who managed to repeatedly break into Buckingham Palace and tried on the crown, sat on the throne, slept in a servant's bed, hid under the sofa. Even it said that read some of Victoria's private correspondence. He was obsessed with this.

He was obsessed with her, with this secret life behind palace doors. And the only way they could get rid of him was actually to send him off to deport him to Australia. So, Dight, with all of these various attempts of Victoria, Was she ever actually harmed? Yes, she was. The worst was by a chap called Robert Pate in Piccadilly, where he managed to hit her, get close to her

and hit her three times on the head with a silver cane. It caused huge bruise and concussion, and yet she went to the theatre that night, which shows the character of the woman. What a woman, indeed. In November 1840, the royal couple's first child, Victoria, was born in Buckingham Palace. Kingham Palace. Despite the fact that the Queen would go on to have nine children, she apparently

did not enjoy being pregnant and wasn't much of a fan of the result either. Where kids were concerned, Victoria did not seem to be the maternal kind. Victoria and Albert had a very lively sex life, it has to be said. They were extremely close in terms of their personality. She was sometimes irritated by him trying to exercise political power, but they were extremely close and I think she was very happy. She really looked up to him for all sorts of guidance and he was her partner every step of the way. In November 1841, Victoria's second child,

Albert, known as Bertie, was born. Bertie would grow up in a very different mould to his parents. He was a playboy who arguably took after his great uncle, George the 4th. He was a party animal and a member of his family of the so-called Marlboro House set, named after his London residence. He enjoyed the company of aristocratic women and is said to have occasionally indulged

in a bit of wife swapping. Bertie seems to become quite a luscious figure. He fell in love with Paris. He loved the whole vibe of the city, and I think that kind of then infected the way he approached sex, approached relationships. You know, he had these very decadent affairs affairs with actresses.

Bertie became everything that Victoria hated. He loved women, loved sex, was outrageous in his lifestyle. He lived a lavish lifestyle. He ate. He partied.

He did everything he wasn't supposed to do. In December 1861, Victoria's beloved husband, Albert, died. Victoria went into a period of for many years, and she wore black for the rest of her life. She commissioned the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens,

dedicated to the love of her life, at a cost of, in today's money, 10 million pounds, or 13 million US dollars. I think it's impossible to underestimate how big an effect the death of Prince Albert had on Queen Victoria. She was there at the moment of his death, and she held his hand, and for the rest of her life, she had a plaster cast of his hand,

in her bed, which seems rather morbid. And she said in a letter to her daughter, Vicky, I can't live without him. I want to be pressed against him and feel his heart beating. Marlikes are people like anybody else, and they have feelings, and part of their job is to restrain those feelings and to be a leader, a ruler.

But Victoria didn't care about that in her grief. And she sought solace, and she sought company, and she sought to be who she was. It's clear how much the death of Albert affected Victoria by the fact that she didn't write in her diary from the day of his death until the new year of 1862, when she wrote this emotional entry, have been unable to write my journal since the day my beloved one left us.

And with what a heavy, broken heart I enter on a new year without him, my dreadful and overwhelming calamity gives me so much to do that I must henceforth merely keep notes of my sad and solitary life. Victoria was completely devastated by Albert's death. It was something she never recovered from. She totally retreated from society. She wouldn't engage in any state functions. She wouldn't meet ambassadors.

She starts to transform into the Victoria that we know. She dresses in black for the rest of her life. She retreats completely from public life to the point where in fact she goes off to Balmorrow. She just gets out of London. She is not seen. She's an invisible figure. And when she is seen again,

she has become what we know as Queen Victoria. With Albert dead, Victoria spent an increasing amount of time away from London in Scotland. And it was here that she became close, it said, to her gilly and personal servant, John Brown. It wasn't quite as simple as Queen servants.

We recently have discovered from letters that have been unearthed that she would sign her letters on occasion Mrs. Brown rather than Queen Victoria. So it seems as though there was a certain kind of parity on some level they thought that they were equals. And I suppose that

shows that the youthful spark that had been so much in evidence before the death of Albert hadn't quite been extinguished. Who knows what? whether she was in love or whether it was just nice to have a companion, but she finds a deep connection with a servant, and it started through him helping her out, you know, perhaps into her carriage,

and then it grew into something more profound as time progressed. The rumor mill went into overdrive, and stories soon started circulating that there was something more to their relationship. Republican journals began to spread the idea that they had secretly married, And even within the royal family, Brown was jokingly known as Mama's lover. It was an incredibly unorthodox relationship because of, obviously, the disparity in rank. And he was this very lowly servant, and here was the Queen of England. She was very, very vulnerable at this time.

This was a real desperate attempt to find solace in the company of another man. We will never know the details of the relationship between Victoria and Mr. Brown. But it's absolutely clear that he was incredibly important to her. Royal historians being royal historians say that it was all very proper and this was a relationship with a servant. But one only has to look at her letters for the tenderness that comes through. One only has to read other people's accounts and diaries of the way they behave together. So there's absolutely no doubt that this was an intrinsically important relationship in her life.

Together for over 30 years, the question as to whether Victoria's relationship with Brown was a serious one will always continue to divide historians. In a letter to Brown, Victoria wrote characteristically in the third person. Perhaps never in history, was there so strong and true, an attachment so warm and loving, a friendship between the sovereign and servant, strength of character, as well as power of, frame. The most fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence, and unselfishness, combined with a tender, warm heart, made him one of the most remarkable men. John Brown died in 1883, and the Queen commissioned a statue in his memory. After the death of John Brown, she shuts down mentally, physically, psychologically, and it seems

to cope with this emotional blow, she turns to food, and this seems to be a direct consequence of that second heartbreak with John Brown. One of the things that is the main part of being a monarch is this loneliness. It's a role that you carry yourself. And so she is the constant throughout her life. People come and go, loves come and go, and it may be absolutely devastating for her, but she continues, she fights on, she lives to see another day. In 1887, the year of the Golden Jubilee, 24-year-old Abdul Karim was one of two boys

selected to become servants to the Queen from the newly British-controlled India. The Queen took to him almost immediately, and he rapidly became one of her closest confidants, filling the shoes of John Brown. There's a huge age gap between these two. They form a very close bond, and she begins to become infatuated with,

Indian foods and kind of Indian fashions and just the Indian way of life. So all of a sudden, the kind of prim and proper British food is sort of cleared away. And she doesn't mind ordering her sort of white courtiers out of the room while she kind of forms this ever closer bond with Abdul Karim. And it seems as though she's regaining something of that lust for life that was so evident in the pre-Albert day. She wants to embrace the unknown and try new things. It's a very intimate association.

It's almost a mother and son relationship. And they share so much, and yet they have nothing outwardly in common at all. She's very absorbed in this relationship, which gives her solace, which gives her comfort, and something that she can connect with. Being a monarch is very lonely, and what she was searching for towards the end of her life was a deep, meaningful connection with somebody. that wasn't a minister, somebody who didn't have an ulterior motive, and here he was.

Soon, Kareem became far more to Victoria than a mere servant. He began to teach her Urdu, and the pair became inseparable. He was promoted and barely left her side. Queen Victoria, you have to remember, was the Empress of India, and that was the jewel in the crown of the empire. so she had several Indian servants, but there was one particular servant, Abdul Karim, the Munshi, as he became known,

who started teaching her Hindi and Urdu, she was always into languages. But they also talked about philosophy, they talked about history. He even introduces her to curry. Curry ends up on the menu. It wasn't new to England, but it ends up being a regular British meal, if you want,

at this time. There was a big age gap between these two people, but that doesn't mean to say that Abdul Karim didn't get anything from this. I mean, he was being introduced to the Queen of England. But also for Queen Victoria, this was a person that had new conversations, interesting things that he could offer her as well, the Indian culture, and different types of food that she'd not experimented with before. So there were things that both sides got from this friendship. On the 22nd of January, 1901, Queen Victoria died at the end of the end of the first of the

age of 81. In keeping with her wishes, she was given a military funeral and was buried in a white dress wearing a wedding veil, an ode to her being Albert's loving wife, even in death. Victoria had written some 60 million words in her diaries, as well as countless letters. It would be assumed that her private life would be there for all to see. But no, when she died, her children worked hard to cover up any potential embarrassments, and so her diaries were altered, and few originals in her handwriting survive. Her son Bertie inherited the throne of England as Edward V.

And ordered all evidence of her relationships with John Brown and Abdul Karim destroyed, going so far as to send agents to India. Well, the fate of Abdul Karim is very telling about how, the monarchy operates because here's someone that was as close as anyone possibly could be to the queen, to the empress. And she promised him jewels, she promised him land, she promised him title. It was clear she was going to die before he would, but he was made all these promises and he sincerely believed them. But the minute she died, none of these promises were kept.

They didn't want him anywhere close to the next monarch, anywhere close to influencing the government or anything like that. The monarchy, those around the queen, those around Edward, who was about to take the throne, said this was unacceptable. And instead of giving him these things, they basically gave him a one-way ticket back to India. And they got rid of him. The evidence of the exciting, fun-loving, and affectionate queen is mostly gone. But it's certainly no longer forgotten. perhaps revealing the truth about the real Queen Victoria.

I think our memory of Queen Victoria since she's died has been what we've seen in the statues, the statue on the mall, the statue in countless cities around the world. And what we didn't know about her, but we're just starting to discover, I mean, through some of the TV dramas, through some of the research, some of the letters that have come out in recent years, is this young Victoria who was very different,

who was very flirty, who was very intelligent, who was very chatty, who had a very little. It's a completely different picture. Whether or not that cancels out the other Victoria, well, we'll have to wait and see. The thing that Victoria had, which all monarchs have, is this strange dual personality. They have their private life and they have their public life.

And I think in the past, we've tended to overlook Victoria's private life, more so than other monarchs, because there's been the impression that it's not that interest in. Well, actually, it is, and she was a very, was a very interesting woman. She was full of beans, full of life, and she enjoyed the company of men and women, men more so throughout her life. While it's clear that there's more to Victoria than the grand titles and popular images would suggest, perhaps we will never know the whole truth.

Victoria was buried with several mementos of those dear to her. On one side of her was a cast of Prince Albert's hand. And on the other, hidden under a bouquet of flowers, a photograph of John Brown. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city. A crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak. A top secret government bunker. A cursed mansion cloaked in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach.

Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go? We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called The Many Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, aeronautical scientists can't quite explain it. They say, we don't actually know how it gets up there. How it stays up?

You're just not good at a science. No, there are explanations? There are explanations. It's just plain physics. Brought to you by Like a Shot, makers of forbidden history. Search for Where Did Everyone Go on your favorite podcast platform.