Happy Families: Hanoverians to Windsors Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History

For centuries, kings and queens have been set apart from the rest of us,

depicted as god-like giants

or virile warriors

or fertile mothers of the nation.

But if you strip away the regal facade,

the reality's very different.

We've had mad monarchs and bad ones

and sexually inadequate kings and infertile queens.

In this series, I'm going to reintroduce you

to our monarchs as human beings, people rather like you and me.

I'm going to investigate their medical problems,

study their doctors' reports, read their private letters

and examine their most intimate possessions.

I'm going to reveal the chinks in the royal armour,

because I believe, ironically, that the lives of these kings and queens,

the survival of the monarchy, the fortunes of the nation, have been

determined, not so much by their strengths but their weaknesses.

In 1817, the 21-year-old Princess Charlotte

was second in line to the throne.

She was the monarchy's great hope.

Charlotte seemed eminently fit to rule.

And even better, she was about to give birth to her first child,

securing the royal succession for another generation.

At 7pm on Monday 3rd November, Charlotte's contractions began.

She retired to bed, in her room just there, attended by her husband,

Prince Leopold, and Sir Richard Croft, a celebrated male midwife.

At 3.30 the next morning, Croft decided it was time to summon

the privy counsellors, who were going to witness this royal birth.

At 5.45, the Home Secretary arrived,

at 6am, the Archbishop of Canterbury,

at 7.30, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

There was nothing for them to do but sit and wait here in the gallery.

The anticipation was enormous,

this was to be the first royal birth in 21 years, since Charlotte's own.

The whole future of the Hanoverian dynasty rested on this baby.

200 years ago,

the country had fallen out of love with the ruling Hanoverians.

The blind old king, George III, had lost touch with reality

and his son and heir, the Prince Regent, was deeply unpopular

and addicted to drink and drugs.

But his daughter, Charlotte, looked set to rescue both the dynasty

and the monarchy itself.

She offered the tantalising prospect of a fresh start for the crown

and the birth of an entirely new concept, a happy royal family.

In 1860, Charlotte got engaged to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.

She was head over heels in love.

This is a letter she wrote about him to her best friend.

It's a very chatty and open letter,

it's surprising un-royal

and it's in Charlotte's very exuberant and slightly

out of control handwriting, just like she was herself.

She says here that she finds Leopold quite charming.

She goes on to say that a princess never set out in life

or married in such prospects of happiness.

Real domestic ones like other people.

After centuries of dynastic marriages and unhappy relationships,

Charlotte and Leopold were breaking the royal mould.

They wanted something different, a normal and happy family life.

Charlotte was the most popular member of the royal family

and her marriage prompted national rejoicing.

Within 18 months of the wedding,

the country was poised to celebrate the arrival of the next royal heir.

The man responsible for Charlotte's labour was Sir Richard Croft,

the country's leading male midwife.

'He's left us a minute-by-minute record

'of his most important delivery.'

Well, it's an extraordinary document.

It's a very detailed account of a birth in the early 19th century.

So she goes into labour at 7pm on the Monday.

Mm-hmm. At 11 on Tuesday morning,

she had dilated to the size of a crown piece, but very thin.

So that's not very much progress in 24 hours.

It's not very good

and he's beginning to suspect that something is not quite right.

He's talking here about a uterine discharge of a dark green colour.

That doesn't sound good.

No, well, this is a sign that the baby is in distress or already dead.

It means the baby has been so badly affected by the process of labour,

that it starts pooing in the womb

and then swallowing this substance.

Eventually, Charlotte does give birth, after 50 hours of labour.

The baby is stillborn.

-They rub his body with salt and mustard...

-Yes.

..But no animation was ever restored.

That must have been so frustrating.

He was legitimate, he'd come to term, he was the right gender,

but then it all went wrong.

Exactly, this was the most important baby in the whole of Great Britain,

obviously, and they did try and revive the boy for a long time.

And the mother seems to have survived, doesn't she?

She's doing reasonably well. She's quite composed and says,

"Well, if this is God's will, then that's it."

And she feels tired, she wants to rest.

And at midnight, Charlotte starts complaining

about a singing in her ears and she feels unwell, she throws up.

And very tragically, she dies at about 2.30 in the morning.

He says here, then "the scene closed" at 2.30 and all he could do

was give her cordials and stimulants, but that was no good.

Despite the depth of the detail,

it's still not clear what actually killed Charlotte,

but it's likely that a haemorrhage caused her to bleed to death.

Croft was tortured by feelings of guilt

at his failure to save the lives of two heirs to the throne.

Three months later, he killed himself.

The nation was shocked

by the sudden loss of the monarchy's next two generations.

After the tragedy, Leopold opened up the gardens of Claremont House,

so people could come and see the place where Charlotte had died.

In particular, this grotto, down by the lake, became

a site of pilgrimage for people who wanted to remember Charlotte.

Many of them wanted a physical reminder to take home too.

The roof was covered with this Blue John stone,

but most of it was snapped off and taken away as souvenirs.

It's hard to overstate the scale of the grief

that was felt for Charlotte.

As one contemporary put it,

"It was as if every house in the country had lost a favourite child."

Charlotte's death was a national catastrophe.

It robbed the country of the prospect of a rejuvenated crown.

Her loss set off a wave of public commemoration.

From hastily published biographies to teapots,

the image of the dead princess was everywhere.

So here we have a teapot.

A commemorative memorial teapot, that's fabulous, isn't it?

But we've got a weeping Britannia.

We've got Charlotte on a sort of funerary monument.

This is really macabre, isn't it, to drink your tea

out of a teapot commemorating a dead princess?

Yes, and it was a relatively new thing.

Of course, what was commemorated a couple of years earlier

was the happy union of Leopold and Charlotte.

And when you think about reaction to dead princesses,

-a very obvious parallel springs to mind, doesn't it?

-Of course.

And in fact, the phrase "England's Rose", that we all know from

Elton John's song for Diana,

the very same term was used of Princess Charlotte.

It was, she was associated with roses.

She was called the English Rose. She liked wearing roses in her hair.

Charlotte's death exposed the brutal reality of hereditary monarchy.

One accident of biology had left the whole Hanoverian dynasty

facing extinction.

Although King George III had 15 children,

Charlotte had been his single legitimate grandchild.

The only hope was that one of the king's unmarried sons

might have a legitimate child.

These disreputable royal dukes now raced to ditch their mistresses,

marry eligible Protestant princesses

and be the first to produce an heir.

Clearly there was something quite comical, farcical, almost,

about this race to reproduce.

The satirist, Peter Pindar, put it like this.

"Hot and hard, each royal pair, are at it hunting for the heir."

But to another poet, Shelley, this wasn't comedy, this was tragedy.

In his poem England in 1819, he said that George III

"Is an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.

"His sons, the princes, are the dregs of their dull race.

"These are rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

"but leech-like to their fainting country cling."

Shelley's capturing here a new public mood,

a sense that George III and his sons are unfit to rule.

For the House of Hanover, though,

the baby race did at least have the desired effect.

On May 24th, 1819,

the Duke of Kent's new German wife gave birth to a daughter,

Princess Victoria. She would become first in line to the throne.

Victoria owes not just her position

but her very existence to the death of her cousin Charlotte.

Victoria's father died when she was still a baby,

leaving her upbringing to his widow, the Duchess of Kent,

and her private secretary, Sir John Conroy.

At Kensington Palace, the young princess lived under

an educational and moral regime, devised by Conroy and her mother.

It became known as the Kensington System.

Victoria was kept under constant surveillance,

not allowed to go anywhere or meet anyone,

except under her mother or her governess' watchful eye.

Victoria's beloved collection of over 130 dolls

offered a temporary escape from this unhappy home.

These are the companions of Victoria's lonely childhood.

There's something awfully poignant

about her collection of little dolls.

She designed the costumes herself.

They were often made by her governess, Baroness Lehzen,

and I think they show a powerful imagination at work.

They're inspired by the ballet dancers

and opera singers Victoria admired.

They're not wearing normal clothes, they're in fancy dress and she

gives them names and often invents a lurid back story for each one.

The saddest thing of all, though,

is that she wasn't playing with her dolls with other little girls,

she played either by herself or with her 40-year-old governess.

What was the point of the Kensington System?

What did it want to achieve?

They were trying to make Victoria less like a Hanoverian.

This was a family that was

rather unpopular with the public

and they wanted to remake her as a different kind of monarch.

You know, they wanted a new kind of monarch,

a monarch rather more like a middle-class English family.

Victoria was this little person who had to be protected from all

of this wickedness emanating from the rest of the family.

And to prove that she was different from her disreputable uncles,

Victoria was sent out to meet

and hopefully to charm her future subjects.

They presented her to the public, but in a very prescribed way.

They made her go out on these tours of England, where

they went around in a carriage and they had this itinerary and she was

presented to people and waved out of the carriage at them.

So it's like doing a publicity campaign for a celebrity today.

They're occasionally allowed to appear, in the right place, with

the right people, at the right time and this sort of builds an appetite.

Yes, they wanted her to be popular

and they wanted her to be well liked.

But all of this was highly controlled, it was all about

managing the image, so that when she did come to the throne,

she would have a kind of base of popularity.

People would know her, people would recognise her and

people would feel well disposed towards her.

Almost inadvertently,

the Duchess and Conroy were laying the foundations

for a new relationship between subjects and their sovereign.

Yet their motivation wasn't public interest, it was private ambition.

They hoped that when Victoria became queen,

she'd be so reliant on their guidance

that they'd be rewarded with positions at the heart of her court.

In the summer of 1835, Victoria made a gruelling tour of the country.

She spent the autumn in Ramsgate

to recover her strength.

During the course of her holiday, Victoria fell dangerously ill.

It's not quite clear what was wrong with her.

It could have been typhoid or it may have been a physical reaction

to the strain she'd been under at home.

Her hair started to fall out, she lost weight, she was feverish but

her mother and Conroy dismissed all of this.

"Childish whims", they said,

more evidence that Victoria wasn't fit to rule without their advice.

It was only when Victoria became delirious that her mother

became seriously concerned.

Victoria is so ill that for five weeks

she can't even leave her room at the lodging house.

Her mother and Conroy try to take advantage of this situation,

to consolidate their power over her.

Her mother brings in a document for Victoria to sign,

saying that she will make Conroy her private secretary.

This would have given him an official position of great influence,

very near the heir to the throne, but she won't sign it.

So her mother sends in Conroy himself.

He comes into the sick room, he stands over her bed,

he puts the pencil in her hand, but still Victoria refuses to sign.

Eventually she recovers from this illness, but from this point on,

Conroy is clearly the enemy in her eyes,

and in this battle at Ramsgate

we can see a clear indication of the queen Victoria will become.

It was these early struggles that forged the steel in her soul.

Victoria wouldn't have to wait long to get her revenge

on her mother and Sir John.

Less than two years after her visit to Ramsgate,

her uncle, King William IV, was on his deathbed

and she was poised to inherit his throne.

And the last act of this story comes

when the death of William is announced.

And from that moment, a kind of shutter comes down

between Victoria and these two people who have been attempting to

manipulate her for all these years.

And the first thing that she asks for is an hour on her own,

in private, something that she's never experienced in her whole life.

The new queen had thwarted her mother

and Sir John's best efforts and would reign entirely by herself.

Ironically, it was their training that had given Victoria

the strength of will to reject them.

Yet the Kensington System had also left an indelible

and troubling stain on Victoria's character.

The 20th June 1837 was Victoria's first day as queen

and her first duty was to meet her privy council.

They'd all arrived here at Kensington Palace,

more than 200 of them.

Old men dressed in black suits, they were an intimidating audience.

But little Victoria went in and she read her declaration

in a firm and clear voice.

The counsellors were overwhelmed by her poise and her dignity.

The Duke of Wellington said,

"Not only did she fill her chair, she filled the room."

So her training for the throne had worked,

it had given her the resolve, the strength to be a queen.

At the same time, though, it had warped her personality.

The isolation and the attention all being on Victoria had made her

far too used to getting her own way, and if she didn't get it,

she'd throw a temper tantrum.

It had created a personality that was wilful and imperious.

As monarch, Victoria could no longer rely on

established power and privilege.

What the country now demanded wasn't so much continuity

but royal reinvention.

Queen Victoria would solve the problem that had plagued

the monarchy for centuries.

She would secure the succession

by producing not only an heir but several spares as well.

But simple biological success was no longer enough

to keep a dynasty on the throne.

Victoria and her heirs would inherit less power than ever before.

Victoria could no longer rule, she could only reign.

Henry VIII had been responsible only to God.

His successors had been answerable to Parliament as well,

but Victoria's family would be held to account

by an even greater power - public opinion.

For a queen to prove herself fit to reign, she needed to come

down from her throne and show herself to her people.

Subjects no longer expected their kings and queens to be semi-divine,

they wanted a monarch who was almost ordinary.

But what was normal for her subjects was entirely new for a queen.

Just like her cousin Charlotte, 20 years earlier,

Victoria was determined to enjoy a happy domestic life.

In 1840, she married her first cousin Prince Albert

and they set about creating the family she'd always longed for.

Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was designed

by Albert as their private haven, away from the public display

of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

At least by royal standards, this was an ordinary family home.

For centuries, kings and queens had tried to keep their private life

pretty much private.

When they did appear in public, it was often in the context

of a ballroom or a grand reception with hundreds of people present.

But now it's as if Queen Victoria flings open the doors

of her private home and invites her subjects in.

This is a new age of the mass media and it's actually Prince Albert

who comes up with a brilliant new public relations strategy.

He invents the concept of the Royal Family and he allows himself

and his wife and children to be depicted as an ordinary family.

They almost look like a middle-class family here,

enjoying their Christmas tree,

with just one single maidservant in the background.

This is Victoria and Albert redefining what it means

to be fit to rule.

They see their job as to set a moral example for the nation to follow.

Victoria and Albert believed that this campaign must begin with

the education of their children.

But by the age of just eight,

Victoria's son and heir, Bertie, was already causing serious concern.

The Prince of Wales seemed slow and rather stupid

and his mother feared that he was not fit to inherit her throne.

To get to the root of his problems,

Albert turned to the new pseudoscience of phrenology.

Phrenologists analyse the size and shape of the head,

supposedly to reveal an individual's intelligence and character.

In October 1850, Britain's leading practitioner, George Combe,

examined Bertie's skull.

So here's Combe's report of his visit. What actually happened?

Well, it's clear from the report that he has concerns,

serious concerns about Bertie and his development.

He stresses that his brain is abnormal.

The quality of the brain of the Prince of the Wales was abnormal?

Yes.

"Producing feebleness and excitability.

"The anterior lobe was deficient in size."

His brain was too small.

His brain was too small and the smallness of his head is

something which a number of people, including Gladstone, commented upon.

And it says here that "the organs of combativeness, self-esteem

"and firmness are in excess." Now where would they be, then?

Well, if we look at a phrenological head from the period,

they would be organs number five, which is round there,

which are part of the propensities -

which are the organs which humans have in common with animals.

And also,

number ten would be self-esteem.

Self-esteem, so he had a big bulge up there, he loved himself.

He loved himself, yes. And number 15 would be of firmness.

Of firmness.

It was often commented upon by his tutors

that he was a very obstinate child and very uncooperative.

Yes, he used to fly into temper tantrums during lessons

-and that sort of thing.

-Yes, so that would be organ 15.

Combe also says here, I'm afraid, that

"there was a great deficiency in the intellectual in Bertie's case."

Yes, that the area of the forehead would be small and in that,

and Combe would be too polite to say so in this report,

but in that, Combe believed that he took after his mother.

He'd observed Queen Victoria at the opera

soon after she came to the throne

and commented on the want of length in her forehead region.

What does that mean, that she's not got a very big brain?

It means essentially that she's rather thick, yeah.

Prince Albert and Combe have a discussion about where Bertie

gets it from - has he inherited it?

Combe says, "I stated plainly my suspicion that his son had inherited

"not only the quality of the brain but its form from King George III

"and I pointed out all that this implied."

And the implication is,

George III was mad - is this madness running in the family?

Yes, I mean, that's clearly a concern for many people at the time

and inheritance is a big part of a phrenological analysis.

But the crucial thing for Combe is that, whatever the configuration

of the brain, there was no inevitability about this process,

that through education, any tendency towards madness could be combated.

At the Swiss Cottage, in the grounds of Osborne House,

each of the young princes and princesses

had a little garden to grow fruit and vegetables.

Here, Albert hoped to mould his children into practical,

responsible and virtuous members of society.

And with strict discipline and hard work, he believed he could

reform Bertie's character and make him a worthy successor to Victoria.

The Swiss Cottage symbolises everything that Prince Albert

had hoped for from his children's education.

He wanted them to grow up as well-informed and industrious

and moral, but for Bertie, the cottage was

the opposite of all that. For him, it was a place of sanctuary.

He snuck away from his tutors, down here, to indulge in

that classic act of teenage rebellion, smoking in secret.

His parents were fearful for the future.

Their son and heir was already showing signs of revolt

against the regime.

By the time he was 19,

Bertie's youthful rebellion was in full swing.

In the summer of 1861, he was sent to an army training camp in Ireland.

Away from the watchful eyes of his parents,

he seized his opportunity to sleep with an actress, Nelly Clifton.

The news did not go down well at home.

When Prince Albert discovered that his son had lost his virginity

to Nelly, he was thrown into anguish.

He wrote Bertie a letter saying this experience had caused him

more pain than he'd ever yet felt in his life.

And he followed up the letter with a surprise visit to Cambridge,

where Bertie was studying.

They went for a long walk in the country lanes together,

during which Bertie got them lost and it started to rain.

They came back with Albert feeling cold and miserable and feverish.

But they had made it up, this was a moment of reconciliation.

The truce, though, would only last for three weeks.

The next time Bertie saw his father, he was on his deathbed.

On the 14th December 1861, Albert died at Windsor Castle.

He was just 42.

His doctors believed that typhoid fever was to blame,

but Victoria was convinced that the stress caused

by Bertie's behaviour had also played a part.

The newly widowed queen retreated to Osborne, where, day after day,

her inconsolable weeping could be heard throughout the house.

It's hard to overstate the importance of what Albert did

to keep Victoria emotionally stable.

His death was cataclysmic for her

and without him, she really lost her way.

There were established conventions of mourning,

but she quickly went above and beyond them.

She turned their homes into shrines to Albert.

Here's their marital bed and he's still in it.

A portrait of him on his deathbed hangs above his pillow.

She slept here with his old nightshirt in her arms

and at the foot of the bed, she's installed a plaque

with the date of the first night that they spent together here

and the date of the last as well.

Victoria, without Albert, was like a completely different person.

As she said herself,

"His death marked the beginning of a new reign."

Victoria was consumed by her grief.

Alarmingly, it seems that without Albert,

she might buckle under the strain of being queen.

It's a very typical letter of condolence,

written to Mary Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln,

after his assassination.

And it's an opportunity, and Victoria grabbed all of them,

to express and reiterate her own grief.

So she says here that she's "utterly broken-hearted" by the loss

of her own beloved husband, who was the light of her life,

He was her stay, he was her all, he was absolutely everything to her.

She's now reached the state where she actually feels

comfortable grieving perpetually.

Now, this is three years on from her bereavement and nothing's changing.

Do you think that today we'd describe Victoria

as clinically depressed?

She definitely was very, very depressed and also suffering

an extreme clinical form of grief that now is recognised.

And of course, today, she'd be having bereavement counselling.

But the trouble is, she was queen,

she was monarch and there was a job to do.

And very quickly, her male ministers became very impatient with this,

because the business of the monarchy was in a state of stasis, they just

wanted her basically to pull herself together and get on with the job.

For centuries, royal doctors had given glowing reports

of their patients' health, assuring the nation

that the monarch was mentally and physically fit to rule.

But now the grieving queen demanded

that her medics take the opposite tack.

Some kind of excuses had to start being made for her

and the easiest thing was to get Dr Jenner,

her very dutiful and rather sycophantic medic,

to write a few royal sick notes, and in fact what he did

was publish an anonymous piece in the Lancet saying

the queen was in this very febrile state and any kind of pressures

on her to do the job more than she was already doing would provoke

a complete and utter mental breakdown,

which of course was a complete nonsense because, in many ways

Victoria was extraordinarily robust, even in her grief.

Victoria was risking her reputation.

As the months of her withdrawal turned into years,

her doctor's excuses began to wear thin.

In 1864, some unknown person put up a sign on the gate

of Buckingham Palace, saying,

"These commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence

"of the declining business of the late occupant."

Since Albert's death, Victoria had spent hardly any time here.

She'd withdrawn to the seclusion of Osborne or Balmoral,

away from the strain of her official duties.

As time went on, though, her subjects began to get frustrated

with having a queen that they never saw and this would develop

into a crisis for the whole institution of the monarchy.

People got used to doing without a queen, so her critics said,

"Do we need one at all?"

Never since the execution of Charles I

had the case for republicanism seemed as strong.

The popular press was quick to pick up on this new mood

of public disquiet.

Daringly subversive cartoons began to appear,

hinting that the queen might not be fit to reign.

We've got the empty throne, the robes have been tossed aside,

the crown's been left behind and discarded

and the British lion is looking very grumpy indeed.

Well, I think he represents, in a way, the disgruntled public,

who hadn't seen their monarch now for the best part of six years

and this is a long time for the queen not to be visible like that.

She was not performing her duty as monarch, opening Parliament,

cutting ribbons, unveiling things.

How does Victoria respond to this growing criticism?

Well, she's very stubborn,

she thinks she can carry on trading on this kind of pot of goodwill

that she and Albert had built up over their 21 years indefinitely.

But the public are becoming impatient.

This is a huge change, isn't it?

At very first, she'd been a very diligent monarch, hadn't she?

I would say she was almost despotic.

She loved being queen, she loved the power.

She was full of energy, full of vibrancy and life

and in a way, the moment Albert came along,

that kind of vibrancy was knocked out of her as she more and more

took almost second place to him as the controlling partner.

Albert's death almost destroyed Victoria personally

and yet, his loss may have been the making of the modern monarchy.

What do you think would have happened if Albert had lived,

if he'd gone on being the knowledgeable, energetic,

interventionist monarch that he'd sort of been?

I think there would have been a serious constitutional crisis.

And of course, this is the irony, because, in a way,

Albert's death changed the course of history, in that

there might have been a much more major confrontation,

because Albert fundamentally was getting much too powerful.

So do you think that Albert's dying, in a way,

ensured the survival of the monarchy as a weakened,

more ceremonial, more feminine institution?

Absolutely, that's the huge irony of this terrible tragedy,

is that, in fact, it probably saved the monarchy.

Victoria's long withdrawal from public life

dramatically reduced the political significance of the crown.

But in Albert's death,

she found a new way to exert her moral influence.

When she eventually emerged to face her subjects once again,

she was a monarch transformed.

This is an everyday outfit of Victoria's from the 1890s.

And you can see here, from the size of the bodice,

that she was now pretty much as wide - that's the waist,

as she was tall - that's the length of the skirt.

This is 30 years since Albert's died

but she's still plunged into deepest, darkest mourning.

As well as the black dress,

we've got a black cape to go round the shoulders, in crepe,

which is the definitive mourning material, very dull.

And here's a matching armband to go with it.

The only other colour that she wore was white.

This is her widow's cap, her sad cap as her daughter Beatrice called it.

It forms a little peak over the forehead there

and the streamers flowed down over the shoulders at the back.

She also wore white underwear, but that was only because black dye

was still too unstable to be worn against the skin.

Here's the defining image of Victoria, the widow in black.

And this is how she presented herself to her people.

At her Diamond Jubilee in 1897,

she didn't appear in a crown, she wore widow's weeds and a bonnet.

She'd become much more than the mother of the family,

she'd become a matriarch, the mother of the whole nation and this

was a new way to be a queen, to get her authority from her morality.

While Victoria became a model widow in black,

the wayward Prince of Wales was cultivating a very different image.

The account books of his Savile Row tailor detail

the expansion of both the royal wardrobe and the royal waistline.

This book contains Edward's personal measurements.

When he first came in 1860, he was just 19 years old,

slim and slender, his waist then was 29-and-a-quarter inches.

But as the years went by, his life of pleasure took its toll.

By 1905, once he was king, his waist had gone up to 46-and-a-half inches.

He'd basically spent those years at one long country house party,

with competitive shooting and gambling and gourmet meals

and a procession of socialite mistresses.

The clothes he ordered were suitable for a life like this.

Here we've got him ordering fancy trousers and a lounging coat

and here a blue silk smoking jacket

to wear at Sandringham,

his new country house that was the centre of this pleasure-seeking.

And down here, to match the coat,

a blue velvet cigar case.

Now, his mother Victoria hated Edward smoking.

In fact, she felt that his whole life was full of self-indulgence.

Her own court at this time was very quiet,

very respectable, very mournful

and she felt that he was bringing the monarchy into disrepute.

As she wrote to one of her daughters, "He more and more shows

"how totally unfit he is for ever becoming king."

And by the time she died, on the 22nd January 1901, it wasn't

just the queen but most of her people who expected the new king,

Edward VII, to make a very disappointing monarch.

Edward was a reluctant king.

"I'd have liked it 20 years ago," he said.

You can understand his lack of enthusiasm.

His mother had endlessly told him he wasn't up to the job

and others shared her doubts.

And despite all the trappings of imperial majesty,

he inherited less power than ever before.

Even with the inauspicious start, though,

Edward would be a surprising success as king.

He seemed to grasp what the role had to be in the 20th century

and to know just how far he could go within its limits.

He had a natural feeling for how to reign as opposed to rule.

Above all, he understood the power of appearances.

This is Edward's monument to Victoria,

with her statue looking right down the middle of the Mall.

And Edward redesigned this whole area as a vast stage,

for the performance of epic public ceremonies.

It's tempting to see the statue as Edward's revenge

on his reclusive mother, because he's placed her right at the centre

of all the razzmatazz and spectacle that she'd done such a lot to avoid.

I think the monument's also Edward's intention for the future

of the monarchy and he saw it very differently from Victoria.

He felt that the survival of the institution depended on pomp

and circumstance and the art of putting on a good show.

By the time Edward came to the throne,

the state opening of Parliament had come to display two things -

the monarchy's symbolic importance

and its political impotence.

Since Albert's death, Victoria had reluctantly performed

the ceremony just seven times in 40 years.

So here we've got a letter informing the Lord Great Chamberlain that

"it is not Her Majesty's intention to open Parliament in person."

What sort of risks does Victoria run in refusing to do what is her duty?

Well, the only thing that makes the monarchy survive is its visibility.

And they have to be seen, they have to perform, they have to go

round opening hospitals, receiving bouquets off some small children.

If they don't do that, there's no purpose in them.

But then when we turn forwards to the next year,

Victoria has died, her son, Edward VII, has come to the throne

and here we've got almost exactly the same letter

but it's got a very different conclusion and it says that

"it IS His Majesty's intention to open Parliament in person."

Yes, Edward's decided that he'd like to do it and he wants to do it

and he needs to do it.

What's the arrangement that he makes to refashion

this ceremony as he wants it?

Well, he makes a lot of detailed changes to the ceremony itself,

but the real change is his presence and his presence in state.

He's in a gilded coach, he's accompanied by the Horse Guards

with some plumes flying, breastplates glistening.

He's wearing the regal crown, the great crown on his head.

So he's giving the people ceremony, he's giving them exhibition,

he's giving them flamboyance. He's enjoying every minute of it,

but it's got a great purpose as well, it's making him more popular.

I like this bit here,

it says the king is quite happy with the number of tickets he's

received for his friends and someone has put in brackets, "ladies".

I think this shows a certain nerve, let's put it frankly.

These are the king's mistresses who will all turn up together.

It's an extraordinary situation when you think of it, how many dozens of

women, all who knew that they slept from time to time with the king,

sitting in a row or in two rows in a gallery of the House of Lords.

When you think about it, it's bizarre, isn't it?

-It is to us, yeah.

-Well, but not to him.

I don't know whether it's to his credit or not,

but demonstration that he didn't care a damn.

What are some of the other things that Edward says

that he wants changed?

The first one is the specification that the queen shall have

her throne next to him.

It will be similar to his but it will be smaller than his.

The more I've thought about this document,

the more I've felt sorry for the poor old man.

I mean, he's there sitting in Windsor or Buckingham Palace

and there's nothing better to do

than worry about the size of the queen's throne.

Not a very enviable life, is it?

It just shows the limitations of monarchy.

You're messing about with little bits of trivia,

rather than getting on with something worth doing.

It's ironic, really, isn't it?

He's made this a much more royal occasion.

He's there, the queen's there,

all the princes and princesses are there.

There's a lot more show attached to it,

but in reality, the monarchy's less powerful than ever.

I think it's a very human characteristic -

the weaker you are, the bigger noise you make.

In Yorkshire they say, "If you can't fight, wear a big hat."

And this is the king not able to fight for power

but wearing a big hat.

In place of private morality, Edward offered public magnificence.

In his brief reign of nine years,

he'd established a tried and tested model of modern monarchy

for his successors to follow.

Unlike his father, George V didn't have much natural charisma.

He didn't enjoy making speeches or public appearances.

In previous centuries, this could have been a real drawback,

but what his subjects wanted, particularly during World War I,

was diligence, sobriety and unflashy hard work, and these they got.

And George had two essential characteristics

for a 20th century monarch.

Firstly, a self-sacrificing sense of duty and secondly,

brutal pragmatism when it came to the survival of the institution.

For a man with so much respect for tradition,

he carried out one act of quite startling reinvention.

At the lowest point of the war, he broke two centuries

of royal ties with Germany. He changed his family's name

from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the much more British-sounding Windsor.

This is a king who understood

that he ignored popular opinion at his peril.

During the First World War,

George had watched aghast as the crowned heads of Europe tumbled,

among them his cousins, the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar.

He became convinced that

if the British monarchy was to survive, he and his family

must dedicate themselves to tireless public service.

At the forefront of this royal charm offensive,

he placed his son and heir, the future Edward VIII.

As Prince of Wales, Edward took on a new role

as a sort of roving ambassador for the crown.

He visited what seems like every single corner of the empire

and it has to be said, these tours were a roaring success.

He had an instinctive feel for the sort of youthful informality

that people would just love.

And that's captured in this quintessential 1920s object,

a set of cigarette cards recording the places he visited.

Here he is with the cowboys.

This one's called Welcome to Barbados.

Here's the prince with a little wallaby in Australia.

Here he's being escorted by a smiling Maori belle

and this one sums it all up - Our Genial Prince.

People started to call him Prince Charming.

It seems that Edward was doing a much better job as Prince of Wales

than either his father, George VI, or his grandfather, Edward VII.

Edward was shaping up to be the perfect monarch

for the 20th century.

But Edward's private letters reveal his true feelings

about his official duties.

In 1920, the prince was on a tour of Australia.

From here he wrote home to Mrs Freda Dudley Ward,

wife of a Liberal MP, mother of two and his current mistress.

Edward's talking here about the "ghastly tour"

that he's on at the moment.

He's worn out but he must carry on as usual,

with "camouflaged smiles" and so-called cheeriness.

Oh dear, he's not enjoying it at all.

Well, this is a rather interesting paradox, isn't it?

Between the kind of public persona and the private passions

that are seething away.

Because we know from press reports,

these tours went down rather well, that they did cement

imperial authority in far-flung parts of the globe.

He was popular, he was seen as the embodiment of youth and poise

and vigour and exuberance and all these kinds of things.

And yet, we also know from his letters that he absolutely hated it.

He'd spend all his time in private, railing against the fact

that he was there and pined to be home, to be back in the old country

and at this point, in the arms of Mrs Freda Dudley Ward.

Here's a bit, he said, "Perhaps I would become something

"like my bloody father or even worse, if I lost you."

So he sees her as a sort of bulwark against royal duty

and his proper job as Prince of Wales.

He sees her, yes, as a kind of rock and a bulwark,

but I think the question one has to ask is,

how he thought this relationship was actually going to pan out.

-But she's married.

-She's married.

-He's crazy.

-He's the Prince of Wales.

There's something quite infantile about the letter, really.

He's writing to his mistress in baby language.

He was "cwying himself to thleep."

He's writing with a lisp and he says here

"I'll be such a good little boy, my Fredy."

This is very infantile stuff, isn't it?

It is. It's this kind of perpetual boyishness that he both cultivated

and I think had cultivated for him.

Because the newspapers used to call him the little man.

What do you think this letter presages for the future?

I think it's very ominous, I think it foreshadows all kinds of trouble.

This is only 1920, he's only just started on these imperial tours.

He's only just become the public face

of this renascent British monarchy and already he's seething about it,

already he's expressing his dissatisfaction,

already he's talking about his father and the other members

of the royal family in the most disparaging terms.

And I think there's a whole heap of trouble looming across the horizon.

In 1924, Edward paid a much publicised visit to New York.

He was now 30 and his continued failure to marry was

causing his father and his own advisers growing concern.

Inevitably, Edward's status as the world's most eligible bachelor

made him a prime target for the American press.

Edward found himself very much at home in America,

he liked the energetic pace of life there.

But the rules of the game regarding the press were very different.

His every single move was closely followed by hordes of journalists.

They were effectively treating him like a Hollywood celebrity.

The prince said that he resented the spying

of "those damned Yank pressmen."

He was on the front page of the paper every single day

of his tour, no matter how trivial the story.

Here we've got...

"Heir To The Throne Laughs At Joke."

And here we've got...

"Prince Flees From Girls at Polo Fields."

Lower down, sub-heading -

"Girls See Him, Anyway".

Now, piles of these cuttings made their way back to

Buckingham Palace and reached the desk of George V

and the king and his more straight-laced courtiers

were absolutely scandalised.

Away from the limelight, Edward sought out aristocratic refuges

like Belton House, home to his old friend Lord Brownlow.

Hidden away in the depths of the Lincolnshire countryside,

it guaranteed the prince's privacy.

And by 1934, he'd found another married woman to accompany him

to this and other royal retreats.

Lord and Lady Brownlow's visitors book shows who came to stay here

in the 1930s and there's some very famous names.

We've got Cecil Beaton

and Evelyn Waugh

and Ernest Simpson and a certain Wallis, his wife.

She was the Prince of Wales' new mistress.

On the very next page, we have Edward himself.

Edward arranged for Wallis to be included in his invitations

to country houses and when he was here at Belton,

he felt he was a million miles away from Buckingham Palace.

At a private house, he believed he could act like a private individual

and only this charmed circle need know what he was up to.

But this was dangerously naive.

The fears of his father and Edward's advisers were very well founded.

On the 20th January 1936,

George V died and Edward inherited the throne.

His father had warned,

"After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months."

It now looked like Edward might fulfil this prediction even faster.

Forced to assume a role he'd never really wanted,

the new king seemed to be on the verge of a mental breakdown

and after decades of respectful silence about his private life,

the autumn of 1936 saw news of Edward's affair

splashed all over the British press.

But the king stubbornly clung onto his one source of emotional stability.

Whatever the cost, he refused to give up Wallis.

Contemporary reports of their relationship suggest that

she was very much the dominant figure, he was very much subservient

and that he rather liked this.

I mean, there are accounts of dinner parties,

at which they were both present, at which he would be in a state

of almost perpetual terror lest he offend her.

It's that kind of, I think,

domineering relationship, almost, that she had over him.

If Edward had been born 100 years earlier than he was,

you can imagine it would have been kind of acceptable for him

to have Mrs Simpson as a longstanding mistress and for him

to have been king, but he's just not going to get away with it, is he?

He would have had much more room for manoeuvre

100 or 150 years previously.

Public morality, certainly, in the second half of the 19th century

because much more middle-class

and upper-class people were much more likely to be judged

by the standards of those lower down the social scale.

And the great shock, I think, to Edward's system was,

suddenly the newspapers, certainly the UK newspapers,

had no mention of Mrs Simpson before, suddenly she's emblazoned

on every page and Edward found that the public wouldn't stand it.

Bourgeois morality wouldn't put up with Mrs Simpson,

it was as simple as that.

Once Wallis was granted a divorce,

it became clear that the king was intent on marrying her.

But Edward's public position now made it impossible for him

to fulfil his private desires.

Parliament refused to grant permission for the king's marriage.

And as monarch, he no longer had the power to defy the politicians.

When Edward gave up the throne to marry Wallis,

he was doing something that no king had ever done before,

he was declaring himself unfit to rule.

He wasn't a monarch, he was just a man and an unhappy one at that.

This is how he put it in his abdication speech.

"I have found it impossible to discharge my duties as king

"without the help and support of the woman I love."

Princess Charlotte and Queen Victoria had paved the way to this,

the idea that even a monarch can't live without love.

And this was the end of a journey that had started 500 years before.

Henry VIII had been this figure with god-like powers,

powers that had trickled away over the course of half a millennium,

to leave this uneasy truce between Parliament, public opinion

and a man who wasn't up to the job.

But of course the abdication wasn't the end for the monarchy,

far from it.

The Royal Family now closed ranks, replaced Edward and marched on.

It was the same as ever -

when faced with failure, the British monarchy reinvents itself

and will continue to do so

for the foreseeable future.

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