Fit to Rule... Hanoverians to Windsors

for centuries kings and queens have been set apart from the rest of us depicted as godlike Giants or vile warriors or fertile mothers of the nation but if you strip away the regal facade the reality is very different we've had mad models 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 armor 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 strength 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 seems 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 7:00 p.m. on Monday the 3rd of 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 6 o'clock 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 sown the whole future that 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 the third had lost touch with reality and his son and heir the Prince Regent was deeply unpopular and addicted to drinkin drugs but his daughter Charlotte looked set to rescue both the dynasty and the monarchy itself she offered the tantalizing prospect of a fresh start for the crown and the birth of an entirely new concept a happy royal family in 1816 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 an open letter it's surprisingly unroyal and it's in Charlotte's very exuberant and slightly out of control the 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 mold they wanted something different and 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 labor was Sir Richard Croft the country's leading male Midwife he's left us a minute-by-minute record of his most important deliveries well it's an extraordinary a document it's a very detailed account of a birth in the early 19th century so she goes into labor at 7 o'clock on the monday mm-hmm at 11 o'clock on Tuesday morning she had her later to the size of a crown piece but very thin so that's not very much progressing 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 color that doesn't sound good no 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 labor that it starts pulling 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 went on exactly this was the most important baby in 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 and 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 ear and she feels unwell she throws up very tragically she dies at about 2:30 in the morning he says here then the scene closed at half past two 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 hemorrhage caused her to bleed to death Croft was tortured by feelings of guilt but 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 monarchies next two generations after the tragedy Leopold opened up the gardens of Clermont 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 - 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 with the grief that was felt for Charlotte as one contemporary put it it was as if every house in the country had lost a favorite child Charlotte's death was a national catastrophe it robs 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's on a sort of funerary monument is this really macabre isn't it - drink your tea out of a teapot commemorating a dead princess yes and it was a relatively new thing of course what was commemorated 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 of course and in fact the phrase England's rose that we all know from Elton John's song for Diana that the very same term was used 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 the third 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 loyal 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 Pinder put it like this hot and hard each royal pair are at its hunting for the air but to another poet Shelley this wasn't comedy this was tragedy in his poem England in 1819 he said that George the third 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 Kling Shelley's capturing here a new public mood a sense that George the third 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 the 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 owed 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 mul 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 governesses 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 Leeds and 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 backstory from 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 ma no no they wanted a new kind of Monica more a monic 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 the carriage at them so it's like doing a publicity campaign for a celebrity today there occasionally allowed to appear in the right place with the right people at the right time and this all builds an appetite yes they wanted her to be popular and they wanted to be well-liked but all of this was highly controlled it was all about managing the image so that the when she did come to the throne she would have a kind of a base of popularity people would know her people would recognize 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 core in the summer of 1835 Victoria made a grueling 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 ty for it well 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 saying Toya 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 sickroom 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 man's gate 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 the fourth 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 fought at her mother and Sir John's best efforts and would reign entirely by herself ironically it was their training that a 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 of 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 counselors 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 if she didn't get it she'd throw a temper tantrum it had created a personality that was willful 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 the Eighth had been responsible only to God his successors had been on servile 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 that 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 looked 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 while the stupid and his mother feared that he was not fit to inherit her throne to get to the root of his bob ylim albert turned to the new pseudoscience of phrenology phonologists analyzed the size and shape of the head supposedly to reveal an individual's intelligence and character in October 1853 Tain's leading practitioner George Coon examined Bertie's skull so his Kunz reports of his visit what actually happened um it's clear from the report that he has concerns serious concerns about Bertie and his development he stresses what his brain is he's abnormal the quality of the brain of the Prince of 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 and commented upon and it says here that the organs of combativeness self esteem and firmness yes they're in excess now where would they be then well if we look at a phonological head from the period they would be organs number five which is round rare which are part of the propensity s 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 for firmness firmness see he was often commented upon by his tutors he was very a very obstinate child very uncooperative yes used to fly into temper DSG unless yes some others that would be Alban 15 whom also says here I'm afraid that there's a great deficiency in the intellectual in Bertie's case yes that the area of the forehead would be small and and in that Koon would be too polite to say so Miss report but in that Kuhn believed he took after his mother he'd observed queen victoria that we opted for soon after she came to the phone 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 uh means essentially but she's rather thick yeah Prince Albert and Combe have a discussion about where Bertie gets it from has he inherited it and Kuhn says I stated plainly my suspicion that his son and inherited not only the quality of the brain buzzes form from King George the third and I pointed out all that this implied in the implication is George the third 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 phonological analysis but the crucial thing for Combe is what whatever the configuration of the brain there was no inevitability about this process but through education any tendency toward 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 mold his children into practical responsible and virtuous members of society and restrict discipline and hard work he believed he could reform Bertie's character and make him a worthy successor to victoria the swiss cottage symbolizes everything that prince albert's 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 Nellie Clifton the news did not go down well at home when Prince Albert discovered that his son had lost his virginity to Nellie he was thrown into anguish he wrote Bertie a letter saying this experience of course in 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 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 is a moment of reconciliation the truce they would only last for three weeks the next time Bertie saw his father he was on his deathbed on the 14th of December 1861 Albert died at Windsor Castle he was just 42 his doctors believed that typhoid fever was the blame but Victoria was convinced that the stress caused by Bertie's behavior had also played a part the newly widowed Queen retreated to Osborn 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 that 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 marks 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 brokenhearted 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 a 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 describe Victoria as clinically depressed she definitely was very very depressed and also suffering an extreme clinical form of grief that now is recognized and of course today she'd be having bereavement counseling but the trouble is she was queen she was monarch and there was 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. Jenna 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 you know 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 an 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 unnamed person put up a sign on the gates 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 - the seclusion of Osbourne 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 the first 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 rain we've got the the empty throne the the robes have been tossed aside the Crown's being left behind and discarded and the British lion is looking very grumpy indeed 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 just not performing her duty as monarch opening parliament cutting ribbons unveiling things how does Victoria respond to this growing criticism what 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 there 21 years indefinitely but public are becoming impatient this is a huge change isn't it a very first she'd been a very diligent monarch and she I would say she was almost despotic she loved being Queen she loved the power she was full of energy full of vibrancy in life and in a way the moment Albert came along that 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's 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 over at 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 that's the huge irony of this terrible tragedy is that in fact you probably saved the monarchy Victoria's long withdrawal from public life dramatically reduced the political significance of the crown but in Albert's death he found a new way to exert her mol influence when she eventually emerged to face her subjects once again she was a monarch transformed this is an everyday outfit of Victorious 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 morning as well as the black dress we've got a black cape to go round the shoulders in crepe it's the definitive morning material very dull and here's a matching armband to go with it the only other color 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 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 become a mitri of the mother 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 Edwards 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 was suitable for a life like this here we've got him ordering fancy trousers and a lounging codes and here a blue silk smoking jacket to wear at Sandringham his new country house that was the center of this Sun pleasure-seeking and down here to match the coat a blue velvet cigar case now his mother Victoria hated Edwards smoking in fact she felt that his whole life was full of self-indulgence her own court at this time was very quiet a 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 forever becoming King and by the time she died on the 22nd of January 1901 it wasn't just the Queen but most of her people who expected the new King Edward the seventh 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 who 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 Edwards monument to Victoria with her statue looking right down the middle of the mall and Edward redesigned this whole area is a vast stage for the performance of epic public ceremonies it's tempting to see the statue as Edwards revenge on his reclusive mother because he's placed her right at the center of all the razzamatazz and spectacle that she'd done such a lot to avoid I think the monuments also Edwards intention for the future at the monarchy and he saw it very differently from Victoria he felt that the survival at the institution depended on pomp and circumstance and the art of putting on a good show by the time Edward came to the phone the State Opening of Parliament had come to display two things the monarchies symbolic importance and it's 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 this is not her Majesty's intention to open Parliament in person what sort of risks Victoria run in refusing to do what is her duty well the only thing that makes the Monica survive is its visibility they have to be seen they have to perform they have to go around Oh opening hospitals recieving bouquets of small children if they don't do that there's no purpose in them then when we turn forwards to the next year Victoria has died her son Edward the seventh has come to the throne and here we've got almost exactly the same letter but he's got a very different conclusion but it says that it is his Majesty's intention to open Parliament in person yes Edwards decided that he likes to do it and he wants to do it and he needs to do it wasn't the arrangements that he makes to refashion this ceremony as he wants it well he makes a lot of detail change changes the sermon itself but the real change is his presence and his presence in state he's in his gilded coach he's accompanied by the Horse Guards from clueless flying breath rates glistening he's wearing a regal crown the great crown on his head so he's giving the people ceremony is giving them exhibition is giving them flamboyance he's enjoying every minute of it but he's got a great purpose as well it's making it 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 Kings mistresses we're all going to turn up together it's next relation when you think with how many a dozen women all of whom knew that they slept from time to time with the king sitting in a row or in two rows in a garret out of Lords when you think about it is bizarre isn't it yes yes to us women but not to him and I don't know whether 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 change the first one is the specification that Queen shall have a throne neck 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 saw it for the poor old man meaning their city in Windsor or bucking pass and there's nothing better to do than worry about the size of the Queen throne I mean 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 monarch is less powerful than ever I think it's afraid 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 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 one was diligence sobriety and unflushed hard work and these they got and George had two essential characteristics for twentieth-century monarch firstly a self-sacrificing sense of duty and secondly brutal pragmatism when it came to the survival at 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 cousin's the German Kaiser and the Russian czar 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 at this royal charm offensive he placed his son and heir the future Edward the eighth 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 at the Empire and it has to be said these tools were a warring 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'd 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 v or his grandfather Edward the seventh Edward was shaping up to be the perfect monarch for the 20th century but Edwards 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 the Liberal MP mother of two and his current mistress it was 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 camouflage smiles in inverted commas 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 the kind of public persona and the private passions the deceiving away because we know from press reports these tours went down rather well that they did cement Imperial thought Authority and far-flung parts of the globe he was popular he was seen as the embodiment of youth and poise and vigor and exuberance and all these kinds of things and yet we also know from his letters that he absolutely hated it spend all his time in private railing against the fact that he was there and timed to be home to be back in the old country and at this point in the arms of mrs. Freda Dudley Ward here's the 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 the way he sees her yes as a kind of rock and a bulwark but how he I think what the question one has to ask is how he thought this relationship was actually going to pan out she's married she's married he's crazy he's the Prince of Wales there's something quite infantile about the lesser really he's writing to his mistress in baby language he was crying himself to sleep he's writing with a lisp and he says here I'll be such a good little boy I freely this is very infantile stuff isn't it it is is this 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 lesser presages for the future I think it's very ominous I think it foreshadows all kinds of trouble this is only nineteen twenty he's only just started on these Imperial tours he's only just become the public face of this Renasant British monarchy on 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 the most disparaging terms and I think there's a whole heap of trouble looming across the horizon in 1924 Edward paid a much-publicized visit to New York he was now 30 his continued failure to marry was causing his father and his own advisors growing concerns inevitably Edwards 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 that those damned yank press men 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 subheading girls see him anyway now piles of these cuttings made their way back to Buckingham Palace and reached the desk of George the fifth and the King and his more straight-laced courtiers were absolutely scandalized away from the limelight EDD would sort out our Socratic refuges like Belton house home to his old friend Lord Brownlow hidden away in the depths of the Lincolnshire countryside it guaranteed the princes privacy and by 1934 he'd found another married woman to accompany him to this and other royal retreats Lordan lady Bramley'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 evylyn war and Ernest Simpson and a certain Wallis his wife she was the Prince of Wales his 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 a 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 Edwards advisers were very well founded on the 20th of 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 fulfill 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 Edwards affair splashed all over the British press but the King stubbornly clung on to his one source of emotional stability whatever the cost he refused to give up Wallis contemporary reports of their relationship suggests 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 to which he would be in a state of almost perpetual terror lest he offend her it's that kind of domineering relationship warmest that she had over him if Edward had been born a hundred years earlier than he was you can imagine it would have been kind of acceptable for him to have mrs. Simpson as a long-standing mistress and for him to have been king but he's just not going to get away with it Susie he would have had much more room for maneuver a hundred or 150 years previously public morality certainly in the second half of the nineteenth century became 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 the great shock I think to Edwards system was suddenly the newspapers which had previously had certainly the UK newspapers had no mention of mr. 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 simple as that once Wallis was granted a divorce it became clear that the king was intent on whirring huh but Edwards public position now made it impossible for him to fulfill his private desires Parliament refused to grant permission for the Kings 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 the Eighth had been this figure with godlike powers powers that had trickled away they were 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 tomorrow at nine two patients undergo brain surgery and we see the work carried out at a cancer unit in Manchester with keeping Britain alive and Pro Green Heaven star Chris Ramsey and Lamar all guests on Buzzcocks next

Channel: Henry Harold

Views: 982,464

Rating: 4.7176137 out of 5

Keywords: House Of Hanover (Royal Line), House Of Windsor (Royal Line), Monarchy Of The United Kingdom (System Of Nobility), England (Country), Crown Prince (Noble Rank), Crown Jewels Of The United Kingdom (Heraldic Crest), United Kingdom (Country), British Empire (Interest), Order Of The British Empire (Order Of Chivalry), Order Of The Garter (Order Of Chivalry), Middle Ages (Event), Education (TV Genre), History (TV Genre)

Id: g5cJ5V-wVDk

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 04 2014