Queen Victoria At Kensington Palace With Lucy Worsley

[Music] i'm here in the beautiful gardens of kensington palace in london this has been one of the principal residences for the royal family since 1689 when william and mary moved in i'm here today to talk about one of its most famous residents queen victorian tell me about her talk to one of my favorite historians lucy wesley lucy as always you showed me a good time you've now brought me into a backstage what's the word for this this is not open we're in kensington palace it's not open to the public this room and yet it's the most important room here well it is this isn't it's used for um education groups and special sessions so only the special people get to come in here and this is the room where queen victoria slept well before she was queen victoria and this is the room in which perhaps my favorite moment in her life happened which was that she was asleep in her bed that morning in june 1837 and then she was woken up very early with news that visitors had come to the palace and there with the archbishop of canterbury and the lord chamberlain and they were kneeling down and kissing her hand and telling her that she'd now become the queen and the cool thing is that she was only 18. amazing and what do we know about her childhood in this room because it was quite unusual wasn't it well one of the reasons that it's so joyful when she sort of becomes the queen and emerges from her shell and the duckling becomes the swan is that she's had a weird semi-abusive childhood here at kensington palace she was brought up by her mum who was a single parent her father died and her mom didn't have all of that all that much confidence in herself and she'd fallen rather into the clutches of this villainous character called john conrad and he set something up that was called the kensington system that sounds quite sinister and it was partly it was about protecting her and keeping her safe so she wasn't seen in public very often she was kept here she wasn't allowed to play with other little girls um it was partly pr and that was in a way a good idea because um it meant that she wasn't associated in people's minds with her very unpopular uncles who were kings george iv and then king william iv so that was kind of a good aspect of the system but the third aspect is that it was about breaking her spirit and she was kept under surveillance and there was you know control of her food and that sort of thing and she remembered her childhood later as a desperately unhappy time so when she becomes queen it's like right away with all of that i'm not having any of that nonsense i'm in charge now how you've just written this brilliant biography of her what did how much do you think that childhood trauma affected her personality outlook the way she was as a mother in later life well i think it was it was hugely important um because it was in the way it could have been the breaking of her had she been a weaker mushier kind of person but in fact it was the making of her because she learned to cope with pressure and the extraordinary what interests me about victoria and what i've written about quite a lot is how she had to work within the rules of being a victorian woman which were weird and complicated from our point of view and one of the first rules is as a girl in the early 19th century is that you are demure you're good you don't draw attention to yourself and yet she's going to live in this pressure cooker of attention for the whole of her life she's going to be a global celebrity so growing up under surveillance was kind of a training for that okay well that's a positive spin on what sounded like a brutal experience but can i just ask about 19th century england and to today kensington palace the pub public are allowed in here look at this beautiful lake out there it's a beautiful day in spring in the uk here sunshine through these windows how would she have looked out these windows and seen normal people were people excluded from this area how how big was the sanitary area around victoria well kensington palace then as it is today had a sort of rural feel because although we're in the middle of london it has all these gardens all around it the is here in the first place for the air the healthy qualities of the air because william iii for whom it was built he suffered from asthma so he couldn't live a white hall down by the river it was too wet and smoggy for his lungs so the gardens are very lovely and they were open to the public victoria's future subjects would stand up against the gate looking in peering in seeing if they could get a glimpse of her but there was a sort of healthy distance kept between her and them and there is a sense being right here in the middle of the gardens that if you were living under the kensington system nobody could hear you scream so that morning she's just found out she's she's been woken up told her uncles that she's the queen uh what did she what were her movements well she went through this way in order to start the day's business which had all been sort of laid out in advance for her so that she knew that she had to um go and have her first meeting with her prime minister okay who was it was kinky lord melbourne oh yes very kinky lord melbourne who we know to have been a spanker and quite a dodgy character in a lot of ways not the source of man that you would leave your 18 year old daughter with but what he did have was immense savoir faire and knowledge of the world and he was a pretty gifted politician so she came through here okay you're getting you're getting all behind the scenes this is very exciting [Music] this was originally uh designed as an exercise and picture gallery and all of these really grand georgian state apartments at kensington palace they became the subject of sort of amusing but distressing territorial battles when victoria was growing up because she and her mom were allowed to live downstairs in some pokey little rooms and because this small unit the unit at kensington was at odds with the main body of the royal family they were supposed to stay downstairs in the pokey little rooms but gradually they took over more and more these big grand rooms upstairs um thinking this is the future queen here she deserves better accommodation but at this when victoria was growing up she had quite a lot of other older cousins and it was only as they began to die one by one that it became clear that she would be the one oh i see he would inherit the fight i didn't actually know that so when did it become really pretty clear from what age do you think right it's going to be me possibly about 11. it's not entirely clear there's this famous scene that's supposed to have unfolded in the school room at kensington palace with victoria's governors who's this fantastic woman called louise layton she she comes over as a dry old stick but i think that lakeson had sort of fire in her belly and she was definitely on victoria's side against the system and there's this famous scene that latex and records in her memoirs which is that um they're looking at the family tree together one day and victoria says hang on hang on who's who's who's next is it me and layson says yes it is you and victoria is supposed to have said i will be good now i've drilled down into this moment in some detail because it sounds too good to be true for me and i do think that much as i love leighton layton is the woman who taught victoria that it's better to be wicked than to be weak she is one of the one of the legacies that she made to this princess who was supposed to be quiet and good and all of these other early 19th century sorts of things but i think that the i will be good scene is layton's own sort of post-factual dramatizing of the situation would an 11 year old girl really say that it's it fits in with victorian culture that's what the victorians would have liked to have believed that an 11 year old girl would have said but i don't think it's very true and there are other sources that sort of contradict it my daughter would say something like i will i will kick ass and steal everybody's money absolutely not very sweet yeah um so this was all divided up okay and so and and i was asked about kennesa paris as a when when she became queen she banished her mum sort of yes what else did did she remain here or did she go to buckingham palace or what was her where did she choose to take up residence she was out of here this was to her a place of unhappy memories so she went off as soon as she could to buckingham palace and she started throwing balls and parties and enjoying her new sort of power that she had it wouldn't go on like that she had all sorts of buffets and problems in her early reign but the first year of it she laughed was she was it was she sort of quite naive did she know how to socialize people are in age and and men and things like that how did it how did she never get worse you see with with victoria a lot of me thinks what are the rules of the age and how did she cope with overcoming them because that's what she had to do she had to break through this expectation that she was supposed to be a non-entity as as victorian girls uh pre-victorian girls were expected to be so and she did that with such conviction she became such a determined eccentric monstrous person in some aspects of her personality that i think that she just had enormous charisma and sort of reserves of something within her um it's i think of her reign as being successful in terms of you know the monarchy i'm not saying that monarchy is the best form of government but she was in many ways by biological chance of her gender the perfect monarch because she was able to get through all of these 60 years of her reign without making any huge missteps and because she was female and was able to absorb the pressure of being monarchy because of of being the monarch because of this character that she had in a way she was the perfect monarch for the 19th century because all over europe other monarchs were having revolutions carried out against them friends were falling but in britain because we had this this woman less threatening not going to bother overthrowing her she's kind of um a stealth monarch if you like she was the perfect woman for the age as it turned out and she channeled that sort of victorian spirit of philanthropy didn't she's very active she sort of did presumably she's trying to this is debatable okay good tell me okay was queen victoria a good philanthropist probably not no um it was her it was her son and his generation who began to come up with this idea that the monarchy should be a force for philanthropy um victoria amassed wealth during the course of her reign particularly under the stewardship of albert he was very good at this sort of thing one of the ways in which albert got his hands on the levers of power was initially for reforming the wasteful royal household once he had done that he thought i'm gonna move on i'm gonna start reforming the country now so it wasn't part of the philanthropic model of monarchy just yet and she was deeply socially conservative she really felt that people ought to stay in their proper places in life she said what's the point of educating people who are going to be servants that sort of thing which is most regrettable so victoria has come into this room wearing a dressing gown or not oh well the very first part of the morning she was in her dressing gown but she did get dressed into a very simple black dress because her uncle had just died of course very sad and then she went down this way okay she makes her first public appearance really so in front of who well in front of um about i think there were even 200-ish of them grandees grandies they're called the privy counsellors and they all started rushing to the palace just as soon as they got the news uh to hold the first meeting it's called the accession council and at it everybody says yes you're the queen and she says yes i am the queen and so to get to it she had to go down this staircase which is important in the mythology of kensington palace because part of the system's rules one hears that she wasn't allowed to go downstairs without holding somebody's hand it sounds like a factoid doesn't it yes it sounds like it's not really true so i went deep into this and eventually found a 19th century courtier called lord esha and he recorded that one of queen victoria's daughters had told him that queen victoria had told her that it was true about the hand holding on it's one of those satisfying moments when you finally skewer something to be true or not true but you know the ironic thing is that the stairs are really that's not a bad idea you can see why the hand holding might have been instituted but on the day the first day of her reign once she was queen no more hand-holding now she came down all alone so she came down here now we're going to go through this no entry signs we're going to go through sign here so that's a nice thing to be able to do oh and it's working progress here the builders are in so these oh look at this look at this this is great this is our new toy these these rooms these are the rooms downstairs where queen victoria was actually living as opposed to the big grand state's apartments upstairs okay and this little funny-looking thing is queen victoria's traveling bed really yes which we have i never i know it doesn't it looks like a table upside down no no it's all comes apart it's all held together with these little they're so clever so it could be flat pads yes and um the place it holds in our story is that during the later years of the kensington system she did begin to make these things that i call her publicity tours and conroy although he's definitely the villain of the story was a man with a good grasp of the business of pr and he did start to arrange these stage-managed tours through the kingdom she'd stay in the houses of noblemen she'd take her own bed with her obviously wow and this was to give glimpses of the coming queen and it started to build up this sense of anticipation and support for her coming reign so we always like a royal bed we like a grand state bed with plumes and a canopy and you know masses of uh curtains and decoration and whatever whatever but we also like um a simple it's quite simple like that yeah i would not fit on that bed that is a simple fact right so she's come through she's coming through here oh yes yes yes she's progressing through the palace we are now going to go through into the red saloon these are the rooms that on the 24th of may are going to be opened up to our visitors okay in their new victorian splendor how do you decide because this building is a georgian building it's a lake stewart building it's a victorian building how you do you just insert exhibitions suit you guys the stories you want to tell research and what we think important is that is important at any given time changes actually so the last time these rooms were done more than 10 years ago they actually told the story of victoria and albert and one of the things we're thinking now in 2018 2019 is hang on albert didn't live here yeah she should be the heroine of her own who cares about alba exactly so we have made them queen victoria's own childhood rooms again and this is where she made her first public appearance let's go so on the first day of her reign she came in here imagine it completely full of men in black that was the patriarchy just crammed into this room the establishment and they had come to judge her there's no getting away from that and she's an 18 year old tiny girl as well really short insignificant looking but with poise and that's what impressed them all they said there was so much more here than was expected and the duke of wellington he said she not only filled her chair she filled the room it was just an epic beginning to her reign how great you got the old iron duke here yes yes my goodness and lord melbourne he was there as well he coached her for this moment and he was so moved by it he was in tears and everybody was going down and doing the hand kissing and it all appeared to be the start of a glorious rain right we're out of the exhibition rooms and this area here is called the stone stairs the significance of the stone stairs is that when she was 16 she was standing exactly where we are and that door from the courtyard opened and in came her young german cousin albert so they first met on this spot this is where they exchanged glances with each other and you think wow there's the sizzle of the great lover fair beginning actually no they didn't take to each other at all so when did they because it was a love match when it eventually happened wasn't it it was but what is love in the 19th century these are the kind of questions that really interest me it was an arranged match they were supposed to do it they knew from birth that their families had intended this at 16 she actually said no i i just don't want to really i'm too young for this go go away albert and then she became queen and then she was having loads of fun and then after a couple of years she began to to wobble she began to experience bad press for the first time and she began to lose confidence in herself and it's so sort of sad to see that happening but it was inevitable because she was under just so much pressure to get married so by the time she reached 20 so four years after the romantic moment on the staircase she did agree to marry him and from then you know she embraced it totally and she became the perfect 19th century wife submissive in every respect but that's one of the reasons why she was such a good queen for that age because she was able to perform that role to perfection in public they had terrible vows in private yeah but that is not how they presented themselves to the world and that's not how people think of them to this day and was his death the great tragedy you know she spent the recive in mourning all that sort of stuff i mean what effect did his death have on her well it was it's you know it's seen as the great hinge in her life really isn't it and that's one of the things that we tried to overcome in our exhibition by showing that after he was out of the way she still had half of her life without him a whole another 40 years to go without him and she did regain confidence during that period and there are all sorts of advantages to being a widow in 19th century society because it's the one time in your life as a woman where you control your own wealth you're not under the control of your father your brother your husband anymore so in a way we see a return to form so victoria has this reputation as a queen empress who straddles this incredibly turbulent period in british and world history the monarchy survives it remains her descendants still sit on the throne how much of that is down to her and how much of it is luck or britain's imperial position or or wealth at the time if you've got a huge rapacious greedy organization like the british empire that's going around the world snapping up other people's territory it's kind of brilliant politics that the head of it is a little old grandmother dressed in black she doesn't look like she's evil does she the deaf star isn't ruled over by a little old lady in a bonnet it's ruled over by cruel looking darth vader it's just ideal that she was a little old lady in terms of politics and in terms of politics is this a reign in which we see the last proper royal interventions in our politics does she craft this new monarchy that becomes above politics a sort of unifying symbolic figure um what her reign saw was the last remaining vestiges of absolutism falling away and a new sort of influential rather than powerful monarchy developing and albert had quite a different model he wanted the monarchy to be more of a force for intervention in politics for making the world a better place but that didn't work that wasn't quite appropriate in britain and there is an argument that if albert had lived if he'd gone on longer there would have been a revolution because the politicians wouldn't have stood for this but what victoria brought to the party was not albert's intellectual intelligence he clearly was a very clever man what she bought was emotional intelligence and she was a very instinctive politician i sort of feel that today she could be a columnist in the daily mail she just had a way of reaching out very directly to ordinary middle england and making those people feel that the monarchy was on their side and that's why the monarchy survived into the 20th century when so many others didn't lucy as ever captivating extraordinary tour around the palace thank you very much indeed tell us uh book an exhibition my book about queen victoria is called queen victoria daughter wife mother widow and our new exhibition that you've seen in progress today that's not the finished thing that's a behind-the-scenes glimpse it's all going to be ready for you on the 24th of may which is queen victoria's 200th birthday [Applause] [Music] thanks for watching this video on the history hit youtube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated history channel history hit dot tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 545,047

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, queen victoria, lucy worsley, kensington palace, lucy worsley documentary, lucy worsley regency, kensington palace gardens, kensington palace documentary, lucy worsley dan snow, lucy worsley full episodes, lucy worsley full documentary, lucy worsley queen victoria, lucy worsley queen victoria documentary, lucy worsley kensington palace, dan snow, dan snow history hit, dan snow documentary, dan snow history, dan snow lucy worsley

Id: yij5LSuT70k

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022