This programme contains strong language from the start, adult
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themes, and views on the monarchy that some people may find offensive.
I didn't make any jokes when the Queen died.
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I maintained a strict silence
as I tried to sneak back out of her bedroom.
People queued for ten miles to see the Queen lying in state.
I accidentally joined the wrong queue.
At the end, there was just a Scouser who charged me a tenner
to see a dead badger in a tiara.
Royal insiders say the new King is keen to modernise the monarchy,
starting with the radical redefinition of the word "modernise"
to mean "keep exactly the same".
Of course they'll try to find ways of sounding relevant.
King Charles spoke out recently about climate change.
He said it was rare to hear such despair
in young people's voices
that aren't coming from his brother's bedroom.
To be fair, the royals are doing their bit to reduce emissions
by never flying the jewels they own back to the countries
they were stolen from.
It's time to say farewell to the monarchy.
The royal family are as much a part of our nation's history
as steam trains and genocide.
Famously, the public drew strength from the royal family
staying in London during World War II.
Presumably, they thought the Luftwaffe might hold back
if there was a risk they'd bomb their own.
But increasingly,
the British monarchy appear like animals in a zoo
that's fallen on hard times -
fidgety, balding, pacing up and down their marble cage,
pausing only to chew their own tail off
or commit a sex crime out of boredom.
So, what will happen to Britain's most boring crime syndicate?
To find out about the future of the monarchy,
we must look back at their past
because that is the premise on which I obtained
the commission for this show.
MUSIC: Rule, Britannia! by Thomas Arne.
I'm going to look at some of the most famous English
and British kings and queens
and choose one quality from each of them
that has helped to shape the monarchy as it is today.
And who better to start with than William the Conqueror?
Just smashing into the white cliffs of Dover,
a proper Brexit death.
LAUGHTER.
William the Conqueror could have conquered anywhere,
but he felt that God had chosen him
as the ruler of the isosceles triangle
of wind and racism known as England.
Before the Normans arrived,
the high point of English culture was watching the village idiot
punch a pig to death in a stone circle
to save the harvest,
and at certain time slots on Channel 5, it still is.
We know quite a lot about the Battle of Hastings
because of the Bayeux Tapestry.
It wasn't created until four years after the battle,
although, in fairness, you'd have to stitch fucking fast
to capture the action as it happened.
William the Conqueror,
he'd been fighting since he was a child, really.
So, from around seven years old,
we know that the Duke of Normandy was taught warfare.
So, he was all set for this battle. His day came.
We'll try and get a...
..an idea of what he would've been wearing in battle.
This is a short tunic,
and that's very heavy just being short, isn't it? Yeah.
And this is the full version? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
This is a slightly lighter gauge, but it's a bigger garment.
How much of a light gauge do you want?
I quite like this. I mean, I sort of think... Yeah, yeah.
But hang on. Hang on. Put yourself in a battle... Yeah.
..where it's like running into a razor blade factory...
Yeah. Yeah?
You're not just fighting the chap in front of you.
You've got everybody else fighting,
and these swords are super, super sharp.
Now you say that, I'd like both.
THEY LAUGH.
That'd be quite good going out...
That's not bad! ..on a Friday night in Glasgow.
All right, let's try this on.
You're looking good.
You want to look good,
cos you're going to be leading from the front.
You want everyone to know that the King's there.
In that time, war was a glorious thing,
so you wanted to be seen.
You had to be seen. Yes. Not like today.
War's had a bit of a bad press lately.
THEY LAUGH.
So, you, sir, are kitted up.
Yeah, I'm going to go and take what the Lord has promised me.
Let's kill some English.
King Harold was shot in the eye -
possibly the first person in Hastings to die
with a needle hanging out of his eyeball,
but not the last.
At the end of the battle, Harold was mutilated by William's men
and the dead English soldiers were stripped naked
in one of the most deeply erotic things
ever to happen on these shores.
This is Odo's house.
Odo was William the Conqueror's half-brother?
Yeah.
He is basically the boss who does all of the work,
and so that's the sort of the thing that you want to keep in the family
because you've got to make sure
you've got an eye on where the money's going.
This is the great hall of the house,
and it makes me want to have a great hall.
SHE LAUGHS It makes me, like, you know,
want to have, like, on Rightmove, an option where you can go...
"Great hall".
THEY LAUGH.
William the Conqueror,
he comes over, as everybody knows, in 1066.
Mm-hm. Kills a bunch of people at Hastings... Yeah.
..and then sort of divvies up their lands to his aristos.
So, you know, one of the things they were very, very good at
is actually record keeping, right?
So, that's how you get the Doomsday Book.
You go through it with a fine tooth comb,
see every sheep, you know, like, every little village,
every little thing, write that down,
and then it tells you how much money you can extract.
And they did a great job of that.
William says, "I'm going to extract all the taxes."
You just put these people all throughout the country,
make sure they're collecting money,
and then send it back to where he's living it large.
So, would you say William is the most important King of England
because he kind of sets the ball rolling?
Yeah, I would say so.
The thing about William is he's the one
who really sort of sets up the monarchy as we know it.
He's the one who says,
"The way that kingship works in England
"is that I give things to my friend,
"we own all the land,
"this is how it works."
We can see the unique quality William possessed was his ability
to see the position of the monarch
as primarily about the extraction of revenue -
a noble tradition that our royals,
the world's largest landowners, at about 6.6 million acres,
continue to this day.
So, this is Regent Street,
and this is owned by the Crown Estates.
It's owned by the King.
It's developed into some of the most expensive real estate
on the planet.
They get more from their flagship Apple store
than they get from all of the farmland that they own.
They own a bunch of, like, shopping centres and...?
Shopping centres, retail parks, huge amounts of farmland.
And there's the famous quote, isn't there,
from the Duke of Westminster,
the late Duke of Westminster, when he was asked,
"How would you get ahead in England?"
He said, "My advice would be to have an ancestor
"who's a close friend of William the Conqueror." Yes. Yes.
And there's land in England...
So, we have the famous statistic in Scotland
where 400 people own half of the land in Scotland. Yes. Yeah.
But it's very concentrated in England as well, isn't it?
It's hugely concentrated. Hugely unequal.
It's probably not quite as unequal as it is in Scotland,
but still about 1% of the population
own half of the land in England.
Wow.
But, like, the aristocracy is kind of quantifiable, isn't it?
There's maybe, like, a couple of thousand...
Yeah. ..Titles in England? Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
About 2,000 people who are in members
of the peerage or baronetage,
and then they own about 30% of England.
30%? 30% of England. Still!
It's like Monopoly, isn't it? Yeah. It is exactly like Monopoly.
And yet the other thing William the Conqueror did was
he formed the Royal Forest,
so then there was, like, a whole swathe of land in England
that was for the King to hunt in,
and if you... Yeah. ..if you hunted there,
you would be mutilated.
You'd have your hands chopped off. Yes. Yes.
Yeah, eyes gouged out, I think, in some of the records
of what would have happened, what would have been the punishment.
The Grosvenor family, that dates back as a nickname
to Hugh "Le Grand Veneur" - "The Fat Hunter",
who was one of the Norman barons
who came over with William the Conqueror
during the Norman Conquest.
"The Fat Hunter". "The Fat Hunter". THEY LAUGH.
Didn't want to get your eyes gouged out by the Fat Hunter.
There have always been royal scandals.
Last year, Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal titles,
though he remains a trustee of his favourite charity,
Happy Finish, which gives work opportunities
to young people in the field of what might broadly be described
as physiotherapy.
Richard III in many ways set the tone
for what would become the modern British monarchy -
a child-sacrificing cult of violent ruthless ambition
which the British public is happy to tolerate in exchange
for a long bank holiday.
Richard's reputation suffered over the years
because he was portrayed by Shakespeare
as a murderous hunchbacked villain,
as opposed to a statutory rapist like Romeo,
or, like a character in one of his light-hearted comedies,
a donkey fucker.
Here is the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
Amazing.
Richard III, it's one of the largest roles
in the entire Shakespearian canon.
It's also a fantastically charismatic part
because we love a villain.
So, a lot of great actors have played Richard III,
a lot of great actors have been drawn to it.
It isn't fact of how do you play the disability.
Do you play, you know, the hunchback,
the "bunch-backed toad"?
So, famously, Tony Sher,
my other half, in 1984, played him with crutches.
He said, you know, "If I had two crutches
"and these funny, long hanging sleeves,
"then I'm almost a spider," you know.
Plots have I laid...
That was such a massive thing. I mean, I can remember that.
So, never been to the theatre in my life,
12 years old or something,
living in a tenement in Glasgow,
I knew that he... a guy was playing Richard III on crutches,
and it was a big sensation. It was.
The Richard III Society wanted to rehabilitate
the reputation of Richard as a good king.
Amazingly, they discovered his body
underneath the car park in Leicester...
..and then discovered this skeleton with scoliosis,
which must have meant that the man was in considerable pain.
And that was really interesting to me,
because the real Richard III,
I don't know that the man was a good man.
I don't know that any medieval king frankly was...
HE CHUCKLES ..was necessarily good,
but we recognise tyranny through the template of Richard III.
An American Shakespeare scholar called Stephen Greenblatt
wrote a book about Richard III and all Shakespeare's tyrants.
Uh, he never mentions the words "Donald Trump",
but it's clearly virtually a biography of Donald Trump.
Yeah. I've read that book - Tyrant. Tyrant. Yeah, yeah.
Because he sort of analyses Richard's character
and says, "Here is a man manifestly unfit to govern.
"He's a narcissist who has enablers around him."
He said, you know, in a way, it is exactly the same with Putin,
with somebody who is indifferent to truth.
And Shakespeare is asking those very same questions, um,
about how we let ourselves be ruled by leaders
who become despotic.
Richard III appointed himself
the 12-year-old Edward V's Lord Protector.
He took an unusual approach to the role,
protecting the king by locking him in the Tower of London
and murdering him.
Of course, I can't prove Richard III murdered his nephews,
but in 1674, workmen in the Tower of London
dug up a box containing two small human skeletons.
To be fair, they could be anyone.
The Tower of London is basically the monarchy's equivalent
of Fred West's patio, but then I'm not a historian,
so I don't need to prove anything.
I could tell you that Henry V invented the fidget spinner
and the worst my producer will do is tut.
That's 550 years of layers of stuff.
He was down here, and Leicester just happened on top of him.
HE LAUGHS.
I'm always keen to learn about DNA,
mainly how not to leave it at my crime scenes,
so I went to Leicester University
to ask professor of genetics Turi King
how they used DNA to identify Richard's body.
This looks like a crime scene investigation... Yeah.
..just 500 years late.
So, Richard's got 11 injuries on him.
He's got that one on the very top of his head.
And if you look at the CT scans,
there's little flaps of bone on the inside
but it's not gone all the way through.
Done with something like a rondel dagger.
That would have made him feel really woozy,
but that wouldn't have killed him.
The ones that have killed him are these.
So, that's the base of his skull.
That's where your spinal column goes up.
He's got seven centimetres of brain exposed.
It's horrific, isn't it? It's horrific.
It's... It's medieval warfare.
I mean, I know it's really brutal, medieval warfare,
but at the same time, he's an anointed King of England.
This is pretty unusual, isn't it,
that someone would be executed on the battlefield?
So, there is a story about how he is stripped naked
and he's flung over the back of a horse,
and then humiliations are heaped upon the body.
Of course, that's a perfect opportunity for somebody
to potentially take a sword or a dagger and do that.
This is just men, isn't it?
This is like... This is what happened to Gaddafi.
It's... It's...
The interesting thing is his face.
So, quite often what would happen in battles is they would, um,
destroy the face so people aren't recognised.
They didn't do this with Richard.
Because they need to show him and say,
"This is the King. We killed him." Exactly. Exactly.
Presumably, this was a really big deal for Leicester?
It was massive.
I suppose the appeal of monarchy, the British monarchy,
is one of the most famous things in the world. Absolutely.
But also he was one of the worst... the most famous ones...
Him and Henry VIII... I know.
..are just the absolute worst ones. Yeah, yeah.
I found it really fascinating,
because obviously with the genetic analysis, I have had...
I mean, I get them now.
I get several a week even now, it's ten years later,
people saying, "I think I'm related to Richard III.
"Can you test my DNA and prove that?"
HE LAUGHS.
And I have to say to them, "Look, you know,
"it's been estimated that there are between
"one and 17 million people alive today
"who are descended from his immediate family."
We're all related to each other, and we're all related to royalty.
I just... I just think as a message, it's just brilliant,
that idea of we're all related to each other... Yeah.
..and we're all related to royalty. Yeah.
That should be the new sort of "Live, laugh, love"... Exactly.
SHE LAUGHS ..on every fridge.There you go.
King for two years,
partly because there was a recession.
A couple of years of recession,
then suddenly getting your head chopped off,
and you're buried under a car park -
something that our modern leaders might like to bear in mind.
In 1996, the divorce of Charles and Diana shook the monarchy
to its foundations in hell.
Prince Charles went on to marry Camilla Parker Bowles,
although they never had any children because, sadly,
their two species can't interbreed.
And yet, still the most famous royal divorcee is King Henry VIII.
Henry VIII is what many of us picture
when we think of a king -
a fat, shiny murderer in women's tights.
Henry was a keen hunter,
and judging from his portraits, he mainly hunted cheese.
Henry was a big believer in the divine right of kings
to rule absolutely, marry who they chose,
or promote their own range of delicious shortbread.
If our monarchy has been chosen by God,
he must have been looking down on some pretty cloudy days.
He married six women in a frenzied royal game
of shag, marry, kill, and the answer was often all three.
Here we are. Oh, my God. This is incredible.
People sort of view his relationship with Anne Boleyn
as the transition kind of from the younger Henry
into I think the despotic tyrant.
Bloated, paranoid maniac.
Yeah, that. That. Mostly that.
Anne Boleyn. The woman of the hour.
Yeah. Smart, charismatic.
If not conventionally beautiful by the standards of the time,
then making up for it in charm and wit.
In just a few short years, he annulled his marriage,
married this woman -
who was only the second commoner ever elevated to Queen -
and then beheaded her.
Yes. Yeah.
And he was...
He was maybe just touching 40 when he married her.
Yeah. He was in his early forties
when they were actually able to get married.
And then by the time he has her executed,
he's, like, 45, is he? Yeah.
I think that's very mid-life-crisis stuff.
I mean, if you're, from the time you're born,
told that you're God's vessel on Earth
and that your will is the will of God,
how can you not be a narcissist, really?
Yeah. And he really believed in the divine right of kings.
He might have been one of the only people in the country
who actually believed in it, but he did explicitly believe in it.
Maybe that's not a healthy way to live or view yourself.
So, this is, um, the bed chamber, where the magic happened.
This is where... Allegedly.
Allegedly happened. Yeah.
Beautiful view underneath the ceiling.
I think Anne Boleyn quite intelligently
or cleverly realised that as a king,
he was used to getting everything he wanted immediately,
and it would sort of be new and exciting
to have something denied,
and realised that if she played her hand right,
she could become Queen of England.
And I mean, she did.
It was a brilliant play. I mean, for me, no notes, well done.
HE LAUGHS And if she had a son,
I think the story would have ended differently.
The point at which he executes Anne Boleyn,
and just sends her away and doesn't see her...
So, he's presented with evidence, and he just says, "OK, kill her."
I mean, it's absolutely shocking.
Beheading a sovereign queen is, I mean, a mad thing to do
in the context of the time.
I mean, it's a mad thing to do now.
HE LAUGHS.
Imagine anyone having the authority to execute their own wife.
And from then, he gets progressively worse,
and the wives come quicker.
Quicker, and the executions come more easy.
I think, you know, after the first one...
It's like tattoos -
after you get one, you just want to keep getting them. HE LAUGHS.
Henry was, by the end of his life, incredibly irrational,
and his moods would affect situations more than his reason.
And I think that is one of the main arguments
against a monarchy having authoritarian power in a country,
is that an individual's whims and moods have global consequences.
Yes, it's not good, is it?
No, it's objectively bad, I think we can say.
I mean, in America,
it's bad enough when a president's whims
and moods have global consequences,
but at least we can get rid of them after a few years.
Yeah. You're talking about assassination?
Oh... THEY LAUGH.
Henry was a narcissist,
famous for multiple wives and children he paid no attention to.
Dead end.
And he understood something
that our current monarchy has learned well -
you can never be too ruthless.
Henry VIII is one of the few husbands.
Johnny Depp can feel superior to.
Only England could watch a man abuse six different women
and think, "Maybe every schoolchild should learn a rhyme
"to remember how he did it."
Henry also invented modern divorce,
and so it's his fault that you're watching this at home,
alone and unloved.
Locked gate.
HE CHUCKLES.
Princess Diana's funeral in 1997
was watched by a staggering 2.5 billion people worldwide,
eclipsing even Meghan Markle's funeral in 2024.
In many ways, it's extraordinary to think
that if Diana had only survived that car crash,
she would have gone on to live a relaxed and happy six months
before being thrown out of a hotel window in a staged suicide.
Which brings us to Lady Jane Grey...
..a young woman who illustrates a quality
seen in the monarchy throughout history -
it's unshakeable misogyny.
Jane was just a teenager when she was deposed and executed.
Of course, nowadays, if you heard about a teenage girl
being killed by the royals, you might be tempted to assume
she was some kind of witness for the prosecution.
Perhaps the misogyny of royalty is inevitable,
given that the principal role they see women as performing
is one of child-bearing.
During the birth of Edward,
Henry VIII was told that both mother and child were in danger.
He replied, "If you cannot save them both,
"at least let the child live, for other wives are easily found."
Quite the birth plan.
So, we're on the Thames,
we're in a little Tudor barge,
and this is how Lady Jane Grey would have travelled down
to the Tower of London first... Exactly.
..when she was made Queen. Yeah.
10th of July 1553,
Jane leaves on a barge like this, never to return again.
And how long was she Queen for? Cos some people say nine days.
I say 13 days, yeah, because she was Queen
from the moment that Edward VI died on the 6th of July.
That would be my argument.
Others would argue that she was Queen
from the day that she was proclaimed,
which was four days later. Mm.
Much of a muchness really, isn't it?
Much of a muchness. Not a great innings... No.
..either way.No. THEY LAUGH.
And Jane actually talks about the fact
that she never wanted the throne,
and that she had been pushed into it.
And the Duke of Northumberland,
he was Lady Jane Grey's father-in-law... Yeah.
..and he decided he'd install her.
This was a massive gamble, wasn't it? Yeah.
The throne is a really, really bloody inheritance,
and, yes, it can lead to glory, but it can also lead to disaster.
Kevin, you're making a sword here.
I mean, yeah. We don't get to make swords too much,
unless I'm making one for myself.
FRANKIE LAUGHS.
But the real key is you don't want to make it too hot
because you start burning the carbon out,
and we're trying to keep the carbon in
because that's the thing that allows it to have a sharp edge
and to hold a sharp edge.
So, very occasionally when they'd have people executed,
they'd use a swordsman.
This was the nice way to go out, wasn't it?
If you've got a swordsman, you were probably...
..you were probably a noble,
and presumably, that was a much nicer way to die
than... than the axe.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the thing is, um, the axe that I think they used
at the Tower of London at that time
was not really a head-taking axe.
Right.
From what I could tell, it was a tree-felling axe,
which is completely the wrong tool for, uh...
..for doing something like that.
It's not how you want to go out, is it,
on the end of a tree-felling axe?
There are some... some terrifying accounts
of people being executed.
If you're going to take someone's head,
you need to have it parallel to the ground like that.
And then what you're going to do is you're going to come right up
and then bring it down hard, half dropping it,
pulling with your left hand as well as pushing with your right.
And of course, there's the follow-through.
So, as the head comes off,
the axe passes right in front of you like that.
There's no way you want to stand like this.
It's almost like a reverse golf swing. Presumably...
She was sentenced to be beheaded,
and this took place on the 12th of February
in the confines of the Tower of London.
And for her actual execution, she was blindfolded
and she couldn't find the block. Yeah.
And genuine panic set in, and she cried out,
"What shall I do? Where is it?"
And fortunately for her,
there was a sympathetic onlooker who guided her hands to the block,
allowing her to compose herself once more.
God, it's so grim, isn't it? It's really grim.
Even now to think about it, it's so grim. Yeah.
I mean, this girl, let's not forget, she was probably 17 years old.
Suddenly, she is going to die,
and she has to prepare herself for that, mentally and physically.
And it's extraordinary, really,
that she did so in such a courageous way.
And, yeah, she laid her head down on the block,
she cried out,
"Lord Jesus, into thy hands I commend my spirit,"
and that was it.
It was all over with one chop.
Because Lady Jane was so young when she was Queen,
no portraits survived from her lifetime.
It was rumoured that there was one in Buckingham Palace,
but the paint ran when Prince Andrew ejaculated on it.
The royal family operate on a symbolic level.
The royals are a bit like the nation's football mascots,
with the slight difference that inside a football mascot,
there's a real human being.
Every royal coat of arms is richly symbolic.
For example, before he became King, Prince Charles's crest
showed a lion mounting another lion while a horse looks patiently on,
whereas the Duke of York's shows a lion paying £12 million
to a sex-trafficked lion cub that the lion claims it never met.
And from Queen Elizabeth I,
today's royals learned a valuable lesson -
understand your own symbolic function.
Elizabeth, in a time of conflict
between Catholicism and Protestantism,
understood that by presenting herself
as a sort of Virgin Mary incarnate, she could dilute those tensions.
And indeed, she went on to shape the worship that took place
in the Anglican church,
creating a sort of Catholicism for pussies.
Elizabeth chose not to have children.
Indeed, we can't be sure if Elizabeth ever had sex,
unlike the current King Charles who has two sons, William and Harry,
so we can be sure he's had sex at least once.
Elizabeth I proved a monarch could rule
not just by force or dynasty, but by cult of personality.
The Maritime Museum in Greenwich, they were given
one of the Armada portraits of Elizabeth I,
and they commissioned me to make a piece of work.
I just wanted to just physically embody, um,
what would it feel like to wear that much clothing,
which is essentially like a walking jewellery box, isn't it?
It's like, "Hey, look at everything I own.
"Look how rich I am."
It's pure swag, isn't it?
It's pure sort of, like, power, you know, the victor.
And there's the Spanish Armada burning in the background... Yeah.
..and there's Elizabeth, and as I remember...
With a fag, going... FRANKIE LAUGHS
..Elizabeth has her hand on a globe,
and her hand's on America.
Yeah. She's like, "Mine. I want this."
Cos Elizabeth I,
she had a strong idea of herself as a symbol, didn't she?
So, she was "the Virgin Queen". Yeah.
Just as, like, they got rid of Catholicism, she was like,
"Well, you could worship me."
"I'm a bit Virgin Mary. Look at me." FRANKIE LAUGHS.
And there's the power and the vulnerability,
cos she was this target for assassination.
The Pope said, I think from 1570, "Look, if you want to, kill her."
Yeah. Open season. Yeah.
And there were all these plots against her.
And yet, she'd go out on these progresses,
so they did a couple of dozen of those
where they just went round the country
kind of waving at people.
And that's what... that's what I wanted to recreate.
Well, she must have felt incredibly vulnerable.
Yeah.
How did people react to that when you did it?
Oh, the...
..the range of responses was amazing.
It ranged from, "I know who you are. I know who you are.
"You're Queen Victoria."
FRANKIE LAUGHS And I'd go...
Because of course, I wasn't speaking.
No-one can get close to me.
It's social distancing before we knew that term.
What, they can't get close to you because of the size of the clothes?
Physically can't get close,
so it's like you're weirdly protected.
It seems to me like a great emblem
of what royalty is, which is it's an incredible prison,
but incredibly gorgeous and luxurious
and lavish at the same time.
She survived a long time,
and that's why she's really fascinating, I think.
And one of the things she did was...
Because she constructed this image of power,
and that's what I was really interested...
Like, what does it cost you
to construct this amazing thing that says,
"Look at me. I am rich. I am in charge.
"I've just defeated the enemy.
"Here's a picture of it in case you've forgotten."
You know, that's what she's doing with this constructing of an icon,
but she's having to do it within a human body
and what does that give you.
She was in that unique position of trying to work out
how to have power and keep hold of power
whilst being a woman.
So, she was doing both things.
"If I am symbolically important enough, then I can survive."
For me, the key is this thing about being silent.
There's something about what's happened
with monarchy since the '50s
where they've kind of started talking more,
and I think there's a really interesting question
of, like, "Do we want that?
"Do we want them to talk?" FRANKIE LAUGHS.
Maybe they've struggled in the information age
because it's harder for them to obfuscate how much power they have
and how much money they have. Absolutely.
Maybe that's where they've gone wrong,
the current monarchy.
I think the present royal family
should go back to, "Just smile. Nod."
The younger members haven't really got that memo.
And how could they? Because it's deeply weird.
Whoa!
This is a replica of the Golden Hinde,
one of Francis Drake's ships,
and this ship is a tourist attraction.
When I was growing up, like, at school,
they taught us about Francis Drake, and he was an adventurer.
When you look into it, he was a lot worse than that.
Francis Drake was a slave trader.
Elizabeth I invested in that.
We have an image of Elizabeth
that's far removed from that, don't we?
We have a very sort of comic book idea of her
as this, you know, "the Virgin Queen".
So, it is a big part of how history's taught in Britain.
This history that is presented as just glorious and inspiring
is actually something that is also dark and corrupt as well.
I guess, like, in that period, the Spanish were accumulating
such massive kind of unimaginable wealth
through their colonies in South America,
and England was, at that stage, you know,
kind of like a real bit player, like, in the game,
and wanted to... wanted to get in on the action.
They needed labour, and that,
a source of that labour, you know, was from...
..was from kidnapped Africans.
And people in Elizabethan England were very quick to get in on that
because it was very profitable. Mm-hm.
Elizabeth invested money in it,
and apparently, she made so much money from the first project
that she endorsed that she paid off the national debt.
It's quite easy to, um, like, kind of...
..to kind of recast the origins of that wealth,
and people will be dazzled, you know,
by the kind of opulence and the kind of, like,
glitz and glamour of it all, so...
And in Queen Elizabeth I's time, they wouldn't have had any problem
with the idea of enslavement, generally.
The kind of notions that we have of race today didn't yet exist.
Queen Elizabeth is certainly, and Francis Drake,
are setting the wheels in motion for the kind of invention of race...
..that need to justify the enslavement of African people
whose labour is going to be needed to exploit the land
to the benefit of this country.
And Elizabeth I, she kind of dipped her toe in the water
of colonialism and slavery.
Does that then necessitate the idea of race?
Central to that dynamic is this idea of, like, a white superiority
and a black inferiority, and they are actually, you know,
kind of doing them a favour by taking them from Africa
and bringing them to civilisation, and, you know, introducing them
to both civilisation and Christianity.
So, one of the strong motivations
behind these concepts of blackness and whiteness
is the justification of the... of the transatlantic slave trade.
I always think if Britain was a person,
you'd sort of recommend therapy, wouldn't you?
SHE LAUGHS Cos you're like...
At the very least. THEY LAUGH.
"Remember all that stuff you did? You've never really apologised."
Queen Victoria, in many ways, set the template
for the current monarchy as a PR operation.
As the job of monarch itself declined in real political power,
she recast it in the public mind as a domestic scene,
as a royal family.
She understood that the fear
and awe inspired by earlier kings and queens
could be translated into affection,
and that this meant you could keep all this stuff.
At Victoria's coronation,
some 400,000 people thronged the streets.
Charles is hoping to emulate this by coinciding his coronation
with a cost of living riot.
The coronation will be a deeply uninspiring affair.
Charles is keen to avoid having any royals at the ceremony
who might cause a public embarrassment,
so he's thinking of banning Andrew, Harry, and himself.
It's rumoured that the coronation is going to be so low-key
that they'll forego the traditional behind-closed-doors human sacrifice.
Instead, they'll save money by simply running over a game keeper
in a Land Rover.
Almost immediately after being crowned,
Queen Victoria fell in love with Albert.
In her diary, she describes him as "extremely handsome,
"eyes large and blue,
"and had a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth".
It seems that despite all her education,
she simply didn't know the word "face".
Queen Victoria gave birth to her eighth child using chloroform.
Nowadays, royal family members are more likely to use it to conceive.
Victoria suffered serious postnatal depression.
During her depression, she hallucinated spots in her eyes
that turned to worms.
Fearing she was losing her mind,
Albert took her to Scotland, where she would blend in.
Victoria had her first sight of Scotland
after arriving by ship at Leith.
If ever a 4'11" woman with nine kids and clinical depression
was going to feel at home, it was going to be in Leith.
Despite being the world's most powerful woman,
society during Queen Victoria's reign
treated women with a level of contempt and disregard
rarely seen outside a Met Police WhatsApp group.
But in some ways, there was, like, a culture war going on
in Victorian England,
where there was a huge culture of vice and debauchery and drinking
and gentlemen's clubs and commercial sex.
And there was a big class element to the sex work, wasn't there?
Cos it's mostly working-class women,
and a lot of the clients are upper-class or middle-class men.
Depends on where you are.
Here in sort of Mayfair, Piccadilly,
you see these pictures from kind of mid-Victorian London
where Regent Street is just lined with questionable women
talking to kind of upper-class toffs.
So, this is a kind of typical late-Victorian police court,
and this was the place where people experienced
sort of first-hand Victorian justice.
Great Marlborough Street would've been the place
where the vast majority of women who were convicted or charged
with selling sex would show up
and the police would bring them to the police station,
which is just next door,
lock them up in the police cells to spend a very uncomfortable night,
and then, kind of hungover, bruised, and battered,
they'd be led through this door to meet the magistrate.
So, we're standing in what would've been the gallery,
and the gallery would've been mostly filled with police court,
uh, reporters, police court sketch artists.
And they'd all be men. And they'd all be men.
You were then having to sort of say, "I'm a common prostitute,"
and plead guilty in front of a room filled with men.
It was a very misogynistic society,
and something I often think about is Jack the Ripper,
there were hundreds of suspects,
and when you look at something like that, you go...
A whole bunch of women have been chopped up,
and you look at that and go, "Well, that could be anybody."
THEY LAUGH Like, that's not...
That's not a great sign.
Because there was so much misogynistic violence.
So, there's this paradox, isn't there?
Because there's these two enormous Jubilees during Victoria's reign.
There's this incredible amount of wealth on display.
But also, on their own streets, there's this incredible poverty.
Yeah, exactly.
This is, like, the kind of street photographs
of very poor children.
Very young children caring for babies
because their mothers are out working.
This is a really iconic photograph that really demonstrates
the kinds of poverty that women would experience.
And Victoria presided over this,
and, you know, had received a first-class education,
had a lot of intelligence, you know,
had a lot of people reporting to her -
must have known what was going on in her country,
but wasn't really interested in any of it.
No. I mean... Or in changing any of it.
..you've got a very conservative Queen on the throne
who has no interest in women's rights,
cos one of the things she said about it,
"A woman's place is in the home, just like me.
"I'm in my home. It just happens to be Buckingham Palace."
There's a famous census they did
where Victoria's listed as Albert's wife
and she puts her job down as Queen...
Mm-hm. SHE CHUCKLES
..so it was very much that way round.
Yeah. He was still head of the household.
"I'm ruling because there was nobody else,
"but thank goodness I have my husband
"and I have other men around me to tell me what to do."
With conditions miserable for many Brits,
Queen Victoria did the obvious
and spread that misery around the world,
much like a U2 tour.
Britain ruled a massive empire from which they took tea,
rubber, and the lives of quite a chunk
of the world's population.
Morally, Victoria sent out mixed messages.
Research her empire and you'd think Victorian values
might include plunder, extortion, and bigotry
rather than covering your piano legs
for fear they might give the vicar a semi.
Last year, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge,
as they were, went on a disastrous trip to the Caribbean,
rekindling memories of Britain's key role
in the slave trade
and its failure to ever pay any kind of reparations
to its victims.
On the trip, they did their best to present
a new modern face of the British monarchy
by not at any point rounding anyone up,
or branding them,
or throwing them into the hold of their ship.
According to a royal insider,
William and Kate's position is that they can't change
what's happened in the past,
which shows a surprisingly good grasp of how time works,
but not such a great understanding
of the concept of making amends for terrible things.
The Victorian era is really the era
in which the British Empire became the richest empire in human history.
So, not just the largest in human history,
but the richest in human history.
And that doesn't come from being kind
and civilised to the natives.
It comes from establishing massive companies
that are able to extract wealth from Africa,
from India, and from the Caribbean,
creating these private companies like The Hudson Bay Company,
The East India Company,
The Royal Niger Company, The Royal Africa Company.
So, in a way, the British monarchy managed a good trick under Victoria
in that they managed to have her as head of the empire
and to personify the empire, and at the same time,
they managed to keep the monarchy away from some of the bloody work
that had to be done in the empire,
but they weren't associated with that.
Absolutely.
You know, that's when we get the kind of gentleman imperialists,
as historians call them.
Bankers and traders and lawyers that really benefit
from the wealth that's been accrued in empire.
You know, this is something
that allows for the building of British capitalism,
and it still has consequences for the way that capital and finance
move across the world today.
The three leading corporate tax havens in the world
are British Overseas Territories and crown dependencies -
places like the Cayman Islands,
places like the British Virgin Islands,
places like Bermuda.
These are still part of Britain's global footprint,
and they play such a crucial role in inequality that we struggle with,
not only globally,
but also right here in the United Kingdom today.
And a lot of those people
just want rid of the British monarchy now, don't they?
They just want to be republics. I think so.
I mean, we've seen that with Barbados.
We saw the people in Jamaica again
calling for the removal of the British head of state.
Mr William, speak some truth on this trip.
Speak truth for what it's worth.
MILITARY BAND PLAYS.
There's real material consequences for having the British monarch
as the head of state for people in the Caribbean.
It means that the British monarch
is the commander in chief of their military.
Their military ultimate loyalty is to the monarch of another country.
And where does the monarchy fit
into that conversation on decolonisation?
Broadly, I think this conversation around decolonisation
could be a much bigger conversation
about what kind of country does Britain want to be now.
Do we want to have a monarch at all?
You know, if we were to write a constitution,
what kind of position would we put a monarch in that constitution,
or would they not exist at all?
Personally, I try to deal
with the injustice of the British monarchy
in my own small way -
giving swan's bread soaked in LSD
to try and liberate them from their mental shackles.
He doesn't own you guys. You're free.
The monarchy can no longer take its survival for granted.
I suppose Prince William already knows
that you can't take anything for granted.
20 years ago, he had hair to rival a prize-winning pony,
and now he looks enviously at a kiwi fruit.
With the death of the Queen,
there's a crisis of legitimacy for the British monarchy,
personified by Prince Andrew.
You'd think that by now,
Andrew would at least have apologised.
I apologise after CONSENSUAL sex.
Conspiracy theories about the royal family being lizards
disguises the fact they're actually something even worse -
a slightly dim German family
to whom we've inexplicably given billions of pounds.
What is the monarchy, really?
The British monarchy has become the linchpin
of Britain's true ideology -
the idea that some people deserve more rights than others.
The further away you get
from an imagined ideal in Britain, the less white,
middle-class, or English you are,
the less rights you're supposed to have.
The royal family are there to firmly define the centre
from which you differ.
The real Britain.
People who tell you their favourite TV show
has gone woke.
Something I've found translates as, "I saw a black person."
I used to be outraged by the British class system
and the way it destroys lives.
Then I bought a "Live, laugh, love" magnet for my fridge.
Now it all just washes over me.
The monarchy is ending, and when that happens,
let's not be bitter.
Let's get out on the streets and raise a bottle to them,
filled with petrol and a burning rag.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media