(dramatic orchestral music) (narrator) Victoria.

♪ The royal who invented the modern monarchy.

♪ Queen who made Britain an empire.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) Victoria's Britain is ruling the waves, ruling the world.

(narrator) But who was the real woman beneath the crown?

In this series, we discover Victoria as we've never seen her before: a sensuous young queen... ♪ ("Victoria") He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other, again and again.

(narrator) ...a reluctant mother of nine... (Dr. Priya Atwal) Victoria definitely didn't like babies.

Almost grosses her out to see her own children.

(tense music) (narrator) ...a devastated widow... (Dr. Annie Gray) She was suicidal, absolutely.

She was inconsolable.

(narrator) ...and a passionate wife.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) It's not Victoria the Virgin, it's Victoria the...

Hot Mama.

Using remarkable archive treasures, and through her own words in journals and diaries, we tell the story of a complex, very human queen.

♪ (Dr. Fern Riddell) Those tiny seconds of moving film, they completely change how we see this monarch.

♪ (Prof. Jane Ridley) This is really exciting new evidence about Victoria.

We think we know everything, but we don't.

(narrator) In this program, the youngest monarch for 290 years becomes a wife.

(Catriona Wilson) They stayed up all night on their wedding night.

She did not get any sleep and she said it in her journal, "and why would she?"

(laughing) (narrator) But soon, struggles to balance life as a wife, a mother, and a monarch.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) This is a marriage that has a central fault line running through it.

She is the queen, she is the boss.

Albert is not the king, he's simply her bloke, her husband.

(soft music) (narrator) This is the private life of Queen Victoria.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ ("Victoria") Monday, 10th of February.

♪ The last time that I slept alone.

♪ (narrator) London, 1840.

Inside Buckingham Palace, the 20-year-old Queen Victoria is hours away from her wedding.

A ruling queen hasn't got married in England for nearly 300 years and she's feeling the nerves.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) All brides, of course, wake up nervous, excited on their wedding day, but can you imagine Victoria waking up in this palace over here?

She can hear the crowds already assembling and she's waking up and knowing this is her wedding day and that she's the star.

♪ (narrator) Just two years earlier, those crowds were roaring for Victoria's coronation, but that day, she'd been a queen.

Today, she was determined to be something else: a wife.

♪ ("Victoria") Albert is so excessively handsome.

My heart is quite going.

♪ (narrator) Victoria's husband-to-be is her German cousin, Prince Albert.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) Victoria is super in love with Albert.

She's super in love because, of course, she hardly knows him.

They have got engaged within a few weeks and married a few weeks after that.

It's like a girl who gets her first boyfriend and just thinks, "This is amazing."

We can't underestimate just the simple kind of leap of hormones.

(bright music) ♪ (narrator) Besides butterflies over the ceremony, Victoria has another reason to be nervous.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) Up till now, royal weddings had tended to take place in a palace, often in the evening, always behind closed doors.

There was no public involvement.

But Victoria's wedding is different.

(crowd cheering) (Dr. Elizabeth Norton) The crowds were enormous right here outside Buckingham Palace.

All of the trees in this area, people were scrambling to get a better view by climbing up them.

People really wanted to see what the queen looked like, what she was wearing for her wedding.

(narrator) At her coronation, Victoria wore heavy royal robes.

But today, she's a wife and that meant a very different outfit.

("Victoria") At half past 12, I set off.

I wore a white satin gown.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) To modernize, Victoria looks a bit like a standard bride.

You know, she's wearing a white dress, but actually, what she was wearing was really surprising.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) She's making a statement, and the point is this: she wants to be married as a woman and not as a monarch.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) White itself, although we see it as a symbol of purity, actually at the time it was more of wealth because you had to be rich enough to clean a white dress which obviously Victoria was.

And it was publicized everywhere.

It was in all the papers.

People copied it.

Victoria is the reason why people wear white dresses to their weddings today.

(narrator) As the royal carriage set off from the palace, Victoria was overjoyed by the welcome she got from the public.

("Victoria") I never saw such crowds of people as there were in the park and they cheered most enthusiastically.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) We're all used to Harry and Meghan, Kate and Wills, earlier Charles and Diana.

They're big events, people celebrate but that wasn't the case before Victoria.

This was the very first big public royal wedding.

(narrator) Just before one o'clock, the bride arrived at St James's Palace.

("Victoria") I entered the chapel.

At the altar, to my right, stood my precious angel.

(narrator) By now the congregation could see the bride close up.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) Victoria prided herself on being able to suppress her emotions and not show what she was feeling, but every orange flower in her hair was quivering and she had red eyes as though she hadn't slept, so it's really clear that Victoria was feeling anxious and nervous on her big day.

(narrator) Victoria's feelings can't have been helped by the wedding vows she was about to make which had the congregation on the edge of their seats.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) The big question that everybody wondered when they watched Victoria walk up the aisle, is she going to swear to obey her husband or not?

♪ (Catriona Wilson) The obey question is really a question about power.

It's about who is actually in charge.

She is the monarch, she's meant to be the top of the totem pole, the top of the tree.

Nobody is supposed to have power over her.

(narrator) The promise of marital obedience was a key part of the Victorian wedding service.

A woman would make the vow... but would a queen?

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) Everyone was waiting with bated breath to see what the vows would actually contain.

And here they are, this is what the Archbishop of Canterbury said to Victoria.

"'Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honor, and keep him so long as you both shall live?'

Her Majesty looked up affectionately into Prince Albert's face and replied, loud enough to be heard in every part of the chapel, 'I will.'"

So it was emphatic.

She almost shouted these words.

She wanted everyone to hear and they did.

Queen Victoria had promised to obey Prince Albert.

(narrator) In promising to obey her husband, Victoria was trying to build the secure, happy family she'd been denied as a child.

She wanted to obey Albert because she wanted to be, in all ways, a wife to him.

Just for that moment in that ceremony, she wanted to be, one hundred percent, the little girl now made into a wife that she'd dreamed about.

(narrator) But how easy would the young queen find it to obey her husband?

(whimsical dramatic music) After a long day on public display, the couple arrived at Windsor Castle.

Victoria's finally alone with her new husband.

(Catriona Wilson) She was completely beside herself.

Very excited.

Very excited both for the wedding day and the wedding night, I think.

I think she'd been thinking quite a lot about that and was very happy to finally be there.

("Victoria") I never, never spent such an evening!!

He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again.

(Dr. Annie Gray) Victoria is, I think it's fair to say, bowled over by the whole concept of sex.

She is so very up for it that it is impossible to say quite how much.

("Victoria") When day dawned, for we did not sleep much, and I beheld that beautiful, angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express.

He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.

♪ They stayed up all night on the wedding night.

She did not get any sleep, and she said it in her journal, "and why would she?"

(laughing) ("Victoria) To lie by his side and in his arms and on his dear bosom and be called by names of tenderness I have never yet heard used to me before was bliss beyond belief.

♪ There's a scene where she talks of Albert helping her to put her stockings on in the morning, stockings which at that point would have been held up by ties, so really a very intimate moment indeed.

I mean, let's face it, if a man is in your giggle zone-- because when you get that far you're laughing-- then really that is a relationship which is all about lust.

(soft music) (narrator) With her new man on her arm, Victoria wanted to dress to impress and she loved a party.

(Catriona Wilson) In the early 1840s, Victoria was a tiny person.

Not only was she very short, she was about 5', 5'1", she also had a tiny waist, and so these large flouncing silhouettes were very important to her as a way of kind of taking up space and getting attention.

This dress is a reproduction of the kind of dress that Victoria was wearing in the very early years of her marriage for balls, court events, and other formal occasions.

It is wonderfully made.

It was a balance for her between her great love of food and excess but also her love of appearing in this very controlled, contained body, and she took great pains to keep that hourglass silhouette.

(dramatic music) (narrator) But although he was always by her side, Albert wasn't quite as much of a party animal as his young wife.

(Catriona Wilson) Albert was a bit more quiet, a bit more bookish, and was less excited about the parties but Victoria was very much in charge of both the country and the marriage so Victoria got what she wanted, ultimately, and that was the parties.

♪ (narrator) It wasn't just the couple's social life where Victoria was laying down the law.

When Albert discovered they were only to get three days for their honeymoon, he asked Victoria for a longer break.

She soon put him in his place.

("Victoria") You forget, my dearest love, that I am the sovereign and that business can stop and wait for nothing.

It is quite impossible for me to be absent from London.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) And she's quite patronizing at that point.

It's as if she's explained, you know, "Look, darling, Mommy's really quite busy.

Mommy's got important work to do, so I'm afraid that's not going to happen."

Victoria had always been someone who was very stubborn.

She was very determined to have her way.

(narrator) As a royal prince, Albert expected status and power in his marriage.

He complained, "I am only the husband and not the master of the house."

(Dr. Annie Gray) Right from the beginning of the marriage, "obey" was always going to be an issue.

Victoria was incredibly status conscious and so to suddenly have someone else, someone she barely knew-- let's face it, they'd only met three times-- saying to her, "No, no, no, I want this, I want that, I demand a longer honeymoon," I mean, no way!

Please.

And this is a marriage that has a central fault line running through it from the start and it's basically this: she is the queen, she is the boss.

Albert is not the king, he's simply her bloke, her husband.

I mean, Albert wonders what on earth he's there-- what is he there for?

(narrator) Before long, early cracks begin to show as Albert wonders whether the marriage is so perfect after all.

(tender music) ♪ Four months into her marriage, Victoria is happier than she's ever been.

♪ She's 21 and madly in love.

And for the British public, the young monarch is a breath of fresh air.

♪ (Dr. Fern Riddell) The monarchs preceding her, her family, her relatives, they are debauched, they are immoral, they have illegitimate children scattered everywhere.

The British public had really lost faith in the monarchy.

They'd lost support.

It was something that was satirized, it was something that people really took the mickey out of.

Victoria really changes that, she challenges it, and she seems to make it her mission to make the Royal Family respectable again.

(narrator) Victoria's marriage to Albert gave the Royal Family a desperately needed kickstart.

(Dr. Fern Riddell) In many ways, Victoria's wedding day is actually more important than her coronation because the wedding means that she is going to start a succession.

♪ (narrator) And Britain didn't have to wait long for the patter of tiny feet.

By summer 1840, less than four months after the wedding, news was already sweeping the country that Victoria was pregnant.

Her public were over the moon.

(whimsical orchestral music) But inside palace walls, there was one person who wasn't at all happy about the pregnancy.

("Victoria") I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness.

(narrator) Victoria fired off angry letters to relatives, revealing how the news had ruined her blissful marriage.

("Victoria") I have always hated the idea.

I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.

(Dr. Annie Gray) She wanted time to enjoy her beautiful new husband.

She wanted time to have a lot of energetic sex and to party and to generally behave like a married woman, which gave her a certain status, but also someone who was young and up for it.

(narrator) As the due date got closer, the palace doctors made detailed plans.

(dramatic music) A hundred and eighty years on, at the Royal College of Physicians in London, one of the doctor's diaries still survives.

It was only published in 2016 and it offers a remarkable insight.

For Victoria, there was no such thing as a private birth.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) Robert Ferguson's diary really takes us behind the scenes.

It takes us into a place where none of the public could go.

The queen is in her room which is at the end of a long chain of interconnecting rooms with double doors, and right at the other end of the chain you have the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all waiting in that room.

And the point here is that the queen does not want to see these old men watching her in childbirth.

And I mean, who would?

You can't blame her.

I think no mother today can imagine this happening.

A room full of sort of-- you know, imagine you'd have Boris in there.

(laughing) (narrator) The doctors rigged up a makeshift screen to give the mum-to-be at least a little bit of privacy.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) "At last, Her Majesty's bedroom door was flung open.

The ministers could see the actual bed, though not Her Majesty, for a screen was elevated in that half of the footboard of the bed on which she lay."

(narrator) Throughout her pregnancy Victoria had prayed for a son.

("Victoria") After a good many hours suffering, a perfect little child was born at two in the afternoon.

But alas, a girl and not a boy.

♪ (Prof. Jane Ridley) Ferguson writes, "The very first words which I heard were from the queen.

'I fear it will create great disappointment.'"

♪ Having a baby, even though it's a very healthy girl, none of that was enough.

It's really rather sad that she felt that she had, you know, a great disappointment.

But Victoria then said, "Never mind.

I expect the next one will be a boy."

(narrator) Despite her disappointment, Victoria had made history.

She was the first ruling monarch ever to give birth in England.

Already balancing the duties of wife and queen, Victoria now had a new role that she'd find far harder than both of these.

♪ Victoria was a new mum but she also had new staff to help.

Aristocratical royal parents weren't expected to do the day-to-day care for their children.

There would be a complete staff of servants for the nursery, so there were nursemaids, nannies, the baby was never alone.

The nursery would be close to Victoria and Albert.

It was often on a different floor to them, often the floor above.

They could access the children whenever they wanted to but they didn't do the day-to-day care.

(narrator) Which may have been just as well as, for Victoria, motherhood didn't always come naturally, as she revealed in brutally honest letters.

("Victoria") An ugly baby is a very nasty object and the prettiest is frightful when undressed.

That terrible frog-like action.

(narrator) For new mothers, Victoria's words were just as harsh.

("Victoria") I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) So she had a wet nurse for the baby.

It was a woman who obviously had their own baby and was still able to nurse.

They would move into the nursery and take the majority of the care of the royal infant as soon as they were born.

(narrator) But if Victoria had her bad days as a new mum, she also found real pleasure in her baby daughter who she named after herself, though the little girl was always known as Vicky.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) This was drawn by Queen Victoria and it is a picture of her baby.

So her eldest child, Princess Vicky.

It's such a beautiful image.

You get a real sense that Victoria knew this child intimately.

This is a mother who's clearly besotted with her child and wants to record an image of her child looking particularly cute and particularly lovely, as modern parents do with cameras.

It's so clear that it was drawn from a place of love.

(Dr. Annie Gray) I think it's unfair to tar Victoria completely with the brush of being a bad mother.

Yes, she did openly say that she disliked babies.

She also wrote letters praising her children, loving her children, saying how cute she found babies to be.

In many ways, she was just human.

At one point, she wanted to strangle her children; at another point, she wanted to sweep them all up into her arms and protect them from the world.

(narrator) Just one year after her daughter, Victoria gave birth to the son and heir she'd always wanted.

("Victoria") At last, at 12 minutes to 11, I gave birth to a fine large boy.

Oh, how happy, how grateful did I feel.

(narrator) Prince Edward was a healthy bouncing baby.

He was given the affectionate name Bertie but Victoria's happiness didn't last.

For decades, historians didn't know what happened next but now a remarkable piece of evidence tells the full shocking story.

Three weeks after Bertie was born, royal doctor Robert Ferguson was summoned to see not the baby but the mother.

His diary, which lay hidden for over a century, reveals why.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) Ferguson writes, "She," that's Victoria, "had been gloomy and desponding.

There were illusions both of the eye and the ear.

By the one sense, she was deceived into a belief that she saw spots on people's faces which turned into worms and that coffins floated before her."

This is the most extraordinary piece of new material about Queen Victoria because what's being described here is hallucinations.

The worms on people's faces, the coffins floating before the queen.

I mean, it must have been truly terrifying.

(narrator) During his visit, Ferguson spoke to a worried Albert.

"His face close to mine, and with pale and haggard looks he broke out, 'The queen has heard that you have paid much attention to mental disease and is afraid that she is about to lose her mind!'"

♪ (narrator) Then Ferguson met Victoria herself in her bedroom.

"She was lying down and the tears were flowing fast over her cheek as she addressed me, overwhelmed with shame at the necessity of confessing her weaknesses, and impelled by the very burden of her mind and her sorrows to seek relief."

This is really exciting new evidence about Victoria.

We think we know everything but we don't.

The intensity of Victoria's hallucinations and this terrible fear that she's losing her mind, this really suggests that Victoria's life at this time is really much darker than we ever knew, and certainly nobody at the time knew this.

It was kept a very close secret.

(dark music) (narrator) Victoria's state of mind brought back a fear that haunted the Royal Family.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) She was the granddaughter of George III and he is Britain's Mad King.

He spent the last few decades of his life unable to rule at all.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) There's a real worry that perhaps Victoria has inherited that as a sort of taint, that there is something rotten at the heart of this family, that it's bad blood and that it's going to come out.

♪ (narrator) As she struggled with parenthood, Victoria found being mother, wife, and queen quite hard to manage.

For now, she's grateful to her supportive husband.

Albert, however, decides to make a bid for power.

(soft dramatic music) ♪ By her 23rd birthday, Victoria was a wife and a mother of two but she was also queen of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

With an empire rapidly circling the globe, Britain needed a strong government and that meant a dedicated Victoria.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) As queen, Victoria was very, very busy.

She would expect to meet with her Prime Minister.

Papers requiring her signature arrived daily.

She would receive government boxes setting out policy, asking her to look over documents, perhaps amend them.

Victoria very much did have political power (narrator) Although her workload was large, Victoria had no intention of sharing any of her royal duties with her husband.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) Albert very much had other ideas and right from the start of their marriage was pushing for more access.

He wanted to see what was in the government boxes, he wanted to be consulted on government policy.

He wanted to help direct the way the country was going.

(narrator) At first, Victoria kept Albert well away from her day job, but gradually she began to relent.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) Once Victoria gives birth and goes on giving birth, it becomes impossible, even for as hard a worker as she.

She has to hand over stuff to Albert.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) Albert was obviously incredibly ambitious but that was matched by his drive for hard work.

He would be up before Victoria and he would work later and he would work and work and work.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) At first, she finds it incredibly difficult to give away power and control, but actually once you start realizing that actually if I have this very competent, extremely hard working person by my side it's like waiting to exhale.

Maybe there's a point at which she kind of goes, "Oh, I don't have to do everything.

Maybe I can share."

(narrator) Grateful for the help, Victoria falls even more in love with her new husband.

("Victoria") His love and gentleness is beyond everything.

Oh, was ever woman so blessed as I am.

(dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) By the age of 29, Victoria had five children.

Since becoming queen, she lived at Buckingham Palace, but as her family grew, she was getting itchy feet.

(Dr. Annie Gray) Buckingham Palace, right in the middle of London, was not seen as being very private.

There were tremendous issues with the public breaking in or with noise.

There weren't really any good sewer systems in the streets surrounding Buckingham Palace.

What happened when the palace was built was it was kind of built on top of a sewer but no one quite realized that, so every time it rained, that particular sewer which ran under the kitchens would flood.

It was just awful, the courtyard would flood, there'd be turds bobbing up and down in puddles.

(Dr. Fern Riddell) It is crowded, it is dirty, it smells terrible The air in the morning is full of brewing and of tanning and these are sulfurous, horrible, rotten eggy smells.

It's terrible and you can't escape it anywhere.

So it's not somewhere that is healthy for really anyone but especially not if you have a young family like Victoria does.

(narrator) For the first time in her life, Victoria wanted a brand new house of her own.

(dramatic music) ♪ Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, was Victoria's dream home.

She and Albert bought the estate for 28,000 pounds, or 2.2 million pounds in today's money, and built an Italian style villa.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) Victoria, she's very very keen on the idea of coming to the Isle of Wight.

She wants somewhere, honestly, where she can have Albert with her all the time because Albert has been bustling around all over the country, he's never at home.

(narrator) By royal standards, Osborne House was a modest affair.

The kitchen was much, much smaller than the kitchens elsewhere, so too were the staffing arrangements.

There were usually about 11 cooks at Osborne House as opposed to the 45 that you would have back at Windsor.

The meals as well, they were much more scaled down versions of the ones that people would have eaten at Windsor.

There were no huge state banquets, there were no massive balls.

This was very much a sort of private palace for small scale entertaining and for living like a family.

♪ (narrator) At Osborne, Victoria initially tried to make time for the children.

There was swimming in the sea, a military fort, and even a replica Swiss cottage in which to play.

It soon became one of Victoria's favorite residences.

("Victoria") We are so thankful for this beautiful seaside home and all the pleasures of the country.

It is really a paradise.

(narrator) But despite what Victoria wrote, behind the scenes, the family home wasn't as ideal as it seemed.

In fact, there was trouble in paradise.

The headstrong Victoria could be impatient with her older children and often struggled to find anything in common with them.

("Victoria") I find no special pleasure or compensation in the company of the older children.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) She never comes across as the more involved parent.

It's often Albert driving the relationship with the children.

Albert plays with the children a lot.

You know, he's always on all fours pretending to be a horse or whatever it might be.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) She wasn't a natural mother because she'd never been properly mothered herself, we would say now.

She didn't know what it was to be mothered, so how on earth could she kind of work out how to do it herself?

Albert seems to have a natural skill so she's very happy to pass over a lot of the mothering to him.

(narrator) But the amount of time Albert spent with his children caused problems.

(Dr. Priya Atwal) With Victoria, her eldest daughter Vicky is obviously very intelligent and bright just like her father and Victoria herself is very proud of that but then again there's this element of jealousy that, "Oh, my daughter's stealing my husband away and, you know, they're close and I'm not."

(solemn music) ("Victoria") I often grudged you children being always there when I longed to be alone with dearest Papa.

Those are always my happiest moments.

(narrator) Victoria resented her children for taking away her husband.

The grudge, like the family, kept getting bigger.

(dramatic music) At 33 years old, Queen Victoria became pregnant with her eighth child.

For the earlier births, she'd suffered pain and depression but now a medical breakthrough offered to take the pain away.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) Chloroform was a new drug and it gave pain relief during childbirth.

You might think that that was a sort of no-brainer that everybody would support, but that was not the case.

(narrator) Some religious figures claimed the Bible said women had to suffer during labor while some doctors were concerned that chloroform was dangerous and potentially fatal.

But despite the risks, Victoria chose to have it.

♪ ("Victoria") At a quarter past one, a boy was born with great happiness to me.

Dr.

Snow administered that blessed chloroform and the effect was soothing, quieting, and delightful beyond measure.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) You can see a certain stubbornness and willfulness but, you know, she'd made up her mind and as it turned out she was right.

(narrator) The impact of Victoria's decision went way beyond the palace.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) It meant that chloroform and pain relief in pregnancy became socially acceptable and it was used quite widely and this, in a sense, was Victoria doing something for women.

♪ (narrator) But if the birth had been smooth, the weeks that followed were rocky.

Victoria's postnatal illness returned, as did screaming rows with Albert.

(Dr. Annie Gray) It was absolutely flaming on some occasions.

They would be ferocious screaming fits at the peak of which he would rush from the room and she would rush from the room.

We have to imagine Victoria pursuing Albert down the corridor, Albert retreating into his room, and while she is on one side of the door, him, you know, writing her a serious letter about how she was at fault, which she would then receive and agree with.

Victoria's response to these letters is always to submit and to blame herself and to apologize and to describe her weaknesses and her failings.

Victoria kept a record of her bad behavior and she had a special notebook for it.

("Victoria") I have great difficulties in my own poor temper, violent feelings, which tend to make one selfish.

(narrator) In her private notebook, a distraught Victoria listed her failings as a woman and a wife.

♪ ("Victoria") Have I improved as much as I ought?

I fear not.

To my beloved and perfect husband, I fear also I have been a great trouble.

♪ It's almost like she has become an extra child in the palace nursery.

She shows the notebook to Albert every now and then and he responds either saying, "You've done very well," or perhaps more often, "You need to show more control and you need to be a bit better."

(narrator) Marks for good behavior were just the beginning.

As the years went by, Victoria grew ever more dependent on her domineering husband.

She calls him "master," he calls her "child."

It's he who chooses the wallpaper, it's he who tells her what she ought to wear, and I have to say in the last two instances he should probably be shot for that because her wallpaper was incredibly busy and her clothes did not flatter her.

She could have probably done a better job herself.

(narrator) But if Victoria was obsessed with Albert, she soon had trouble with another man in her life.

Bertie, Victoria's eldest son, was becoming a teenage nightmare.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) The expectation had been that Bertie would turn into another Albert.

He'd been educated for that and his education had been a complete failure.

He was always smoking or drinking or being caught out.

He seemed to be far too interested in girls, far too interested in fashion.

You have a Prince of Wales who is essentially a playboy.

He was just what the monarchy didn't need.

(narrator) In the private notebook she used to list her own failings, Victoria now wrote scathing remarks about her own son.

("Victoria") His intellect, alas, is weak which is not his fault, but what is his fault is his shocking laziness which I fear has been far too much indulged.

He seems in a sort of dreaminess which alarms us for his brain.

(narrator) By 16, Bertie's features were fully developed, but his mother wasn't impressed.

("Victoria") His nose and mouth are too enormous and he pastes his hair down to his head.

Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features, and total want of chin.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) I think the things that annoyed Victoria most about Bertie were all the things that reminded her of her young self.

At one point, she complains about him having "a want of chin" to which you really want to say, "Well, just look at yourself, madam."

The fact that he has a very bad temper, you feel like saying, "Hello?

Do you ever wonder where he got it from?"

There's also his huge appetites for food, for sex, which again you feel like saying, "Well, perhaps he got that from his mother."

(narrator) The idea of Bertie inheriting her throne filled Victoria with dread, as she wrote in horror to her daughter.

("Victoria") I tremble at the thought.

I try to shut my eyes to that terrible moment.

♪ This is going to be disastrous for Britain.

He is going to make a rotten ruler.

It must have been absolutely terrifying for her to see that, to see, as it were, this car crash coming towards her.

(narrator) Victoria believed that only a short sharp shock could save Bertie from disaster.

("Victoria") I only hope he will meet with some severe lesson to shame him out of his ignorance and dullness.

(narrator) Victoria didn't know it but that severe lesson was on its way.

Instead of saving Bertie, it would tear her own life to shreds.

(dramatic music) By the age of 42, Queen Victoria had been on her throne for over two decades.

The mother of nine children, she'd finally won the love of her family and her nation, yet she was about to face the most devastating year of her life thanks to the antics of her eldest son.

♪ In the summer of 1861, Bertie went to train as an officer with the army in Ireland.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) What the parents didn't realize was that Bertie's fellow officers had managed to smuggle into his bed one night a lady of the night, as they called her, who was known as Nelly Clifton.

(narrator) Bertie spent three nights with Nelly.

The gossip soon spread back to the palace.

Victoria is absolutely appalled to learn that Bertie has been set up with a prostitute.

She thinks it's disgusting, it's awful, it's dirty.

She and Albert had worked so hard to raise the profile of the Royal Family, raise their popularity, to present this moral family to the world, and in three nights he had simply undone that.

It was perfectly normal for a young man of Bertie's background and class to have sex with a prostitute.

This was what happened at that time.

What was not normal was the reaction of Prince Albert.

Albert becomes almost sort of hysterical about this.

♪ (narrator) By now, Bertie had left Ireland to study in Cambridge and it was here that a fateful meeting took place.

(Prof. Jane Ridley) Albert goes to Cambridge where Bertie was and they have a long walk and they come back having made it up, but it was absolutely pouring with rain and Albert caught a chill and that chill turned into an increasingly serious illness.

(somber music) ♪ (narrator) Albert returned to Windsor and took to his bed.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) The doctors can't work out what the matter is with him.

Is it typhoid?

Is it in fact something that's long, long in the making?

Some medical historians think that he may have had stomach cancer.

(narrator) But whatever their private theories, the royal doctors didn't share them with Victoria.

("Victoria") Good, kind old Sir James Clark has been here since yesterday and reassured me, saying there was no cause for alarm, either present or future.

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) Nobody liked to tell Victoria because they knew how she would react, how upset she would be.

(narrator) Soon, Albert's true condition was impossible to hide.

("Victoria") I went in at seven.

He seemed to me a little incoherent.

Went back to my room and felt as if my heart must break.

May god help me and protect him.

(narrator) Within days, Albert was suffering from a fever and experiencing hallucinations, yet the doctors still reassured Victoria that all would be well.

("Victoria") Dr. Watson, whom I like and who is very kind, said he had seen many infinitely worse cases recover.

♪ (narrator) On the morning of the 14th of December, Victoria went in early as usual to be by Albert's side.

("Victoria") It was a bright morning.

The sun just rising and shining brightly.

Never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun.

His eyes unusually bright, gazing, as it were, on unseen objects and not taking notice of me.

(narrator) The doctors told Victoria to go for a short walk.

Minutes later, they called her back.

("Victoria") I took his dear left hand which was already cold.

All, all was over.

I stood up and kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter and agonizing cry, "Oh, my dear darling," and then dropped on my knees.

(narrator) They'd been inseparable for 20 years but now Albert was dead.

After Albert had died, Victoria left the room where he died and she went up to the nursery where she collected up her youngest daughter, Beatrice, who was four years old and carried her back to her own bed and she then lay weeping next to Beatrice for the entire night.

♪ (Dr. Annie Gray) This was the love of her life.

This was a man upon whom she completely relied.

This was her only friend.

♪ (narrator) Victoria was just 42 years old.

("Victoria") My life, as I considered it, is gone, past, closed.

It is like death in life.

Utter desolation, darkness, and loneliness.

(somber music) (narrator) It was the end of one of the greatest partnerships in British history and perhaps the most important in modern royalty.

(Shrabani Basu) They reinvented this monarchy.

They put this stamp on it of something people could look up to, something to respect, something that would last the years, and I think this saves the monarchy because at a time when monarchies were toppling in Europe, the British monarchy survives and the reason for this is Victoria and Albert.

♪ (narrator) Victoria had found a way to do what no English woman had done before.

She'd been a new mother, a wife, and a queen.

But suddenly, she was alone.

Paralyzed by grief, she doubted she could carry on.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) It's like starting all over again but without the buoyancy of youth, without the optimism of being a young woman.

How is she going to manage this?

(Dr. Elizabeth Norton) The thought of ruling without Albert was devastating to Victoria, but she had no choice.

She had to go on and she had to go on alone.

(narrator) Victoria had to rediscover the confidence she'd shown as a young woman, with one difference.

She'd given away power once but she never would again.

♪ ("Victoria") No one person, may he be ever so good, is to lead or dictate to me.

♪ (narrator) Next time... Victoria's left a widow after the death of her beloved Albert.

(tense music) (Dr. Elizabeth Norton) She simply didn't want to be sovereign.

She wanted to be alone.

(narrator) She runs away from public life and leaves Britain without a queen.

(Matthew Sweet) MPs are openly saying it's time to wind the monarchy up.

(narrator) But Victoria fights back to win power and the love of her people.

(Prof. Kathryn Hughes) There's a sense in which the empire comes home and it puts on an amazing show.

(Dr. Annie Gray) She suddenly realized that what she'd missed was huge crowds of people there for her and her alone.

(dramatic orchestral music) ♪ (bright music)