Pregnancy & Childbirth

- I hadn't realized at that time that 65% of people died in childbirth, so I hadn't realized how prevalent.

I knew it was a big danger, but it was extremely, extremely common so the moment you became pregnant there was always the fear that.

- [Albert] You are with child.

- You may die, which is shocking to even kind of try to consider today.

I'm afraid.

So that side of the story was really, really interesting, and obviously we know she went on to have nine children, but it's very much a prevalent fear in those days and something to be afraid of.

- Childbirth is a dangerous business.

Look what happened to Princess Charlotte.

- The last heir to the throne was a woman called Princess Charlotte, and she died in childbirth.

Awful labor, she died, the baby died, and that meant that everybody had to get married and have more grandchildren, and that's how Victoria ended up being queen.

So childbirth is a really dangerous business in the 19th century and Victoria, we know this from her diaries, really dreaded to having children.

- What are you doing?

- [Daisy] She wasn't a natural mother, even though she had nine children, what she really enjoyed was sex.

She didn't necessarily like what came after.

- Lehzen said if I didn't want to have children right away.

- So what I try to do in the series is to show her trying to negotiate how she might not have children right away with some very primitive ideas of what might work contraceptive-wise, and also when she does get pregnant she's really scared because there's probably a 50% chance that she's gonna die because the other thing of course is if you're queen, the doctors are terrified of intervening or doing anything because nobody wants to be the person who killed the queen.

- You know, the whole world would have me trussed up in bed all day.

That's hardly my style, is it?

- She writes afterwards, she said that she refused to breastfeed.

She said, "I'm a queen, not a cow."

So she's got quite different views to all of that than we might have now.

With her seventh child, they'd invented chloroform by that stage, and she decided to use it, and she had to get permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury because the Church felt that it was incumbent on women to suffer during labor and she had to get permission to have pain relief.

But then she did have pain relief and she said it was a blessing and then after that, she was the person who paved the way for all women to have pain relief during labor.

So, that's one thing all women can thank Victoria for.