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Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things — History
Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things

Expert history with a wicked twist: Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things is the podcast that goes behind palace doors and beyond the balcony smiles, to uncover the stories that the history books have politely skipped.

Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things reveals the schemers, lovers, plotters and even the pets who’ve made the British monarchy the world’s longest-running reality show.

Hosts, Royal biographers Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams trace how power, passion and paranoia have shaped every crown. There are queens who ruled better than their husbands, and princes who partied harder than their people. We meet saints, sinners and those hovering somewhere in between – from the man formerly known as Prince Andrew to the less-vilified Richard III.

Sometimes we get reflective: how monarchy survives scandal, how image-making began long before Instagram, and why royal women have always been the best crisis managers in the room. Other times we’re just here for the gossip: who wore what, who slept where, and who accidentally started a war over breakfast.

Think of it as history with its crown slightly askew. If you like your royal stories with equal parts grandeur and chaos, step into the world of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things because behind every coronation lies a cover-up, behind every portrait a scandal, and behind every great monarch… a very patient servant wondering how to get the blood out of the carpet.

New episodes out every MONDAY, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Copyright: © Daily Mail

Latest Episodes:

Victoria: Death of an Empress Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Queen Victoria: Scandal, and a Funeral Fiasco.

What happens when the most powerful Queen in the world dies and even her funeral doesn't go according to plan?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams bring their Queen Victoria story to a close, with a monarch who has become a global icon, an empire at the height of its power and a Royal Household still finding plenty to be scandalised about.

There's a new favourite at court: Abdul Karim, the young Indian servant who becomes Victoria's trusted companion and teacher, to the fury of her family and courtiers. Meanwhile, her wayward son Bertie is still waiting impatiently for the throne, and the Queen is enjoying the adoration of a nation celebrating her Diamond Jubilee.

But in January 1901, after more than 63 years on the throne, Victoria finally dies. The news sends shockwaves around the world and triggers a royal funeral of extraordinary proportions, complete with runaway horses, a furious new King and an astonishing gatecrasher at the graveside.

From the Queen's unlikely friendships to the extraordinary blunders of her final farewell, Robert and Kate explore the end of the Victorian age and the remarkable legacy of a woman who opposed votes for women but became an inspiration to the suffragettes

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Victoria's Secrets Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

Did Queen Victoria find love again and become more powerful than ever?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore the extraordinary second act of Victoria’s reign: a story of grief, scandal, royal gossip and an unlikely new man in the Queen’s life.

After the death of her beloved Prince Albert, the 42-year-old Victoria retreats into mourning and largely disappears from public view. Her popularity plummets, republican sentiment grows and then along comes John Brown, the blunt Highland servant who becomes one of her closest companions. Their intense friendship sets tongues wagging, infuriates the Royal Family and earns Victoria the nickname “Mrs Brown”.

But the Widow of Windsor is far from finished. There’s an assassination attempt, the recovery of her wayward son Bertie, the spectacular flattery of Benjamin Disraeli and, in 1876, an imposing new title: Empress of India.

By her Golden Jubilee, the Queen who had virtually vanished from public life had transformed herself into an imperial matriarch at the centre of a global empire.

So what brought Victoria back ... John Brown, Disraeli, or the Queen’s own formidable instinct for survival?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Victoria in Love Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

A passionate marriage. Nine children. Assassination attempts, and the monarchy is threatened with a scandal.

In the second part of our deep dive into Queen Victoria, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore Victoria as wife, mother, monarch and increasingly formidable stateswoman.

Her marriage to Prince Albert begins as an intense love affair, but behind the carefully cultivated image of domestic bliss lies a more complicated struggle over who really holds power. As Victoria endures pregnancy after pregnancy, Albert carves out an increasingly influential role beside her, while together they reshape the monarchy and create the intimate royal getaways of Osborne House and Balmoral Castle.

Victoria survives multiple assassinations, embraces the new and controversial use of chloroform in childbirth and begins using her growing family to forge dynastic links across Europe.

But trouble is brewing much closer to home. Her wayward heir, Bertie, is caught up in a potentially explosive affair, and when an already ailing Albert intervenes, events culminate in his sudden death at just 42.

Victoria is left a widow, a mother of nine and a Queen devastated by grief. And she knows exactly who she blames.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Victoria: The Girl Who Became Queen Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Queen Victoria would give her name to an age, but she was never really supposed to be Queen at all.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams go back to the chaotic royal family of George III and the unexpected death that triggered a desperate race to produce an heir, a contest that eventually produced the baby Alexandrina Victoria.

Her childhood at Kensington Palace was anything but happy. Controlled by her mother and the domineering John Conroy, Victoria was rarely allowed to be alone, couldn't even walk downstairs without someone holding her hand and grew up knowing that others expected to rule through her.

Then, just weeks after her 18th birthday, two men arrived at Kensington Palace with the news that changed everything: William IV was dead, and Victoria was Queen. Her first requests? An hour completely alone – and to have her bed moved out of her mother's room.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Countess at Nuremberg Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

An unusual Royal connection to the Nuremberg Trials that prosecuted members of the Nazi leadership.

Eighty years after the trials, we know the names of the Nazi leaders in the dock and the MEN who prosecuted them. But what about the extraordinary women who helped bring them to justice?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams are joined by Natalie Livingstone, author of The Nuremberg Women, to uncover the forgotten female stories behind one of the defining legal events of the 20th century.

One of these women was Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky, an aristocratic refugee with links to today’s Royal Family, who found herself running an extraordinary 'witness house' where Holocaust survivors lived under the same roof as members of Hitler’s inner circle as they waited to give evidence at the trials.

Above all, there is Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the French Resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück before confronting the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg with an unforgettable eyewitness account of the horrors she had witnessed.

From castles and courtrooms to concentration camps, this is the remarkable story of the women who witnessed history, helped make history, and were then too often written out of it.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Grace Kelly: Hollywood Princess Sep 07, 2026

Show notes

Grace Kelly had it all: beauty, an Oscar, Hollywood stardom and a glittering career ahead of her. Then she married a prince.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams revisit one of the great celebrity fairy tales of the 20th century: the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. But behind the wedding-of-the-century photographs lay a rather more complicated story.

From Grace’s battles to make it in the decidedly sleazy world of 1950s Hollywood to an extraordinary royal courtship – involving Aristotle Onassis, Marilyn Monroe and even a young JFK – they explore how an American movie star found herself transformed into a European princess.

There was also a price. Grace was required to give up acting, provide a $2 million dowry and even undergo a fertility test before the marriage could go ahead. Yet the woman who surrendered her Hollywood career would ultimately transform Monaco itself, bringing glamour, money and international respectability to the tiny principality.

So was Grace Kelly’s marriage really the fairy tale the world was sold or did becoming a princess cost her far more than anyone realised?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Bayeux Mysteries! Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most famous works of art in the world: nearly 70 metres of kings, battles, betrayals and bloodshed. But how much of the story it tells can we actually believe?

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary 11th-century embroidery that turned the Norman Conquest into a medieval propaganda epic. Who commissioned it? Why was it probably made by English women? And did Harold really die with an arrow in his eye?

There are mysteries in the margins too, including the enigmatic Aelfgifu, Halley’s Comet and a surprisingly large number of naked men.

And then there’s the remarkable survival of the tapestry itself. From revolutionaries who nearly used it as a wagon cover to Napoleon and the Nazis, it has repeatedly come within a whisker of disappearing altogether.

Nearly a thousand years after the Battle of Hastings, what can the Bayeux Tapestry really tell us about 1066, and about the people who wanted history to remember their version of it?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Aragon Girls Aug 23, 2026

Show notes

We’ve had the Boleyn girls. Now meet the Aragon girls: two sisters born into perhaps the most powerful royal family in Europe, whose lives would take very different but equally extraordinary turns.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams head to Renaissance Spain to meet their formidable mother, Isabella of Castile: warrior queen, patron of Christopher Columbus and, with Ferdinand of Aragon, architect of a new Spanish superpower.

Her youngest daughter Catherine would become Henry VIII’s first wife, an educated, politically astute queen who proved considerably harder to get rid of than Henry expected. But Catherine’s elder sister Joanna faced an even darker fate. Married to Philip the Handsome and heir to Castile, she was declared insane and shut away while first her husband, then her father and finally her own son ruled in her place.

So was “Joanna the Mad” really mad at all? Or was one of Europe’s most powerful women simply the victim of the men who wanted her throne?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tudor Season: The Bloody End Aug 17, 2026

Show notes

Wives, bloodshed, war: the end is approaching for Henry VIII, but England’s most notorious king is not going quietly.

In the final part of our epic journey through Henry’s life, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams meet his doomed fifth wife, Catherine Howard, and discover how a convenient change in the law helped send another queen to the scaffold.

Then comes wife number six: the clever, glamorous Catherine Parr, who proves more than capable of managing the increasingly ill-tempered king, but still comes perilously close to becoming wife number three to lose her head.

There’s war with Scotland, another invasion of France and catastrophe at sea as Henry watches his beloved Mary Rose sink before his eyes.

So, as the curtain finally comes down on Henry VIII, what are we left with: Renaissance prince, murderous tyrant or a king whose desperate obsession with producing a son changed England forever?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tudor Season: Monstrous Henry Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

Henry VIII finally has his longed-for son. So why isn't he happy?

Continuing our Tudor season, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore one of the most dramatic chapters of Henry's reign. Within days of Anne Boleyn's execution, he's married Jane Seymour. At last, the Tudor dynasty has its male heir, but the triumph is heartbreakingly short-lived.

Then comes Henry's next great gamble: the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves, the humiliating first meeting that became the stuff of legend, and the spectacular downfall of Thomas Cromwell. Along the way, discover why the Dissolution of the Monasteries transformed England forever, how Henry's relentless pursuit of power reshaped the nation, and why his search for the perfect wife was becoming ever more desperate.

By the end, another teenage bride is waiting in the wings, and Henry VIII's most tyrannical years are only just beginning.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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