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Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Daily Mail
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.
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- 6 days ago34 min
Sherlock & Victoria
Welcome to the dastardly world of Victorian medicine.What connects Queen Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, a gruesome Victorian merman and a surgeon who could diagnose a patient with a single glance?Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams are joined by medical historian Dr Lindsey Fitzharris, author of Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, to explore the extraordinary world of Victorian medicine and its surprising royal connections.At the heart of the story is Joseph Bell, the brilliant Edinburgh surgeon whose uncanny powers of observation inspired his student Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. Bell could read a human body like a crime scene, and in 1881 his remarkable talents brought him face-to-face with Queen Victoria herself.There are bloody surgical aprons, operations on dining-room tables and terrifying Victorian treatments. But this was also an age of extraordinary medical progress. We discover how Joseph Lister helped save Victoria’s life, why the Queen’s use of chloroform during childbirth was revolutionary, and how royal enthusiasm for medicine helped usher in a new era.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- 1 weeks ago33 min
Grace Kelly: Hollywood Princess
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 WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- 2 weeks ago28 min
The Bayeux Mysteries!
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 WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- 4 weeks ago24 min
The Aragon Girls
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 WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- Aug 17, 202632 min
Tudor Season: The Bloody End
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 WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- Aug 9, 202627 min
Tudor Season: Monstrous Henry
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 WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- Aug 2, 202627 min
Tudor Season: The Queen Killer
He broke with Rome. He defied the Pope. He turned England upside down to marry Anne Boleyn. Just three years later... he sent her to the executioner's block.In this gripping third episode of our Henry VIII series, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the extraordinary rise and devastating fall of England's most fascinating queen, Anne Boleyn.From the birth of the future Elizabeth I and the execution of Sir Thomas More to Henry's wandering eye, Anne's disastrous miscarriages and the ruthless conspiracy that sealed her fate, this is one of history's greatest political thrillers.Was Anne really guilty of adultery and treason? Or was she simply the victim of a king who had already decided she had to die? Join us as we explore the evidence behind one of the most shocking Royal stories in British history.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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.
- Jul 26, 202630 min
Tudor Season: Anne Boleyn
One king. One controversial romance. One decision that would change England forever.In the second episode of our Henry VIII series, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams chart the extraordinary rise of Anne Boleyn, the brilliant, charismatic courtier who refused to become the king's mistress and instead demanded a crown.As Henry's obsession deepens, Catherine of Aragon fights to save her marriage, Cardinal Wolsey's world begins to collapse, and England edges towards an unprecedented break with Rome. Was this really a love story? Or was Anne Boleyn simply the catalyst for a revolution Henry had already begun to imagine?From glittering Tudor pageantry and secret courtship to political intrigue, religious upheaval and one of history's most consequential marriages, discover how the pursuit of one woman transformed the English monarchy forever.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph PalmerExecutive Producer: Bella SoamesA 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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About 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.
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