Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things

A seasonal cracker from the podcast that loves Royals and history - listen now.In this special edition of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unwrap the surprisingly rich, and frequently eccentric, festive legacy of the monarchy. From a 10th-century duke reinvented as a Victorian Christmas hero, to Henry VIII moonlighting as a carol writer, to the Tudor court’s rather questionable idea of “seasonal cheer,” it turns out the royals have been shaping our holidays for over a millennium.We travel from medieval Bohemia to Cromwell’s anti-Christmas crackdown, before settling by the fire with Victoria and Albert, the couple who practically invented the modern festive season. Along the way, we explore SEDITION in much-loved carols, rogue wassailers, musical monarchs, and a surprising link between the Windsors and “Good King Wenceslas.”This episode asks the big question: what have the royals ever given us for Christmas?Quite a lot, as it turns out.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive 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.

The real-life Game of Thrones continues - listen now.In the second part of our deep dive into the Wars of the Roses, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams pick up the story at England’s bloodiest moment: the Battle of Towton. From boy kings and warrior queens to vanishing princes and spectacular betrayals, this is the era when the crown changed hands with alarming regularity.We follow Edward IV’s meteoric rise, Warwick the Kingmaker’s dramatic change of sides, the astonishing comeback of Henry VI, and Margaret of Anjou’s final, desperate bid to win a throne for her son. And when the dust seems to settle, trouble brews again with the arrival of one very determined Tudor.It’s a tale of power, politics, omens in the sky, and a kingdom exhausted by decades of feuding. Join us as the saga accelerates toward its thunderous finale at Bosworth Field.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive Producer: Bella SoamesHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive 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.

The Wars of the Roses is the real-life Game of Thrones - the conflict that inspired George R. R. Martin’s world of rival houses, contested thrones, formidable queens, and sudden, shocking reversals of fortune. But long before fantasy claimed it, this struggle was one of the pivotal turning points in British history.In the first of a two-parter, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams trace the origins of a conflict that splintered a dynasty and set two branches of the same royal family on a collision course. What begins with a boy-king, a warrior queen, and a realm weakened by loss soon becomes a landscape defined by blood feuds, personal vendettas, and battles in which neighbours and brothers met across the field as enemies.This is England at its most combustible: a nation undone by ambition, and ultimately reshaped by the dynasties fighting for its crown.Join us as we return to the moment the red rose and the white first entered the national imagination, a struggle of extraordinary brutality, brilliance, and consequence.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive Producer: Bella SoamesHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive 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.

A queen knelt, a sword flashed, a dynasty shifted. This episode looks at how and why the execution of Henry VIII’s second wife became one of the most iconic, mesmerising moments in British history.Professor Kate dives straight into the charged final minutes of the execution, peeling back the myths, the melodrama, and the emotions of that fatal walk to the scaffold.Anne hoped, right up to the last, that the King might intervene. She rehearsed her courage. She made jokes. She forgave people she absolutely did not need to forgive. And as she stepped onto that scaffold, there were rumours that she harboured a tiny ember of belief that Henry might still call it all off.And then there’s the Frenchman: the swordsman from Calais, specially imported because he had a reputation for doing the dreadful job swiftly, silently… and with a trick. A trick that meant Anne Boleyn may not even have known the exact second her life ended. A trick that changed the choreography of English executions forever.Kate and Robert break down the politics, the theatre, the psychological games, and the shocking tenderness of those last moments. Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive Producer: Bella SoamesHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive 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.

What is Princess Diana’s legacy?In our final episode on the Princess of Wales’s life, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams pick up the story at the turning point: the Royal separation that launched the most consequential chapter of her life, her emergence as a global humanitarian supernova.Diana shakes hands with patients in AIDS wards, embraces children with leprosy, confronts the landmine crisis in a bulletproof vest, and rewrites the royal rulebook with empathy and emotional intelligence. We follow the divorce negotiations, the media frenzy, the complicated final summer with Dodi Fayed, and the midnight chase that became one of the darkest moments in modern royal history.Robert shares what it was actually like on those last Royal tours with Diana, while Kate uncovers how Diana bent royal protocol, political convention, and 20th-century misogyny to her will. And, then, of course, there was her funeral, a day unlike anything the nation had ever seen.Brave, chaotic, glamorous, bruised, and brilliant, Princess Diana’s legacy still shapes the monarchy today, for the better.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive Producer: Bella SoamesHosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Executive 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.