Trashy Royals

We tend to think of Queen Victoria attired in black, with a dour countenance, but as a young queen she was anything but. Her marriage to Prince Albert was the rare love match, and according to her surviving letters and journal entries, the two enjoyed a vibrant intimacy, albeit in an era where birth control wasn't really a thing. The nine children Victoria and Albert produced speaks to that.Then, Alicia has some tales from the more ordinary lives of Victorians in England, most of which evinced an enduring - and in our day, a somewhat funny - fascination with death.Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Queen Victoria was just 18 when she assumed the throne in the United Kingdom in 1837. She ruled for more than 63 years and is considered truly one of the great monarchs in history, but her reign did not start without a few hiccups. Looking at her first two years on the throne or so, we examine some of the personal politics that played out through the lenses of a few people in her orbit.Sir John Conroy, her mother's comptroller (and possibly lover), had been integral to the much-loathed "Kensington System" under which she had been raised. While intended to make her meek and dependent on her mother and Conroy, the opposite happened, and when Victoria was finally liberated by the death of her uncle, King William IV, one of her first acts was to bar him from her presence. He remained her mother's comptroller, however, and would continue to attempt to exert malign influence for a few years to come.The Whig Prime Minister at the time, Lord Melbourne, took a keen interest in the young Queen, and spent substantial amounts of time educating her on the finer points of politics in the Kingdom. This, of course, set less charitable tongues wagging, particularly given Lord Melbourne's fairly sordid background. Seriously - how did this guy manage to become PM?In what became a genuine stain on Victoria's early years, the Lady Flora Hastings affair was a culmination of her enduring anger over the Kensington System, and gave John Conroy a last chance to attack the new Queen's judgment. When one of her mother's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, developed a swollen belly and other signs of pregnancy, rumors swirled that the unmarried Lady Flora was pregnant with John Conroy's child. Animosity ran deep on all sides, and Victoria ultimately made clear that Lady Flora would not be permitted in her mother's household until she submitted to an invasive examination by the royal physician. Tragically, Lady Flora was not pregnant; her true condition was an advanced cancerous tumor on her liver, and the whole scandal - including Lady Flora's death just months later - left Victoria personally ashamed and publicly damaged.Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We tend to think of royal upbringings as fairly entitled, but for the future Queen Victoria, her childhood was more like a hostage situation. After her father's death when she was just an infant, her mother and (maybe) her mother's lover went to great lengths to control every aspect of her life. Young Victoria was simply never allowed to be alone, including sleeping in her mother's bedroom until the day she became Queen, and was not permitted to walk down stairs without holding the hand of either her mother or her governess. This so-called Kensington System, invented by her mother and Sir John Conroy, also kept her isolated from other children and her Hanoverian relatives, with the intent of making Victoria dependent on them for the rest of her life. In that, it was a colossal failure. As Queen, Victoria barely maintained a relationship with her mother, and Sir John Conroy was specifically banned from her apartments in one of her first acts as monarch.Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the never-ending see-saw that was Romanov rule in Russia, a truly forward-thinking Tsar finally came to power in 1855. Alexander II accomplished Catherine the Great's never-achieved emancipation of Russia's serfs, among a host of other good-government reforms, leading his newly free and suddenly energized public to call him Alexander the Liberator.Likely influenced by a grand tour of Europe when he was a young man (and during which he and a 20-year-old Queen Victoria may have had a bit of a romance), he took the throne amidst plenty of chaos left over from his father, Nicholas I's, rule. Russia was still bogged down in the Crimean War, for instance, a situation Alexander resolved by simply withdrawing Russia from the conflict and negotiating a disadvantageous peace that allowed him to focus on the stuff he really liked.Under his leadership, with freedom in fairly full flower in Russia, new business formation went through the roof, new rail lines were built to expand commerce and promote defense, and municipalities and regions gained more rights for self-government. Trials by jury were the new fashion, and Russia even found a way to rid itself of a money-losing North American colony on the western coast of Canada.But Russia remained Russia, and radical groups still chafed under Romanov rule. Alexander survived a number of assassination attempts during his reign, but in 1881, a bombing finally left him mortally wounded - and the bombers' stories would go on to intersect with Russian history in a profound way just a few decades later.Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Not every Romanov Nicholas got to be a Tsar. In the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century, the grandson of Nicholas I, Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich, drove his royal family absolutely batty. The first in his family to go to college (as we would put it today), the dapper military hero scandalized St. Petersburg with his affair with an American woman and his theft - for money - of a valuable religious icon from his mother.He was banished repeatedly; first to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan; later to Crimea, and eventually found his way back to Tashkent, where he was instrumental in developing canals, art museums, and irrigation projects. His death in Tashkent in January 1918 was certainly set against the backdrop of the revolution in Russia that swept his family from the throne; his relatives back in St. Petersburg were murdered by the Bolsheviks six months later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Upon the death (or departure?) of Russia's Alexander I in 1825, an unusual power struggle developed between his two surviving brothers. The eldest, Constantine, declined the opportunity to take power, leaving Nicholas, the youngest son of Paul I, the only legitimate candidate.The delay, and apparent passing over of the next in line, prompted an uprising called the Decembrist Revolt, and while Nicholas successfully put it down, the rebellion likely heightened his more autocratic impulses, including the creation of an extensive secret police force whose job was to blot out any and all who might plot against his authority.His efforts to control all facets of his subjects' lives led to horrifying outcomes. Russian Jews, in particular, were forced into military conscription, and Jewish children were often sent by the state to schools far away from their families and communities, where they could be indoctrinated in an effort at Russification. Strongly opposed to civil liberties and popular revolution, he engaged with Europe largely to back monarchs against their people. After Russia's military incompetence was revealed in the Crimean War, Nicholas died after a 30 year reign when he refused medical treatment for pneumonia. Contemporaries described it as "passive suicide," and a close aid wrote soon after, "The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's almost a historical accident that England's Queen Victoria, granddaughter of King George III, was born at all. Her father, George III's fourth son, shared his many brothers' predilection for the freedom of a bachelor's life, so when the heir apparent of the next generation, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth, the princes of England found themselves in a race to marry and produce legitimate offspring to eventually take the crown.Victoria's father, Edward, Duke of Kent, was high up in the line of succession himself, but having succeeded in marrying and producing Victoria, he promptly died - meaning that there was no chance that he and her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, could produce a male heir to leapfrog her in the line.It's safe to say that the sons of George III were a blight on the country and the monarchy, but somehow out of that whole mess, one of Great Britain's finest and most beloved monarchs emerged. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the see-saw nature of Russian leadership, Catherine the Great had died before establishing her grandson, the future Alexander I, as her heir, leaving Alexander's father, Paul I, to take the big chair in his stead. This... went poorly for Paul, who was assassinated by a group of his nobles after just four and a half years. Alexander I became Emperor of Russia in 1801, and spent the first part of his reign navigating a complicated relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte's France.After helping the European alliance to victory in the Napoleonic Wars, he became drawn to mysticism, and gradually seemed to withdraw from interest in the duties of a monarch. When Alexander's wife, Louise of Baden, took ill and required a change of weather in 1825, the couple boarded a train heading south. Stories here diverge; in the official account, Alexander I caught typhus on the journey, dying in the southern town of Taganrog. But another story developed, too, and continues to captivate. A decade later, a mysterious monk named Feodor Kuzmich arrived in Siberia with a knowledge, bearing, and wisdom that grew the legend that the monk was in fact Alexander, having faked his own death to escape the bondage of his title. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As the long reign of Catherine the Great wound down, she made moves to ensure the succession of her grandson, Alexander, but those were still incomplete by the time she died. Instead, it was her estranged son Paul who became emperor, and while his reign was not long, it was spiteful and much reviled by both the public and the elites. In just four and a half years, Paul I passed nearly 8,000 laws engineered to roll back the achievements and advances made by his mother, who he blamed for his father's death, and plunge Russia backward.It was only four and a half years before a conspiracy of nobles attempted to depose Paul by forcing him to sign papers of abdication. When he resisted, they beat him to death, leaving the throne to his son Alexander, who had known of the plot for a bloodless coup, and never forgave himself for not interceding in a plot that, in fact, led to his father's murder. We'll be back next week with the mystery of Emperor Alexander I. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One of history's great ironies is that one of Russia's most successful periods occurred under the leadership of a monarch with not a drop of Russian blood. Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great, was a minor Prussian princess whose fairly horrible mother set her sights on achieving notoriety through her daughter.Fortunately for young Catherine (who was born Sophie), Frederick the Great of Prussia had a political project to strengthen ties between his country and Russia, and Russia's Empress Elizabeth needed her heir, the future Peter III, to find a wife, have babies, and continue the Romanov line. All eyes turned to the 16-year-old from Anhalt-Zerbst.The marriage went poorly, but the real surprise occurred on the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1762. While crowned as Empress Consort to her husband, Peter III, it was only a matter of months before Catherine deposed her husband, forced him to sign an abdication, and became Russia's sole ruler, and the longest-ruling Empress in Russia's history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It feels safe to say that when Russians recall a leader's reign as a "dark era," we're into some deeply, deeply dark events. Empress Anna, a niece of Peter the (Not So) Great, had survived many humiliations before Russia's Supreme Privy Council elevated her to Empress; they thought she would be easy to control, but instead, her decade-long reign was characterized by Anna's cruelty and capriciousness. A career of personal vendettas was fueled by her limitless power and a secret police system she stood up to discover and end plots against her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For the Dutch Republic, 1672 was a series of existential catastrophes that nearly saw the nation swallowed by France's Louis XIV. But the internal push and pulls that culminated in the brutal murder and partial consumption of the man who'd run the place for a couple of decades actually began much, much earlier, when Martin Luther (perhaps) hammered his Ninety-Five Theses into a church door, sparking a flowering of dissonant thought across Europe, as well as a brutal regime of repression to try to tamp it down.Across the 80 year struggle for Dutch independence from Spain, a succession of Princes of the House of Orange ably managed the country's political and military affairs. But once the war ended, Dutch nobility preferred to decentralize power through a Republican model of government, putting the House of Orange and its supporters on the margins. This went pretty well, right up until it didn't, and as the calamities of 1672 unfolded, public anger against the longtime administrator of the country, Johan de Witt, grew into the kind of blind rage that leads to dangerous mob violence. In The Hague that August, it led all the way to cannibalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The last couple of years have been a time of enormous change for the House of Windsor, the United Kingdom, and the 14 nations that comprise the Commonwealth, and we are so grateful to be joined by podcasting superstar and Royal watcher extraordinaire Kristen Meinzer to discuss.When Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022, Prince Charles, England’s longest-serving Prince of Wales, immediately fulfilled the obligation he had waited 73 years to meet: He became King Charles III, and his second wife, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, was coronated Queen alongside him on May 6 of this year.It’s no secret that Charles and Camilla’s history is… complicated. Kristen walks us through the decades of history behind their 2005 marriage, as well as the toxicity of Camilla’s close friendships with some of the UK’s least savory media personalities.Check out more of Kristen’s Royal (and more) watching at The Daily Fail podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pausing from the messiness of Plantagenet England, Alicia takes us on a trip to the east to visit Mother Russia, circa 1700, where the Romanov Tsar Peter the Great was busily acquiring lands, founding cities, and reforming the institutions of a country that - largely through his efforts - would become a major player on the world state for centuries to come. But with those accolades and accomplishments, it's important to recall that the dude was really, really trashy - as his two wives, many mistresses, and romantic rivals would attest to. At least, those whose heads didn't end up in jars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alicia continues with our inexorable march to the Tudor dynasty with yet another French princess contributing to the Plantagenet - now technically Lancastrian - line of the English monarchy. Her marriage to King Henry V, grandson of John of Gaunt and great grandson of King Edward III, was cut tragically short when Henry died on military adventure in France. Doubly tragically, Henry's child with Catherine, Henry VI, had been born just months before his demise.What's a 21-year-old, beautiful, royal Dowager Queen to do? An early flirtation with a member of the Beaufort line was stymied by an act of Parliament, but all's well that ends well, because that left the door open for a (presumably) dashing young Welshman employed in the household by the name of Owen Tudor. Yes - through a possible secret marriage to Catherine - he became the grandfather of those Tudors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's probably impossible to fully understand the events leading up to the Tudor dynasty without talking about perhaps the 14th century's most singular figure - at least from a historical perspective. John of Gaunt was the third son of King Edward III, and through beneficial marriages, became extremely rich in both land and money. His successes on the battlefield and the untimely death of his brother, Edward the Black Prince, made him a powerful political operator. But perhaps the most consequential thing John of Gaunt did was carry on a years-long extramarital affair with a woman named Katherine Swynford - resulting in four children who were given the surname "Beaufort." Theirs was a questionable lineage that would nevertheless have its day in the sun almost a century later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

While the 14th century wasn't exactly a hotbed of feminist fervor in England, the place wasn't without its powerful and intriguing women. Joan of Kent was one. Though her family was caught up in the armed conflicts that ended the reign of Edward II, once Edward III threw off the restraints imposed by his mother, Isabella of France, he welcomed Joan's family - his relatives - back to his court.This might have been the happy end of Joan's role in history except for the little matter of her bigamy - and eventual marriage to Edward III's eldest son, Edward, the Black Prince. While the Black Prince did not live long enough to succeed his father, his union with Joan made her the mother of the final Plantagenet King of England, Richard II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The War of the Roses was hardly the first period of civil war in England. In fact, Edward III's father oversaw such a period long before Eddie III's kids kicked off a few generations of bloody sibling rivalry. Interestingly for the age, Edward II's wife, Isabella of France, had a starring role in ending his disastrous reign. Alicia has the full story, from the 12-year-old fully royal child bride to, many years later, her return to England with an invasion force provided by the Count of Hainaut (in modern day Belgium), with which she waged a successful campaign against her husband and, perhaps, his lover, Hugh Despenser. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Unsurprisingly, the French Revolution didn’t happen particularly spontaneously. Years of financial mismanagement, poor crops, massive unemployment, and a swelling population in Paris itself all contributed to a growing dissatisfaction with King Louis XVI and the monarchy in general. The King’s cause wasn’t helped at all by a lingering suspicion that his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, was a profligate spender and an Austrian spy, but Marie Antoinette’s reputation took a calamitous hit in 1785, when an ambitious con artist named Jeanne de la Motte hatched a plan to acquire one of the most expensive jewelry pieces ever crafted.Playing on the vanity and avarice of one of her lovers, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Jeanne and her crew succeeded in boosting a piece worth $2 million – and forever ended any goodwill the French public had toward their Queen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Court of the Trashy Royals, friends! Today, Alicia takes us on a wild ride through the family values of the descendants of England’s King Edward III (1312-1377), who basically spent the next century-plus fighting over who would wear the big crown. The question was finally settled by the emergence of England’s first Tudor king, whose red- and white-rose motif represented a final coming together of the White Rose of the House of York and the Red Rose of the House of Lancaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rounding out the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome is Nero, the fifth and final of his line. While his ascension was initially met with relief, it was only a few short years before Nero’s hands were as covered in blood as his predecessors’, but it was a fire that finally sealed his fate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

While Rome expanded its reach across Europe and onto the isles of Britannia, not everyone was on board with domination from a distant bureaucracy. Rebellions and uprisings in Roman-held territory were not particularly uncommon, but a series of missteps by Roman governors in what is now the United Kingdom amounted to a series of costly own-goals.After Caligula’s successor, Claudius, gained a foothold in Britain in AD 43, his armies were forced to put down an uprising four years later, which likely laid the groundwork for a bloody insurgency that nearly cost Rome its entire occupation in AD 60 or 61.Who was the fierce commander who set the legions of Rome on their heels? It was Boudica of the Iceni, a once Rome-friendly Queen of her people who became an icon of the fury of a woman pushed too far, and a keystone of the modern UK’s national identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Imagine being so destructive, and so capricious in your violence and sadism, that even two thousand years after you shake off your mortal coil, your childhood nickname still evokes wickedness, wantonness, and profound corruption among all who hear it.Welcome to Trashy Royals, friends, where we begin with Rome’s third emperor – and among its most notorious – Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known to his parents as Caligula (“Little Boots” in their native tongue).Caligula’s path to Roman Emperor was bloody and twisted, with his family murdered or exiled by Emperor Tiberius, who in turn became something of a sadism teacher to his receptive student. History is replete with examples of poor rulers and bad people, but few figures combine the worst of both as shockingly as Caligula. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New from the team at Hemlock Creatives, Alicia and Stacie (Trashy Divorces) turn their jaded eyes toward the long history of Our Betters, only to find that they, too, are raging dumpster fires. Weekly episodes begin May 4 - subscribe now and never miss the trashcandy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.