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.
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29:48
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29:48
Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part Three
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.
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34:48
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34:48
Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part Two
The fairytale is starting to fall apart ... In the second part of our Diana deep dive, Kate Williams and Robert Hardman pick up the story just after that balcony kiss, and follow the new Princess of Wales through the most dazzling and difficult years of her royal life.From the Riviera honeymoon aboard Britannia to the birth of Prince William, from the Australian tour that electrified a nation to the famous dance with John Travolta at the White House, this episode charts the meteoric rise of a young woman becoming the most photographed person on the planet. But behind the smiles, pressure is building: morning sickness that lasts for months, the demands of instant royal life, the relentless press pack, post-natal depression, and the first unmistakable cracks in the marriage.This week, we follow Diana and Charles from the “love boat” towards the year the Queen would later call her annus horribilis. The glamour, the joy, the strain, the scrutiny: the contradictions that made Diana a global phenomenon are all here.A rollercoaster chapter in the story of a princess who changed the monarchy forever.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.
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31:03
Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part One
The first episode in our deep-dive exploration of the most influential figures in modern royal history - Diana, Princess of Wales.It begins as the greatest love story of the age: a shy nursery assistant, a lonely prince, and a glittering wedding watched by nearly a billion people. But before the heartbreak, the revenge dresses and the headlines, there was the young Lady Diana Spencer - awkward, funny, occasionally lost, and totally unprepared for what came next.In this episode, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams trace her rise from the fringes of Sandringham to the steps of St Paul’s. They uncover the aristocratic family that produced her, the fractured childhood that shaped her, and the courtship that captivated the world. There are guinea-pig prizes, polo parties, awkward proposals and that famous “Whatever love is” interview. All the moments that built the myth before it broke.Part royal history, part social snapshot, this is Britain on the brink of the 1980s. Unemployment high, spirits low, and suddenly a fairytale to believe in. The first act of Diana’s story is pure spectacle: puff sleeves, flashbulbs, and a nation in love.Join us as Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things begins its most revealing journey yet.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniExecutive 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.
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30:09
The Royal Woof!
OMRG*, we’ve got a genuinely Royal corgi in the studio, a four-legged, waggy-tailed world exclusive on Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things. Listen NowJoining Kate and Robert is Lee, a champion pedigree Welsh corgi descended directly from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s own beloved dogs, alongside her breeder, Mary Davies, who once met the Queen herself to arrange an aristocratic “blind date” between their corgis.Yes, we’re going barking mad in the best possible way, as we talk royals and their pets. From Queen Victoria’s pampered spaniel Dash to Edward VII’s terrier Caesar, from a Pekinese looted in the Opium Wars to the late Queen’s famously mischievous pack of corgis and dorgis, it’s a conversation that bounds happily through two centuries of canine companionship, full of devotion, diplomacy, and the infamous “Corgi war” at Windsor.*(that’s our Royal version)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.
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.
France