Podcast
Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things
Hosted by Daily Mail · EN
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.
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41episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Eleanor: England's Lost Queen
Jan 500:25:01Tap to summarizeLove, loss, and a queen who deserves to be famous again.This week, Kate is joined by historian and broadcaster Alice Loxton, whose new book follows a wonderfully bonkers idea: walking 200 miles in December to retrace the funeral route of Eleanor of Castile, England’s “lost queen.”Eleanor was no mild medieval consort. She introduced carpets and forks, built dazzling Castilian-style gardens, amassed a property empire, travelled endlessly while almost constantly pregnant, and inspired her grief-stricken husband Edward I to build a string of spectacular monuments across the country. Alice and Kate plunge into Eleanor’s world of crusades, court politics, Arthurian myth, medieval plumbing, purgatory, poisoned daggers, and the unexpected origins of Charing Cross as a London landmark.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.
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Wars of the Roses: Rise of the Tudors (Part 2)
Dec 1500:30:55Tap to summarizeThe 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.
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Wars of the Roses: The Fighting Begins (Part 1)
Dec 800:33:12Tap to summarizeThe 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.
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The Execution of Anne Boleyn
Dec 100:29:48Tap to summarizeA 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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Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part Three
Nov 2400:34:48Tap to summarizeWhat 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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Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part Two
Nov 1700:31:03Tap to summarizeThe 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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Royals in Crisis: The Diana Years - Part One
Nov 1000:30:09Tap to summarizeThe 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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The Royal Woof!
Nov 300:22:23Tap to summarizeOMRG*, 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.
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Rotten Spares: The Prince Andrews & Harrys of History - Part 2
Oct 2700:24:43Tap to summarizeAre Princes Andrew and Harry the most troublesome ‘spares’ in royal history?You might think so — but buckle up, because history is littered with spares who partied harder, plotted darker and pushed the Crown to breaking point.Welcome to Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, where royal biographers Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams take you inside the palace doors to meet the heirs… and the headaches. Every monarchy needs a backup but what happens when the backup goes rogue? From regency playboys who bankrupt the nation, to sword-swinging dukes suspected of murder, to princesses who perfected the art of rebellion, we reveal the royals who made even today’s headlines look tame.Join us for the royal stories the courtiers hoped you’d never hear.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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Rotten Spares: The Prince Andrews & Harrys of History - Part 1
Oct 1900:25:48Tap to summarizePrince Harry may have put the word spare on the map, but he and his uncle Prince Andrew are not the first royal to grumble about being second in line. In this week’s episode, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams dig into centuries of royal runners-up — from Elizabeth I to George V — the siblings who weren’t meant to rule, yet somehow stole the show.From party-loving princes to quietly competent sisters, being “the spare” has always been a tricky business. Some plotted their way to the throne, some partied their way out of it, and others just got on with the job — usually in glorious frustration.And as for Harry, is history repeating itself, or breaking the royal mould entirely? Who thrived in the shadow of the crown? Who went gloriously rogue? And could Harry himself one day surprise us all?Tune in for a rollicking history of royal back-ups, brides recycled and brothers upstaged — only on Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things. LISTEN NOWHosts: 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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