Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things

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 Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

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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 Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A 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.

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 Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A 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.

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 Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A 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.

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 Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams
Series Producer: Ben Devlin
Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini
Content Editor: Joseph Palmer
Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A 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.