(intense music) (narrator) Victoria.

(whooshing sounds) The royal who invented the modern monarchy.

♪ Queen who made Britain an empire.

(Professor Hughes) Victoria's Britain is ruling the waves, ruling the world.

(narrator) But who was the real woman beneath the crown?

In this program, we discover the young Queen Victoria as we've never seen her before: -A vulnerable princess.

-What they're doing is making sure she will be their puppet.

-A sensuous young woman.

-He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again.

(Professor Hughes) It's not Victoria the virgin, it's Victoria the hot mama.

(narrator) And once she breaks free from her controlling mother, the youngest ruler of England for nearly three centuries.

(Dr. Norton) We see Victoria standing alone, expected to rule alone, and for a teenager that's quite daunting.

(narrator) Using remarkable archived treasures and through her own words in journals and diaries, we tell the story of a complex, very human queen.

(Professor Ridley) This is really exciting, new evidence about Victoria.

We think we know everything, but we don't.

(narrator) This is the private life of Queen Victoria.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ In May 1819, the Duke of Kent and his heavily pregnant wife raced across Europe from their home in Germany.

They were desperate to reach Kensington Palace in London, so their baby could be born on British soil.

They arrived just in the nick of time, and on the 24th of May, in one of the palace's bed chambers, Queen Victoria was born.

(baby crying) (Professor Ridley) The reason why the Duke was so insistent on the baby being born in Kensington Palace was because this established her as being a potential heir to the throne.

♪ (narrator) The child was given a name fit for a future queen.

(Professor Hughes) She was Princess Alexandrina Victoria.

Big mouthful.

Alexandrina because her godfather was the tsar of Russia, Alexander the First, and Victoria because, well, Victoire was her mother's name, although she's always known as Victoria.

(narrator) The new family set up home in Kensington Palace.

But just eight months later, Victoria's father died.

♪ Her German mother, the Duchess of Kent, suddenly found herself in a foreign country with a new baby and few friends.

For a while the future looked bleak for the Duchess and her daughter.

♪ But her husband's former assistant, a handsome officer called John Conroy, came to their rescue, making sure they had a stable home.

From childhood, Victoria kept diaries and in them she talked about her earliest memories growing up at the palace.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) My oldest recollections are connected with Kensington Palace where I can remember crawling on a yellow carpet.

I used to ride a donkey given me by the uncle, the Duke of York, who was very kind to me.

Up to my fifth year, I had pretty much been indulged by everyone.

(narrator) But if John Conroy had rescued Victoria and her mother, it soon became clear there was a price to pay.

(Professor Hughes) Sir John Conroy, he goes by this very strange title of comptroller, which is actually much apt than you might think.

The way that he spoke to both Victoria and her mother was very surprising.

He was very informal with them, very blunt, and often quite rude, particularly to Victoria.

(Professor Hughes) He's booming, he's loud and he's very domineering.

♪ He is a man who likes to be the center of everything.

(narrator) And Conroy had a plan.

He hoped that one day the young Victoria might become Queen; and if she did, he wanted to be there to share her power.

As she grew up, one by one, the royals ahead of her in line to the throne started dying off.

And with every passing year, she got closer and closer.

(Professor Hughes) When Princess Victoria is born in 1819, she's so obscure that really the national newspapers don't really bother to take much notice.

And so what happens as everybody gets older and babies either appear stillborn or they live a few months, is that Victoria gets nearer and nearer to the throne.

The Duchess of Kent and Conroy looked more and more chirpy.

They know now that they have the future Queen of England in their care and it's an immensely kind of exciting moment.

(narrator) Then, at just eleven, Victoria became heir to the throne and, suddenly, there were big changes at home.

Conroy and her mother began to view all those around her with suspicion.

Even the rest of the royal family.

(Shrabani) The minute it was clear she is going to be Queen, there was this ring of protection around her.

(soft, tense music) ♪ (Professor Hughes) Paranoia breaks out in Kensington Palace.

There's a worry that a particularly wicked uncle called the Duke of Cumberland is actually plotting to murder Princess Victoria.

♪ As a result of fears for Victoria's safety, a number of measures were taken.

They decided that she should always be carefully observed.

(narrator) From now on it was decided that Victoria could never be left alone.

She lived under 24-hour scrutiny.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I never had a room to myself till I was nearly grownup.

Always slept in my mother's room till I came to the throne.

(Dr. Norton) She wasn't even allowed to walk down the stairs without holding hands with a servant just to make sure that no accident happened -and that she was safe.

-Victoria's mother and Conroy forced her to abide by strict rules.

Her set of rules is so codified that it actually has a name.

It's called The Kensington System.

♪ (Matthew) The Kensington System was a kind of routine devised to manage young Victoria's behavior.

To reshape her in many ways.

To give her a kind of discipline and to protect her from the dangers of the outside world.

(narrator) Every part of Victoria's young life was carefully controlled.

What she studied, what she did her in spare time, even what she was allowed to eat.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Eating my bread and milk out of a small silver basin.

(Dr. Gray) Victoria does seem to have been kept on what we would call nursery food for longer than many children of her class.

♪ She was kept away from strong meat or red wine or things that might excite her appetite.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Took my luncheon, which consisted of potato soup.

(Dr. Riddell) There's a belief that if you eat a plain diet, you will become far more moral.

You will become far more sober, far more kind.

♪ So if you're someone who wants to control how someone is, restricting their diet and giving them plain food will make them supposedly more docile.

(narrator) By their early teens, other girls of Victoria's class were moving on to more adult meals with complex sauces and soups and a glass of wine.

They would also have started to join their parents at table for dinner.

But though she was paraded through the dining room, most of Victoria's meals were taken in her room.

♪ But if Victoria's life was regimented, she was allowed to follow some of the fashions of the day.

♪ (Dr. Norton) This image here is lovely because it shows Victoria's hair as a young girl.

We've got ringlets at the side and then it's been plated and coiled around.

So it's almost like a little crown on top of her head.

(narrator) Her elaborate hairstyles took lots of work.

Having your hair done was something that many young women of the time enjoyed.

It was a chance to chat and catch up.

♪ (Catriona) For a girl like Victoria, in the morning and in the evenings she would have to have her hair done and undone, and that was a long process.

It was often a time for women to kind of relax, but often they'd gossip.

For Victoria, that was not an option.

Her mother would prevent her from gossiping in case she said anything.

♪ (narrator) Under The Kensington System, Victoria's access to other children -was strictly limited.

-Victoria always recalled her childhood as lonely and quite sad, and to some extent it was.

She didn't have that many friends her own age.

(narrator) But if Victoria didn't have friends, -she was allowed to have pets.

-Pets were really popular, particularly among the aristocracy.

Victoria went beyond many people, her pets were very much people as far as she was concerned.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I dressed dear, sweet little Dash for the second time after dinner in a scarlet jacket and blue trousers.

(Dr. Norton) Victoria loved animals and had a series of pets.

In her early years, by far her favorite was her King Charles Spaniel, Dash.

He was an immediate hit in the household.

Victoria adored him.

♪ (Queen Victoria Reenactment) Little Dash is perfection.

He's already much attached to Mama and lies always at her feet.

(piano music) (narrator) Despite her great affection for pets like Dash, Victoria's childhood under the control of John Conroy and her mother was strict and unforgiving.

♪ (Dr. Norton) There was actually a darker side to it, and that was to raise a queen who was dependent and childlike, to keep Victoria is a state of innocence and neediness, so that when she came to the throne, she wouldn't be capable of ruling alone.

(narrator) But as Conroy and the Duchess were soon to discover, keeping such a tight rein on Victoria would backfire.

(intense music) ♪ In 1832, Princess Victoria turned 13, but her mother and John Conroy still maintained their iron grip on all aspects of her life.

What they're doing is making sure that this little girl is so dependent on them that she will be their puppet.

We have a word for that now, we call it coercive control.

(grim music) (narrator) Around this time, Victoria began keeping a journal.

(Dr. Norton) The journal had been given to her by her mother and it was part of her education that she wrote in the journal and it was expected that these would be read.

So she had to be quite careful what she actually put in the journal.

She would spend about half and hour writing her diary, hence we've got such great records of her and what she was thinking and what she was doing.

(soft, bright music) ♪ (narrator) Victoria wrote in her journal almost every day until her death aged 81.

♪ But as the sovereign to be, she quickly discovered -she didn't have much privacy.

-You have to remember that there's somebody reading over her shoulder.

These documents are very slippery.

They're very compromised.

(Dr. Gray) As she grew older she started to use them as a form of passive aggressive communication.

So some of the entries very much read as a coded message to her mother.

(narrator) Although Victoria had a difficult relationship with her mother, there was one person at the palace she became close to, Louise Lehzen.

(Catriona) Lehzen was Victoria's governess and cared for her for her entire childhood and well into her adulthood.

She wasn't her mother but she was this sort of mother-like figure.

(soft music) Lehzen was strict, she was very hard on Victoria in a certain way, but it did come from a place of genuine love and concern and care, and Victoria did understand that, which is why she felt so differently to Lehzen than she did about her mother or Conroy.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Though she was most kind, she was very firm and I had a proper respect for her.

♪ (narrator) Lehzen brought Victoria up to be a good girl, and there was a particularly unusual way of monitoring the young princess's behavior.

♪ (Professor Hughes) Here, we have the infamous behavior book.

It's a sort of hour-by-hour account of whether Victoria has managed to be a good girl or a not good girl.

It's all to do with constant monitoring, nothing is too small for it not to be noticed.

Each column here is a day, and there's about seven or eight, sometimes nine entries for each day.

So Victoria's being asked to give a sort of absolute constant account of how she's behaving.

Now most of the time it's quite good, and we know this because "Good.

Good.

Good."

Victoria has written of herself.

Sometimes, clearly, something goes very, very wrong, because here we've got on Tuesday, "Very naughty."

Double underlined.

It shows that Victoria is brought up in a sense to constantly scrutinize herself.

Lehzen was very, very keen that if she could contain her emotions, give nothing away, as it were, that would make her very, very powerful.

♪ (Queen Victoria Reenactment) I felt deeply repentant for all I had done which was wrong and trusted in God almighty to strengthen my heart and mind.

(Dr. Riddell) Her diaries, her teenage diaries especially are full of this kind of angst and pain and self-flagellation.

Because she is being made to record anything she does wrong every day and think about it.

And that's incredibly damaging.

She does start to fight back.

She does start as a teenager to become willful, to become self-determined, and to, really, I think, in her own mind, form a plan of escape.

(soft, tense music) (narrator) As Victoria turned 16, she finally began to imagine a life beyond the confining walls of Kensington Palace.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I feel that the two years to come till I obtain my 18th are the most important of any.

(Professor Hughes) We're in countdown now.

This is going to be crunch time.

Conroy and the Duchess are starting to press on her.

They are starting to make her give them promises and assurances.

(narrator) Conroy and her mother were reluctant to relax their iron grip, and part of their grand plan was to get the princess into the public eye.

Part of The Kensington System was to ensure that Victoria would be a popular monarch, and a way of doing that was to show herself to the population, to take around the country so that she wasn't an unknown quantity.

(narrator) These grand tours were called Victoria's Progresses.

♪ A major purpose of Victoria's Progresses was so that her future subjects could see her and know her before she became Queen.

It was a way of cementing her position as heir to the throne.

And we have this great image.

This girl at the front with the hat is Victoria.

She is surrounded by a crowd of people staring at her.

We know from her journal she was often quite alarmed by the crowds that came out to see her.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) The crowd was dreadful.

The people crowded around the carriage in numbers.

(Professor Hughes) They have to sell her to the country.

She will do all the things that a royal princess should do.

She goes and talks to factory girls.

She goes and peers down slate mines.

She goes and talks to manufacturers.

She's going to be somebody who understands the new Britain.

She's going to understand that there's a world beyond the great houses, the great mansions of Britain.

(narrator) To recover from her tours, Victoria visited Ramsgate in Kent.

Ready to enjoy an increasingly popular indulgence from the middle and upper classes: the seaside holiday.

(soft music) Piers, promenades, and new-fangled bathing machines, to protect the modesty of swimmers, were springing up in elegant coastal towns like Ramsgate.

Getting a royal visitor was a massive boost.

So the town put on a display fit for a princess.

(Dr. Norton) Hundred of the finest citizens of the town arrived.

They were carrying white wands in their hands and wearing rosettes and they then lead Victoria's carriage into the town.

There were banners with PV for Princess Victoria and DK for Duchess of Kent, just to really show what an important visitor Victoria was.

♪ (narrator) In Ramsgate, Victoria was joined by her beloved uncle, Leopold, King of the Belgians.

(Professor Ridley) Victoria sees Leopold as her potential savior.

She desperately hopes that he will be able to rescue her from this sort of bullying and control imposed upon her by her mother and Sir John Conroy.

(narrator) Victoria wrote about their meetings in her journal.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) We talked over many important and serious matters.

I look up to him as a father with complete confidence, love, and affection.

He is the best and kindest advisor I have.

(narrator) Three days later, Leopold returned to Belgium.

Missing her uncle and exhausted from her tours, Victoria became ill. (somber music) (Queen Victoria Reenactment) Sat up, felt wretched and cried bitterly.

I felt so ill and wretched that I did not leave my room for the rest of the evening.

Went to bed early.

♪ Victoria becomes very ill with typhoid.

She's ill for weeks.

She is struggling to walk more than a few steps at points.

She's literally bedridden and she starts losing all of her hair.

Her hair is falling out in chunks.

She's losing weight and struggling to eat.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I am still very weak and I'm grown very thin.

(thundering) (waves crashing) (narrator) While Victoria was ill and vulnerable... (soft, tense music) ...her mother and Conroy visited her with papers they wanted her to sign.

(intense music) They invade her bedroom when she's at her least strong and powerful and wave papers in front of her face and say, "Sign these to say that when you come to the throne, we will have the executive powers that we want."

(narrator) Victoria knew that is she did sign, her power as Queen would be weakened.

♪ So she stood her ground.

♪ (Professor Hughes) It's absolutely extraordinary.

She manages to hold them at bay.

This is the turning point.

It's at this point that iron enters her soul.

It's game over, really, as far as Conroy and the Duchess are concerned.

This is their last big push and they failed.

They know it, she knows it.

(majestic music) ♪ (soft music) (narrator) Seven months later, Victoria celebrated her 17th birthday.

The young princess was now more confident and assured and was looking forward to her adult life.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I awoke at seven.

Today, I complete my 17th year.

A very old person I am indeed.

(Dr. Norton) Seventeen was very grown up in the period.

I mean, other girls of her class were married by that age.

So she was very close to being a grownup.

♪ (narrator) The very week Victoria turned 17, some relatives arrived.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) At a quarter to two, we went down into the hall to receive my Uncle Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and my cousins, Ernest and Albert, his sons.

♪ (Professor Hughes) We're standing at the foot of the staircase where Victoria first set eyes on Albert.

Absolutely momentous occasion.

She did a quick inventory.

Albert was here with his elder brother, Ernest.

(soft, quirky music) (Queen Victoria Reenactment) Ernest has dark hair and fine dark eyes and eyebrows, but the nose and mouth are not good.

♪ Albert, who is just as tall as Ernest but stouter, is extremely handsome.

His hair is about the same color as mine.

His eyes are large and blue and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth.

Victoria's description of Albert and also his brother Ernest is very physical, she was clearly eyeing them up.

And the fact that she felt it important to record it in her diary, it's very teenage girl.

It's very modern.

(narrator) Behind the scenes, Victoria's Uncle Leopold was trying to set her up.

(Dr. Norton) From pretty much his birth, Leopold had marked Albert out as Victoria's future husband, and he certainly informed Albert of this.

Albert knew that his destiny lay in marrying Victoria.

(soft music) (narrator) After meeting Albert, Victoria wrote to her uncle.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) My cousins are most delightful young people.

They are both very amiable.

Very kind and good and extremely merry.

(fireworks) (upbeat music) ♪ (narrator) Later that evening, Victoria traveled to Saint James' Palace for a ball being held in her honor.

It was a chance to be seen and to size up eligible young men before she became queen.

A bit like a teen prom for the young aristocracy.

These events were full of dos and don'ts.

There's a lot of etiquette surrounding balls because they were this place where actually the opposite sexes could mingle.

There was a lot of caution employed.

Everyone would wear white gloves so that they weren't actually touching when they danced, and that was very, very important.

The role of a woman was quite passive at a ball.

So it was never the done thing for the girl to ask a man to dance with them.

They would wait until they were asked.

And it was terribly impolite to say no.

(soft, bright music) (narrator) Following the dancing, something else Victoria loved, the eating.

♪ At this party, the buffet was truly extravagant.

(Dr. Gray) A ball supper would be served probably around midnight.

This was enormous.

Huge feast for all the senses.

If you can dream of it, it would be on that table.

Lots and lots of roast meats.

Lots and lots of very beautiful sweet things often that wobble or glisten in the light.

Victoria tended to stand up for them, which scandalized certain older members of society.

But I think in her view it meant she could get in, scoff as much food as possible and then get back out to the dancing which is really where it was at.

(soft music) ♪ Victoria's dance card, as the heir to the throne, was understandably quite full.

(Professor Hughes) She loved dancing, she loved music.

She was absolutely at her best while being whirled around the dance floor by a handsome princeling.

♪ (narrator) Victoria danced with different partners, but there was one name missing from her dance list.

It's actually very surprising that Albert's not there, but unfortunately, according to Victoria's journal, he only managed to stay for two dances.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Poor, dearest Albert, who was very unwell when he went, having only danced twice turned as pale as ashes.

We all feared he might faint.

He therefore went home.

(Dr. Gray) Albert was a bit of a wuss, to be honest, at that point.

Suffered quite a lot from stomach upsets, prone to fainting fits.

Not, I would say, the best specimen of a prince.

♪ (Dr. Norton) Victoria didn't actually seem very bothered about Albert leaving, I think she was getting a bit fed up with his constant illnesses, which is probably rather disappointing for him.

(narrator) But by the end of the trip, the quiet, thoughtful Albert had begun to win Victoria over and she confessed her growing feelings for him in a letter.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Allow me then, my dearest uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him.

He is so sensible, so kind and so good.

(narrator) But it would be three years before Victoria saw Albert again, and in that time, she would become one of the most powerful women in the world.

(soft, tense music) Inside Winsor Castle, the King William IV is dying.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) The poor King, they say, can live but a few hours more.

(hooves thundering, horses whinnying) (narrator) And heir to the throne is the 18 year old Princess Victoria.

♪ When the sun rose over Kensington Palace, Victoria was woken by her mother and taken to meet the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I got out of bed and went into my sitting room alone.

Victoria makes a big thing of saying she went out "alone," and that's such an important word because she'd hardly ever been alone for her entire life.

I'm sure her mother would've liked to have come with her and was probably sort of craning her neck and trying to listen at the door.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) The Lord Chamberlain then acquainted me that my poor uncle, the King, was no more and consequently, that I am Queen.

(orchestral music) (narrator) Much of Victoria's young life had been leading to this moment.

She was the first unmarried English woman to become Queen for nearly three centuries.

♪ Victoria was now in charge.

Her first acts as Queen were to settle some scores.

Within hours, she cut the ties of her troubled childhood, moving out of her mother's bedroom to finally sleep alone.

And dismissing the domineering John Conroy -from her royal household.

-The fact that Victoria was asserting herself showed that Conroy and her mother had really failed in their attempts to create a compliant Queen, because, actually, it was very, very clear that Victoria intended to rule alone.

♪ (narrator) The young Queen left Kensington Palace with all its bad memories.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I have gone through painful and disagreeable scenes here.

'Tis true that I am still fond of the poor, old palace.

♪ (narrator) She moved a short ride away to Buckingham Palace, making it her official London residence.

(soft music) ♪ As sovereign, Victoria was expected to feed her many guests and visitors, and menus from the royal archive show just how lavishly.

♪ This is the first record that we've got of what Victoria ate as Queen.

That's all of this page here.

She starts off with soup, chicken and rice and Soup Printanière, which is a sort of spring vegetable soup.

Then you go onto your other dishes.

So those dishes that are on the table at the same time as the soup.

In this case, you've got a large piece of beef, you've got some roast lamb, you've got lamb cutlet, there's some fish filets.

All of that's her first course and then her second course you've got roasts.

In this case, you've got quail and also capon.

Then you've got a souffléd omelet and then you've got your sweet dishes.

There's also a buffet.

So in addition to all of this food on the table, there would've been a side table, and that was just in case you got hungry after all of that food.

So this is a Queen who is dining regularly, as in every day, with 20 or 30 different people.

(piano music) ♪ (narrator) June the 28th, 1838.

Coronation day.

Victoria is about to be crowned Queen.

♪ Thousands came to London to celebrate.

(cheering) ♪ (uplifting music) (Queen Victoria Reenactment) Millions of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the procession.

Their good humor and excessive loyalty was beyond everything.

People just felt very positive towards Victoria.

She was such a blank slate.

She was such a perfect metaphor for how the Victorians saw themselves.

This kind of young and fresh and exciting, all of the potential with no mistakes to her name.

(majestic music) ♪ (narrator) This was to be the launch of a new national icon.

♪ Today was all about making Victoria the people's Queen.

A modest young girl in a pure white dress, she looked like a hopeful bride and she's finally ready to marry the crown.

♪ (Dr. Norton) We have a great image here of the coronation.

You can see how packed the abbey is.

This was the hottest ticket in town.

Everybody wanted to come and watch the coronation.

♪ (narrator) During the ceremony an accident showed the kind of girl Victoria really was.

(Dr. Norton) While she was taking homage from her Lords, Lord Rolle fell down the steps.

Instead of just remaining sitting, she got out of her chair and went down the steps to give him her hand to kiss and to ask if he was unhurt.

And it showed her humanity.

It showed her kindness towards this elderly member of her court and it just summed up the popularity of the day with crowds cheering both inside and outside the abbey.

(narrator) Unfortunately for Victoria, Lord Rolle's roll wasn't the only trip-up that day.

(soft, quirky music) It's always said these days that we are absolutely brilliant at pageantry, and we are pretty good at it.

But the coronation of Queen Victoria -was pretty much a shambles.

-The Archbishop came in and ought to have delivered the Orb to me.

But I had already got it and he, as usual, was so confused and puzzled.

Victoria felt the Archbishop himself wasn't really up to the job.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) The Archbishop had, most awkwardly, put the ring on the wrong finger and the consequence was that I had the greatest difficulty -to take it off again.

-But the gaffes of the old men around her didn't spoil Victoria's big day.

(orchestral music) Victoria's coronation was a moment of national celebration.

♪ But as a young and female ruler, she now had to prove herself.

We see Victoria standing alone and expected to rule alone, and for a teenager that's quite daunting.

(narrator) Leaning heavily on her beloved Prime Minister Lord Melvin for advice, Victoria improved her grasp of politics.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) It is to me the greatest pleasure to do my duty -for my country and my people.

-The dutiful new Queen knuckled down to learn on the job but she was still a young woman and loved her friends and a good gossip too.

She makes remarks in her journal about who's pretty, who's got a great sense of dress, who's a bit overweight.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Lady Ashley was looking very pretty, though a little tired and not quite strong.

Lady Mary, though on too large a scale, was looking handsome.

(soft music) These early years of the reign show Victoria is very inexperienced and very easily influenced and too much affected by intrigue and gossip.

(dramatic music) (narrator) Less than a year into her reign, a particularly juicy rumor surfaced, and Queen Victoria was soon at the center of a scandal that threatened to ruin the young woman involved, Lady Flora Hastings.

(Dr. Norton) Flora served as a lady in waiting to Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent.

As a result of this, Victoria knew her well.

She looks very demure, she looks virginal.

She looks upstanding.

(soft, tense music) (narrator) But Flora was part of the enemy camp.

(Dr. Norton) She was part of the hated Kensington System that Victoria railed against.

So when Victoria became Queen, Flora is banished to a distant part of Buckingham Palace along with the Duchess of Kent.

Victoria disliked Lady Flora.

She was willing to think the worst of her.

(narrator) Changes to Lady Flora's waistline had caught the attention of the ladies of the palace, -especially Victoria.

-She started having a noticeable growth to her lower stomach and she was seen experiencing nausea and sickness and fatigue.

♪ (narrator) The teenage queen jumped at the chance to suggest something scandalous had happened.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I discovered how exceedingly suspicious her figure looked.

More have observed this and we have no doubt that she is, to use plain words, with child.

♪ (narrator) Being pregnant would make Flora a fallen woman, the ultimate disgrace at the time.

Victoria and morality could be unforgiven.

In the mid 19th century, it was important that unmarried women were seen to be pure.

Many desperate, unmarried pregnant women had to give up their babies to foundling hospitals.

Working class women became destitute.

More well to do women like Flora could claw their way back to respectable lives as governesses or servants.

If Flora was pregnant, she was ruined.

(grim music) So it looks as though she may be pregnant out of wedlock.

Well, that in itself is exciting, but what Victoria becomes convinced of is that the father of this phantom child is none other than Sir John Conroy.

(soft, tense music) (narrator) Victoria still hated Conroy.

♪ And described him as... (Queen Victoria Reenactment) The monster and demon incarnate.

(Catriona) She saw this as the perfect piece of scandal to destroy this man who controlled her for her teenage years, who she hated.

♪ (narrator) While rumors swirled about the father, there was no place in society for the unmarried mother and certainly not at Buckingham Palace.

♪ Flora was given an intrusive medical examination.

♪ But the doctor discovered that she wasn't pregnant.

♪ (Professor Hughes) Victoria is pretty furious.

(door slams) It was absolutely mortifying to find out that there's nothing the matter with Lady Flora.

(narrator) Word got out that the young Queen was at the heart of the scandal and that she made a terrible mistake.

(Professor Hughes) She's proved what everybody worried about, which is that a woman, and a young woman at that, is really completely unsuitable to be Queen.

I mean, she has basically turned the whole thing into a school girl scandal.

(narrator) Many of Victoria's subjects were outraged and turned against her.

(Professor Hughes) It is as if the whole world is jabbering at Victoria.

Every newspaper, wherever she looks, there's a kind of fiesta of pointing fingers and retrying the whole case.

It is actually really, really terrible for her.

(narrator) Victoria knew she needed to find a way to repair the damage urgently.

(Professor Hughes) This could actually bring Victoria down.

We could be talking abdication.

(dark music) ♪ (narrator) Only a year after she was crowned Queen, Victoria's reputation was at rock bottom.

And she seemed out of her depth.

(soft music) People are furious, understandably.

You know, they see Victoria as this sort of petulant gossiping child.

(narrator) The target of her gossip, Lady Flora Hastings, was now seriously ill, and a humble Victoria visited her to try and make peace.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I found poor Lady Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive.

Literally a skeleton but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child.

She grasped my hand as if to say, "I shall not see you again."

♪ (narrator) A week later, Lady Flora died.

(grim music) An autopsy revealed her swollen stomach was the result of a tumor on her liver.

Victoria had been desperate to use the scandal to punish her enemy, Sir John Conroy, the man she blamed for her miserable childhood.

(Dr. Atwal) She though she'd got the golden ticket to kick him out, but she misjudged it and then it backfired on her.

Must've been a bitter pill to swallow I would've thought.

(narrator) If Victoria's reign was to be a success, she had to grow up.

And by the end of the year, she'd made a decision that showed her public she had.

♪ That autumn a familiar face arrived at Windsor Castle and this time, Victoria became completely love-struck.

(Dr. Norton) The last time Victoria had seen Albert has been for her 17th birthday, and then he'd been a shy, slightly awkward teenager.

This all changed when Albert returned to England after Victoria became Queen.

The portrait suggests the Albert had transformed.

He'd grown out of this sort of gawkiness of youth and he'd become a young man.

This is the Albert that Victoria met and immediately fell in love with.

She refers to him as "beautiful."

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) Such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth.

A beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist.

My heart is quite going.

(soft music) (narrator) Within four days, Victoria's mind was made up.

♪ She knew what she wanted.

She made her own choices, and right up to choosing her own husband.

Nobody choose Albert for her.

He may had been suggested but she had the final decision.

(narrator) But when you're the Queen, getting engaged -is a tricky business.

-Her position was a very awkward one because, traditionally, of course, the male made the proposition.

But in her case, it couldn't be like that.

Her station and her rank were much higher than his.

(piano music) (narrator) Five days after Albert's arrival, Victoria followed royal protocol and popped the question.

(Catriona) She summoned him for a private chat in her salon and they sort of make some awkward small talk and then eventually, she kind of got to it.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) I thought, he must be aware of why I wished him to come here and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished, to marry me.

We embraced each other over and over again.

(Dr. Riddell) When Victoria writes "We embraced multiple times" of course this means they kissed.

So this is Victoria writing about her first kiss.

This will have been, we suspect, the first time a man's body has been against hers.

The first time she would've felt the arms of someone who's going to be her lover around her.

So for Victoria, this is everything she's ever dreamed of.

(Queen Victoria Reenactment) He is perfection.

Perfection in every way.

In beauty, in everything.

I told him I was quite unworthy of him -and kissed his dear hand.

-She's so in love with him at that moment.

♪ (narrator) Victoria's first two years on the throne had been a huge challenge.

She'd done it alone.

And now she needed someone to support her.

(Professor Hughes) She's made a hash of being queen.

She needs to draft in extra resources, extra help, and she is clever enough or lucky enough to choose Albert.

♪ (Dr. Gray) When you look at Queen Victoria at that point, you just are filled with love for her.

Yes, she's flawed, of course she's flawed.

She's deeply innocent, she knows nothing of the world, she makes huge mistakes.

She thinks she knows her own mind, but it's easily swayed.

There are loads of things where it's not great, but everybody's human and she's in some way so painfully human that you just want to give her a really big hug and then go down to the pub with her.

♪ (energetic music) ♪