Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things

Welcome to royal history with bite.In this episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams head east to Transylvania to unravel one of the strangest threads in modern royal history. King Charles III’s long-standing fascination with Romania turns out to involve more than rural preservation and beautiful churches — it also leads back, genealogically, to Vlad III, the ruler whose brutality helped inspire the Dracula legend.But Vlad is not the region’s only blood-soaked aristocrat uncovered. Their conversation also takes in the infamous Countess Elizabeth Báthory, accused of torturing and killing young women in neighbouring Hungary — and asks whether her reputation reflects historical reality, political convenience, or deep-seated fears about power, inheritance, and women who ruled alone.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Royals, hot dogs, Hollywood, and the making of the “special relationship”Robert and Kate conclude their deep dive into Britain and America’s long and complicated partnership. Joined once again by historian, broadcaster, and Gilded Age expert Julie Montagu, Countess of Sandwich, they trace how glamour, war, royalty, and politics combined to create the modern Anglo-American world.From Edward VII’s fascination with wealthy, irreverent Americans, through the cultural explosion of Hollywood and jazz, to the shockwaves caused by Wallis Simpson, the episode explores how America became both Britain’s obsession and its future. As two world wars redraw the balance of power, monarchs and presidents begin meeting face to face, propaganda goes viral before the word exists, and American soldiers — and culture — flood into Britain at its darkest hour.The story culminates with the Second World War, the rise of American global dominance, the humiliation of Suez, and Queen Elizabeth II’s pivotal visits to the United States. A final chapter in a long political divorce: no longer bitter, never quite clean, but undeniably special.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Revolution, the American divorce, and the true history of the sandwich! Robert and Kate return to the American War of Independence as the story moves beyond declarations and slogans, and into the long, uncertain struggle of what independence actually meant. Joined by a special guest, historian, broadcaster, and Gilded Age expert Julie Montagu, Countess of Sandwich, they explore the years after 1776, when the war dragged on, loyalties fractured, and victory was anything but assured.From Yorktown and the uneasy end of the war, to the daunting task of inventing a new nation from scratch, the episode examines how America decided not to become what it had just escaped. Should George Washington be a king? What should a president look like? And how does a former colony meet its former monarch again — as an equal?The story stretches forward through fragile reconciliation, the burning of Washington in the War of 1812, and the long shadow of the Civil War, before arriving at the Gilded Age — a moment when old aristocracy and new American wealth collide, and the modern “special relationship” begins to take shape. A tale of ambition, miscalculation, reinvention, and the strange intimacy of a political divorce that never quite became a clean break.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of American Independence - unfolding the momentous history.Robert and Kate kick off a three-part deep dive into one of history’s significant break-ups: how George III went from being “King of America” to the monarch who lost an entire continent. From the earliest English colonies - Jamestown’s swampy gamble, and the Puritans braving the Mayflower crossing - to the booming, self-confident 13 colonies of the 18th century, the stage is set for a spectacular falling-out.Taxes, tea, troops in your living room, the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, Washington’s early defeats, and that electrifying moment in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence rewrote the world. Robert and Kate unpack the misunderstandings, blunders, loyalties, and sheer distances that pushed a loyal colony into open rebellion and forced a young George III to face the greatest divorce in royal history.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Love, 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 Palmer 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.

Behind every coronation, balcony wave and solemn procession lies a simple truth: royalty is theatre.In this sparkling, story-packed episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams pull back the velvet curtain on the royals’ surprisingly long, and often hilarious, love affair with pantomime.From Henry VIII discovering Anne Boleyn through a masked performance, to the Restoration actresses who scandalised a queen, to Queen Victoria’s sentimental family tableaux, the stage has always been a royal playground. But nothing compares to the Second World War pantomimes at Windsor Castle, where a teenage Princess Elizabeth donned tights as Aladdin, Princess Margaret stole scenes as Cinderella, and a young naval officer named Philip watched from the audience.History, romance, and panto all in one room… oh yes it was.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

A seasonal cracker from the podcast that loves Royals and history - listen now.In this special edition of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unwrap the surprisingly rich, and frequently eccentric, festive legacy of the monarchy. From a 10th-century duke reinvented as a Victorian Christmas hero, to Henry VIII moonlighting as a carol writer, to the Tudor court’s rather questionable idea of “seasonal cheer,” it turns out the royals have been shaping our holidays for over a millennium.We travel from medieval Bohemia to Cromwell’s anti-Christmas crackdown, before settling by the fire with Victoria and Albert, the couple who practically invented the modern festive season. Along the way, we explore SEDITION in much-loved carols, rogue wassailers, musical monarchs, and a surprising link between the Windsors and “Good King Wenceslas.”This episode asks the big question: what have the royals ever given us for Christmas?Quite a lot, as it turns out.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

The 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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

The 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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Are 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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Prince 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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Was Churchill her favourite PM — and who did the Queen secretly loathe?Find out in this week’s royally revealing episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things! Robert Hardman is joined by royal biographer Andrew Morton — yes, the man behind Diana: Her True Story — to spill the palace secrets behind Queen Elizabeth II’s fifteen Prime Ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss.From Churchill bursting into tears during audiences to Thatcher trudging through the Balmoral mud in high heels, from John Major quietly becoming the boys’ guardian after Diana’s death to Edward Heath’s icy froideur over Europe, it’s a whistle-stop tour through seventy years of royal-political drama.Who made her laugh? Who bored her senseless? And which PM nodded off next to her at dinner?With anecdotes of horse talk, coronation nerves, backstairs gossip, and power struggles behind palace doors, this episode lifts the velvet curtain on one of history’s most enduring double acts — the monarch who never flinched, and the politicians who tried to keep up.Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate WilliamsSeries Producer: Ben DevlinProduction Manager: Vittoria Cecchini Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

Royals in taxis, Groucho Marx glasses on ski slopes, and a Soviet mole hiding in the Queen’s drawing room — this episode has it all. Listen Now.In their second episode of Spies & The Crown, Kate Williams and Robert Hardman go full cloak-and-dagger as they unmask Anthony Blunt — the Queen’s own art adviser turned KGB spy — and dig into the bizarre world of undercover royals. From Princess Elizabeth sneaking into the VE Day crowds, to Prince Harry insisting he was just “Bob” in a nightclub, history proves the Windsors have never been short on disguises.And then there’s the bombshell: how close did treachery really get to the heart of Buckingham Palace? And could it happen again?Listen now to Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things — where the palace walls whisper, and the spies are sometimes already inside.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

From the Tudors to King Charles III, the royals have always been close to spies. Listen to find out!Today’s monarchs get discreet MI5 briefings — but back in Elizabeth I’s day, her spymaster Francis Walsingham was inventing the modern secret service with beer-barrel dead drops, forged letters, and a plot that sent Mary Queen of Scots to the block.This episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things dives into the wildest tales of royal espionage: Christopher Marlowe, the playwright who may have been a double agent; John Dee, the Queen’s astrologer signing his reports “007”; and Queen Victoria’s Indian confidant Abdul Karim, hounded as a foreign spy by jealous courtiers. Fast forward to World War II and you’ll find Hitler’s agents scheming to kidnap Edward VIII and put him back on the throne as a Nazi puppet.Plots, paranoia, and velvet cushions hiding sharpened daggers — when royalty meets espionage, the truth is stranger than any Bond film.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.

“Off with his head!” may be the most famous royal sentence ever passed — but what happens before the axe falls? Can kings and queens actually be locked up like the rest of us? Listen to find out!On today’s episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Kate Williams and Robert Hardman dig into the murky history of royal captivity — where velvet cushions meet iron bars, and sovereign immunity doesn’t always save the day.We’ve got Charles I, the would-be master of disguise who chopped off his beard, called himself “Harry,” and still managed to end up wedged in a castle window like Winnie the Pooh after too much honey. We’ve got Mary Queen of Scots, forever scheming her way out of tower rooms and washer-woman costumes, until Elizabeth I finally lost patience. And we’ve got Marie Antoinette, who began her confinement with upholstered chairs and charity visits, but ended it humiliated, stripped of dignity, and walking towards the guillotine while the crowd jeered.Not all prison stories end with a block and blade. Some are quieter — and crueller. George III was never convicted of treason, never even plotted escape, yet he spent his last years effectively locked up in Windsor, a prisoner of his own mind and his doctors’ brutal “cures.” And in the 20th century, Hitler’s Colditz Castle became a surreal jail for royal hostages — cousins of the Queen turned into bargaining chips in the dying days of the war.So — can royals be jailed? History’s answer is complicated. Some lost their heads. Some lost their freedom. And some, like poor Princess Alice, were locked away simply for being inconvenient.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 Content Editor: Joseph Palmer 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.