Frankie Boyle's Farewell to the Monarchy (2023)

[bunniefuu]

I didn't make any jokes
when the Queen died.

I maintained a strict silence

as I tried to sneak
back out of her bedroom.

People queued for ten miles
to see the Queen lying in state.

I accidentally joined the wrong queue.

At the end, there was just
a Scouser who charged me a tenner

to see a dead badger in a tiara.

Royal insiders say the new King
is keen to modernise the monarchy,

starting with the radical
redefinition of the word "modernise"

to mean "keep exactly the same".

Of course they'll try to find ways
of sounding relevant.

King Charles spoke out recently
about climate change.

He said it was rare to hear such despair

in young people's voices

that aren't coming
from his brother's bedroom.

To be fair, the royals are doing
their bit to reduce emissions

by never flying the jewels
they own back to the countries

they were stolen from.

It's time to say farewell to the monarchy.

The royal family are as much
a part of our nation's history

as steam trains and genocide.

Famously, the public drew strength
from the royal family

staying in London during World w*r II.

Presumably, they thought
the Luftwaffe might hold back

if there was a risk they'd b*mb their own.

But increasingly,

the British monarchy
appear like animals in a zoo

that's fallen on hard times -

fidgety, balding, pacing up and down
their marble cage,

pausing only to chew their own tail off

or commit a sex crime out of boredom.

So, what will happen to Britain's
most boring crime syndicate?

To find out
about the future of the monarchy,

we must look back at their past

because that is the premise
on which I obtained

the commission for this show.

I'm going to look at some
of the most famous English

and British kings and queens

and choose one quality from each of them

that has helped to shape
the monarchy as it is today.

And who better to start
with than William the Conqueror?

Just smashing into
the white cliffs of Dover,

a proper Brexit death.

William the Conqueror
could have conquered anywhere,

but he felt that God had chosen him

as the ruler of the isosceles triangle

of wind and racism known as England.

Before the Normans arrived,

the high point of English culture
was watching the village idiot

punch a pig to death in a stone circle

to save the harvest,

and at certain time slots
on Channel 5, it still is.

We know quite a lot
about the Battle of Hastings

because of the Bayeux Tapestry.

It wasn't created
until four years after the battle,

although, in fairness,
you'd have to stitch f*cking fast

to capture the action as it happened.

William the Conqueror,

he'd been fighting
since he was a child, really.

So, from around seven years old,

we know that the Duke of Normandy
was taught warfare.

So, he was all set
for this battle. His day came.

We'll try and get a...

..an idea of what
he would've been wearing in battle.

This is a short tunic,

and that's very heavy
just being short, isn't it? Yeah.

And this is the full version?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

This is a slightly lighter gauge,
but it's a bigger garment.

How much of a light gauge do you want?

I quite like this. I mean,
I sort of think... Yeah, yeah.

But hang on. Hang on.
Put yourself in a battle... Yeah.

..where it's like running
into a razor blade factory...

Yeah. Yeah?

You're not just fighting
the chap in front of you.

You've got everybody else fighting,

and these swords are super, super sharp.

Now you say that, I'd like both.

That'd be quite good going out...

That's not bad!
..on a Friday night in Glasgow.

All right, let's try this on.

You're looking good.

You want to look good,

cos you're going to be
leading from the front.

You want everyone to know
that the King's there.

In that time, w*r was a glorious thing,

so you wanted to be seen.

You had to be seen. Yes.
Not like today.

w*r's had a bit of a bad press lately.

So, you, sir, are kitted up.

Yeah, I'm going to go and take
what the Lord has promised me.

Let's k*ll some English.

King Harold was shot in the eye -

possibly the first person
in Hastings to die

with a needle hanging out of his eyeball,

but not the last.

At the end of the battle, Harold was
mutilated by William's men

and the dead English soldiers
were stripped naked

in one of the most deeply erotic things

ever to happen on these shores.

This is Odo's house.

Odo was William the Conqueror's
half-brother?

Yeah.

He is basically the boss
who does all of the work,

and so that's the sort of the thing
that you want to keep in the family

because you've got to make sure

you've got an eye
on where the money's going.

This is the great hall of the house,

and it makes me want to have a great hall.

SHE LAUGHS It makes me, like, you know,

want to have, like, on Rightmove,
an option where you can go...

"Great hall".

William the Conqueror,

he comes over, as everybody knows, in 1066.

Mm-hm. Kills a bunch of people
at Hastings... Yeah.

..and then sort of divvies up
their lands to his aristos.

So, you know, one of the things
they were very, very good at

is actually record keeping, right?

So, that's how you get the Doomsday Book.

You go through it with a fine tooth comb,

see every sheep, you know,
like, every little village,

every little thing, write that down,

and then it tells you
how much money you can extract.

And they did a great job of that.

William says, "I'm going
to extract all the taxes."

You just put these people
all throughout the country,

make sure they're collecting money,

and then send it back
to where he's living it large.

So, would you say William is
the most important King of England

because he kind of sets the ball rolling?

Yeah, I would say so.

The thing about William is he's the one

who really sort of sets up
the monarchy as we know it.

He's the one who says,

"The way that kingship works in England

"is that I give things to my friend,

"we own all the land,

"this is how it works."

We can see the unique quality
William possessed was his ability

to see the position of the monarch

as primarily
about the extraction of revenue -

a noble tradition that our royals,

the world's largest landowners,
at about 6.6 million acres,

continue to this day.

So, this is Regent Street,

and this is owned by the Crown Estates.

It's owned by the King.

It's developed into some
of the most expensive real estate

on the planet.

They get more from their flagship
Apple store

than they get from
all of the farmland that they own.

They own a bunch of, like,
shopping centres and...?

Shopping centres, retail parks,
huge amounts of farmland.

And there's the famous quote, isn't there,

from the Duke of Westminster,

the late Duke of Westminster,
when he was asked,

"How would you get ahead in
England?"

He said, "My advice
would be to have an ancestor

"who's a close friend
of William the Conqueror." Yes. Yes.

And there's land in England...

So, we have the famous statistic
in Scotland

where 400 people own half
of the land in Scotland. Yes. Yeah.

But it's very concentrated
in England as well, isn't it?

It's hugely concentrated.
Hugely unequal.

It's probably not quite
as unequal as it is in Scotland,

but still about 1% of the population

own half of the land in England.

Wow.

But, like, the aristocracy is
kind of quantifiable, isn't it?

There's maybe, like,
a couple of thousand...

Yeah... Titles in England?
Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

About 2,000 people who are in members

of the peerage or baronetage,

and then they own about 30% of England.

30%? 30% of England. Still!

It's like Monopoly, isn't it?
Yeah. It is exactly like Monopoly.

And yet the other thing
William the Conqueror did was

he formed the Royal Forest,

so then there was, like,
a whole swathe of land in England

that was for the King to hunt in,

and if you... Yeah.
..if you hunted there,

you would be mutilated.

You'd have your hands chopped off.
Yes. Yes.

Yeah, eyes gouged out,
I think, in some of the records

of what would have happened,
what would have been the punishment.

The Grosvenor family,
that dates back as a nickname

to Hugh "Le Grand Veneur" -
"The Fat Hunter",

who was one of the Norman barons

who came over with William the Conqueror

during the Norman Conquest.

"The Fat Hunter". "The Fat Hunter".

Didn't want to get your eyes
gouged out by the Fat Hunter.

There have always been royal scandals.

Last year, Prince Andrew was
stripped of his royal titles,

though he remains a trustee
of his favourite charity,

Happy Finish,
which gives work opportunities

to young people in the field
of what might broadly be described

as physiotherapy.

Richard III in many ways set the tone

for what would become
the modern British monarchy -

a child-sacrificing cult
of violent ruthless ambition

which the British public is
happy to tolerate in exchange

for a long bank holiday.

Richard's reputation suffered
over the years

because he was portrayed by Shakespeare

as a murderous hunchbacked villain,

as opposed to a statutory r*pist
like Romeo,

or, like a character in one
of his light-hearted comedies,

a donkey f*ck.

Here is the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Amazing.

Richard III, it's one of the largest roles

in the entire Shakespearian canon.

It's also a fantastically charismatic part

because we love a villain.

So, a lot of great actors
have played Richard III,

a lot of great actors
have been drawn to it.

It isn't fact of how
do you play the disability.

Do you play, you know, the hunchback,

the "bunch-backed toad"?

So, famously, Tony Sher,

my other half, in 1984,
played him with crutches.

He said, you know, "If I had two crutches

"and these funny, long hanging sleeves,

"then I'm almost a spider," you know.

Plots have I laid...

That was such a massive thing.
I mean, I can remember that.

So, never been to the theatre in my life,

12 years old or something,

living in a tenement in Glasgow,

I knew that he... a guy
was playing Richard III on crutches,

and it was a big sensation. It was.

The Richard III Society
wanted to rehabilitate

the reputation of Richard as a good king.

Amazingly, they discovered his body

underneath the car park in Leicester...

..and then discovered
this skeleton with scoliosis,

which must have meant that the man
was in considerable pain.

And that was really interesting to me,

because the real Richard III,

I don't know that the man was a good man.

I don't know that
any medieval king frankly was...

..was necessarily good,

but we recognise tyranny through
the template of Richard III.

An American Shakespeare scholar
called Stephen Greenblatt

wrote a book about Richard III
and all Shakespeare's tyrants.

Uh, he never mentions
the words "Donald Trump",

but it's clearly virtually
a biography of Donald Trump.

Yeah. I've read that book - Tyrant.
Tyrant. Yeah, yeah.

Because he sort
of analyses Richard's character

and says, "Here is a man
manifestly unfit to govern.

"He's a narcissist
who has enablers around him."

He said, you know, in a way,
it is exactly the same with Putin,

with somebody who is indifferent to truth.

And Shakespeare is asking
those very same questions, um,

about how we let ourselves
be ruled by leaders

who become despotic.

Richard III appointed himself

the 12-year-old Edward V's Lord Protector.

He took an unusual approach to the role,

protecting the king by locking him
in the Tower of London

and murdering him.

Of course, I can't prove
Richard III m*rder*d his nephews,

but in 1674, workmen in the Tower of London

dug up a box containing
two small human skeletons.

To be fair, they could be anyone.

The Tower of London is basically
the monarchy's equivalent

of Fred West's patio,
but then I'm not a historian,

so I don't need to prove anything.

I could tell you that Henry V
invented the fidget spinner

and the worst my producer will do is tut.

That's 550 years of layers of stuff.

He was down here, and Leicester
just happened on top of him.

I'm always keen to learn about DNA,

mainly how not to leave it
at my crime scenes,

so I went to Leicester University

to ask professor of genetics Turi King

how they used DNA
to identify Richard's body.

This looks like
a crime scene investigation... Yeah.

..just 500 years late.

So, Richard's got 11 injuries on him.

He's got that one
on the very top of his head.

And if you look at the CT scans,

there's little flaps of bone on the inside

but it's not gone all the way through.

Done with something like a rondel dagger.

That would have made him feel really woozy,

but that wouldn't have k*lled him.

The ones that have k*lled him are these.

So, that's the base of his skull.

That's where your spinal column goes up.

He's got seven centimetres
of brain exposed.

It's horrific, isn't it?
It's horrific.

It's... It's medieval warfare.

I mean, I know it's really brutal,
medieval warfare,

but at the same time,
he's an anointed King of England.

This is pretty unusual, isn't it,

that someone would be ex*cuted
on the b*ttlefield?

So, there is a story
about how he is stripped naked

and he's flung over the back of a horse,

and then humiliations
are heaped upon the body.

Of course, that's a perfect
opportunity for somebody

to potentially take a sword
or a dagger and do that.

This is just men, isn't it?

This is like...
This is what happened to Gaddafi.

It's... It's...

The interesting thing is his face.

So, quite often what would happen
in battles is they would, um,

destroy the face
so people aren't recognised.

They didn't do this with Richard.

Because they need to show him and say,

"This is the King. We k*lled him."
Exactly. Exactly.

Presumably, this was
a really big deal for Leicester?

It was massive.

I suppose the appeal of monarchy,
the British monarchy,

is one of the most famous things
in the world. Absolutely.

But also he was one of the worst...
the most famous ones...

Him and Henry VIII... I know.

..are just the absolute worst ones.
Yeah, yeah.

I found it really fascinating,

because obviously with
the genetic analysis, I have had...

I mean, I get them now.

I get several a week even now,
it's ten years later,

people saying, "I think
I'm related to Richard III.

"Can you test my DNA
and prove that?"

And I have to say to them, "Look, you know,

"it's been estimated that there are between

"one and 17 million people alive today

"who are descended
from his immediate family."

We're all related to each other,
and we're all related to royalty.

I just... I just think as a message,
it's just brilliant,

that idea of we're all related
to each other... Yeah.

..and we're all related to royalty.
Yeah.

That should be the new sort of
"Live, laugh, love"... Exactly.

..on every fridge. There you go.

King for two years,

partly because there was a recession.

A couple of years of recession,

then suddenly
getting your head chopped off,

and you're buried under a car park -

something that our modern leaders
might like to bear in mind.

In 1996, the divorce of Charles
and Diana shook the monarchy

to its foundations in hell.

Prince Charles went on
to marry Camilla Parker Bowles,

although they never had
any children because, sadly,

their two species can't interbreed.

And yet, still the most famous
royal divorcee is King Henry VIII.

Henry VIII is what many of us picture

when we think of a king -

a fat, shiny m*rder*r in women's tights.

Henry was a keen hunter,

and judging from his portraits,
he mainly hunted cheese.

Henry was a big believer
in the divine right of kings

to rule absolutely, marry who they chose,

or promote their own range
of delicious shortbread.

If our monarchy has been chosen by God,

he must have been looking down
on some pretty cloudy days.

He married six women
in a frenzied royal game

of shag, marry, k*ll,
and the answer was often all three.

Here we are. Oh, my God.
This is incredible.

People sort of view his relationship
with Anne Boleyn

as the transition kind of
from the younger Henry

into I think the despotic tyrant.

Bloated, paranoid maniac.

Yeah, that. That. Mostly that.

Anne Boleyn. The woman of the hour.

Yeah. Smart, charismatic.

If not conventionally beautiful
by the standards of the time,

then making up for it in charm and wit.

In just a few short years,
he annulled his marriage,

married this woman -

who was only the second commoner
ever elevated to Queen -

and then beheaded her.

Yes. Yeah.

And he was...

He was maybe just touching 40
when he married her.

Yeah. He was in his early forties

when they were actually able
to get married.

And then by the time he has her ex*cuted,

he's, like, 45, is he? Yeah.

I think that's very mid-life-crisis stuff.

I mean, if you're,
from the time you're born,

told that you're God's vessel on Earth

and that your will is the will of God,

how can you not be a narcissist, really?

Yeah. And he really believed
in the divine right of kings.

He might have been one of
the only people in the country

who actually believed in it, but
he did explicitly believe in it.

Maybe that's not a healthy way
to live or view yourself.

So, this is, um, the bed chamber,
where the magic happened.

This is where... Allegedly.

Allegedly happened. Yeah.

Beautiful view underneath the ceiling.

I think Anne Boleyn quite intelligently

or cleverly realised that as a king,

he was used to getting everything
he wanted immediately,

and it would sort of be new and exciting

to have something denied,

and realised that
if she played her hand right,

she could become Queen of England.

And I mean, she did.

It was a brilliant play.
I mean, for me, no notes, well done.

HE LAUGHS And if she had a son,

I think the story
would have ended differently.

The point at which he executes Anne Boleyn,

and just sends her away
and doesn't see her...

So, he's presented with evidence,
and he just says, "OK, k*ll her."

I mean, it's absolutely shocking.

Beheading a sovereign queen is,
I mean, a mad thing to do

in the context of the time.

I mean, it's a mad thing to do now.

Imagine anyone having the authority
to execute their own wife.

And from then, he gets progressively worse,

and the wives come quicker.

Quicker, and the executions come more easy.

I think, you know, after the first one...

It's like tattoos -

after you get one, you just want
to keep getting them. HE LAUGHS.

Henry was, by the end of his life,
incredibly irrational,

and his moods would affect
situations more than his reason.

And I think that is
one of the main arguments

against a monarchy having
authoritarian power in a country,

is that an individual's whims
and moods have global consequences.

Yes, it's not good, is it?

No, it's objectively bad,
I think we can say.

I mean, in America,

it's bad enough when a president's whims

and moods have global consequences,

but at least we can get rid of them
after a few years.

Yeah. You're talking
about assassination?

Oh...

Henry was a narcissist,

famous for multiple wives and
children he paid no attention to.

Dead end.

And he understood something

that our current monarchy
has learned well -

you can never be too ruthless.

Henry VIII is one of the few husbands.

Johnny Depp can feel superior to.

Only England could watch a man abuse
six different women

and think, "Maybe every schoolchild
should learn a rhyme

"to remember how he did it."

Henry also invented modern divorce,

and so it's his fault
that you're watching this at home,

alone and unloved.

Locked gate.

Princess Diana's funeral in 1997

was watched by a staggering
2.5 billion people worldwide,

eclipsing even Meghan Markle's
funeral in 2024.

In many ways, it's extraordinary to think

that if Diana had only survived
that car crash,

she would have gone on to live
a relaxed and happy six months

before being thrown out of
a hotel window in a staged suicide.

Which brings us to Lady Jane Grey...

..a young woman
who illustrates a quality

seen in the monarchy throughout history -

it's unshakeable misogyny.

Jane was just a teenager
when she was deposed and ex*cuted.

Of course, nowadays,
if you heard about a teenage girl

being k*lled by the royals,
you might be tempted to assume

she was some kind of witness
for the prosecution.

Perhaps the misogyny
of royalty is inevitable,

given that the principal role
they see women as performing

is one of child-bearing.

During the birth of Edward,

Henry VIII was told that both
mother and child were in danger.

He replied, "If you cannot save them both,

"at least let the child live,
for other wives are easily found."

Quite the birth plan.

So, we're on the Thames,

we're in a little Tudor barge,

and this is how Lady Jane Grey
would have travelled down

to the Tower of London first...
Exactly.

..when she was made Queen. Yeah.

10th of July 1553,

Jane leaves on a barge like this,
never to return again.

And how long was she Queen for?
Cos some people say nine days.

I say 13 days, yeah, because she was Queen

from the moment that Edward VI died
on the 6th of July.

That would be my argument.

Others would argue that she was Queen

from the day that she was proclaimed,

which was four days later. Mm.

Much of a muchness really, isn't it?

Much of a muchness.
Not a great innings... No.

And Jane actually talks about the fact

that she never wanted the throne,

and that she had been pushed into it.

And the Duke of Northumberland,

he was Lady Jane Grey's
father-in-law... Yeah.

..and he decided he'd install her.

This was a massive gamble,
wasn't it? Yeah.

The throne is a really,
really bloody inheritance,

and, yes, it can lead to glory,
but it can also lead to disaster.

Kevin, you're making a sword here.

I mean, yeah. We don't get
to make swords too much,

unless I'm making one for myself.

But the real key is you don't want
to make it too hot

because you start burning the carbon out,

and we're trying to keep the carbon in

because that's the thing
that allows it to have a sharp edge

and to hold a sharp edge.

So, very occasionally when
they'd have people ex*cuted,

they'd use a swordsman.

This was the nice way to go out, wasn't it?

If you've got a swordsman,
you were probably...

..you were probably a noble,

and presumably,
that was a much nicer way to die

than... than the axe.

Well, yeah.

I mean, the thing is, um,
the axe that I think they used

at the Tower of London at that time

was not really a head-taking axe.

Right.

From what I could tell,
it was a tree-felling axe,

which is completely
the wrong tool for, uh...

..for doing something like that.

It's not how you want to go out, is it,

on the end of a tree-felling axe?

There are some...
some terrifying accounts

of people being ex*cuted.

If you're going to take someone's head,

you need to have it parallel
to the ground like that.

And then what you're going to do
is you're going to come right up

and then bring it down hard,
half dropping it,

pulling with your left hand
as well as pushing with your right.

And of course, there's the follow-through.

So, as the head comes off,

the axe passes right
in front of you like that.

There's no way you want to stand like this.

It's almost like
a reverse golf swing. Presumably...

She was sentenced to be beheaded,

and this took place on the 12th of February

in the confines of the Tower of London.

And for her actual execution,
she was blindfolded

and she couldn't find the block.
Yeah.

And genuine panic set in,
and she cried out,

"What shall I do? Where is it?"

And fortunately for her,

there was a sympathetic onlooker
who guided her hands to the block,

allowing her to compose herself once more.

God, it's so grim, isn't it?
It's really grim.

Even now to think about it,
it's so grim. Yeah.

I mean, this girl, let's not forget,
she was probably 17 years old.

Suddenly, she is going to die,

and she has to prepare herself
for that, mentally and physically.

And it's extraordinary, really,

that she did so in such a courageous way.

And, yeah,
she laid her head down on the block,

she cried out,

"Lord Jesus, into thy hands
I commend my spirit,"

and that was it.

It was all over with one chop.

Because Lady Jane was so young
when she was Queen,

no portraits survived from her lifetime.

It was rumoured that there was one
in Buckingham Palace,

but the paint ran when
Prince Andrew ejaculated on it.

The royal family operate
on a symbolic level.

The royals are a bit like
the nation's football mascots,

with the slight difference
that inside a football mascot,

there's a real human being.

Every royal coat of arms
is richly symbolic.

For example, before he became King,
Prince Charles's crest

showed a lion mounting another lion
while a horse looks patiently on,

whereas the Duke of York's shows
a lion paying £12 million

to a sex-trafficked lion cub
that the lion claims it never met.

And from Queen Elizabeth I,

today's royals learned a valuable lesson -

understand your own symbolic function.

Elizabeth, in a time of conflict

between Catholicism and Protestantism,

understood that by presenting herself

as a sort of Virgin Mary incarnate,
she could dilute those tensions.

And indeed, she went on to shape
the worship that took place

in the Anglican church,

creating a sort of Catholicism for pussies.

Elizabeth chose not to have children.

Indeed, we can't be sure
if Elizabeth ever had sex,

unlike the current King Charles
who has two sons, William and Harry,

so we can be sure he's had sex
at least once.

Elizabeth I proved a monarch could rule

not just by force or dynasty,
but by cult of personality.

The Maritime Museum in Greenwich,
they were given

one of the Armada portraits of Elizabeth I,

and they commissioned me
to make a piece of work.

I just wanted to just
physically embody, um,

what would it feel like
to wear that much clothing,

which is essentially like
a walking jewellery box, isn't it?

It's like, "Hey, look at everything I own.

"Look how rich I am."

It's pure swag, isn't it?

It's pure sort of, like, power,
you know, the victor.

And there's the Spanish Armada
burning in the background... Yeah.

..and there's Elizabeth,
and as I remember...

With a f*g, going...

..Elizabeth has her hand on a globe,

and her hand's on America.

Yeah. She's like,
"Mine. I want this."

Cos Elizabeth I,

she had a strong idea of herself
as a symbol, didn't she?

So, she was "the Virgin Queen".
Yeah.

Just as, like, they got rid of
Catholicism, she was like,

"Well, you could worship me."

"I'm a bit Virgin Mary. Look at me."

And there's the power
and the vulnerability,

cos she was this target for assassination.

The Pope said, I think from 1570,
"Look, if you want to, k*ll her."

Yeah. Open season. Yeah.

And there were all these plots against her.

And yet, she'd go out on these progresses,

so they did a couple of dozen of those

where they just went round the country

kind of waving at people.

And that's what...
that's what I wanted to recreate.

Well, she must have felt
incredibly vulnerable.

Yeah.

How did people react to that
when you did it?

Oh, the...

..the range of responses
was amazing.

It ranged from, "I know who you are.
I know who you are.

"You're Queen Victoria."

FRANKIE LAUGHS And I'd go...

Because of course, I wasn't speaking.

No-one can get close to me.

It's social distancing
before we knew that term.

What, they can't get close to you
because of the size of the clothes?

Physically can't get close,

so it's like you're weirdly protected.

It seems to me like a great emblem

of what royalty is, which is
it's an incredible prison,

but incredibly gorgeous and luxurious

and lavish at the same time.

She survived a long time,

and that's why she's really
fascinating, I think.

And one of the things she did was...

Because she constructed
this image of power,

and that's what I was really interested...

Like, what does it cost you

to construct this amazing thing that says,

"Look at me. I am rich.
I am in charge.

"I've just defeated the enemy.

"Here's a picture of it
in case you've forgotten."

You know, that's what she's doing
with this constructing of an icon,

but she's having to do it
within a human body

and what does that give you.

She was in that unique position
of trying to work out

how to have power and keep hold of power

whilst being a woman.

So, she was doing both things.

"If I am symbolically important
enough, then I can survive."

For me, the key is this thing
about being silent.

There's something about what's happened

with monarchy since the '50s

where they've kind of started talking more,

and I think there's
a really interesting question

of, like, "Do we want that?

"Do we want them to talk?"

Maybe they've struggled
in the information age

because it's harder for them to
obfuscate how much power they have

and how much money they have.
Absolutely.

Maybe that's where they've gone wrong,

the current monarchy.

I think the present royal family

should go back to,
"Just smile. Nod."

The younger members
haven't really got that memo.

And how could they?
Because it's deeply weird.

Whoa!

This is a replica of the Golden Hinde,

one of Francis Drake's ships,

and this ship is a tourist attraction.

When I was growing up, like, at school,

they taught us about Francis Drake,
and he was an adventurer.

When you look into it,
he was a lot worse than that.

Francis Drake was a sl*ve trader.

Elizabeth I invested in that.

We have an image of Elizabeth

that's far removed from that, don't we?

We have a very sort of
comic book idea of her

as this, you know, "the Virgin Queen".

So, it is a big part
of how history's taught in Britain.

This history that is presented
as just glorious and inspiring

is actually something that is
also dark and corrupt as well.

I guess, like, in that period,
the Spanish were accumulating

such massive kind of unimaginable wealth

through their colonies in South America,

and England was, at that stage, you know,

kind of like a real bit player,
like, in the game,

and wanted to...
wanted to get in on the action.

They needed labour, and that,

a source of that labour,
you know, was from...

..was from kidnapped Africans.

And people in Elizabethan England
were very quick to get in on that

because it was very profitable.
Mm-hm.

Elizabeth invested money in it,

and apparently, she made
so much money from the first project

that she endorsed
that she paid off the national debt.

It's quite easy to, um, like, kind of...

..to kind of recast
the origins of that wealth,

and people will be dazzled, you know,

by the kind of opulence
and the kind of, like,

glitz and glamour of it all, so...

And in Queen Elizabeth I's time,
they wouldn't have had any problem

with the idea of enslavement, generally.

The kind of notions that we have
of race today didn't yet exist.

Queen Elizabeth is certainly,
and Francis Drake,

are setting the wheels in motion
for the kind of invention of race...

..that need to justify
the enslavement of African people

whose labour is going to be needed
to exploit the land

to the benefit of this country.

And Elizabeth I, she kind
of dipped her toe in the water

of colonialism and sl*very.

Does that then necessitate
the idea of race?

Central to that dynamic is this idea
of, like, a white superiority

and a black inferiority,
and they are actually, you know,

kind of doing them a favour
by taking them from Africa

and bringing them to civilisation,
and, you know, introducing them

to both civilisation and Christianity.

So, one of the strong motivations

behind these concepts of blackness
and whiteness

is the justification of the...
of the transatlantic sl*ve trade.

I always think if Britain was a person,

you'd sort of
recommend therapy, wouldn't you?

SHE LAUGHS Cos you're like...

At the very least.

"Remember all that stuff you did?
You've never really apologised."

Queen Victoria, in many ways,
set the template

for the current monarchy as a PR operation.

As the job of monarch itself
declined in real political power,

she recast it in the public mind
as a domestic scene,

as a royal family.

She understood that the fear

and awe inspired
by earlier kings and queens

could be translated into affection,

and that this meant
you could keep all this stuff.

At Victoria's coronation,

some 400,000 people thronged the streets.

Charles is hoping to emulate this
by coinciding his coronation

with a cost of living riot.

The coronation will be
a deeply uninspiring affair.

Charles is keen to avoid
having any royals at the ceremony

who might cause a public embarrassment,

so he's thinking of banning Andrew,
Harry, and himself.

It's rumoured that the coronation
is going to be so low-key

that they'll forego the traditional
behind-closed-doors human sacrifice.

Instead, they'll save money
by simply running over a game keeper

in a Land Rover.

Almost immediately after being crowned,

Queen Victoria fell in love with Albert.

In her diary, she describes him
as "extremely handsome,

"eyes large and blue,

"and had a beautiful nose
and a very sweet mouth".

It seems that despite all her education,

she simply didn't know the word "face".

Queen Victoria gave birth to her
eighth child using chloroform.

Nowadays, royal family members are
more likely to use it to conceive.

Victoria suffered serious
postnatal depression.

During her depression,
she hallucinated spots in her eyes

that turned to worms.

Fearing she was losing her mind,

Albert took her to Scotland,
where she would blend in.

Victoria had her first sight of Scotland

after arriving by ship at Leith.

If ever a 4'11" woman with nine kids
and clinical depression

was going to feel at home,
it was going to be in Leith.

Despite being the world's
most powerful woman,

society during Queen Victoria's reign

treated women with a level
of contempt and disregard

rarely seen outside
a Met Police WhatsApp group.

But in some ways, there was,
like, a culture w*r going on

in Victorian England,

where there was a huge culture
of vice and debauchery and drinking

and gentlemen's clubs and commercial sex.

And there was a big class element
to the sex work, wasn't there?

Cos it's mostly working-class women,

and a lot of the clients are
upper-class or middle-class men.

Depends on where you are.

Here in sort of Mayfair, Piccadilly,

you see these pictures
from kind of mid-Victorian London

where Regent Street is just lined
with questionable women

talking to kind of upper-class toffs.

So, this is a kind of typical
late-Victorian police court,

and this was the place
where people experienced

sort of first-hand Victorian justice.

Great Marlborough Street
would've been the place

where the vast majority of women
who were convicted or charged

with selling sex would show up

and the police would bring them
to the police station,

which is just next door,

lock them up in the police cells
to spend a very uncomfortable night,

and then, kind of hungover,
bruised, and battered,

they'd be led through this door
to meet the magistrate.

So, we're standing in what
would've been the gallery,

and the gallery would've been
mostly filled with police court,

uh, reporters, police court sketch artists.

And they'd all be men.
And they'd all be men.

You were then having to sort of say,
"I'm a common prost*tute,"

and plead guilty in front
of a room filled with men.

It was a very misogynistic society,

and something I often think about
is Jack the Ripper,

there were hundreds of suspects,

and when you look at something
like that, you go...

A whole bunch of women
have been chopped up,

and you look at that and go,
"Well, that could be anybody."

Like, that's not...

That's not a great sign.

Because there was
so much misogynistic violence.

So, there's this paradox, isn't there?

Because there's these two enormous
Jubilees during Victoria's reign.

There's this incredible amount
of wealth on display.

But also, on their own streets,
there's this incredible poverty.

Yeah, exactly.

This is, like, the kind
of street photographs

of very poor children.

Very young children caring for babies

because their mothers are out working.

This is a really iconic photograph
that really demonstrates

the kinds of poverty
that women would experience.

And Victoria presided over this,

and, you know, had received
a first-class education,

had a lot of intelligence, you know,

had a lot of people reporting to her -

must have known what was going on
in her country,

but wasn't really interested in any of it.

No. I mean...
Or in changing any of it.

..you've got a very conservative
Queen on the throne

who has no interest in women's rights,

cos one of the things she said about it,

"A woman's place is in the home,
just like me.

"I'm in my home. It just happens
to be Buckingham Palace."

There's a famous census they did

where Victoria's listed as Albert's wife

and she puts her job down as Queen...

Mm-hm.

..so it was very much that way
round.

Yeah. He was still
head of the household.

"I'm ruling because there was nobody else,

"but thank goodness I have my husband

"and I have other men around me
to tell me what to do."

With conditions miserable for many Brits,

Queen Victoria did the obvious

and spread that misery around the world,

much like a U2 tour.

Britain ruled a massive empire
from which they took tea,

rubber, and the lives of quite a chunk

of the world's population.

Morally, Victoria sent out mixed messages.

Research her empire
and you'd think Victorian values

might include plunder,
extortion, and bigotry

rather than covering your piano legs

for fear they might give the vicar a semi.

Last year,
the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge,

as they were, went on
a disastrous trip to the Caribbean,

rekindling memories of Britain's key role

in the sl*ve trade

and its failure to ever pay
any kind of reparations

to its victims.

On the trip, they did their best to present

a new modern face of the British monarchy

by not at any point rounding anyone up,

or branding them,

or throwing them
into the hold of their ship.

According to a royal insider,

William and Kate's position is
that they can't change

what's happened in the past,

which shows a surprisingly
good grasp of how time works,

but not such a great understanding

of the concept of making amends
for terrible things.

The Victorian era is really the era

in which the British Empire became
the richest empire in human history.

So, not just the largest in human history,

but the richest in human history.

And that doesn't come from being kind

and civilised to the natives.

It comes from establishing
massive companies

that are able to extract wealth
from Africa,

from India, and from the Caribbean,

creating these private companies
like The Hudson Bay Company,

The East India Company,

The Royal Niger Company,
The Royal Africa Company.

So, in a way, the British monarchy
managed a good trick under Victoria

in that they managed to have her
as head of the empire

and to personify the empire,
and at the same time,

they managed to keep the monarchy
away from some of the bloody work

that had to be done in the empire,

but they weren't associated with that.

Absolutely.

You know, that's when we get
the kind of gentleman imperialists,

as historians call them.

Bankers and traders and lawyers
that really benefit

from the wealth
that's been accrued in empire.

You know, this is something

that allows for the building
of British capitalism,

and it still has consequences
for the way that capital and finance

move across the world today.

The three leading
corporate tax havens in the world

are British Overseas Territories
and crown dependencies -

places like the Cayman Islands,

places like the British Virgin Islands,

places like Bermuda.

These are still part
of Britain's global footprint,

and they play such a crucial role
in inequality that we struggle with,

not only globally,

but also right here
in the United Kingdom today.

And a lot of those people

just want rid of the British
monarchy now, don't they?

They just want to be republics.
I think so.

I mean, we've seen that with Barbados.

We saw the people in Jamaica again

calling for the removal
of the British head of state.

Mr William, speak some truth on this trip.

Speak truth for what it's worth.

There's real material consequences
for having the British monarch

as the head of state
for people in the Caribbean.

It means that the British monarch

is the commander in chief
of their military.

Their military ultimate loyalty is
to the monarch of another country.

And where does the monarchy fit

into that conversation on decolonisation?

Broadly, I think this conversation
around decolonisation

could be a much bigger conversation

about what kind of country
does Britain want to be now.

Do we want to have a monarch at all?

You know, if we were
to write a constitution,

what kind of position would we put
a monarch in that constitution,

or would they not exist at all?

Personally, I try to deal

with the injustice of the British monarchy

in my own small way -

giving swan's bread soaked in LSD

to try and liberate them
from their mental shackles.

He doesn't own you guys. You're
free.

The monarchy can no longer
take its survival for granted.

I suppose Prince William already knows

that you can't take anything for granted.

20 years ago, he had hair
to rival a prize-winning pony,

and now he looks enviously at a kiwi fruit.

With the death of the Queen,

there's a crisis of legitimacy
for the British monarchy,

personified by Prince Andrew.

You'd think that by now,

Andrew would at least have apologised.

I apologise after CONSENSUAL sex.

Conspiracy theories about
the royal family being lizards

disguises the fact they're actually
something even worse -

a slightly dim German family

to whom we've inexplicably
given billions of pounds.

What is the monarchy, really?

The British monarchy
has become the linchpin

of Britain's true ideology -

the idea that some people
deserve more rights than others.

The further away you get

from an imagined ideal in Britain,
the less white,

middle-class, or English you are,

the less rights you're supposed to have.

The royal family are there
to firmly define the centre

from which you differ.

The real Britain.

People who tell you their favourite TV show

has gone woke.

Something I've found translates as,
"I saw a black person."

I used to be outraged
by the British class system

and the way it destroys lives.

Then I bought a "Live, laugh, love"
magnet for my fridge.

Now it all just washes over me.

The monarchy is ending,
and when that happens,

let's not be bitter.

Let's get out on the streets
and raise a bottle to them,

filled with petrol and a burning rag.