Queen Victoria's Children

I watched it for about 15 mins. and found it so unbearable , what a cruel , cruel person she was .

In fact I have a picture of her hanging on my landing , not so sure now .

Was always under the impression she was a kindly old soul .

Exactly - she was a cruel, selfish and unfeeling monster
(oops that's my OBE gone, I expect)

I'm going to watch this on iplayer, gracesmum Sounds good.

I missed the middle episode but will catch up on it. Amazingly, she had to check up on Alexandra's menstrual cycle! Victoria and Albert both give a whole new meaning to 'control freak'. No wonder that Bertie, when he had his chance, was, though all too briefly, a highly popular monarch. George V and Queen Mary were, as far as I know, much more stiff and starchy.

I've just watched the first one. The mind boggles at the thought of a young Princess Louise boiling her knees in whisky every night What a waste of good whisky.

Didn"t watch 1st one , why did she boil her knees in whiskey and ^ why ^

and ^ how ^

I am no great fan of Queen Victoria, but I think this was a bit of an over-simplification. If you read her letters to her daughters, especially Vicky, you see a much more complex relationship. I can't abide the over-dramatic, breathless hush style of narration in these programmes. For example, I have just read the new biography of Bertie and I really don't see how the early comments that he had no brain and was completely hopeless make sense as he then turned into a fairly successful and wise King (as far as these things go).
Victoria had a deeply dysfunctional childhood as did Albert, so parenting was always likely to be hard. She was clearly very needy and her children had an awful time, but I dislike the way the programme turned her into a pantomime baddie. It sometimes seems that everyone else is entitled to compassion and understanding, but bad mothers are just bad, without any understanding of why they are as they are.

I too am reading the Jane Ridley biography and I think both she and the other historians (including A N Wilson and other serious, academics ) were authentic in what they had to say. Your point Mamie is exactly right - Victoria and Albert decided Bertie was slow, had his head bumps "read"by a phrenologist who decreed his brain wasn't working the right way (ridiculous or what!) and treated him accordingly. I absolutely agree that his later years once King gave the lie to that, but in his childhood he was denigrated by his parents as "slow-witted". I thought the quotes from Victoria's letters were very revealing and basically, that's about as much as any biographer has to go on. Victoria and Albert, like many of their class and generation had dysfunctional childhoods which possiblt explains her obsession with the man but doesn't obscure her whingeing and selfishness once widowed vis a vis her children!

Yes I agree that V and A thought that about Bertie, but it was one of the "experts" who said maybe he was just stupid (or something similar).Clearly much more to it than that.
I think it is hard to judge the past from a modern perspective; I thought the bit about her objections to breastfeeding should be seen from the perspective of someone's reaction today if their daughters said b/f was old-fashioned and bottle feeding was all the rage....
I absolutely agree that she was utterly self-centred and needy, but with everyone fawning over her, I don't think she was ever going to be anything else.
Would like to continue discussion, but need to go and put potted shrimps on blinis before visitors arrive!

Yum yum

nonu Apparently she thought it was the only way to achieve good health. Goodness knows how she managed to do it. but after Albert's death she could have invented 'Knees Up Mother Brown'

Or if she liked a little something with it she could ask for water on the knee!

Merlot , I like it , LOL

I so wanted to see the series but couldn't watch it for three nights running. Hope it's repeated. It's reminded me that there's a new Stephen Poliakof starting soon. I did enjoy The Lost Prince, but thought he lost his way after that [no pun intended].I am fascinated by that time, though. If I could go back in time it would be to go to The Great Exhibition.

I watched all three and found it fascinating yet cruel, especially the treatment of poor Leopold.

I know, crimson isn't it such a shame that it was destroyed - it must have been out of this world!

I know it's sort of obvious but sometimes I have to remind myself that people in the past were actually in 'their' present and that things were happening around them that must have made them marvel; discoveries and theories and dinosaur bones and stuff.

It is so hard to make a judgement as clearly the choice of extracts from V's letters was intended to reflect her troubled relationship with her children. For all I know there may have been other affectionate entries. However - to write some of the things that she did about her children is mind-boggling and deeply unmaternal! No wonder the poor royal family has troubles with history like that.

I've just watched the programme about the daughters. The way she tried to stop Vicky and Alice breastfeeding was appalling. She was really horrid about babies too. However, the princesses became strong and influential women in their own right, in spite of - or was it because of?- her attempts to control them. Did her behaviour make them stronger?

I was rather struck by the idea of her daughter reading Darwin and Karl Marx - didn't really fit in with Victoria's Camelot ideals did it? The suggestion that she didn't breastfeed because her breasts were for Albert's pleasure surprised me. I thought that was quite a recent concept, hence all the young girls who bottle feed now. What a nightmare to live with though!

I don't think that's the reason young mothers don't bottlefeed now, Deedaa! I think it's partly that it went out of fashion, and also that a lot of women have to go back to work so quickly after having a baby. I've never heard any woman say they regard their breasts as exclusively for the pleasure of their partner!

Having seen that documentary Queen Vic seems to have been a dreadfully dysfunctional mother. Emotional abuse comes to mind.

There has been a parallel thread on Mumsnet, where people have quoted from letters which show a completely different side to the relationships, especially with her daughters. Also, someone on there pointed out that the death of Alice was hardly mentioned in the programme, probably because Victoria was distraught with grief for her for ages and that didn't fit the hypothesis. I still think it was a biased and incomplete picture, distorted through a modern lens. I don't doubt the views of the individual experts and I admire Juliet Gardiner and Miranda Carter particularly, but I think the programme was edited to be sensationalist and fit a particular, extreme viewpoint, when the truth (whatever historical truth means) is always much more complex and nuanced. (And as I said before, I am no fan of Victoria).

The thread on Mumsnet is in AIBU and is entitled "To think Queen Victoria was a nutter". It is very interesting with some particularly informed comment particularly towards the end.