Original subtitles

In 1840, two 20-year-olds became the most famous couple on Earth.

Dearly beloved...

The marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg

was a pivotal moment in British history.

What began as an arranged marriage became the greatest royal love story

of all time.

Victoria sees this vision of male beauty.

It was pure, beautiful, gobsmacking love.

We're going to reconstruct the big day, to tell the story of a queen

and a prince who desperately needed to win their people's hearts.

It was romance and politics.

This marriage had to stave off revolution.

The monarchy was very close to extinction and people

were throwing bricks and stones through the palace windows.

It's only by recreating the wedding that we'll see the meticulous stage

management that went into every moment and understand the genius

behind this 19th-century public relations coup.

It's going to be a big challenge.

I'm calling on a team of experts to recreate every aspect

of the ceremony.

They'll investigate the incredible wedding food and uncover the details

of Victoria's legendary wedding dress.

They'll open Albert's wardrobe, and search for the

elusive wedding music.

Together, we'll step back to February 1840,

to see how this wedding saved the crown.

This event is the first example of the royal wedding

machine in action.

It was the birth of a brand - the myth, the powerful legend

of Victoria and Albert.

It was the wedding of the century and,

this time, we're all invited.

The Britain Victoria was born into was the richest nation

in the Western world.

Home to 14 million people, most of them living in poverty.

The average citizen was young and died that way.

During Victoria's 63-year reign, the population of Britain

had doubled in size.

Suburbs blossomed, so did the railway network,

and a queen who was born by candlelight lived

to see electricity.

Not very much of the Britain Victoria grew up in survived.

Our story is set in the remains of the Regency world she was born

into, in palaces and castles, in fragments.

This pocket handkerchief of a square is a jewel.

It's clinging on just behind what's now the modern Victoria Station.

The square was built the year she became Queen.

At the start of Victoria's reign, everything was smaller -

the houses, the carriages, even the people -

but expectations were great.

The pressure on this tiny girl was gigantic.

She'd only be 18 years old when she became Queen.

She had a special lightweight crown made to sit on her little head

at her coronation.

But despite her youth, clearly, she needed to get married

and babied up.

This is the story of the royal wedding machine,

first created to get Princess Victoria to the altar.

It was set running the very day that she was born.

Early in the morning of 24th May 1819, Victoria was born

here at Kensington Palace, in that first-floor drawing room.

Her father was King George III's fourth son, Edward Duke of Kent,

and her mother was Princess Louise Victoire of Saxe-Coburg,

now Duchess of Kent.

We know a huge amount about Queen Victoria

because she left us her thoughts - 141 volumes of them.

This room is Queen Victoria's childhood bedroom.

From the age of 13, here at Kensington Palace,

she'd been keeping a daily diary, a journal.

The originals of these volumes are at Windsor Castle today,

but anyone in the world can read them because they've all

been put online.

She wrote about where she'd been, who she'd met, her hopes

and her dreams, the weather.

As a child, she'd had very little freedom.

Her mother controlled every move, driven by the need to make sure

she survived to become Queen.

Initially, she was very resistant to the idea of immediately marrying.

Victoria's priority was to spare herself the inevitability

of marriage and producing a line of little babies to succeed

and be in line to the throne.

She felt that onerous responsibility.

Victoria always knew that she was destined

for an arranged marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert

of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - a small German family with a big

place in history.

They were connected with all the great royalty and all the huge

dynasties of Europe, and they'd been connected

with the great historical events of Europe.

Victoria's mother was a Coburg princess.

This union was designed to strengthen the bloodline

of the British monarchy and introduce progressive

continental ideas.

The plan to marry the cousins was hatched when they were babies.

Their first meeting was in London, at Victoria's 17th birthday party.

The court held their breath.

According to the plan, romantic sparks would fly.

Victoria wasn't terribly impressed by Albert.

She thought Albert was rather too plump.

And he kept falling asleep.

Ah, this is very nice in here.

Andrew Wilson is one of Victoria's biographers.

Andrew, what do you think happened the first time

they were in the same room?

He was very, very shy.

He was an awkward teenager.

He had hardly known any female companionship.

He had almost no females near him throughout his upbringing.

So he'd had 16 years of an all-male, all-German atmosphere.

The other thing is, Albert had permanent diarrhoea

when he first met her.

The entire German party came over, had dreadful gastric attacks,

so it wasn't a very successful first encounter.

I find it very striking that in her journal entry

for that day, she describes meeting Albert, then there's a whole lot

more about this parrot... Exactly! ..that she gets given as a present.

If she falls in love with anybody that day,

it was with the parrot.

It was with the parrot, exactly!

Three years later, the Princess had become

Queen Victoria, and Albert returned from Germany for a second visit.

The love story began for real at Windsor Castle.

Victoria knew her duty, but remembered her

unimpressive cousin.

Albert was her intended, but she wanted her freedom.

She didn't like the idea.

She didn't want to have babies so soon.

She just didn't want to commit herself.

Albert felt the same.

He hardly knew this girl, who'd already rejected him once.

His brother Ernest was with him for moral support.

He makes up his mind that, you know, what he's going to do

is break it off.

He was extremely apprehensive about how things were going

to turn out.

And also feeling humiliated because,

really, you know, Victoria kept him hanging around for the best part

of three years.

The master marriage plan hung in the balance.

Suddenly, the frog of 1836 has turned into this gorgeous,

gorgeous man.

Victoria looks down and she sees this vision of male beauty.

From Victoria's point of view, it was pure, beautiful,

gobsmacking love.

Victoria is a real romantic.

She loved romantic novels when she was young.

When she saw him, she writes frankly.

She's not somebody who makes up these things in her journals.

She adores him.

She wrote, "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,

"who is beautiful."

Albert and Ernest stayed for several days.

And on 11th October, he danced with her.

For Victoria, it was love.

Love at second sight.

Four days later, the Queen faced a difficult task.

A monarch can't be proposed to, so she had to ask the big question.

She wrote, "I said to him that I thought he must be aware why

"I wished them to come here. That it would make me too happy

"if he would consent to what I wished, to marry me."

Once again, Victoria's journal reveals the depth of her feelings.

"I feel the happiest of human beings."

The engagement of Victoria and Albert was the first step

towards the altar, and a wedding meticulously planned

to make it the PR coup of the century.

The wedding was so ground-breaking, we still feel the effects today.

Every modern white wedding dress is descended from the one worn

by Queen Victoria.

She was the first to popularise white for brides.

Like all these women, we're starting our journey

to Victoria's big day with the dress.

Victoria's own wedding gown is kept in our Queen's private collection.

The challenge is to recreate this iconic garment using

pictures from 1840.

The artist George Hayter was actually at the wedding

for this painting.

I'm taking that challenge to historical costumier

Harriet Waterhouse, who's in Windsor with

more reference materials.

Now, Harriet, does the thought of making the wedding dress give

you any particular problems?

Erm...

Challenges.

Well, I'm going to be sewing everything by hand.

But actually, once you get used to doing it by hand,

you can be quite quick. If you're an expert.

The dress is quite simple.

It's expensive and beautiful... Mmm. ..and romantic, but it's not...

It's not showy.

It was said at the time that Victoria's dress

and all the bridesmaids being in white set them apart

from everyone around them and made them really shine.

It's also said that they looked more simply dressed.

Well, if you look at previous royal brides' dresses, traditionally are

very encrusted and glittering.

The lack of embellishment of a metallic sort

is really very striking.

So, she really did break the mould.

Like all royal women, the young Queen's clothes

were closely observed.

There are clues to her tastes at her first home.

These rooms at Kensington Palace, where Victoria grew up,

are stuffed full of vital research materials for our project,

including her clothing.

This dress is from her early reign.

People looking at it often say, but it's tiny!

And she does here have a 24-inch waist.

And you can really see that she wasn't very tall -

five foot one and a quarter inches.

People who met her, though, often commented on her shapeliness.

One American visitor to the Palace said that,

like all Englishwomen, she had a very good bust.

I've come here today in search of one particular,

very precious garment.

OK, gloves on, gloves on.

Curator Claudia Acott Williams has in her care a tiny petticoat

that belonged to Queen Victoria.

More than that, it's rumoured to be the one she wore

at the wedding.

So, this is an unusual and quite rare survival from her early reign.

It's quite simple in its design, but it's the quality of the textile

and the kind of masterful construction which show us

that it was made for a queen.

So, on her wedding day, she would have had to have worn

something underneath and this is, well, it was possibly even

this one, wasn't it?

Possibly. I mean, we can't sort of confirm that, but it would

have been something very, very similar to this.

We're going to remake her wedding dress... Yes.

..for this project and I know that the dimensions

of this petticoat match the ones of the wedding dress itself.

That's right. This would follow very much the line of the dress,

so we get a real sense of her shape and her stature at this point.

There's nothing like seeing a person's underwear to give

you a sense of who they really were. Yes, exactly.

At her home, costumier Harriet prepares her workroom.

Historical clothes are not just what you see in the painting.

The stuff underneath makes the shape.

This petticoat would have been worn over a chemise corset,

a couple of petticoats and a crinoline.

The important thing is that everything looks

proportionally like the painting.

In the Hayter picture, it's a gentle sort of bell shape.

There's a sort of lace collar, made of Honiton lace.

I've got a variety of different laces.

Queen Victoria wanted to reinvigorate British industry,

so all her lace was manufactured in Devon.

It's a thing that the royal family still do today

but up till that point, people were wearing what they wanted

and, often, it was foreign.

Thankfully, I've got quite a collection of

different antique laces.

This is fragile.

I'm going to have to do a little bit of mending on it.

But it's, er... It's a wedding veil.

It's probably around the right date.

It's not quite as magnificent as Queen Victoria's,

but it's a similar size.

And she wore it just on the back of her head.

Sort of there-ish.

And it just hung.

So it's quite...

..quite a minimal thing, but she was so, so fond

of her wedding veil.

Authenticity demands Harriet works in antique measurements.

I really love this.

This is a yardstick.

The yard is divided.

It's in quarters.

You see there's a pin for each quarter.

This quarter at the end is divided in half

and that's a finger.

The finger is divided in half

and that measurement there is a nail.

This little remnant of a pin, there, that was an inch.

Subtly not quite a whole inch, as we understand it now.

Harriet isn't just making the wedding gown, she's also

dressing our guests in authentic clothing that will help them think

and feel 1840.

It's very exciting.

I've got a whole range of really lovely frocks.

Getting a load of dresses together is like creating someone's life.

Victoria was 20, a slip of a girl, quite unlike the more matronly

figure she'd become.

That fits nicely. Yeah. I like that.

Albert was a strapping lad, who enjoyed outdoor pursuits.

But he was extremely bookish and, even by Victorian standards,

he was pretty straight-laced.

Among the guests, the man closest to the Queen before she fell

for Albert, her adviser and Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.

He would be wedding planner in chief, but it was going

to be painful for Melbourne.

Lots of people suspected that he himself was in love with Victoria.

Also at the fitting, the most important woman

in Victoria's life, the Queen Mother.

Victoria couldn't forgive her for the strict upbringing

she'd endured and they rarely spoke.

The Queen Mother spent years plotting the marriage

of her daughter and Albert.

She understood that this wedding was about public relations

and how essential that was because she had given birth

to Victoria to solve a royal image crisis.

For decades, the people of Britain had been fed

up with their Kings, the Hanoverians.

To survive, the monarchy must adapt, work with Parliament and the people,

but that called for a new kind of ruler.

Public fury was at its worst when Victoria was a child.

On the throne, her uncle George IV was a vain,

drug-addicted adulterer.

The monarchy was very close to extinction and there

were revolutionary rumblings in Britain.

If you'd had another person like George IV sitting

on the throne, you could have seen the monarchy being chucked

out of the window.

King George had done one thing right.

With Caroline of Brunswick, he'd produced a legitimate heir,

Charlotte.

She was the darling of the people -

a fine, decent Queen-in-waiting.

But in 1817, she died in childbirth.

She was the only legitimate grandchild of King George III.

He had lots of grandchildren, but most of them were illegitimate,

except for Princess Charlotte.

So she was the only possible heir to the throne and her death

was a sort of national calamity.

You know, this was a possible sort of turning point for the monarchy.

I mean, it was so unpopular.

George IV died without a legitimate child,

so his brother William became King, but none of his surviving children

were legitimate either!

The crown was in danger.

Brother number four, Edward, married German Princess Victoire

specifically to produce a legitimate heir to the throne.

Like Charlotte, Victoria must win the people's hearts,

marry well and be a new kind of monarch.

Her father died soon after her birth, leaving

her in the tender care of her mother, whose task

was to keep alive.

Victoria grew up here at Kensington Palace,

under a strict set of rules that became known as the

Kensington System.

This was partly about her safety.

She wasn't supposed to walk up or down stairs without somebody

holding her hand in case she fell.

But it was also about mental control and surveillance.

Her mother even read her diary.

The rules and regulations made Victoria hate her mother

and her mother's right-hand man, John Conroy.

The Kensington System sounds ridiculously rigid to us,

but there was a point to it.

Had little Princess Victoria fallen down the stairs or fallen

off her horse or died, that really would have been curtains

for the British monarchy.

When Victoria became Queen, the nation once again felt hope.

She was the modern, decent ruler they'd waited for.

And then, a few months before she met Prince Albert

and fell in love, it all went wrong.

In the summer of 1839, the Palace is tense.

The new Queen has been doing some quite surprising things.

She's been testing the limits of her power.

Some of the things she's done have made her advisers wince.

KNOCKING

Enter!

Victoria's inexperience, combined with her temper,

created two scandals that rocked the Palace,

outraged the press and endangered the monarchy itself.

Scandal number one was just the latest battle in the ongoing war

between Victoria and her mother.

They used to spend every waking hour together,

but now her mother lived in a remote part of the Palace and Victoria only

communicated with her by letter.

Victoria's frostiness also extended to the Queen Mother's staff.

Lady Flora Hastings was a lady-in-waiting to Victoria's

mother and she was known to have ridden by herself

in a carriage with John Conroy.

Shortly after this, Lady Flora's belly mysteriously

started to swell.

Victoria and her side of the court assumed the very worst.

Lady Flora Hastings was suspected of being pregnant,

and possibly pregnant by John Conroy.

John Conroy was a bounder and a cad.

All the gossips of London, everybody at court,

assumed that Conroy's hold over the Duchess of Kent -

and, hence, over Queen Victoria - was sexual.

Poor Lady Flora had to undergo an intrusive, degrading,

really horrible medical examination.

Queen Victoria had made this appalling blunder.

There was no justification for the way she behaved at all.

She wasn't pregnant.

She was, in fact, suffering from cancer.

The court was horrified.

How could anyone have thought ill of this innocent?

Melbourne made Victoria go to her bedside.

She couldn't shake off this hatred of her mother but,

by proxy, she also hated Flora Hastings.

Her family releases letters that get into the papers

of how she was accused and how she was humiliated,

and the press really turned against Victoria.

In July 1839, Flora finally died of liver cancer.

The Queen's carriage was hissed at in the streets.

She'd turned into an object of vilification and people

were throwing bricks and stones through the Palace windows

and smashing the windows.

It was a public relations disaster, but it was as nothing compared

with the other scandal of that summer, a constitutional crisis.

Some people said it was caused by Victoria's naivete.

Others said, worse, her arrogance.

At this time, Britain had two main political parties -

the progressive Whigs and the more conservative Tories.

In May 1839, the Whig Party almost lost a crucial vote

and Prime Minister Melbourne resigned.

This triggered a change of government.

The Queen was horrified when power passed to the Tories,

that she loathed, and their leader, Sir Robert Peel, whom she disliked.

She was furious.

As a token of her confidence, Robert Peel wants her to dismiss

some of the Ladies of the Bedchamber,

ladies-in-waiting, who are married to Whig peers,

because he thinks the Queen is too close to the Whigs.

And, er, Queen Victoria says, no, I won't do that.

She stamps her foot.

Peel said, "Well, if that's your attitude,

"then I'm not going to be your Prime Minister."

And she thought that she'd won that round,

not realising, of course, it showed that the Government

of the country couldn't go on unless the politicians,

not the monarch, had control.

Melbourne's Whig Party returned to government,

but was seriously weakened.

The Queen had disrespected Parliamentary process,

like a high-handed Hanoverian.

The proper workings of the constitutional process

were being messed with by just a little girl.

Melbourne was thought to be egging her on,

like a lovesick old fool.

People, important people, began to think that she really

needed a man to stop her from doing this sort of thing.

She needed a husband.

Melbourne, in particular, realised that they needed something,

they needed to manage the news.

They needed some propaganda moment and a little bit of magic.

This was the reason Albert came back.

The hope that a romantic story would provide

the public relations solution.

Love conquers all, but could it prevent rebellion?

As soon as the engagement was announced, Melbourne began

to plot the wedding day.

He deliberately chose a small, rather plain venue for this

people-friendly couple - the Chapel Royal,

inside St James's Palace.

Our challenge, to find a venue that feels like that chapel,

seen here in George Hayter's painting of the event.

Could the city of Winchester hold the answer?

Jasdeep Singh is a military historian, with a special interest

in Prince Albert.

He's trawled dozens of churches to try to find the right place

for our reconstruction.

We've seen this one online. It looks great.

I've got a good feeling.

Go on, go on.

Ah-ha!

Now, this looks pretty good, I would say.

It's perfect. Do you think that the search could be over?

It's got the feeling, hasn't it?

Just imagine.

Richard II was on the throne when Winchester College,

a boys' boarding school, was established.

This fabulous panelling.

This'll be a very grand royal stand-in.

Winchester College Chapel dates from 1395, so it's older

than Saint James's, but the proportions of it

seem exactly right.

It's long and narrow, just what we want.

Every wedding needs music, so we've called in composer

Nick Ryan to investigate ours.

But he's come up against a hurdle.

Victoria and Albert famously loved music,

but what was chosen or composed for their ceremony

is hard to discover.

The music is such an important creator of atmosphere and emotion

at a wedding.

I want to find out what music was played,

who selected it and why?

To Oxford, and the Christ Church College music library.

Matthias, hi.

Dr Matthias Range is an expert in royal ceremonial music.

We're trying to reconstruct this wedding and there's

very little information about the wedding music.

Well, the royal household just didn't keep records. Really?

But then we do know what other reports tell us,

that when Prince Albert approached the chapel,

there is some idea that the music could have been

See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes!

By Handel. Indeed.

It was so well known at the time, so just hearing the tune,

people would have associated it with those words,

see, the conqu'ring hero comes.

It seems a bit odd, the idea of him being a conquering hero.

Well, he conquered the Queen, didn't he? Yes!

But we do have one report of when the Queen entered.

And that tells us that the organists of the Chapel Royal included

Handel's chorus, "A virtuous wife shall soften Fortune's frown".

Again, a sort of apt choice in music for the bride.

She's declared to be a virtuous wife.

A melodic line... On the organ. ..just on the organ.

Albert was a great musician, he was a composer.

What involvement did he have in the wedding?

He was the bridegroom.

Obviously!

We don't know anything of his involvement in the wedding.

Do you find it a bit strange?

He must have been absolutely desperate to be involved.

It's the Queen, it's the sovereign, the Head of State,

marrying some foreign prince.

They wouldn't have thought of asking him anything.

We do know for certain of two pieces, which we see on the table

here, two choral pieces.

The so-called Deus misereatur, and the Anthem.

Nothing specially composed for the wedding,

but plain repertoire music.

So this was actually in popular use?

Yes. Yeah.

Up and down the country, in cathedrals and bigger parish

churches, where they had a choir.

What about the second piece?

There's one verse for four voices and then there's one for two voices.

Fantastic.

"Both riches and honour come of thee, come of thee."

Lovely. Mm-hmm.

Even the music was propaganda.

Bride and groom enter to music with a message.

His heroism, her virtue.

And two choral pieces means Nick must now find us a choir.

The royal couple celebrated with the most lavish wedding breakfast.

More than 100 dishes, dreamt up by the best

chefs in Britain.

Food historian Annie Gray is taking up the challenge

of recreating the feast.

She's found the original menu, not just fit for any old queen,

but seemingly created with this one's appetites in mind.

What was Queen Victoria's favourite food?

Food in general was something that she would embrace.

One of her ladies-in-waiting recounts her sitting

down to an afternoon tea at one point and putting away several

slices of toast and cake and scones, and getting to the end,

looking with regret and going, "I suppose I should stop now."

And what was food in general like then?

A lot of butter, a lot of cream, a lot of brandy.

The meat is often larded, so that's sewing strips of fat

through the flesh of animals.

This is a recipe book written by Charles Elme Francatelli,

who was the cook to Queen Victoria after William Ball,

who was the mastermind behind the wedding.

So we are fairly certain his recipes must have reflected the kind

of thing he was serving for the Queen.

The menu for that day, it's enormous.

There are, I think, about 100 or so dishes.

You've got lamb cutlets, which have been fried. Fried bird, chicken.

Fried bird?

Fried bird. That's what they serve at Nando's, isn't it?

Fried bird. Yeah!

On the opposite page, an outlandish dish which looks

like a pile of eyeballs.

And this is timbales of macaroni, which is tremendously complicated.

That involves little tubes of macaroni,

cut up, put round a mould.

Then there's a mousse in the middle and then there's chopped up chicken

breasts and that's been steamed.

And then turned out of the mould perfectly.

I'd look at that and think, I'm not sure how it will come

out of the mould. Or, indeed, how you would go about building it.

The most challenging thing is this gateaux aux fruitage.

It is ten or 11 pieces of puff pastry that need to be piled

up on top of each other.

With the outside then masked with meringue and instead of

meringue steeple on top, the risk is you end up with this sort of

leaning tower of Pisa effect as it slowly slides to one side.

I'm glad to hear there are a few surprises and challenges thrown

in for you there. Well, yes.

Annie isn't going to cook all the dishes -

only the most difficult ones.

Mr Ball, head chef at Buckingham Palace,

sourced locally, where possible.

Annie's based close to the Norfolk border and will do the same,

much to the surprise of her regular suppliers.

So, I'm recreating Victoria and Albert's wedding feast.

Well, I can't say I'm not apprehensive,

it's quite a long menu.

You've got mutton fillets, bird fillets, larded.

Sweetbreads, which we're going to lard,

so we need some lardons as well, actually.

The thing with the roasts,

they're all served with their heads and legs on.

Can I get a hare and I need it whole

so that I can skin it and leave the ears on?

There was a lot of meat, a lot of alcohol.

So I need probably about a gallon of brandy.

Well, there would have been a whole dessert course.

Cakes, bread pudding, jellies.

I need about 2st of sugar.

I do fear that this may have been the meal that broke Mr Ball,

the chief cook, because he retired a month later.

Oh, it's quite heavy.

But, it could also have been, perhaps, his swansong.

The pinnacle of his career.

So perhaps if I hold on to that thought,

it'll be a little bit less daunting?

For our experiment, the sumptuous interiors

of Holkham Hall in Norfolk are doubling for Buckingham Palace.

Built in 1764, it's only a little bit younger

and suitably grand.

To recreate the wedding breakfast, Annie and her team must resurrect

dishes from the distant past, at speed, in the Georgian kitchens.

I'm going to see how disastrous this pudding is.

Rehearsals are vital, every recipe must be tested.

This is experimental. I'm not quite sure of the amounts

for this mould or whether the whole thing will split apart.

So what I want to do is, I want to test it so there are no

nasty surprises on the day.

I'd hate to serve Queen Victoria and Prince Albert a kind

of split pudding.

Oh, it's looking good.

Annie's next big challenge, the wedding cake.

Nine feet in circumference, 300 pounds in weight.

There were smaller cakes sent out to friends,

relatives and embassies, but the main cake was such

a monster, it had to be baked in sections.

The first problem is the lack of original giant baking tins.

The solution?

Victorian metalwork specialist, David le Versha.

Copper has always been the best material to use for cookware

because of the way it transmits heat.

I try to see how people in those times worked with copper.

They weren't making everything machine perfect.

The tin was quite large, so we're assuming it was made

in two sections, two D shapes.

170 years ago they would have been doing what I'm doing here,

they'd mark it out, probably with chalk.

Cut it by hand, it's quite soft.

All hammered together tightly.

When the dish is finished, it has to be coated with tin

to prevent the copper from oxidising when it's in the oven.

Copper will oxidise and it will poison anyone that eats

the cake...

..eventually.

The half moon tin will have to be filled eight times to build

the towering edifice - once we've found our baker.

In the winter of 1839, Melbourne plotted the make or break

matrimonials that had to launch a new kind of royal family.

The day had to go without a hitch.

18 months earlier, lack of stage management had made

Victoria's Coronation a bit of a farce.

Victoria's Coronation was a sort of comedy of errors.

It's an exhausting, long ceremony of five

and a half hours.

Queen Victoria was constantly wandering around, nobody

had told her during the ceremony where to go to the lavatory.

The Archbishop of Canterbury made a dreadful error

with the ring of state.

The Archbishop put the ring on the wrong finger and jammed

it on so she had an agonising time.

Another bishop accidentally turned over two pages of the order

of service, leaving the Queen in the wrong place.

And then poor Lord Rolle...

An ancient, 82-year-old peer who came up to pay homage

to the Queen...

Of course, Lord Rolle fell backwards down the steps and people

thought he'd died.

Victoria breaks with protocol, stands up, helps him up.

And this is actually the big story of the day.

Headlines told how the young Queen had leapt from her throne

to save a pensioner

and the Coronation disaster became a PR hit.

Melbourne knew that good press had to be integral

to his stage management.

What he planned was stupendously audacious.

He had the idea of inventing a new tradition,

to use the wedding to distract the British people from any thoughts

of rebellion or revolution, and this would be vital

for the future of the monarchy.

And given Melbourne's personal feelings,

it was a sacrifice for him.

He was making a gift of love to Victoria.

Melbourne's wedding plan involved three separate carriage journeys.

After the terrible summer, the popularity of the monarchy

was at a new low.

The people had to see their Queen to fall back in love with her.

It wasn't just the Queen who needed better public relations -

Albert was in trouble as well.

The Saxe-Coburgs are not popular with the British and there's a lot

of talk about, you know, German beggars and princelings

coming to help themselves to English queens.

In the press, you will see cartoons of him as a German sausage shop

owner, shuttering up his sausage shop in order to come

over to Britain to take advantage, really,

of this wealthy, young woman.

One result of this is that Albert is voted a rather insultingly

low allowance by Parliament,

which Victoria is most annoyed by.

She wrote, "Stephenson came from Denison to Lord M,

"wishing it to be reduced to 30,000.

"I was frantic.

"Lord M feels like me about the meanness of all this."

The Queen believed that Field Marshal,

the Duke of Wellington, a leading Tory politician,

was the person behind the salary injustice.

Her request to have Albert made an honorary Field Marshal,

the highest rank in the British Army,

might soothe the Prince's hurt pride.

But young Albert had no military experience.

How must he have felt?

Historian Jasdeep is a curator at the National Army Museum.

The museum holds over 80,000 pieces of uniform and equipment.

It's one of the best collections available.

I'm really interested in the psyche behind Albert,

the thought process Albert was going through,

but to explore that through uniform, explore that through clothing.

A British officer's Redcoat is iconic.

Even now, when we put any uniform or clothing on,

it transforms a person.

But if you're wearing the Field Marshal's coat,

you're wearing something right at the top of the army rank structure.

What might that have done to a man of 20,

new to the country, keen on making an impact

and a statement?

This is our sword store.

In any age, there are very few field marshals,

so surviving uniforms are rare.

But Jasdeep has access to 180-year-old elements of the kind

of uniform Albert wore.

Look at that.

Albert went to his wedding, knowing he'd be surrounded

by senior soldiers.

Among them, the most famous Field Marshal alive.

These actual epaulettes belonged to the Duke of Wellington,

worn on his shoulders.

Albert knows he's unpopular with the press.

He's unpopular with the British public.

He's German, he is stepping into the highest position

in the Army with no experience.

He's got grand, old dukes, like the Duke of Wellington

standing over him and judging him.

And when he wears this uniform, there's a sense of Albert having,

to not just don the role of Field Marshal, but also to fit

that expectation and that's a tall order.

But I'm a bit surprised by the size, it just looks tiny to me,

it just looks so small.

All the living field marshals were little, old men,

so strapping Albert couldn't have borrowed the uniform.

Where did he get it from?

This company on London's Savile Row were Albert's tailors.

But a bespoke suit takes weeks to make and Albert was 48 hours

from the altar.

Albert only had the best, but could he have had a complex

military uniform made in double quick time?

It's possible that this tailoring house stepped in.

Curator James Sherwood has the proof that Albert

was at least in the order books straight after the wedding,

suggesting a relationship.

This is the earliest letter that we have touting for business

to Prince Albert for April 1840.

So just after the wedding?

Yes, they acknowledge that he's been made the Colonel

in Chief of the 11th Hussars.

So he's only been made a Field Marshal a couple of days

before the wedding?

What could the turnaround for a Field Marshal's uniform be?

Because Hawkes & Co were such great military tailors,

they know exactly what they're doing.

The house would have had an absolute legion of outworkers, so a tunic

could be made within 24 hours, there wouldn't be any

problem with that.

So, yes, it's entirely possible that that could be done.

All resources being thrown into this?

It would be all hands to the deck for Prince Albert, absolutely.

The final preparations for our royal wedding in Winchester College

are under way.

Having discovered that there were two sung pieces of music

for the service, Nick Ryan has enlisted a choir.

CHORAL SINGING

Can I just say thank you, thank you so much.

These choristers aren't from Winchester.

They're in the nearby town of Romsey and they're

well-seasoned veterans of many a wedding.

Here at Romsey, we have around 40 weddings a year.

We've not had these two pieces as requests before.

The interesting thing, I suppose, is the amount of Handel,

which was in this ceremony.

Handel had such an effect on music in England.

He really was the top of the charts.

Handel was so good, so popular, that no-one else

really wrote much.

Isn't that why England was known to Germany as the land

with no music? Precisely so.

It's almost like English music froze from Handel,

all the way up to the late 1800s and Elgar.

So your choir must sing all different kinds of music.

How has it been for them to sing these two pieces?

I think it's a bit of a miracle that you can get today's kids,

21st-century kids, singing music from the 18th,

19th century. 17th, 16th century.

But actually, they don't care if something's 500 years old.

If it's good, it's good.

So we're days away from the performance,

the reconstruction of this wedding.

Are we getting there?

I think so, yes.

CHORAL SINGING

It's so exciting!

It's the first wedding dress that is iconic.

It's the mother of all wedding dresses, this one.

In every way.

Harriet Waterhouse still has several miles of satin to sew.

This is a fantastic dress to make because this is duchess satin.

It has a lovely sheen to it but not shiny.

It's particularly lovely.

You do find when you're sewing that you have a feeling

about the people who worked on it.

I shall be sewing and thinking about the seamstresses.

CHORAL SINGING

With just 48 hours before the start of our royal wedding,

the huge tin has been delivered to Smith's the Bakers

in King's Lynn.

They will be taking on the big bake, but then they do

have the royal warrant to purvey cakes to the Queen

when she's at Sandringham.

Now they're working for her great, great grandmother.

There's over 200 eggs going in the completed cake.

64 pounds of butter, which is 128 packs.

Cherries, currants and plenty of brandy.

If anyone left the reception sober, I'd be surprised.

What's worrying me is the size and the weight of it

because it's going to take eight of these tins to make

the full-sized cake.

If it weighs anything like the original one,

which was 300 pounds, that is not easily moved about.

We've got to get it right.

The tin will be filled seven more times before Paul can begin

building the cake.

The challenge then will be getting it into our Buckingham Palace,

Holkham Hall.

CHORAL SINGING

The mechanism Melbourne had constructed for just this moment

was now running at full speed.

Today, we're all used to the concept of

royal wedding fever.

But then, Britain was in the grip of it for the very first time.

There was the press speculation, there was the gossip.

Charles Dickens wrote a satirical piece but then in private

he admitted that he, too, really was in love with the Queen.

We all know how to participate in a royal wedding and we imagine

the ceremonial processes as well as those celebratory

traditions have been laid down for centuries.

Well, they're really only as old as 1840 and they were

constructed by Melbourne and Victoria and the people

around them.

And, really, what you get is the creation of this machine

and it's a machine for producing spectacle.

It's a machine for, in a way, encouraging a national

participation in this event.

It makes it hard to ignore.

Melbourne worked with the press.

He kept the public informed of the wedding schedule.

The haughty Hanoverians never dreamt of such openness.

Melbourne insisted that the wedding should take place in daylight.

It was a completely new event. Royal weddings in the past

had been in palaces, usually late at night.

They'd been very, very private.

This was a royal wedding for the people.

As the big day loomed, the Buckingham Palace

cooks laboured round-the-clock.

In our Holkham Hall kitchen, Annie Gray's team is hard at work

on the first course of the wedding breakfast.

Dishes not seen in any kitchen for centuries,

now come to life.

The macaroni timbale that alarmed Annie is coming together at speed.

The garden soup - peas, cabbage and turnips - was the opening

gambit chosen by the royal chef, Mr Ball.

It'll go at one end of the table, mirrored at the other end

by the fish.

And what a fish it is!

The mighty turbot was a rare treat.

This one weighs in at eight kilos.

This particular turbot's going to be served very simply,

turbot a l'Anglaise. English turbot.

So it's just going to be boiled, having been rubbed with some salt

and lemon juice and served with a very simple lobster sauce.

It's really deceptive, isn't it?

You just think anyone can cook that, lemon and salt, whatever.

But ruining something like this...

Your life wouldn't be worth living, would it? Criminal. Even now.

And, of course, it has to be done exactly at the point of serving.

Victoria and Albert were usually late for dinner.

One of the most time-consuming processes is larding,

sewing strips of bacon, in this case through sweetbreads,

the neck glands of a sheep.

In 1840, Buckingham Palace was no place to be a vegetarian.

Amongst the first wave of dishes, there was a lot of mutton,

a favourite of Her Majesty's.

Mr Ball's team larded multiple saddles of mutton with fat,

then braised them and glazed them and served them with mash.

Good to have a bit of carbohydrate for balance.

No Victorian party would be complete without that classic 19th-century

dish, the raised pie.

Mr Ball's pigeon pies were made in the traditional manner,

stuffed full of pigeon breast, forcemeat stuffing and then,

in this case, a few little feet poking out of the top,

just so the diners knew what the pie was.

In case they were still in doubt, the other pie will have a full

pigeon in-flight sticking out of the top.

Taxidermy heaven.

On the cold, wet night of Sunday, February 9th 1840,

the palace kitchens were a hive of activity.

Upstairs, there was also work going on.

In her room, the Queen shared her thoughts with her journal.

She wrote, "It was my last unmarried evening, which made me feel so odd."

Then she recalled seeing Lord Melbourne,

who'd been as emotional as ever.

Again she wrote, "I took his hand and pressed it and thanked him

"for all his kindness, which I hoped he would continue."

Melbourne knew his work was done.

He had to let her go.

OWL HOOTS

As the Queen retired, the palace clock winders

began their work.

Citizens all over the country did the same.

When the nation's clocks were next wound,

Britain would be a different place.

Changed by the union of two young people,

who, together, would put her on a new course.

The Queen wakes up at 8:45 and at 11:00, she begins to dress.

Preparations that will affect the way so many brides in the future

appear before their public.

Just hours before the wedding, Albert writes to the woman

he knows best, Coburg Duchess Karoline Amalie.

She's actually his grandfather's second wife, but the person he

loves, trusts and calls Grandmama.

Albert had a great affection for his grandmother and clearly

was very upset at having to leave her behind.

He wept when he left Coburg,

when he had to say farewell to everyone.

It was all uncharted waters for him.

It's time, the big day is here at last.

It's the wedding day and we're all invited.

Here at Winchester College, when we step into the chapel

it will be the 10th of February 1840.

And the weather couldn't be more perfect, just as it was then,

it's really cold and wet.

For our ceremony, the chapel at Winchester College

is almost ready.

The wedding cake begins its journey to the dining room at Holkham Hall,

our Buckingham Palace.

The original set a fashion for rich fruit cakes for royal

weddings to come,

a tradition only recently broken by Meghan and Harry with their lemon

and elderflower cake.

Our guests are also preparing.

I'm very pleased with the fake hair I'm going to get.

I couldn't miss the chance to dress up for a royal wedding.

Silk stockings... Lovely. ..for madam. What's this?

Oh! I quite like the look of this.

Yes, I thought you might.

I and those people will get the chance to experience,

as near as first hand as is possible, that wedding ceremony.

How exciting! It's brilliant, isn't it?

It is! I'm so jealous.

Are you jealous that you're not dressing up too? Yes, absolutely!

At the palace, Albert is bathed and is helped into his bespoke

uniform, fresh from his Mayfair tailors.

Victoria is in her dress.

She's assisted by the very stylish Duchess of Sutherland.

The Duchess stage-managed, as far as the clothes were concerned.

She was a kind of progressive. She was in favour of reform

and she certainly would have filled Queen Victoria's head

with the idea of progress.

This morning, the Duchess is no doubt pleased that the dress

has a political message. It's put bread on the tables

of British artisans.

Victoria wanted to help British crafts

and impoverished British tradesmen,

who had they not had that fantastic commission

over those winter months before the wedding,

would all have been literally starving.

CLOCK CHIMES

12 o'clock - Prince Albert, his father, Ernest I,

and his brother, Ernest II, are in the first carriage

to go to St James's Palace.

They're bound for the private chapel inside.

FANFARE

Our performers represent wedding guests who have been travelling,

some of them for days, to get here.

Most of these guests have money and they have dressed

to impress the Queen.

They're sporting wool, linen, perhaps silk woven by Huguenots

in east London.

And some may be wearing more exotic fabrics imported from India

and China by the East India Company.

Wellington, the Iron Duke, hero of Waterloo, is one of the few

Tories the Queen's invited - and then only because

Melbourne insisted.

Victoria dislikes these Conservatives.

All of her friends, and of course Melbourne himself,

are members of the more progressive Whig Party.

Nick Ryan and Jasdeep Singh have joined me to observe

from the 21st century.

The guests await the arrival of the Queen and her prince,

just as they did on that cold February morning.

Among them, foreign potentates, including one couple whose presence

demonstrates the international significance of this wedding.

The American ambassador and his wife is amongst the audience.

You know, in spite of the fact that America had become independent

and even more recently, that in the war of 1812,

the British had invaded the United States.

Now Victoria begins her carriage journey to St James's,

less than a quarter of a mile from Buckingham Palace.

At the centre of the district is St James's Park,

now full of loyal citizens.

In the park itself, even the trees were full of people

and occasionally a branch would break and they'd tumble

into the mud, causing great hilarity.

But it wasn't just here in the capital - the entire

population of Britain was in a state of romantic delirium.

Prince Albert has arrived before Victoria and awaits his

moment to enter the chapel.

The Queen, meanwhile, is in a side room with her bridesmaids.

She wrote, "My 12 young train bearers were dressed all in white

"with white roses, which had a beautiful effect".

This is the mother of all white wedding dresses.

It's quite shockingly, radically simple.

What everybody was expecting to see was a shouty, golden dress.

This is a perfect example of Melbourne's stage management.

The satin has to be seen in the half light to appreciate

its explosive effect.

You can see that it really does glow in the dark,

that's what the white does.

And Victoria is a visionary when it comes to her wedding dress.

Millions of people will follow in her wake.

Some people are less impressed with the bridesmaids than Victoria

herself, saying that there's no danger of them outshining

her because they look like a bunch of village girls.

The ladies are in fact all aristocratic, but the list

has been the subject of a heated debate between Victoria and Albert.

Albert had demanded that only the virginal daughters

of aristocratic mothers with impeccable morals

could be train bearers.

This causes a problem.

Lord Melbourne will not put up with this at all and he says

it's impossible to find 12 daughters of the English aristocracy whose

parents do not have lives that are tarnished in some ways

by scandal or illegitimacy.

And Victoria is a realist.

The list of tainted bridesmaids is allowed to stand,

including the daughter of the late King's mistress,

Lady Jersey.

And right there, with her laissez faire and

Albert's uptight morality,

we've got a glimpse of differences to come between our lovers.

And now the music that signals Albert's entrance.

He's been back in Britain for just a few days,

he will now live here for the rest of his life.

MUSIC: Hail, The Conqu'ring Hero Comes by Handel

Albert comes into this piece by Handel,

Hail, The Conqu'ring Hero Comes.

He is a conqueror. He's stamping down on prejudices

about his background.

And conquering his queen's heart.

It's amazing to see him in context.

Looking into the history, feeling the sort of intake of breath

as he arrives.

Albert goes up to his future mother-in-law,

the Duchess of Kent, and kisses her very fondly.

People have already noticed that Albert is building bridges

between Victoria and her mother.

Victoria's really good at holding a grudge,

she still loathes her mother, but Albert can see this is

problematic, if not dangerous.

Albert is determined to heal that feud.

This is the Saxe-Coburg family, we must be united.

Also, Albert is dubious about Victoria's replacement

mother, her governess, Lehzen.

Albert might be jealous of the love Victoria feels

for her old governess. They even had adjoining bedrooms.

It might also be snobbishness because Lehzen was born a commoner.

Baroness Lehzen is controlling the things that Albert wants

to control, particularly the finances of the court.

He might even already be thinking about plans to ease Lehzen out.

The ceremony is about to begin. Albert waits for his bride.

All eyes are on the groom, in his Field Marshal's uniform.

Albert is just feet away from the Duke of Wellington.

He probably chooses not to catch his eye because he knows

this national hero almost didn't get invited after he'd upset Victoria

over Albert's salary.

So you have this German boy dressed up for the first time

in his life as an English Field Marshal,

which must, in itself, been a pretty scary experience.

The Duke of Wellington was a very scary person,

and all around these old soldiers

who are veterans of the Napoleonic Wars.

He must have been extremely frightened.

The Duke has also been quite ill,

and while the whole court went to visit his bedside,

Victoria refused to go.

This was fabulous in rehearsal.

And now you can really feel the effect of these youthful voices

in such an ancient setting.

Everybody here has become a cog in this new machine,

the royal wedding machine that will steam roller its way

through the next couple of centuries.

What's happening here will change the way that life is lived

in this world, the world of 1840,

but it will also affect the future,

with millions of white weddings to come.

It's a great aesthetic decision, this, because Victoria is clad

in pristine, virginal white.

You know, there's nothing clean and white in London in 1840.

That dress must really have burned itself onto the retina.

It's much more than just a wedding of two young people,

it is scene one of a great drama which is going to be the unfolding

of modern constitutional monarchy.

ORGAN PLAYS

Victoria enters to music chosen for its message -

Handel's A Virtuous Wife Shall Soften Fortune's Frowns.

The moment everyone has waited for -

the Queen makes her entrance.

This is what the experiment is all about.

Sitting here in the middle of it, I can't help but be swept up

in enthusiasm for the little Queen, for the romance,

for the monarchy itself.

This is perhaps the only flaw in the brilliant plan -

the Queen's train is a bit too short for so many bridesmaids

and they're treading on each other's heels.

The chapel is so narrow, everyone is near enough to hear

the rustle of all that satin.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here...

Even though we're recreating all of this, I'm getting an insight

into how the royal magic works.

To join together this man...

Something else made obvious by reconstructing the wedding -

the Queen has placed her mother just out of her eyeline,

but can easily catch the adoring glances of her dear friend,

Baroness Lehzen.

In the corner, the Queen's favourite painter is making sketches

for the wedding picture that will take two years to finish.

George Hayter produces the first great portrait

of her while she's on the throne,

and Victoria and Albert commission him

to produce the official wedding portrait,

which is something from a perfect world,

it's burnished and soft focus.

Secondly, it was ordained Christ's holy body...

While the Archbishop deals with the sins of the flesh,

many in the congregation are looking at Albert's family.

Albert's father and his brother were philanderers,

and it was a horror that he really never came to terms with.

Albert was very frightened of the consequences

of sexual licence, of profligacy.

He was very proper, very moral right from the beginning.

And keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's holy body.

This union would bring Germany and Britain closer together

than ever before.

It was supposed to ensure international security,

keep Europe safe.

And this would work - at least for a while.

Be thou wedded wife, to live together...

As the ceremony progressed, many observers later noted

how Victoria had locked her eyes on Albert throughout the ceremony,

how she looked pale and slightly drawn.

The press cast it as charming, innocent and girlish.

Perhaps she's waiting for the most important word

in the entire service.

Victoria...

Now, this is the big-breath moment.

There's been so much speculation about the exact form of words

they're going to use.

What everybody wants to know is, is she going to use the O word?

Will thou obey him?

I will.

She insisted, when it came to the vows that, no,

she was going to vow to obey Albert because she said,

"I want to be married as any other woman and not as a queen."

As with many a royal bride,

Victoria's father isn't here to give her away.

Her favourite uncle, the Duke of Sussex stands in.

Just at any other wedding, there was a certain amount

of gossiping and sniping from the congregation.

This duke here was famously skint and some people were saying

that he was only too pleased to give away what wasn't his.

For as long as you both shall live...

This duke will die with no legitimate children,

which means that his title will die with him.

The Sussex title lapsed.

Meghan and Harry, of course, now have assumed that title

and it's been revived.

With this ring, I thee wed.

With my body, I thee worship.

With my body, I thee worship.

In the name of the father...

In the name of the father...

..and the son... ..and the son...

..and the Holy Ghost... ..and the Holy Ghost...

Amen. Amen.

This is the climax.

Victoria will say later that this was the best moment of all.

She and Albert have actually practised putting the rings on.

She remembered the mess up with the ring at her coronation.

And with all my worldly goods, I thee endow...

And with all my worldly goods, I thee endow...

..in the name of the father...

Everybody in the audience has sort of tried to stop themselves bursting

out laughing when they know Albert hasn't got any money.

And Victoria is the richest woman in the world, actually. So...

CHOIR SING

Albert is so near to the finish line.

The British people here are probably thinking

that he's the country bumpkin about to make good.

But I'm pretty sure that he sees it differently.

I think he's thinking,

"I'm about to become the boss of this lot."

The Archbishop marries the couple using the same Book of Common Prayer

found in every parish church.

The Queen might be head of state, but she's also just like any other

person who's found their soulmate.

I now pronounce you man and wife.

APPLAUSE

This moment caused quite a stir.

Lots of guests noticed that while the Queen

had been smiling and winking at Baroness Lehzen throughout

and now made a special point of kissing Queen Adelaide.

And as for her mother, well, she merely shook her hand.

In the throne room, the newlyweds sign the register.

The Archbishop signs first.

They're signing with just their first names,

like kings and queens do.

No need for any surnames -

of course everybody knows who they are.

As the ceremony finishes, the Queen assembles her pretty maids

and gives them all a fabulous gift -

a jewelled eagle brooch, designed by Prince Albert.

In this example, at Woburn Abbey, we see the turquoise that stands

for true love, the ruby eye for passion,

the diamond beak for eternity

and the pearls for beauty.

The guests invited to the palace for the wedding breakfast

now wait in a withdrawing room.

The first dishes are already next door,

but they can't start until Victoria and Albert arrive.

But rather than joining their guests,

they retire to her quarters.

Until now, protocol has prevented them spending

a moment together alone.

Suddenly, now they're married and, at last,

they can shut the door on everybody.

And maybe it was quite a frightening moment for them,

because there they are confronted with reality

and they have a whole lot of discovering to do.

In her journal, Victoria says that at this moment,

they made vows every bit as important as the ones

they made in church.

Albert said they must never have secrets from each other.

Years later, after he was dead,

she made a very poignant annotation to this page.

"No secrets," he said, and she added,

"And so it was".

In 1840, dinners were served a la francaise.

It was a beautiful, intricate style of service,

in which all of the dishes for each course were placed on the table

simultaneously, laid out symmetrically.

In practice, in the royal palaces, this meant that there was a whole

division of people called the table deckers.

It was their job to measure out with set squares and tape measures,

making sure that the gaps between each plate were perfect,

that the table was completely symmetrical -

fit, of course, for royalty.

In the 20th century, these Georgian kitchens became

a tourist attraction, but today

they're going to once again see some culinary gymnastics.

A multitude of dishes undergo all kinds of process -

glazing, basting, boiling and frying.

The royal recipe book calls for some terrifyingly old-school practices.

Annie, what is this distressing object?

Er, this is a hare.

What have you done to it?

Well, I've Victorianised it.

Today, we would always take the heads and legs off roast birds

and roast meat, and the idea of presenting it like this

is really alien.

We don't want our food to look like food any more.

No, we like to have nothing that reminds us that anything

was once alive on the table,

whereas the Victorians were completely the opposite.

I think the thing about Victorian food, especially at the high-end

like this, is it's got to be a feast for all the senses.

When you're working with dishes which, in some cases,

really haven't been cooked for 100 years, if not 150,

you do find surprises.

And actually, for me, the biggest surprise

has been how amazing they all look when they start to come together.

I kind of have a vision in my head of how I think it will look,

and then it looks even better.

Their tryst over, the Queen and Field Marshal Prince Albert

descend to the withdrawing room,

no doubt to the delight of their famished guests.

After the ceremony, everybody noticed how radiant

she looked, the colour had come back into her pale cheeks.

And can you see another part of the magic of the white dress?

It makes her stand out in the colourful crowd.

Reading between the lines of her journal,

it seems the Queen and her new husband invited very few,

perhaps 50 of their 300 guests, to eat at the palace.

An even more select group sit at the table with the newlyweds.

The seating plan doesn't survive, but we've worked it out from clues

in Victoria's journals.

She's between Albert and her uncle, the Duke of Sussex.

And you can see the declining of Melbourne's influence by the fact

that he's several places away.

They've put him in the corner.

Where's Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent?

Well, she had to be here at the family top table,

but she's right down the other end.

She's out of Victoria's eyeline and earshot.

Where's the Duke of Wellington?

Well, she was forced to have the nation's hero

at the ceremony, but he hasn't made the guest list for the breakfast.

This meal is as political as the wedding ceremony had been,

the Queen showing friends and enemies alike their place

in the new pecking order.

Who sits where, how easily can they catch the Queen's eye

or eavesdrop on the conversation?

The food must be a mouth-watering relief.

The wedding breakfast was characteristically lavish and huge.

Prince Albert was extraordinarily fastidious and squeamish

about what he ate, and was very easily upset by what he ate.

She, on the other hand, always loved guzzle, guzzle, guzzle.

She shovelled it in, course after course.

And, also, she had a very strong head, she drank like a fish.

She wasn't alcoholic, but she loved knocking back the booze.

Whereas Albert, one glass would have finished him off, probably!

This is the roast capon for the second course.

Now, Mr Ball's capons would have been castrated cockerels,

but that's illegal in modern Britain.

You can only buy French ones.

This, therefore, is just a chicken.

The point of caponing, however, was that the birds became

extraordinarily plump and luscious.

Quite superior to a normal bird.

Here's the country life brought to the city table.

Asparagus standing to attention on a bread base,

naturally, served drenched in butter.

Another capon dish, a key part of the second course.

These have been galantined, so boned out.

They've then been stuffed and then glazed with this chaudfroid sauce,

which is a type of cream sauce set with the inevitable gelatine.

Everything is all about aspic.

They are then being beautifully decorated up.

These really are like little jewellery boxes

sitting on the table.

The culotte de boeuf features combs from the heads of cockerels,

on skewers, interspersed with crayfish and mushrooms.

This is the remove dish, so this is a really crucial part

of it, because you've got everything on the table

and then something goes out, the turbot or the soup -

and once this comes in, all the other dishes are then uncovered.

So this is quite a sort of key wow factor.

It's a wow factor now, isn't it?

When the waiting staff have delivered the meats to the table,

the guests themselves have the pleasure of carving them.

Victorian diners above-stairs revelled in the artistry

of the craftspeople down below.

A host was judged on their ability to find a great cook and,

of course, Victoria had the best.

Her head chefs were stars, and when they left the palace,

they had their pick of jobs at grand hotels and restaurants.

So many dishes to get through,

but Victorian diners knew to pace themselves.

One trick they had was to put mustard inside the ear.

It's supposed to deaden the nerve that tells the brain

when the stomach's full.

Once she was queen, Victoria was distressed to discover

that she was putting on weight.

She once asked Lord Melbourne about this.

He said, "You should only eat when you're hungry."

She said, "Well, then I'd always be eating."

Victoria was notorious for being an extremely fast eater.

And, of course, the protocols were that the minute the Queen

finished her food and put her knife and fork down,

that was it, the servants came in, whisked the plates away.

And there were always these complaints from members

of the entourage that they never had a chance to finish

what was on their plate because Victoria had gobbled her food.

Her Majesty might have been racing to get to the jellies and puddings.

Like so many of her subjects, Victoria has a sweet tooth.

OK. Well, it sounds good. Ooh... Yeah, yeah.

There's a bit of leakage.

Oh!

SHE GASPS

Yes! Wahey, excellent.

The kitchens at the royal palaces were divided into divisions,

and one of the most important was the confectionery division

which was in charge of sugar craft and that kind of thing,

but also jellies.

If you were Victorian and you had money and you wanted

to show it, then you put moulded foods on your table.

Not just jellies.

If it could be moulded, then you'd mould it.

So this one is a moulded fruit puree, this mould over here,

this is designed for cakes. Or you've got something like this,

which might well be used for a meat mousse.

Put it this way, it would not be a Victorian wedding feast

if we didn't have moulded foods on the table.

This confection of icing sugar,

jam and whipped cream is gateau en feuilletage,

laced with liqueurs that ooze at the first touch of the spoon.

That looks precarious. Oh, yeah, it is.

I sort of had a vision of what this would look like,

based on reading the recipe but you never really know

till you see it. I'm not sure I'd realised it was quite so...

..dangerous.

Puff pastry is so delicate.

It's very light, it looks sort of like an enormous cake

but, actually, it's just very, very light cream and a really

quite light jam.

This is actually almost a sort of cloud as a mouthful,

rather than an enormous great cake.

So much time and work that goes into it.

There was a little bit of apprehension, for sure,

but, actually, I quite like it.

This is the gateau that had made Annie quake.

Will it collapse before it reaches the table?

Now fully dressed and still upright,

it's ready to ascend to the dining room.

Like all weddings, the ceremony and this meal were family occasions.

For some guests, one of the last of such gatherings.

Within four years, Albert's father Ernst I would be gone.

His son, Ernst II, would live to be 75,

busy philandering, active in the arts and in German politics,

and nearly becoming the King of Greece.

The Queen Mother would live for another 21 years.

She and Victoria would never fully reconcile,

although after her death,

the Queen would realise how much her mother had loved her

and would be grief stricken.

The Duchess of Sutherland would become a high-profile campaigner

against slavery and remain the Queen's close friend -

the person Victoria would cling to when Albert died.

In 1842, Baroness Lehzen would be dismissed by Prince Albert

and go to live in Germany, where she would die in 1870,

surrounded by pictures of the Queen she adored.

The grand finale of the feast is this mammoth cake,

the mothership of a flotilla of cakes sent out to those

who couldn't be in London for the big day.

The cake is sensational.

It's nine feet in circumference,

it contains 300 pounds of fruit and 11 pints of French brandy.

The top part shows Victoria and Albert themselves,

rather incongruously dressed in Grecian robes.

There's so much sugar and brandy in the cake that it will last for ever.

The guests were given slices to take home in special little tins,

and sometimes they still come up for sale in auctions.

So you could buy a bit and, I guess, you could still eat it.

After the cake is cut, Victoria and Albert rise and leave the table.

They have somewhere else to be,

away from the madding crowd.

APPLAUSE

She wrote, "I went upstairs and undressed and put on a white

"silk gown trimmed with swan's-down and a bonnet with orange flowers.

"At 20 minutes to four, Lord Melbourne came to see me."

Perhaps she then finally realised how tired and exhausted he had been

the last three years, looking after her and, you know,

nurturing her and helping her learn the job of being queen.

Suddenly, their long-held roles are reversed.

She's in charge now, telling him to have an early night

and then Albert comes in looking wonderful and he's the one

who carries her off, leaving poor Melbourne.

Melbourne was very diplomatic with Albert.

He didn't entirely approve of his rather priggish personality,

as he described it, but he understood that Albert

was the right man to be Victoria's husband

and to guide her.

They were to be separated.

I can see why he cries, I cry thinking about it myself.

So I think it's the most moving little moment

in the whole day, really.

It's four o'clock - time to put the grime

of the capital behind them.

The rain stopped and the sun came out,

and then they were riding west out of town towards Windsor.

They were deliciously alone.

They were in limbo - they were free from all

the formality and the pressure of Buckingham Palace

and ahead of them lay the fairy tale castle of Windsor.

The newlyweds spend the evening in her old rooms

and have their supper delivered.

He plays her sweet music and she swoons.

Victoria wasn't feeling very well,

but nothing would stop her enjoying her wedding night.

There is no element of prudery in her.

She describes it frankly in her journals,

she describes the first night they spend as man and wife.

She adored him.

As she wrote, "At 20 minutes past ten, we both went to bed."

"Of course, in one bed, to lie by his side and in his arms

"and on his dear bosom

"and be called by names of tenderness I have never

"yet heard used to me before, was bliss beyond belief."

A baby, Princess Vicky, was very possibly conceived

even that night.

Eight more would follow over the next 16 years.

The Queen began to long for the days when she and Albert could be alone.

Not surprisingly, being the Queen as well as Albert's wife

as well as the mother of all of these children,

began to take its toll on Victoria.

She started to experience symptoms

that today might lead to a diagnosis of postnatal depression.

Even so, during this first decade of her marriage,

she proved herself to be dutiful and spirited and pretty tough.

The Queen knew that her wedding day had established a brand.

Victoria and Albert - a family business that people could trust.

It had rescued the crown.

14 years later, what's said to be a retrospective wedding photograph

was snapped up by their devoted public.

We remade that wedding to see how

even the smallest detail was managed.

The use of scale was masterful,

the small Queen in the huge dress was vulnerable and powerful.

Albert's scarlet drew the eye, made the boy a man.

We understood Victoria's placing of those she loved in her eyeline

and those she distrusted out of it.

And most of all, we saw the story the public would be sold.

The new-style royals who believed in love,

a happy ever after for everyone.

Splashed across every newspaper,

the wedding and the marriage were expertly crafted to stop

Britain from becoming a republic -

and it worked.

There is a kind of cooperation that happens between the press

and the Palace.

Victorian and Albert are going to be a fresh start,

they're going to be representatives of progress, and that's something

that most newspaper editors of this period are interested in,

the idea that Britain is going to go on some kind of forward trajectory.

The wedding of Victoria and Albert saw the birth of a legend,

the legend of their powerful love that came to define her whole reign.

The brand of Victoria and Albert was born at this ceremony.

And, on top of that, their new way of getting married

affects the way that people still get married to this day.