Royal Sex: Queen Victoria

With NINE children, it can probably be assumed that Queen Victoria was no stranger to the sheets, but what do we actually know about her love (and sex) life? To examine Victoria's diaries, her passionate relationship and her society's attitude to sex, Kate is joined for this special episode by Royal Historian Kate Williams and journalist Robert Hardman. Kate and Robert are cohosts of 'Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things', a podcast from the Daily Mail. Listen to find out why bicycle porn was all the rage! This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy. The producers were Sophie Gee and Benedick Devlin. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you! Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are you, I am me, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. And thank goodness you've decided to pop by once more to have me wittering into your ear holes. But before we can go any further together, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way of coming around adult subjects and you being an adult too. We call that the Fair Do's Warning, because Fair Do's, we didn't tell you it was gonna get rude. Right, on with the show.

• 1:52Kate Lister?

  A 20-year-old woman writes feverishly in her diary. She's recollecting the night before, her cheeks and neck and bosom are flushing as she does so. Her heartbeat is racing, her breath is shallow. She writes by gaslamp alone at night. These words are for her and her alone. Except that they're not, because this 20-year-old woman is a queen, and these pages will be pored over by historians, royal experts, and, well, nosy bitches like me.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  What do you call a man?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Oh, money, of course.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Goodness, what beautiful day. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.

• 2:58Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Queen Victoria gave birth to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 children during her lifetime. That's right, one woman, one vagina, nine children, over a span of 17 years. Now, I'm sure by this point I don't need to tell you how babies are made. And with nine children, it seems that, well, Vicky didn't need to be told either. But what do we know about Queen Victoria's sex life? Was she really as frumpy and prudish as everyone likes to make out? Did she live up to the Victorian values? And do Victorians in general conform to the stuffy stereotype we have them down for?

• 3:42Kate Lister?

  Well, today I am going to find out. And to do so, I will be cozying up with the hosts of Kings, Queens and Dastardly Things, royal historians Kate Williams and Robert Harding.

• 3:58Kate Lister?

  Hello, Kate. Hello. Thank you so much for inviting me on. Well, it's certainly going to liven things up. Well, I think we're about ready to tiptoe into Queen Victoria's bedroom. Sounds good to me. So we know quite a bit about Queen Victoria's attitude to sex through her voluminous diaries. She kept meticulous details on all manner of things, including, I mean, it's not graphically explicit, but she does talk about her darling husband quite a lot.

• 4:26Speaker 06

  Yes, Kate, the word for Victoria's diary is, you coined it, voluminous. Sixty-two million words in her lifetime. Anything that Victoria experienced, she wrote it down in her diary. And we see in it, as you say, this outpouring of love for Prince Albert. She'd had a pretty miserable childhood, so had he. And so when they get married at this very young age, it's just all this devotion comes really streaming out of Victoria and all this physical affection as well. So in eighteen thirty-nine, when she watches him climb the steps of Windsor Castle, she writes, "He is the most handsome prince in Europe." You know, sometimes she does write a few little details she did say in, also in eighteen thirty-nine, so these are younger years. "My dear Albert came in today from the rain.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  He looks so handsome in his white cashmere breeches with nothing on underneath."

• 5:16Kate Lister?

  She's absolutely thirsty for him, isn't she? She can't get enough of this man, she really can't.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  She is totally thirsty for him and, and the wedding night, you know, they say quite a few couples these days don't do much on their wedding night.

• 5:28Kate Lister?

  They do.

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Apart from collapse in bed with a cup of tea, but that's not what happens here. She writes after her wedding night, "She didn't think it would be possible to be so happy." She talks about the bliss of watching him shave and how wonderful it is when he helps her put on her stockings. And she says, "I never, never spent such an evening. My dearest, dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I could never have hoped to have felt before. He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again. Oh, this was the happiest day of my life."

• 6:06Kate Lister?

  I'm so pleased she's getting some, though. Like, don't you just like, I, I know that it's proper teenage girl heartthrob, like, oh my God, I love him so much, but she had such a rotten time in childhood, so strict and controlled. There must have been a sense for her of just like, wow.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, this is someone who, you know, wasn't even allowed to walk up and downstairs together, had to share a bedroom with her mother or with a nurse for her entire life. Finally, she's in the room with someone other than a chaperone or her mum. I mean. You know, how exciting is that? And I do think, I mean, I think she writes very nicely. I mean, let's not forget, she did have a talent for writing. I mean, she wrote a book when she was just eleven. Sweet little sort of children's book. And she was a prolific diary writer. And, I mean, Kate, you're a historian. I mean, can you think of, or I should say both Kates. Can we think of other royal journals, British royal journals that are quite so, not necessarily explicit, but certainly as intimate?

• 7:05Speaker 06

  I mean, I would say there's nothing to beat Queen Victoria's journal. And as you say, she's a very talented writer. I mean, Highland leaves her book when she's a lot older. It's a bestseller. I mean, it would be at the Sunday Times list now for weeks, the equivalent of it. And she is very effusive, very affectionate. And I, but I think, I think, you know, this level of intimacy you get into the life of a queen, into the thinking of a monarch, but also into the thinking of a Victorian woman. And I think she's just, as you say, she's had this very miserable upbringing and this is her first moment to really be herself. And initially she was unsure about marrying because I think she felt she was the one to be a bit more of a Elizabeth I for a little bit longer, a bit more single. But she was told very firmly that either you marry or you have Mama in the palace. And she and Mama, in no way.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  So Albert is like her rescuer. He's the rescuer of her from Mama and her court. And she really thinks she's finally got someone as her best friend and a supporter. And I think she also really does buy the Victorian vision of the companion marriage. So the Georgians, the door is closed. It's now a new era and it's about, you know, middle class companion marriage. You're happily ever after, you have the children, your husband would never want to go to any frequent place of the night. And this is their future. And she actually writes about the wedding night and she says, "We both went to bed. To lie by his side and in his arms and on his dear bosom and to be called by names of tenderness, I have never heard used to me before, was bliss beyond belief."

• 8:35Speaker 06

  Oh, so it's marvelous.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  Probably explains why she was so furious just three months later when she discovered he was pregnant.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  What a surprise. What a surprise. I'm surprised it was three months. You would have thought it was the next. She was pregnant very swiftly, but I think that's also part of it in the sense that everyone is watching the marriage like a hawk that Victoria gets pregnant. This is her big job.

• 8:57Kate Lister?

  It's her big job.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  She has to secure the throne because her naughty uncles by eighteen hundred had between them managed fifty-six legitimate children and one legitimate child and then poor Charlotte died in childbirth. So you can see why Victoria, I think, really is sort of, I think she kind of loves the joys of the marriage bed, but also she sees it as her duty because she has to start producing these heirs. Although she didn't, as Robert says, she wasn't expecting to get pregnant quite so quickly.

• 9:24Kate Lister?

  There was a longstanding belief as well, it's been around for centuries, that once you got pregnant, you couldn't have sex, that that would somehow damage the baby. And I think that's why Henry VIII was allowed to stray, or at least he thought he was allowed to stray, when Anne Boleyn became pregnant.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  She did not like.

• 9:41Kate Lister?

  She did not like that. But, Anne, if they'll do it with you, they'll do it to you. Moving on.

• 9:49Speaker 07

  In the case of Victoria, is this a recurring theme with all her pregnancies? Because, I mean, she gets pregnant again very quickly, doesn't she?

• 9:56Kate Lister?

  She does, yeah. I mean, she was clearly eager to get back in the sack with Albert. And, yeah, it probably would have been for her as well, is like, as soon as that's, as soon as you're knocked up, then there's.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Then there's no more.

• 10:08Speaker 07

  Particularly in upper class circles, because it's perfectly acceptable. In fact, it's the norm to hire a wet nurse.

• 10:14Kate Lister?

  Yep, yep.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  So you lose that contraceptive potential that breastfeeding gives you. So you're going to get pregnant straight away. And I think it might be the case that often you're more fertile quite soon after you've had a baby, because sometimes the body believes the baby's longer there. So you are more fertile. So Victoria was pregnant again, three months after she had her first child.

• 10:32Speaker 07

  Kate, would Victoria have known that breastfeeding would have extended her window of opportunity with Albert?

• 10:40Kate Lister?

  I don't think she would have done. I don't think that was common knowledge at this point, because in order to know that, you need to know about hormone levels, regulations. And hormone theory didn't come in until. Into the twentieth century. So I mean, there might have been some received wisdom, old wives' tale that was actually spot on, but I don't recall this being medical advice anyway.

• 11:01Speaker 07

  If only Victoria had known that. I mean, right away after her first born, when Vicky was born, she hired Mrs Ratsey, the wife of a sailmaker from cows, to step in and serve as a wet nurse. But I think if Victoria had known, she might have been able to.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  Would she be able to break that taboo? Because it's obviously, it's a very, it's a very important, it's totally a taboo to breastfeed your own children. Although Victoria's mother did try to do it. She felt she wanted to be close to her baby. But it is absolutely a taboo to feed your own children. You give them to a wet nurse. And I think the theory also is that you recover faster. And of course, Victoria is queen. She wants to get back to work swiftly. What she also hates about being pregnant is that she is pushed out of power, that when she's pregnant, it is a time when the ministers are saying, not, not so much, dear. On top of that, she has to give birth in front of her ministers with a, just a screen separating them.

• 11:53Kate Lister?

  When they talk about confinement, they actually mean proper confinement. I'm not sure if they were still doing it as much up to the nineteenth century.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  The time when it was all, no windows were ever opened.

• 12:02Kate Lister?

  You were just locked in this darkened room with no sunlight and no, nothing, and almost no contact with anybody because of this idea that you can't startle the mother. The baby will come out scared or something, or whatever it was that they thought was going to happen. So it really is quite a debilitating thing to be pregnant at this particular period.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  All of Victorian culture has the vision that when a woman is pregnant, you know, she can do nothing.

• 12:25Kate Lister?

  Do nothing.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  And her head is overwhelmed. So Victoria is confronted by this. And there's a, although she adores Albert, there is a power struggle between her and Albert for power, because he does want to be a joint monarch. His vision is William and Mary all over again, and hers is Victoria plus consort. But when she's pregnant, this starts to be the moment when he takes a lot more power. And of course, if she dies, he will be regent for the baby. And dying in childbirth was something that did happen to her poor cousin, Princess Charlotte, who had this nearly fifty hour labour. And no one intervened because they were too scared to do so to the heir to the throne. So she has that fear. And on top of that, she loses so much power. And she finds the physical difficulties of pregnancy particularly annoying.

• 13:04Speaker 07

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, she's the first. Maybe not just mono, but one of the first women to use some sort of relief in the form of.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  That's for Prince Leopold, yes. So it's not now. Yeah, it's much, it's much further on. And she is the first one to do this. And I think that part of the reason why she uses it is because there is this archaic practice that she has to give birth in front of her ministers. So obviously that was seen as fine for the consort, but as a woman who has to deal professionally with these men, and they're just separated by this tiny screen. And I think one reason why she does it is, is because she feels very strongly that, you know, why should they listen to her going through this pain. But, but it's very controversial that Victoria uses chloroform because the principle is that pain in childbirth brings a woman closer to understanding the evil of Eve. So if Eve brought down the entirety of culture by giving Adam the apple, she committed the first sin, that sin is what you must encounter

• 13:57Speaker 06

  by childbirth, by pain in childbirth. And if you don't have pain, it's like cheating.

• 14:01Speaker 07

  Pretty Thomas Aquinas in the nineteenth century, isn't it? Do people still believe this?

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 14:06Speaker 07

  You've got to pay penance for the fall.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  It's really fascinating. But I saw this even said ten years ago, that if a woman doesn't have a natural birth, if she has a cesarean, she'll find it harder to love and bond with her baby. And which is totally crazy, isn't it? That possible idea, see, but there still is this overhang that if you don't suffer, and obviously not all childbirth is hugely painful, but if you don't suffer the pain of childbirth, you can't love the child, you're cheating, you're a cheat.

• 14:33Speaker 07

  Just getting back to Victoria there, I mean, her enthusiasm in the bedroom, I mean, it, it continues right the way to, till, till Albert's death, am I right?

• 14:42Kate Lister?

  It really does. I mean, she is head over heels devoted, in love with this guy, writing obsessively about how beautiful his face is and how beautiful his, his shirt is and his body is, and she's lying next to him. And it's real like teenage girl crush stuff. They have arguments and there's a real power struggle because you've got this weird dynamic of she's the queen, she's the monarch, but she's also attempting to adhere to this very Victorian morality of submitting to your husband. But she can't because she's the queen and it all gets very, ugh, tense, tense.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  Because she promises to obey, even though the ministers tell her not to. And they put up all these pictures, don't they, of Victoria's like serving Albert and being the subservient housewife, but really, she's also telling him what to do.

• 15:25Kate Lister?

  And she definitely fancied him the whole way through, I've no doubt about that.

• 15:40Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 16:22Speaker 07

  So we're talking about attitudes to sex in Victorian times. We all have a very clear view of the Victorians as this sort of buttoned up breed of repressed, hypocritical, nymphomaniacal, straitlaced people who might sit there in church on a Sunday and be ostensibly god fearing, but beneath the surface they're lurked raging passions. Were they really any different from the Georgians or from 20th, 21st century Brits?

• 16:54Kate Lister?

  No, not really. We've always enjoyed sex and having sex with each other and talking about sex and gossiping about it and they were no different at all. What changes are the social attitudes, what's to do, what's not to do? And if you look with a very long lens at history, what you tend to get is that each generation tries to rebel in some way against the one that came before it. And for the Victorians, a big part of that was distancing themselves from the Georgians, who had been notorious for putting it about and for enjoying themselves very, very much. And monarchs that were leaving litters of illegitimate children all over the place.

• 17:34Speaker 07

  And recognizing as well, aren't they, by giving them titles and palaces?

• 17:37Speaker 06

  And mistresses were openly at the theatre with you.

• 17:40Kate Lister?

  Yep, absolutely.

• 17:40Speaker 06

  It was a way into high society to be a mistress.

• 17:43Kate Lister?

  It was. If you could play that game well, then you had access to an awful lot of power, actually. But the Victorians come along and they're trying to define themselves against all of that. So part of that comes with their attitude towards sex, which is that we're now going to become quite reserved about it. But there are a few things we need to know about that is first of all, that's largely a middle class morality that we're seeing there. The nineteenth century saw a huge expanse of the middle class. And there have been historians who've suggested that what we see with this, you can't talk about sex, I won't talk about sex, oh, it's absolutely awful. That is the middle classes attempting to be better than the upper classes and the lower classes. They can't beat the upper classes in terms of money, but they can be morally better than them.

• 18:27Kate Lister?

  And the working classes, they had their own morality, but space is something that is a really modern concept. If you were a working class Victorian person, you almost certainly would have grown up in the same room as your entire family. You wouldn't have space and privacy the way we have it. You would probably have seen your parents having sex. You'd be aware of this, so you'd have a very different attitude to it. You need a lot of money to have that kind of, well, I'm not going to talk about blah, blah, blah, blah, stuff. So a lot of what we're seeing here is the middle class Victorian morality. But we also need to remember, these are the people that invented pornographic videos and pornographic photographs. So they're not as buttoned down and prudish as people like to think.

• 19:10Kate Lister?

  In fact, what tends to happen when you repress something is it just explodes somewhere else. What develops is this very seedy underworld of the nineteenth century, if you knew where to go. And it's the Industrial Revolution as well, so we've industrialized sex in many ways. So you get this weird situation of middle class, middle to upper class people denying that, we're not going to talk about it, we're not, it's absolutely shocking. But of course, people are still having sex and there's a lot of sex to be had as well.

• 19:39Speaker 07

  And all those myths about people sort of covering up table legs and all that, is that true?

• 19:43Kate Lister?

  That's not true. That was said a little bit later on in a way to sort of make fun of the Victorians for being as prudish. There have been historians who've suggested. That actually the Victorians are obsessed with sex. They make the argument that if you walk around talking and thinking about something that much, you can't possibly be not interested in it. Like, if I turned up and went, "Who's got a banana? Have you got a banana? I'm not thinking about a banana. Why do you want a banana? Who's got a banana?" You would not think this is a person who has no issues at all with bananas. You'd think, "Oh, my God, this person's obsessed." That's the Victorians.

• 20:17Speaker 07

  And they were, of course, running an empire at the same time, weren't they, Kate?

• 20:21Speaker 06

  This is the Victorian empire and the vision of upright, non-sexual behaviour, the domestic idyll.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  They're exporting it, aren't they?

• 20:30Speaker 06

  Is what is used to be exporting. It's on the biscuit tins. It's the image of Victoria and the perfect family and the companionate marriage. And this is all based on the vision of this upright man who's going to rule the world, who's going to rule over a quarter of the empire because he is, he's, he's Christian, he's moral, he's straight, and he would never indulge in any sexual practices. And these kinds of practices have to be stamped out across the empire. And this is justifying why the white man gets to rule. So it's all the ideology, the confidence, and as you say, Kate, the industrialisation of morality. This is all part of the ideology that allows the Victorians to say, "We should govern the world."

• 21:06Speaker 07

  But meanwhile, back in the real world.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  The real world.

• 21:09Speaker 07

  Okay, listen, if I could ask, as you said, the Georgians were from Nell Gwynne up to the sort of courtesans and the sort of free range, and then along come the Victorians. But what's going on with, you've suddenly got all these repressed men. One hears quite a lot about scandals going on behind the scenes, aren't there? I mean, are there these sort of houses of ill repute? Don't go away, do they? Just because the Victorians have come along?

• 21:32Kate Lister?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. In fact, they were really, really worried about what they termed the great social evil, which is people selling sex. They were completely panicked that sex workers just exploded during this period and all these women had gone on the game and, "Isn't it awful? It's terrible." And there were moralists who were estimating that there was 200,000, half a million people selling sex in the capital of London, and that gets written up as fact. But it was complete nonsense. We don't actually have accurate statistics for that to this very day, let alone how the Victorians were. And I think William Acton was one guy and he estimated the number of fallen women in London by looking at the illegitimate birth records and then timesing them by ten

• 22:14Kate Lister?

  because he figured that they would also be and it just gets very bizarre but all of that shows you how big a problem they thought that this was. Really what's going on here is you get increasing urbanisation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, London has a population of, I think it's one million, and by the end, it's nearly seven million. Within a hundred, so it's, it explodes and what you get with that is increasing poverty and you need an infrastructure to be able to support people and wherever you get poverty, you will get people who are going to sell sex, especially if you also create an environment where no one's supposed to be having sex.

• 22:50Speaker 06

  And it's interesting, isn't it, because if we look at the penal code, if you steal something, you will be severely punished. I mean, it's still possible you could be hanged. And we might say now, if I was desperate for money, I'd steal. But in those days, you are much better off, you're much safer selling sex because the authorities will turn a blind eye. And there are a lot of people who have a job and are also doing it by the side. And there's a word, that's exactly, that's dollymop, isn't it? What is a dollymop?

• 23:16Kate Lister?

  A dollymop is somebody who has employment but tops up their income with selling sex from time to time.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  So maids and clerks and...

• 23:25Kate Lister?

  Women couldn't earn, well, men as well, couldn't earn very much money. So you would occasionally turn to a much more lucrative industry to top up your income and that was known as dollymopping.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  And there's all the grey area, isn't it, that we might call sugar daddy-ing and a lot of grey areas between sex work and marriage and really, and I think, you know, until you get to the situation which you have with W T Sted and underage girls, if you're an adult sex worker, blind eyes are normally turned.

• 23:51Kate Lister?

  They are. It was legal, you could be charged for prostitution under the eighteen twenty-four Vagrancy Act. So if you're causing a nuisance and you are looking like a vagrant person, so if you're out on the streets trying to sell it, basically, you could be prosecuted for that. You could be prosecuted for keeping a disorderly house. So again, it's noise offences, really. But by the most part, people were willing to just turn a blind eye because it was so usual for men to be visiting these establishments. You hear so many stories of famous men who lost their virginities in these kind of establishments. Vincent van Gogh was one I was reading about quite recently. It just seems to have been a really common thing.

• 24:32Kate Lister?

  And it's a really strange situation because we know that these establishments were there, but we have so little records of them. Sometimes we have guides to the city of London. There was something called the Swells Guide to London and it gives you some addresses. There was one in the 18th century called Harris's List that gives you the names and addresses and expertise of some sex workers in the city. But one that we do know that was in the 19th century was a flagellation house, a lady who specialised in BDSM. She wouldn't have called it that. That was Teresa Barclay. Don't know an awful lot about her. She crops up in a few texts here or there. Arthur Henry Ashby, who compiled the bibliography of obscene books, he talks about her.

• 25:14Kate Lister?

  She dies in 1836 and she has her house on Charlotte Street. And she specialised in spanking, whipping and generally humiliating upper-class men who were paying an awful lot of money for that privilege.

• 25:27Speaker 07

  It's funny how the literary canon, books and subsequently films, dramatisations, it's always portraying upper-class men as going to these places. And it goes right the way through the Victorian era. And I mean, probably the most famous sort of example of that is anything to do with Jack the Ripper.

• 25:45Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 25:45Speaker 07

  It's always the East End, these poor sex workers in Bethnal Green and Mile End. And it's always a sort of chap in a top hat coming in and, you know, is it the Prince of Wales? Is it Bertie? Is it Lord Searnsay? That seems to be, I think, the way that we've come to stereotype the 19th century sex worker scene, but that's probably just an extreme example, isn't it?

• 26:10Kate Lister?

  It's one example. That certainly existed. There were very, very wealthy men who were taking advantage of much poorer people. The Cleveland Street scandal would be a good example of that. That was in 1889, when it turned out that Telegraph boys, and they were boys, they were between 15 and 20 years old, had been selling sex to very wealthy men in a brothel on Cleveland Street while using the Telegraph system. As a sort of a cover for it and some very, very well to do, highfalutin fancy names were mentioned.

• 26:43Speaker 07

  Well, there was a rumour that the Duke of Clarence, the seventh eldest son was was one of them, but I I mean, there's no, I don't think there's ever any proof of that, but I think, you know, people people rather like, he was the one, of course, that people thought was Jack the Ripper as well.

• 26:56Speaker 06

  Prince of Wales equerry, I think the Prince of Wales equerry had to rush away abroad before anyone started asking him too many questions about where he'd been.

• 27:03Kate Lister?

  But what's interesting though is that the press were clearly colluding and covering this up at the time, they didn't want to report it, trying to get information around it is quite difficult, they're obviously just stop talking about it, you can't imagine that happening today, can you?

• 27:18Speaker 06

  Conspiracy of silence to protect upper class mores because we can't let, it makes me think a bit about how lesbianism was not outlawed because you don't want women to find out about what they could possibly do and the law would make that clear, so we don't want the working classes to find out what is really happening, even though it's working class boys who are being used in these brothels.

• 27:37Kate Lister?

  But Teresa, she catered to the upper classes.

• 27:40Speaker 07

  This is the Charlotte Street.

• 27:41Kate Lister?

  This is Charlotte Street, this is Mrs Teresa Berkeley, or Barclay I should say. It's written about in quite graphic detail about some of the punishments that she could administer, one of the things she was said to do was keep nettles in a long vase of water, so she would keep them pliant and that she would whip her paying clientele with that, don't get any ideas anybody, just don't be writing us angry letters about this. She also invented something called the Barclay horse, which is an implement for you to be strapped over while you're being whipped and she had a lot of women working for her as well, she was well known enough and good enough at this to have cropped up in various memoirs of people from the time, but as always with this subject, she herself disappears, we don't know anything about the boys in the Cleveland Street scandal, we don't know

• 28:26Kate Lister?

  anything about Teresa, just we know they were there.

• 28:39Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  So women's freedom of movement was being controlled, but we also see a craze for this new fangled thing, the bicycle, and Queen Victoria was a bit of a fan of the bicycle.

• 29:34Speaker 07

  Yes, Kate, Queen Victoria deserves a place, I think, in the Hall of Fame of British cycling. Although she never actually got on a bicycle herself, she did get on a tricycle. She was known to find this rather innovative and exciting mode of transport. She was in the Isle of Wight in 1881, so by this stage, long widowed. And her carriage was suddenly overtaken by a girl riding a tricycle called a salvo. And the Queen thought, well, that's very impressive. So she asked to have a look at one of these things. And so the inventor duly brought one to Osborne House. And Queen Victoria had a go and thought, this is very exciting.

• 30:15Speaker 07

  And so, once the Queen Empress had effectively endorsed this new mode of transport with this royal imprimatur, then of course that opened the way for everybody to do it. And then we went from tricycles to bicycles. And I believe, Kate, that led to a whole new strand of Victorian erotica, am I right?

• 30:34Kate Lister?

  You are right. It's a strange, struggled route from Victoria on the Isle of Wight on a tricycle to cycling porn a little bit later on, but there is dots to be joined up. The first thing we need to know about the bicycle is that it played a really unacknowledged huge part in the women's liberation movement. Because, do you remember when you were a little kid and the first time you got on a bicycle and it meant that you could go and see your friends and you could cycle, you could go far away. So when you first get a car for the first time, my god, I can go anywhere. The bicycle did that, it made people geographically closer than they have been before. That's huge. That women, so many women had these really, I don't want to say boring, because that's not fair, but kind of boring lives.

• 31:17Kate Lister?

  But there was that famous Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice that said it's just a bunch of people going to each other's houses. There's a reason for that, is because geographically they're kind of limited.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  But put Lizzie Barnes on a bicycle and what could have happened?

• 31:30Kate Lister?

  Right, so you get this, so now all of a sudden it's associated with the women's liberation movement. Blue stockings loved a bicycle. And the other thing that we've got to contend with is the saddle. Now, you can't really ride side saddle on a bicycle, the same way that you can do with a horse. So all of a sudden, you've got an acknowledgement that women have crotches, oh my god, and that you're going to have a saddle rubbing up against that area. And that did lead, I'm glad to say, not in the UK, we seem to have kept our wits about us, but in America and Canada you do get a lot of doctors absolutely panicking that women are going to be riding bicycles so they can orgasm. And that they're just, they're just going to keep going down the street and no one's going to be able to stop them.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  All that sexual pleasure.

• 32:14Kate Lister?

  All that sexual pleasure.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  They won't need a man anymore if they can just get it on a bicycle.

• 32:17Kate Lister?

  That's exactly the, and there was another line of thought that it might, it might damage their reproductive organs.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Lose their virginity on a bicycle.

• 32:24Kate Lister?

  You could lose your virginity. That rumor was still doing the rounds when I was at school that that was possible, that it might somehow disrupt their reproductive organs. There was a really ridiculous concern for a while called bicycle face, which was that if women were riding bicycles, that they'd suddenly lose their looks and get this really pinched, old, awful expression.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  They tried everything to warn women off bicycles, didn't they?

• 32:47Kate Lister?

  To get women off bicycles.

• 32:48Speaker 06

  It was going to ruin your internal organs, probably ruin your chance of getting pregnant.

• 32:52Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 32:53Speaker 06

  And ruin your looks.

• 32:54Kate Lister?

  And also, you have to wear different clothes. A corset, a tight fitting corset isn't much good to you when you're on a bicycle. Voluminous skirts with loads of petticoats, hopeless on a bicycle, and then we get the bloomers. Then we start to get more loose dress, the rational. Women's Dress Society comes along and all of this is linked to the bicycle.

• 33:11Speaker 07

  The Rational Women's Dress Society.

• 33:13Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 07

  I love that.

• 33:15Kate Lister?

  That was this idea that, you know, we're going to dress more sensibly, we're gonna, you don't need corsets and huge petticoats and all this stuff. We can wear bloomers and more loose fitting clothes. We're going to free boob it on a bicycle and all of that stuff. But because it's associated with women and them finding a new freedom and new slightly daring sexy clothes. And because the discussion is already around, well, I think the saddles rubbing on some rather intimate areas. It suddenly becomes quite an erotic implement as well. And also it does allow lovers to meet up in a way that perhaps they wouldn't have been able to do before. They can cycle off together.

• 33:52Speaker 07

  Can lose their chaperone, can't they?

• 33:54Kate Lister?

  Exactly.

• 33:54Speaker 07

  They're emancipated, you know, the old maid or the maid and aunt who's expected to go with them everywhere. Can't keep up, off they go.

• 34:02Kate Lister?

  Exactly. So the bicycle suddenly becomes quite a weirdly sexy object. And you do get, when they first start producing pornographic photographs, which must have been all of five minutes after they started producing regular photographs. I don't know what the timeframe is on that, but it must have been very swift. In some of the earliest ones, you do get this reoccurring motif of a bicycle. And it's not just the fact that visually you have to sort of bend over a bicycle, you know, you get a good shot. Sometimes they're just stood next to a bicycle, like leaning on it completely nude. That's all it takes. That's all it takes. And they're just smiling away. You're just like, this is me on my bicycle. And it does seem that it was an erotically charged item. I don't know if Victoria knew that at the time.

• 34:47Kate Lister?

  I'm going to say, no, I'm not going to link her with this, with this madness.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, who would be responsible for actually telling her about this? I can't think of anyone. So I think I'll just leave her happily pedaling up and down the driveway at Osborne House on her salvo tricycle.

• 35:02Kate Lister?

  But you can see some of this stuff. I mean, if you're feeling very daring, you can Google Victorian erotica bicycle. Do clear your history afterwards, but you can see. Some of this stuff, they're in archives all around the world. It's just amazing how often, oh, they've got another bicycle. There's a bicycle in the background. Why are there so many bicycles?

• 35:20Speaker 06

  So, Robert, now that we're dipped into the realms of erotica, often what comes to people's minds when they think about Victoria and Albert and their sex life is a certain appendage, isn't it?

• 35:30Speaker 07

  Oh, I thought you might chuck that subject my way, Kate. I have no intimate knowledge of this subject at all. But it does, as you say, it sort of recurs and it's become one of those sort of urban myths, I think, that Prince Albert allegedly, who knows where it came from, it's not in any, I can assure you, it's not in the royal archives.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  It's impossible to know where this myth came from, isn't it?

• 35:52Speaker 07

  It's this idea that he had a piercing in a particularly sensitive part of his anatomy. I'm being all Victorian here, aren't I? I might throw this over to Kate Lister. Kate, what is the genesis and what is the proof that, if any, that Prince Albert had a piercing down below?

• 36:12Kate Lister?

  This is still very much a thing to this very day. If you wandered into a piercing establishment right now, at this very moment, and asked them for a Prince Albert, they would pierce you through the shaft of your penis with a ring in it. There is a lot of debate as to why on earth is it called a Prince Albert? We can put it to bed right now that Prince Albert himself did not have a piercing like this. I've found zero record of it. I'm sure Victorian would have mentioned it.

• 36:37Speaker 06

  She would have told us. She would have said, "And my Albert's jewellery was very fine tonight."

• 36:42Kate Lister?

  She would have been shocked.

• 36:43Speaker 07

  She had just been appalled.

• 36:45Kate Lister?

  We don't have Albert's diaries, do we, to know how he felt about his relationships with Victoria?

• 36:51Speaker 07

  We've got some of his letters home to his, I mean, he would write to his uncle quite a lot. I'm not sure I'd necessarily go into that sort of detail.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  He was delighted by the love affair. He talked about how, you know, he was loved and adored because his childhood wasn't great either. And so he did love that adoration that she gave him. But certainly as we see as a relationship progresses, he becomes, I think, more and more exhausted by the levels of demands that the court makes on him, that she makes on him, that the family makes on him, and becomes sort of more exhausted under the weight of Victoria's sort of... She is an inexhaustible little person. Victoria is inexhaustible in every way and I think Albert is much more tired, so certainly.

• 37:28Speaker 07

  But there's no reference to any sort of.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  And it is stunning, isn't it, because so many TV programmes have asked me about it and I just say it just doesn't exist.

• 37:37Kate Lister?

  Just listen to what you've said out loud with your own words. Did Prince Albert have his penis pierced? No, he didn't. I've done as much digging around this as I possibly can for you and all I've been able to find out is that the actual, to call it a Prince Albert piercing dates to the 1970s. That's as early as we've been able to find it. So I don't even know where it started. I've also heard it said that, oh, well, this has come from a dressing trend where he would have had a dressing ring which would have been sort of a ring that he would have put into his penis to keep it off to one side as he was dressing. I can't find any evidence for that.

• 38:16Speaker 06

  Flattering. And it's interesting because I read an interesting theory that someone was saying this is actually the opposite of Victorian male dress. Victorian male dress, you have the shorter waistcoat, don't you? So the crotch part is available to be seen, not quite like the codpiece, but pretty like it. And that Victoria, of course, compliments that, saying, oh, Albert's got white trousers with nothing underneath them. And so I think they wouldn't have hidden it away.

• 38:39Kate Lister?

  No, and the Victorian Albert Museum have a wonderful article on the history of male underwear. Nowhere do they mention a ring that was used to keep a penis to one side. I mean, do you need a ring to keep it? How big was it? You don't need a, that's just not a thing. I don't believe that that's ever happened. I'm sure fashion historians can write in and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that there's ever been a dressing ring that would keep a penis off to one side. I'd put my life on the fact he didn't have it pierced.

• 39:06Speaker 06

  I'm joining you, I'm joining you.

• 39:07Speaker 07

  Good, I'm very glad to hear that we can clear this one up. I think we can just say that if anywhere was going to know about it, it would be the museum he founded, the Victorian he endowed.

• 39:16Speaker 06

  Yep. Oh, Roberts.

• 39:18Speaker 07

  It would be the museum that bears his name, the Victorian Albert. And if they've got nothing on this, then.

• 39:23Kate Lister?

  Nothing.

• 39:23Speaker 07

  Good. Well, there we are. It's always nice to clear up the odd myth on this podcast. But while we're on the subject of myths, Kate Williams, Professor Kate Williams, let me turn to another one of those sort of, well, it's not quite an urban myth because it's not in the city, it's another Isle of Wight myth. Can we talk about Queen Victoria's sex button?

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Well, Robert, we've said the Prince Albert was a myth, and here's another one. This idea that in their beloved Osborne House, on the beautiful Isle of Wight, this country residence that they bought, they hugely renovated, Italianate style, Albert's design dream, that in this house, which was their country house for them and their family, they had a sex button, and the purpose of this button was that when they felt like enjoying some marital congress, they'd press the button, the doors would lock, and none of the children or servants would interrupt them, a bit like a modern day panic room. So in the same way that you might hear a burglar and press a button, Victorian Albert did this when they felt

• 40:28Speaker 06

  like getting down to some more baby making. Well, it's not true at all. Now, Osborne House has a lot of innovations. Victorian Albert were great adopters, the telephone, the gramophone, and there is no sex button, there is no truth to this. But we can say that Osborne House does show us a lot of the intimacy that they had, because they bought each other for birthdays, sort of nude paintings, gorgeous paintings, statues of nudes, these beautiful, modern paintings. So in 1852, Victoria bought Albert Florinda, which is in Osborne House, over his desk, some semi-naked women around a pool, and it's from the legend of Rodrick, who was watching Maids of Honour, and Victoria, you know, loved looking at it, and then she gave him another nude, and she thought it very

• 41:11Speaker 06

  beautiful. And at one point, Albert himself commissions a sculpture of him posing as a Greek warrior, and he's got bare legs and feet, his left hand on his sword, and Victoria thought it very beautiful. Of course, you're going to imagine, oh, marvellous, here's a fake Albert I can look at when he's not here. But Albert had second thoughts. He thought he'd gone too far with these naked feet, and he hid the sculpture before commissioning a second, more modest version. And so, you know, Victoria and Albert, they did exchange this art, which really, I think, goes to the heart of this intimate relationship that they have. And there's even a painting of Victoria that is Albert's favourite, and I think it's the Victorian equivalent of a Boudoir picture. It's her with this loose hair, this sort of nearly off-the-shoulder dress, she's

• 41:57Speaker 06

  Looking in the distance, obviously, we imagine, thinking about our husband. I mean, that's the portrait he liked, not the queen ones, not the crowns, not all the sort of done-up portraits, that's his favourite.

• 42:07Kate Lister?

  It's very intimate. When you look at it now, when you first hear that, oh, Victoria had a saucy portrait done for Albert, and you think, oh, really? And then you look at it and you go, oh, that's not very saucy. But for a queen, that it was unbelievably erotic, the exposed shoulders, the languid look, the loose hair. That was really spicy for her to do that.

• 42:30Speaker 07

  Who would have seen that portrait? I mean, it was, I can't imagine the average visitor to Osborne would have come across it.

• 42:36Speaker 06

  It was in, it was in the private writing room in Windsor. Only the servants and the very intimate family would have seen any of these works of art, because most of them were in their private studies, their private rooms. And Albert kept this portrait in his private writing room at Windsor, which would have been really his zone to be, his man cave, really. It's the equivalent of Albert's man cave.

• 42:56Speaker 07

  I mean, this is, this is a time when institutions like the British Museum are putting on show sculptures of, I mean, there's all, there are three or four large depictions of, I can't remember which goddess it is, but she's sort of naked, bathing in a pool, you know, there's quite a lot of that sort of classical imagery, which is being kind of presented to the public. I mean, Kate, is that the equivalent of of a sort of carry-on film or sort of soft porn for the Victorians, the, you know, what you could find in your museum or your art gallery?

• 43:34Kate Lister?

  They did worry about that a lot, you know. And you still get that argument today, when does it stop being art and when does it start being erotica?

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Female nudity is very tolerated, naked women. So I'm just thinking now of the Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. His memorial in Bankman Gardens, which is put with this half-naked woman worshipping him, and that's for, that's for musical composer, and that's put up in 1903, so a bit after the Victorian period. But there is this tolerance of naked women, naked sculptures of women, but when it comes to a naked man, it's seen as shocking.

• 44:05Speaker 07

  Call him a muse or call him a goddess, and it's fine, isn't it?

• 44:07Speaker 06

  It's fine, and this is one of the great feminist arguments, how few statues there are of women who aren't Queen Victoria or naked.

• 44:14Kate Lister?

  You do actually get a couple of art scandals where there has been a nude exhibited and the woman in it does not look enough like a goddess. That happens, that she looks too much like just a regular woman. So they clearly have it in their heads that as long as it's conforming to being a muse, a goddess, then that's okay. Young and beautiful, that's okay. But as soon as it steps outside of that, they get very upset. Or if a woman painted it, they don't like that very much. There was a big fight on at the time for women artists to be able to access life models within the academy. Eventually, they had to let women artists in. And then for a long time, they wouldn't let them sketch nude people. It was just too unseemly. And apparently, the

• 44:56Kate Lister?

  first time they did it, some woman fainted. Really let the side down there. Damn it.

• 45:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, we just shouldn't get the the box of penises out for that group of artists.

• 45:07Speaker 07

  Just thinking of Victorian curios in one of my favourite places, which is the repository for the Science Museum. So it's all the stuff that's not on display in the Science Museum has until very recently been kept in Blythe House in Olympia. It's a fascinating collection of all sorts of scientific instruments and implements and bits of old plane crash and models of royal yachts that never existed, you name it. But in there, there's also a rather terrifying glass case full of chastity belts. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Terrifying, actually. Through the ages, and not just through the Middle Ages, but, you know, right up into the nineteenth century. So, I mean, the Victorians, they were certainly

• 45:51Speaker 07

  interested in, I think, all aspects of what they would have called prurient, irreverent behaviour. But, I mean, it's still there on display, or just not on public display.

• 46:02Speaker 06

  Heavens above. Well, maybe one day we'll see it out there in the in the shows.

• 46:06Kate Lister?

  I feel like I should jump in here and say that the Victorians invented the chastity belt.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  Ah, so they are Victorian. There we go. Carry on.

• 46:14Kate Lister?

  The Victorians created them. And then they said, well, that was the medieval people who did that. We've never found one. We've never found a medieval chastity belt. The only ones that exist are Victorian imitations of what they think the medieval chastity belt would have looked like. They're a saucy bunch, honestly.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Kate, you're writing this brilliant book about the history of the female orgasm. So tell us, at this period, how understood is the female orgasm? How understood would say a woman like Victoria? And I was just wondering, because we have it in the 18th century, don't we, the overhang that for a woman to pop out an egg, she needs to have an orgasm. There's that feeling. And do we think, we still think that in the Victorian times?

• 46:56Kate Lister?

  You do actually have this. It's a lego, a legover. It's a leftover from very ancient Greek thought that, it's called the two-seed theory. So a man would have to release his seed, fairly self-explanatory, and a woman would have to release her seed. And we're not entirely sure what that that means. But they thought that a woman would have to orgasm, just like a man has to orgasm for the seed to be released. And then they would mingle and then poof, there would be a baby and everybody's happy. This stays with us for a remarkably long time. It was actually being dispelled in the 17th century. It was William Harvey of heart and blood pumping fame, who actually wrote pretty conclusively, no, he gives a bit too much away, actually. He says, I've known plenty of women who got pregnant and did an orgasm. Going, William, you've told on yourself rather spectacularly there.

• 47:41Kate Lister?

  But they knew about this, but it stays in force as this kind. And at least they're still debating it by the 19th century. You get entire medical journals dedicated to this. Mostly people going, it's not true. But yeah, so it's still in force, but they certainly understood orgasm.

• 47:55Speaker 06

  And it's fascinating, isn't it? Because lie back and think of England, a phrase that we associate with the Victorian period and even with Queen Victoria, that doesn't come in till much later.

• 48:04Kate Lister?

  That's not Victorian, no. That was a joke that was much, much later. That is, I think the earliest they've been able to find that is the 1950s, that joke to lie back and think of England.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  So we have the, you know, the chastity belt, the armpit penis, the penis ring, all these acronyms. So we have still got this overhang of the belief that you have to enjoy sex to get pregnant.

• 48:22Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 06

  Then, you know, some of that, I think perhaps is maybe impacting on Victoria's attitude towards it.

• 48:28Kate Lister?

  It's another myth that they thought. That women were entirely sexless. I mean, you can find one or two Victorian quack doctors who say something like, I think, again, William Acton said, thankfully for them, women are not much troubled by sexual pleasure of any kind. But you only have to read through Victorian erotic literature to realise that they knew perfectly well, or not even, don't have to go that far, read Victoria's diaries, that knew that sexual pleasure was very important, but they did have a very clear idea that sexual pleasure should be between a man and a woman, and it should be married, and they should be trying to make babies. Those were their ground rules.

• 49:01Speaker 06

  Yes, that's what it's for.

• 49:02Kate Lister?

  That's what it's for.

• 49:03Speaker 06

  Not just for fun.

• 49:03Kate Lister?

  But it's all right to enjoy it. It's been such fun to hang out with you both. Thank you, everyone, for listening. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, you just fancied a chat, then you can email us at [email protected]. For listeners who want more royal shenanigans, join Kate Williams and Robert Hardman over at King's Queens and Dastardly Things. Otherwise, join me back on this podcast, wherever it was that you found us today, for more Sex Lives of Queens and, well, everybody else. This podcast by History Hit and The Daily Mail was edited by Tom Delargy and produced

• 49:45Kate Lister?

  by Benedict Devlin and Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again at Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.