Should facts get in the way of a good royal romp?

ITV’s new drama, Victoria, contains lots of historical inaccuracies but also some important truths

According to ITV’s lavish eightepisode drama beginning tomorrow night, Queen Victoria was infatuated with her first prime minister. Alone, 18 and a political innocent, Victoria falls for Lord Melbourne from day one of her reign. Convincingly played by the cool, husky-voiced Rufus Sewell, Melbourne protects her from the machinations of her tiresome German mother, the Duchess of Kent, and the charlatan Sir John Conroy. Melbourne flirts with Victoria and dances with her, but he draws the line at the passionate clinch that she so desperately wants. Victoria becomes so besotted that she visits Melbourne at his home, Brocket Hall, and proposes to him. He turns her down.

None of this is true. We would certainly know if Victoria was in love with Melbourne. By some miracle her journal for these years escaped the savage editing of her daughter Princess Beatrice, who transcribed the later diaries, cutting the interesting bits and burning the originals. Victoria’s frank, vivid and detailed account makes it abundantly clear that she didn’t fancy Melbourne, let alone contemplate marrying him. Instead, she worshipped him as the father figure she had never had (the Duke of Kent died when she was a baby). Melbourne was urbane and witty, but at 60 he wasn’t nearly as handsome as Rufus Sewell – and he had become enormously fat.

There are other points for historians to quibble about. The chronology is seriously wonky. Victoria’s wicked uncle, the hideously scarred Duke of Cumberland, is shown as plotting with the Duchess of Kent to grab power from the queen (not true). Victoria didn’t intervene to pardon the Newport Chartists – on the contrary, she took little interest in the starving poor.

We see a lot of the palace kitchens, which seem oddly empty. Below stairs the palace would have teemed with maids and pages, but here it resembles an earlier generation of the servants’ hall at Downton Abbey. In an invented episode, the steward, who is a villain, attempts to sabotage a royal ball by playing tricks with melting wax, which drips onto people’s heads. There’s an infestation of rats, which is intended to drive Victoria mad so that she can be deposed like her insane grandfather George III (another fabrication).

Scriptwriter Daisy Goodwin freely admits to embroidering the truth, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. The rules for period drama are far from clear. Philippa Gregory recently announced that she has become so incensed by filmmakers changing the carefully researched history of her novels that she makes them sign a clause agreeing not to tamper with the facts.

This is perhaps going a bit far. Period drama can get away with fiddling the facts when it conveys a psychological or historical truth. The film Mrs Brown, starring Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, worked because it charted the widow Victoria’s realisation that her duty lay in being visible to her people.

In The Young Victoria, Lord Melbourne is portrayed as a flintyhearted toff who teaches Victoria to despise the poor, while Prince Albert redeems her by teaching her to have a social conscience. This is sentimental fantasy and undermines a good film. By establishing Melbourne as the hero, Goodwin turns the 2009 film on its head. As the ITV drama demonstrates, Melbourne’s real importance was in teaching Victoria how to be queen. For the teenage monarch who had grown up in a bubble of royal intrigue at Kensington Palace, learning to separate her public duty from her private life was crucial. In her diaries, Victoria wrote down Melbourne’s words verbatim – he was her mentor.

Melbourne understood that the way to win Victoria’s trust was to treat her like a woman, and not as a branch of the constitution. A play like The

Audience, which relates the present Queen’s relations with her prime ministers, would be far more dramatic if written about Victoria. Gladstone seriously miscalculated by lecturing the queen and treating her like a public meeting. She loathed him, and made no attempt to hide it. Disraeli, on the other hand, laid on the flattery with a trowel, and wrote her intimate letters which gave her the sense that she and he were governing the country together. She adored him.

As for Albert, he makes his entry in the ITV drama not as a German romantic, standing bedraggled but beautiful at the foot of the stairs at Windsor, but as a Teutonic control freak. The series promises to show Albert in a realistic light as a stiff, awkward careerist, determined to take over control of the monarchy from his wife.

Victoria, played by Jenna Coleman, is perhaps too thin and too pretty – more like Kate Middleton, controlled and poised, than the historical, tempestuous and wilful plump young queen. But it would be asking too much for this series to delve deep into the young Victoria’s psychology. This is an entertaining romp. It lacks the authenticity of Wolf Hall, but it is eminently more realistic than the BBC’s recent adaptation of Versailles.