The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Dissecting the royals: ‘It’s humanising’
Gout, pneumonia, poison? The Royal Autopsy pathologists on putting our monarchs under the knife
It’s cold, the air smells of formaldehyde and fresh guts, and the Queen of Great Britain is being dissected in front of me. The monarch lies on a metal trolley, while two attendees in scrubs and masks peer over her. Taking a scalpel, one slices through her finger with gutchurning ease, revealing a layer of yellow fat, thick as clotted cream.
They move onto her abdomen, which is stretched taut with scars. One lifts up the sheet covering her legs and… “Bugger, I’ve forgotten the uterus,” she says, bursting into giggles. The tension snaps, the camera crew stretch and fidget, and a make-up assistant rushes forward to touch up the corpse.
I’m at Bristol University’s anatomy lab, on the set of Sky History’s series Royal Autopsy. The scrubbedup duo are the forensic pathologist Dr Brett Lockyer and Professor Alice Roberts, the writer and television presenter. Their “patient” is Queen Anne, last of the Stuart line, who ruled between 1702 and 1714. Except, of course, her actual body has lain in Westminster Abbey for more than 300 years. Lockyer and Roberts are operating on a latex mock-up stuffed with pig organs. The effect is unexpectedly realistic – and chilling.
First broadcast in late 2022, Royal Autopsy is about to start its second season. A mix of reconstructions, interviews with experts and – the cadaver in the room – those “royal autopsies”, each episode takes a historical British monarch and peers beneath their (usually hideously diseased) skin to find out how they died. It’s an appealing combination of substantial research and larky Horrible Histories energy. This atmosphere is reflected on set – one production runner sits cradling a heavy leatherbound tome, the diary of Sir David Hamilton, Queen Anne’s personal physician, checking the notes on her conditions. Meanwhile, another is ringing round local butchers, frantically trying to track down a pig heart: Bristol’s offal-lovers are in danger of halting production.
But the show isn’t simply grossout entertainment. Watching the finished cut, I’m taken aback by how moving I find Queen Anne’s episode (George IV, Mary Tudor and Henry IV are coming up in the series, too). As dramatised in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite – for which
Olivia Colman won an Oscar – Queen Anne dragged herself stoically through her time on the throne while suffering from appalling health problems. She was beset by nearconstant pain, and had 17 pregnancies, only five of which survived to term. None of her children lived to adulthood. Yet despite this, she was a calm and capable ruler, especially after the dissolute men who had preceded her. She presided over the 1707 Acts of Union, which united England and Scotland (Wales was already part of the union) – one of the most significant achievements in British political history.
“This programme allows you to meet these monarchs as humans,” says Roberts. “Seeing them through their medical histories is very humanising. As a mum, I find it devastating to think about how many babies she lost. For anyone to carry that weight of grief around and to rule the country at the same time…”
Lockyer points out that the condition they eventually diagnose Queen Anne with – the autoimmune disease antiphospholipid syndrome – is eminently treatable today. Yet her physicians at the time thought she suffered from gout and dropsy, and subjected her to a ghastly regime of bleedings, powdered millipede in fresh butter, and shots of iron filings in sherry. It’s not the first time the series has challenged received wisdom about how monarchs died: in series one, Elizabeth I was found ultimately to have been killed by pneumonia, not the schoolboy favourite of toxic lead in her skin-whitening cream.
So far, the series has dealt with monarchs who died in the remote past. Would they consider cutting up more recent royals? “I think if we did modern monarchs, that would be too emotive,” says Roberts carefully. “And, to be honest, the historic ones are more interesting, anyway.”
Yet, as the speculation over the health of the Princess of Wales and King Charles demonstrates, we live in an era still fixated by royal bodies. In her essay “Royal Bodies”, the
writer Hilary Mantel compared the Royal family to pandas – expensive, but good for tourism – and wrote that the Princess of Wales was a “jointed doll”: elegant, fragile and mute. It’s striking that the war over Photoshopping between the Princess of Wales and the picture agencies has fixated on Mother’s Day images. Queen Anne would have well understood this mania over the royal children.
“We live in a modern democracy and the monarchy is quite an archaic institution,” says Roberts. “But there’s this very strong connection between the health of the monarch and the health of the nation. So there will always be this anxiety.
“But I feel desperately sorry for them. Because there’s this clamour to know what’s going on when you’re in the most vulnerable situation possible. I think, though, they’re striking the right balance between privacy and openness – at the end of the day, it’s their health.”
The topic of death, unsurprisingly, comes up time and again in our conversation. While Lockyer says he has never come close to dying – “thank God” – Roberts tells me she’s had three near-death experiences. The first was when she was 17 and was hit by a car in Bristol – “I learnt then that I wasn’t invincible”; the second was a case of severe hypothermia in Siberia. And most recently, she was washed off a breakwater and nearly drowned. Death, she jokes, is life’s one guarantee – but the one we’re most reluctant to discuss.
Such talk inevitably leads onto the question of what comes next. Lockyer professes himself uncertain. “My mum came from Irish Romany stock and she was very suspicious – and I think a bit of that has rubbed off on me. I’ve had experiences I can’t explain, weird things. Even now when I do autopsies on people, I’ll talk to them. Just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean they’re any less a human being than they were when they were alive.”
Roberts is sceptical, her eye-roll held politely in check. “Life stops at death. That’s it. When my brain isn’t functioning, then my mind, my personality won’t continue. But obviously my body will live on organically in other lives – and I actually kind of love that thought.”
Her attitude is hardly a surprise. Roberts, after all, served for three years as the president of Humanists UK, stepping down in 2022. Yet she was raised in a devout Christian family – and she had a very public falling out with her mother over the Humanists’ campaign to end taxpayers’ “facilitating” of “indoctrination” in Church of England faith schools. In a letter to The Times, her mother wrote: “Celebrity swings an awful lot of opinion and for no reason other than that they are well known. That is a form of indoctrination, isn’t it?”
Roberts’s mother died in 2023, and in the past she has declined to discuss their rift. Now, though, she tells me: “The distance between me and my mother goes back to when I was a teenager. It wasn’t actually about that [campaign]. That was just the manifestation of a very difficult relationship that had been difficult for a long time. It’s a very hard thing to be estranged from your parents.”
Yet she doesn’t regret her involvement with the Humanists (she is still a member). She brings up Esther Rantzen’s drive to legalise assisted dying as an example of how humanism can “help advance society in all sorts of ways”.
“It would be a really big advancement in human rights if assisted dying were legalised in this country,” she argues. “It’s quite shocking that someone can be in pain, and nearing the end of their life, and not make that decision.”
Both Roberts and Lockyer would support Keir Starmer’s proposal to change the law on assisted dying. “In my time as a doctor, I’ve seen people suffering horrendous deaths because they can’t make the decision to end their lives,” says Lockyer. “But who are we keeping them alive for? It’s not for themselves. We keep them alive because we want to postpone grief – but grief will come.”
I ask whether they feel doctors who help patients end their lives should be prosecuted.
Lockyer replies: “Doctors shouldn’t be prosecuted for helping people. We sign up to ‘do no harm’, and by not intervening, we are allowing harm to take place. It should be done in a more dignified and open way than is currently happening.”
That notion of dignity is – unlikely as it seems – central to Royal Autopsy. Of course, it’s easy to be distracted by its cor-blimey gore and weren’t-the-olden-times-weird trappings. But at its heart, it rescues royals from the indignity of their royalty. Its subjects are, at last, simply human beings. They lived, they suffered, they died – and there’s a majesty in that.
As Roberts puts it: “Ultimately, we’re all just bodies.”
Queen Anne was subjected to ghastly bleedings and eating powdered insects