Victoria & Albert: The Royal Wedding
Historian Lucy Worsley on the challenge of recreating Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s big day…
Victoria & Albert: The Royal Wedding FRIDAY / BBC2 / 8.30PM
This year, we have already celebrated two royal weddings, with Prince Harry tying the knot with Meghan Markle in May, followed by Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank in October.
This week, there’s a third as historian Lucy Worsley oversees a reenactment of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s nuptials.
And, as this one-off BBC2 documentary reveals, their
1840 ceremony is where many modern wedding traditions began.
Over 12 months, Lucy and a team of experts painstakingly recreated everything from their big day, from Victoria’s
white silk dress – an unusual choice at a time when colours were popular for wedding gowns – and the 300lb two-tiered cake to the elaborate wedding breakfast and huge guest list.
Here, in an exclusive interview with TV Times, Lucy, who turns 45 on 18 December, tells us more about this epic challenge…
Why did you want to recreate Queen victoria’s wedding?
We wanted to recreate a special day in royal history and next year is Victoria’s bicentenary. It makes you answer all sorts of questions that never normally come up, like how exactly the wedding cake was made. It’s a little snapshot of so many things – the dress, the individual characters who were involved, the changing nature of the monarchy – and, in a year when we’ve had two royal weddings, it’s very interesting to see where the royal wedding first began
back in 1840. it sounds like a huge project…
It was. The biggest challenge was trying to find people who could provide the right stuff. There was a special cake tin that had to be made; we had to find all the game on the menu – some of which it is illegal to eat now. And then there were the costumes…
How hard was it to have everything as it was in 1840?
It wasn’t possible to do absolutely everything. We’ve lost the skills and we didn’t have the ready access to cheap labour that people had in the 19th century. On their cake, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had this amazing sugar sculpture but it would have been impossible to make that in the modern age. We had to use a 3D printer.
Where did you get your information from?
Victoria’s diary was a key source, as were contemporary newspaper accounts and the records of one of the bridesmaids. There were Prince Albert’s letters to his
grandmother and Victoria’s own notes to him on the day. I’ve also read Victoria’s mother’s diary.
You look at the story behind the wedding, don’t you? Yes. Theirs was a beautiful love story but there’s more to it. Victoria didn’t want to get married and held out for three years. She only agreed because she was getting a lot of bad press.
The Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, saw this could be the thing that revived the monarchy. He saw chances to involve the London crowd, such as the carriage ride, and the event was very well publicised.
Which elements have stood the test of time?
Well, the white dress. Victoria needed to make a signal of submission. She needed to appear as a woman rather than a Queen, which is why she wasn’t in royal robes. There’s also the idea you travel through the streets in a special vehicle with everybody cheering. Plus the family feast and the big wedding cake.
How did you feel on the day of the reenactment?
I was very excited. Part of me was thinking, ‘This feels so marvellous’, and part of me was thinking, ‘The royal machine wants me to feel marvellous.’ So I was inside it but also observing it. But the dressing-up was wonderful. It was like looking into history.
It’s very interesting to see where the royal wedding first began