10. The Sinking of a Great Ship

Lucy Worsley, curator at Historic Royal Palaces, concludes her exploration of Queen Victoria's reign with her final days.

The Queen had reigned for so long that few could remember the protocol for the passing of a monarch, but now Victoria's last days were drawing near.

On 22 January 1902, a crowd of family and servants, two emperors and numerous nurses, gathered at the dying Queen's bedside at Osborne House.

Among them was Bishop Randall Davidson, one of the few people towards whom Victoria had friendly feelings even if their relationship had begun with a tremendous row over her desire to publish a eulogy to John Brown.

Summonsed on the eve of her death, Davidson deeply felt the weight of history. He recorded every step of his journey across the sea to the island, and every family feud that broke out in the room where the queen died.

His journal, now in the Lambeth Palace Archives, is a revealing on-the-spot history of exactly what happened as Britain's longest reigning monarch breathed her last.

Most of the people present had their own very different ideas of what she was thinking about when she died, as she’d lived, under the hungry gaze of other people.

With the writer and historian A.N. Wilson.

Readers: Michael Bertenshaw, Susan Jameson and Sara Ovens

Producer: Mark Burman

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2019.