Tales from the Royal Bedchamber

(processional music playing) DR. LUCY WORSLEY: Today it seems that the royal family are being constantly watched by the entire world.

No detail of their lives is too tiny to be fascinating.

This obsession that we've got with our monarchy is nothing new.

But these days we don't get to see inside their bedrooms.

It's surprising to learn that it was very different in the past.

And the royal bed was a public place.

It was like a little stage where the future of the monarchy and the nation was played out.

In this program, I'm going to get into bed with kings and queens from history, examine their fabulous beds, and uncover the secrets of the royal bedchamber.

And that's because I believe the rise and the fall of the magnificent royal bed reflects the rise and the fall in the power of the monarchy itself.

We get our first glimpse of the importance and grandeur of the royal bed in medieval times.

Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales has a lot to say on the subject of the beds of the medieval rich and famous.

In another poem called The Book of the Duchess, he describes 14th-century luxury.

"A feather-bed arrayed with gold, and right well clad in fine black satin from over the seas."

Now, surprisingly, Chaucer actually knew what he was talking about here.

He had a very technical knowledge of beds.

That's because as well as being a poet, he had a whole string of different jobs in the royal household, and one of these was yeoman valet to the king's chamber.

And in this job his duties included helping to make the king's own bed.

Despite Chaucer's wonderfully vivid description, it's hard to know exactly what a medieval bed was like because, on the whole, they don't survive from this period.

At the Tower of London, though, my curator colleagues have cunningly used a few scanty clues to reconstruct the bed of one medieval monarch, Edward I, who reigned from 1272 to 1307.

Now this bed, to our eyes, it looks a bit sort of gaudy and strange.

How do you know that this is what it looked like?

Well, we don't know exactly what a 13th-century royal bed looked like, so we based it on a variety of different sources, a combination of building accounts, wardrobe accounts.

If we look at this rather peculiar picture here...

This is a sex scene.

(laughing) Is that a nun?

Well, it's the mother of Merlin.

Merlin is in the process of being conceived.

Who's that, then?

Well, that's a demon.

I love the way he's gritting his teeth and saying, "I must do my duty here."

She looks quite happy, doesn't she?

But anyway, moving on, and casting our eyes onto the bed furniture, Lucy, is the structure of the bed, the boring detail of the structure of the bed.

This is what our bed is based on, so we've got the posts in the corner, and we've got this convenient opening here to allow the king to get easily onto the bed, because it's quite high.

It's like a little playpen for him with a fence all around.

No, exactly, it would have been very comfortable, I think, yeah.

How did you choose this lovely rich red color?

This is based on the wardrobe accounts of Margaret of France and on Edward's children.

What about that white fur, is that an accurate detail?

The royal family had coverlets and quilts with fur on the underside to keep them nice and warm, and often this were miniver, or squirrel fur.

And the most expensive form of fur you could have, really, was vair, which was made from the bellies of northern red squirrels.

White bellies of the squirrels?

That's so sumptuous.

Yes.

Now, you mentioned the accounts of the queen and the accounts of the king.

Were they not sleeping in the same bed?

No.

They tended to come together for conjugal relations, but most of the time they had their own household and they had their own bedchambers.

And we know about this particularly in this early period from an account from Henry III's reign in 1238 at Woodstock Palace, and Henry survived an assassination attempt on him because he was in bed with the queen in her apartment whilst the assassin came to his apartment, and of course he wasn't there.

He was saved by sex.

Indeed, good old Henry.

(laughing) You may have wondered why, when you see pictures of medieval people in bed, they often look like they're sleeping sitting up.

This could be something to do with art, showing the sitter's face more clearly.

Or iconography.

I don't believe that kings actually wore their crowns in bed.

But there's another explanation for it.

Early beds until the 17th century were often strung with ropes so the mattress was sitting on a construction a bit like a hammock.

You can't lie flat in that.

You're forced to adopt the position of a banana.

And this bed is demountable-- it comes apart.

And the accounts for medieval beds often include big leather bags to pack them into, and the king would take it with him when he traveled to a new castle.

Sleeping in this was a bit like camping.

The king's portable beds reflected the mobile lifestyle of medieval monarchs.

Kings were constantly on the move.

Their beds traveled with them from castle to castle, and setting up the royal bedchambers each time was a huge operation.

The king even had a massive warehouse where his bedroom furnishings were stored, ready to be dispatched wherever he needed them.

The names of churches in the City of London often give us clues to things that aren't there anymore, and St. Andrew by the Wardrobe used to stand next door to the King's Wardrobe.

Here it is on the map.

And the wardrobe wasn't a big piece of furniture, it was this vast complex of buildings here.

It's called the Wardrop.

It was a big storage facility.

The people who worked here were called the warders of the robes and it was their job to look after the king's gowns and his clothes, but also his soft furnishings, including his bedding.

Now, inventories talk about the king's bolsters and his fustian pillows.

All this stuff used to be kept in the Tower of London, but in 1361 Edward III brought it here to the new facility and there it stayed until 1666, when it got burnt down in the Great Fire.

After the fire the site was redeveloped, and it turned out that it was big enough to take 30 normal people's houses.

The medieval royal bedchamber was hugely important, but then it wasn't just a place for the monarch to sleep, it was also where he conducted the day-to-day business of being king, holding meetings with his courtiers.

The most trusted of them, the lord chamberlain, was literally the lord of his bedchamber, and he needed to travel around his realm to show himself to his people, maintaining order and discouraging rebellion simply by his presence.

If you look at the last seven medieval kings, and by that I mean the seven running up to Henry VIII, no less than four of them seized the throne by violence.

That means they weren't inheriting it from their fathers as the result of activity in the royal bedroom.

At this period the battlefield is still a better means of gaining power.

When Henry Tudor ended the Wars of the Roses with his victory in 1485, he finally brought stability to the monarchy and the country.

His Tudor successors would no longer constantly have to pack up their beds and go campaigning to protect their realm against usurpers.

By the time we get to the reign of Henry VIII, the royal lifestyle has settled down a bit.

He is still traveling from palace to palace, but each one now has a dedicated, specialized bedchamber.

Considering that Henry had 60 palaces to choose from, it's a shame that none of his Tudor bedrooms survived, although we can look elsewhere to get a glimpse of the sort of bed he would have slept in.

This is Hever Castle in Kent, in the Tudor period home to the famous Boleyn family.

We know that Henry visited Hever and if he stayed over, Thomas Boleyn, the head of the house, would have had to give up his bed for his monarch.

This bed is a typical Tudor affair-- solid oak and decorated all over with intricate carvings.

Tudor monarchs slept a little more peacefully than their medieval predecessors, but there were still some disruptions.

Even royal beds were infested with fleas.

Henry VIII took a little piece of fur to bed with him so that the bugs would jump onto that instead of sucking his own blue blood.

And there were security checks too.

Before bedtime, servants would roll across his bed to check that assassins hadn't concealed a dagger in the straw mattress.

The future and the stability of the monarchy was beginning to shift away from the battlefield and into the royal bedroom.

It was here that the long-term success of the dynasty would be decided.

Now at first, the Tudors could be said to have quite a tenuous grasp on the crown, couldn't they?

Henry VII, he seized it from Richard III.

How does he go about building up a stable dynasty?

The best way of doing that, of course, was to make a good marriage and then, of course, to have an heir, which is exactly what Henry did.

He married soon after his accession and within a very short time he managed to have an heir, Prince Arthur.

So marriage and the birth of children, they're central.

Matters of the bedroom are central?

Really, we can consider the bed as our kind of theater or stage upon which all the key events are going to play out.

When you read accounts of the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine, the Spanish princess, it's almost voyeuristic, the detail.

We get to see them going to bed together.

You can just imagine sort of Catherine looking at Arthur and Arthur looking at Catherine and thinking... We're for it, we've got to do this now.

You know, we've got to get busy.

So, a massive expectation.

And, of course, although everybody would withdraw, you could imagine all the kind of whisperings outside the door-- exactly-- to know what was going on.

And so, of course, when the couple emerged in the morning, there was great expectation.

What had happened that wedding night becomes hugely important, because within just less than a year Arthur dies.

Catherine of Aragon is left a widow.

She's too important a figure to remain unmarried, she is the daughter of Spain, and so what happens?

She marries Henry VIII, brother to Prince Arthur.

The marriage is happy for a while.

Then when no male heir emerges, Henry decides that he wants an annulment.

His attention has wandered to Anne Boleyn.

And the key issue in order to get that annulment becomes events 30 years before, way back in the bedchamber of Arthur and Catherine of Aragon.

The controversy is when Henry wants this divorce from Catherine, he needs to prove that Arthur and Catherine did consummate their marriage, and she needs to prove that they didn't.

Yes.

I mean, he turns to the text of Leviticus, where it says that a man shouldn't lie with his brother's widow, and suddenly says, "Aha, this is evidence that I should never have married anyway."

And so any of those people that were around at the time were called upon to describe what had happened.

One of those sources describes how the morning after the wedding, the morning after the night before, when Prince Arthur emerges from the bedchamber, he brags to one of the grooms of the chamber, "Bring me a drink, for I am thirsty because I have spent the night in the midst of Spain, which is a hot region."

He could have just been showing off, in my opinion.

Bawdy adolescence, perhaps, but who's to say?

Catherine remains absolutely committed to the line that she never had sex with Prince Arthur, therefore it's absolutely fine and above board for her to have married his brother, Henry VIII.

So it's like a little keyhole detail, isn't it?

It's such an intimate thing, and yet it's a matter of international diplomacy.

Exactly.

The marriage bed, which we sort of see as a private space, is the stage, the sort of great public arena through which these key issues of the Tudor monarchy are played out, really.

WORSLEY: Catherine of Aragon endured great personal suffering as a result of this investigation into her sex life.

But it was also to have extraordinary consequences for the nation as a whole.

Gossip from a Tudor bedroom had given Henry the excuse he needed for his divorce, ultimately leading to the break from Rome and the birth of the Church of England.

It was clear that a king's performance-- or nonperformance-- in the royal bedroom could now transform the future of the country.

The pressure to produce new members of the dynasty became even more intense as the queen's crown passed to Anne Boleyn.

Catching Henry's fancy wasn't enough to ensure Anne's success.

She had to produce a male heir.

As with Catherine, Anne's fate, and the fate of the nation would be decided in the royal bedroom.

To make sure that a royal baby, heir to the throne, was healthy and safely delivered, a Tudor queen's pregnancy was closely monitored.

So on the 26th August, 1533, following the announcement that Anne was going to have a baby, she was confined to her bedchamber at Greenwich Palace.

The doors were closed, the windows were blocked, fires were lit and the darkened room was prepared with candles and aromatic oils.

Despite the stifling summer heat, Anne would have to spend the next eight weeks in this stuffy cocoon.

Every moment of her pregnancy was witnessed by a gaggle of women selected from the Tudor court.

It must have been horrible for Anne to be trapped in what sounds like a really oppressive environment for such a long time, at the height of summer, with all these people watching her.

And when the baby was born, it was a disappointment.

Everybody had been hoping and praying for a boy to secure the succession, but Anne's baby was a girl.

For her, this was a personal tragedy.

It was a step on the journey towards her fall and, ultimately, her execution.

The trauma of this event and the importance that was attached to it showed how the future of the succession would now unfold in the royal bedchamber.

And the Tudor dynasty's anxiety about its future would all be centered in the royal bed.

As the number of Henry's wives mounted up, people's scrutiny of what was going on between the royal sheets got more and more intense and intimate and quite extraordinary in its detail.

When Henry VIII wants to get rid of his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, his line is that Anne was just too unattractive.

He couldn't bring himself to consummate the marriage.

But this was a risky strategy, because people may have said, "Well, it's Henry's fault.

The king is now old, he's becoming impotent."

So to counter this, Henry does something quite extraordinary.

He has his doctor, Dr. Butts, make an announcement in the House of Lords that the king has still got it in the bedroom department.

Dr. Butts tells the lords that the king's had duas pollusiones nocturnus in somno-- that means two nocturnal pollutions, two emissions.

This is intended to show that the king is still very capable of fathering a child.

In the Tudor period, then, inadequacies in the royal bedroom had been instrumental in the divorce and downfall of four of Henry's six queens.

And when none of his children produced heirs of their own, it was the end of the Tudor dynasty.

Under their successors, the Stuarts, the royal bedroom would get even more splendid, and the pressure to reproduce got even more intense.

After a rather bad patch for the monarchy-- the Civil War, Charles I's annus horribilis, and ten years without any monarch at all-- Charles II was unexpectedly restored to the throne.

He knew he had to create a stable and a popular dynasty.

When he arranged the marriage between his niece and the Dutch prince, William of Orange, he even turned up at their wedding night to egg them on.

When the 15-year-old Mary was told that she had to marry this unknown 27-year-old hook-nosed Dutchman, she cried for two days.

And their wedding night was quite inauspicious.

The young couple were put to bed by the whole court, and then Charles II, who was uncle to both of them, shouted out some helpful words of encouragement: "Now nephew," he said, "to your work for St. George and England."

As with the Tudors, royal wedding nights were witnessed, and when a royal baby was born, it was equally important that courtiers were present to swear that the heir was healthy and likely to live.

And the Stuarts would discover that you could never be too careful about getting this done properly.

In 1688, dangerous speculation about failings in the royal bedroom would bring about the downfall of the king himself, James II.

This bed belonged to James II's second wife, Mary of Modena, the Italian princess.

But when I say that, I have to qualify it a bit, because the bed's actually a bit of a mishmash.

Mary would have slept in it in the late 17th century, but the wooden structure holding up the canopy actually dates from the early 18th.

Those are Mary and James's initials on the headboard, but they'd been brought from another bed, cut out and slightly randomly plonked here, so it's not the greatest work of art in the world.

But the reason that people have looked after it and repaired it and cherished it for centuries is because of what went on here.

This was the location of the famous warming pan incident.

The warming pan incident began with the announcement from St. James's Palace that Mary of Modena had given birth to a son.

Usually, this would have been a cause for national celebration, but James II was extremely unpopular.

He was autocratic, he was arrogant-- qualities that most of his subjects hoped that they'd seen the last of when they beheaded his father, Charles I.

But James's biggest problem was that he converted to Catholicism.

Large numbers of his subjects weren't keen on returning to the Church of Rome, but now with the news that James had a Catholic heir, there was a real threat that Catholicism would be back for good.

In the eyes of the Protestant establishment, something had to be done.

James's Protestant enemies put it about that his baby boy had died, and to cover this up, an impostor baby, a changeling, had been smuggled into the queen's bed.

This became a very elaborate story with all kinds of circumstantial detail.

People even produced maps, showing the route by which the baby is said to have been smuggled into the palace.

This is ever so detailed.

He came in here, they said, and he was carried through these rooms, round the corner, along here, through these rooms, and finally, along here into the queen's bedchamber.

And how was the baby supposed to have been transported?

Well, it was in the 17th century equivalent of a hot water bottle.

It's a metal pan, you fill it with hot coals, use it to warm the sheets, and this is the infamous warming pan.

As the rumors gained credence, James got more and more furious.

Hoping to kill the speculation, he published the results of an official inquiry into exactly who'd been at the birth and what they'd seen.

Now clearly, this inquiry was a bit of a farce.

There were 40 witnesses to this birth, and you can't even fit a baby into one of these things.

But it was a good story, and this meant a lot of people believed it.

The smear campaign had worked, and within months, James had fled the country.

After James II was overthrown, the crown passed jointly to his daughter Mary and to her husband, James's own nephew, William of Orange, both of them strongly Protestant.

These two, William and Mary, had been very keen on the warming pan story and had done their best to spread it about to damage James.

William and Mary came out on top, but their succession had come at a price.

Before being crowned, they'd had to agree that they'd be answerable to their people and to Parliament.

As their position changed, so too did the role of the royal bedroom.

William and Mary made their main base at Hampton Court, totally remodeling the rambling Tudor palace and spending £131,000, about £9.5 million today, on the refurbishments and its new baroque layout.

And the new royal bedrooms give a fascinating insight into the changing relationship between the monarchy and its subjects.

A dynasty's success was now just as dependent on winning over the political classes as it was on producing heirs, so there was less of a focus on the bedroom in terms of marriage and childbirth.

Its importance now lay as a place where elaborate ceremonies were played out, where aspirational courtiers would try to gain access to the king to exert their influence.

In the 17th century, this was almost literally a corridor of power.

What you needed to make it as a courtier was face time with the king.

These are his rooms, and they're laid out in a chain that gets increasingly exclusive as you go up it.

There were the more public rooms at that end for receiving guests, then the more private rooms that are for eating and for little parties.

Now, the more important and influential you were, the more likely you could get up this chain and the more likely you were to get into the actual presence of the king.

The climax to the whole experience is the king's bedchamber.

You can tell this is the most important room because of the painted ceiling, the decoration is much fancier than elsewhere, and obviously, there's an enormous red velvet bed in it with an explosion of ostrich feathers.

It's quite surprising that the king's bedroom was a semi-public space, but those top courtiers, the ones who'd made it, they were allowed in here to watch the ceremony: the king being dressed in the morning-- that was called the levee-- or undressed at night, the couchee.

The king didn't actually sleep in this bed-- he nipped next door to a much more comfortable little one-- and by the late 17th century, this is a purely ceremonial space.

It's a bit weird to think, though, that sometimes it was packed with courtiers looking at the king in his underwear.

These rituals may sound extraordinary today, but they really mattered.

Although power was beginning to shift to the people, the monarch was still ultimately in charge.

To see or to be seen with the king was any ambitious courtier's goal.

But it was the people holding backstage passes, the staff responsible for looking after the royal body and bedroom and orchestrating these rituals, who were really at the top of the tree.

OLIVIA FRYMAN: So what we have here is a list of all the servants who attended the king in his bedchamber.

LUCY WORSLEY: Quite a number of them then really, ranging from high to low in serried ranks, is that right?

FRYMAN: Yes, absolutely.

WORSLEY: And the groom of the stool, or "stole," as it's written here, he's the most important.

What was his job?

Well, the groom of the stole was originally the groom of the stool, so during the Tudor period, the officer that attended the king when he went into his stool closet... His toilet.

When he used his closed stool, yes.

And did he have the job of wiping the king's bottom then?

Probably not, no.

Oh, come on.

Surely lost in the mists of medieval time, it was pretty hands-on.

It was hands-on, but he would have done things like holding the candle, helping the king with his clothes, and passing him the stool ducket, so the wiping linen.

Well, if you're handing the king something to wipe his bottom on, that's still a pretty dirty job.

It is, but it wasn't considered to be menial.

It was actually a very important and honorable role.

That was because you got the chance to be alone with the king, intimate with him, you could ask him a good favor.

Yes, it's a key moment where you can ask the king for a promotion, or you can ask for one of your friends to be promoted, or perhaps try and influence some political policy.

It's amazing to think that this is the top job at court, and yes, it involves the toilet, but everybody wanted it.

Absolutely.

It really was the most important job at court.

What about actual dressing?

Well, the grooms of the bedchamber were responsible for keeping the king's underwear, so his day shirt and his drawers.

So they bring those into the royal bedchamber.

He's not important enough to put the shirt on the king himself, so they would warm the shirt by the fire and then pass it to the groom of the stole, who would then put it on the king.

I like that.

So the more important you are, the more intimate the things are that you're allowed to do.

Absolutely.

WORSLEY: The monarch had a huge retinue of staff, each with his or her own title and very specific function.

Many of these offices still survive in the royal household to this day.

Those who were responsible for the bedchamber, the most important room of the palace, were at the top of the hierarchy.

The groom of the stool, or stole, had access to all areas.

He had the private key to the king's apartments that he wore on a blue ribbon round his neck as a badge of his office.

Where, you might wonder, could William III ever be by himself?

Well, there was one place.

Down here in the king's private apartments, this little room was his private bedchamber.

It's got three different doors, but on the inside of each of them is a lock with a bolt, so the king could slip these three bolts and he was in the one room of the whole palace where he could be on his own.

This is what you might call the service entrance to the king's bedchamber.

It's a secret hidden set of stairs called the back stairs.

Here you might meet the necessary woman coming down with the chamber pot when it was full or other servants going up with food and drink and clean sheets.

This was very heavily guarded to keep out any riff-raff, but sometimes you might meet some very important people here.

If the king wanted any visitors to come and see him in secret, with discretion, then they came up through the back stairs.

Access to these back stairs was closely monitored by the Page of the Back Stairs.

For some people, he used his less formal job title, the Pimp Master General.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, male monarchs were notorious for their mistresses.

Charles II's infamous actress turned mistress turned duchess Nell Gywnn, and Barbara Villiers, the uncrowned queen who secured titles and wealth not just for herself, but her five illegitimate children with the king.

And George II had his famed official mistress Henrietta Howard.

Today, if somebody has a mistress, it's almost by definition a secret thing, isn't it?

And yet everybody knew who these women were.

TRACY BOORMAN: Absolutely.

In the 18th century, it was a very public figure.

If you were a royal mistress, it was an official position.

And the likes of Henrietta Howard, long term and, indeed, long suffering mistress of George II, she's given a salary, she's given a pension when she retires.

It's all very public and out in the open.

It's as official a position as any other that you would find at court.

What sort of contemporary accounts are there about Henrietta's behavior?

Henrietta was very popular with certain sections of the court, and her apartments were forever filled with ambitious courtiers all expecting her to be able to put in a good word on their behalf with the king.

Whatever the perception was, how much power did Henrietta really have?

I think the truth was Henrietta had very little power.

We can't actually trace any action or gift that the king made that was thanks to Henrietta's influence, so I think really she had nothing, she had very, very little.

But actually, her enemy, Lord Harvey, probably put his finger on it because he writes quite a lot about this in his memoirs.

He says that "she was forced to live "in the constant subjection of a wife "with all the reproach of a mistress "to flatter and manage a man whom she must see and feel "had as little inclination to her person as regard to her advice."

That's terrible then.

She has to put up with all the tough stuff of being a wife, being bossed around, but at the same time, she doesn't get the fun of being the queen because she has no real tip-top official position.

But actually, it didn't matter, in fact, whether Henrietta had power or not.

The idea that she had it was enough to secure her position.

WORSLEY: By the 18th century, the royal bedroom was the epicenter of power at court, and if you could gain access to it, you were considered to be amongst the chosen few.

Its prominence was illustrated by the extraordinary beds that were made for it.

When the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, realized that she was approaching the end of her life, she commissioned what people have called one of the most magnificent beds ever created.

This is Queen Anne's bed, and we believe that she commissioned this for a very special reason.

We believe that she intended to die in it.

Unfortunately, she left things a bit late and she actually died before the bed was finished.

But if you think about a bed fit for a queen, this has to be what comes to mind.

It's so tall, it's so brightly colored, it's so rich.

And Anne's successors valued it ever so highly.

100 years later, George III called this the most splendid bed in the universe.

Anne's bed reflects the height of baroque furnishing fashions.

The fabric alone cost about £78,000 in today's money.

Even the parts of the bed that you're not supposed to see are incredibly sumptuous.

Here are the five mattresses, and look at this: they go from rough to smooth.

They get increasingly silky as you approach the proximity of the monarch's flesh.

When Queen Anne commissioned her "death bed" in 1714, it didn't just express her personal taste-- it was a political statement.

Traditionally, luxurious fabrics like this would have been created on the continent, but now, with Britain at war with France, this bed had to feature the best of British.

Today, Gainsborough Silks in Suffolk is one of the oldest silk weaving firms in the country and the only one to hold a royal warrant.

NEIL THOMAS: We've got fabrics from... dating back as early as the 15th century right through to 20th century.

We've got one for Buckingham Palace here.

Well, they've kept you quite busy, haven't they?

Absolutely.

It doesn't say where they're going.

No, we're always quite private about that side of things.

WORSLEY: Well, some things might be strictly hush-hush, but Gainsborough's swanky silks still show just how much money and effort must have gone into a bed like Anne's.

How many meters can the machine produce in one day?

On a good day here, we'll do between eight and ten meters of fabric.

Oh, that's not much.

Yeah, no, not really, not by modern standards.

WORSLEY: If a weaver from 1714 was to come here, how much of the setup would he recognize?

THOMAS: He'd probably recognize the majority of the setup.

Basically, weaving's been the same for centuries.

Obviously some more modern innovations, for example, the power, but apart from that, it's all pretty much familiar.

WORSLEY: Now, what's the name of the beautiful pattern that Lee's weaving here?

This is one of our designs, Bologna, which is an early 18th century design.

WORSLEY: And it's very similar to the damask woven for Queen Anne's bedchamber at Hampton Court, isn't it?

THOMAS: Absolutely.

We know from the accounts that she needed 300 meters' worth of silk.

That's an incredible amount of fabric for a hand weaver at the time to be doing.

They may do a couple of meters a day, so you're probably looking at about a year's work for an individual.

A year's work, wow.

THOMAS: Yeah.

WORSLEY: That cost her nearly £400, which in today's money is £78,000.

Has that got more expensive?

Probably slightly less than that, but not very much.

Less?

It's a bargain then, this place.

Between £50,000 and 60,000 of fabric for that quantity.

For 300 meters.

That's still quite a lot of money.

It's still a lot of money.

WORSLEY: With an affluent and growing middling class in the 17th and 18th centuries, it wasn't only kings and queens who desired the conspicuous consumption involved in a royal bed.

The lust for luxury began to filter down from the palace to the people.

Samuel Pepys' diaries are the most intimate of the 17th century, and in them, he takes this childish glee in the things that he owns, including his two goose down mattresses for his bed.

And when he gets a second bed, it's even better.

This is what he has to say.

"Mighty proud I am, "and ought to be thankful to God Almighty that I'm able to have a spare bed for my friends."

In the 17th century, beds were something that everybody wanted to be able to boast about.

Samuel Pepys was the official secretary to the admiralty, and in his work, he sometimes rubbed shoulders with royalty, but he wasn't grand enough ever to expect a king or queen to visit his house.

For those a bit higher up the social ladder, though, the idea of owning a bed fit for a king or queen could be a realistic ambition.

Some courtiers weren't content with gaining entrance to the monarch's bedroom at the levee.

Even better than that was to have the king or queen come to visit you in your own home.

This was the age of the phenomenon of the state bed in commoners' houses.

Noblemen and aristocrats would buy one of these fabulous pieces of furniture and often build a special bedroom to put it in, all in the hope of a visit from the king.

But this was risky.

You could end up bankrupt and disappointed, because there was no guarantee that the monarch would actually show up.

That's what happened to the owner of Dirham Park near Bath.

They spent a lot of money on this fabulous bed for Queen Anne, but she never arrived to sleep in it.

And the same thing happened here at Keddlestone Hall, which is by Derby.

They built here an absolutely fabulous state bed-- look at that one-- but George III never showed up to sleep in it.

And the same again happened at Audley End House in Essex.

For the third time now, we have one more bed in which the king never slept.

Most frustrating of all is what happened to the owner of Wilton House.

He actually had a royal visit booked, but he didn't have a state bed, so he borrowed one from a friend.

It was a huge palaver getting it into the house, but when George III actually arrived, he wouldn't sleep in it.

He'd brought his own bed with him.

Since the royal family thought that they owned the best beds in the universe, perhaps it's not surprising that they'd shun second best.

But although many people were disappointed that their state beds went unslept in, for others, the cachet of simply owning a state bed fit for a king or queen was enough.

This is Osterley Park, the 18th century home of the Child family.

The Childs weren't old school aristocracy who worked their way up through the royal court, but they'd got their money through banking.

They were part of a growing new elite who were reaping the benefits of Britain's Industrial Revolution and its expanding empire.

And although they had little chance of getting a royal visit, the bed they created is probably the most spectacular we've seen.

In my opinion, this is one of the most flamboyant and playful beds ever designed.

It makes me think of actors and actresses and the theater.

It's the work of Robert Adam, who created the very distinctive look of the late Georgian age, and it's a whopper.

The dome is so heavy that it's not only a four-poster bed, it's an eight-poster to take the weight.

At the same time as he was working on this commission, Adam was also designing a new box at the Italian theater in the Haymarket for George III, and some people think that the two commissions got intertwined, and I do think that those velvet swags look like just the sort of thing that you'd find round the box at the theater.

When the bill arrived for his bed, Robert ripped it up so that his wife couldn't see how much money he'd spent on it.

But people guessed that it probably cost £2,000, which is £210,000 today-- an awful lot of money to spend on a piece of furniture.

But to Robert Child, this was money well spent.

The king might not actually come to sleep in it, but Robert was the first generation of his family to have been born a gentleman.

He wanted to have all the trappings of high society, and he was very proud of his bed.

He and his wife would bring guests through here on a candlelight tour to admire it, and it was even accessible to members of the public.

They too could see it if they paid the housekeeper.

The connoisseur Horace Walpole found that it was a bit too theatrical, a little bit nouveau riche.

He said it looked like a lady's hat decorated with flowers around the top.

And he asked, "What would the serious Roman architect Vitruvius make of this form of classicism?"

The dome looks like it's been decorated by a milliner.

The bed may have got mixed reviews, but Robert Childs had certainly succeeded in creating a talking point.

This bed intrigues me even more because nobody really expected it to be used.

Even though it was brand spanking new, it was a relic from a lost way of life.

By the end of the 18th century, even the royal family themselves had stopped commissioning state beds.

The very last one was ordered by George III's wife, Queen Charlotte.

This has got to be the most delicate and beautiful of all the royal beds, wouldn't you say?

SEBASTIAN EDWARDS: I think it really is exactly that.

And there's a reason for that perhaps, because it's one of the last gasps of the great state beds, so they put all their ideas and energies and thoughts into it.

And the theme is English country garden, but there's nothing informal about it, is there?

Absolutely not.

It's a very neo-classical design.

It probably involved a royal architect, perhaps even William Chambers, the leading king's architect himself.

The textiles are very much to do with the queen's own interest and her passionate interest in gardening and botany.

WORSLEY: What's that one there?

EDWARDS: That looks like some kind of tulip.

And I think... is that a rose?

EDWARDS: Or is it a big peony?

What's that one?

We could be looking at this all day, Lucy.

There are 4,200 flowers on it.

4,200, and they're all different.

Every one different, every little posy carefully drawn in a row.

And each one would have probably taken about a day or more to stitch.

WORSLEY: But it's a bit funny and ironic, because Queen Charlotte never actually slept in it, did she?

No, by this time the state bed is a largely pointless object, and they are made to occupy the space where there must be a bed in the great state apartment, but there is no longer the levee in the morning when people attend the monarch and watch them getting dressed.

They don't sleep in these beds at all.

The levee has sort of become an afternoon tea party.

The levee itself is an all-male affair now, and it's carried on in the late morning or the early afternoon by the king, largely at one palace in particular, St. James's Palace.

And it's a social gathering where business is conducted between gentlemen in the aristocracy and the king.

So nobody gets to take their clothes off anymore?

Nobody takes their clothes off, there's no bed presence, it's just a word, and it carries on right through to the 20th century.

Why do you think then that this great phenomenon of the state bed falls into decline?

By this time, the king and queen were no longer actually ruling from their own palaces and ruling particularly from the bedchamber, and so you don't have to have all of the great and the good assembled around you all the time.

WORSLEY: So a bed like this, it's become a dinosaur, hasn't it?

EDWARDS: It is exactly that.

Politics has moved from the bedchamber to the houses of Parliament, so these beds are no longer required.

Families like the Childs of Osterley no longer needed royal patronage to maintain their wealth and status.

If anything, they were often richer than the king was.

They weren't queuing up for jobs anymore in the royal household or competing for access to the royal bedchamber.

And some people began to ask what was the point of this whole paraphernalia of palaces and state beds?

In 1831, the political reformer John Wade put together what he calls an extraordinary list of the incomes, privileges and power of the aristocracy, and he doesn't mean that in a good way.

He asks all sorts of difficult questions, like, "What is a levee?"

He says it's just a procession of fools.

They bow and the king bows, and sometimes the king even smiles.

And what's the point of the ancient offices of the royal household, the groom of the stool, or the lords of the bedchamber?

Well, at best, they give a nice little income to some ruined aristocrat or some low parasite.

By the 19th century, the monarch had become little more than a national figurehead.

The court was no longer a certain route to financial success.

Political power now lay squarely with Parliament and the prime minister.

But there would be one final remarkable episode before the royal bedroom lost its power and significance for good.

In 1839, just two years into Queen Victoria's reign, the parliamentary archives tell the story of the greatest upset in the royal bedchamber since the warming pan incident 250 years before.

In 1839, Victoria was still a young and inexperienced and unmarried queen.

She relied a lot on her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, the Whig.

But he fell from power.

Victoria was very upset.

What was supposed to happen is that Melbourne's rival, Robert Peel, the Tory, should have formed the government, but he refused unless a certain condition was met.

He said, "I won't do it unless Victoria sacks her ladies of the bedchamber."

Now, what was Peel's problem?

Lots of Victoria's ladies were Whigs, and he was worried that these people who were intimate with the queen would be rude about the Tories.

He wanted them replacing with people from his own party.

But Victoria refused.

These people were her friends.

She didn't want to be surrounded by some strange Tory ladies.

There was a stand-off.

Now, you might think that this sounds like a ridiculous storm in a teacup, but actually, it's a constitutional crisis.

There is no prime minister.

It all comes out in the House of Commons.

Here we have it in Ministerial Explanations, and Peel has to defend himself.

He has to give a blow-by-blow account of the whole debate.

Here, he says he's been to see her last Thursday, and verbal communications took place on this subject, and then she writes to him saying, "No, I won't sack my ladies.

That would be repugnant to my feelings."

Eventually, Victoria has to back down.

She has to accept that she's now the servant of her people.

She can no longer have powerful political friends in her bedchamber.

Under Queen Victoria, matters of state would no longer unfold in her or in anybody else's bedroom.

When her favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, came to office and bought Hughenden Manor, owning a big house was a prerequisite of his job.

But although he was the most powerful man in the country, his bedroom was rather a low-key affair.

Hughenden did have a state bedroom, but it was just a hangover from when the house was built 100 years earlier.

NICHOLAS WITHERICK: So when Disraeli was here, this top floor was really a servants' quarters, but we do know he had a smoking room up here as well.

He famously called tobacco the tomb of love.

The tomb of love, that's brilliant.

I did enjoy going past that "no admittance" sign.

That was quite a good thing to do.

So how is this curious room a state bedroom?

How does it work?

Well, this was the size of the state bedroom, and it feels very squat, and that's because this floor didn't exist.

It's been inserted into...

Absolutely.

...a big, tubular room.

This was a two-story quarter of the house.

So this is the original ceiling and plasterwork to the room below here.

So it was a vast room.

It's pretty grand.

Absolutely, it's one of the impressive ceilings of the house, actually.

So was there ever a royal state visit to Hughenden?

Disraeli, when he lived here, did have a royal visit, and that was Prince Albert, who got caught in snow passing through Wickham and diverted to Hughenden and was snowed in here for three days.

That's really ironic that we're in this very grand 18th century shell that was constructed for a state visit.

It never got used.

But eventually Prince Albert did come, but it was a private, low-key, domestic, cozy little visit.

Absolutely, yes.

And they famously played whist together and had what, by all accounts, was a really enjoyable three days.

WORSLEY: So Disraeli's state visit happened purely by accident.

He didn't crave the ceremonial charade that went on between monarchs and their subjects in the century before.

Although Victoria and Albert may have had little choice in the removal of politics from their bedchamber, the removal of publicity was no great loss.

It actually suited their sensibilities.

So Helen, from Queen Victoria's diaries, we sometimes get a glimpse into what actually happened in her bedroom with Albert, but generally people at the time wouldn't have had a clue, would they?

No, all of that was strictly off-limits.

The private life was private, but the image that was projected for public consumption was, of course, this one of the happy family round the Christmas tree at Windsor.

WORSLEY: This is almost middle class, but like any middle-class Victorian person, we're not going to let you into our bedroom.

Absolutely not.

That was their own very, very private sphere.

But there's enough to show that Victoria was a very lusty woman, enjoyed the physicality of her relationship with Albert.

The sex life was certainly driven by Victoria's very strong sexual appetite.

When Victoria became pregnant, was this announced to the public?

Oh, absolutely not.

Nothing was said virtually until she's had the baby.

There's this polite announcement, as you get in most of the press, about the "accouchement" of the queen.

The queen became "unwell."

WORSLEY: So it says here, "The queen was brought to bed on Tuesday after an indisposition of a few hours' duration."

They usually say that, that she became ill. Just an indisposition.

It was all over in a trice, really.

The queen herself found pregnancy actually unpleasant, ugly, uncomfortable, very animalistic.

She didn't like the process of being pregnant.

For example, in this letter, she talks about how she hated seeing ladies going out in public when they were heavily pregnant, and she used the word "enceinte," the French word for pregnant, and it's another euphemism that was used.

She thought it was absolutely appalling.

She said, "It was quite disgusting.

"It is more like a rabbit or guinea pig than anything else, and really it is not very nice."

(laughing) That's brilliant.

She found the whole process extremely ugly.

"I feel like a cow or a dog at such moments.

"I often feel shocked at the confidences "of other married ladies.

They are very indelicate about these things."

Victoria just believed that matters of the body should be kept private, especially childbirth and what went on in bed.

You can see this preference by comparing her favorite palace, Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight, to other royal residences.

Osbourne is private.

It's a holiday retreat on an island, and its bedchamber was somewhere that Victoria could escape and enjoy time alone with her husband.

This bed is an incredibly personal and intimate piece of furniture.

Her bed was of great importance to Queen Victoria, but in her private roles as a wife and a mother, and they're both commemorated here.

Down at this end, she's put up a little plaque which marks the date of the first night that she spent here with her beloved husband Albert.

And the date of the last night too, because clearly he died many years before she did.

This isn't spelled out in the plaque, it's just the dates.

It's intended to be read only by Victoria.

And at this end of the bed, this plaque commemorates her death in this bed in 1901.

And this is a family thing.

It was put up by her daughter-in-law.

It's not for public consumption.

And it reads, "In loving memory "from her sorrowing children, "grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to their ever beloved mother."

In Queen Victoria's bedroom, you do feel like an intruder, like you're not really allowed to be there, and for many years, the public weren't.

When Osbourne House was opened up shortly after Victoria's death, the bedroom suite was kept private until 1955, and visitors were kept out by these iron gates.

When the royal bedroom door swung closed in Victoria's reign, it stayed closed.

Today, the royal family don't release details of what may or may not go on in the royal bedroom.

Any knowledge that does get out is stolen.

As the power of the monarchy has waned over the centuries, the royal bedchamber has also faded out of public sight.

When medieval kings moved around their realm, their mobile bedchamber was the key to their administration.

Under the Tudors and the Stuarts, it was essential to the success of a royal dynasty, and throughout the 18th century, it became more of a ceremonial space where aspiring courtiers could still gain influence and status.

But ever since Queen Victoria, the bedroom has become a totally private domain.

The royal bedchamber may have lost its political significance, but we're still just as fascinated as we ever were about what goes on inside it.

And that's because the story of the royal family-- marriage, childbirth, renewal-- is still central to the story of Great Britain.

Tales from the Royal Bedchamber is available on DVD.

To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.