When the most powerful empire in Europe sends an Armada to invade your country, what do you do?

In this episode of our trilogy on Elizabeth I, we reach the moment everyone associates with England’s most famous queen: the looming threat of the Spanish Armada. But the great showdown of 1588 did not arrive out of nowhere. It was the result of years of political intrigue, espionage, religious tension — and a dangerous rivalry with Philip II of Spain.

Along the way we meet the other woman whose shadow hung over Elizabeth’s reign: Mary, Queen of Scots. Was she a genuine threat to the English throne, or a prisoner whose existence fuelled a web of plots and paranoia? From the murky world of spies and codebreakers to the dramatic fallout of the Babington Plot, Elizabeth’s government was constantly balancing mercy, survival and ruthless political calculation.

Then comes the crisis that would define the age. As Spain’s vast armada sails towards England, Elizabeth faces the greatest challenge of her reign — and delivers the famous rallying cry at Tilbury, declaring that though she has the body of a “weak and feeble woman”, she has the heart and stomach of a king.

The defeat of the Armada would become one of the most powerful myths in English history. Yet as we discover, the reality was far messier — with further armadas, failed invasions, and an emerging English maritime power that would shape the world in ways both triumphant and troubling.

Next time: the Virgin Queen’s most personal battlefield — her love life, her suitors, and the political game of marriage that defined the rest of her reign.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

She was born a princess and declared a bastard before she could walk.

In this episode, we go back to the beginning of Elizabeth I: a child of extraordinary promise, born into splendour, then cast into uncertainty by the fall of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Courtly favour turned to suspicion. Affection turned to danger. And survival became a skill learned early.

From the shadow of Henry VIII’s volatile court to the careful education that shaped her formidable intellect, this is the story of a girl navigating power long before she wore a crown. Stepmothers rose and fell. Brothers and sisters shifted in rank and religion. Every alliance mattered. Every silence mattered more.

This is the first of three deep dives into the Virgin Queen, beginning with the precarious childhood that forged one of history’s most enduring rulers.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore the instability, calculation, and emotional discipline that defined Elizabeth’s early years and ask how a child declared illegitimate grew into a monarch who would outlast them all.

Was her resilience instinct? Training? Or the necessary armour of a Tudor princess who learned, very young, that survival was everything?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shakespeare, Hollywood, the Oscars, the plague, and a little boy called Hamnet.

In this episode of Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams are joined by historian Alice Loxton to explore the extraordinary new film Hamnet — the Oscar-tipped adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel.

Set in late 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon and plague-stricken London, the film imagines the private world of William Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway — here called Agnes — and their three children. When their son Hamnet dies in 1596, the story asks a haunting question: did that loss shape the creation of the play Hamlet?

We explore Tudor childbirth, superstition and healing, the realities of plague in Elizabethan England, and the fragile line between history and imagination. Who was Anne Hathaway really? A healer? A neglected wife? A woman left to manage home and grief while her husband built a theatrical empire?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Kennedy Curse didn't end with the assassination of JFK - far from it!

In this final episode of our Kennedy trilogy, we ask what happened after Camelot fell. With John F. Kennedy gone and Robert Kennedy gunned down just five years later, the dynasty’s hopes shifted once more — to the younger generation. Could the flame stay lit? Or was tragedy now woven into the Kennedy name itself?

From Ted Kennedy and the shadow of Chappaquiddick, to Jackie’s controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis, and the rise — and devastating fall — of John F. Kennedy Jr., this is the story of heirs burdened by expectation, fame, and a family legacy unlike any other. Plane crashes. Scandals. Political ambition. And one final, haunting echo of a mother’s warning: never fly your own plane.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams explore the weight carried by the next generation — the pressure to redeem the past, the struggle to escape it, and the events that cemented the idea of a “Kennedy curse” in the public imagination.

Is it fate? Is it recklessness? Or is it simply the peril of living so visibly, so ambitiously, and so publicly for over a century?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The assassination of JFK - an unforgettable moment in a changing and volatile world: the Berlin Wall rising, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then came the shocking events of Dallas.

In this second of three special episodes, we move from ambition to power, and from power to catastrophe. With John F. Kennedy now President, the Kennedys became global royalty: glamorous state visits, televised debates, Jackie dazzling Europe, and a youthful administration promising civil rights, a man on the moon, and a new American frontier.

But beneath the polish lies mounting pressures — Cold War brinkmanship, CIA miscalculations, the Bay of Pigs disaster, civil rights battles that split the South, and a president pushed to prove his strength. At home, private grief shadows public triumph, as personal loss and political peril collide.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams chart the heady rise of “Camelot” — and the moment it shattered.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

JFK’s assassination, plane crashes, scandals, and untimely deaths. Is there really such a thing as a Kennedy curse?

In this first of three special episodes, we go back to the beginning — to the making of a dynasty, forged in ambition and driven by a patriarch who expected greatness and tolerated nothing less. In the Kennedy household, sons were groomed for the presidency, daughters for perfection, and failure was not merely disappointing… it was unthinkable.

Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams unravel the astonishing rise of this Irish-American family from immigrant roots to global prominence, exploring the wealth, political muscle, wartime heroics and ruthless determination that built the Kennedy legend — and the immense personal pressure that came with it.

Before the building of a modern Camelot, before Dallas, there was a family determined to conquer America - but at what cost?

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For Valentine’s Day, Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things goes full royal romance-with-a-body-count.

Robert Hardman and Prof Kate Williams delve into the whispered love story of Edward II and his dazzling courtier, Piers Gaveston — a friendship (or something more) so intense it detonates the English court. Why did the barons loathe Gaveston so much? Who gets the stuffed-crust portion of medieval “pizza” of land, titles, and power, and who’s left starving?

And then comes the infamous comeuppance: the notorious ending Christopher Marlowe gives Edward II —death by red-hot poker. True? Find out.

Royal love. A battle for lands. And a legend that refuses to die.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to royal history with bite.

In this episode of Queens, Kings & Dastardly Things, Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams head east to Transylvania to unravel one of the strangest threads in modern royal history. King Charles III’s long-standing fascination with Romania turns out to involve more than rural preservation and beautiful churches — it also leads back, genealogically, to Vlad III, the ruler whose brutality helped inspire the Dracula legend.

But Vlad is not the region’s only blood-soaked aristocrat uncovered. Their conversation also takes in the infamous Countess Elizabeth Báthory, accused of torturing and killing young women in neighbouring Hungary — and asks whether her reputation reflects historical reality, political convenience, or deep-seated fears about power, inheritance, and women who ruled alone.

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

Hosts: Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams

Series Producer: Ben Devlin

Production Manager: Vittoria Cecchini

Content Editor: Joseph Palmer

Executive Producer: Bella Soames

A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular.

Sign up to Palace Confidential, the FREE royals newsletter from the Mail's top experts. Delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday, it's the smartest way to stay in the royal inner circle. Just head to dailymail.co.uk/palaceconfidential to sign up today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.