Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

In this talk with Historic Royal Palace's chief curator Lucy Worsley and TV executive Emma Hindley,

we go behind the scenes of the BBC series Fit to Rule and explore how royal illness

influence the reins of our monarchs throughout history.

Personally, what's always interested me about kings and queens is not their power or their

status or their position at the top of society.

It's always been the fact that they're the best documented people of their day. We just know so much about them.

If you think of the whole range of people who were alive in 1714 or 1890, there are very few of

them, of whom we can know as we do about George I, exactly how his

haemorrhoids were treated. And who did it? And there are very few people who we can

know exactly how big their underwear it was. We know this about Queen Victoria. But we couldn't just go into a whole

succession of biographies in a television series. We had to create a bigger, a more serious

story about history. Let me give you a quotation now from King Farouk of Egypt.

He was speaking just after the Second World War

when hereditary monarchies were crashing and burning all over the world.

They were going up in flames, basically.

And King Farouk of Egypt said that in 100 years' time, there will only be five kings left in the world.

The king of hearts, the king of diamonds, clubs, spades, and the king of England.

Now, how did the British monarchy achieve this amazing longevity?

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