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.

Despite ill health and tragedy, Queen Anne was a surprisingly successful monarch.

This series from our archive explores different perceptions of her reign.

In this episode, historian Dr Anna Whitelock discusses the body of Queen Anne

and how her appearance has influenced how people

think about her reign.

I mean, bodies are very much my preoccupation at the moment. Bodies and beds, I'm slightly

obsessed about. In all kinds of ways, actually, I'd very much like to spend a lot more time

sleeping in my bed at the moment. But more more than that thinking about the bed as a stage for monarchy and the bed is really the heart of the court

and as the kind of stage upon which the monarch was at its most as his or her most vulnerable

but also where the two bodies as we we understand it, of the monarch, the natural body and the political body, or the body politic, came together in the most, it was like the stage for the two of them.

And so the book that I'm writing at the moment is actually on Elizabeth's bedfellows and Elizabeth the first exactly um

pander to the audience with that title um although apparently are the Americans that needs to be

called the Queen's Bed because they might not understand Bedfellows and they don't know what that

means if I've got any American people does that work for you bedf Bedfellows? Yeah, it would work for you?

Well, anyway, that's an argument I'll have with the publisher.

But anyway, with Elizabeth, obviously, we all famously know her as the Virgin Queen.

And actually, you know, one of the questions that people always ask is, you know, what about

her and Robert Dudley, did or they didn't.

...