Lucy Worsley's Royal Myths & Secrets Season 2 Episodes

Episode 1

The French Revolution

Lucy Worsley explores some of the myths and fibs swirling around the French Revolution of 1789 and the uprising that brought down the french royal family. This violent revolution became the blueprint of many future revolutions across the world.

Episode 2

George IV and the Regency

We think of the Regency as genteel and well-ordered: beautiful buildings, Jane Austen's romances and red-coated officers defeating Napoleon at Waterloo. Lucy Worsley digs behind the facade of Georgian elegance to reveal the fibs that helped conceal a darker side to the Regency and suppress rebellion in an age of revolution. This was the end of the Georgian era, when a mentally ill King George III was forced to hand power to his extravagant son - the prince regent and future King George IV. Both kings lived in the shadow of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. To make matters worse for the royals, British radicals were demanding political reform. To stop rebellion, monarchy and government relied on spin, secrets and lies. Lucy reveals how an international victory at Waterloo became distinctly British, why the Peterloo Massacre was airbrushed out of history and how Scotland was dressed up in tartan to support the union.

Episode 3

The Russian Revolution

59 mins

After 3 centuries of his Romanov dynasty, czar Nicholas II was unpopular, not in the least because of his German-born wife and her mysterious confident Rasputin, a fake monk who secretly helped with calming the crown prince, whose illness was kept from the people, who believed the man her lover. AS the troops were beaten in the Great War, the commander in chief was advised by all to abdicate and soon did. This grim mood cleared the way for a republican revolution, but not immediately the Bolshevik one, a moderate interim government was installed by Kerensky, rather bourgeois, and women laborers played a curious part in persuading the imperial troops to abstain from ordered violent repression in capital St.Petersburg. The communists later claimed all merit, but neither nor his lieutenants Trotski and Stalin were even there at the time. Russian state propaganda keeps 're-writing' its history grotesquely, sanctifying Lenin and later his evil successor Stalin, whom Lenin warned against on his death bed. The imperial family was locked up and only murdered when their exile near Yekaterinburg was about to fall into 'White Russian' counterrevolutionary hands, faking the decision 'by a local soviet', actually getting an implicit blessing from Lenin, their corpses were sneakily buried in a forest, allowing the myth of a surviving princess Anastasia till DNA evidence disproved that. Putin had the czars and the state-linked Russian Orthodox church re-appreciated, as model for his own lair autocracy.