John Conroy

And in the aftermath of her mother's death, she'd found all the letters that both she and her mother had exchanged all through her childhood and her youth.

And she realised actually that her mother was actually a very loving mother after all, and was not this sort of rather heartless collaborator with the evil John Conroy.

And suddenly she thought, golly, I've actually been very unkind about my mother, and she loved me dearly.

So you had these twin emotions, the Albert emotions, utter shot and totally polaxed, as you say, by that, but also the mum.

And there's a lot of recent scholarship that says Victoria comes into her own when Albert is no longer there, pushing her around, controlling her, claiming you don't know anything and I know everything.

So there is this interesting idea and interesting, actually more than ideas, you know, big, swathe of scholarship suggesting that this is now the moment, even though Victoria is heartbroken, that she can now be independent of control because she was controlled by her mother.

Well, really controlled by John Conroy, who used and exploited her mother as proxy.

And I think Victoria's mother was obedient to John Conroy's machinations cruel wishes there's a great line in the Young Victoria film where Paul Bettany who says he plays Lord Melbourne doesn't he says to them you played the game and you lost you know they tried to control her they failed and that that always stayed with Victoria, those attempts when she was a teenager to exert control in these pretty aggressive ways.

They'd only been married for around two years.

But she, she turned to a man called Sir John Conroy.

He became her equerry- And between them, they devised a system called the Kensington System, which was a whole series of very strict rules with regards how Princess Victoria should be brought up.

Relations between the Duchess of Kent and her brother-in-law, King George IV, were actually very poor.

George didn't really like his brother Edward, and the king really was not supportive of the duchess.

So Sir John Conroy and the duchess, yeah, they devised a system of very strict rules.

I won't go through all the rules, but one rule was Victoria had to sleep in her mother's bedroom.

So even when Victoria became an older child, she still had to sleep in her mother's bedroom.