Victoria & Albert: The Wedding

-In 1840, two 20-year-olds became the most famous couple on Earth.

-Dearly beloved... -The marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg was a pivotal moment in British history.

What began as an arranged marriage became the greatest royal love story of all time.

-Victoria sees this vision of male beauty.

-It was pure, beautiful, gobsmacking love.

-We're going to reconstruct the big day to tell the story of a queen and a prince who desperately needed to win their people's hearts.

It was romance and politics.

This marriage had to stave off revolution.

-The monarchy was very close to extinction.

-It's only by re-creating the wedding that we'll see the meticulous stage management that went into every moment and understand the genius behind this 19th-century public-relations coup.

Last time, we made preparations for our restaging of the wedding that changed history.

Do you think that the search could be over?

The clothes the queen wore... -We get a real sense of her shape and her stature.

-...the feelings Prince Albert's uniform inspired in him... -He's got grand old dukes standing over him and judging him.

-...the music they loved was a mystery solved.

-We know for certain two choral pieces.

-Even the menu for their wedding breakfast was under inspection.

-Well, I can't say I'm not apprehensive.

-Together, we'll step back to February 1840 to see how and why this wedding was the spectacle to save the crown.

-This event is the first example of the royal-wedding machine in action.

[ Clanking ] -It was the birth of a brand, the myth, the powerful legend of Victoria and Albert.

-The mechanism Melbourne had constructed for just this moment was now running at full speed.

Today, we're all used to the concept of royal-wedding fever.

But then, Britain was in the grip of it for the very first time.

There was the press speculation.

There was the gossip.

Charles Dickens wrote a satirical piece, but then, in private, he admitted that he, too, really was in love with the queen.

-We all know how to participate in a royal wedding, and we imagine the ceremonial processes, as well as those -- those celebratory traditions have been laid down for centuries.

Well, they're really only as old as 1840, and they were constructed by Melbourne and Victoria and the people around them.

And really what you get is the creation of this machine.

And it's a machine for producing spectacle.

It's a machine for, in a way, encouraging a national participation in this event.

It makes it hard to ignore.

-Prime Minister Lord Melbourne worked with the press and kept the public informed of the wedding schedule.

The need to win the hearts of the people was behind every decision.

Melbourne fully understood the power of words and images.

Even the painting of the ceremony was commissioned with spin in mind.

Our art expert, Wolf Burchard, decodes it.

-This is a postcard that shows the royal wedding as it was portrayed by Sir George Hayter, the queen's favorite painter.

It's in the Chapel at St. James's Palace with Prince Albert and the Queen at the center.

The question is, how accurate a guide it is for our re-creation of the wedding.

It looks like we're in a huge space, almost in a cathedral, when, in fact, the chapel is rather small.

It was a very, very gray and grim day, and yet you have this powerful shaft of sunlight penetrating the scene.

What Victoria, Albert, and Lord Melbourne didn't want is for this picture to be a mere documentation of the event.

They wanted this to be propaganda, and that's exactly what Hayter delivered.

-Melbourne knew the young queen was his greatest propaganda tool.

The more visible she was, the better.

The haughty Hanoverians never dreamt of such openness.

-Melbourne insisted that the wedding should take place in daylight.

It was a completely new event.

Royal weddings in the past had been in palaces, usually late at night.

They'd been very, very private.

This was a royal wedding for the people.

-The British public were being courted, but the palace also wanted this wedding to signal a change, a new start to the whole world.

One of the queen's first invitations went to an embassy not long established in London's Mayfair District.

-In the winter of 1839, a messenger from Buckingham Palace came carrying an invitation to the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, addressed to Ambassador Andrew Stevenson, a Democrat from Virginia.

This was a queen that could be brash and opinionated, who could hold a grudge.

In reaching out to America, a nation that defeated her grandfather, George III, she showed her pragmatism and modernity.

-As the big day loomed, the Buckingham Palace cooks labored around the clock, under the command of Royal Chef Mr. Ball.

In our Holkham Hall kitchen, food historian Annie Gray and her team are hard at work on the first course at the wedding breakfast.

You probably imagine scenes of knife throwing and drama in the Buckingham Palace kitchens, but Mr. Ball and his team knew what they were doing.

They were capable of turning out 600 dinners on a normal day.

A state banquet for 2,000 wouldn't faze them.

There was noise, and there was sweat, but they were professionals.

Like this lot.

-Annie is using recipes by Charles Elm Francatelli, who replaced Mr. Ball when the head chef retired soon after the wedding.

They're an incredible insight into the lavish concoctions we believe were served at the wedding breakfast.

And some are so complicated that they've got Annie and her chefs worried.

-There are a couple of dishes in particular that are somewhat more challenging than others.

One of them is the macaroni timbale, which I am leaving to Sophie completely.

-So, this is the mold we're going to be using, and it's a mold lined with pasta.

It'll look almost like honeycomb on the outside.

It's certainly sticky, isn't it?

-Yeah, and that's what we want.

-So, really, we want to build a wall.

-Yeah.

-Garden soup -- peas, cabbage, and turnips -- was the opening gambit chosen by the royal chef, Mr. Ball.

It'll go at one end of the table, mirrored at the other end by the fish.

The mighty turbot was a rare treat.

This one weighs in at 8 kilos, or more than 17 pounds.

-This particular turbot's going to be served very simply.

Turbot l'Anglaise.

English Turbot.

So it's just going to be boiled, having been rubbed with some salt and lemon juice and served with very simple lobster sauce.

It's really deceptive, isn't it?

'Cause I mean, you just think, "Oh, well, anyone can cook that.

Lemon, salt, whatever."

But ruining something like this... -Your life wouldn't be worth living, would it?

-Criminal.

-Even now.

-And of course, it has to be done exactly at the point of serving.

-Do you know, not much has changed, to be perfectly honest.

If you see turbot on a menu, you know that you're having something very special, don't you?

You know that it's cost the host an awful lot of money, and the chef has had to prepare it with absolute skill.

-One of the most time-consuming processes is larding -- sewing strips of bacon, in this case, through sweetbreads, the neck glands of a sheep.

In 1840, Buckingham Palace was no place to be a vegetarian.

Amongst the first wave of dishes, there was a lot of mutton, a favorite of Her Majesty's.

Mr. Ball's team larded multiple saddles of mutton with fat and braised them and glazed them and served them with mash.

Good to have a bit of carbohydrate for balance.

-No Victorian party would be complete without that classic 19th-century dish, the raised pie.

Mr. Ball's pigeon pies were made in the traditional manner, stuffed full of pigeon breast, forcemeat stuffing, and then, in this case, a few little feet poking out of the top, just so the diners knew what the pie was.

In case they were still in doubt, the other pie will have a full pigeon in flight sticking out of the top.

Taxidermy heaven.

-In London on the cold, wet night of Sunday, February 9, 1840, the eve of the wedding, the palace kitchens were a hive of activity.

Albert was in his room in Buckingham Palace.

Also in London that night was his mentor, Baron Stockmar, who'd come over from Germany for the wedding.

And he was a man with a vision.

-Stockmar saw the point of this marriage in a way that perhaps nobody else in Europe quite did.

It was planned as a political marriage from the moment they were babies, from the moment they were born.

-The long-held dreams of the Coburg court were about to come true -- a marriage of Britain and Germany.

A European union.

In her room, the Queen shares her thoughts with her journal.

She wrote, "It was my last unmarried evening, which made me feel so odd."

Then she recalled seeing Lord Melbourne, who'd been as emotional as ever.

Again, she wrote, "I took his hand and pressed it and thanked him for all his kindness, which I hoped he would continue."

Melbourne knew his work was done.

He had to let her go.

As the Queen retired, the palace clock winders began their work.

Citizens all over the country did the same.

When the nation's clocks were next wound, Britain would be a different place, changed by the union of two young people who together would put her on a new course.

[ Clanking and whirring ] On the day of the wedding, the Queen woke at 8:45.

And at 11:00, she began to dress -- preparations that would affect the way so many royal brides in the future would appear before their public.

Just hours before the wedding, Albert writes to the woman he knows best -- Coburg Duchess Caroline Amalie.

She's actually his grandfather's second wife, but the person he loves, trusts, and calls Grandmama.

-Albert had a great affection for his grandmother and clearly was very upset at having to leave her behind.

He wept when he left Coburg, when he had to say farewell to everyone.

It was all uncharted waters for him.

[ Rain pouring, thunder rumbling ] -It's time.

The big day is here at last.

It's the wedding day.

And we're all invited.

Here at Winchester College, when we step into the chapel, it will be the 10th of February, 1840.

And the weather couldn't be more perfect, just as it was then.

It's really cold and wet.

For our ceremony, the Chapel at Winchester College is almost ready.

Master baker Paul Brandon has beautifully re-created the 300-pound wedding cake.

It would have been carried extremely carefully from the basement kitchen up to the dining room.

It set the fashion for rich fruit cakes for royal weddings to come -- a tradition only recently broken by Prince Harry and Meghan with their lemon and elderflower cake.

The cake topper features Victoria and Albert in Grecian costume, surrounded by cherubs.

Our guests are also preparing.

I'm very pleased with the fake hair I'm going to get.

I couldn't miss the chance to dress up for a royal wedding.

-Silk stockings for madame.

-Ooh, lovely.

What's this?

-Oh.

-I quite like the look of this.

-Yes, I thought you might.

-I and those people will get the chance to experience near as first-hand as is possible that wedding ceremony.

-How exciting.

-It's brilliant, isn't it?

-It is.

So jealous.

[ Laughs ] -Are you jealous that you're not dressing up, too?

-Yes, absolutely.

-At the palace, Albert is bathed and is helped into his bespoke uniform, fresh from his Mayfair tailors.

-The newspapers described him that morning looking attractive, but also pensive.

What was going through his mind?

In terms of what lay ahead, he must have been nervous.

Queen Victoria's diary explains why.

Two days before, she and Melbourne had been calming his fears at having to guess so much of the order of service because his command of English wasn't quite up to scratch.

He did, of course, speak German, French, and Italian, and read Latin and Greek.

-Victoria is in her dress.

She's assisted by the very stylish Duchess of Sutherland.

-The Duchess stage-managed as far as the clothes were concerned.

She was a kind of progressive.

She was in favor of reform, and she certainly would have filled Queen Victoria's head with the idea of progress.

-This morning, the Duchess is no doubt pleased that the dress has a political message.

It's put bread on the tables of British artisans.

-Victoria wanted to help British crafts and impoverished Britain tradesmen who, had they not had that fantastic commission over those winter months before the wedding, would all have been literally starving.

[ Bell tolling ] -12:00.

Prince Albert, his father, Ernest I, and his brother, Ernest II, are in the first carriage to go to St. James's Palace.

They're bound for the private chapel inside.

[ Horn playing fanfare ] Our performers represent wedding guests who've been traveling -- some of them for days -- to get here.

Most of these guests have money, and they have dressed to impress the queen.

-It's fairly easy to imagine the excitement when the invitations arrived in grand houses around the country just before Christmas.

Now picture the moment these distinguished people look in the wardrobe.

How many of them decide they simply haven't got a thing to wear?

-They're sporting wool, linen, perhaps silk woven by Huguenots in East London.

And some may be wearing more exotic fabrics imported from India and China by the East India Company.

Wellington, the Iron Duke, hero of Waterloo, is one of the few Tories the queen has invited, and then only because Melbourne insisted.

Victoria dislikes these conservatives.

All of her friends, and, of course, Melbourne himself are members of the more progressive Whig Party.

Wolf Burchard, Nick Ryan, and Jasdeep Singh, have joined me to observe from the 21st century.

Only guests in costume are in the Victorian moment.

They await the arrival of the queen and the prince just as they did on that original cold February morning.

Amongst them, foreign potentates whose nations are already buying up royal-wedding souvenirs.

-The American ambassador and his wife is amongst the audience.

You know, in spite of the fact that America had become independent, and even more recently, that in the War of 1812, the British had invited the United States.

[ Clock ticking ] -Victoria begins to travel to St. James's Palace -- the journey of a quarter of a mile.

At the center of the district is St. James's Park, now full of loyal citizens.

-In the park itself, even the trees were full of people, and occasionally a branch would break, and they'd tumble into the mud, causing great hilarity.

But it wasn't just here in the capital.

The entire population of Britain was in a state of romantic delirium.

-Prince Albert has arrived before Victoria and awaits his moment to enter the chapel.

The Queen, meanwhile, is in a side room with her bridesmaids.

She wrote, "My 12 young train bearers were dressed all in white with white roses, which had a beautiful effect."

This is the mother of all white wedding dresses.

It's quite shockingly, radically simple.

What everybody was expecting to see was a shouty, golden dress.

The dress is a perfect example of Melbourne's stage management.

The satin has to be seen in the half-light to appreciate its explosive effect.

You can see that it really does glow in the dark.

That's what the white does, and Victoria is a visionary when it comes to her wedding dress.

Millions of people will follow in her wake.

Some people are less impressed with the bridesmaids than Victoria, saying that there's no danger of them outshining her beauty because they looked like a bunch of village girls.

The ladies are, in fact, all aristocratic, but the list has been the subject of a heated debate between Victoria and Albert.

Albert had demanded that only the virginal daughters of aristocratic mothers with impeccable morals could be train bearers.

This causes a problem.

-Lord Melbourne will not put up with this at all, and he says, "It's impossible to find 12 daughters of the English aristocracy whose parents do not have lives that are tarnished in some ways by scandal or illegitimacy."

-And Victoria is a realist.

The list of tainted bridesmaids is allowed to stand, including the daughter of the late King's mistress, Lady Jersey.

And right there, with her laissez-faire and Albert's uptight morality, we've got a glimpse of differences to come between our lovers.

And now the music that signals Albert's entrance.

He'd been back in Britain for just a few days.

He will now live here for the rest of his life.

[ Handel's "Hail the Conquering Hero Comes" plays ] -Albert comes in to this piece by Handel, "Hail the Conquering Hero Comes."

-He is a conqueror.

He's stamping down on prejudices about his background and conquering his queen's heart.

It's amazing to see him in context, looking into the history, feeling the sort of intake of breath as he arrives.

-Albert goes up to his future mother-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, and kisses her very fondly.

-People have already noticed that Albert is building bridges between Victoria and her mother.

Victoria's really good about holding a grudge.

She still loathes her mother, but Albert can see that this is problematic, if not dangerous.

-Albert is determined to heal that feud.

"This is the Saxe-Coburg family.

We must be united."

-Also, Albert is dubious about Victoria's replacement mother, the governess Lehzen.

Albert might be jealous of the love Victoria feels for her old governess.

They even had adjoining bedrooms.

Might also be snobbishness because Lehzen was born a commoner.

-Baroness Lehzen is controlling the things that Albert wants to control, particularly the finances of the court.

-He might even already be thinking about plans to ease Lehzen out.

[ Choir sings ] The ceremony is about to begin.

Albert waits for his bride.

All eyes are on Albert in his field marshal's uniform as he waits for his bride.

-Albert is just feet away from the Duke of Wellington.

He probably chooses not to catch his eye because he knows this national hero almost didn't get invited after he had upset Victoria over Albert's salary.

-So you have this German boy dressed up for the first time in his life as an English field marshal, which must itself have been a pretty scary experience.

The Duke of Wellington was a very scary person.

And all around, these old soldiers who were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars.

He must have been extremely frightened.

-The Duke has also been quite ill, and while the whole court went to visit his bedside, Victoria refused to go.

-This was fabulous in rehearsal.

And now you can really feel the effect of these youthful voices in such an ancient setting.

[ Choir singing ] -It's such a lovely piece by James Kent, and it was old even then.

It was written in 1773.

-Everybody here has become a cog in this new machine, the royal-wedding machine that will steamroller its way through the next couple of centuries.

What's happening here will change the way that life is lived in this world, the world of 1840, but it will also affect the future of millions of white weddings to come.

-It's a great aesthetic decision, this, because Victoria is clad in pristine virginal white.

You know, there's nothing clean and white in London in 1840.

That dress must really have burned itself onto the retina.

-The union that will change Britain is about to begin.

-It's much more than just the wedding of two young people.

It is scene one of the great drama which is going to be the unfolding of modern constitutional monarchy.

[ Handel's "A Virtuous Wife Shall Soften Fortune's Frown" plays ] -Victoria enters to music chosen for its message, Handel's "A Virtuous Wife Shall Soften Fortune's Frowns."

-The moment everyone has waited for.

The Queen makes her entrance.

This is what the experiment is all about.

Sitting here in the middle of it, I can't help but be swept up in enthusiasm for the little queen, for the romance, for the monarchy itself.

This is perhaps the only flaw in the brilliant plan.

The queen's train is a bit too short for so many bridesmaids, and they're treading on each other's heels.

Here's Melbourne's eye, or ear, for detail again.

The chapel's so narrow, everyone is near enough to hear the rustle of all that satin.

-Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God... -Even though when re-creating all of this, I'm getting an insight into how the royal magic works.

-...to join together this man, this woman... -Something else made obvious by reconstructing the wedding -- the Queen has placed her mother just out of her eyeline, but can easily catch the adoring glances of her dear friend, Baroness Lehzen.

-The Queen's favorite painter is making sketches, the notes, as it were, for his famous picture.

It won't be ready for another two years, but he's got to work fast this morning.

-George Hayter was Queen Victoria's favorite painter.

He produces the first great portrait of her while she's on the throne.

And Victoria and Albert commissioned him to produce the official wedding portrait, which is totally idealized and romanticized.

It's like walking into the dream that Victoria and Albert had of their wedding day.

It can't reflect the reality of it.

It absolutely can't.

It's something from a perfect world.

It's burnished in soft focus.

-Secondly, it was ordained, Christ's holy body... -While the archbishop deals with the sins of the flesh, many in the congregation are looking at Albert's family.

Albert's father and his brother were philanderers, and it was a horror that he really never came to terms with.

-Albert was very frightened of the consequences of sexual license, of profligacy.

He was very proper, very moral right from the beginning.

-And keep themselves undefiled, members of Christ's holy body... -This union would bring Germany and Britain closer together than ever before.

It was supposed to ensure international security, keep Europe safe.

And this would work, at least for a while.

-To my wedded wife, to live together... -As the ceremony progressed, many observers later noted how Victoria had locked her eyes on Albert throughout the ceremony, how she looked pale and slightly drawn.

The press cast her as "charming, innocent, and girlish."

-Perhaps she's waiting for the most important word in the entire service.

-Victoria, wilt thou obey him... -Now, this is the big-breath moment.

There's been so much speculation about the exact form of words they're going to use.

What everybody wants to know is, she going to use the "O" word?

-Wilt thou obey him?

-I will.

-She insisted, when it came to the vows, that, no, she was going to vow to obey Albert because she said, "I want to be married as any other woman and not as a queen."

-As with many a royal bride, Victoria's father isn't here to give her away.

Her favorite uncle, the Duke of Sussex, stands in.

-Just as any other wedding, there's a certain amount of gossiping and sniping from the congregation.

This duke here was famously skint, and some people were saying that he was only too pleased to give away what wasn't his.

-For as long as you both... -This duke will die with no legitimate children, which means that his title will die with him.

-With this ring, I thee wed... -The Sussex title lapsed.

Meghan and Harry, of course, now have assumed that title, and it's been revived.

-With this ring, I thee wed. -We now enter some slight mystery territory.

What exactly went on with the ring, or rings, is subject to some debate.

-I thee worship... -Newspaper reports were confused about how many rings there actually were, who put them or it on who, and whether, in fact, Albert was given his ring after the event.

But that's not the point.

This is the climax.

Victoria will say later that this was the best moment of all.

She and Albert have actually practiced putting the rings on.

She remembered the mess-up with the ring at her coronation.

-With my body, I thee worship... -The wedding vows said by Victoria and Albert date back largely unchanged to 1549.

-In the name of the father... -And these solemn promises are still made in much the same way in Christian ceremonies today.

-...I thee endow.

-And with all my worldly goods, I thee endow.

-Everybody in the audience has sort of tried to stop themselves bursting out laughing when they know that Albert hasn't got any money, and Victoria is the richest woman in the world, actually, so... [ Chuckles ] [ Choir singing ] -Albert is so near to the finish line.

The British people here are probably thinking that he's the country bumpkin about to make good, but I'm pretty sure that he sees it differently.

I think he's thinking, "I'm about to become the boss of this lot."

-Our father... -The archbishop marries the couple using the same Book of Common Prayer found in every parish church.

The queen might be head of state, but she's also just like any other person who's found their soul mate.

-I pronounce you man and wife.

[ Applause ] -This moment caused quite a stir.

Lots of guests noticed that while the Queen had been smiling and winking at Baroness Lehzen throughout, and now made a special point of kissing Queen Adelaide, and as for her mother, well, she merely shook her hand.

-In the throne room, the newlyweds sign the register.

The archbishop signs first.

-They're signing with just their first names, like kings and queens do.

No need for any surnames.

Of course.

Everybody knows who they are.

-As the ceremony finishes, the queen assembles her pretty maids and gives them all a fabulous gift -- a jeweled eagle broach designed by Prince Albert.

In this example at Woburn Abbey, we see the turquoise that stands for true love, the ruby eye for passion, the diamond beak for eternity, and the pearls for beauty.

[ Applause ] [ Clanking, whirring ] -The guests invited to the palace for the wedding breakfast now wait in a withdrawing room.

The first dishes are already next door, but they can't start until Victoria and Albert arrive.

Rather than joining their guests, they retire to Victoria's quarters.

Until now, protocol has prevented them spending a moment alone.

-Suddenly now they're married, and at last, they can shut the door on everybody, and maybe it was quite a frightening moment for them because there they are, confronted with reality, and they have a whole lot of discovering to do.

-In her journal, Victoria says that at this moment, they made vows every bit as important as the ones they made in church.

Albert said they must never have secrets from each other.

Years later, after he was dead, she made a very poignant annotation.

"No secrets, he'd said."

And she added, "And so it was."

-In 1840, dinners were served la francaise.

It was a beautiful, intricate style of service in which all of the dishes for each course were placed on the table simultaneously, laid out symmetrically.

In practice in the royal palaces, this meant that there was a whole division of people called the table deckers.

It was their job to measure out with set squares and tape measures, making sure that the gaps between each plate were perfect, that the table was completely symmetrical.

Fit, of course, for royalty.

-In the 20th century, these Georgian kitchens became a tourist attraction.

But today, they're going to once again see some culinary gymnastics.

A multitude of dishes are in various stages of development.

Some are outsourced to the modern facility, leaving the Georgian kitchen for terrifyingly old-school practices.

Annie, what is this distressing object?

-This is a hare.

-What have you done to it?

-Well, I Victorianized it.

Today, we would always take the heads and the legs off roast birds and roast meat, and the idea of presenting it like this is really alien.

-We don't want our food to look like food anymore.

-No, we like to have nothing that reminds us that anything was once alive on the table.

Whereas, the Victorians were completely the opposite.

I think the thing about Victorian food, especially at the high end like this, is it's got to be a feast for all the senses.

When you're working with dishes, which in some cases really haven't been cooked for 100 years, if not 150, you do find surprises.

And actually for me, the biggest surprise has been how amazing they all look when they start to come together.

I kind of have a vision in my head of how I think it will look, and then it looks even better.

-Their tryst over, the Queen and Field Marshal Prince Albert descend to the withdrawing room, no doubt to the delight of their famished guests.

After the ceremony, everybody noticed how radiant she looked.

The color had come back into her pale cheeks.

And can you see another part of the magic of the white dress?

It makes her stand out in the colorful crowd.

Reading between the lines of her journal, it seems the queen and her new husband invited very few, perhaps 50 of their 300 guests, to eat at the palace.

An even more select group sit at the table with the newlyweds.

The seating plan doesn't survive, but we've worked it out from clues in Victoria's journals.

She's between Albert and her uncle, the Duke of Sussex.

And you can see the declining of Melbourne's influence by the fact that he's several places away.

They've put him in the corner.

Where's Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent?

Well, she had to be here at the family top table, but she is right down the other end.

She's out of Victoria's eyeline and earshot.

Where's the Duke of Wellington?

Well, she was forced to have the nation's hero at the ceremony, but he hasn't made the guest list for the breakfast.

Records put the cost of the wedding at around the modern equivalent of just less than a million pounds.

It was a sensible, low-budget affair by Hanoverian standards.

The exact price of the breakfast isn't recorded, but we wonder what the recently rebellious public might have thought of this feast.

-The wedding breakfast was characteristically lavish and huge.

-Prince Albert was extraordinarily fastidious and squeamish about what he ate and was very easily upset by what he ate.

She, on the other hand, always loved guzzle, guzzle, guzzle.

And I bet that when she sat down to that great feast at the wedding breakfast, she shoveled it in, course after course.

And also, she had a very strong head.

She drank like a fish.

She wasn't an alcoholic, but she loved knocking back the booze, whereas Albert, one glass would have finished him off, probably.

-This is the roast capon for the second course.

Now, Mr. Ball's capons would have been castrated cockerels, but that's illegal in modern Britain.

You can only buy French ones.

This, therefore, is just a chicken.

The point of caponing, however, was that the birds became extraordinarily plump and luscious.

Quite superior to a normal bird.

-Here's the country life brought to the city table.

Asparagus standing to attention on a bread base, naturally served drenched in butter.

-Another capon dish, a key part of the second course.

These have been galantined, so boned out.

They've then been stuffed and then glazed with this chaudfroid sauce, which is a type of cream sauce set with the inevitable gelatin.

Everything is all about aspic.

They are then being beautifully decorated up.

These really are like little jewelry boxes sitting on the table.

-The culotte de boeuf features combs from the heads of cockerels on skewers interspersed with crayfish and mushrooms.

-This is the remove dish, so this is a really crucial part of it because you've got everything on the table, and then something goes out, the turbot, we'll say.

And then once this comes in, all the other dishes are then uncovered, and they can be eaten.

So this is quite a sort of key wow factor.

-When the waiting staff have delivered the meats to the table, the guests themselves have the pleasure of carving them.

Victorian diners abovestairs reveled in the artistry of the craftspeople down below.

A host was judged on their ability to find a great cook, and, of course, Victoria had the best.

Her head chefs were stars, and when they left the palace, they had their pick of jobs at grand hotels and restaurants.

So many dishes to get through, but Victorian diners knew to pace themselves.

One trick they had was to put mustard inside the ear.

It's supposed to deaden the nerve that tells the brain when the stomach's full.

Once she was queen, Victoria was distressed to discover that she was putting on weight.

She once asked Lord Melbourne about this.

He said, "You should only eat when you're hungry."

She said, "Well, then I'd always be eating."

Wave after wave of dishes are arriving and being consumed.

-Victoria was notorious for being an extremely fast eater.

And, of course, the protocols were that the minute the queen finished her food and put her knife and fork down, that was it.

The servants came in, whisked the plates away.

And there were always these complaints from members of the entourage that they never had a chance to finish what was on their plate because Victoria gobbled her food.

-It didn't help that since the 17th century, Britain had had a sweet tooth, and Victoria was no exception.

-That sounds good.

A bit of leakage.

-Oh!

[ Laughter ] -[ Gasps ] -Yes!

-Wah-hey!

Excellent.

The kitchens at the royal palaces were divided into divisions, and one of the most important was the confectionery division, which was in charge of sugar craft and that kind of thing.

But also jellies.

If you were Victorian and you had money and you wanted to show it, then you put molded foods on your table.

Not just jellies.

If it could be molded, then you'd mold it.

So this one is a molded fruit puree.

This mold over here, this is designed for cakes.

Or you've got something like this, which might well be used for a meat mousse.

Put it this way.

It would not be a Victorian wedding feast if we didn't have molded foods on the table.

-This confection of icing sugar, jam, and whipped cream is gateau ou feuilletage.

Laced with liqueurs that ooze at the first touch of the spoon.

-That looks precarious.

-Yeah.

It is.

-I sort of had a vision of what this would looked like based on reading the recipe, but you never really know until you see it.

I'm not sure I'd realized it was quite so, um, dangerous.

-Puff pastry is so delicate.

-But it's very light.

It looks like a sort of enormous cake, but actually, it's just very, very light cream and a really quite light jam.

This is actually almost a sort of cloud as a mouthful rather than an enormous great cake.

So much time and work that goes into it.

-There was a little bit of apprehension, for sure.

But, actually, I quite like it.

-The gateau had made Annie quake.

Would it collapse before it reached the table?

Now it's ready to ascend to the dining room.

Like all weddings, the ceremony and this meal were family occasions -- for some guests, one of the last of such gatherings.

Within four years, Albert's father, Ernest I, would be gone.

His son, Ernest II, would live to be 75... busy philandering, active in the arts and in German politics, and nearly becoming the King of Greece.

The Queen Mother would live for another 21 years.

She and Victoria would never fully reconcile, although after her death, the Queen would realize how much her mother had loved her and would be grief-stricken.

The Duchess of Sutherland would become a high-profile campaigner against slavery and remain the Queen's close friend, the person Victoria would cling to when Albert died.

In 1842, Baroness Lehzen would be dismissed by Prince Albert and go to live in Germany, where she'd die in 1870, surrounded by pictures of the queen she adored.

The grand finale of the feast is this mammoth cake, the mothership of a flotilla of cakes sent out to those who couldn't be in London for the big day.

The cake is sensational.

It's 9 feet in circumference.

It contains 300 pounds of fruit and 11 pints of French brandy.

The top part shows Victoria and Albert themselves rather incongruously dressed in Grecian robes.

There's so much sugar and brandy in the cake that it will last forever.

The guests were given slices to take home in special little tins, and sometimes they still come up for sale in auctions, so you could buy a bit, and, I guess, you could still eat it.

[ All gasp ] -After the cake is cut, Victoria and Albert rise and leave the table.

They've somewhere else to be, away from the madding crowd.

[ Applause ] She wrote, "I went upstairs and undressed and put on a white silk gown trimmed with swan's down and a bonnet with orange flowers."

At 20 minutes to 4: 00, Lord Melbourne came to see me.

-Perhaps she then finally realized how tired and exhausted he had been the last three years looking after her and nurturing her and helping her learn the job of being queen.

-Suddenly, their long-held roles are reversed.

She's in charge now, telling him to have an early night.

And then Albert comes in looking wonderful, and he's the one who carries her off, leaving poor Melbourne.

-Melbourne was very diplomatic with Albert.

He didn't entirely approve of his rather priggish personality, as he described it, but he understood that Albert was the right man to be Victoria's husband and to guide her.

-They were to be separated.

It is -- I can see why he cries.

I cry thinking about it myself.

So I think it's the most moving little moment in the whole day, really.

[ Clanking and whirring ] -It's 4:00.

Time to put the grime of the capital behind them.

The rain stopped, and the sun came out, and then they were riding west out of town towards Windsor.

They were deliciously alone.

They were in limbo.

They were free from all the formality and the pressure of Buckingham Palace, and ahead of them lay the fairy-tale Castle of Windsor.

The newlyweds spend the evening in her old rooms and have their supper delivered.

He plays her sweet music, and she swoons.

Victoria wasn't feeling very well, but nothing would stop her enjoying her wedding night.

-There is no other element of prudity in her.

She describes it frankly in her journals.

She describes the first night they spend as man and wife.

-As she wrote, "At 20 minutes past 10:00, we both went to bed.

Of course, in one bed.

To lie by his side and in his arms and on his dear bosom and be called by names of tenderness I have never yet heard used to me before.

It was bliss beyond belief."

But the passion soon went in another direction.

Very quickly, tension grew around the reigns of power and Victoria's insistence that Albert couldn't grasp them.

-Stockmar had brainwashed him pretty much that his primary duty was to sacrifice personal needs for the greater good.

-He had slightly picked up the wrong end of the stick from Stockmar, and Stockmar hadn't really got -- Although he was a brilliant man, he hadn't really got the hang of what British life was like.

And Albert thought, when he got to England, that he could become a sort of Absolute monarch.

Admittedly, spreading enlightenment ideas, but having far more power than he was ever going to be granted.

-The developing power struggle that would be one of the hallmarks of the 21-year marriage was obvious to the whole court.

Victoria held daily briefings with her ministers, but Albert was kept out of the room.

-Do you have a handkerchief?

-He needn't have worried.

It was just a matter of time.

-Rumors were going by as early as April that she was pregnant.

In many ways, she was quite conflicted because she knew that pregnancy would, little by little, kind of subordinate her.

-She doesn't want to give up her role as queen, and this is interfering with her boxes and her daily administration that she loves to do.

She doesn't even want to share it with Albert initially.

But I think the pregnancies force her to do this.

-Within a very few weeks, the Queen was, indeed, pregnant.

Little Princess Victoria was just the first.

The Queen began to long for the days when she and Albert could be alone.

-She didn't find babies attractive at all.

She thought they looked like little frogs.

She certainly never had any intention of feeding her own children, breastfeeding.

This is the woman who is supposed to be the mother of the nation, and yet she hates mothering children.

-Not surprisingly, being the queen, as well as Albert's wife, as well as the mother of all these children, began to take its toll on Victoria.

She started to experience symptoms that today might lead to a diagnosis of postnatal depression.

Even so, during this first decade of her marriage, she proved herself to be dutiful and spirited and pretty tough.

Albert and Victoria rescued the crown by creating a modern monarchy the masses could get behind.

They even used the latest technology, photography, in 1844.

What was said to be a retrospective wedding portrait proved very popular with the public.

-So, Victoria and Albert are a very modern couple.

They are a break from the past.

All the new innovations of the 19th century are happening on their watch.

-Prince Albert was obsessed with social welfare, the advancement of science, the development of the arts, and the total revision of the British Army.

-Albert was a brilliant administrator.

He was respected by all the politicians that he had to deal with.

He was creative, too, a real polymath.

The only thing he wasn't any good at was staying alive.

-For 21 years, for better or for worse, Victoria and Albert provided an example to the nation of a successful marriage.

When Albert died, aged just 42, their union continued.

-Victoria still had half of her life to go without Albert, another 40 years.

And for the whole of that time, she kept the memory of him alive.

If you look at her official portrait from her Diamond Jubilee -- that's 50 years on the throne -- she's still wearing her wedding veil.

It's part of her skirt.

When Albert died, she had a cast taken of his dead hand, I think so that she could go on holding it.

And when she herself died, Albert's hand went with her into her coffin.

This marriage that started with our wedding continued to the grave and beyond.

We remade that wedding to see how even the smallest detail was managed.

The choice of a small chapel that meant everybody was near to the couple.

The use of scale was masterful.

The small queen in the huge dress was vulnerable and powerful.

Albert's scarlet drew the eye, made the boy a man.

Without reliving it, we'd never have understood Victoria's placing of those she loved in her eyeline and those she distrusted out of it.

And most of all, we saw the story the public would be sold.

The new-style royals who believed in love -- a happy ever after for everyone.

[ Hooves clopping ] The wedding of Victoria and Albert saw the birth of a legend.

The legend of their powerful love that came to define her whole reign.

The brand of Victoria and Albert was born at this ceremony.

And on top of that, their new way of getting married affects the way that people still get married to this day.

-To order "Victoria & Albert: The Wedding" on DVD, visit shopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Also available on Amazon Prime Video.