– I hadn't realized at that
time that 65% of people died in childbirth, so I hadn't
realized how prevalent. I knew it was a big danger,
but it was extremely, extremely common so the
moment you became pregnant there was always the fear that. – [Albert] You are with child. – You may die, which is
shocking to even kind of try to consider today. I'm afraid. So that side of the story was
really, really interesting, and obviously we know she
went on to have nine children, but it's very much a
prevalent fear in those days and something to be afraid of. – Childbirth is a dangerous business. Look what happened to Princess Charlotte. – The last heir to the throne was a woman called Princess Charlotte, and she died in childbirth. Awful labor, she died, the baby died, and that
meant that everybody had to get married and have
more grandchildren, and that's how Victoria
ended up being queen.
So childbirth is a
really dangerous business in the 19th century and Victoria, we know this from her diaries, really dreaded to having children. – What are you doing? – [Daisy] She wasn't a natural mother, even though she had nine children, what she really enjoyed was sex. She didn't necessarily
like what came after. – Lehzen said if I didn't want to have children right away. – So what I try to do in the series is to show her trying to negotiate how she might not have children right away with some very primitive ideas of what might work contraceptive-wise, and also when she does get
pregnant she's really scared because there's probably a 50%
chance that she's gonna die because the other thing of
course is if you're queen, the doctors are terrified of
intervening or doing anything because nobody wants to be the
person who killed the queen. – You know, the whole world
would have me trussed up in bed all day. That's hardly my style, is it? – She writes afterwards, she said that she refused to breastfeed. She said, "I'm a queen, not a cow." So she's got quite different
views to all of that than we might have now.
With her seventh child,
they'd invented chloroform by that stage, and she decided to use it, and she had to get permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury
because the Church felt that it was incumbent on
women to suffer during labor and she had to get permission
to have pain relief. But then she did have pain relief and she said it was a
blessing and then after that, she was the person who
paved the way for all women to have pain relief during labor. So, that's one thing all
women can thank Victoria for..