-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.

It's going to be a big challenge, so I'm calling on a team of experts to help uncover every glorious detail of the wedding -- where the royal couple married, who was with them, the elaborate cake, the decadent menu, and the mother of all bridal gowns.

A white wedding that set the trend for all to come.

We'll discover art as propaganda, open Prince Albert's wardrobe, and search for the elusive music that was played.

Together, we'll step back to February 1840 to see how this wedding saved the crown.

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

-It was the wedding of the century, and this time, we're all invited.

It was the birth of a brand, the myth, the powerful legend of Victoria and Albert.

♪♪ [ Hooves beating ] -The Britain Victoria was born into was the richest nation in the western world.

Home to 14 million people, most of them living in poverty.

The average citizen was young and died that way.

During Victoria's 63-year reign, the population of Britain had doubled in size.

Suburbs blossomed.

So did the railway network.

And a queen who was born by candlelight lived to see electricity.

Not very much of the Britain Victoria grew up in survived.

Our story is set in the remains of the Regency world she was born into... in palaces and castles in fragments.

♪♪ This pocket handkerchief of a square is a jewel.

It's clinging on just behind what's now the modern Victoria station.

The square was built the year she became queen.

At the start of Victoria's reign, everything was smaller -- the houses, the carriages, even the people.

But expectations were great.

The pressure on this tiny girl was gigantic.

She'd only be 18 years old when she became queen.

She had a special lightweight crown made to sit on her little head at her coronation.

But despite her youth, clearly, she needed to get married and babied up.

[ Clanking ] But fully to understand the pressures she faced, we have to start at the very beginning.

The race to get Victoria to the altar began the day that she was born.

Early in the morning on the 24th of May, 1819, Victoria was born here at Kensington Palace in that first-floor drawing room.

Her father was King George III's fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent, and her mother was Princess Louise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, now Duchess of Kent.

We know a huge amount about Queen Victoria because she left us her thoughts, 141 volumes of them.

This room is Queen Victoria's childhood bedroom.

From the age of 13 here at Kensington Palace, she had been keeping a daily diary -- a journal.

The originals of these volumes are at Windsor Castle today, but anyone in the world can read them because they've all been put online.

She wrote about where she'd been, who she'd met, her hopes and her dreams, the weather.

♪♪ -Initially, she was very resistant to the idea of immediately marrying.

Victoria's priority was to spare herself the inevitably of marriage and producing a line of little babies to succeed and be in line to the throne.

She felt that onerous responsibility.

-Victoria always knew that she was destined for an arranged marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a small German family with a big place in history.

-They were connected with all the great royalty and all the huge dynasties of Europe.

-Victoria's mother was a Coburg princess.

This union was designed to strengthen the bloodline of the British monarchy and introduce progressive continental ideas.

[ Clanking ] Even though the plan to marry the cousins was hatched when they were babies, their first meeting was in London at Victoria's 17th birthday party.

The court held their breath.

According to the plan, romantic sparks would fly.

-Victoria wasn't terribly impressed by Albert.

She thought Albert was rather too plump, and he kept falling asleep.

-Ah, this is very nice in here.

I'm at the London home of one of Victoria's biographers, Andrew Wilson.

Andrew, what do you think happened the first time they were in the same room?

-He was very, very shy.

He was an awkward teenager.

He had hardly known any female companionship.

He had almost no females near him throughout his upbringing, so he'd had 16 years of an all-male, all-German atmosphere.

The other thing is, Albert had permanent diarrhea when he first met her.

The entire German party who came over had dreadful gastric attacks.

So it wasn't a very successful first encounter.

-I find it very striking that in her journal entry for that day, she describes meeting Albert, then there's a whole lot more about this parrot that she gets given as a present.

If she falls in love with anybody that day, it was with the parrot.

-It was with the parrot, exactly.

-Victoria's uncle, King William IV, didn't want a Coburger in the family and had often suggested other princes.

None of them amused her.

She wrote, "Prince Henry of Orange is an ugly and stupid-looking and timid young man."

When King William died in 1837, Victoria became queen, and now bachelors everywhere thought that they had a chance.

-A man called Lieutenant Gossett is seen hanging around Kensington Palace.

He claims he's the Lama of Tibet, which he clearly isn't.

J.H.

Frolick Jr. wanted to propose to her, claimed that he was King John I.

And then there was James Bryan, who was a rather eccentric Scotsman who came to Windsor and bothered her while she was coming out of church and said, very loudly, why didn't she show a bit of ankle?

-The key man in Victoria's life was her adored advisor and Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

He knew she must marry.

He must help her to do it, but he felt conflicted because he was in love with her.

-There were people shouting at her, "Mrs. Melbourne," in the gutter press, which suggests she might want to marry Melbourne.

-He was besotted by the young queen, but I don't think that this was a sexual relationship.

-But Prince Albert was still the suitor her mother's family wanted for Victoria.

She, however, was fed up with all this meddlesome matchmaking.

-I've had just about enough!

[ Stomps foot ] -So when, in the summer of 1839, Melbourne learned that a touring Russian prince fancied dropping by, the queen saw red, but not for long.

-Alexander swans in, looking gorgeous and tall and romantic and whispers sweet nothings to Victoria in French.

-She wrote, "He's tall with a fine figure, a pleasing, open countenance without being handsome.

Fine blue eyes, a short nose, and a pretty mouth with a sweet smile."

-The entourage around her got very anxious when they saw how, you know, the flirting was getting quite serious.

-First, the right boy was all wrong, now the wrong boy was very all right.

Of course, the Queen of Great Britain could never marry the future Czar of Russia.

Alexander's father orders him home.

[ Clanking ] In Germany, Albert's advisors saw that with romance in the air, it was the right time for Queen Victoria to receive another visit.

The love story began for real at Windsor Castle.

Victoria knew her duty... but remembered her unimpressive cousin.

Albert was her intended, but she wanted her freedom.

-She didn't like the idea.

She didn't want to have babies so soon.

She just didn't want to commit herself.

-Albert felt the same.

He hardly knew this girl, who'd already rejected him once.

His brother, Ernest, was with him for moral support.

-He makes up his mind that what he's going to do is break it off.

-He was extremely apprehensive about how things were going to turn out, and also feeling humiliated because really, you know, Victoria kept him hanging around for the best part of three years.

-The master marriage plan hung in the balance.

♪♪ -Suddenly, the frog of 1836 has turned into this gorgeous, gorgeous man.

-Victoria looks down, and she sees this vision of male beauty.

-From Victoria's point of view, it was pure, beautiful, gobsmacking love.

-Victoria is a real romantic.

She loved romantic novels when she was young.

When she saw him, she writes frankly.

She's not somebody who makes up these things in her journals.

She adores him.

-"It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert, who is beautiful."

Albert and Ernest stayed for several days, and on the 11th of October, he danced with her.

For Victoria, it was love.

Love at second sight.

♪♪ Four days later, the queen faced a difficult task.

A monarch can't be proposed to, so she had to ask the big question.

"I said to him that I thought he must be aware why I wished them to come here, that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished."

♪♪ -Will you marry me?

Please.

-I will.

-Victoria's journal reveals the depth of her feelings.

"I feel the happiest of human beings."

♪♪ -I've just met the most wonderful man.

I've just met a boy... -Victoria raced to share the good news with her dear friend, Lord Melbourne.

He wanted this marriage for her and for Britain, but he himself was broken-hearted.

-Of course, he was utterly bereft because he knew he was excess to requirements.

-He cried very easily.

He loved her.

They were to be separated.

♪♪ -The engagement of Victoria and Albert was the first step towards the altar and a wedding meticulously planned to make it the PR coup of the century.

Like all these women, we're starting our journey to Victoria's big day with the dress.

The wedding was so groundbreaking, we still feel the effects today.

Every modern white wedding dress is descended from the one worn by Queen Victoria.

She was the first to popularize white for brides.

Victoria took a special interest in the design of her dress, which is today kept in Her Majesty the Queen's private collection.

But at Kensington Palace, there are personal items that give insight into Victoria's taste as a young woman.

These rooms at Kensington Palace where Victoria grew up are stuffed full of vital research materials for our project, including her clothing.

This dress is from her early reign.

People looking at it often say, "But it's tiny!"

And she does here have a 24-inch waist, and you can really see that she wasn't very tall.

5 foot, 1 1/4 inches.

People who met her, though, often commented on her shapeliness.

One American visitor to the palace said that, like all English women, she had a very good bust.

I've come here today in search of one particular, very precious garment.

Okay.

Gloves on, gloves on.

Curator Claudia Acott Williams has in her care a tiny petticoat that belonged to Queen Victoria.

More than that, it's rumored to be the one she wore at the wedding.

-So, this is an unusual and quite rare survival from her early reign.

It's quite simple in its design, but it's the quality of the textile and the kind of masterful construction of which show us that it was made for a queen.

-So on her wedding day, she would have had to have worn something underneath, and this is -- Well, it was possibly even this one, wasn't it?

-Possibly.

I mean, we can't confirm that, but it would have been something very, very similar to this.

-We're going to remake her wedding dress for this project, and I know that the dimensions of this petticoat match the ones of the wedding dress itself.

-That's right.

This would follow very much the line of the dress, so we get a real sense of her shape and her stature at this point.

-There's nothing like seeing a person's underwear to give you a sense of who they really were.

-Yes, exactly.

-Naturally, the queen's garments were of the finest quality.

We've asked historical costumier Harriet Waterhouse to take on the challenge of re-creating her stunning bridal gown.

Now, Harriet, does the thought of remaking the wedding dress give you any particular problems, challenges?

-Well, I'm going to be sewing everything by hand.

But actually, once you get used to doing it by hand, you can be quite quick.

As for constructing the dress, it's quite simple, actually.

It's expensive and beautiful and romantic, but it's not showy.

It was said at the time that Victoria's dress and all the bridesmaids being in white set them apart from everyone around them and made them really shine.

-It's also said that they looked more simply dressed.

-Well, if you look at previous royal brides' dresses, traditionally -- very encrusted and glittering.

The lack of embellishment of a metallic sort is really very striking.

So she really did break the mold.

-It's the mother of all wedding dresses.

Harriet's task begins with research.

There are plenty of pictures of the wedding dress, not least in a painting of the ceremony by Sir George Hayter, who was actually there.

-The Hayter painting is probably the most realistic depiction that we have of the dress.

It's a gentle sort of bell shape, which was fashionable at the time.

Historical clothes are not just what you see in the painting.

The stuff underneath makes the shape.

This petticoat would have been worn over different layers.

She would have a chemise underneath, a corset, a couple of petticoats, and a crinoline.

Building up these layers is going to be important.

But really, all that people will see is the dress over the top.

-Authenticity demands Harriet works in antique measurements.

-I really love this.

This is a yard stick.

The yard is divided.

It's in quarters.

You see there's a pin for each quarter.

This quarter at the end is divided in half, and that's a finger.

The finger is divided in half, and that measurement there is a nail.

This little bit here, you can see the nail has been divided in half.

A little remnant of a pin there, and that was an inch.

Subtly not quite a whole inch as we understand it now.

Obviously, Victoria had her lace made specially for her.

That would be something that I attach.

This is fragile.

I'm going to have to do a little bit of mending on it.

But it's a wedding veil.

I'm going to hopefully get this a little bit whiter.

It's not quite as magnificent as Queen Victoria's, but it's a similar size, and she wore it just on the back of her head.

So her hair was up, and it was attached sort of there-ish, and it just hung.

-At the time, it was Italy and Belgium that were famed for making lace, but the queen would go elsewhere for this special order.

Historian Jasdeep Singh has come to the place given the honor.

-Victoria decided that for the exquisite veil and for flounces -- details around the neckline -- the lace had to be made not in Europe, but here in the village of Beer in Devon.

This was great for the lacemakers and was a good patriotic press story.

Victoria was buying British.

-The ladies at the Devon lacemaking association know how hard their predecessors must have worked to produce such a large quantity of fine filigree.

-The order comes through.

Is everyone pitching in?

How does that work?

-Yeah, there were 200 lacemakers.

I mean, it gave employment to the majority of the women and some of the men, as well, particularly sailors when they couldn't go out to sea.

And people would actually be working all day and all night, and we believe that for the latter part, lacemakers from other villages were brought in to get it up to London in time for February the 10th.

-It was quite literally all hands -- -It was all hands on deck with everybody who was involved in it.

It was hard work.

It was hard work.

-Queen Victoria was fond of lace in general?

-Oh, she was very fond of lace.

The National Archives at Kew record vast sums of money paid to embroiderers, lacemakers, lace manufacturers.

The amount of money that she spent over her reign equates really to about a million pounds in today's money.

-Wow.

Can you tell me a little bit about the process?

-Well, first of all, you've got to have a design.

The lacemakers would be given what was known as a sprig, which was an individual piece of lace, and they would make that design over and over and over again.

Queen Victoria would specify what she wanted in it.

-Are there any patterns remaining from the original dress?

-No.

Because they were all burnt.

-The pattern was destroyed?

-The patterns were destroyed so that the designs could never be made again.

-Wow.

-The queen's wedding lace meant so much to her, she'd wear it again at the weddings of her own children.

♪♪ Harriet isn't just making the wedding gown.

She's also dressing our guests in authentic clothing that will help them think and feel 1840.

-It's very exciting.

I've got a whole range of really lovely frocks.

Getting a load of dresses together is like creating someone's life.

-Among them, the two most important women in the queen's life -- one she loves and one she loathes.

♪♪ Dearly beloved by the queen, Baroness Lehzen is another German.

She was Victoria's governess and her best and only childhood friend.

German Princess Victoria is the queen's mother.

-I have a very big, lacy collar that will sit across your shoulders.

-Victoria couldn't forgive her for the strict upbringing she'd endured, and they rarely spoke.

The Queen Mother spent years plotting the marriage of her daughter and Albert.

♪♪ -Try that one.

-Yeah.

-The Queen Mother understands that this wedding is about public relations and how essential this is because she gave birth to Victoria to solve a previous royal PR crisis.

In the early years of the 19th century, the people had had enough of their kings, the Hanoverians.

Revolution was in the air.

The hatred was at its worst when Victoria was a child.

On the throne, King George IV, a vain, drug-addicted adulterer.

He inspired resentment and disgust.

-The monarchy was very close to extinction.

And there were revolutionary rumblings in Britain.

If you'd had another person like George IV sitting on the throne, you could have seen the monarchy being chucked out of the window.

-The king had done one thing right -- he'd produced a legitimate heir.

Charlotte, Princess of Wales, was the darling of the people.

She was a fine, decent queen in waiting, but she died in childbirth in 1817.

-She was the only legitimate grandchild of King George III.

He had lots of grandchildren, but most of them were illegitimate except for Princess Charlotte.

So she was the only possible heir to the throne.

And her death was a sort of national calamity.

Not only was this a terrible tragedy, this 21-year-old princess dying after a ghastly time in childbirth, but more than that, this was a possible sort of turning point for the monarchy.

I mean, it was so unpopular.

-Princess Victoria was conceived specifically to fill the gap left by her cousin Charlotte.

She must win the people's hearts, marry well, and save the monarchy, so she couldn't die.

-Victoria grew up here at Kensington Palace under a strict set of rules that became known as the Kensington System.

This is partly about her safety.

She wasn't supposed to walk up or down stairs without somebody holding her hand in case she fell, but it was also about mental control and surveillance.

Her mother even read her diary.

-The Kensington System sounds ridiculously rigid to us, but there was a point to it.

Had little Princess Victoria fallen down the stairs or fallen off her horse or died, that really would have been curtains for the British Monarchy.

-The harsh regime left Victoria with a distrust of her mother and hatred for her mother's right-hand man, John Conroy.

-Queen Victoria had quite good reason by then to hate her mother because the stupid goose, the Duchess of Kent, had thrown herself completely under the influence of Sir John Conroy.

And watching her mother fall for all the tricks that Conroy got up to, it was more than Victoria could stand.

-Victoria loathed Conroy and what he'd done to the mother she'd once been so close to.

Becoming queen would be about taking on the responsibility she was born to assume about duty and service and revenge, for one incident in particular.

A traumatic conflict of her childhood, which all played out, surprisingly enough, in a rented holiday house here in sunny Ramsgate.

The resort had long been a summer destination for minor members of the royal family, relatives of Victoria's who didn't own their own country houses.

♪♪ Victoria had been coming on holiday here since she was tiny.

She used to play on Ramsgate sands.

She loved the freshness of the air and the view.

In her journals, she described how there was nothing between us and France but the sea.

♪♪ -Victoria's mother decided to introduce her to her future public.

They took her 'round on this tour by rattling coach all over Britain.

But, of course, it wore Victoria out.

It was very, very exhausting.

-The tour ended in the autumn of 1835.

Victoria, tired and ill, came for a rest in the salty air of Ramsgate.

♪♪ The local papers wondered why she wasn't on the beach.

John Conroy said that she had a cold but privately declared it to be teenage nonsense and sent the royal doctor packing.

It was, in fact, a high fever and very probably typhoid.

Victoria was desperately ill. She was feverish, she was delirious... when Conroy tried to take advantage of her weakness.

♪♪ He came into this room, her bedroom, and he attempted to force her to sign a piece of paper.

-Wake up!

-She was to promise to make him her private secretary.

That would have made him the power behind her throne.

-Wake up!

Come on, now!

Wake up!

-Get out!

Get out!

-Conroy was also insane.

He believed that his wife, a Miss Fisher, was the rightful Queen of England, he should have been the Prince consort, and that this little brat -- and he hated Queen Victoria -- had no right to the crown.

-Victoria always found the memory of her illness and the Ramsgate affair very painful.

She never forgave her mother for her weakness over Conroy.

Two years later, when her ministers came at dawn to tell her of King William's death and that she was now queen, she noted in her journal that she saw them alone.

The Queen Mother was excluded.

Victoria never seems to have understood her daughter's grudge.

When Victoria became their queen, the nation once again felt hope.

She was the modern, decent ruler they'd waited for, and then... a few months before she met Prince Albert and fell in love, it all went wrong.

In the summer of 1839, the palace is tense.

The new queen has been doing some quite surprising things.

She's been testing the limits of her power.

Some of the things she's done have made her advisers wince.

[ Knock on door ] -Enter.

-Victoria's inexperience, combined with her temper, created two scandals that rocked the palace, outraged the press, and endangered the monarchy itself.

Scandal number one was just the latest battle in the ongoing war between Victoria and her mother.

The Queen Mother used to spend every waking hour with Princess Victoria.

Now she lives in a remote part of the palace, and her daughter only communicates with her by letter.

Victoria's frostiness extends to the Queen Mother's staff.

Lady Flora Hastings was a lady-in-waiting to Victoria's mother.

And she was known to have ridden by herself in a carriage with John Conroy.

Shortly after this, Lady Flora's belly mysteriously started to swell.

Victoria and her side of the court assumes the very worst.

-Lady Flora Hastings was suspected of being pregnant and possibly pregnant by John Conroy.

-John Conroy was a bounder and a cad.

-Poor Lady Flora had to undergo an intrusive, degrading, really horrible medical examination.

-Queen Victoria had made this appalling blunder.

There was no justification for the way she behaved at all.

She wasn't pregnant.

She was, in fact, suffering from cancer.

-The court was horrified.

How could anyone have thought ill of this innocent?

Melbourne made Victoria go to her bedside.

-She couldn't shake off this hatred of her mother, that by proxy, she also hated Flora Hastings.

-Her family releases letters that get into the papers of how she was accused and how she was humiliated.

And the press really turned against Victoria.

-In July 1839, Flora finally died of liver cancer.

The Queen's Carriage was hissed at in the streets.

-She had turned into an object of vilification, and people were throwing bricks and stones through the palace windows and smashing the windows.

-At this time, Britain had two main political parties -- the progressive Whigs and the more conservative Tories.

In May 1839, the Whig Party almost lost a crucial vote, and Prime Minister Melbourne resigned.

This triggered a change of government.

The queen was horrified when power passed to the Tories, who she loathed, and their leader, Sir Robert Peel, whom she disliked.

She was furious.

-As a token of her confidence, he wants her to dismiss some of the Ladies of the Bedchamber, Ladies in Waiting, who are married to Whig peers because he thinks the queen is too close to the Whigs.

And Queen Victoria says, "No, I won't do that."

She stamps her foot.

-Peel said, "Well, if that's your attitude, then I'm not going to be your prime minister."

And she thought that she'd won that round, not realizing, of course, that it showed that the government of the country couldn't go on unless the politicians, not the monarch, had control.

-Melbourne's Whig Party returned to government but was seriously weakened.

The Queen had disrespected parliamentary process, like a high-handed Hanoverian.

-The proper workings of the Constitutional Process were being messed with by just a little girl.

Melbourne was thought to be egging her on, like a lovesick old fool.

People, important people, began to think that she really needed a man to stop her from doing this sort of thing.

She needed a husband.

-Melbourne, in particular, realized that they needed something.

They needed to manage the news.

They needed some propaganda moment and a little bit of magic.

-This was the reason Albert was invited for that second visit -- the hope that a romantic story would provide the public-relations solution.

Love conquers all.

But could it prevent rebellion?

That was the big question on Melbourne's mind when the queen and the prince were married in the private Chapel Royal inside St. James's Palace.

To reconstruct the wedding as exactly as possible, we need to find a venue that feels like that chapel seen here in George Hayter's painting of the event.

While the ceremony could have taken place in a grand cathedral, Melbourne specifically chose somewhere small and intimate.

Now our challenge is to find a chapel with the same atmosphere.

♪♪ We've trolled images of dozens of churches, and that search has brought us to the Hampshire City of Winchester.

Come on in.

♪♪ Go on, go on.

A-ha.

♪♪ Now, this looks pretty good, I would say.

-It's perfect.

-Do you think that the search could be over?

-It's got the feeling, isn't it?

♪♪ -Richard II was on the throne when Winchester College, a boys' boarding school, was established.

-This fabulous paneling.

-Winchester College Chapel dates from 1395, so it's older than St. James's, but the proportions of it seem exactly right.

It's long and narrow, just what we want.

♪♪ Every wedding needs music, so we've called in composer Nick Ryan to investigate ours.

This chapel is right, visually, but are the musical facilities going to deliver the right sound?

-This wonderful and versatile organ is able to reproduce the sorts of tones played by the organ in the Chapel Royal which was built in 1711.

German precision is the very best when it comes to organs.

This organ is constructed according to the principles of Werkprinzip, which refers to the relationships between different parts or divisions of the organ.

[ Organ playing ] -Nick must also identify the music played on the organ.

At his studio in London's Somerset House, he's come up against a hurdle.

Victoria and Albert famously loved music, but what was played during their ceremony is hard to discover.

♪♪ -This piece I'm trying to learn on the piano is called "Serenade," and it bears all the hallmarks of a romantic art song.

And it's by Queen Victoria's favorite composer, Prince Albert's favorite composer, too.

It's by Prince Albert himself.

And this is another one of his called "Melody for Violin."

[ Violin music playing ] It's beautiful.

And you might be forgiven for thinking it was by Mendelssohn or Schubert.

He was such a music fan.

He went on to found some of the most important music institutions in the country.

And were it not for his duties, he could have been a prolific composer.

So, I find it really hard to believe that he had nothing to do with the music for his wedding, the most romantic day of his life.

♪♪ The music is such an important, creative atmosphere and emotion at a wedding.

I want to find out what music was played, who selected it, and why.

I've started where anyone probably would, with the Master of the Queen's Musick, who at the time was Franz Cramer.

-Did Albert and Victoria ask Cramer to write an anthem for their big day?

If so, where is it?

To find out, Nick goes to Oxford and to the Christ Church College Music Library.

♪♪ -Matthias, hi.

-Dr. Matthias Range, an expert in royal ceremonial music, has news for Nick, both good and bad.

-So, I've been doing some research, and I've come across this very obscure character called Franz Cramer.

What can you tell me about him?

Because he seems to be in this very important role of Master of the Queen's Musick and be writing music for her.

-What that meant -- they looked after the queen's music, which is music for state banquets and balls and these things.

But this was a chapel occasion and sacred music.

That's done by organists and choirmasters.

Completely different things in the royal household at the time.

-So he definitely didn't have any involvement in the wedding music?

-We can say it would be highly unlikely that he had any involvement.

-What do we know about the music that was there?

-We do know -- The reports tell us that when Prince Albert approached the chapel, they had some idea that the music could have been "See, the Conquering Hero Comes."

-By Handel.

-Indeed.

It was so well-known at the time, so just hearing that tune, people would have associated with those words, "See, the Conquering Hero Comes."

We do have one report of when the queen entered, and that tells us that Handel's -- Well, the subject of Handel's chorus "A Virtuous Wife Shall Soften Fortune's Frown."

Again, a sort of apt choice in music for the bride.

She is declared to be a virtuous wife.

-A melodic line just on the organ.

Albert was a great musician.

He was a composer.

He must have been absolutely desperate to be involved.

-It's the queen, the sovereign, the head of state, marrying some foreign prince.

They wouldn't have thought of asking him anything.

We do know two pieces we see on the table here, two choral pieces.

The so-called "Deus Misereatur" and "Anthem."

Nothing specially composed for the wedding, but playing repertoire music.

-So this was actually in popular use.

-Yes, up and down the country in cathedrals and bigger parish churches where they had a choir.

-And what about the second piece?

-There was one verse for four voices, and then there's one for two voices.

-Fantastic.

"Both riches and honor.

Cometh thee, cometh thee."

Lovely.

-Mm-hmm.

-So even the music was propaganda.

Bride and groom entered to music with a message -- his heroism, her virtue.

And the two choral pieces means Nick must find us a choir.

After the ceremony, the royal couple celebrated with the most lavish wedding breakfast -- more than 100 dishes dreamt up by the best chefs in Britain.

Food historian Annie Gray is taking up the challenge of re-creating the feast.

She's found the original menu.

Not just fit for any old queen, but seemingly created with this one's appetites in mind.

What was Queen Victoria's favorite food?

-Food in general was something that she would embrace.

One of her ladies in waiting recounts her sitting down to an afternoon tea at one point and putting away several slices of toast and cake and scones and getting to the end and looking with regret and going, "I suppose I should stop now."

-And what was food in general like then?

-A lot of butter, a lot of cream, a lot of brandy.

The meat is often larded, so that's sewing strips of fat through the flesh of animals.

This is a recipe book written by Charles Elmé Francatelli, who was the cook to Queen Victoria after William Ball, who was the mastermind behind the wedding.

So we are fairly certain that his recipes must have reflected the kind of thing he was serving for the queen.

The menu for that day, it's enormous.

There are, I think, about 100 or so dishes.

You've got lamb cutlets, which have been fried.

Fried bird, chicken.

-"Fried bird."

-Fried bird.

-On the opposite page, an outlandish dish which looks like a pile of eyeballs.

-And this is a timballo of macaroni, which is tremendously complicated.

That involves little tubes of macaroni cut up, put 'round a mold, then there's a mousse in the middle, and then there's chopped-up chicken breasts, and then that's been steamed, and then turned out of the mold perfectly.

I'd look at that and think, "I'm not sure how it will come out of the mold."

Or indeed how you would go about building it.

The most challenging thing -- this is gateau ou feuilletage.

It's 10 or 11 pieces of puff pastry that need to be piled up on top of each other with the outside then masked with meringue and then a sort of meringue steeple on top.

The risk is, you end up with a sort of Leaning Tower of Pisa effect as it slowly slides to one side.

-I'm glad to hear there are a few surprises and challenges thrown in for you, though.

-[ Laughs ] Well, yes.

-And since Queen Victoria's chef had sourced locally where possible, Annie will do the same, much to the surprise of her regular suppliers.

-So, I'm re-creating Victoria and Albert's wedding feast.

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

It's quite a long menu.

You've got mutton fillets, bird fillets, larded.

Sweetbreads, which we're going to lard.

We'll need some lardoons, as well, actually.

And the thing with the roast, they're all served with their heads and legs on.

Can I get a hare, and I need it whole so that I can skin it and leave the ears on?

I want a lot of meat, a lot of alcohol.

So I need probably about a gallon of brandy.

Well, it would have been a whole dessert course.

Cakes, bread pudding, jellies.

I need about two stone of sugar.

I do fear that this may have been the meal that broke Mr. Ball, the chief cook, because he retired a month later.

Ooh, it's quite heavy.

But it could also have been perhaps his swan song -- the pinnacle of his career.

So perhaps if I hold onto that thought, it will be a little bit less daunting.

-For our experiment, the sumptuous interiors of Holkham Hall in Norfolk are doubling for Buckingham Palace.

Built in 1764, it's only a little bit younger and suitably grand.

To re-create the wedding breakfast, Annie and her team must resurrect dishes from the distant past at speed in the Georgian kitchens.

-I'm going to see how disastrous this pudding is.

-Rehearsals are vital in a modern catering school.

-This is experimental.

I'm not quite sure of the amounts for this mold or whether the whole thing will split apart.

So what I want to do is I want to test it so there aren't any nasty surprises on the day.

I'd hate to serve Queen Victoria and Prince Albert a kind of split pudding.

Ooh!

It's looking good!

-Annie's biggest challenge, literally, is the giant wedding cake.

So big, it had to be baked in sections.

The first problem is the lack of original giant baking tins.

The solution -- Victorian metalwork specialist David Le Versha.

♪♪ -Copper has always been the best material to use for cookware because of the way it transmits heat.

I'm trying to see how people in those times worked with copper.

And sometimes you think, "Yeah, I know that's how they did it."

They weren't making everything machine-perfect.

The tin is quite large, so we're assuming it was made in two sections -- two D shapes.

170 years ago, they would have been doing what I'm doing here.

They'd mark it out probably with chalk.

Cut it by hand.

It's quite soft.

All hammered together tightly.

When the dish is finished, it has to be coated with tin to prevent the copper from oxidizing when it's in the oven.

Copper will oxidize, and it will poison anyone that eats the cake.

[ Laughs ] Eventually.

-The half-moon tin will make it possible to bake the towering edifice the 1840s way, in sections.

So Annie's next challenge is to find a baker.

[ Clanking ] In the winter of 1839, Melbourne began plotting what he knew would be the make-or-break nuptials that could revitalize the royal family.

He'd learned two important lessons from the mismanagement of Victoria's coronation 18 months earlier.

Every detail must be carefully planned for it to go without a hitch, so the press spectacle could be used to advantage.

-Victoria's coronation was a sort of comedy of errors.

-The ceremony was a huge undertaking and needed careful planning.

-It's an exhausting long ceremony of 5 1/2 hours.

-Queen Victoria was constantly wandering around.

Nobody had told her during the ceremony where to go to the lavatory.

-The Archbishop of Canterbury should have been a calming influence to this all, but chaos ensued when he gave the queen a ceremonial ring.

-The Archbishop put the ring on the wrong finger and jammed it on, so she had an agonizing time.

-The Bishop of Bath and Wells lost control of proceedings, accidentally turning over two pages of the Order of the Service.

-And then poor Lord Rolle.

-An ancient, 82-year-old peer, who came up to pay homage to the queen.

-So, of course, Lord Rolle fell back, goes down the steps, and people thought he'd died.

-Victoria breaks with protocol, stands up, helps him up.

And this is actually the big story of the day.

-Headlines told how the young queen had leapt from her throne to save a pensioner, and the coronation disaster became a PR hit.

Our art expert, Wolf Burchard, decodes John Martin's coronation painting that makes the accident the subject.

-What I think is so fascinating about this depiction is that it really departs from other representations of coronations.

And it's a hugely dramatic representation of the scene, of this huge cathedral and all the different figures, and very, very different from previous depiction of royal coronations.

Of course, this captures exactly what Melbourne wanted to avoid with the royal wedding -- a drama, a disaster.

However, he understood very well that this was a PR success and the value of spin.

-Melbourne knew that good press had to be integral to his staged management.

What he planned was stupendously audacious.

He had the idea of inventing a new tradition, to use the wedding to distract the British people from any thoughts of rebellion or revolution, and this would be vital for the future of the monarchy.

And given Melbourne's personal feelings, it was a sacrifice for him.

He was making a gift of love to Victoria.

♪♪ And it wasn't just the queen who needed a better public image.

Prince Albert was in trouble, as well.

-The Saxe-Coburgs are not popular with the British, and there's a lot of talk about German beggars and princelings coming to sort of help themselves to English queens.

-In the press, you will see cartoons of him as a German sausage shop owner shuttering up his sausage shop in order to come over to Britain to take advantage, really, of this wealthy young woman.

-One result of this is that Albert is voted a rather insultingly low allowance by Parliament, which Victoria is most annoyed by.

-She wrote, "Stephenson came from denizen to Lord M., wishing it to be reduced to 30,000.

I was frantic.

Lord M. feels like me about the meanness of all this."

The queen believed that Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, a leading Tory politician, was the person behind the salary injustice.

♪♪ Her request to have Albert made an honorary field marshal might have made matters worse, but her mind was made up.

How must her bookish fiancé have felt?

Jasdeep is a curator at the National Army Museum, which holds more than 80,000 pieces of uniform and equipment.

It's one of the most extensive collections in the world.

-I'm really interested in the psyche behind Albert, the thought process that Albert was going through, but to explore that through uniform, explore that through clothing.

A British officer's redcoat is iconic.

Even now when we put any uniform or clothing on, it transforms a person.

But if you're wearing the field marshal's coat, you're wearing something right at the top of the Army rank structure.

What might have that done to a man of 20, new to the country, keen on making an impact and a statement?

This is our sword store.

-In any age, there are very few field marshals, so surviving uniforms are rare, but Jasdeep has access to 180-year-old elements of the kind of uniform Albert wore.

-Oh, that.

-Albert went to his wedding knowing he'd be surrounded by senior soldiers.

Among them, the most famous field marshal alive.

-These actual epaulets belonged to the Duke of Wellington, worn on his shoulders.

Albert knows he's unpopular with the press.

He's unpopular with the British public.

He's German.

He is stepping into the highest position of the Army with no experience.

He's got grand old dukes like the Duke of Wellington standing over him and judging him.

And when he wears this uniform, there's a sense of Albert having to not just don the role of a field marshal, but also to fit that expectation, and that's a tall order.

But I'm a bit surprised by the size.

It just looks tiny to me.

It just looks so small.

-All the living field marshals were little old men, so strapping Albert couldn't have borrowed a uniform.

Where did he get it from?

This company on London's Savile Row were Albert's tailors.

But the bespoke suit takes weeks to make, and Albert was 48 hours from the altar.

-Albert only had the best, but could he have had a complex military uniform made in double-quick time?

-If Albert's wedding clothes were made for him, it would have been by this ancient tailoring house.

Curator James Sherwood has proof that he was in the order books straight after the wedding.

-This is the earliest letter that we have touting for business to Prince Albert for April 1840.

-So just after the wedding?

-Yes.

They acknowledge that he's been made the Colonel in Chief of the 11th Hussars.

-So he's only been made a field marshal a couple of days before the wedding.

What could the turnaround for a field marshal's uniform be?

-Because Hawkes & Co were such great military tailors, they know exactly what they're doing.

The house would have had an absolute legion of outworkers, so a tunic could be made within 24 hours.

There wouldn't be any problem with that.

So, yes, it's entirely possible that that could be done.

-All resources being thrown into this?

-It would be all hands to the deck for Prince Albert, absolutely.

-The final preparations for our royal wedding in Winchester College are under way.

[ Chorus singing ] Having discovered that there were two sung pieces of music for the service, Nick Ryan has enlisted a choir in the nearby town of Romsey.

[ Choir singing ] ♪♪ Harriet Waterhouse, still at work, on the wedding dress, embodies the essence of this experiment, understanding the past by reliving it.

-This is a fantastic dress to make because the materials themselves are top-notch.

This is duchess satin.

It has a lovely sheen to it, but not shiny.

It's particularly lovely, and you do find when you're sewing, that you have a feeling about the people who worked on it.

I shall be sewing and thinking about the seamstresses.

[ Singing continues ] ♪♪ -The huge tin has been delivered to Smiths the Bakers in King's Lynn.

They will be taking on the big bake, but, then, they do have the Royal Warrant to purvey cakes to the queen when she's at Sandringham.

Now they're working for her great-great grandmother.

♪♪ -There's over 200 eggs going in the completed cake, 64 pound of butter, which is 128 packs.

Cherries, currants, and plenty of brandy.

If anyone left their reception sober, I'd be surprised.

What's worrying me is the size and the weight of it because it's going to take eight of these tins to make a full-size cake.

If it weighs anything like the original one, which was 300 pounds, that is not easily moved about.

We've got to get it right.

[ Laughs ] -Once the fruity layers are baked and decorated, Paul will face the ultimate challenge -- getting the giant wedding cake, the culinary star of the show, safely up to our palace dining room.

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

Also available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪ ♪♪