Profs and Pints Online presents: “Royal Messes,” a look at the British royal family’s long history of scandals, with Julie Taddeo, professor of British history at the University of Maryland at College Park.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Oprah Winfrey's widely watched interview with Harry and Meghan, a.k.a. the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, exposed how the royal family was torn apart by accusations of racism and misogyny and has been generating fodder for royals-obsessed media ever since. This ugly dispute within the royal family is hardly the first, however. Rather, it’s just the latest in a long line of such scandals dating back centuries.

Learn about royal scandals dating back to the early 1700s with Julie Taddeo, a scholar of British history and culture who previously gave an excellent Profs and Pints Online talk about Bridgerton and romance in the Regency Era. You will come away with a knowledge of how the conflicted relationship between the monarchy and celebrity culture is centuries old, with tabloids wielding the power to make or break certain royals.

We’ll start our journey through time in Georgian Britain, when newspapers began treating royals as celebrities subject to the demands and whims of public opinion. Then we’ll meet the Prince Regent (later George IV), caricatured relentlessly by the press as a drug- and food-addicted, pleasure-loving "Prince of Whales," and learn about how his attempt to divorce his own queen tore the country apart in 1820.

We’ll learn how rumors about Queen Victoria's affairs, first with Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and later with her horseman, John Brown, reminded the most powerful woman in the world that she needed to behave. Meanwhile her oldest son and heir to the throne, known as “Edward the Caresser,” engaged in one extramarital affair after another. (Edward's favorite mistress was the grandmother of Camilla, the former mistress and now wife of Prince Charles, whose own disastrous marriage to and divorce from Diana has recently been chronicled in The Crown.)

To put in historical context “Megxit”—Meghan and Harry’s resignation from certain royal duties and departure from England—we’ll look at how Meghan has been compared (usually unfavorably) to two figures: George III's wife, Queen Charlotte, whose mixed-race heritage was hinted at in Bridgerton, and American divorcee Wallis Simpson, blamed for Edward VIII's abdication in 1936.

Professor Taddeo will show what these scandals tell us about the larger social and political contexts in which they occurred, with the latest Harry and Meghan scandal being compared to Brexit and exposing a backward-looking society steeped in nostalgia for an imperial, racist past. Lastly, she’ll discuss how today’s pop culture represents the royal family in works such as The Crown, Bridgerton, and Victoria, and she’ll take on the question of why we still care about an institution that some say is well past its due date.

Profs & Pints Online: Royal Messes