Lucy Worsley Talks Richard III, ‘Bridgerton,’ and Channeling Her Inner Gillian Anderson in ‘Lucy Worsley Investigates’

There are few historians working in TV today who can make the past come alive quite like Lucy Worsley. The British historian, author, presenter, and Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces has taken us into the feminist origins of British Romance, the palaces of the Russian Tsars, and even to Henry VIII’s Christmas table.

Worsley’s latest historical docuseries on PBS is called Lucy Worsley Investigates. The four part series, with two episodes premiering this month and two more this fall, casts Worsley in the role of detective. Her cases? Some of the most contentiously debated episodes in British history. Lucy Worsley Investigates will look into the mysteries of who killed the Princes in the Tower, what affliction caused the Madness of King George, what sparked the Jacobean Witch Craze of the late 16th Century, and what really happened during the infamous Black Death. Worsley partners with scholars and scientists to look at the real, hard-boiled evidence in each case. More importantly, she uses each mystery to examine a bigger picture, whether it’s about childhood in medieval times or the historic lack of mental health resources for the poor.

Decider recently caught up with Lucy Worsley over Zoom to go over the nitty-gritty of what it takes to make a show like Lucy Worsley Investigates. We discussed everything from how Worsley curates her famously chic wardrobe for her specials to how involved other people are with her scripts. Worsley also opened up about whether or not she thinks Richard III did “kill” his young nephews, Prince Edward and Prince Richard, in the Tower of London, and how she feels about the fact that many people have gotten their first introduction to “the Madness of King George” from Netflix’s steamy soap Bridgerton…

**Minor spoilers for Lucy Worsley Investigates ahead!**

DECIDER: How did the idea for Lucy Worsley Investigates come to you? How did you decide to focus first on the Princes in the Tower and the madness of King George?

LUCY WORSLEY: We thought it would be fun to look at stories from history that people might still talk about at the water cooler, if you like. Certainly where I work at Hampton Court Palace, we talk about this kind of thing at the water cooler. We love a historical mystery and we thought we’d select ones where there still seems to be some element of the unknown, something that was confusing, something that was mysterious. What links the four mysteries that we’ve chosen, because there’s two more in the autumn, is that we felt it would be fruitful to look at them from a different perspective because normally with history, you get sort of the top down view. I’ve been so guilty of this myself. I did a lot of programs about kings and queens and great men and great women. We thought it would be fruitful to maybe look at history from the bottom up, through the worm side if you like, through the eyes of people who didn’t have power at the time. See if we get a fresh perspective, and I hope that we did. It was fun to try, anyway.

A very silly question: one thing I’ve always been dying to ask you is how you come up with your wardrobe for each different special. They always seem to be in tone with the topic or the place or the time. Sometimes you wear traditional garb from a certain time period. How do you come up with these amazing costumes? How did you arrive on the look for this program?

This is very perceptive of you, Meghan! Sometimes the subject matter is quite dark. We are talking about the murder of children, we’re talking about mental health, we’re talking about a woman who was accused of witchcraft. There wasn’t any dressing up on my part [in Lucy Worsley Investigates], it didn’t seem appropriate. I never thought anybody would notice and ask, but there’s a series in the UK that was called The Fall where Gillian Anderson was this amazing powerful female detective and in it, she wore a pale silky blouse and she wore a black skirt and she wore high heeled shoes. So I am channeling the character played by Gillian Anderson in The Fall in my investigation of the past.

That’s great, I love that! Also on a more dry scale, I’m perpetually intrigued by how you weave in primary sources to the program. Whether you’re going in person to a place where the subject lived, whether you’re dealing with artifacts from the time, how important is it for you to weave in those primary sources for the audience? What is it like working with various libraries and institutions to source those?

This series, we’ve taken a bit of a risk with it, actually. The series is about history, but it’s also about the work of the historian. It’s about the journey of investigation the historian goes on, and that really does involve evidence. And we do get down and dirty with the evidence here, which to me is such a joy and a privilege and going to places and handling original documents, but it also could be a woman at a desk reading something. I hope it doesn’t come over like that. I hope that we manage to bring to life the thrill of the chase, the smell of the paper that really does get into the blood of historians and send our pulses racing. It was all about that thrilling journey you could go on through the archives following one piece of paper to another to tell a story. That’s why it was kind of fruitful to my mind, to follow the stories through the eyes of people who don’t often get their say like the woman who was accused of witchcraft, like the woman who was a patient in a Georgian mental health facility and actually experienced some really awful things. It’s also a celebration of their lives, they are remembered, we can honor their presence in history and the way we can do that is through tracking their presence through paper.

As soon as I knew you were doing the Princes in the Tower, I wondered to myself if you knew about the Richard III Society and what you thought of them, because I remember them being prominent in the exhumation of his tomb in the car park. I’m curious why you included them and let them sort of speak their case and what you think they say about… I feel like you were touching upon this idea on why it’s important to not enter historical investigation with biases.

Yes, the Richard III Society, a fabulous group of people who have done so much historical research and publish historical research. They’re a great force for good in the world of history. Of course, we had to invite them into the tent to talk about their different theories.

Where they and I differ is I think probably that he did do it, they think probably that he didn’t. What we’ve been able to do in our episode that’s really cool — it’s just amazing, because nobody would’ve thought that there could be any new archival discoveries in this area that’s been so well gone over — but the historian Tim Thorton comes to the show with this evidence that he discovered which is just a piece of paper, but he adds to the credibility of the source Thomas More. So Thomas More is the main source — well, it’s the fullest source — that says Richard III did it. The downside is people say it was Tudor propaganda, he was writing 30 years later, he wasn’t an eye witness to what he was discussing… What Tim Thornton’s discovery does is put Moore in touch [with witnesses]. He was at the same place at the same time, he knew the son of the man who was fingered with the murder, so there’s this a sort of chain of circumstantial evidence that builds up the credibility of Thomas More, to the detriment I’m afraid, of the innocence of Richard III.

But on top of that, this is something where I think people get hung up too much. People think about this question, “Did Richard III do it or not?” and they think of it like a detective story. They talk of him like a suspect in a case, and I really feel that’s being seduced by the great man theory of history, that it’s all about the King. What we were able to do is sort of pull out the cast, the characters, to think about the political culture of the time, think about others who had skin in this game like the victims, like the princes themselves. It’s quite a kind of subtle thing to kind of explain in a short interview like this, but we wanted to just widen the perspective.

On that note, I noticed that you took pains to give us a point of view of Prince Edward, who we don’t really think about as a living child, we just think of him as that beautiful deified image from the Victorian era. Is there a reason why we didn’t hear as much about his brother Prince Richard? Is it just a lack of primary sources? Is there anything, any little tidbits about the princes that you wanted to include but couldn’t because of editing or what have you?

Actually that is a point there wasn’t really room for. We did talk a little bit about medieval concepts of childhood and we made the point that yes, people love their children and that’s kind of a fallacy that people have about the past, that they were treated as little economic units and it was their job to work for the family and it didn’t matter if they died. That is wrong. People clearly loved their children in the past. What there wasn’t room to include, though, was the idea that even these very young men, the two boys, would be trained in the art of war. So you were incredibly young when you went into the battlefield. In a way, the Victorian idea that childhood is a special time of innocence, I would’ve liked to be able to unpick that a little bit more. Because children did mature incredibly early and it’s astonishing to think about some of the battle leaders in the War of the Roses only being in their teens, that sort of thing. And the court of Henry VIII in the next century, it was basically full of teenage boys. I wonder if it was a kind of boisterous kind of place.

Another question I had about the Madness of King George episode is that a lot of people, friends of mine who aren’t as into history as I am, might be first learning about this topic through Bridgerton. They have King George as a character on the show and there’s going to be a spin off of his early days with the Queen. How do you as a historian feel about the general populace finding out about these incidents from a soapy Netflix show? Do you think there’s any merit to how they’re trying to do it?

I feel really divided on this because as someone who works in the field of history, I’m happy to take any tool at all that will get people over the threshold and into the world of the past. I’m not proud. I see myself as being the thin end of the wedge. That’s why I’m quite happy to lark about in costumes as I do from time to time. Anything to make people who don’t like history think, “Okay, maybe there’s something for me here.” And I will take a period drama absolutely.

What I worry about, though, is that people sometimes say, “Is ‘so and so’, a period drama, accurate?” And as a historian I’m thinking, you’re making a category error even asking me that question. People don’t make drama to be accurate. They make drama to tell a story, to give us insight into the human condition, to express character, to give us knowledge about the world and ourselves. And if you want to find out what happened, then you need to watch a really well-researched history documentary, don’t you? Don’t watch Bridgerton, watch my show instead! [laughing] But I know that this will never go away and the only history that a lot of people will ever touch will be in drama, so I need to get over myself and stop being cross about that.

I just also want through shows like mine, to show people not just what happened in the past, but how a historian finds data, what skills do historians have, and one of those skills is asking questions about the evidence and the kind of basic question is, is this thing fact or is it fiction? Does it purport to tell the truth or is it an artistic representation of the past? Which is a very different thing. It’s like working out between news and fake news, isn’t it? Although, that’s not quite a fair comparison because fake news is produced very often by bad actors and I’m not saying the people who produce period dramas are doing that. They’re not setting out to trick us, they’re setting out to entertain us, so that’s a noble aid in itself.

Like Shakespeare. You mention how some early historians cite him as a primary source and he was just making a period drama for his own time.

He was, which is really relevant to Thomas Moore, who was the key source for Shakespeare’s Richard III. That’s a very interesting comparison, I suppose. That does show how gullible people can be, which is that they’ve taken a period drama, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and believed it to be true. That’s why I’m here tearing my hair out all these years later in a sense.

On the history note, I’ve noticed for both specials you’ve cited as consultants: Professor Tim Thornton, who you mentioned, Arthur Burns, Julia Richardson… How much did you rely upon them for factual research? When you’re making the scripts for these specials, how much of it is you? How much of it is the research that you’re doing? How much do you collaborate?

I often feel sad really that people see me on screen and think that I’m somehow omniscient and I just know all this stuff. No! Behind the scenes, there’s a huge, huge team of people. It’s one of the reasons it’s fun to make a TV program is because it’s so collaborative and I genuinely learned so much from doing it from people like Arthur Burns and Tim Thornton and Turi King, the geneticist. It’s like going back to school for me, I’m learning stuff the whole time.

The script gets written several times. It gets written as a treatment, that’s the first stage. Somebody goes, “Yes, we’d like a program roughly along those lines.” Then it gets written in the form of a shooting script that says what we’re going to cover. And then it gets rewritten in the moment, if you like, when we do an interview with a contributor or when I deliver a piece to camera because I’m often just sort of changing or riffing on the ideas that I’ve been given. And then in the final stages, it gets gone over very carefully by the whole team in the stage of tidying up and fact-checking and putting all the pieces into the right order. That’s a little insight into the stages of the writing process, if you like. But it’s definitely not my voice, I’m speaking on behalf of a large and wonderful group of people.

I understand the next two installments are the Black Death and the Witch Craze. Is there anything you can tease about those two that you’re excited for people to see? Was there anything surprising you learned? How amped should people be for the fall episodes?

We’ve got two really contrasting stories here. Both of them quite dark stories. The first of them is about a midwife in Scotland in the later 16th century who was accused of witchcraft and who was killed. She was executed. It’s a sad story that these things happened to her. It’s also a sort of celebration of her because we’ve been able to tell the world that she existed and to chase her through the archives and to find out stuff about her life that would never otherwise have been recorded if she hadn’t been investigated for this supposed crime of witchcraft. And it’s actually really timely because just in Scotland this year on International Women’s Day, their prime minister announced an official pardon for all the women who were accused of witchcraft in this particular craze in 16th and 17th century Scotland. It happened all over Europe but it happened particularly in Scotland. I’m really happy that they did that. I can see why people care about it because there are echoes of this sort of treatment of women in the world today. There shouldn’t be, but there are. And there are countries in the world where witches are still hunted. I say “witches”, but people who are still accused of witchcraft and things are happening as a consequence of it.

And then the other one is again, a horrible but slightly positive story about a woman, Olivia Cranmer. I don’t want to make it out like it’s a happy story, it’s not, it’s just devastating to think about that level of mortality. In fact, when we were doing that one, I asked one of the leading historians of the Black Death, Professor John Hatcher who appears in the program, I said, “Why would anybody study the Black Death?” and he said, “‘Cause it’ll make you feel good about coronavirus.” Because the mortality was possibly half the population. This is the thing about history, there’s never all good or all bad. What it did do was reduce population so that standards of living could rise and in the wake of the Black Death, there was kind of the equivalent of, you know the Great Resignation that you read about in the papers today, people coming out of coronavirus and thinking, “I don’t want to go back to the rat race, I’m going to give up my job!” The workers did that in the wake of the Black Death. They said, “We want higher wages, c’mon! We’re not going back to work for you lot, we can see that you need us more than you used to.”

Do you see this series being something that could go beyond these four episodes? Are there other mysteries you’d like to tackle? Are there any non-British historical mysteries you could see yourself delving into that you’d love to?

I really hope that viewers get to enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it because you can see that you can take this approach to other historical mysteries. I couldn’t predict which ones they are though, because what we would have to do, if we were to get the challenge to do this, is to think in that moment, what is going to appeal to people now? Because the Black Death, it wasn’t a response to coronavirus, but that was very much in the back of our minds because we were seeing parallels with stuff we’d experienced and what they were experiencing then. So we’d have to see what was at the top of the agenda in the moment when we were picking what we were going to talk about.

Lucy Worsley Investigates premieres on PBS this Sunday, May 15 with an episode about the Princes in the Tower.