Having six wives and beheading two of them is not the sort of behaviour recommended in parenting manuals.

But the creator of the Victoria television drama has called out the double standards which see Queen Victoria dubbed a “bad mother” while Henry VIII’s dubious record as a father goes unmentioned.

“Victoria is not judged by the same standards as as other monarchs because ‘she’s a woman’, and part of me wants to redress that,” said Daisy Goodwin, explaining why her show is largely sympathetic to the queen.

“She gets judged on her parenting skills in a way that doesn’t happen with male monarchs: we don’t criticise Henry VIII for being a bad father, for example,” she told Radio Times.

Victoria is often portrayed as a woman who adored her husband, Albert, but had little interest in her nine children. She wrote in her diaries that “I find no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the older children”, and “an ugly baby is a very nasty object”.

As the family grew, she sometimes went weeks without seeing some of her children.

However, Goodwin said the idea of Victoria as a bad mother is a “misogynist myth”.