ON THIS DAY THIS HAPPENED · THE ARTICLE COLLECTION
Royal scandals, forgotten lives and moments that changed everything. Take a little longer with the stories behind them.
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167 articles
7 MIN READ ·
She told her brother she would marry the old French king if he gave her one promise. He promised. She sailed. She kept her word. The question was whether he would keep his.
5 MIN READ ·
She was pregnant seventeen times. She buried every child. History calls her the last Stuart queen, the first Queen of Great Britain, the monarch who presided over the birth of a nation. She was also a woman who ran out of children before she ran out of grief, and the nation she built died with her, and by the end she had lost almost everything a person can lose and was still required to be a queen.
3 MIN READ ·
Her brother would not go so she made a choice. What Edward I of England built in response is the measure of what it cost.
5 MIN READ ·
His wife had an affair and was imprisoned for thirty-two years. In 1714 he became King of Great Britain. He kept a mistress throughout their marriage without consequence. His mistress claimed the titles and wealth of a kingdom while his wife remained locked inside a castle she was not permitted to leave.
5 MIN READ ·
She was four years old when they sent her to France to live with the thirty-one year old man she was going to marry. Six years later her mother married him instead. Then they sent her to Scotland.
5 MIN READ ·
She was betrothed at six. Married at fourteen. Pregnant at fifteen. Dead at twenty-four. In the nine years between her wedding and her death she was pregnant for the majority of them. Nobody asked her about any of it.
5 MIN READ ·
Diego Velázquez painted her at three years old. Then at five. Then at eight. Then at nine. Her father sent every portrait north to Vienna so that the man she was going to marry could watch her grow up. That man was her uncle.
6 MIN READ ·
Every dynasty in Europe practised strategic marriage. The Habsburgs practised it on themselves. Maria Antonia of Austria was the result.
2 MIN READ ·
The death of Catherine-Charlotte de Gramont on June 4 1678 brought a quiet end to a life defined by open defiance of her marriage and high-profile romantic liaisons at the French court. She was the daughter of Antoine de Gramont, a Marshal of France, and a grandniece of Cardinal Richelieu. In 1660, she married Louis Grimaldi, the Duke of Valentinois and heir to the throne of Monaco, in an alliance designed to strengthen ties between the French nobility and the sovereign Grimaldi family. When her husband ascended the throne as Prince Louis I in 1662, she became the Princess consort of Monaco.
5 MIN READ ·
He gave testimony that the court used against his wife. He spent the rest of the year making it right.
4 MIN READ ·
She was the daughter of a gravedigger and she had married a man who cleaned latrines.
5 MIN READ ·
She was known as the Wise Wife of Keith. That was her title before they gave her another one.