6 MIN READ ·
Mary Grey and Thomas Keyes: The Smallest Grey Sister's Secret Marriage
Her sisters had aimed at thrones and died for it. Mary Grey aimed at a palace gatekeeper and a quiet life. Elizabeth imprisoned them both anyway.
ON THIS DAY THIS HAPPENED · THE ARTICLE COLLECTION
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Royal scandals, forgotten lives and moments that changed everything. Take a little longer with the stories behind them.
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214 articles
7 MIN READ ·
Katherine Grey: The Secret Marriage and the Tower
Katherine Grey was twenty years old, eight months pregnant, and standing outside Robert Dudley's bedroom in the middle of the night asking him to help her. She had a secret husband, a missing marriage certificate, and a cousin on the throne who would never forgive her for any of it. She had done nothing except fall in love at the wrong time and with the wrong man. She was trapped in the wrong body. It was a body that carried royal blood she had never asked for and could not give back.
3 MIN READ ·
Cranmer's Court at Dunstable Priory, 10 May 1533
On this day the 10th of May 1533, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer opened a court at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire to determine whether the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon was valid. Catherine was not there. She had refused to attend, refused to recognise the court's jurisdiction, and refused to accept that a man personally appointed by the husband trying to be rid of her was an appropriate person to decide whether that husband was entitled to be rid of her.
5 MIN READ ·
Gwenllian of Wales: The Last Prince's Daughter, Shut Away at Sempringham
Caernarfon Castle was not built to be beautiful. Edward I of England began it in 1283 as a statement pressed in limestone against the throat of a conquered nation, its banded stonework and eagle towers rising from Welsh earth to say, in the language of stone that kings have always preferred, that Wales was finished. The castle was the full stop at the end of a sentence Wales had not agreed to speak.
8 MIN READ ·
Frances Brandon: The Mother of the Nine-Days Queen
Her daughter was queen for nine days and beheaded at sixteen or seventeen. Frances Brandon attended to the consequences, settled the estate, and remarried within months. She lived for another decade. History has never quite known what to do with her. Neither, probably, did she.
6 MIN READ ·
Mercy Otis Warren: The Woman Who Wrote a Revolution Without Her Name
She wrote the words that helped start a revolution. She wrote them without her name on them, because the era did not permit a woman to write politics under her own name, and she had things to say that could not wait for the era to change.
11 MIN READ ·
Elizabeth I: The Last of Henry VIII's Children
She was the last of them. Every other child Henry VIII had wanted, made, or broken was dead before she took the throne. She had survived them all by learning, very young, that need was the thing that killed you.
4 MIN READ ·
Inês de Castro: Killed at Coimbra, 7 January 1355
They killed her while Pedro was away. They made sure of that.
7 MIN READ ·
Lady Jane Grey: Queen for Nine Days
She was queen for nine days. She had not asked to be. On the morning of her execution she was blindfolded and could not find the block. She said quietly, where is it, where is it, and someone guided her hands to it. She was sixteen or seventeen years old. She had spent the nine days writing letters asking to be allowed to go home.
8 MIN READ ·
Tadeusz Kościuszko: The Will Left to Free Jefferson's Slaves
He came to America with nothing and left it all to the slaves of the man who was supposed to free them. The man did not free them.
5 MIN READ ·
Olympe de Gouges: The Rights of Woman and the Blade, 1793
She was executed, the record states, for sedition and for having forgotten the virtues which befit her sex.
10 MIN READ ·
Edward VI: The Answer to Henry VIII's Question
He was the answer to a question that had cost Henry VIII a church, two marriages, and several lives. He was fifteen years old when tuberculosis made the question relevant again.