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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220 articles
4 MIN READ ·
She was a poor illiterate servant girl from Kent who told the King of England to his face that God would destroy him if he divorced his wife. He could not execute God. He executed her instead.
5 MIN READ ·
His grandfather had put the Tudors on the throne of England. Henry VIII took his head in return.
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He told every court in Europe he was the son of Henry VIII. Henry VIII never said a word on the subject, which is either the most eloquent denial in Tudor history or the most expensive silence.
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He sent his niece to the block in 1536. He sent another niece to the block in 1542. He survived both. Thomas Howard always did.
5 MIN READ ·
His father died carrying the Tudor flag before Charles Brandon was old enough to walk. He spent the next sixty years making sure he never had to carry anyone else's.
4 MIN READ ·
Henry VIII's favourite sister made him a promise before she agreed to anything. He kept it. She collected on it the moment the old king of France was cold. Mary Tudor was born on 18 March 1496 at Sheen Palace, the fifth child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the youngest of their children to survive infancy, and by the time she was a teenager the Venetian ambassador had described her as a paradise.
5 MIN READ ·
Margaret Tudor was born on 28 November 1489 at Westminster Palace, the second child of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, the first daughter of the new Tudor dynasty that her father had won at the point of a sword at Bosworth Field four years earlier.
4 MIN READ ·
Sir John Perrot was born around 1528 in Pembrokeshire, Wales, the third child of Sir Thomas Perrot, a Welsh gentleman of some standing, and his wife Mary Berkeley. His father Sir Thomas died in 1531 when John was approximately three years old, and John grew up in Wales under his mother's care with no particular reason to be remembered by anyone outside the county.
4 MIN READ ·
Henry Fitzroy was born on the 15th of June 1519 at Blackmore Priory in Essex, the son of Henry VIII and Elizabeth Blount, a lady of the court whose dancing the king had particularly admired, and he was acknowledged from the moment of his birth with a thoroughness that made his status perfectly clear and his legal position perfectly impossible simultaneously.
4 MIN READ ·
Katherine Howard was born around 1523, the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, into a family that had the right surname and almost none of the resources that surname was supposed to guarantee. Edmund Howard was the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, which made him well-connected in the way that younger brothers of powerful men are always well-connected, adjacent to consequence without any of its material benefits.
5 MIN READ ·
The Roman Empire invented the import/export economy, concrete, central heating, and a dental hygiene industry built entirely on human urine. Three of these things are unambiguously impressive.
4 MIN READ ·
She was born on the 16th of December 1485 at the Archbishop's Palace of Alcalá de Henares, the fourth surviving child of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and the world she was born into was the most formidable political construction of the late fifteenth century.