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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331 articles
7 MIN READ ·
John Fisher looked at the demand then looked at it again. He put his pen down. He was the only one. Every bishop in England signed. Every single one. The most powerful churchmen in the country, men whose entire lives had been devoted to the authority of the Church, looked at what Henry was demanding and picked up their pens.
10 MIN READ ·
She was born a princess, declared a bastard, stripped of her title, separated from her mother, and told for twenty years that she was nothing. Then she became Queen of England. The story of Blood Mary is not a story about a monster. It is a story about what happens when you break a person slowly, carefully, and then hand them a crown.
5 MIN READ ·
He won the war, he had the army, and every man in history who had done both had made himself a king. He went home to his farm instead.
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.
5 MIN READ ·
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.
5 MIN READ ·
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.