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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74 articles
7 MIN READ ·
Margaret Beaufort’s first husband was born on 27 September 1442. Seven years later, he married her. She was likely only six years old. The pope only gave his blessing afterwards.
3 MIN READ ·
Leonor de Cisneros watched her husband burn alive rather than recant. She recanted, and lived. Nine years later, she would choose the death she had once refused.
4 MIN READ ·
Queen Elizabeth was displeased he had not yet found some way to "shorten the life" of his prisoner. His loyalty was unquestionable, as was his honour. His response was blunt and immediate.
5 MIN READ ·
He was the most powerful king in Europe. He wept at the carriage door while she climbed in. You are the king, she said, and you weep. He dried his eyes and married someone else. She spent the next fifty years making sure the record was accurate.
4 MIN READ ·
The youngest was four when they sent her across the Atlantic. Her brother and two sisters went too. Their mother had been trying to get them back.
5 MIN READ ·
Her son's clothes no longer fitted him. His grandmother wrote to tell her. She had gone to Scotland to marry a king. Her little boy had stayed in France.
7 MIN READ ·
She sent Anne Boleyn a monkey. She sent Jane Seymour quails. She housed Anne of Cleves for a fortnight. She put her own daughter in the path of the king. None of it was kindness. All of it was survival. For seven years it worked. Then it didn't.
5 MIN READ ·
She refused to leave. So he had her dragged out by the arms. She spent a decade writing letters that nobody acted on. Then the moment came, and she told them everything.
3 MIN READ ·
The last thing Joan Waste did before the fire was let go of her brother's hand. Roger had walked with her from the town to Windmill Pit on Burton Road. They had been born together, blind and sighted, in the same moment in 1534. He had been beside her for all twenty-two years of her life. At the edge of the pit she held his hand for a time, and then she released it, and they tied her above the fire.
6 MIN READ ·
Philip Augustus went down in the middle of his own battlefield, hooked from his saddle by the men of Renaud of Boulogne, a lord who had once been his friend and was now doing everything in his power to end him personally, in the mud, before the day could be decided any other way.
4 MIN READ ·
The soldiers found him mid-Mass. That was all of the evidence they needed.
5 MIN READ ·
In the spring of 1890, Duchess Antoinette of Anhalt lay sick with diphtheria in a house that could offer her every comfort money could buy and almost none of the medical skill that might actually save her.