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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399 articles
6 MIN READ ·
She exchanged rings with a man in secret and Henry VIII put him in the Tower. He died there. She walked out and went back to court and spent the next forty years reaching for the crown that had killed him.
7 MIN READ ·
She ran a household where grown men crept into the girls' dormitory at night. She knew. She burned the evidence before anyone could take it from her.
7 MIN READ ·
She rode through a January blizzard to reach a dying woman the king had forbidden her to visit. She had been riding for Katherine of Aragon for thirty-five years. She was not going to stop for Henry Tudor or a snowstorm.
6 MIN READ ·
She has been a villain for five hundred years. History was covering for someone else.
6 MIN READ ·
She told her husband, while he was drafting the laws of a new nation, to remember the ladies. He wrote back that he could not but laugh. The nation took one hundred and forty-four years to stop laughing.
7 MIN READ ·
The British killed his father before he could walk. He spent the rest of his life making them pay for it. He never called it revenge. He called it liberty. The distinction mattered to him enormously. Whether it was a distinction is a different question.
6 MIN READ ·
Mary Shelton was fifteen years old when it was given. This was not generosity. It was the most dangerous gift one woman ever gave another. She was Anne Boleyn's cousin. Anne Boleyn introduced her to the king.
7 MIN READ ·
Thomas More had a strategy. It was legally perfect. He would say nothing. He would attend nothing. He would sign nothing. A man who says nothing cannot be convicted of saying the wrong thing. He was right about the law and wrong about Richard Rich, and the distance between those two facts is a scaffold on Tower Hill on the sixth of July 1535.
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.