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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94 articles
10 MIN READ ·
They began with water. At dawn in Paris, a woman was strapped down in the Conciergerie and forced to swallow water until her body became an instrument of pain all by itself. The question extraordinaire was not a hidden act. It was part of the script.
4 MIN READ ·
She could not stand by the time they burned her, so they carried her to Smithfield in a chair and tied her upright with a chain, because her own legs would not hold her anymore.
3 MIN READ ·
He had started writing a letter so awful that he could not bring himself to finish writing it...
4 MIN READ ·
Prince Albert saw her before the Portuguese ever did. He wrote home that there was something in her face, a kind of selflessness and trustful entreaty, that made a stranger want to offer her knightly protection. He was arranging her marriage at the time. She would be dead within two years of it.
2 MIN READ ·
Julius Palmer once cheered when Protestants burned. Then he watched two of them die well, and it broke something in him he couldn't put back.
2 MIN READ ·
She was born a bastard. She died Queen of Scots. Her husband never remarried. He built a monument to her on an island most people have never heard of.
3 MIN READ ·
A queen stood in the rain and held up her five-year-old son to a crowd of three hundred thousand people. "This is my son," she said, "who joins in the same sentiments as me." Within three years, she was dead. Within two more, so was he.
6 MIN READ ·
He was quite possibly richer than the king, older in blood than the king, and considerably more careful about saying so. He was not careful enough.
2 MIN READ ·
Katherine Willoughby had two sons. On the 14th of July 1551 she lost them both in the same afternoon.
6 MIN READ ·
Parliament declared her dead in 1474. She was forty-seven years old, in good health, and had approximately eighteen more years to live. The act required no evidence of death because her death was not the point. Her estates were the point. She was simply in the way of them.
3 MIN READ ·
Ruth Ellis was hanged for a question the court never really asked. Seventy-one years later, Britain finally answered it.
3 MIN READ ·
Mary I lost Calais to France. Six months later, her ships were still firing at the French, for a war that was never hers. She got nothing back. Not the city, not her husband's loyalty, not even peace.