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
5 MIN READ ·
On 8 July 1617, a cart rolled into the Place de Grève in Paris with a woman inside it. She had spent thirty years within reach of the French queen’s hand. The crowd was there to watch a witch die.
4 MIN READ ·
At six years old, Longshanks' daughter was given to God. She kept dice, wine, and a stable of twenty-four horses instead.
3 MIN READ ·
Margaret Tudor was five years old when they promised her to a king sixteen years her senior. She was thirteen, and newly motherless, when she finally left to marry him. On the eighth of July 1503 she would say goodbye to her father for the last time.
2 MIN READ ·
Two months before turning seventeen Madeleine de Valois wrote to her father that she was getting better. Twenty-nine days later she would be dead.
3 MIN READ ·
Henry VIII had given her a "Rough Wooing" since she was barely old enough to walk. His son continued it. On the seventh of July 1548, Scotland promised its five year old queen to France. She was some seventy miles away and did not know it was happening.
4 MIN READ ·
A king died at Chinon, broken by the first name on a list of rebels. When the news reached his wife's gaolers they did not wait for permission. They let her go.
6 MIN READ ·
A fifteen year old boy died at Greenwich on the sixth of July 1553. His death put three women on a collision course none of them had chosen. Two would soon become queens. The third would watch and wait.
4 MIN READ ·
She kept her father's head for nine years. She wanted to be buried with it in her arms. Henry VIII had impaled it on a spike.
4 MIN READ ·
She arrived in France at sixteen unable to speak French. Two years later she learned that the man she had married had ordered the massacre of thousands of his own subjects. She asked for her book of hours and prayed for him.
5 MIN READ ·
She was born in the Tower of London. Six years later her mother had her father murdered. A year after that, she was given away. She was seven years old.
7 MIN READ ·
She was seven when her father died and the king sold her wardship to a man who would eventually decide to marry her himself. She was fourteen when that happened. She had no say in it.
4 MIN READ ·
She was ten years old when her brother-in-law tried to put her in a convent. He did not do it out of piety. He did it because if she took holy vows her inheritance would pass to him.