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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114 articles
4 MIN READ ·
She was five years old when the Swedish parliament decided who she would marry. The boy chosen for her was five as well. Both families objected. Decades later, someone shot the boy at a masquerade ball.
4 MIN READ ·
Henry VIII may have cuckolded the man who had claimed to be his father. If true then his sisters were the queens of England...
5 MIN READ ·
He had convinced the Holy Roman Emperor that he was the rightful King of England. He watched from his ship as the men of Kent lured his soldiers ashore with friendly words and killed them on the beach. He never set foot on English soil.
4 MIN READ ·
She was still in bed when the north fell. Her daughter was barely two weeks old and she had not seen her husband for seventy-five days. She had no idea she would never see him again.
2 MIN READ ·
She was born Elizabeth Tudor. She was not England's greatest queen. Most people who know that name do not know that she ever existed.
5 MIN READ ·
Henry VIII never claimed him. He never needed to. The education, the Oxford place, the Tudor rose on his mother's coat of arms, and the position at the heart of the royal court said everything Henry VIII chose not to say out loud.
3 MIN READ ·
They had never met. He sent her a diamond. She sent him an embroidered pillow. On the first of July 1569 Norfolk wrote that he had gone too far to stop.
4 MIN READ ·
They identified her in the morning by the diamonds embedded in what remained of her breastbone. She had gone back inside to save her daughter. Napoleon and his wife had survived.
3 MIN READ ·
Henry had travelled north intending to demonstrate his absolute power. His wife accompanied him. So did her lover.
4 MIN READ ·
Elizabeth "Bessie" Blount was born around 1498 or 1500 at Kinlet in Shropshire, the daughter of Sir John Blount of Kinlet and Katherine Peshall, the eldest daughter of a well-connected gentry family in the Welsh Marches, and she arrived at the court of Henry VIII in 1512 or 1513 at approximately twelve years old as a maid of honour to Catherine of Aragon.
3 MIN READ ·
He had been her first love. He sentenced her to death. Then his wife claimed he had confessed they were never truly married, because Anne had been his all along.