Every life has a story.

Inês de Castro

Prince Pedro and Inês de Castro shared a love so powerful it defied a king and outlasted the grave. Torn apart by a brutal royal execution, their story concludes with one of history's most chilling and devoted acts of vengeance.

During the fourteenth century, the Portuguese court was upended when Prince Pedro became infatuated with Inês de Castro, a stunning Galician noblewoman who served as a lady-in-waiting to his bride. After his wife passed away, Pedro openly defied royal expectations by moving Inês into his estate, where they raised four children. This union deeply alarmed Pedro's father, King Afonso IV, and his state councilors. They strongly believed that her influential Castilian family posed a direct threat to the Portuguese succession and could drag the nation into disastrous foreign wars.

Seeking to eliminate this perceived political danger, King Afonso launched a plot while Pedro was away on a hunting expedition in 1355. Three royal assassins were dispatched to the monastery where Inês resided, where they savagely executed her in front of her young children. Upon his return, the sight of his murdered lover drove Pedro into a state of absolute madness. He immediately instigated a fierce civil war against his father, ravaging the Portuguese landscape until a temporary truce was established.

Once King Afonso died and Pedro claimed the crown as King Pedro I, he immediately sought retribution. He successfully extradited two of the assassins from Castile and ordered their hearts ripped out during a public execution, declaring that individuals who could slaughter an innocent mother possessed no hearts. Pedro then stunned his subjects by announcing that he had secretly wedded Inês prior to her assassination, legally establishing her as his rightful queen.

According to historical lore, the grieving king then exhumed Inês, clothed her remains in magnificent royal attire, crowned her, and ordered the nobility to swear fealty by kissing her skeletal hand. While contemporary scholars question the exact details of this macabre ceremony, Pedro did order two spectacularly carved stone tombs built in the Monastery of Alcobaça. He positioned the monuments foot-to-foot so that on judgment day, the very first sight to greet their opening eyes would be each other.

Mary Boleyn

Long before her sister Anne took the throne, Mary Boleyn lived a life of royal passion, devastating loss, and forbidden love. She survived court scandals and severe poverty, only to risk everything for a secret romance.

In her youth, Mary Boleyn was sent to the glittering court of France as a maid of honour. It was here that her complicated reputation began.

Rumours quickly spread regarding her private life, with later gossip even alleging that she had a brief liaison with King Francis I himself. While French chroniclers painted her as a woman of immense scandal, modern historians view these records with caution, noting that foreign courts often used sexual gossip to slander English political figures.Upon returning to England, Mary was quickly married to a rising courtier named William Carey. Not long after the wedding, she caught the eye of King Henry VIII and became his mistress. This relationship lasted for several years, spanning the births of Mary’s two children, Catherine and Henry. Because of the timing of the affair, immense historical speculation has always surrounded the parentage of her children. Many contemporaries believed that the boy in particular bore a striking resemblance to the King, though Henry VIII never officially acknowledged either child as his own.

The affair ended quietly, and tragedy soon followed. In 1528, the deadly sweating sickness swept through the English court, claiming the life of William Carey. His sudden death left Mary in a precarious financial state. Despite her sister Anne’s rising influence over the King, Mary found herself facing severe poverty and was forced to beg for financial assistance to support her young family. It was during this vulnerable period that she was pushed to the fringes of the court.

Mary's final chapter proved to be her most defiant. In 1534, she secretly married William Stafford, a soldier of lower social standing. When she returned to court visibly pregnant, her family was outraged by the unequal match. Her sister Anne and her father banished her from court as punishment, cutting off her allowance. Yet, despite the harsh exile, Mary’s second marriage proved remarkably stable. She chose a quiet, private life away from the dangerous Tudor court, ultimately surviving the brutal executions of her famous siblings.

Princes in the Tower

Two young princes enter the Tower of London under the protection of their uncle, Richard III, and vanish without a trace. Did a ruthless king murder his own nephews to steal a throne or was it the Beaufort woman?

Roman baths

Roman baths were not just for men. Sometimes they opened the doors to women too. But the best days are days spent with the boys. Relaxing, cleansing, bathing together.

Marie Antoinette

Disclaimer - This reel is intended as a work of satirical comedic fiction and should not in anyway be misconstrued for a factual representation of the actual life/times and or breakfast/eleveses of Marie Antoinette.

If you think your morning routine is a struggle, imagine needing a four-person committee just to put on your socks. Marie Antoinette wasn’t just the Queen of France; she was the original "don’t talk to me until I’ve had my cake" influencer.

Between the 10-pound wigs and the aggressive corset tightening that definitely counted as a cardio workout, it is a miracle she didn't start the revolution herself just to get five minutes of peace.

From 5:00 AM hot chocolate sessions in bed to dodging three different aunts just to eat a piece of ham in private, this is the Versailles version of "getting ready with me" that the history books were too afraid to show. Honestly, she probably invented the "staring blankly at the wall for twenty minutes" stage of waking up.

Henry Carey

Henry VIII may have cuckolded the man who had claimed to be his father. If true then his sisters were the queens of England...

Henry Carey was born on 4 March 1526. His mother was Mary Boleyn, sister to Anne Boleyn, former maid of honour to Catherine of Aragon, and the woman Henry VIII had taken as his mistress somewhere around 1522. His official father was Sir William Carey, a courtier in the king's household, a man of good standing and genuine usefulness to the crown who had the particular usefulness of being willing to marry a woman the king had been sleeping with and to ask no questions about the children she subsequently produced.

Sir William Carey died of sweating sickness in June 1528 when Henry was two years old. Henry VIII paid for his funeral. He did not acknowledge the boy.

The king had acknowledged a boy before. In June 1519, seven years earlier, Bessie Blount had given birth to Henry Fitzroy at Jericho Priory in Essex, attended by the king's own physician, in a confinement arranged and paid for by the king himself. Fitzroy was immediately and publicly acknowledged, given a ducal title at six, the Garter at six, a Howard bride at fourteen. The acknowledgement was the entire point. Fitzroy was proof that Henry VIII could father a living son, that the failure of Catherine of Aragon's pregnancies was Catherine's failure and not his, and the proof was exhibited publicly and expensively because the proof was the argument.

When Henry Carey was born in 1526, Henry VIII already had that argument. He had already won it. The proof of concept had been delivered by a different woman in a different county seven years earlier, and there was no political advantage in acknowledging a second illegitimate son at the precise moment he was attempting to persuade the most powerful institutions in Christendom that he should be permitted to set aside his wife and marry the acknowledged boy's aunt. The timing was, to put it with restraint, inconvenient.

In 1534 Mary Boleyn was banished from court after secretly marrying William Stafford, a soldier of no particular rank or fortune, without royal permission. Contemporary accounts note that the queen's grace might not suffer her son to remain at court. The queen who removed him was Anne Boleyn. His own aunt.

The boy who may have been the king's son was sent out of the queen's sight so that the queen would not have to look at him, and the irony of that arrangement, the specific cruelty of the geometry of it, does not appear to have troubled anyone in a position to prevent it. Henry Carey was eight years old.

Henry VIII died in January 1547 without having said a single word on the matter.

Six weeks after Elizabeth I came to the throne in November 1558 she knighted Henry Carey. Months later she made him Baron Hunsdon. Over the following years she gave him estates, a pension, military commands of significant responsibility, the Order of the Garter, and ultimately the office of Lord Chamberlain, one of the most senior positions in the English crown.

When the Spanish Armada threatened England in 1588 it was Henry Carey she appointed to command the forces responsible for the protection of her person. Elizabeth Tudor, who trusted almost no one completely and spent forty-five years of monarchy demonstrating exactly how well she understood the difference between people who could be trusted and people who could not, chose the man whose paternity she could not officially acknowledge to stand between her body and the greatest military threat of her reign.

He also became, in the course of his career, the patron of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which employed a playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon named William Shakespeare. A boy whose father was a question nobody would answer in writing grew up to be the man who kept Shakespeare working.

He was dying in July 1596 when Elizabeth came to visit him. She offered, according to the account, to make him Earl of Wiltshire. He refused. He said he had rather die a Lord Hunsdon than live an Earl of Wiltshire. He died on 23 July 1596.

Whether Henry Carey was Henry VIII's son cannot now be confirmed. Whether Elizabeth I believed he was is written in every appointment she ever made him and in the fact that when she needed someone she could trust with her life, she chose him, and he did not let her down, and she knew he would not, and the reason she knew that is the part that was never written down.