HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T10:40:23.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/henry-viii/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Henry VIII’s mistresses: who else did the Tudor king sleep with?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/henry-viiis-mistresses-who-else-did-the-tudor-king-sleep-with/ 2026-10-23T10:40:23.000Z 2026-10-23T10:26:00.000Z Popular history is so well versed in the six wives of Henry VIII that they require little introduction. From the colourful bodice-ripper series The Tudors (2007–10) to the feminist retelling in Six (2017–present), we are reminded of the old mantra we learned at school: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
We might also be forgiven for thinking that the king was so busy keeping up with the women to whom he was legally united that he had little time for any others. However, Henry VIII, with his “angelic” face, athletic build and red-gold hair, had an eye for the ladies, and in his early years, particularly, few were able to resist him.
Paradoxically, we can learn most about Henry’s mistresses through his wives. Anne Boleyn’s refusal to sleep with the king in the late 1520s was all the more successful because until this point he was accustomed to other women saying yes. Two of them are known to us: Elizabeth Blount and Anne’s own sister, Mary, who were Henry’s lovers in the late 1510s and early 1520s after he started to question his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Who was Bessie Blount?
Elizabeth, or ‘Bessie’, is the first woman who is known, with any certainty, to have been Henry’s mistress. She was born at Kinlet in Shropshire in around 1500, making her just a teenager when she arrived at Henry’s court. Her family home fell under the jurisdiction of Catherine of Aragon’s first husband, Arthur, so it's possible that the young Catherine saw Bessie as a baby during her residence at Ludlow Castle in 1501–02. In fact, it is quite likely that Bessie’s parents capitalised on this early connection to place their daughter in the queen’s household.
Two court dances suggest the duration of Bessie’s tenure. Bessie is recorded as being one of eight in a masque performed to celebrate new year 1515, partnered by Henry himself. Then, in October 1518 she was paired with courtier Francis Bryan during a masque performed at Durham House in London. It was around this time that she fell pregnant with Henry’s son.
The pregnant Bessie disappeared from court, taken in secret by Henry’s leading minister, Thomas Wolsey, into the safety of the Essex countryside. There, at the Augustinian priory of St Laurence at Blackmore, also known as ‘Jericho’, Bessie gave birth to Henry Fitzroy, the king’s only acknowledged illegitimate child.
Henry stayed at two of his nearby properties that summer, Havering-atte-Bower in August and Beaulieu in September, which would have allowed him to visit his newborn son, had he been minded to do so. What Catherine thought of the arrangement, or whether she was then aware of the situation, is not recorded. Wolsey stood in as godfather and the boy would later be given such significant titles as the Duke of Somerset and Richmond.
A marriage was arranged for Bessie to Gilbert Tailboys in 1522 (although some sources suggest 1519) and she retired from court for a time, bearing at least two more children (some sources suggest up to four) in the early 1520s. The uncertainty of the children’s birth dates has led to speculation that they were fathered by Henry, although by this time we know he had moved on to Mary Boleyn. Bessie remarried in the 1530s following Tailboys’ death and lived long enough to outlive Henry Fitzroy (who died in 1536), serving briefly as a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves shortly before her own death in around 1540.
The other Boleyn sister
Another masque marks the entry of the Boleyn sisters to the Tudor scene. In March 1522, Mary Boleyn took the part of Kindness and Anne that of Perseverance in the Chateau Vert pageant at York Place. Henry was among the eight men led by the figure of ‘Ardent Desire’ to lay siege to the castle to rescue the women.
Anne had recently returned from the French court, which Mary had left several years before – rumours still persisted that Mary had been intimate with Francis I. In February 1520 Henry had attended Mary’s wedding to his gentleman of the privy chamber, William Carey, or at least sent a gift in addition to his offering of 8s 6d. The exact moment Mary became Henry’s mistress is unclear, but it is interesting that her marriage coincided with substantial gifts from Henry to her father and husband.
Much of Mary’s personality and education eludes us, as do the details and duration of her affair with Henry. Both she and Anne were already known to Henry as the daughters of Sir Thomas Boleyn who, along with Wolsey, had masterminded the magnificent Anglo-French meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Yet it was Mary who caught Henry’s eye first and her two children, Catherine and Henry, born in 1524 and 1526 respectively, have sometimes been attributed to the king. As Mary was married, though, the children were legally considered to be those of her husband, who always treated them as such.
By the time of Henry Carey’s birth, though, the king’s attention had wandered to the enchanting, dark-eyed Anne Boleyn. We only know about his prior relationship with Mary because he required a dispensation to marry her sister, and had to admit to the affair. When questioned about his relations with the Boleyn girls and their mother, Henry replied, tellingly, “never with the mother”.
After Carey’s death from the sweating sickness, Mary remarried for love, returning briefly to court during her sister’s reign and admitting her secret. Mary was banished for her indiscretion and lived out her days in the Essex countryside.
Henry’s relations with Bessie and Mary are known to us almost by accident. If Henry Fitzroy had not lived, or had Henry not been forced to declare his past relationship with Mary, he might today be lauded by historians for his faithfulness to Catherine of Aragon.
These accidental survivals raise the question of what other secrets have remained concealed in Henry’s private life. Glimmers of possible affairs can be read into his associations with other women at his court. In 1534, during the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote that Henry had “renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of his court” and that Anne attempted to “dismiss the damsel from her service”.
Referred to as the ‘imperial lady’, the identity of this woman cannot be verified, but her presence seems to have put a strain upon Henry’s marriage, occasioning harsh words between husband and wife. ‘Imperial’ may not have referred to the woman’s origins but instead highlighted her sympathies to the cause of Rome and Henry’s rejected daughter, Mary.
Also from this era date the rumours of Henry’s involvement with Anne Boleyn’s cousin, Margaret (or ‘Madge’) Shelton, who may be the same person as Mary Shelton, who until recently was assumed to be Anne’s sister. Chapuys’ letters from February 1535 make reference to a Mistress Shelton, and any affair she had with Henry would date to that year. Early in 1536 Madge was engaged to the ill-fated Henry Norris, who lost his head along with Anne Boleyn that May. Mistress Shelton was suggested as a potential wife for the widowed king two years later, but she married another man in 1546 and lived well into the reign of Elizabeth I.
Who were the other rumoured mistresses?
Most of the other reputed mistresses who may have shared Henry’s bed date from the earlier part of his reign. During Catherine of Aragon’s first pregnancy, in 1509, Henry was embroiled with Anne Hastings, sister of the Duke of Buckingham and a newly married member of Catherine’s household. Henry’s close friend William Compton appears to have acted as a go-between, although Anne later went on to have an affair with Compton himself. Henry sent her away from court in retaliation.
There was also a ‘Madame the Bastard’ who kept Henry dancing into the small hours of the morning in 1513 at the court of Margaret of Savoy, and Étiennette de la Baume, whose plaintive letter to Henry asking for assistance reminded him of the promise he had made her when leaving France that year, and that he had called her his ‘page’.
There was the mysterious Jane Popincourt, who was refused entry to France by Louis XII, with the comment that she should be burned, plus a host of other ladies who received gifts from Henry at some point, or danced with him in a masque. Their connections with Henry are only fleeting and suggested, yet they might hint at secrets that the king had hidden more successfully than those of Bessie and Mary.
Given Henry’s desire for an heir, it is unsurprising that various stories survive that connect him with illegitimate paternity. The timing of these is interesting, with three in particular dating from the period when the king was wooing Anne Boleyn and, apparently, refraining from sex. If Henry did not sleep with Anne until 1532, Tudor medicine would have advised him not to remain completely celibate, as this would have been thought to imperil his health. Accordingly, Henry may have sought solace elsewhere.
Mary Berkeley had been married in 1526 to her uncle’s ward, Thomas Perrot, settling in Pembrokeshire. Perrot had been knighted by Henry that year and was a great hunter; it is thought that Mary was part of Catherine’s household, placing the pair at court during these years. Mary’s eldest son, John, was born in November 1528 and reputedly bore a great resemblance to the king. As a young man John was in the king’s favour – Henry once intervened to prevent him from being punished after he was drawn into a brawl. Later involved with piracy, debt, deception and scandal, John’s reputed parentage may have been a convenient way to escape retribution.
In the same way, another man claimed to be Henry’s son, with perhaps the same intentions. Thomas Stukeley was employed as a standard bearer in 1547, in his late teens. The son of Jane Pollard, who was married in around 1520 to Sir Hugh Stukeley, Thomas is thought to have been conceived when Henry stayed at their Devon home of Affeton Castle. Thomas was something of a romantic figure, and poems and plays written about him after his death (for example, George Peele’s 1590s work The Battle of Alcazar) served to inflame such rumours.
Finally, the child arguably most likely to be related to Henry is an Ethelreda, or Audrey, Malte. If Henry had sought sexual satisfaction from someone other than Anne Boleyn, he is more likely to have turned to a woman of the lower classes, who were considered to be more ‘earthy’ and would not complicate lines of dynastic inheritance. Audrey’s mother was a Joan or Joanna Dingley, employed as a royal laundress, and the girl was raised by one of the cutters in the king’s wardrobe [who cut clothing patterns out of cloth]. John Malte “and Awdrye his base daughter” received a grant of £1,312 from the king while he lay on his deathbed, a huge sum for mere servants. Nothing more is known of Joanna or her daughter.
What this exploration of Henry’s love life makes tantalisingly clear is the fragile nature of the surviving sources. Henry’s desire for secrecy, and his ability to achieve it, are coupled with the problematic nature of rumour and second-hand accounts that date from this period. It may be that Chapuys exaggerated, or that Perrot made false claims; perhaps, in the case of Jane Popincourt, Louis XII was mistaken; or Anne Hastings’ sister was being over-protective.
What we know for certain is that our scant knowledge of Henry’s affairs with Bessie and Mary reached us accidentally and indirectly. Far from being a prude, Henry was a very private man and took measures to cover his tracks. When it comes to the question of who shared the king’s bed, it is likely that we will never know the full truth.
Amy Licence is an author and historian. Her latest book is Philip II: The King, the Man, the Marriages (The History Press, 2026)
A version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2016
]]> Sarah Gristwood <![CDATA[Royal rivalry: 10 monarchs whose fate was determined by their siblings]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/royal-sibling-rivalries/ 2026-08-20T12:02:04.000Z 2026-08-20T12:01:54.000Z In the bad old days of high infant mortality, any royal family needed an heir and several ‘spares’ – north of the border, James V and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, are just two of the many British monarchs with elder brothers who died in infancy. William the Conqueror left England to his second son, another William, while the eldest son, Robert, inherited Normandy.
Since then, the history of these islands has been littered with famous second – or third, or fourth – royal siblings (or, more specifically, royal sons, since gender continued to trump age right into the 21st century), who for better or for worse have done much to shape the monarchy that we know today. Here are 10 of the most famous...
Richard I (1157–99)
It wasn’t Richard the Lionheart, but his elder brother, Henry, who was crowned ‘the Young King’ of England, unusually during their father’s lifetime. In the event Henry predeceased his father, but perhaps the fact Richard hadn’t been raised for the job explains why the crusader showed so little real enthusiasm for hands-on rule of England, spending only a few months in the country during his 10-year reign.
Richard was himself succeeded by his younger brother, John. Fairly or unfairly, King John has gone down in popular history as a disastrous monarch whose reign was epitomised by his losing the crown jewels in the Wash – but he did inadvertently help to give us Magna Carta.
- Read more | When and how did Richard the Lionheart die?
John of Gaunt (1340–99)
By contrast to John I, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – fourth son of the prolific Edward III – has traditionally been accorded a good measure of respect for the steering hand he kept on the country during the minority of his nephew, Richard II.
His harsh fiscal policies, however, made him a particular target of the Peasants’ Revolt – while almost as soon as John himself died, Richard II was deposed by John’s exiled son, the Bolingbroke of Shakespeare’s plays, who took the throne as Henry IV. These were the family divisions that, half a century later, would produce the Wars of the Roses.
Richard III (1452–85)
The best-known casualty of those wars was of course Richard III, whose death at Bosworth ushered in the Tudor dynasty. Richard was only the fourth son of the York family, but by the time he seized the throne the first, second and third sons were all dead – Edmund killed by the Lancastrians, and George, Duke of Clarence (after plotting against Edward) drowned in the famous butt of malmsey.
The grounds upon which Richard took the throne in 1483 – chiefly the supposed invalidity of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – are still debated today. So too, of course, is the fate of Edward IV’s sons, the princes in the Tower, and Richard’s role in their possible murder. Either way, Richard – his brother Edward’s most loyal supporter during his lifetime – provides the most dramatic prism through which to examine both the royal sibling bond, and the question of sibling rivalry.
Henry VIII (1491–1547)
It wasn’t Henry but his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was expected to lead the Tudor dynasty through the 16th century. But Arthur died in 1502 – and if anyone ever forgot that in the glorious early days of Henry VIII’s reign, they had ample cause to remember two decades later, when Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was endlessly debated, and ultimately declared invalid, on the grounds that she had been his brother Arthur’s widow.
Indeed, there has been speculation that Henry’s position as a mere second son – reared with his mother and sisters, while Arthur was sent away to Ludlow – affected his later attitudes, and his infamous marital history.
Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
Elizabeth was Henry’s second surviving legitimate child; her sister, ‘Bloody’ Mary, Henry’s eldest. But both women accepted that first place in the succession went to their younger brother, Edward VI.
After Edward’s premature death in 1553, however, differences between the sisters led to Elizabeth being imprisoned in the Tower, in danger of her life. This was no simple case of sibling rivalry, of course, since religious differences led to real dispute as to whether the Catholic Mary or the Protestant Elizabeth had best claim to the throne. All the same, no one looking for the model of a happy family is ever going to pick the Tudors!
Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Elizabeth I
Charles I (1600–49)
When James VI and I’s eldest son, Prince Henry, died in 1612 of what was probably typhoid, shock waves went through the country. At 18, the vibrant Henry was already the great hope of the Stuart dynasty. His brother Charles, by contrast, was a sickly 11-year-old considered unlikely to survive. Perhaps early insecurities left the adult Charles, as a monarch, particularly susceptible both to the influence of his favourite Buckingham [George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham] and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and to an inflated conception of the monarchy.
Elizabeth of Bohemia (1596–1662)
It may seem like cheating to list two siblings as separately important, but it’s the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, not of her brother, Charles I, who sit on the British throne today. When Charles I’s eldest surviving son, Charles II, was succeeded by his own younger brother James, the latter’s unpopularity and Catholicism led to his deposition in 1688.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of that year brought in, instead, James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, while the Catholic descendants of James’s second marriage dwindled to the status of pretenders.
Anne (1665–1714)
When William and Mary died without children, the crown passed to another younger sibling. Mary’s sister, Anne, came to the throne under the Act of Settlement of 1701, which effectively secured the throne to the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, since it was already apparent that Anne too was unlikely to bear a surviving child, despite 18 pregnancies.
Upon Queen Anne’s death the throne was offered to the Elector of Hanover, a grandson of Elizabeth of Bohemia, who became Britain’s George I. He and his Hanoverian descendants would reign, however, on very different terms from those earlier rulers had enjoyed. The stage was set for a modern, ‘constitutional’, monarchy (a position confirmed more than a century later when George’s great-great grandson William IV – succeeding his elder brother George IV – ceded yet further royal powers).
George V (1865–1936)
You might think that in the modern age the importance of the royal second sibling is outdated – we are, after all, past the days of high infant mortality.
King George V was born the second son of the future Edward VII, but his elder brother, Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy, died of pneumonia in his twenties, while his grandmother, Queen Victoria, was still on the throne. By that time Eddy had been linked to the Cleveland Street scandal, which involved a homosexual brothel, amid wider concerns over his character and abilities. (He has, however unconvincingly, even been identified as Jack the Ripper). His brother George, by contrast, was a formidable figure who, besides taking on Eddy’s engagement to Princess Mary of Teck in 1917, changed the name of the royal family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.
George VI (1895–1952)
The first half of the 20th century saw two second sons accede to the throne – both important in shaping the form of the present monarchy. George V was of course succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII, the future Duke of Windsor, but Edward’s reign lasted less than a year, and he was never crowned. When he abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson, his younger brother was forced to step up to the plate.
Diffident and reluctant – we’d come a long way from the power-hungry days of the medieval monarchy – George VI nonetheless saw the country through the dark days of Second World War. That example of dutiful service would model an ideal for his daughter, Elizabeth II.
A version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018
]]> Tracy Borman <![CDATA[The curse of the Boleyns: how Anne's fall doomed her family]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-curse-of-the-boleyns-how-annes-fall-doomed-her-family/ 2026-07-08T14:40:57.000Z 2026-07-06T14:00:02.000Z Anne Boleyn is one of the most famous women in history. Her story has been told countless times since her tragic demise almost 500 years ago. So determined was Henry VIII to make her his queen that he wrenched England away from Roman Catholic Europe and set in train a sweeping reformation that shaped the course of British history. But when Anne failed to give him a son, he had her executed on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason in 1536.
So far, so familiar. But though Anne’s turbulent relationship with England’s most-married monarch has been pored over for centuries, her backstory is relatively unknown. What – or, more precisely, who – made her into a woman so extraordinarily captivating that she held a king in thrall for seven long years and turned his entire kingdom upside down?
Humble roots
Though they rose to become one of the most powerful families in Tudor England, the Boleyns could boast neither royal blood nor aristocratic pedigree. They were likely of northern French descent, among numerous Norman families to settle in England after the conquest of 1066. The first known reference to the family is found in the deed for a small plot of land close to Norwich in 1188. The Boleyns remained in Norfolk for the next three centuries, where they made their living from the wool trade.
It was Geoffrey Boleyn (1406–63), Anne’s great-grandfather, who put the family on the map. He made a small fortune from his work as a hatter, and was appointed Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers. By 1451, he was so wealthy that he loaned Henry VI money for an expedition to France. Six years later, he was elected Lord Mayor of London. To signal his prestige, Geoffrey purchased several properties, including the manors of Blickling in north Norfolk and Hever in Kent.
Geoffrey’s son William propelled the Boleyns into royal circles when he entered the service of Richard III, who made him a knight of the Bath at his coronation in 1483. William also made an advantageous marriage to Margaret Butler, daughter and co-heiress of the seventh Earl of Ormond, a prominent Irish nobleman.
With a deftness that characterised the Boleyns’ rise to power, when Richard III was defeated by Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, William declared his allegiance to the new king.
- Read more | What did Elizabeth I really think about Anne Boleyn? These secret symbols might unlock the truth
William also invested heavily in the education of his eldest son and heir, Thomas. Aged about eight when Henry VII took the throne, Thomas grew into a charming and cultured young man who soon won favour at court. Upon the death of his father in 1505, he became the head of the family and led the Boleyns to the apogee of their power. At Henry VIII’s accession in 1509, he was created a Knight of the Garter and an esquire of the new king’s privy chamber.
By then, Thomas was married with a growing family. Like his father, he had chosen a high-ranking bride. Elizabeth Howard was the eldest daughter of Thomas Howard, later the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, and was appointed to serve Catherine of Aragon, the widow of Prince Arthur, whom Henry had married soon after becoming king. “She brought me every year a child,” Thomas said of Elizabeth, though only three survived to adulthood: Mary, Anne and George.
Two small brass crosses mark the burial places of Henry and Thomas Boleyn (junior) – one in the church next to Hever, the other close to Penshurst Place, the seat of Thomas Boleyn’s rival Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham. (It’s thought that Thomas Jr may have been sent to Penshurst to receive an education.) There is no other record of the two boys or of Anne’s relationship with her lost brothers, assuming she knew them at all. The size of the crosses suggests that they died in their infancy – a reminder of the fragility of life in Tudor England.
The Boleyn children were raised at Blickling Hall and Hever Castle, though the latter soon became the principal family seat. Judging from the date of his first appearance at court around 1514, George seems to have been the youngest, and Mary was later referred to as the elder of the two daughters, though their birth dates are unclear.
- Read more | Five shocking tales from Britain’s royal palaces
It is also not clear how much time Anne spent with her mother, but they are thought to have been close. Elizabeth would have superintended her children’s early education, juggling that with her service at court. There was a rumour that Elizabeth was briefly the mistress of Henry VIII, but this is not substantiated by any reliable evidence, and Henry himself later denied it, exclaiming: “Never with the mother!”
From a young age, Anne and Mary were schooled in the accomplishments expected of young women at the time, including music and dancing, embroidery and religion. They were also taught literature and languages – the latter being something in which Anne excelled. Her father proudly noted that she was exceptionally “toward”.
Thomas played an important role in Anne’s education, and his humanist beliefs may have influenced her curriculum. He was a progressive thinker and espoused the emerging fashion for educating daughters, not just sons, as famously advocated by
his fellow courtiers Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.
Dazzling opportunity
In 1513, when Anne was probably around 12 years old, her father secured her a dazzling opportunity. She was sent to the palace of Mechelen in Brabant (a region now spanning parts of Belgium and the Netherlands) to join the court of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands.
It was an education like no other, and profoundly shaped Anne’s outlook, accomplishments and intellect. Her new mistress was a woman who wielded real power in a male-dominated world. Years later, when a queen-in-waiting, Anne remodelled York Place in London on Margaret’s palace at Mechelen, creating the Palace of Whitehall.
Anne remained in close contact with the household at Hever throughout her years abroad. A letter she wrote to her father in around 1514 still survives. As well as showing off her new mastery of French, she assured Thomas that absence had made her heart grow fonder: “I promise you that my love is based on such great strength that it will never grow less.”
Anne’s courtly training continued when her father arranged for her to serve in the French court with her sister. While Mary enjoyed the glittering social life and is rumoured to have become a mistress of King Francis I, Anne preferred the company of his sister, Marguerite of Navarre. An intellectual powerhouse, Marguerite argued for the reform of the Catholic church and was a fierce advocate for female authority. The teenaged Anne soaked all this up like a sponge. By the time she left France in 1521, she was a changed young woman.
Back at Hever, another Margaret exerted a profound influence on Anne: her paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Butler. Hers was one of the most powerful noble families in Ireland, and Margaret inherited considerable estates upon the death of her father, the 7th Earl of Ormond, in 1515. She was thus a rare example of a wealthy and independent woman in an age dominated by men.
Four years after coming into her inheritance, though, Margaret was suddenly declared insane and deprived of her lands. Whether she really was suffering from a mental illness (or, perhaps, dementia – by then she was aged about 65) is uncertain. Either way, it served as a salutary reminder to Anne of just how precarious a woman’s position could be.
Anne was also influenced by her elder sister, Mary – albeit as an example of what not to do. Returning from France some time before Anne, Mary took up a position in the household of Catherine of Aragon. In 1520, she married William Carey, a gentleman of Henry VIII’s privy chamber, but around that time she almost certainly began an affair with the king. It isn’t clear how long their liaison lasted, but Henry was rumoured to have been the father of at least one of Mary’s children. He neither acknowledged this nor made any provision for Mary once their affair ended. She was simply discarded, her reputation in ruins. It was a lesson Anne never forgot.
A shock proposal
Anne made her debut at the English court early in 1522, after her father secured her a place in Queen Catherine’s household. This exotic arrival from the French court was soon the talk of London. Her intellect, accomplishments and style made the other ladies of Henry’s court appear positively pedestrian. She danced and sang better than any of them and, though not conventionally beautiful, her charisma and self-confidence quickly attracted a legion of male admirers.
Anne’s self-serving uncle Thomas Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, tried to engineer a marriage with James Butler, her cousin and heir to the Earl of Ormond, which prompted the first in a series of clashes with his niece. Norfolk later ranted that Anne would be “the ruin of her whole family”. When it came to the Boleyns, blood wasn’t always thicker than water.
At least initially, the king himself appeared immune to Anne’s charms, and it was not until 1526 that he declared his interest in her. It was at this time that Hever Castle became Anne’s refuge. Contrary to the popular image of her father as a grasping courtier who pushed her into the king’s path to further his own ambitions, the evidence suggests that Thomas tried to protect Anne from Henry’s advances. Whenever his royal master became too overbearing, he arranged for his younger daughter to seek sanctuary at the family home. But the more Anne retreated to Hever, the more determinedly Henry pursued her.
When Anne went to stay at Hever for Christmas in 1526, she received a letter from the king. It was very different to his usual billets-doux: astonishingly, he proposed marriage. This must have sent shockwaves through the castle. Henry already had a wife – one who was greatly revered throughout England. But he claimed that his marriage to Catherine was unlawful and had been cursed by God, as evidenced by the fact that they had no living son.
Henry spent the next seven years trying to convince Pope Clement VII to grant an annulment of his marriage. For much of this time, Anne flitted between the court and Hever. She was attended by both her mother and her sister-in-law, Jane, who married George Boleyn around 1524. By contrast, Anne saw little of her sister, Mary, and later banished her from court for marrying William Stafford, a lowly soldier, claiming that it had brought disgrace on the Boleyns.
At home at Hever
The Boleyn family's manor has its own rich tale
The external form of the Boleyns’ family seat, Hever Castle in Kent, is thought to date from the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Two years after Wat Tyler led a rebellion sparked by onerous taxation, John de Cobham – a wealthy landowner and tax collector – was granted a licence by Richard II to fortify his manor of Hever Cobham, presumably fearing future uprisings targeting tax collectors. He built high sandstone walls around the original manor house, as well as three portcullises and a moat. Hever was purchased in 1462 by Geoffrey and Thomas Boleyn. Soon afterwards, Geoffrey bought out his brother and took sole ownership. He renamed the manor Hever Castle, and proceeded to establish it as a luxurious family home complete with private reception rooms, fashionable oriel windows and fireplaces, and a remodelled great hall.
Geoffrey didn’t enjoy his new home for long because he died just a year later. His younger son, William, inherited Hever, among other manors, but spent most of his time at the Boleyns’ Norfolk seat, Blickling Hall. It was William’s son Thomas who established Hever as the principal Boleyn residence around 1505, almost certainly because of its convenient location. As one of Henry VIII’s most trusted diplomats, Thomas was sent on numerous missions overseas, and Hever was within easy reach of both Dover and the court in London. After the death in 1539 of both Thomas and his mother, Margaret, Hever passed into the possession of Henry VIII, who granted his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, the use of it during her lifetime. She seems to have taken a shine to the childhood home of her namesake and predecessor. She made substantial additions to the castle, including a new entrance hall and long gallery. The ownership of Hever changed hands several times over the following centuries, eventually falling into a poor state of repair. In 1903, it was acquired and restored by the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor. Much of the interior visitors see today is Astor’s creation, though the Boleyn apartments have recently been restored to their appearance in Anne’s heyday.
Source of solace
George was a constant source of solace and companionship to Anne. Like his father, he was a favourite of the king and rose rapidly through the ranks once his sister had caught Henry’s eye. George shared Anne’s reformist views, and they both imported radical religious texts from abroad that might have had them condemned as heretics.
Supported by her brother, Anne brought her influence to bear on Henry, persuading him that a king should be subject to no authority but God’s – a view that made the pope an irrelevance. Henry had the justification he needed to break with Rome and push through the annulment. In January 1533, he married Anne in a secret ceremony at Whitehall. Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to England from the Holy Roman Empire and a prolific letter-writer, claimed that both her parents were in attendance.
Anne’s coronation on 1 June 1533 was – literally – the crowning glory of the Boleyns’ meteoric rise. But it was not long before cracks began to appear in her marriage. Things went from bad to worse in September 1533 when Anne gave birth to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for son. Over the following two and a half years she suffered a series of miscarriages, the last of them in January 1536. By then, her relationship with Henry had deteriorated so badly that he was seen to “shrink from her” in private.
End of the line
The end came in May that year, when Anne was arrested on trumped-up charges of adultery. Among her five alleged lovers was her brother George. The siblings were swiftly condemned and executed.
Their grief-stricken parents left court immediately. Elizabeth Boleyn died in the London home of Hugh Faringdon, Abbot of Reading, in April 1538. Her husband, Thomas, retreated to Hever, where he lived out his days in obscurity. He returned briefly to court in October 1537 to attend the christening of Henry VIII’s “precious jewel”, Prince Edward, born to the king’s third wife, Jane Seymour, who had replaced Anne. Thomas died at Hever in March 1539, shortly followed by his by then elderly mother, Margaret.
Anne’s former sister-in-law, Jane, who has traditionally – and unjustly – been blamed for testifying against her, went on to serve three more of Henry VIII’s wives. She was executed in February 1542 for aiding and abetting the adulterous liaisons of Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife.
The last of the Boleyns to survive was Anne’s sister Mary. Scant evidence for her life after 1534 survives, but the fact that her father bequeathed her some lands at Hever suggests that they were reconciled before his death. Mary died in July 1543, probably at her marital home, Rochford Hall in Essex.
Yet the family’s fortune would rise again, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Against all odds, Anne’s daughter Elizabeth became the longest-reigning and most successful of the Tudors. And the Boleyn bloodline endures even today, as King Charles III is a direct descendant of Mary Boleyn.
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[The ultimate Cold War sex scandal – and 11 other political outrages from British history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ 2026-05-17T14:30:04.000Z 2026-05-17T14:30:01.000Z The first English parliaments were intended as countermeasures to bad kingship, protecting the realm from the worst excesses of rogue royals.
From these medieval beginnings, and through its evolution into the modern parliament of the United Kingdom, the institution has spread across the world as a model of representative government and as a symbol of democracy. But that doesn’t mean that it has been without controversy.
Since its inception, parliament has been dogged by scandals that have affected its reputation and altered its procedures. But which episodes have had the most lasting influence and infamy – and why? James Osborne investigates…
1. Alice Perrers and the Good Parliament (1376)
By the start of the 1370s, King Edward III had ruled England for nearly half a century. He was a transformative monarch who had taken the country into the Hundred Years’ War with France. But age and illness had left him diminished, and he had withdrawn from day-to-day rule. Filling that vacuum of power were the king’s courtiers and confidants, including Alice Perrers.
Perrers had risen from relatively modest origins to become the king’s closest companion after the death of Queen Philippa. She was ever-present at court, decorated with jewels belonging to the crown. She had accumulated lands, wealth and influence on a scale that positioned her as one of the most powerful women in England. Both in appearance and power, she had assumed the role of a pseudo-queen.
Chroniclers accused her of inserting herself where she didn’t belong, interrupting legal proceedings and persuading the king to reward her allies. Whether these claims were true (or an instance of medieval misogyny) didn’t matter. The perception was that royal power was being manipulated for personal gain.
When parliament met in 1376, the long war with France was going badly, taxes were high and confidence in the royal household had collapsed. With Edward III’s power eroded, this assembly (later known as the Good Parliament) was able to be unusually assertive. Alice Perrers quickly became its central target.
MPs accused her of using her sexual relationship with the king to enrich herself, distort justice and dominate access to royal favour. Parliament forced Perrers to swear an oath to never again approach the king, stripped her of property, and removed her from court.
But within a few months, Perrers had returned, protected by the king and his allies, and many of the reforms of the Good Parliament were undone. It wasn’t until Edward’s death in 1377 that Perrers was tried for corruption and subsequently exiled.
The episode marked parliament’s growing confidence in naming, shaming and punishing abuses of power – even when those abuses were entangled with sexual politics and the private life of the crown.
2. The fall of Thomas Cromwell (1540)
In the mid-16th century, during the apogee of Tudor England, Thomas Cromwell was second only to Henry VIII as the most powerful man in the realm.
The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell had risen from simple origins, elevating himself with a combination of fierce intelligence, canny administrative skill and absolute loyalty to the king. He was the architect of the English Reformation, the man who used parliament to break with the pope, dissolve the monasteries, and place the king at the head of the Church of England.
But by tying himself so closely to the king, Cromwell’s power was predicated on his patron’s favour. When Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, proved a humiliating failure, Cromwell was blamed. It proved disastrous: his numerous enemies at court seized the moment, assembling accusations of treason and heresy.
Cromwell was arrested in June 1540, stripped of office, and executed a month later on Tower Hill. The man who had expanded parliament’s authority was killed by the same institution, at the king’s behest. Later generations would look back on cases like Cromwell’s as examples of how parliamentary power could be abused, and why limits on that power were necessary.
3. The ship money crisis (1630s)
The second Stuart king, Charles I, deemed parliament a nuisance. He dissolved it in 1629 and chose to govern without it. This period, later dubbed the ‘Personal Rule’, lasted 11 years. This wasn’t illegal in itself – and parliaments were only called periodically anyway – but it created a practical problem: war, government and the royal court all required money. But taxes were meant to be raised only with parliament’s approval.
So, Charles and his advisers turned to older forms of revenue that didn’t require parliamentary assent. The most controversial was ‘ship money’, a levy traditionally raised from coastal towns to fund naval defence in emergencies. In the 1630s, the crown extended ship money across the country and began demanding it in peacetime.
In effect, this was a tax by another name, imposed without parliament’s consent. Ship money wasn’t the largest source of royal income, but it did become the clearest example of royal overreach.
When Charles later faced rebellion in Scotland and needed funds for an army, he was forced to recall parliament in 1640 – which was now an assembly brimming with pent-up anger. In the long term, the scandal became part of the chain of events that led to civil war.
4. The South Sea Bubble (1720)
The South Sea Company was founded in 1711. A joint-stock company, it took on government debt in return for guaranteed interest payments, and in 1713 secured a significant contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish South America. This was one of many examples of complex arrangements between government and private companies, as the state sought to deal with the heavy burden of debt accumulated from protracted wars.
In 1719, the company proposed a new and ambitious scheme. It would absorb a large portion of the national debt, and in return, it would offer its shares as a route to great wealth. Parliament approved the plan, and ministers, MPs and members of the royal family were given shares on favourable terms.
The value of the company’s shares rose rapidly, driven by hype rather than financial stability or impressive profits. Similar opportunist ventures quickly popped up, many with no serious business behind them. Ordinary investors, encouraged by the involvement of political leaders, poured their savings into the schemes. By the summer of 1720, the bubble burst and prices collapsed, ruining the finances of thousands who had become involved.
Against a backdrop of intense public anger, parliament was forced to act against its own members who had accepted bribes in the form of shares and loans, or unscrupulously promoted legislation from which they stood to profit directly. Several politicians were expelled or otherwise left in disgrace.
One figure who emerged strengthened was Robert Walpole, who helped stabilise the system and limit the fallout. He would later become Britain’s first prime minister.
5. The Wilkes affair (1763–74)
As the Georgian era progressed, Britain was becoming a more politically engaged society. With growing press freedoms, newspapers had taken on a new and important role, and elections were becoming fiercely contested. Parliament was no longer such a distant institution.
John Wilkes benefited from these changes. He was a journalist, pamphleteer and MP who made his name by attacking the government in print.
Wilkes was elected to parliament in 1757, and within a few years he had become a sharp critic of the ministry and of George III’s advisers. In 1763 his newspaper, The North Briton, published an issue accusing the king’s speech to parliament of being deliberately misleading.
Fearing the damage he might cause to royal reputations, the government responded by issuing a general warrant for Wilkes’s arrest. Wilkes was imprisoned, but successfully argued that as an MP he was protected by parliamentary privilege. He was released and became a public cause célèbre.
The conflict between Wilkes and the government escalated when he fled abroad and was convicted of obscene and seditious libel in absentia.
On his return, he was repeatedly elected as MP for Middlesex. Each time, the House of Commons expelled him. At one point, parliament declared his defeated opponent the winner of the election, despite Wilkes having the most votes. The affair dragged on, but, eventually, parliament retreated. Wilkes was allowed to take his seat in 1774.
Wilkes’s name became a shorthand for a wider series of demands: freedom of the press, fair elections and limits on parliamentary privileges.
6. The Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial (1776)
For much of its history, parliament acted in certain cases as a court. Members of the peerage could only be tried by the House of Lords. This placed some of the most private and scandalous disputes of elite life at the centre of public politics – including the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1776.
Elizabeth Chudleigh had built a reputation as one of the most flamboyant figures of Georgian high society. She served as a maid of honour at court, cultivated powerful patrons, and was well known for her conspicuous wealth and independence. In 1769 she married Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, only enhancing her status further.
But after the duke’s death in 1773, questions were raised about whether the marriage had been legal. In 1744, Chudleigh had secretly married a naval officer, Augustus Hervey. The marriage was poorly documented and later disputed, but it had never been formally dissolved. If it was valid, her later marriage to the Duke of Kingston would have amounted to bigamy – a serious criminal offence.
Because she was now a duchess, the case was heard in the House of Lords, and the trial became a public spectacle. The personal life of a prominent woman was dissected in full view of parliament, attracting enormous public interest and extensive press coverage.
The Lords found Chudleigh guilty. She was spared imprisonment but stripped of her title.
7. The Charles Dilke affair (1885–86)
Toward the final decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign, Britain’s political system was becoming more democratic, but it remained shaped by Victorian ideas about morality and respectability. Public figures were expected to embody private virtue, as well as public service.
Charles Dilke was a wealthy Radical Liberal MP, first elected in his mid-twenties and widely regarded as a future prime minister. He supported republican ideas, social reform, and the expansion of the franchise. By the mid-1880s he was president of the Local Government Board and one of the most recognisable faces in British politics.
But Dilke’s highest political ambitions were derailed by allegations that surfaced in Donald Crawford’s 1885 divorce petition against his wife, Virginia. The scandal became public at the first hearing of Crawford v Crawford and Dilke on 12 February 1886, when Donald Crawford told the court (repeating a confession Virginia had made to him in July 1885) that she had committed adultery with Dilke and described lurid “French vices”, including an allegation that Dilke involved her in a ménage-à-trois.
Although the judge dismissed the case against Dilke for lack of evidence while granting Crawford a divorce, press and political pressure made this an inadequate vindication for Dilke. Seeking to clear his name, Dilke helped trigger a second hearing in July 1886, in which further explicit testimony and admissions proved disastrous for him.
The MP lost his seat in the general election that same month, and although he re-entered parliament in 1892, Dilke’s political career never fully recovered.
8. The Marconi scandal (1912–13)
The Marconi scandal centred on a government contract to build a chain of wireless telegraphy stations across the British empire.
The contract was awarded to the British subsidiary of the Marconi Company, a firm at the forefront of a new and strategically important technology. But not long after the decision, questions were raised in parliament about whether ministers had financial interests connected to the deal.
It emerged that several senior figures in the Liberal government, including the chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs and the postmaster general Herbert Samuel, had bought shares in the American Marconi Company. Although this was a separate business from the British subsidiary that received the contract, the distinction was subtle, and widely misunderstood. Opposition MPs accused ministers of insider trading and misleading parliament and, thanks to interest from the press, the issue became a prolonged public controversy.
As for the fallout, Professor Nicholas Allen of Royal Holloway University of London tells HistoryExtra, “Lloyd George obviously survived Marconi after a (perceived friendly) select committee inquiry, and, indeed, went on to prosper!”
- Read more | 6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House: from the Petticoat Affair to Clinton-Lewinsky
9. Cash for honours (1916–22)
During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Britain was governed by a coalition led by David Lloyd George, a forceful and unconventional prime minister. Lloyd George relied heavily on political fundraising to maintain his position, particularly after the war.
For many years, honours such as knighthoods and peerages had been influenced by political service and donation. Under Lloyd George, this informal system evolved into something altogether more formal. Wealthy individuals were invited to make large contributions to party funds with the clear expectation that an honour would follow: a knighthood for thousands of pounds, a peerage for a sizeable sum more.
The practice was an open secret in political circles, but it came to the attention of the public after Lloyd George left office in 1922. Former associates and journalists published details of the dealings, including lists of honours that appeared to match donations with suspicious precision. The idea that seats in the House of Lords could effectively be bought by the wealthy created widespread public anger.
The scandal damaged trust in the honours system and reinforced perceptions of postwar politics as cynical and corrupt, though Lloyd George managed to avoid any formal consequences – the second time he dodged punishment for a scandal within the space of a few years.
The wider impact has also been limited, according to Professor Allen. “Cash for honours led to legislation that made explicit sales illegal. But, of course, the correlation between party donations and honours has continued ever since.”
10. Hugh Dalton’s accidental budget leak (1947)
Hugh Dalton was chancellor of the Exchequer in the postwar Labour government led by Clement Attlee. Dalton was an experienced figure, a key architect of Labour’s economic policy and the expansion of the welfare state.
On 12 November 1947, he arrived at the House of Commons to deliver his latest budget. While waiting outside the chamber, Dalton chatted briefly to a journalist and mentioned a small detail of the forthcoming budget: a proposed increase in the rate of purchase tax.
Working quickly, the journalist was able to rush from parliament and publish the information almost immediately. As a result, a detail from the budget appeared in print before Dalton had even finished presenting it to parliament.
The next day, Dalton resigned – though this was only a “formal resignation”, according to Professor Allen, who says that, in reality, the chancellor was “swiftly sacked by Attlee”.
There wasn’t any suggestion of personal gain, corruption or deception. Dalton’s only mistake had been to unintentionally break the convention that parliament should be the first recipient of major financial information from the government – but it was a fatal mistake.
Surely one of the strangest and most arcane scandals in parliamentary history, Professor Allen says that Dalton’s downfall “was more of an executive failing. Though, of course, Dalton re-entered government later in Labour’s term.”
11. The Profumo affair (1963)
John Profumo was the secretary of state for war in the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.
Profumo was seen as a reliable figure in a sensitive defence role during the peak of Cold War tensions. Profumo was married, but in 1961 he began a brief sexual relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model and showgirl connected to social circles that included prominent diplomats and figures within the intelligence community.
But Profumo wasn’t Keeler’s only romantic liaison. Keeler was also intimately acquainted with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché widely believed to be an intelligence officer working for the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, the possibility that a prominent cabinet minister – and the secretary of state for war, no less – might have shared a lover with a Soviet spy raised shocking security concerns.
Rumours began circulating in Westminster in early 1963, prompting Profumo to make a personal statement to the House of Commons in which he categorically denied any impropriety. Within weeks, mounting evidence made that denial untenable. Profumo was forced to admit that he had conducted a sexual affair with Keeler and, crucially, that he had deliberately misled parliament.
He resigned immediately. That resignation helped to embed the expectation that lying to parliament or misleading the house would be widely accepted (though not entirely accepted) as a resigning matter.
The affair eroded confidence in the judgment and competence of Macmillan’s government, reinforcing simmering perceptions of moral decay and elite irresponsibility. Macmillan’s personal authority never fully recovered, and he resigned later in 1963, officially citing ill health.
12. The Jeremy Thorpe affair (1976–79)
In 1967, during Harold Wilson’s tenure as prime minister, homosexuality between consenting adults had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales. But well into the 1970s, parliament still clung to old expectations about private conduct.
Jeremy Thorpe was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 and, for a time, one of the most prominent politicians outside the two leading parties. He was articulate, media-savvy, and played a key role in the closely fought general elections of 1974, when the Liberals briefly held the balance of power at Westminster.
But Thorpe had a secret that would quickly spiral out of control. Thorpe had met a man called Norman Scott (then known as Norman Josiffe) in the early 1960s, and the pair began a relationship. However, noting the damage that it would do to his political career if this secret relationship were to become public, Thorpe allegedly threatened Scott into silence. This escalated into a botched conspiracy to have Scott killed to ensure that the secret would never get out.
In 1975, Scott’s dog was shot by an associate of Thorpe who was sent to intimidate Scott. Scott himself was unharmed, but the incident triggered a police investigation.
Thorpe was charged in 1978 with conspiracy to murder. The trial, held at the Old Bailey, was followed with immense interest by the press. Thorpe denied the charges and was ultimately acquitted, but the damage was irreversible. He had already resigned as party leader, and his parliamentary career had effectively ended.
]]> Isabel King <![CDATA[The 'Nine Days Queen' is one of England's most controversial monarchs - here's why]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/nine-days-queen-england-controversial-monarch/ 2026-04-30T14:40:39.000Z 2026-04-30T14:40:39.000Z In April 2026, Bradgate House – the childhood home of Lady Jane Grey – was reopened to the public after extensive conservation work, bringing with it a new wave of interest in the so-called ‘Nine Days Queen’.
But what do we actually know about this enigmatic Tudor noble, who is often cast as a tragic victim?
Who was Lady Jane Grey?
In 1537, Jane was born into the noble Grey family. Her parents were the Duke of Suffolk, Henry Grey, and Lady Frances Brandon.
As the great-granddaughter of Henry VII and great-niece of Henry VIII, Jane was orbiting the English throne from birth. However, as historian Nicola Tallis explains on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “she wasn’t ever raised as an heir to the throne. She was just this great-niece of Henry VIII who had been living in the countryside."
In 1553, that all changed.
King Edward VI was in increasingly ill-health but, being the first English monarch raised as a Protestant, he was desperate for his Protestant legacy to live on. So, he issued his Devise for the Succession. This legislation barred both of Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from succeeding to the throne.
“[Edward] didn’t want his Catholic half-sister [Mary] to be given the opportunity to reverse all of his good work in the cause of religion”, explains Nicola. “However, Edward realised that he couldn’t exclude one half-sister without also excluding the other. And so, he bars both Mary and his younger half-sister Elizabeth from the succession by reason of their illegitimacy."
This catapulted Jane to first in line for the throne – a place she didn’t want to be.
A reluctant queen
On 6 July 1553, just a few weeks after the Devise for the Succession, Edward VI died at age 15. This officially made Lady Jane Grey the Queen of England.
“She had no wish or desire to be queen whatsoever, but this was an impossible situation for Jane because she was pressured into accepting the throne," says Nicola.
So, Jane reluctantly took to the throne and was publicly proclaimed Queen on 10 July 1553.
Though, it would not last long; Jane would hold the title for a mere nine days. She was soon toppled by Mary I.
Was she really queen?
There has been some debate about whether Lady Jane Grey should be considered one of Britain’s monarchs, given the fact that the Devise for the Succession was never passed through parliament.
But as Diarmaid MacCulloch, speaking to HistoryExtra, points out, “the monarchy has never descended by strict primogeniture, and Queen Jane had a perfectly good claim to the throne: the sort of claim that brought James VI of Scotland to be James I of England in 1603."
Tudor historian Tracy Borman agrees.
“Edward’s Devise for the Succession was legally binding, so Jane’s claim was entirely valid – and arguably more so than other monarchs who claimed the throne without being legally named."
So, why is Jane often left off the list of British monarchs?
“Mary I [Edward VI’s half-sister who took the throne from Lady Jane Grey] had to ensure that her subjects saw her – not the woman she had supplanted – as the only true queen," explains Tracy. The dismissal of Lady Jane Grey was, therefore, a form of propaganda.
- Read more | Mary I: your guide to the life and rule of Henry VIII's daughter – plus a timeline and 7 little-known facts
In the battle over religious belief, Catholic Mary I had many supporters following the intense Protestantism of Edward VI’s reign, and that meant Lady Jane Grey – as a devout Protestant herself – made many enemies. As soon as Mary came to the throne on 19 July 1553, Jane was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Why was Bradgate House so important?
Within the tumultuous story of Lady Jane Grey’s life, Bradgate House was the place that defined her childhood and provided the environment that shaped her.
“Jane would have grown up in an elite Protestant setting at Bradgate and, during the reign of Edward, some star Protestant preachers such as Bishop Hugh Latimer were welcome guests there," says Diarmaid. This moulded Jane’s Protestant beliefs, which made her such a good candidate to follow in Edward’s footsteps.
Living at Bradgate also gave Jane the opportunity to be educated, in a world where women were still often limited in this regard. Speaking to HistoryExtra, biographer James D Taylor explains that Jane’s scholarly abilities and intellect were nurtured in an environment where education was encouraged: “at a time when schools that we know of now did not exist, [growing up at Bradgate] allowed Jane to read and study with the guidance of tutors."
What can we learn from the story of Lady Jane Grey?
Whether or not Jane is considered a true queen, she was a certainly a definitive figure of the Tudor period, and representative of the era’s religious tensions.
“She’s a great symbol of historical might-have-beens,” says MacCulloch.
Of her short reign, Taylor adds, “though ill-prepared to rule, she did the best she could in the short amount of time she sat on the throne."
Jane refused to have her husband, Lord Guildford, proclaimed king without an Act of Parliament and, as Tallis explains, “the odds did seem to be very much stacked in Jane's favour to begin with. Even Mary's supporters were urging her to flee abroad for her safety because they were convinced that Jane's reign was going to be secure.”
- Read more | The curse of the nine-day queen
But despite her best efforts, Jane couldn’t compete with a vengeful Mary I, who, after being denied her birth right once before, was not willing to let it happen again. When Jane’s father was revealed as a key conspirator in Wyatt's rebellion – a 1554 uprising that aimed to prevent Mary I’s marriage to Philip II of Spain – Jane’s fate was sealed.
On 12 February 1554, Jane was executed at the Tower of London.
But perhaps she shouldn’t be remembered solely as a victim.
“Jane's story vividly illustrates how powerless women could be in the face of ambitious male relatives," says Borman. “Yet it also provides an inspiring example of a young woman with unshakeable religious convictions and principles – one who might, if history had turned out differently, have proved an excellent queen.”
Nicola Tallis was speaking to Isabel King on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, available soon.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[A history of the world in 7 faces: from Tutankhamun to the Virgin Mary]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-history-of-the-world-in-7-faces-from-tutankhamun-to-the-virgin-mary/ 2026-04-27T16:01:05.000Z 2026-04-27T16:00:55.000Z 1. The art of darkness
This enigmatic head is a 25,000-year-old testament to the innate urge to capture the essence of a person in art
In 1894, an archaeologist called Édouard Piette walked into a cave in the village of Brassempouy in south-west France and came face-to-face with humanity’s distant past.
Lying in the darkness was a fragment of mammoth-ivory carved to depict a head. That head was tiny – so small that it could nestle in the palm of Piette’s hand – and yet it had survived for 25,000 years, carved by an artist deep in the Palaeolithic period. Piette couldn’t have been aware of it at the time, but he had just discovered one of the earliest known representations of a human face in art.
That representation is both awe-inspiring – and deeply enigmatic. It would soon be known as ‘The Venus of Brassempouy’ – there were other Venuses in the same cave, with those rounded hips and breasts associated with fertility symbols – and yet we can’t even be sure if it depicts a woman.
Despite these uncertainties, the fact that this rare and portable object exists at all tells us that it was important for the artist to capture something of the essence of a person – and with a level of detail that is unusual for a Venus figurine. That depth of detail is most evident in the intricate, chequerboard-patterned hair – possibly a wig or hood – from which the object derives its nickname, ‘La Dame à La Capuche’ (Lady with the Hood). The face, by comparison, is a blank canvas. It has a prominent forehead, nose and brow, but it lacks a mouth. Was this artistic decision influenced by convention? Religion? Personal style? Time? We do not know.
What we do know is that the Venus of Brassempouy stands as a symbol of how representations of the face have evolved over 25,000 years. Today, we take it for granted that our face represents us – a phenomenon I have termed ‘facehood’. It is marked on our passports and unlocks our mobiles; it is captured in photographs countless times over our lifetimes. It has become a shorthand for a unique, individual person in a way that simply wasn’t the case with the Venus of Brassempouy.
2. From death to deity
Tutankhamun’s dazzling mask was designed to transform a mortal man into a god
In ancient Egypt, memorialising people did not mean remembering what they looked like. It was wealth, power and similarity to the gods that mattered. For proof, look no further than one of the world’s most recognisable objects: Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask.
Revealed in 1925 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, three years after he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, this dazzling artefact measures 54cm high – a fit for an average adult’s head. Weighing over 10kg, the mask is made of solid gold, with intricate inlays of lapis lazuli and carnelian. Yet the most intriguing feature is its 2.5kg golden beard.
That beard, which is long and plaited, extends down from the chin with a formal, geometric appearance and rectangular shape. Look at the mask in profile and you’ll see that it is not intended to look naturalistic; the beard is held in place with a band beneath the chin – as it would have been in a ceremony.
Tutankhamun died c1323 BC, aged just 18 or 19 – too young to grow such a beard. This – coupled with the fact that the mask has pierced earlobes, the preserve of women and children – has led some Egyptologists to argue that it was never intended to be used by Tutankhamun at all. It was, they argue, designed for his stepmother, Nefertiti.
Yet for ancient Egyptians, faces had symbolic rather than literal, gendered meanings. Eyes, for instance, had mystical connotations – as illustrated by the ‘Eye of Horus’ and the ‘Eye of Ra’ (representing wellbeing, healing and protection). Both male and female rulers wore fake beards in ancient Egyptian ceremonies and art – to display divine power and royal authority. The principle was practical, but the practice was genderless.
Hence Tutankhamun’s mask resembles the gods Osiris and Ra, whose bodies were made of gold and lapis lazuli. An inscription on the mask reads: “Your forehead is Anubis, your right eye is the night boat [of Ra], your left eye is the day boat, your eyebrows are in the company of nine gods.”
The mask was intended to be seen by the gods, not by humans. Such images were theological objects that transformed a corpse into a deity.
3. Age before beauty
The Romans believed that wisdom – and, therefore, fitness to rule – was etched in the lines of the face
We do not know the identity of the artist, or indeed the subject, of this ‘Head of a Roman Patrician’. So what do we see when we look at it? We might conclude, from the richness of the drapery, that this was someone important. After all, plebs and slaves were not sculpted in marble.
He is a serious man, with a poker-straight posture and a solemn expression, whose face and neck are wizened by age. The skin on his forehead and balding brow is deeply lined by years of thinking – and, perhaps, by responsibility.
Earlier scholars suggested that the sitter was Cato the Censor, the famously austere Republican statesman. Yet we should beware making the mistake of thinking the sculptor aimed at realism, or likeness, as we understand it.
This bust is an example of ‘verism’, a style of Roman portraiture that sought symbolic rather than literal truth. Roman sculptors and philosophers followed the rules of physiognomy that meant character was revealed in the lines and structure of the face.
Why? Because Romans needed a visual language that demonstrated political legitimacy in a system where power was contested. In later centuries it would be important for monarchs to have individually recognisable portraits for propaganda and coinage. But their rule was assured by blood or war. In the Republic of Rome, rulers showed their fitness in the experience, wisdom and expertise etched on their faces.
Women – wives and daughters of those rulers – were not depicted as aged and wise, because female value, then as now, was too often based on beauty, not intellect. Men could also be subject to gendered idealism. Since a Republican politician often needed to embody not only the wisdom and experience of age, but also the physical prowess of a warrior, some sculptural portraits had wizened faces but youthful, vigorous bodies.
4. Why the long face?
In the Middle Ages, religious portraiture relied on symbolism rather than realism to spread the word of God
Patricians symbolising leadership in ancient Rome were concerned principally with their peers – the literate elite who read character in wrinkles. The medieval church faced a different problem: it needed to communicate to vast populations, most of them illiterate, many of them poor, none of them experts at what faces meant.
So the church developed a visual language of symbols in portraiture. These symbols told viewers instantly who Jesus and the saints were, as well as religious martyrs, local landowners and wealthy donors who invested in the church fabric.
Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned is one of the most famous examples of a symbolically laden portrait. Here, the Virgin Mary’s image lacks the emotionality and fleshiness of later artworks such as Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca (c1506–07).
Painted around 1310, Giotto’s work was influenced by Byzantine tradition, which dominated Italian art, though he began introducing more naturalism. Gold leaf, bright colours, formal poses and slender, otherworldly faces were what people expected from divine images.
What made Mary instantly recognisable were her symbols: the dark blue mantel, the white headscarf, the Christ child on her lap, the throne, the surrounding saints with their haloes and attributes, the gold trim and background. She might also be shown with a crown of 12 stars, roses, rosary beads and a heart pierced by a sword.
In a world before consumer capitalism, bureaucracy and mass urbanisation, personal portraiture that showed an ordinary person simply wasn’t necessary.
- Read more | Medieval family planning: meet the strong-willed women who redefined motherhood in the Middle Ages
5. The man in the mirror
By the 17th century, symbolism was being swept aside by portraits that sought to reveal the unvarnished truth
In 1659, the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn sat before a mirror to capture his reflection. Unlike the Roman patrician, Giotto’s Madonna – or indeed Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of Henry VIII a century earlier – there is nothing idealised about Rembrandt’s self-portrait. What he produced was unflinchingly realistic.
Rembrandt wears a dark coat and a black beret, and stares out from a dark, featureless canvas. Nothing distracts from the face, the centre of emotion, humanity and the self, with a posture and expression that reveals emotion in the creases round the mouth and eyes. His skin is weathered, his features irregular, his nose is prominent, his jowls sagging. This is a man who has suffered – Rembrandt was care-worn from a recent bankruptcy. His eyes meet ours, offering an invitation to connect.
Unlike earlier self-portraits – Rembrandt created almost 100 during his lifetime – there are no elaborate symbols on display here: no artist’s palette, no jewels signalling status, no books to indicate learning or hourglass to warn of time’s passing.
Self-portraits of his era reflect the fact that the status of the artist was becoming more important, as well as the idea of interiority and psychological individualism.
Rembrandt’s portrait is an archetype of modern portraiture – it betrays a feeling face. We can see what he looked like as a specific, unique person, and the same face ageing across different self-portraits. In medieval portraits, faces had been more stylised and generic, and painters often re-used faces, because they were not the focal point of the painting. With its radical approach to symbols, identity and the face, the Renaissance changed all that. From now on, artists would seek to portray their subjects as distinctly individual and recognisable.
Portraiture, then, did not only reflect a growing interest in the face, but also encouraged and perpetuated it – much as photographic portraits did in the 19th century.
6. What lies beneath
Photography forced artists to look beyond the skin to the sitter’s core, with often unsettling results
This Head of a Woman was crafted in 1909 by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is modelled on Fernande Olivier, an artist in her own right. Olivier is usually credited as Picasso’s muse, yet flattery was clearly not a consideration in this particular portrayal of her. Picasso’s ‘Head’ is roughly constructed, with no attempt at realism.
But why? To answer that question, we need to consider the dramatic technological changes that had convulsed the art world between the ages of Rembrandt and Picasso. When Rembrandt plied his trade, artists could make a good living. Their success came from their ability to capture some essential truth about appearance – to reproduce the world as it really was. But between the 1840s and the 1870s, with the invention and popularisation of photography, everything changed.
Once a camera could capture likeness with mechanical precision, the project of realistic portraiture became obsolete. If a camera could do in a few minutes what took a painter months, what was the job of the artist?
For artists such as Picasso, the answer lay in achieving in their paintings what a photograph could not: penetrating the core of a person to capture what the mind feels. Picasso’s Cubist work embodies this approach.
For all the head’s lack of realism, skill is not an issue here. Picasso was accomplished at realism in painting and sculpture. Rather, the focus was different. The face was now a problem to be solved and understood – a structural puzzle, rather than an object to be copied.
For artists that followed, such as Francis Bacon and the surrealists, the artist’s job was to ferret out what could only be discovered through their special insight. In such hands, and increasingly after the crisis of confidence caused by the First World War, the portrait was a tool for psychological investigation rather than social documentation.
- Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America
7. Sweet scents and rotting flesh
This installation serves as a reminder that, over the history of portraiture, not all faces have been equal
Today, the question is less how faces are portrayed, but rather, whose faces. For centuries, the canon of western portraiture has, for the most part, not included black people. And where they were included, it was as servants, slaves, exoticised presences in paintings made by, and for, white subjects. There are exceptions: Juan de Pareja, enslaved and painted by Velázquez; Frederick Douglass, photographed repeatedly after achieving freedom. But these instances are rare. For most of history, black people have appeared as exhibits, in the margins, in the background, or not at all.
However, in the 21st century artists such as Kara Walker have begun to subvert Victorian artistic styles, such as the silhouette – a medium historically associated with genteel portraiture – to critique the racist depictions of black faces found in art and culture, from slavery advertisements to blackface.
In 2014, Walker created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a monumental installation in the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the centre of that artwork stands a sphinx coated with 8 tonnes of sugar – the commodity that built American wealth on the backs of slaves. The face of the statue invokes that mammy archetype, Aunt Jemima, while the gaze stares straight ahead, as impassively as the Great Sphinx of Giza, on which it is modelled. But the body is exposed and sexualised, as black women’s bodies have been in history.
Around the sphinx are smaller figures: molasses-covered children, whose bodies are deteriorating, some with missing limbs and empty eye sockets. The sweet smell of sugar gives way to the acrid stench of rotting flesh. What is beneath the surface here is not some secret interiority – as was the case for Bacon or Picasso – but the question of who is being looked at, and who is doing the looking. It is the nature of artistic production and consumption itself that takes centre stage.
Fay Bound-Alberti is professor of modern history, and director of Interface at King’s College London. Her new book, The Face: A Cultural History, was published by Allen Lane in February
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Tracy Borman <![CDATA[Think you know everything about the Tudors? Here are 15 facts that will prove you wrong]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/think-you-know-everything-about-the-tudors-here-are-15-facts-that-will-prove-you-wrong/ 2026-10-08T12:35:32.000Z 2026-04-12T15:00:00.000Z 1. The Tudors weren’t known as the Tudors
Although we use ‘Tudor’ as a nifty shorthand for both the era and the dynasty, it wasn’t used at the time either by the monarchs or their people. Neither did they see it as a distinct period: in fact, Henry VII went to great lengths to emphasise the continuity with his royal predecessors, even down to using the same tailor whom Edward IV had employed.
He also emphasised his Lancastrian roots and tried to downplay his Welsh origins, aware that his grandfather Owen Tudor had married well above him when he bagged Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois as a bride. Throughout the period 1485–1603, the people identified as subjects of each successive king or queen, as well as taking pride in their local affiliations, rather than seeing themselves as ‘Tudor people’.
2. They had a pretty dodgy claim to the throne
When Henry Tudor won the crown from Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, he was quick to stress his legitimacy. But there was more than a hint of protesting too much. In fact, the Tudors were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, and his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford.
Moreover, Henry VII’s father Edmund was the child of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh attendant. With such a dubious bloodline, it’s little wonder that England’s first Tudor king wasted no time in marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest child of Edward IV. Their marriage united the warring houses of York and Lancaster and, crucially, gave the Tudors some much-needed legitimacy.
3. Henry VII was no miser
The first Tudor king has a reputation for penny-pinching. But while he kept a close eye on his expenditure, he knew how to splash the cash when it was to his advantage.
In the early years of his reign, when he was under constant threat from rivals and pretenders and many of his subjects questioned his right to be king, he spent lavish sums on dressing the part. Just over a week after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, he ordered a set of new gowns fashioned from cloth of gold, satin and royal purple velvet at a cost of £336, which roughly equates to £225,000 in today’s money.
During the two years that followed, he spent an eye-watering £5,386 (£3.6 million) on his wardrobe. But his generosity had its limits. His wife, Elizabeth of York, struggled to make ends meet throughout their marriage.
4. You would smell Henry VIII before you saw him
For the last 20 years of his life, Henry was tormented by pain from a chronic leg ulcer, which was aggravated by a serious fall from his horse while jousting in 1536. The ulcer often became inflamed and – unsurprisingly – Henry was a difficult patient, refusing to rest for long enough for it to heal. At its worst, the suppurating wound could be smelt from three rooms away.
- Read more | Was this the moment Henry VIII became a tyrant?
5. Henry VIII’s love of hawking was almost the death of him
Henry’s love of sport was well known throughout the court. As a young king, he would spend hours hunting, jousting, shooting arrows and playing tennis. Hawking was another of his favourite sports and his private apartments contained an impressive array of falconry equipment.
But in 1525, Henry was almost killed while pursuing his hawk. Attempting to pole vault over a ditch, instead he fell headfirst into it and almost drowned. Thankfully, his quick-thinking footman, Edmund Moody, managed to pull him out in the nick of time.
6. Henry VIII was a bit of a prude
Contrary to popular belief, Tudor England’s most-married monarch wasn’t much of a lothario. In fact, he had twice as many wives as mistresses. There is only evidence of three extramarital affairs.
The women involved were Bessie Blount (the mother of Henry’s not-so-subtly-named illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy), Mary Boleyn (sister of his second wife Anne) and ‘Mistress Shelton’, who was either Margaret or Mary Shelton, both cousins of Anne Boleyn.
Although there was a rumour that he once had an affair with Anne’s mother Elizabeth, he stoutly denied it: “Never with the mother!”
7. Anne Boleyn did not have a sixth finger on one hand
This oft-repeated tale is based on scurrilous gossip written almost 50 years after Anne’s death. A host of hostile Catholic tracts about Anne appeared in the 1580s as part of a smear campaign against her ‘heretic’ daughter, Elizabeth I.
Nicholas Sander was one of the most influential and claimed that Anne had been Henry VIII’s daughter as well as his wife, the result of his clandestine affair with her mother. Feeding on the rumours of witchcraft that had circulated at the time of Anne’s demise, he asserted that she had a sixth finger on her right hand and a large ‘wen’ (a boil or mole) under her chin.
Such blemishes were commonly thought to be the ‘Devil’s Mark’ – a symbol of having made a pact with Satan. In fact, Anne was proud of her long, slender fingers and always took care to show them off to best effect… all 10 of them.
8. Anne of Cleves was not ugly
You may have heard the story: Henry VIII fell in love with Anne of Cleves’ portrait and immediately signed on the dotted line of the marriage contract. But when he met his bride in person, he was appalled that she was nothing like her profile picture. So, he had the marriage annulled before you could say ‘off with her head’.
In fact, Holbein’s portrait was faithful to Anne, and many contemporary accounts praise her beauty. If anyone had cause for complaint about their betrothed’s physical assets, it was Anne. Henry was no oil painting by the time she married him in January 1540. Pushing 50, he was bloated, ulcer-ridden and almost certainly impotent. It was with understandable haste that Anne agreed to an annulment just six months later.
9. Edward VI kept a diary
The boy king was the only Tudor monarch to leave behind a private journal. But if you’re expecting a tell-all exposé full of secretly expressed desires, grudges and hopes, you might be disappointed. In fact, it’s a rather dry summary of the events of his reign.
Even the execution of his once-cherished uncle is afforded only the following curt line: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off today.” Overall, the diary reveals a boy who was precociously intelligent, as might be expected for Henry VIII’s “precious jewel”, who had the best of everything growing up.
But he also appears cold, unfeeling and uncompromising – a dangerous blend of traits that might have made him an even greater tyrant than his father if he lived to maturity.
10. Lady Jane Grey was queen for 14 days, not nine
Jane has gone down in history as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. But while it’s true that she was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and deposed by Mary Tudor on 19 July, her reign technically began as soon as Edward VI had breathed his last on 6 July.
On his deathbed, Edward changed the succession in favour of his Protestant cousin Jane to prevent his Catholic half-sister Mary claiming her right. He was heavily influenced by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had married his son Guildford to Jane.
Even so, Edward’s ‘Device’ for the succession was legally-binding, so Jane was the rightful queen as soon as the young king died. Yet she is always referred to as ‘Lady’ rather than ‘Queen’ and is often omitted from the roll call of English monarchs altogether. That owes much to Mary Tudor’s propaganda: to seize the throne, she had to present Jane as a usurper.
11. ‘Bloody Mary’ wasn’t all that bloody
Mary I’s obsession with returning England to the Roman Catholic faith spurred her to have around 300 Protestant heretics burned at the stake. But while there is no doubting the horrific nature of their deaths, Mary acted out of conscience rather than brutality.
Blinded by her own faith, she genuinely believed that she was saving her subjects from eternal damnation by bringing them into the Roman Catholic fold. Furthermore, the number of people who died on Mary’s orders was just a fraction of those who suffered at the hands of her far bloodier father, Henry VIII.
He sent more men and women to their deaths than any other Tudor monarch. Anyone who refused to fall in with his will was sent to the block – commoners, statesmen and wives alike. It even became a crime to think differently from the king. Contemporary records are patchy and inconsistent, so it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many deaths Henry was responsible for. Estimates vary from a few thousand to as many as 72,000.
12. Mary Tudor was a bit of a party girl
Despite her reputation for sober-mindedness and piety, Mary loved to have fun. One of her favourite companions was Jane Fool, a female jester. The queen was also an avid gambler and loved to play cards and board games. She also entertained lavishly and spent huge sums on feasting and drinking.
A scandalised Spanish ambassador reported: “There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river [known as the Pisuerga river today]… The ladies and gentlemen put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.”
13. Elizabeth I employed the original James Bond
The queen’s personal astrologer Dr John Dee was one of her closest advisers. She would regularly consult him about the most apposite moment to undertake key events, such as her coronation.
An astrologer, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Dee was one of the most learned men of the age. But he also carried out more covert assignments for his royal mistress. She employed Dee as a spy, and he would report on intrigues abroad using complex codes. He signed his letters with the numerals ‘007’.
14. Elizabeth I was (apparently) a man
The ‘Bisley Boy’ legend states that in 1542, the future Elizabeth I (then aged around nine) was sent to Overcourt House in the Cotswold village of Bisley to escape the plague in London. Whilst there, she sickened with a fever and died. Knowing that Henry VIII was on his way to visit his daughter, her panic-stricken governess searched the village in vain for a girl who resembled Elizabeth closely enough to fool the king.
The only child of the right age and colouring was a boy, so in desperation she dressed him in the princess’s clothes and the deception was complete. This unlikely tale dates from the 1800s and was made popular by Dracula author Bram Stoker in his book Famous Impostors.
There is no contemporary evidence to support it and more than a whiff of misogyny about the whole thing. How else could Elizabeth have ruled so successfully for so many years? She must have been a man.
15. Elizabeth I didn’t leave her throne to James VI
But as she lay dying at Richmond Palace in March 1603, she finally settled the matter, gasping that she would have none but “my nearest kinsman the King of Scots”.
This deathbed scene was recorded by the contemporary historian William Camden, who had been commissioned to write a biography of the celebrated queen during her lifetime. But dramatic new research by the British Library has proved that Camden was forced to rewrite it on the orders of the new king to make his accession look more predetermined than it had been.
Using transmitted light, the researchers found that in his original manuscript, written at the time of Elizabeth’s death, Camden had recorded that she died without naming a successor. But a few years later, his words were covered over with the lie that ushered the Stuarts to the Tudor throne.
]]> Dr Owen Emmerson <![CDATA[What did Anne Boleyn REALLY look like? Our new research could change everything]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-did-anne-boleyn-really-look-like-our-new-research-could-change-everything/ 2026-04-02T09:39:39.000Z 2026-03-13T17:30:55.000Z Close your eyes and picture Anne Boleyn. Chances are you can conjure up a pretty clear and detailed image in your imagination – because few figures in English history seem as visually familiar as Henry VIII’s second queen.
Representations of her face appear everywhere: in films, television dramas and novels, in museum gift shops and digital reconstructions. She is often depicted in popular culture as an elegant brunette whose sophistication distinguishes her from others at court. Over time, this image has hardened into something close to fact. Anne Boleyn, we are told, was devastatingly beautiful.
Yet this certainty is built on fragile foundations, and surviving evidence provides a less concrete understanding of Anne’s appearance. No formal painted portraits from life survive today, though images in a number of smaller, more intimate formats – particularly miniatures – are candidates for having captured her true likeness based on contemporary encounters. The more-familiar portraits featuring the now-iconic ‘B’ pendant necklace, meanwhile, were likely created decades later, influenced by politics, artistic convention and hindsight.
For generations, historians assumed that any accurate representations created during Anne’s life had been lost altogether, erased after her execution in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII. That story is compelling, but it is wrong. My research – which underpins Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn, a new exhibition at Anne’s childhood home, Hever Castle – suggests that her true likeness remained visible long after her dramatic death.
Her image circulated widely in several different forms: in print, on medals and in drawings that outlived her. Alongside written descriptions left by those who saw her, these sources allow us to come close to understanding how Anne Boleyn looked. They also prompt a more revealing question: during her lifetime, was Anne admired for beauty – at least, as the 16th century understood it? And how much did beauty really matter in a court where power, conviction and function carried far greater weight?
Ideals of beauty
Today, audiences are encouraged to believe that Anne Boleyn must have been very beautiful indeed to have displaced Queen Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII’s affections, and to have inspired him to reshape England’s religious and political landscape in order to marry her. This assumption reflects modern ideas about attraction and agency far more than it does the reality of Tudor mores. Different priorities shaped ideals of female beauty then: light colouring and complexion were widely admired. In 16th-century England, though, beauty alone rarely secured influence. At court, education, connections and presence mattered far more than looks. Intelligence, conversation and the ability to command attention in a highly performative environment were prized qualities. Anne excelled in these attributes.
- Read more | Anne Boleyn’s fatal French connection
Anne stood out, but not because she perfectly embodied an ideal of beauty. Her continental education, her penchant for French fashions and her finely honed courtly manner set her apart in a milieu still shaped by conservative English expectations. Contemporary responses to her appearance consistently suggest moderate attractiveness rather than conventional beauty. To understand that distinction properly, we must turn to the accounts of her appearance and demeanour from people who saw her.
Consistent picture
Contemporary descriptions of Anne are limited but broadly consistent. Simon Grynaeus, a German humanist who visited the English court in 1531, wrote to a compatriot that she was “young, good-looking, of a rather dark complexion”. In October 1532, the Venetian ambassador Carlo Capello, in a report later recorded in Marino Sanuto’s Diarii, described her as “not one of the handsomest women in the world… of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised… and her eyes, which are black and beautiful”.
Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French ambassador in London, wrote a long poetic account of Anne’s fall and execution in 1536, emphasising her expression and presence rather than physical features. Even sympathetic observers were measured: the reformist cleric John Barlow described her as “reasonably good-looking”, a phrase that in Tudor usage suggested composure and refinement rather than striking beauty.
What emerges is not the image of a woman celebrated for physical perfection but of someone whose appearance was animated by intelligence and presence. Observers repeatedly returned to her eyes and manner. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carle said of her eyes that she “knew well how to use [them] with effect”, capturing a sense of engagement, wit and command that made her captivating in person.
For centuries, the absence of a painted portrait from Anne’s lifetime was explained by a dramatic story: that Henry VIII ordered every likeness of her be destroyed after her execution. The image of a furious king erasing the woman for whom he had broken with Rome is powerful, but has no basis in contemporary sources. The story appeared first in the 19th century, when historians sought an explanation for Anne’s apparent visual disappearance.
What happened after the queen’s fall was administrative rather than vengeful. Anne’s badges and monograms were removed from royal buildings and replaced with those of her successor, Jane Seymour, just as Catherine of Aragon’s emblems had earlier been replaced by Anne’s. The King’s Works accounts for September 1536 list payments for removing Anne’s devices alongside those of Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s former chief minister, by then long dead.
No orders to destroy Anne’s portraits have been found, and even the command to remove her emblems was carried out only partly. Many of her falcon badges remain in the roof of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, blackened with paint but intact. Moreover, inventories taken after Henry’s death show that he continued to own objects that had once belonged to Anne and were decorated with her iconography, albeit packed away in chests. Anne herself had become valueless to him, but the gold and silver fashioned into her goods had not. He did not destroy them, just ensured that they were no longer seen.
The people’s prints
Though no painted panel portrait survives from Anne’s lifetime, images of her certainly do. Some of the most revealing were created not for the elite interiors of palaces but for public circulation. In the summer of 1533, the prolific printer Wynkyn de Worde was employed to publish a pamphlet titled The Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Quene Anne. Its cover features a small woodcut long dismissed by historians as a generic courtly scene. However, in collaboration with historian Jessica Carey-Bunning, I have identified this as a narrative composition including three contemporary images of Anne Boleyn at distinct stages of her relationship with Henry VIII.
The woodcut provides a visual sequence affirming the validity of the union. To the left, Henry courts Anne; in the centre, the couple are joined in marriage; and in the most prominent image, at the right, Henry and Anne are crowned beneath a cloth of estate, the king’s hand resting on his queen’s stomach. To a contemporary viewer, this was an explicit declaration of pregnancy. When the pamphlet was published, Anne was about six months pregnant with the child who would reign as Elizabeth I.
This woodcut image operated as a tool of legitimacy, fertility and dynastic hope. It was intended not to capture Anne’s features but, rather, to put her face to work. It was circulated deliberately and widely at the most politically sensitive moment of her queenship.
Other contemporary images reinforce this visibility. A lead prototype or proof known as the ‘Moost Happi’ medal, likely commissioned in anticipation of a male heir and struck in 1534, depicts Anne in part profile wearing a gable hood, and bears the initials AR (for Anna Regina). Edward Hawkins, keeper of antiquities at the British Museum in the 19th century, suggested that another surviving lead prototype showing Henry was a companion to Anne’s medal. My discovery of a fully cast example of the companion medal of Henry, fashioned as a hat pin in modest tin, indicates that these likenesses were destined for a wide distribution beyond the court – an effort to disseminate images of the king and his new queen.
Another contemporary image of Anne survives in a sketch of her coronation banquet, depicting her crowned beneath a cloth of estate in Westminster Hall, the focal point of an elaborate theatrical display. Even in this crude drawing, Anne is unmistakably the axis around which the ceremony revolves. Together, these show that Anne was among the most visually represented queens of early Tudor England.
Something rarer also survives: a glimpse of Anne Boleyn as she may have been seen by those who knew her personally. A chalk drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, depicts a woman in a fur-trimmed nightgown with a simple coif, her eyes lowered in contemplation. Though its subject has long been debated, recent scholarship by Dr Kate Heard has fundamentally reshaped understanding of this work, strongly supporting its identification as Anne Boleyn.
The drawing dates securely to Holbein’s second period in England, when he was working at the heart of the Tudor court, producing preparatory studies for both painted portraits and miniatures – and, crucially, working extensively under Anne’s patronage. The apparent informality of the portrait, once used to argue against the identification, now strengthens it. Comparable works by the Horenbout workshop similarly depict elite sitters such as Henry VIII’s son, the Duke of Richmond, in a state of undress, intended for private viewing.
Technical examination by the Royal Collection Trust has revealed that the sitter’s hair was originally far darker than it appears today. Layers of red, brown and black chalk have been largely worn away, with only remnants visible. Most compelling, however, is the later inscription identifying Anne as the sitter, based on an attribution by Sir John Cheke, who had met Anne in 1534, benefited from her patronage, and was closely connected to her circle through his wife, Mary Hill. If identified correctly, which now seems highly likely, this drawing represents the most direct surviving contemporary likeness of Anne. It shows her not as a crowned emblem of dynastic hope, as her public image had been crafted, but as a thinking, contemplative and private individual.
The Windsor drawing also unlocks the meaning of a later engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar titled Faith, or St Barbara, produced in 1647. This print, based on a now-lost Holbein design once in the Earl of Arundel’s collection, depicts a crowned female figure holding a chalice and wafer set against a landscape of cliffs and water.
When compared closely with the Windsor drawing, the resemblance is striking: they share the same profile, jawline, eye shape and cranial structure. The correspondence between the two strongly suggests that Holbein’s use of Anne’s face for Saint Barbara was drawn from his preparatory study. In this reading, the Windsor drawing was not an isolated likeness but part of a broader artistic conception.
The choice of that saint is significant because, like the reformist Anne, Barbara was associated with steadfast Christian faith and resistance to coercion when compelled to revert to traditional beliefs. In Anne’s book of hours, King’s MS 9, the illumination of Saint Barbara shares compositional similarities with the Windsor sketch and Hollar engraving, including a distinctive looped plait, indicating direct visual continuity. Portraying Anne in this guise would have aligned her queenship with conscience and reform.
Seen in this light, the image becomes both devotional and political. It presents Anne not simply as consort but as belief embodied. Saint Barbara was martyred and executed by the sword – a parallel that later viewers of this image could hardly have missed. The tragic irony is inescapable, though clearly it lies beyond the image’s original intent.
The possibility that Anne’s contemporary likeness survives in smaller, more intimate painted formats is strongly supported by this pairing of the Windsor sketch and the image of her as Saint Barbara. Two other near-identical portrait miniatures – one now in the collection of the Duke of Bucchleuch, the other in the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada – long associated with Anne, share a striking physiognomy with these two. When viewed together, the alignment of the facial structures is too close to be dismissed as a coincidence. These works appear to preserve a recognisable likeness circulating within and shortly after Anne’s lifetime, intended for private recognition rather than public proclamation.
Though we can’t be absolutely certain of the person whom they portray, these miniatures stand as the most plausible painted candidates for capturing Anne Boleyn’s likeness from life.
- Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
Changing faces
After her execution, Anne’s image fell out of use. When it re-emerged during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I, it was in a radically altered political landscape. One of the most familiar images of Anne today is the portrait painted c1584 and catalogued as NPG 668 in the National Portrait Gallery. Long treated as a posthumously created likeness of Anne herself, it preserves something else: Elizabeth’s face.
Art historian Lawrence Hendra has identified the creator of this famous panel painting as the as-yet-unnamed ‘Pearl Artist’. Comparing this artist’s other works – including portraits of Elizabeth I, her half-sister Mary I and her great-grandfather, Edward IV – it is clear that the painter used the same facial pattern for each sitter, including Anne Boleyn. The elongated facial structure, refined nose and controlled expression closely mirror Elizabeth’s physiognomy.
This effort to make Elizabeth’s relatives, some of whom likely bore no resemblance to one another, look alike was deliberate. In the 1580s, Elizabeth’s position was vulnerable. She was unmarried, without an heir, and facing both internal Catholic resistance and external threat. So repainting her ancestors with her own facial features anchored her visually as the rightful queen at a time when her legitimacy was again in question. Ensuring that Elizabeth looked like her father’s relatives as well as her mother, who had been accused of adultery, was a covert attempt to transform Anne from a condemned queen into a dynastic foundation stone, visually legitimising her daughter’s rule.
A different but equally deliberate innovation appears in the so-called Hever Rose portrait. Recent multi-modal scientific analysis by the Hamilton Kerr Institute, combined with dendrochronology (the dating of the wooden panel), places its painting in c1583, just one year before the famous picture in the National Portrait Gallery. Infrared reflectography reveals that the artist initially followed a pre-existing design but then interrupted it, inserting fully articulated hands holding a rose.
This moment matters, because it marks the first time Anne’s hands appeared in her posthumous iconography – a choice that was almost certainly polemical. In the early 1580s, defamatory claims by Nicholas Sander alleging that Anne possessed a sixth finger were already circulating widely in manuscript, years before they appeared in print. By depicting elegant, unblemished hands, with each finger made carefully visible, the artist offers a quiet but pointed rebuttal to this claim.
Both portraits respond to the same anxiety. In a period when Elizabeth’s legitimacy was under attack, Anne’s image was re-engineered to defend it: her face reshaped to mirror the queen’s, her body corrected to refute slander. Art became a form of political repair.
Lost likeness
Nearly five centuries after her execution, we may never know precisely what Anne Boleyn looked like. Her face survives only in fragments, refracted through prisms of politics, art and memory. Yet this uncertainty is not a failure of evidence; it is part of her history.
The images and descriptions that survive show that Anne was not invisible, and not admired solely for her beauty. She was compelling because of her presence, intelligence and conviction. She understood the power of being seen, and used imagery, print and ceremony to assert her place in the world.
In the end, the question of her appearance matters not because it satisfies curiosity but because it restores agency. Anne Boleyn was not merely a face shaped by others but an active participant – through her patronage of Holbein and the Horenbout family, not least – in how she was represented, remembered and contested. Approaching 500 years on, we are still learning to see her clearly.
Unpicking locks
What colour was Anne Boleyn's hair?
Modern portrayals often depict Anne with jet-black hair, reinforcing an image of dark, exotic beauty. The historical record, however, is more ambiguous. Contemporary descriptions mention dark eyes and darker complexion, but none explicitly describe hair colour – likely because it may not have seemed remarkable enough to comment upon.
Some later sources describe Anne as “witch-like” with black hair; others suggest chestnut or reddish tones. The poet Thomas Wyatt may have been referring to her when he wrote of a “brunet” woman. In Tudor usage, that could refer to dark hair, darker skin or both, and was often used to signal complexion rather than colouring alone.
Genetics adds more uncertainty. Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was red-haired, as was Henry VIII in his youth. Red hair is linked to variants of the MC1R gene expressed only if inherited from both parents, so Anne must have carried at least one such variant. Though not proof that she herself was red-haired, this significantly increases the likelihood, and makes chestnut or auburn tones entirely plausible.
Later portraits often show Anne with lighter reddish-brown hair. These may reflect attempts to align her appearance more closely with Elizabeth’s, reinforcing dynastic continuity. In a culture where fair hair was associated with virtue, this shift was politically advantageous.
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[What was the most important year in history? We asked 9 experts – and this is what they said]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-was-the-most-important-year-in-history-we-asked-9-experts-and-this-is-what-they-said/ 2026-03-09T15:31:03.000Z 2026-03-09T15:30:15.000Z AD 1000
Norse power: when worlds collide
This moment is surely imbued with the most global symbolism. It was when, according to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, adventurers sailed across the north Atlantic from settlements on the west coast of Greenland to the edge of the North American continent. There they met inhabitants of coastal regions of what’s now Canada: ancestors of peoples such as the Beothuk and Algonquin. The circle of humanity was closed for the first time in recorded history.
In the 1960s, archaeologists found a Norse overwintering site at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. This backed up what the sagas had already described: a series of voyages west from Greenland, the discovery of new lands and resources, and increasingly violent encounters with the people they called Skrælingar – an unpleasant name meaning ‘wretched ones’. These cross-cultural encounters began promisingly enough, with red cloth and dairy products traded for animal pelts. Eventually, though, relations disintegrated into distrust, violence and murder – an uneasy foreshadowing of what would follow centuries later.
This is, of course, a moment of retrospective significance. Those voyagers didn’t realise that they had reached an entirely new continent. Their expeditions did not make big news around the world. For me, that makes this moment in history even more interesting. Because when we’re being carried along by the churning currents of time, it’s not always possible to tell which events and dates will mean the most to those looking back.
Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024)
1066
Conquest, castles, class shifts and chivalry
For British history, at least, the answer is 1066. This might seem surprising to people who remember only the battle of Hastings, the death of King Harold and the accession of William the Conqueror, but the regime change that followed the Norman takeover went far beyond just a new royal dynasty. As Domesday Book shows, by 1086 the old ruling class of Anglo-Saxon England had been replaced almost entirely, and more than 90 per cent of the land was now held by continental newcomers.
This had an immediate effect on the country’s physical appearance. Castles, which had hardly existed in England at all before 1066, were constructed in their hundreds. Cathedrals and abbeys were ripped down and rebuilt in a new Romanesque style. Notoriously, the north was brutally harried into submission and turned into a desert. Less perceptibly, but even more importantly in the long run, the Conquest also introduced new ideas about how society should be regulated. Slavery, which had been commonplace among the Anglo-Saxons, disappeared over the next half-century. The custom of sparing the life of a defeated opponent became the new norm among the ruling elite.
The rapid adoption of these new attitudes by the English set them apart from their insular neighbours, who continued to slaughter their enemies and practise war as slave-hunt. The novel perception of the Welsh, Scots and Irish as uncivilised barbarians was a direct result of the Norman conquest, and fuelled the aggressive English colonisation of those countries in the centuries that followed.
Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster
1945
World war, international aftermath
At a global scale, the Second World War was the most momentous period in history. So it follows that the year of its conclusion – 1945 – was the most important year.
The list of transformations that took place because of that war is truly astonishing. There were massive advances in computer technology, radio technology, plastics research, jet planes, rocket science and the production of antibiotics. Nuclear power quite literally exploded into our consciousness in 1945. Super Glue was discovered during the war, as was the technology behind microwave ovens. And it was the final victory in 1945 that allowed such innovations to be released from the secrecy of wartime and into the wider world.
Alongside new technologies came huge social and geopolitical changes. It was in 1945 that today’s map of Europe was drawn during the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. At the same time, the communist takeover of eastern Europe began. This was the year when the nations of Asia and Africa, inspired by wartime rhetoric, began their final push towards decolonisation. The international order was reborn with the establishment of the United Nations that summer, and a whole network of affiliated organisations followed. The list goes on.
The Second World War cast a shadow on the world so long that it still affects us to this day. The memory of 1945, and of all that it represents, is preserved in our culture of storytelling, movie-making and novel writing, and we still commemorate it annually. No other single year in history has ever held such power over us – nor is ever likely to do so again.
Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)
31 BC
Actium: turning the tide of Roman history
At noon on 2 September 31 BC, Marcus Agrippa stood aboard his flagship and gazed towards the Greek promontory of Actium. Some 60 of his enemy’s warships were speeding over the Ionian waves in the direction of the 400 vessels led by him and Octavian, who was watching from an advantageous point on land. Those approaching were part of the fleet of 230 led by Mark Antony, Octavian’s former Roman ally, and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt.
As they reached the melee, Cleopatra’s ships sailed straight into the middle of the battle line – and for a moment it seemed as if the tide might turn. Instead, they surged straight through and into the open sea: Cleopatra was escaping. Panicked, Mark Antony abandoned his flagship and followed her with several smaller vessels, leaving their remaining fleet to face the onslaught alone. Surrender followed.
At the time of the battle, the Roman empire was divided between Octavian in the west and Mark Antony in the east. With the suicides of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 30 BC following their defeat at Actium, Octavian became sole ruler of Rome and conqueror of Egypt. Three years later, the Roman senate conferred on Octavian the title Augustus, officially marking the end of the Republic and the start of the Roman empire.
Had Antony prevailed, Rome’s centre might have shifted eastwards. Alexandria might have become a second capital, Rome’s ambitions would likely have turned towards Mesopotamia and Persia rather than Germania and Britannia, and today Europe might instead have a Greek rather than Latin language base.
Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author
1453
Bye bye Byzantines, all hail the Ottomans
It is, of course, an impossible task to select one specific year. Momentous happenings do occur, but they’re made possible by structural changes – political, economic, cultural – over many decades or even centuries. Having said that, I’d pick 1453. That was the year in which the Hundred Years’ War ended – but also, even more significantly, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. That marked the end of the Byzantine empire – the last remnant of the Roman realm – which had lasted for more than 1,000 years.
The city became the capital of the growing Ottoman empire, which endured until 1922 as a major global power. The religious make-up of the region changed dramatically, though it remained a melting pot of peoples of different cultures and faiths. The fall of Constantinople led to an influx of Greek scholars to Europe, who brought deep learning and fresh ideas that added extra stimulus to the Renaissance.
It also represented a tectonic shift in global geopolitics, changing the balance of power in the Middle East and radically reconfiguring trade routes between Europe and Asia. Some argue that growing complications involved in trading along overland routes through Eurasia stimulated European Atlantic exploration. It also contributed to a reconfiguration of the medieval slave trade. As it became harder for European traders to traffic people via the Black Sea, they turned increasingly to the coast of west Africa – fuelling the growth of one of the most appalling and tragic phenomena in human history.
Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford
1533
The wedding that reshaped England’s religious, social and political life
It’s for good reason that the dawn of the Tudor era has widely been considered to mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern age. The 118 years when this celebrated dynasty occupied the throne witnessed unprecedented change in every aspect of English life. And no single year was more transformative than 1533.
In 1527, Henry VIII had first petitioned the pope for an annulment from wife number one, Catherine of Aragon. He was driven by his all-consuming desire for a son and his obsession with Anne Boleyn, a woman of his wife’s household who had told him that if he wanted her, he’d have to put a ring on it.
Henry eventually took matters into his own hands by breaking with Rome and setting up a new Church of England, with himself as the supreme head. On 25 January 1533, he married Anne Boleyn. In May, his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was formally annulled and Anne was confirmed as his legitimate queen by the archbishop of Canterbury. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 1 June, by which time she was visibly pregnant. On 7 September, the new queen gave birth – not to the hoped-for son but to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I.
This proved to be the beginning of the end for Anne. But her marriage to Henry had sparked a seismic shift in England’s religious, political and social life that would reverberate down the centuries. It also produced a monarch who ruled for longer than any of her Tudor predecessors and blazed a trail for future queens regnant.
Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster
1858
Dawn of the Information Age
On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria sent a message to US president James Buchanan. Ordinarily, it would have taken about 10 days for such a communication to cross the Atlantic by ship – but this one arrived in only 16 hours. It was sent to mark the connection of the first transatlantic telegraph cable – a direct line between the Old World and the New.
Shorter connections had already been completed between Britain and mainland Europe, including a cross-channel line in 1850, but the Atlantic presented a tougher challenge. For years, engineers including Samuel Morse had debated whether it was possible to lay 2,500 miles of cable beneath the ocean. The first attempt in 1857 failed when the line snapped. But now, at last, it was done. Some commentators hailed it as the Eighth Wonder of the World. An excited newspaper in Boston announced simply: “THERE IS NO MORE SEA!”
This first transatlantic cable failed after only three weeks, and it wasn’t until 1866 that a permanent line was established. But a precedent had been set: it would now be possible to connect every corner of world in an ever more extensive network of telegraph cables, eventually allowing huge volumes of information to pulse around the globe at previously unimaginable speeds.
It was many years later before this vision was fully realised, but in 1858 we see the beginning of the new Information Age – a recognisably modern moment that culminated in the arrival of the internet.
Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University
1917
When revolution reshaped alliances, identities and ambitions
In this pivotal year, Russia stopped fighting in the First World War and the US entered it. Neither country ranked much as a world power at the time, but wartime actions sparked global transformations. President Woodrow Wilson’s championing of international cooperation and American-style democracy (universal in rhetoric but deeply racialised in practice) signalled US ambitions for the world stage.
But the big story was Russia: its economy shattered by the war, its people toppled the tsar in March (February in the Julian calendar then in use), setting the stage for the Bolsheviks to seize power in November (Julian: October). The Russian Revolution – the most important event of the 20th century – was complete by the end of 1917, and the Soviet Union was secured by 1922.
Neither the civil rights movement nor decolonial struggles would have unfolded as they did without the Soviet Union, whether as foil or ally. In the US, for example, communist organising and Soviet propaganda forced segregationists to either justify or modify their system of racial division. In the world subject to European empire, Soviet communism offered intellectual and material resources to anticolonial nationalists.
Cold War historians tend to focus on the ascendant US and its Soviet nemesis duking it out for global hegemony via conflicts in Latin America, Africa and Asia. More salient are the ways in which the revolutionary model and the revolutionary challenge pushed communities, groups and nations to articulate who they were and who they wished to be. The Russian Revolution helped remake the world – and we live out its legacy.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University
490 BC
Marathon: a victory for democracy
Six decades after Cyrus the Great had founded the Achaemenid empire, the Persian forces of King Darius I – also ‘the Great’ – were pushing west to conquer all of Greece. Their primary aim was to lay waste to Athens, which had had the temerity to support a revolt against the empire that by then controlled swathes of the region. But they hadn’t banked on the determination and tactical nous of their opponents.
By September 490 BC, the Persian fleet had landed on the coast of Attica about 17 miles north-east of Athens, its troops disembarking onto the plain of Marathon. Around 10,000 Athenian men mustered in the surrounding hills, joined by 1,000 from Plataea – but were still vastly outnumbered.
On learning that the Persian cavalry was absent, Greek warriors led by Athenian general Miltiades swept down on the enemy. Against the odds, the Persian troops were routed – reputedly at the cost of only 192 Athenian dead. This was a critical moment in ancient history: it gave confidence to the Greeks that they could stand up to the mighty Persian empire and, thanks to their part in the victory, the Athenians emerged as the most important polis in Greece. It also provided momentum for Athens’ emerging democracy.
In the mid-19th century, English philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that “as an event in English history, the battle of Marathon was more important than the battle of Hastings” because Greek (and, particularly, Athenian) victory in that clash was so linked to the development of democracy.
Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick
This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Tracy Borman <![CDATA[Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a day]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/porpoise-for-breakfast-and-late-night-sex-visits-henry-viiis-life-in-a-day/ 2025-12-05T17:01:03.000Z 2025-12-05T17:00:37.000Z The year 1533 was a big one for Henry VIII. It began with his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, followed a few months later by the annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The new queen was crowned in June, then in September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for male heir. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Reformation parliament passed radical religious legislation that would separate the country from Rome and make Henry supreme head of the new Church of England.
Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it.
In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock.
But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth.
An “improbably large codpiece”
To get Henry ready for whatever the day held, his privy chamber staff had to rise even earlier than he did. Having cleaned the king’s chambers, the grooms would wake the esquires of the body, who slept in the ‘pallet chamber’ next door to the royal bedchamber. The esquires would enter their royal master’s bedchamber to “array him and dress him in his [under]clothes”, which were strewn with fresh herbs to keep them sweet-smelling.
Having been “loosely dressed” by his esquires, Henry would step into the privy chamber so that his six gentlemen could complete the ceremony of robing with whichever garments he had chosen for that day. Henry loved to show off his physique – as well as his riches – in the quality and quantity of the cloth from which his garments were fashioned. His broad shoulders were emphasised by padded and embroidered sleeves, the curve of his calf muscles was shown off to best effect by white silk hose, and his improbably large codpiece symbolised his masculinity and power. Clearly, he pulled it off. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Guistinian, described Henry as “the best dressed sovereign in the world”.
Hair, ear wax and urine
When the king was dressed for the day, his barber would begin shaving his royal master and dressing his hair. He had to be a man of infinite trustworthiness: after all, he would be holding sharp blades to the king’s throat! During the early years of his reign, Henry was clean-shaven, as Catherine of Aragon preferred. But what she liked mattered less by 1533, when he sported a fine beard, which the barber would ensure was neatly trimmed.
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Luxury pervaded the business of hairdressing and shaving, as it did every other element of Henry’s daily routine. Inventories of his possessions list silver basins for shaving and facecloths trimmed with black silk, as well as a comb of “gold garnished with… stones and pearl”, a toothpick case of gold, and an “ear pick of silver”. Among the many gifts that the king had showered Anne Boleyn with during their courtship was a gold ear wax scoop. Who says romance is dead?
Next up, Henry would be examined by one of his team of physicians. They came armed with bladder-shaped flasks for inspecting the king’s urine and would also examine his stools. In submitting himself to the frequent attentions of his medics, the king was following royal protocol – after all, a sovereign’s health was of the utmost importance to the state. But Henry had always been prone to hypochondria and would be thrown into a panic at any sign of illness at court. The French ambassador described him as “the most timid person in such matters you could meet”.
Mrs Cornwallis’s sweet treats
Having been washed, groomed, dressed and examined, the king was at last ready to go out into the court. The first meal of the day was generally served at around 10.30 or 11 o’clock, although sometimes it was as late as midday (breakfast was not a thing until the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth). This was known as ‘dinner’ and was substantial enough to maintain the king and his courtiers until late afternoon. It comprised an array of different meats, such as boar, pork, lamb and venison, as well as game birds like pheasant and rabbit, swan and more unusual fare like conger eel and porpoise. The king had a sweet tooth, too, and regularly gorged on custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and quince marmalade. His favourite confectioner was a woman named Mrs Cornwallis, whom he rewarded with a fine house close to the Tower of London.
In contrast to the popular image of Henry seated at the top table of a great feast, devouring endless chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulder, he was a very fastidious eater and preferred to take his meals in private. He didn’t like to linger over his meals, either, because he was impatient to get on with his day.
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Hunting, archery, bowling and tennis took up several hours. Sir William Kingston, who was a regular at Henry’s court (and was later Anne Boleyn’s gaoler at the Tower), observed that even after more than 20 years on the throne: “The king hawks every day with goshawks and others… both before noon and after.” Having practised these sporting pursuits from childhood, Henry was highly skilled, particularly at tennis. The Venetian ambassador enthused: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play.”
“Tedious and painful”
The distinction between work and play was blurred during Henry’s reign. He would discuss politics with ambassadors and ministers while enjoying a game of bowls or practising archery, and would hold more private audiences with his advisors while being dressed or undressed, taking his meals or bathing.
The privy council was the beating heart of Henry’s government and would meet almost every day at around noon. By 1533, Henry was attending those meetings much more frequently than during the carefree early years of his reign. They would discuss all the most pressing matters of the day – of which there was no shortage in the year that the king rid himself of one wife, took another and separated England from Roman Catholic Europe. Thomas Cromwell was the most influential member of the privy council and worked closely with Henry, often holding private meetings with the king.
Supper was served between three and four o’clock each afternoon and would typically comprise soups, pottage, roasted meats, tarts, custards, fruits, nuts and cheeses. If Henry was peckish in the evening, his cooks would prepare a snack known as a ‘rear night’ or ‘all night’, which was usually served between eight and nine o’clock.
Henry was renowned for his piety and spent a significant part of every day in worship. One ambassador reported: “He hears three masses daily when he hunts and sometimes five on other days.” This had been encouraged by his first wife, a devout Roman Catholic. By contrast, Anne Boleyn was a reformer and introduced Henry to radical religious texts that encouraged him to break from obedience to Rome. Although he admitted to finding writing “tedious and painful”, the king was a voracious reader, and his private library was filled with classical and theological texts from across the world.
Long trips to the loo
Every so often, the king would take a bath in his private apartments. But the leading physicians of the age cautioned against regular bathing in hot water because it opened the pores and allowed deadly diseases such as the plague, sweating sickness and smallpox to enter the body. Instead, cold water was used for washing the king’s hands and face first thing in the morning and before and after every meal. Even if Henry’s baths were infrequent, they were predictably luxurious. At the palaces of Richmond and Whitehall, Henry had steam baths installed, fragments of which are still preserved at Hampton Court.
Henry had his own private close stool (a type of portable toilet) in each palace. His ‘stool chambers’ at Greenwich and Hampton Court were kitted out with pictures and bookshelves to keep the king amused during the long hours that he spent there. His close stools were covered in embroidered velvet, stuffed with swan’s-down and studded with gilt nails.
To emphasise his magnificence, Henry staged lavish evening entertainments at court. His Master of the Revels devised plays, pageants and musical interludes to be performed in front of the king and his guests. Some of the more ambitious set-pieces involved mock battles and the famous ‘Château Vert’ pageant of 1522, when a certain young lady called Anne Boleyn made her first appearance at Henry’s court. As well as being an accomplished musician, Henry loved to show off on the dance floor. He “exercised himself daily in dancing” and “does wonders and leaps like a stag”, reported an astonished onlooker.
Most evenings, the king and his courtiers would indulge in gambling. Huge sums would be won and lost at cards, dice and board games. Between the years 1529 and 1532, Henry squandered a staggering £3,243 (equivalent to £2.36 million today). But there was always a jester or ‘fool’ on hand to cheer the king after his losses. Henry’s favourite fool was Will Somer, who entered his service in 1525 and kept the king entertained for the next 20 years. It was said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than was this fool”.
Henry’s bedroom antics
The king rarely retired before midnight, “which is our accustomed hour at court to go to bed”. An elaborate ceremony of disrobing began as soon as he stepped into the bedchamber. His gentlemen and esquires of the body would carefully untie, unbuckle and remove every item of clothing and then put on his nightgown. Another attendant would bring a basin of water and a cloth so that he could wash his face and clean his teeth. The king’s body servants would then comb his hair and cover it with a ‘night-bonnet’ of scarlet or black embroidered velvet before helping him into bed and lighting a candle next to it. Their work complete, all but one of the privy chamber attendants bowed low and backed out of the room, leaving their royal master to his rest.
Every detail of this protracted routine would be observed each night without fail. It only differed when Henry chose to visit his wife. On such occasions, he would summon his grooms of the chamber, who would dress him in his nightrobe and escort him with lighted torches to the door of the queen’s bedchamber. The king would rarely spend the night there, though, and would return to his own bedchamber once his, erm, ‘business’ there had been concluded.
But given that Anne Boleyn was almost certainly pregnant at the time she married Henry in January 1533, these conjugal visits would have been rare or non-existent until she gave birth in September. The wisdom of the day dictated that sex during pregnancy was harmful to the unborn child, so instead Henry found comfort with other women.
This caused the first serious rift between the newlyweds in August 1533, when Anne was about to enter her ‘confinement’ – the month-long period when a royal wife would live in complete seclusion to await the birth of her child. “The king’s affection for her [Anne] is less than it was”, reported the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. “He now shows himself in love with another lady, and many nobles are assisting him in the affair.” When she heard of this, Anne was “very jealous” and confronted her royal husband. To her dismay, rather than offering placatory assurances, he spat back that she must “shut her eyes and endure” as more “worthy” persons had done. Henry’s affection for his new wife took another nose-dive when she gave birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) on 7 September, rather than the hoped-for son.
Adultery, treason and execution
As the year 1533 drew to a close, the court moved to Greenwich for the Christmas celebrations. “The King’s Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”, one guest observed. There was a good reason for Henry to be cheerful: Anne Boleyn was pregnant once more. Her New Year gift to the king was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds and pearls. Designed by Hans Holbein, it featured three naked women standing at the foot of a fountain, water issuing forth from their nipples – a clear allusion to her impending motherhood.
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Sadly, the queen lost the child a few months later and miscarried twice more in the two years that followed. The king, who in the early days of their courtship had been so enraptured that he had overturned his entire kingdom in order to marry Anne, now “shrank from her”. In May 1536, Anne was condemned on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and treason and executed.
Earlier that year, Henry had suffered a serious accident whilst jousting, which brought the physical activities that had filled so many of his days at court to an abrupt end. Plagued by pain and humiliated by his expanding girth, this most famous of kings became the bloated tyrant of legend.
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