HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T10:26:04.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/sex-and-love/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/ 2026-10-23T10:26:04.000Z 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
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[From magic spells to dirty graffiti: 16 surprising facts about sex in the classical world]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-magic-spells-to-dirty-graffiti-16-surprising-facts-about-sex-in-the-classical-world/ 2026-10-18T14:31:03.000Z 2026-10-18T14:30:53.000Z If it were up to the Victorians, we’d all believe the ancient Greeks and Romans were a bunch of sexless prudes, too busy composing poetry even to think about getting down and dirty. And while, yes, they did write a lot of poetry, they certainly made time for sex too – after all, a lot of that poetry was erotic. In short, pleasure and desire were important parts of ancient life.
For centuries, historians and archaeologists, guided by their contemporary social mores, tried to hide the ancients’ interest in sexual matters away from the public gaze. Scholarship concerning the phallic fertility god Priapus was relegated to pornographic magazines. Museums in Britain and Italy banished explicit vase paintings and statues to secret rooms that women and the working classes were forbidden from entering. Trust me when I say that’s a lot of vases and statues.
In recent decades, however, scholars have begun the task of freeing the classical world from the prejudices of the 18th and 19th centuries by asking the question: what did sex really mean to the ancients?
It is too easy, lazy even, to dismiss sex as unimportant when trying to understand the past. History is more than just battles and royal successions. It’s about what happened in day-to-day life and, if you’ll allow me, night-to-night life too, what occurs between the sheets. That’s why I have pulled together some of my favourite facts (and rumours) concerning sex and pleasure in ancient Greece and Rome, in the hopes of pumping up your curiosity in the erotic lives of those who came before.
1. Olive oil was the ultimate all-purpose product
There wasn’t much the Ancient Greeks couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do with olive oil. Not only was it a delicious ingredient, a handy base for perfumes, and an appropriate offering to gods and goddesses, but it also served numerous functions in the bedroom. For one, it was an excellent and readily accessible lubricant. Meanwhile, and more surprising perhaps, the second-century physician Soranus of Ephesus recommended olive oil be used as contraception in his treatise Gynaecology.
(Warning: do not try this at home!)
2. ‘Pussy licker’ was a favourite insult
Unfortunately for many, cunnilingus was frowned upon across the ancient Mediterranean. The Roman poet Martial called it “repugnant”, while the Greek physician Galen described it as akin to eating faeces (On Simple Drugs). This resulted in ‘pussy licker’ becoming a popular way to insult someone, especially men in antiquity. One third-century BC stonemason even went so far as to inscribe the words “Euphiletos, pussy licker” on a brick before firing it. Personally, I like to hope Euphiletos’ partners were very happy with him.
3. Sex was a matter of life and death
According to the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of Greek medical texts attributed to the students of the physician Hippocrates, women needed to have sex, or else they might simply keel over. Their theory was that the womb was not attached to anything else (it is) and that when it got too dry it wandered around the body looking for moisture (it doesn’t). This in turn could lead to a number of health problems. Your womb floats too low? Leg pain. Your womb floats to high? Indigestion. Higher still? Suffocation.
If women had regular sex, however, the resulting wetness made sure their wombs stayed put and such dire consequences were avoided. This belief was so ingrained that a Roman man named Apuleius even stated in court that he married his wife to bring an end to the many illnesses she had suffered since her first husband died. Unfortunately, respectable women were not supposed to have sex outside of marriage even for their health.
4. The ancients loved romance novels too
Love it or hate it, romance is the number one bestseller when it comes to literary genres in the modern world. However, our appetite for love stories is nothing new. During the Roman empire we see the emergence of a new literary form now known as the ‘ancient Greek romance’. These were narratives written in prose that followed the adventures of various fictional lovers. From pirate ships to near-death experiences, these novels were as trope-filled as contemporary stories – and no less entertaining. If you’re curious, I suggest starting with Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (my favourite of the five complete examples that survive).
5. Some believed magic could get you laid
When all else failed it seems, some men and women in antiquity turned to magic to attract a lover. Examples of such ‘attraction’ spells have been preserved on papyri fragments written in Greek but found in Egypt, and dating to the third and fourth centuries. One favourite of mine instructs the spell caster to take the eyes of a bat and insert them into a dog made of dough or wax. They should then attach a label to said dog that includes the name of the one they want to attract, as well as their own name. Finally, they must take their model and leave it where three roads meet. Just in case they later change their mind, they are reminded to make a note of the spot. The outcome of such spells we will sadly never know.
6. Aphrodite was more powerful than any other god
According to such sources as the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess of love was considered by some to be the most powerful of all the ancient Greek deities. Due to her dominion over sex and desire, she was able to influence all living creatures, from animals to mortals and the gods themselves. We even see her fellow gods and goddesses turn to her for assistance on a number of occasions in Greek mythology.
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7. One statue of Aphrodite was just too sexy
In the fourth century BC, the people of Kos commissioned the Greek sculptor Praxiteles create a life-sized statue of Aphrodite. He created two, one of which eschewed tradition by depicting her in the nude. The people of Kos refused the naked statue, considering only the clothed version to be decent. The people of Knidos were not as fussy, and they happily purchased the other statue from the artist. According to the Pseudo-Lucian Erōtes, this turned out to be a great move in terms of tourism, as the nude Aphrodite drew visitors from far and wide.
Unfortunately, not all her visitors were happy simply to observe. One man was even said to have hidden in her temple overnight and, when no-one else was around, attempt intercourse with the statue. In the end, he managed to ejaculate on her thigh leaving a permanent mark on the marble (the mark was probably already there).
8. Birds were sexy?
In his Natural History, the Roman historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder recommended aphrodisiacs specifically for men. These included but were not limited to: an amulet made from the lung of a vulture worn around the neck; a tonic made from the yolk of five pigeon eggs; another amulet, this time containing a cockerel’s right testicle; and sparrow eggs.
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9. Ancient dildos were probably made of leather
We know the ancient Greeks and Romans used dildos. This fact is undisputable. They are depicted in art and described in literature. They may even survive among the archaeological record if objects such as the wooden phallus from Vindolanda are anything to go by. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how common dildos were because many were likely made of a less long-lasting material: leather. Or at least that’s what writers such as Aristophanes and Herodas tell us.
10. Some dildos were double ended
It is not uncommon to find women depicted using dildos on themselves in archaic Greek vases. Yet one vase from the sixth-century BC stands out from the rest. Unlike its fellows, the red-figure cup attributed to the Nikosthenes Painter depicts not only a man using a dildo on a woman, but the dildo in question is doubled ended! If you’d like to look for yourself, it is currently owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
11. Adultery could get you killed
At the end of the first century BC and beginning of the first century AD, new legislation aimed at ‘protecting the family’ – known as the Leges Juliae – was introduced. This included the possibility of exile or death for women who had sex with men other than their husbands. Men, meanwhile, were welcome to have extra-marital sex, so long as it wasn’t with married women. Then they risked similar punishment.
12. The emperor Tiberius loved an orgy
All right, so this is just a rumour, but ancient literature is so full of rumours that I had to include at least one. According to The Lives of the 12 Caesars by the Roman historian Suetonius, the marriage between Julia the Elder, daughter of Augustus, and Tiberius broke down prior to his appointment as emperor. Tiberius abandoned Rome for the island of Capri. Here, he was said to have decorated his villa with erotic art and filled his library with sex manuals, which his guests then used as inspiration during their endless orgies. Julia, meanwhile, was exiled for her extra-marital affairs.
13. Spartan society may have been polyamorous
According to the Greek historian Xenophon, ancient Sparta was said to have practiced “wife-sharing” (The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians). This meant that Spartan men might give other men permission to sleep with their wives so they could procreate. Their reasoning being that if a woman produced healthy sons for one man, she might be able to do so for another – and healthy sons were Sparta’s top priority. The only problem with this information is that none of it comes from Spartan sources, since the Spartans didn’t tend to write things down. We therefore cannot say how common wife-sharing really was – or how Spartan women felt about it.
14. Dirty graffiti was just as common 2,000 years ago
Today you can wander into any public bathroom cubicle, and read a litany of sexual innuendos, declarations of ‘love’, and dirty jokes at your leisure. Don’t be fooled, however, these are no modern invention. Examples of similar graffiti can be found throughout the historical record. The ancient Roman city of Pompeii is a particularly rich source for such material. There, you will find numerous men’s names carved into the walls of different buildings, along with the words “fucked well”. Oh, to have your sexual prowess memorialised for millennia. Some graffito meanwhile is more practical. Take, for example, advice that simply reads “thrust slowly”.
15. The penis was considered lucky
Whether you lived in ancient Greece or Rome you would have been hard pressed not to be familiar with the penis or, at least, its image. The phallus was everywhere in antiquity and for very good reason. It was considered by many to serve an apotropaic function, that is, it could ward off bad luck. Today, such symbols survive in various forms, from jewellery to wall carvings. A miniscule bronze penis was even found by archaeologists as far north as Cumbria, during the excavation of a Roman site in 2026.
16. Sex was not inherently shameful
It is true that there are many caveats to this statement – I’ve discussed a few in this article – but I think it important to make clear that sex for sex’s sake was not considered shameful in the ancient Mediterranean. Prior to the rise of Christianity in ancient Greece and Rome, most people did not consider the purpose of sex to be purely reproductive. So long as it was conducted according to contemporary social mores, sex was deemed a normal, healthy and enjoyable part of life.
Jean Menzies is an author, ancient historian and presenter. Her latest book is Aphrodisia: Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Classical World (Monoray, 2026)
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – so why was it destroyed three times?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-greece/it-was-the-one-of-the-seven-wonders-of-the-ancient-world-so-why-was-it-destroyed-three-times/ 2026-10-15T21:43:49.000Z 2026-10-14T10:30:17.000Z When ancient travellers of the Mediterranean Rim came up with their lists of must-see architectural marvels, which would be collated into the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a landmark that always made the cut was the Temple of Artemis.
One such traveller, the second-century BC poet Antipater of Sidon, went so far as to say: “I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the Hanging Gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand’.”
At its grandest, the Temple of Artemis, or Artemesium, loomed over the landscape of Ephesus, in modern-day Selcuk, Turkey, at nearly double the size of the Parthenon in Athens. A total of 127 columns ran in two rows along all four sides, many adorned with works of art depicting scenes from Greek mythology, and an inner chamber at the centre houses a statue of the goddess Artemis.
Who was Artemis?
Artemis was the Greek goddess of the hunt and wild animals, as well as chastity and childbirth. The twin sister of Apollo, she was typically represented as a youthful maiden carrying a bow and arrow and wearing a short tunic so that she could run during her hunts in the forests.
At Ephesus, however, Artemis was worshipped more for her role in childbirth and her depiction differed from the typical Greek image as it contained elements from other cultures. More of a maternal figure, her statue in the great temple had oval objects all over the torso, thought to represent breasts or eggs as a symbol of fertility.
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How many temples were there?
Long before Antipater of Sidon looked upon the wondrous structure that was the Temple of Artemis in the second century BC, the site had already seen two earlier attempts at a temple. The first went back to the eighth century BC, established by the Amazons, according to legend, before being damaged in a flood.
Around 550 BC, Croesus, King of Lydia and conqueror of Ephesus, ordered the construction of a great temple out of marble to honour Artemis. Designed and built by the architect Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, this would become the model of Ionic temples across the Hellenistic world.
This second temple may well have been the version that ended up on the list of Seven Wonders, were it not for a man named Herostratus. In 356 BC, he burned it down for no reason other than his desire to be famous. He got his wish, but at the cost of his life.
Traditionally, Herostratus’s destruction of the temple took place on the same day as the birth of Alexander the Great. It was even said that Artemis had become distracted by the historic event and so did not see the fire until it was too late. As a man, Alexander visited Ephesus and offered to pay for the rebuilding of the temple, but he was declined. The Ephesians argued that it would not be right for one god to give such a gift to another.
When was the final destruction of the temple?
Instead, they themselves paid to have the third, and most impressive, version of the Temple of Artemis built. It stood for some 600 years before the final destruction came at the hands of East Germanic Goths in the third century. The temple fell into disuse until its official closure with the Christian persecution of pagan beliefs.
Lost for centuries, the ruins of the temple were discovered in 1869 by British archaeologist John Turtle Wood. Further excavations began in 1904 under David George Hogarth. Today, the only part of the temple still standing is a single, reconstructed column.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Was Alexander the Great addicted to sex? The truth about the conqueror's love life]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/alexander-the-great-relationships-marriages-hephaestion/ 2026-09-18T15:00:57.000Z 2026-09-20T10:50:09.000Z In 324 BC, Alexander the Great lost the man who had accompanied him through much of his extraordinary life.
Hephaestion died after falling ill at Ecbatana, in what is now western Iran. The ancient historian Arrian describes how, overwhelmed by grief, Alexander fell into a state of dismay. He refused food, neglected himself, and lay immobilised by mourning. Orders for public grief carried a private bereavement across his empire. Arrian’s account acknowledges disagreements over the details, but insists that the intensity of Alexander’s sorrow was beyond dispute.
For Edmund Richardson, professor of classics at Durham University and author of Alexander: God, King, Man, this was the defining attachment within an exceptionally complicated personal life.
“Really the closest relationship of his life was with his childhood friend Hephaestion,” he explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
But Alexander also had wives, other female lovers and children.
How did this all mesh together?
A king with many families
Born in 356 BC, Alexander grew up in Macedonia, a kingdom centred in what is now northern Greece. His father, Philip II, transformed it into a formidable military power. When Philip was assassinated in 336 BC, Alexander inherited the throne aged 20.
He also inherited an example of royal marriage in which one wife did not necessarily replace another.
“Like his father, Philip II, Alexander is cheerfully polygamous,” says Richardson. “He has one of the most complicated and elaborate collections of sexual partners in history.”
For a Macedonian king, marriage was an important political tool that could connect different aristocratic families to the throne, secure alliances and produce potential heirs. But each additional family also introduced competing interests. A child might give its mother and her relatives greater influence; another marriage could threaten their standing.
Richardson describes “multiple children, multiple families, multiple power bases; everyone looking over their shoulders and everyone trying to get Alexander's attention”.
This helps explain why questions about Alexander’s sexuality and sexual identity produce an incomplete picture. Modern identity categories do not map neatly onto his world. Marriage to women and fatherhood, alongside intimacy with men, were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Barsine and a connection to childhood
Alexander’s invasion of the Persian empire in 334 BC brought him into contact with families whose influence stretched far beyond Macedonia. Among them was Barsine, daughter of the Persian aristocrat Artabazus. Her connection to Alexander, however, apparently began much earlier.
She was someone “who Alexander actually knew from his childhood because she was in exile at the Macedonian court while he was growing up”, Richardson explains, “and whom he seems to have been exceedingly smitten with”.
The relationship linked Alexander’s upbringing to the world he was conquering. Barsine belonged to a Persian elite familiar with Greek culture; she had also been married to Memnon, a Greek commander who served Persia.
According to Plutarch’s account, she was captured at Damascus after Alexander’s victory at Issus in 333 BC. He describes her education and distinguished ancestry as attractions, alongside encouragement from Alexander’s general Parmenion.
“With Barsine, he had a son called Heracles,” Richardson says. Heracles appears in ancient accounts as Alexander’s son, although historians have questioned the certainty of that paternity. Barsine herself is generally distinguished from Alexander’s formally acknowledged wives.
Later, in 327 BC, Alexander married Roxana, whom Richardson describes as “the aristocrat from the East”.
She was the daughter of Oxyartes, a nobleman associated with Bactria, a region encompassing parts of modern Afghanistan and neighbouring Central Asia. Alexander had pushed far beyond Persia’s western territories, encountering determined resistance as he attempted to consolidate his conquests.
Ancient accounts present him as captivated by Roxana. The marriage also connected him to a prominent local family in a difficult region.
A wedding to join together empires
By 324 BC, Alexander had defeated Darius III, Persia’s last reigning Achaemenid king, and extended his campaigns into the Indian subcontinent.
At Susa, in modern Iran, he staged marriages joining his Macedonian companions to women from the Persian elite. Alexander married Stateira, Darius’s daughter. Arrian also records his marriage to Parysatis, daughter of an earlier Persian king, Artaxerxes III. Roxana remained his wife. These new marriages added royal connections rather than replacing an existing household, but in effect Alexander was binding himself to the dynasty whose empire he had conquered.
Hephaestion, meanwhile, married Stateira’s sister Drypetis. Arrian explains that Alexander wanted their children to be cousins. Even the arrangements for future generations drew his closest companion into his family.
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But producing possible successors was different from securing a succession.
“With Roxana, he had a son called Alexander, Alexander IV,” Richardson says. That child was born after his father’s death in Babylon in June 323 BC. Richardson also considers it probable that Stateira was pregnant when Alexander died. Her pregnancy remains an uncertainty, but her royal ancestry made her a potential centre of opposition.
So, according to the tradition preserved by Plutarch, Roxana arranged Stateira’s murder with the assistance of Perdiccas, one of Alexander’s commanders.
The death of Hephaestion
For all these dynastic calculations, Richardson places Hephaestion at the emotional centre of Alexander’s life.
“Alexander and Hephaestion were friends, were companions, were sometimes lovers.”
That last description is Richardson’s interpretation of a relationship whose precise sexual nature remains debated. The surviving evidence establishes exceptional closeness more securely than it documents what happened privately between them.
Hephaestion was also a senior commander. Their bond encompassed shared experience, military responsibility and political trust, alongside the intimacy Richardson identifies.
“And Hephaestion's death, less than a year Alexander's own, absolutely broke him,” he says. “It was grief that he just simply never recovered from.”
Alexander could accumulate territories, titles, wives, children, and royal connections. None supplied a replacement for the companion he had lost.
Edmund Richardson was speaking to Rob Attar on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Catherine Curzon <![CDATA[From Nell Gwyn to Meghan Markle: 9 romances between actors and royals]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/ 2026-09-07T11:53:04.000Z 2026-09-07T11:52:56.000Z On 19 May 2018, Meghan Markle married into the British royal family when she tied the knot with Prince Harry at Windsor Castle.
The couple – now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – have rarely been out of the headlines in the intervening years, and recently found themselves at the centre of a tabloid storm when it was revealed that they would be returning to the UK with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, having set up home in the United States in 2020.
Meanwhile, rumours are also circulating that the Duchess of Sussex is exploring a return to acting – a career that, to some, seemed incompatible with the traditional expectations of a royal bride. Yet Harry and Meghan’s relationship is merely the latest in a long line of romances between royals and members of the acting profession.
Below, historian Catherine Curzon examines nine other relationships, spanning the 17th century to the present day…
1. Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes and Prince Rupert of the Rhine
Better known as Peg, Margaret Hughes (c1630–1719) holds the distinction of being one of the first recorded female actors to grace the London stage, appearing as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello on 8 December 1660 at the Vere Street Theatre.
Up until this point, women had been forbidden to act on stage at all, and it wasn’t until King Charles II issued a royal warrant declaring that female roles must be played by women in 1662 that female actors became a common sight, as opposed to young men dressed up to look like them.
Peg was no young man, though, and she not only bewitched her audience but managed to steal the heart of Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to Charles II.
After Rupert’s death in 1682, Peg gambled away much of his bequest to her and sold off many valuables, including a necklace that was bought by the infamous Nell Gwyn (see below). Peg died in 1719, having never regained the lifestyle she once enjoyed.
2. Nell Gwyn and King Charles II
Perhaps the most famous of all England’s royal mistresses, Nell Gwyn (1650–87) began her career selling oranges to the patrons of a theatre on London’s Brydges Street, Charles II’s royal playhouse. By the time she was 14 years old, Nell was treading the boards as an actor and she found her niche as a leading light of Restoration comedy, soon becoming one of London’s most celebrated comedians.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was unofficially appointed to arrange suitably impressive lovers for Nell. Seeing a chance to increase his own influence as well as her cachet, he attempted to install her as the king’s mistress. Though Charles was married to Catherine of Braganza, the queen had long since learned to put up with his many mistresses, recognising them as a fact of royal life.
- Read more | Was Charles II too randy to rule?
Nell was amenable to the duke’s scheme, but informed him that she expected a retainer of £500 a year for the privilege. However, the role of king’s mistress was a privileged one, filled with luxury and opulence, and Charles had plenty of willing candidates to choose from – even without paying them £500. When he heard the figure Nell was demanding, Charles rejected the idea, but when he met her in 1668, he was smitten.
Despite plenty of rivals and other mistresses snapping at her heels, Nell bore two children by the king. The actor and the monarch were a couple until his death in 1685, often sharing Nell’s silver bed, upon which the couple’s images were engraved. On his deathbed, the king begged “let not poor Nelly starve”, and she certainly didn’t. Awarded a substantial payment, she lived on for two more years before she succumbed to a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis.
3. Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and King George IV
Mary Robinson (1757–1800) knew all about reinvention. When her father abandoned his family in 1764, Mary’s privileged childhood ended with a bump. Married in her teens, she survived a spell in debtor’s prison thanks to her dissolute husband and took to the stage in need of cash.
Mary became known for her so-called ‘breeches roles’, in which she played men and flashed her famed legs, a part of the female anatomy that wasn’t often on display in the Georgian era. It was as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that she caught the eye of the young and capricious George, Prince of Wales, the future King George IV.
- Read more | 16 of the worst monarchs in history
The prince offered Mary a huge payment if she gave up the stage to become his official mistress and she accepted. However, the money was not forthcoming, and soon he had moved on to new lovers, leaving Mary high and dry. With her reputation in tatters, Mary took up her pen and began a new career as a poet and novelist, earning herself the nickname ‘the English Sappho’.
Partially paralysed by a later illness, Mary died in 1800 aged just 43.
4. Dorothea Jordan and King William IV
While Prince George was romancing Mary, his younger brother William (the future William IV) made a play for Dorothea ‘Dora’ Jordan (1761–1816), a celebrated Anglo-Irish comedian with a long list of lovers in her past. William and Dora lived together as man and wife for 20 years and had 10 children.
However, the couple never married and – with Princess Charlotte of Wales likely to remain the only child of his elder brother and his bitterly estranged wife – William found himself closer to the throne than he had ever expected to be. Perhaps more importantly, William was desperately in need of money to settle his debts and knew that an official marriage might do wonders for his allowance.
He dropped Dora with a bump and promised her an annuity and custody of their daughters on the understanding that she wouldn’t go back to the stage. Unfortunately, when her financial situation led Dora to return to the theatre, William kept his word. He took the girls from her care and slashed her allowance accordingly.
Dora died in poverty in 1816 and left a heartbroken William to rue his decision. Ironically, even when he later made an official marriage, he and his wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, failed to produce any surviving heirs.
5. Marguerite Bellanger and Emperor Napoleon III
Marguerite Bellanger (1838–86) was born into abject poverty but thanks to a modicum of acting talent and a whole lot of charm, she wouldn’t stay there. She started her performance career as an acrobat and equestrienne and soon progressed to acting, while establishing herself as one of the most popular courtesans in Paris.
Marguerite’s most famous patron was undoubtedly Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon I), whom she met while sheltering from the rain in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud in 1863. From that romantic beginning, the couple were together for a decade until his death and they had a son. Though Marguerite still had other lovers, Napoleon awarded her a generous pension and even a castle in which she and his son could live.
After Napoleon’s death in 1873, Marguerite moved to England and married an army officer. The couple eventually settled in France and it was there, in 1886, that she died.
6. Lillie Langtry and King Edward VII
Anglo-American music hall star Lillie Langtry (1853–1929) was a bona fide megastar of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and she had a love life that would keep any modern tabloid in material for years. As one of many mistresses of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), Lillie was even presented to his mother Queen Victoria. During their three-year relationship, Lillie was happy to share her lover with both his wife and his other mistresses, seeming to enjoy not being tied exclusively to the prince.
- Read more | A timeline of Britain in the reign of Edward VII
Though the couple separated amicably, Edward wasn’t Lillie’s last royal fling. While still in a relationship with the Prince of Wales, she fell pregnant by Prince Louis of Battenberg (1854–1921). He was the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and had been naturalised as a Briton, eventually changing his name to Mountbatten.
Louis was a member of the Royal Navy, so when news of the pregnancy came out, the horrified Prince Alexander had his son sent to sea aboard HMS Inconstant. The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, paid for Lillie to spend her pregnancy in Paris, where she gave birth to a daughter.
Lillie died in 1929 and to this day her name remains synonymous with the glory days of the British music hall.
7. Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan
In 1949, Rita Hayworth (1918–87), one of Hollywood’s most popular and celebrated actors, gave up the silver screen for life as the wife of Prince Aly Khan. The prince was the son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the hereditary imam of the Nizari Ismailis, one of the largest Shia Muslim communities in the world.
Sadly for Rita, her new husband had a weakness for actors and two years later he was back in the very club where he and his princess first met, this time romancing Hollywood star Joan Fontaine. Rita took their daughter, Yasmin, and filed for divorce, convinced that Aly Khan would abduct the little girl if she wasn’t kept under guard.
The couple’s divorce was a tabloid favourite: as lawyers argued over whether Yasmin should be raised as a Christian or a Muslim, she played in the courtroom and even settled on the judge’s lap. Ultimately the court found in Rita’s favour, and she was awarded custody of her daughter.
8. Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco
As Hollywood royalty, Grace Kelly (1929–82) was beloved by cinemagoers across the world. Having earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl (1954) and starred in hits from High Noon (1952) to Rear Window (1954), it seemed the perfect fairy-tale ending when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956.
- Read more | Historians at the movies: Grace of Monaco reviewed
In fact, Princess Grace’s life was anything but a fairy tale. Her marriage at the age of 26 marked the end of her Hollywood career. She was forced to turn down the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Marnie (1964) when the people of Monaco reacted with outrage to the idea of their princess playing a criminal. Further rumoured returns to the screen were similarly rejected as a result of Rainier’s wish for his wife to remain in professional retirement.
Instead, Grace dedicated herself to philanthropy and her three children. She also struck up a friendship with Diana, Princess of Wales. Sadly, Grace died at the age of 52 as a result of a car accident in 1982.
9. Clotilde Courau and Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice
In 2003, Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, reportedly had to swallow his pride when his son, Emanuele Filiberto, married the politically outspoken left-wing French actor Clotilde Courau (born 1969).
Courau had once been described by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica as “a militant anarcho-Communist” – making her an unconventional choice of bride for the grandson of Italy’s last reigning king, Umberto II.
Unlike many of the other stars on this list, Clotilde refused to give up her career after marrying into royalty and continued to act, while also pursuing charitable activities under her official title, Clotilde of Savoy.
The couple had two daughters together before announcing that they had begun formal divorce proceedings in April 2026.
An older version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2018
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[How the Americas transformed Tudor England]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-the-americas-transformed-tudor-england-podcast/ 2026-08-24T14:48:43.000Z 2026-08-24T14:48:43.000Z What did Tudor England really gain from its early encounters with the Americas? In this episode, Elinor Evans speaks to historian Dr Lauren Working about her new book A Golden World, exploring the overlooked exchange of ideas, materials and knowledge between Indigenous peoples and Renaissance England.
From brilliant red dyes made from insects, to tobacco, pearls and exotic animals, Working reveals how English society was profoundly shaped by American influences, challenging long-held assumptions about colonial history.
]]> Lauren Good <![CDATA[Have we got ancient women's sexuality all wrong?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/have-we-got-ancient-womens-sexuality-all-wrong/ 2026-08-21T13:34:07.000Z 2026-08-21T13:34:07.000Z You might assume that women were prevented from pursuing sexual pleasure in the classical world. However, as Dr Jean Menzies discusses with Lauren Good, this is not the case. They explore how women were active in pursuing and expressing sexual fulfilment, from erotic magic to some particularly graphic graffiti in Pompeii.
Please note that this episode features discussion of some adult topics.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Hot sex and cold jelly: how a wobbly dessert ignited Georgian bedrooms]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/scandalous-after-dark-secrets-of-jelly-shops/ 2026-08-21T13:20:57.000Z 2026-08-21T13:20:57.000Z In the light of day, a Georgian-era jelly shop would look perfectly respectable. A shopper might step in from the crowded London street, sit down with a glass of delicately flavoured jelly, and enjoy one of the capital’s fashionable new treats. The jelly might be clear and jewel-like, scented with fruit, wine or flowers, and served in a long, elegant glass. It was refined, modern and entirely suitable for polite company.
After dark, however, the same shop could become something entirely different. In the streets around Covent Garden, some jelly shops became intimately associated with illicit sex: places where sex workers met clients, pimps displayed women, and men took a restorative jelly before or after visiting a brothel.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Peter Ross explains he was initially surprised by just how fashionable jelly became in the 18th century.
“I was very amused by this; by the idea of jellies, because when I was growing up, jelly was something you had at a children’s party in a little paper bowl – a fruit jelly.”
The Georgian version was far more sophisticated, part of a culture of elaborate dining intended to display wealth, taste and refinement. Aristocratic and affluent households competed to produce impressive tables filled with substantial and decorative dishes designed to delight the tastebuds and catch the eye, including jellies.
“If you went to a Georgian-era grand banquet or a big meal at a rich person’s house, you might be served jelly. It might be dramatically moulded.”
Unlike modern packet jelly, these dishes required time, skill and expensive ingredients. Cooks had to make the setting agent themselves through a slow and labour-intensive process.
- Read more | The power of the Georgian underclass
“Gelatine could be used, which comes from boiling down various bones or from the swim bladders of certain fish,” Ross says. “It could also be made by boiling down a calf’s foot.” This extracted collagen from animal tissue, producing a clear gelatine that could be set into elaborate moulds.
“What you end up with is a flavourless jelly, so don’t imagine these things tasted savoury.”
Instead, cooks added fashionable flavourings.
“Today it’s often flavoured with fruit. The Georgians mostly flavoured it with fruit too, but you could make jelly with almost any flavour – wine-flavoured jelly, for example.”
Wine jellies, citrus jellies and jellies scented with spices or flowers all appeared on fashionable Georgian tables. They could be beautiful, delicate and expensive indicators of status – and, perhaps secondarily, a dessert.
From banquets to the high street
As 18th-century Britain became wealthier, luxuries once confined to elite households increasingly filtered into urban consumer culture.
London was central to this transformation. Its growing population supported specialist retailers of every kind: coffee houses, pastry cooks, confectioners, print sellers, toy shops and pleasure gardens. Shopping and eating out became part of the experience of city life. Jelly followed this same path.
“Gradually, during the Georgian period, jelly became so popular that jelly houses and jelly shops appeared,” Ross explains.
These shops didn’t usually serve the monumental moulded jellies of aristocratic banquets. Instead, they offered individual portions to customers who wanted a fashionable refreshment.
“During the day, you could go and have a little jelly in a jelly glass. You can still track down Georgian jelly glasses,” Ross notes. “If you imagine a long, bell-shaped sherry glass, that’s the sort of thing it was.”
For respectable customers, a jelly shop was therefore a place to enjoy an increasingly trendy sweet while shopping, socialising or strolling through London.
But many of these shops were located in and around Covent Garden, one of the most vibrant – and notorious – districts in the capital.
Covent Garden after dark
Today, Covent Garden is associated with theatres, cafés, street performers and tourists. In the 18th century, it was already a major entertainment district, but one with a much rougher edge.
The nearby Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden Theatre drew large evening crowds. Taverns, gambling venues and pleasure gardens kept the area busy late into the night, traversed by a diverse catalogue of actors, aristocrats, labourers, pickpockets, servants, tourists and sex workers.
Indeed, Covent Garden was London’s most famous red-light district.
Prostitution was highly visible there, and publications such as Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies turned the area’s sexual economy into print, offering descriptions of women, their appearances, personalities and prices for prospective clients.
Against that backdrop, some jelly shops acquired a distinct, nocturnal identity.
As Ross explains, “at night, they became places where sex workers would take their clients, pimps would parade their prostitutes, and people would go for a jelly before visiting a brothel.”
“They’re very different things to different people. During the day they’re one kind of place, and in the evening they become something completely different.”
“Therefore, many people who considered themselves respectable would never be seen dead in a jelly shop at night in Covent Garden,” Ross explains. “If they were a woman, they’d be thought of as a sex worker. If they were a man, they’d be thought of as a pimp or a client.”
“During the day, though, people didn’t think anything of it. Women could go with their husbands to a respectable jelly shop quite safely, but in the evening it had a completely different reputation.”
Jelly as Georgian Viagra?
The obvious question is why jelly became associated with sex in the first place. Part of the answer lies in 18th-century medical thinking.
“There were reasons why Georgians thought jelly was an aphrodisiac,” Ross explains. “They even thought of it as a prototype Viagra. There’s a diarist who writes that he had a jelly before going off with a prostitute – or after he’d been with one.”
18th century medicine was still strongly influenced by ideas inherited from antiquity, especially from the Greek physician Galen.
Although anatomy and observation had advanced significantly, many physicians continued to understand health through the body’s humours and qualities. Illness could be explained through imbalances: hot and cold, wet and dry, smooth and sharp.
“Their medicine was still based on the humours,” Ross says. “They thought, for instance, that sexual diseases were caused by an excess of sharpness within the body.”
If illness came from sharpness, the cure required its opposite.
“To counteract that sharpness, you needed something smooth, like a soup or a jelly.”
Jelly’s slippery texture seemed to suggest soothing, softening and healing properties. Some even thought it might protect against venereal disease.
“There was also the idea of signatures,” Ross explains, “that God had created things in the world that indicated what they could be used to treat.”
Known as the doctrine of signatures, this theory held that God had placed clues in nature to reveal the medicinal uses of plants, minerals and animal products.
- Read more | You probably eat these foods every day, so why did the ancient Romans think they were disgusting poison?
“If a flower was shaped like a liver, then if you boiled it down into a medicine, it would help your liver.”
Similar reasoning could be applied to jelly. Some jellies were made from hartshorn – the antlers of male deer – or even from elephant ivory.
Because antlers and tusks were hard, strong and associated with masculine power, they were believed capable of transferring those qualities to the human body.
“So if you were making something from something hard, then it might help make something else hard. That's why it was associated with the effects of something like Viagra.”
“It seems bizarre to us today, but they genuinely believed it.”
Peter Ross was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Sex and the Stuarts: inside 17th-century London's most notorious brothel]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sex-and-the-stuarts-inside-17th-century-londons-most-notorious-brothel/ 2026-08-11T10:49:20.000Z 2026-07-27T15:00:46.000Z The fearful residents of Southwark must have heard the Shrove Tuesday rioters before they saw them. Charging across London Bridge on 22 February 1631, the enraged throng surged west through streets snaking along the south bank of the Thames, armed with fists and sticks and stones – no doubt terrifying people living on these thoroughfares. But on this day, they had a specific target in mind: a moated, semi-fortified manor house near the river, known as Holland’s Leaguer.
This was far from the first such attack in London, and it would certainly not be the last. These mobs were to be taken very seriously – indeed, 10 years later, one would drive Charles I from his capital altogether. And the core of the swarm comprised a volatile community.
The apprentices of Stuart London were a notoriously rowdy bunch. Perhaps it was understandable: barely paid, hardly fed, indentured to his master for the whole of his adolescence, the life of an apprentice was a repressed, restrictive one. Just about his only pleasure was riot and disorder – an activity into which he threw himself with gusto on every public holiday.
Shrove Tuesday was a particular favourite, because it provided a plausible excuse for violence. An apprentice might claim that he set upon only places that represented sources of wicked temptation during Lent – theatres, taverns and, above all, London’s brothels, from which these penniless lads must have felt themselves most cruelly excluded. In 1614, rioting apprentices had attacked and totally destroyed the Shoreditch brothel run by Joan Leake.
On Shrove Tuesday 1631, their target was Holland’s Leaguer. On this occasion, the house did not fall: the drawbridge was raised, and the apprentices were repulsed. But the seeds of its downfall had been sown. The days of perhaps the largest, most notorious and most luxurious brothel in Southwark – if not all of London – were numbered.
Inspiring iniquity
What do we know of this infamous “house of obscenitie”, as Nicholas Goodman described it? To begin with, this brothel – or, rather its destruction – inspired three ballads, an extravagant pamphlet by Goodman, and a play by Shackerley Marmion that enjoyed what was, for the times, a record-breaking London run.
We also know that Bess Holland was its bawd, or madam. We also know where Holland’s Leaguer would have stood: where the southern end of Blackfriars Station now makes landfall on the bank of the Thames – a mere flounce of the petticoats from where Holland Street runs today.
We have a good idea of what it looked like. In Hollands Leaguer: or, An Historical Discourse of the Life and Actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia, published the year after the Leaguer’s demise, Goodman tells us that Bess set up shop in an old moated manor house, complete with a drawbridge.
This pamphlet is basically a diatribe against the state of England, so one should take much of what Goodman says with a hefty pinch of salt. But it’s true that, on the 1633 version of the ‘Agas map’ of London (a section of which is shown below), a moated manor house is marked exactly where the Leaguer would have been, in Southwark’s Old Paris Gardens.
Goodman describes the house as a “Citadell… so fortified… neither the Turkes wealth, nor the Traytors wit could ever have betrayed it”. At the time, ‘leaguer’ was a term for a fortified camp. In that conflict-bedevilled age – the bloody Thirty Years’ War raged in western Europe, and civil war loomed in England – dreadful puns were popular, as was likening amorous conquest to the military kind. But if even half of the defences Goodman described surrounding the Leaguer did exist, it’s clear why the name stuck.
Before reaching the drawbridge, you had to make your way along a narrow path “betwixt two dangerous ditches”, passing through palisades and barricades and between “strong ramparts”. And on finally crossing the drawbridge, you would be met at the door by a “Ruffian… monstrous both in shape and condition”. There he is in the woodcut illustrating Goodman’s pamphlet – reproduced on the opposite page – armed with a halberd, standing beside the Leaguer’s intimidatingly fortified front door. At the window to his right, hands on hips, is a female figure – could this be Bess Holland herself?
Clearly, those enraged apprentices came up against a well-defended target, with its moat and barricades and ramparts – but is that the only reason the attack failed? Did Bess’s neighbours band together on her behalf? Southwark was then a morass of taverns and theatres, of bull- and bear-baiting arenas, as well as brothels, so there could have been a sense that an attack on one was an attack on all. Or did Bess pay the mob to leave her in peace?
A woman of her times
Much of what we know about the Leaguer’s madam comes from Goodman’s pamphlet, though other clues can be found. He states that Bess was born in the country to virtuous and respectable parents, whom she manipulated into allowing her to move to London. There she became the mistress to a wealthy man, Goodman says, describing him as “Ignatius, a Puritane Jesuite” and also using a pun that might identify him as the lawyer Alberico Gentili. Bess was no common hussy, then, but a sophisticated courtesan with “a fayre Eye, full of strong inchauntment” – though “such a wicked spirit”, and “so masculine in her disposition” (my italics) that “all goodness became to her an utter stranger.”
Bess may have been surprisingly well connected. Records reveal that she leased the house from John Carey, the 3rd Baron Hunsdon. (Intriguingly, his father, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, had been the patron of Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men.) That may be relevant because one of the frequently repeated factoids about the Leaguer is that James VI & I was among its clients, as was the Duke of Buckingham.
Peter Ackroyd wrote of London’s “strange oscillation between freedom and restraint” in this period, when decorum and decadence weren’t mutually exclusive. The Bishop of Winchester owned the land on which many of Southwark’s ‘stews’ (brothels) stood – the women working in them became known as ‘Winchester Geese’ – and the court of James VI & I had a reputation for hedonism. Bess, then, was a product of her times, clearly aware of the tastes of her more discerning potential clients. When establishing her Leaguer, Goodman tells us, she ensured that it “wanted nothing for State, nothing for Magnificence, nothing for Delight, nothing for Beauty”.
There were gardens in which to carouse. The Dona Britanica woodcut shows two couples enjoying the gardens’ delights, one of them canoodling in an arbour. Rather charmingly, such flirtatious foreplay was known as ‘embroidery’.
Inside the house lay a warren of rooms: “doors, to come in and out by undiscovered, sliding windows also, and trap-boards in floors to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket”.
That’s how Thomas Nashe described such houses in his 1593 Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, another outburst against the state of England in general and London in particular. In such a place a man might indeed “kisse… Minions w[i]thout shame”, as the pamphleteer ‘Tom Tell Troth’ wrote in 1622.
Bess had three “household Officers, a Cooke-wench… and a Girle-Scullion”. Her kitchen, says Goodman, was “ever flaming” – a comment usually taken as evidence of gourmet dining, but which might also be another pun: a woman’s ‘kitchen’ could also mean her nether regions, and a reference to heat or flames could hint at symptoms of gonorrhoea or other sexually transmitted diseases. (Bess also employed a surgeon.)
But the true art went into the entertainments. For a previous establishment near Puddle Dock in Blackfriars, Bess had, wrote Goodman, recruited “petulant, painted, and halfe guilt Mimicks [actors]” to amuse her clients. At the Leaguer, a “Tyre [attire] woman” was responsible for the “phantastical ornaments” of the sex workers, and there was a “Laundry-Lasse”, a “Sempster” (seamstress) “for Ruffes”, and a “Taylor”.
Such an emphasis on costume suggests that the entertainments laid on in her houses were as elaborate as court masques – though no doubt more erotic. If King James or Buckingham did indeed pay the Leaguer a visit, they would not have been disappointed in what they encountered.
The price of love
Goodman names four of Bess’s sex workers: “Beta Breslonia, a huge Bona-Roba [young woman seen as sexually available]… impudent above measure”; Eliza Caunce, apparently a redhead, “yong, little, but a wondrous wanton”; “Longa Maria, a wench of a good handsome carriage, not so Rampant as the rest”; and “Maria Petit, a small handfull of woman… all Motion, and Action”. You would need deep pockets to enjoy their favours: a common ‘trull’ might ask one or two shillings, but a top-class 17th-century courtesan would charge 5 guineas a night – more than two months’ wages for a skilled tradesman.
“If you on sport be eager, Go unto Holland’s Leaguer,” as one ballad, ‘The Kind Believing Hostess’, put it:
For Wenches she can get yee
And of all sorts can fit yee,
Most bravely clad,
As may be had,
If leasure but permit yee
A Girle, attir’d in Sattin,
Can speake both French and Latine;
If you have gold
You may be bold
And have a fine roome to chat in
Who were these women? Southwark hosted a sizeable community of Dutch and Flemish immigrants at that time, and a 1605 drama, The Dutch Courtesan, presents such a woman as the height of licentiousness and desirability. A link has also been suggested between Holland’s Leaguer and another famously luxurious 17th-century brothel in Brussels, the ‘Lovely Little Maiden’.
The fictional Bess, Goodman’s ‘Dona Britanica’, supposedly brought her girls to London from the country – rural girls were reputed to be more free from disease. If so, these were no country mice. Bess Holland dealt with Baron Hunsdon as a business equal, and it was from his class of men that the Leaguer’s clients would have been drawn. So the women who entertained them knew – or learned – how to present. They must have had a sense of themselves and of their value.
- Read more | From whipping horses to royal love chairs: the lewd yet luxurious history of high-end erotic furniture
Washed and scented top to toe, painted and powdered and attired in their exotic costumes, these women must have looked like every gallant’s fantasy. Once the theatres opened in late afternoon, and Southwark began to come alive, they would have tempted clients with anchovies and oysters, sugar-cakes and peaches to make the wine “go merrily down”. Perhaps they sang or played music, and must have been amusing companions. A piece of contemporary pornography, ‘The Wandering Whore’, gives a sense of just how bawdy their conversation might have been, with no entendre undoubled. (It also details ‘entertainments’ that would not be out of place in a particularly exotic modern strip club.)
Immense fortune
A bawd such as Bess might make £10 a month from each of her ‘damsels’, wrote Sir William Vaughan in a moralising tract from the early 17th century. She charged not only for entrance and food but also to access successive rooms. No wonder her fortune grew immense. “Her baggs were so many, and so massy, that she had scarce chests enowe to containe them,” Goodman tells us.
The narrator of contemporary ballad ‘The Joviall Broome Man’ – a veteran who served with everyone from Tamburlaine to Sir Francis Drake, according to that verse – comes to Holland’s Leaguer and finds that there “the service provd too hot”, leaving this unlucky soldier “naked, hungry, cold and dry” – a nod to syphilis, or to the effects of the mercury used to treat it. At this high point in its fortunes, the Leaguer was sufficiently well known for everyone to get the joke. But the curtain was already rising on its final act.
Charles I was a very different character from his father, James VI & I. Some of Charles’s earliest ordinances, issued in 1626, proscribed such “immodest lascivious and shameless women” who “both in the day and the night time sit at the doors of such houses exposing themselves”. In 1629, he began his precarious Personal Rule, and could not tolerate riot, disorder or their causes. Sometime in the winter of 1631, perhaps as a result of the apprentices’ riot, the Leaguer came to the notice of the authorities who, Goodman wrote, despatched a corporal and “a stoute band of Halberd[i]ers” to close it for good.
Though titled Holland’s Leaguer, Marmion’s play sets only one part of its comic subplot in the brothel. But in the character of the Bawd, with her defiance of “any man” and her “Pox on the Marshal!” we may glimpse some of Bess’s real character. The apprentices had underestimated her; now the soldiers did, too. Raising the Leaguer’s portcullis to lure them on, Bess waited until her persecutors had filled the drawbridge, then raised that as well. The corporal and his men plunged into the moat; to describe “how they lay plunged in mud and myre, how one to helpe another, became worse and worse incumbred… would make a Tracte double this volume”, says Goodman.
Bess and her “shee-furies” knew that defying the corporal and his men, even if only to win a little time, was worth the effort. Once in the hands of the authorities, they could expect to be carted – heads shaved and exposed to public humiliation – to Bridewell to be flogged, then brought back to Newgate and imprisoned there. Bess had been in Newgate before; in that instance, her protector had got her out, but now she had no one to rely on but herself.
- Read more | Are your neighbours spying on you? In the 17th century they had the power to destroy your life
At that moment, though, a second force under a provost marshal appeared and laid siege to the Leaguer, seeking to starve out the women. Here Goodman ends his account, and Bess’s fate seems to have been sealed.
“Elizabeth Holland, a woman of ill reporte” was summoned to appear before the court of High Commission in January 1631 – 1632 in the Gregorian calendar – but didn’t attend. (A mysterious husband ordered to appear also didn’t show.) She was summoned again on 9 February, and again did not attend, despite fines that jumped up by £100 for each non-appearance.
The Leaguer’s new leaseholders, Felix Hunt and Robert Rogers, learned that the apprentices were planning another attack. So they petitioned the court to have Southwark’s streets patrolled for “Shrovetyde”. Their plea reveals that Bess had quit her house and not been seen in weeks.
What became of her? Some years later, in March 1637, one Ursula Babthorpe was accused of fraud and of having once been “a common prostitute [in] Holland Leaguer”, but of Bess herself there is no mention. Did she disappear into wealthy retirement? Did she set up elsewhere? Perhaps she suffered the same fate as another 17th-century “woman of pleasure” described in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, who “grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died”.
Ulcerated to the bone
As for Ursula’s other co-workers, nothing is known for sure. But a 10-minute walk from the site of the Leaguer is Cross Bones Graveyard, likely the “plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard” mentioned by John Stow in his 1598 Survey of London. From the late Middle Ages until its closure in 1853, this was the resting place of an estimated 15,000 paupers, including generations of women from the Southwark stews.
During the 1990s, part of the Cross Bones site was excavated during work on the London Underground, removing some 148 skeletons. In 2008, the Wellcome Collection published its analysis on the remains of a young woman aged between 18 and 25 when she was buried in this unconsecrated ground during that era of dissolution in Southwark. It revealed that she had suffered the ravages of full-blown syphilis, and was ulcerated to the bone. Was her fate representative of that of the residents of Holland’s Leaguer? We can only guess – but such might well have been the end of Bess and of any of her girls, and Cross Bones their final destination.
Jacky Colliss Harvey is a writer and editor. Her latest novel, The Wanton Road (Allen & Unwin), is out now in paperback
This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Serafina Kenny <![CDATA[Instead of marrying their lovers, these men adopted them. Can you guess why?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/adult-adoption-attitudes-toward-sexuality/ 2026-06-27T10:05:04.000Z 2026-06-27T10:05:01.000Z The terms ‘gay’ and ‘queer,’ and the identity categories that have sprung up around them, are quite modern. But people who were what we would now call gay, queer, and gender non-conforming have existed forever – even in the Georgian period, more than 200 years before homosexual acts were decriminalised in the UK in 1967.
“We are told that so much of our history as queer people is new, or that Oscar Wilde happened and then we were all gay. But this isn’t the case – we have always been here,” Anthony Delaney, an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers, told the HistoryExtra podcast.
“Queer people have always had to be quite fluid in the ways in which they interact with the law and with legalities. They had to circumvent things that appeared in their way, by using mechanisms that were available to them at the time in order to get what they wanted,” Delaney says.
One of these mechanisms used by queer people was adult adoption.
Gay men adopted each other in the 1980s and the 1780s
Today, perhaps the best-known examples of adult adoption between gay men were during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s.
“If you look at that time period, you'll often find gay men adopting their younger partner, because this would then allow them to be at their bedside when they were dying, for instance, or to inherit everything that they wanted to leave them after they died,” Delaney says.
- Learn more | The world of the Georgians with Alice Loxton
But this wasn’t the first time in history that gay men had adopted each other to legally link themselves outside of an official marriage.
“There are these hints in the archive that what we saw happening in the 80s and in the early 90s was not necessarily a new thing,” Delaney says. “There's a suggestion that this was happening as far back as the 1780s.”
During the Georgian period – 1714 to 1837 – it wasn’t legal for two people of the same sex to marry. But gay men still wanted a way to legally link themselves together to pass on property and titles.
It wasn’t about a younger man becoming the legal ‘son’ of his partner but rather becoming his legal heir.
“It wasn’t necessarily that unusual, because adult adoption was happening in the 18th century anyway in order to secure inheritances and to pass on property. What makes it more unusual is this queer element,” Delaney says.
There are some "important caveats to bear in mind” about the strategy of adoption, though, he says. It wasn’t always possible and would have been much easier for elite men to have gone through with it than anyone else.
The ‘Chuthheads’ were an example of this
One couple who Delaney thinks used adult adoption were John Chute and Francis Whitehead.
Chute was born in 1701 and inherited The Vyne, his family’s country house in Hampshire, after the deaths of his two older brothers. He had spent most of his youth touring Europe and was known for his taste in decor and fashion. He was very good friends with noted politician Horace Walpole, whose sexuality has been the subject of speculation.
Chute never married, but “surrounded himself with younger men” according to art historian Maurice Howard. One of these men was his cousin, Francis Whitehead, who was 18 years younger than him.
Chute accompanied Whitehead on his ‘grand tour’ – a long trip, filled with culture, politics, and languages that elite young men would often take around Europe as a rite of passage – between 1740 and 1746.
They lived together in Florence for a while, where they were collectively known as the ‘Chuthheads’ to their friends. Chute made Whitehead his heir, but he died at The Vyne in 1751 at the age of 31. Chute died, childless, in 1776, and his estate passed to another cousin.
Same-sex couples have existed in various guises throughout history
Some same-sex couples tried to cheat the law to legally marry each other, like Marcela Gracia Ibeas and Elisa Sánchez Loriga, who had the first same-sex marriage in Spain in 1901.
To achieve this, Elisa put her name on the marriage certificate as Mario Sanchez and dressed masculine for the ceremony. But soon after the marriage, their neighbours exposed them to the press. They lost their jobs, were excommunicated by the Catholic Church, and had arrest warrants put out for them.
We know that they managed to board a ship bound for South America, and that’s the last that is known about them. Their marriage was never annulled, so they officially had Spain’s first same-sex marriage.
Other same-sex couples have managed to confirm their relationships within the law or social customs.
In Eastern Christianity, from the 14th to the 20th century, there was a ceremony which bound two people of the same sex together under the eyes of the church called adelphopoiesis, or ‘brother-making.’ Historians disagree on the nature of the relationships formed through adelphopoiesis, with some claiming that it was akin to a sibling relationship and others that it was a marriage-like union. It is no longer practised because, according to the Pedalion, a book of Orthodox canon law, “it is the cause of many evils… and merely affords matter for some persons to fulfil their carnal desires and to enjoy sensual pleasures.”
Meanwhile, before the 1860s in Japan, same-sex relations were a key part of samurai culture. The principles of nanshoku (meaning male love) and shudo (meaning ‘the way of the youth’) led to pairings of older, more experienced samurais entering into ‘brotherhood contracts’ with younger men apprenticed to them to learn martial arts.
As part of these contracts, a life-long loyalty was created between the two. Before the younger wakashū came of age, he was expected to submit to the older nenja’s sexual attention as part of this loyalty.
Anthony Delaney was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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