HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/womens-history Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:31:03 GMT en hourly 1 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/ Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:30:53 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-magic-spells-to-dirty-graffiti-16-surprising-facts-about-sex-in-the-classical-world/ Orgies and olive oil. Lucky willies and leather dildos. Polyamory and pigeon-powered love potions. Forget prudish Victorian attitudes towards the ancients, says Dr Jean Menzies, the Greeks and Romans had rich and imaginative sex lives that tell us much about their societies 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.
WATCH | Ruth Goodman on love, sex and marriage in Tudor England
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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.
- Read more | 14 weird contraception methods from history: from weasel testicles to fish bladder condoms
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)
]]> From plague 'searchers' to strawberry birthmarks: a history of women's bodies https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-plague-searchers-to-strawberry-birthmarks-a-history-of-womens-bodies/ Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:00:07 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-plague-searchers-to-strawberry-birthmarks-a-history-of-womens-bodies/ Erin Maglaque explores the history of the female body – and society's longstanding beliefs about it. What was 'nidgeting'? How did women know they were pregnant before modern tests? And what did people in the past believe a mother’s imagination could do to her unborn child?
In this episode, Lauren Good speaks to historian Erin Maglaque about her book Presence, which explores the history of the female body – and society's longstanding beliefs about it.
]]> "No votes, no golf!": how the suffragettes made sport a political battlefield https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:30:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ In the early 20th century, sport came to be regarded as a male-only activity – by men, anyway. As Rachel Hewitt explains, the overlooked history of women’s participation in cricket, golf, wrestling, hockey and even mountaineering is intertwined with the emergence of the suffragist movement On the afternoon of Saturday 1 November 1902, a group of men and women careered around Hampton Court Park, enjoying a friendly game of hockey. A local newspaper reported that “the weather was glorious”, though the ground was muddy. Players included residents of Hampton Court Palace’s apartments; it is likely that Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – a talented hockey player who turned out for both the Palace team and the nearby East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club, and who lived on the Hampton Court estate – was among them.
Photographs of the Molesey club help us imagine Singh in action: they show women sprinting in determined pursuit of the ball, loosened neckties flying free from billowing white shirts, rose-red skirts ballooning to reveal shin pads and studded boots, sticks expertly poised to strike winning shots.
Daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, Sophia Duleep Singh was born in England and is known today for her leading role in the British suffrage movement. As Anita Anand recounts in her 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Singh boycotted the 1911 census and refused to pay taxes or fees for dog and carriage licences because she would not accept “taxation without representation”.
She joined suffrage protests and raised funds for the Kingston and district branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), selling The Suffragette newspaper outside her Hampton Court home. (Strictly speaking, suffragettes took direct, often militant, action, whereas suffragists used largely peaceful methods in pursuit of votes for women. However, the two groups were often conflated in the 20th century.)
Political football
Though her activities in support of votes for women are widely recognised, Singh’s sporting activities are mostly forgotten today. Indeed, we don’t tend to speak of suffragists and sportswomen in the same breath. That’s partly because of the enduring legacy of anti-suffrage propaganda, which depicted WSPU members as scrawny spinsters or portly old maids – tyrants in the home, not athletes on the hockey pitch.
It also reflects a popular and persistent misconception that sport – particularly women’s sport – is a trivial leisure pursuit and irrelevant to politics. If such beliefs are still widespread today, why would we imagine that anyone was interested in suffragists’ sports a century ago?
- Read more | From china cups to letter bombs: how suffragettes got out the message of votes for women
Yet these entwined ideas – that suffragists didn’t care much about sport, and that politics and sports shouldn’t mix – obscure an important historical thread. Sport was genuinely meaningful to many suffragist women, both personally and politically. When Singh declared that sport was “the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she princess or peasant”, she was making a political point – echoing the republican theory that English men and women had once possessed liberties that were subsequently removed by tyrannical oppressors.
Singh was far from an outlier in her love of sport. For example, the Pankhursts were members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Rosa May Billinghurst, who survived polio, used an adapted tricycle to attend suffragist protests. Hilda Webb, who threw stones at government buildings with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, helped to establish women’s hockey in Ireland.
Vera Holme, chauffeur to various leaders of the WSPU, excelled at fly fishing. There was also Lady Florence Dixie, an early suffragist and president of the British Ladies’ Football Club – co-founded with London suffragist Nettie Honeyball – as well as a passionate hunter, mountaineer and explorer. Louisa Lumsden, president of the Aberdeen branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a champion of girls’ international cricket. Across the Atlantic, Lucy Diggs Slowe advocated for the inclusion of black women in the US suffrage movement. She won the American Tennis Association tournament (which had been founded for black tennis players) in 1917, the year after the US Lawn Tennis Association had banned black athletes.
Indeed, in the early 20th century the association between suffragism and sport was so entrenched that it became a literary trope. One suffragette character in the French play Les Éclaireuses was “dressed in a short tweed hockey skirt”. Another was a “lady mountaineer” who featured in Frank Savile’s 1908 short story The Suffragette. Spare a thought, too, for the male narrator of a poem who, wearied by his girlfriend’s devotion to sport and politics, lamented that “A golfing girl is bad enough, but oh! A Suffragette!”
Mixed messages
Many of the sportiest suffragists of the early 20th century had honed their athletic abilities – along with their commitment to women’s rights – in the 1880s and 1890s. During those decades, men and women competed together in mixed-doubles tennis and in mixed-sex cricket and hockey games. Hiking, climbing, sailing, skating, rowing and running in hare-and-hounds cross-country events were shared pastimes. Men and women even bobsleighed together. They often used the same sporting facilities, belonged to the same clubs, and revelled in the reporting of their sporting achievements in the same newspapers and newsletters.
Sometimes, though, men’s physiological and social advantages made it desirable for women to play sport in all-female environments. The mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond suggested that a Ladies’ Alpine Club could counter the male-dominated nature of mountaineering literature by forming an “extensive and authoritative library” of women’s writings on the subject. She also wanted women to share female-specific information about “the formation of climbing parties, the provision of guides, means of travelling, and general accommodation”.
In addition, a wealth of women’s sports clubs and competitions sprang up in the 1880s and 1890s, including the East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club (which became England’s first ever women’s hockey team in 1887), the Irish Ladies’ Hockey Union in 1894 and, in 1895, the Blackheath Ladies’ Hockey Club and the All England Women’s Hockey Association.
Most surviving records concern upper-class pursuits, but sport was equally important in urban and rural working-class women’s lives. The 1880s saw the tail end of a craze for female pedestrianism, with women and girls earning money speed-walking extraordinary distances. In 1864, for example, Emma Sharp is said to have been the first woman to complete a 1,000-mile walk in 1,000 hours.
Researcher Sarah Elizabeth Cox has unearthed evidence of two black or mixed-heritage women known as “the Sisters Mills, or the Muscular Maids from Mexico”, who boxed in the East End of London in the 1880s.
Women’s foot-races and cricket games were staples of village fairs from the 17th century onwards – it’s said that overarm bowling was devised by women as a way to avoid getting their hands caught in skirts. Later, when women’s teams such as the Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club were formed – many of them initially drawing players from women working in factories during the First World War – they were building on a long heritage of working-class women’s sport.
Exercising ambition
As the new century began, women who had been physically active had experienced how sport promoted health, strength, education and camaraderie, as well as offering opportunities for travel, adventure and meeting new people. They knew that participating could bring money, fame and respect – and the chance to lead. Lizzie Le Blond referred to climbing as “the work”. Fellow climber Frederica Plunket described how physical activity allowed her to escape a lifestyle of upper-class feminine indolence featuring neither “hard work” nor “play”, letting her instead tire herself out and earn “absolute rest” – as men did.
Women’s sporting experiences informed their political and social ambitions, too. The late 19th-century ideal ‘New Woman’ was well educated, wanted to work and was intent upon domestic equality. She was also an enthusiast for sport, particularly cycling. Reasons for this were outlined by the American suffragist Susan B Anthony in 1895: “Bicycling… has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”
This passion for sport fed into the later female suffrage movement, often in practical ways. During the 1908 trial of the Pankhursts and Flora Drummond for inciting a riot, suffragist Evelyn Sharp described how she’d been able to dodge a policeman: “It was like a rush at hockey.” Meanwhile, Suffragists used bicycles to distribute campaign literature.
Between 1912 and 1914, though, suffragists’ approach to sport took a markedly different turn. These were years when militant suffragettes launched a campaign in which sports facilities were the primary target. At first, women approached male politicians as they played golf. They heckled Asquith at the Aboyne course and, on the Balmoral links, threw a worm at Winston Churchill.
The campaign intensified in 1913. Over just one weekend that February, at least 12 golf courses were damaged. Suffragettes used acid and weedkiller to burn phrases into the grass, including “Justice Before Sport” and “No Votes, No Golf”. They dug holes into greens, inserting suffragist magazines and posters. And they replaced the golf courses’ flags with their own, bearing mottos such as “Women’s War”.
Later the same month, a groundsman at Roehampton Golf Club interrupted two suspicious-looking women who ran off, dropping a bag whose incendiary contents suggested that they had intended to burn down the pavilion. The police raided the flat of a suffragette called Olive Hockin, where they found corrosive fluid, clippers, firelighters, hammers, flints, false car registration plates and golfing flags.
At a WSPU meeting soon afterwards, a perplexed attendee asked: “Why do the Suffragettes destroy golf links?” It was a reasonable question. After all, many suffragists had grown up loving sport. Why were they now seeking to destroy the facilities on which they’d originally flourished?
Eva McLaren – Aiming high
An activist and leading member of five suffrage societies, McLaren (1852–1921) was a keen mountaineer in her youth. Mountaineering was so synonymous with suffragism that, in 1909, Votes for Women joked that the Ladies’ Alpine Club’s membership roster could be a recruitment list for militant suffragettes. McLaren created a centre of excellence for women’s sport, with a focus on hockey.
Edith Garrud – Creating fighting chances
Trained as a physical culture instructor, Garrud (1872–1971) specialised in teaching Japanese martial arts to women and girls from the late 1890s, becoming the first known female jiu-jitsu instructor in Britain. She joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1906, offering jiu-jitsu classes to suffragettes as “a necessary safeguard for the woman who has to defend herself” against the police. She trained the 30-strong all-female Bodyguard Unit, who protected the WSPU’s leaders from arrest.
Olive Hockin – The skiing suffragette
Joining the suffrage movement in 1912, Hockin (1881–1936) took part in militant action including attempted arson at Roehampton Golf Club. According to biographies, she was a trained artist who designed suffragette banners. Less well known is that Hockin was also a champion ski-runner and ski-jumper. She went to prison for the Roehampton action, but got out in time to win the British Ski Championship in January 1914.
Male privilege
In November 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst explained that men had “made a rule that, although the ladies may play golf all the week [on days when men were typically at work], the golf links are entirely reserved for men on Saturday and Sunday”.
This was about more than day-to-day sexism. Pankhurst was identifying a dramatic cultural shift in which sport was being redefined as a predominantly male pursuit. The modern Olympic Games, which were first held in 1896 and initially permitted no female participants, marked a milestone in this shift. The Olympics’ co-founder, academic and historian Pierre de Coubertin, had decided that masculinity was under threat. He thought that “solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” was the best way to rebuild weak men – and would entail cleansing sport of female influence. This reinforced a belief extolled in all-male schools and universities, which saw organised sport as key to preparing men for careers in public service.
Sports clubs and competitions around the world followed the Olympics’ example. Cycling clubs changed policies to exclude women; new groups such as the Manchester Wheelers were male-only. Wimbledon had no official women’s doubles championships until 1913. And in 1907, the Swiss Alpine Club – which had welcomed female members since 1863 – kicked out women.
Golf had once been a quintessential upper-class female sport, but clubs started imposing restrictions of the type Pankhurst mentioned in her speech, or banning women altogether. Women’s sport was shorthand for women’s political emancipation, and there was a burgeoning backlash against both. In an 1897 protest against women taking degrees at the University of Cambridge, male students directed their ire towards an effigy of a female cyclist.
By 1910, sport had been redefined to be predominantly associated with men. Suffragettes justified their “ruin of golf links and cricket pavilions” on the basis that it was the best way to attract men’s attention while “injuring no human being”. Flora Drummond observed that “[Male golfers] don’t give a thought to the women who are being tortured in prison by the government… [but] it interests golfers to find their links damaged and they inquire who did it. Then they realise that women are asking for votes.” Emmeline Pankhurst urged angry male golfers to “tell the government to give women the vote in order to secure the golf greens from further injury”.
A man’s world?
In short, sport was not tangential to suffragist politics: it was the training ground on which many women first realised their capabilities and their deserved rights. Following male logic, which emphasised how sporting excellence helped prepare men for professional roles, it was also the arena in which women had, time and time again, proved themselves well equipped for public life. The suffragettes’ golf course campaign saw women reclaiming sporting spaces in which they had once been at home, reminding the public of this not-too-distant history.
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Their protests also drew attention to the dramatic change that was taking place in sporting culture, out of which women were being driven. Among other things, this demonstrated how men’s support for women’s rights was inconsistent, and could go into reverse. As Sophia Duleep Singh argued, sport was a “birthright”for women – an original liberty that was being denied and removed by a tyrannical oppressor. Addressing men directly, Emmeline Pankhurst pointed out that “for nearly 50 years we had your sympathy and your support, and nothing happened… [now, by targeting your sports facilities, we] have your disgust and have you thoroughly annoyed.”
In the campaign for suffrage, women’s rights eventually prevailed – but the backlash against women’s sport had long-lasting effects. It succeeded not only in suppressing women’s ability to play sport but also in obscuring records of women’s sporting achievements. It entrenched the ideas that, as de Coubertin put it, female sport is “against the laws of nature” and that sport had always been – or certainly should have been – the preserve of men.
Because of that backlash, the history of suffragettes’ sporting pursuits has been forgotten. By resurrecting this history, we can gain not just a better understanding of the suffragist movement but also a more comprehensive understanding of sport’s identity and its kinship with politics.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer and historian. Her books include In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto, 2023)
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> The pioneering surgeon who stood up to Rasputin https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pioneering-surgeon-who-stood-up-to-rasputin-podcast/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:42 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pioneering-surgeon-who-stood-up-to-rasputin-podcast/ Acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour explains the remarkable life and accomplishments of pioneering surgeon Vera Gedroits – and why her story was erased She pioneered lifesaving battlefield surgery, challenged the medical establishment, stood up to Rasputin, and became the world's first female professor of surgery – yet today, few people have heard of Vera Gedroits.
In today's episode, acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour tells Elinor Evans about Vera's remarkable life and accomplishments – and why her story was erased.
]]> "She made an impact without being sexually attractive": why this Renaissance fashionista is my history hero https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-made-an-impact-without-being-sexually-attractive-why-this-renaissance-fashionista-is-my-history-hero/ Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:00:12 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-made-an-impact-without-being-sexually-attractive-why-this-renaissance-fashionista-is-my-history-hero/ Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant chooses Isabella d'Este (1474–1539) as her history hero In profile
Isabella d’Este was the Marchioness of Mantua, a wealthy city-state, during the Italian Renaissance. A patron of the arts, she owned works by Michelangelo, while Leonardo da Vinci sketched her. After the death of her husband, Francesco II Gonzaga, she ruled Mantua as regent for her son, Federico II, and played an important role in Italian politics. The mother of eight children, six of whom survived, she died aged 64.
When did you first hear about Isabella?
I came across her when I was writing about the Borgia family a decade or so ago and she emerged as the sister-in-law from hell to Lucrezia Borgia.
Isabella was a bit of a snob and looked down upon Lucrezia as an illegitimate parvenu. But the more I learnt about this opinionated, clever, strong-willed woman [Isabella], who became the foremost female art collector of her age, the more she fascinated me.
What kind of woman was she?
She was smart, confident, well-born and grew up in a household where art was important. She became a collector herself – many of the great artists of the age would work for her. She was also musical, educated and fluent in Latin. At the age of six, she could recite prose by Cicero and poetry by Virgil from memory. Her father clearly adored her, which was unusual for the time, because men invariably wanted a son.
Something about her personality – she was a bit of a show-off but also brave – attracted people. She was never a great beauty, but she made the best of her looks and became a bit of an Anna Wintour-style fashionista-influencer. There are some notable similarities between the Mona Lisa and da Vinci’s earlier sketches of Isabella!
What made her a hero?
Firstly, the fact that she made such an impact as a woman without being sexually attractive or dangerous, which was unusual in her era. Secondly, the way she achieved her goal of creating her own art collection. She even built a study where she could sit and gaze at her artworks, in a sense ‘a room of her own’. The idea of a woman having such a space back then was outrageous – only men were supposed to enjoy such things – so she had to grow a thick skin to counter criticism. And thirdly, her leadership skills.
What was Isabella’s finest hour?
Successfully ruling Mantua when her husband was in prison. A female ruler without a husband at that time was vulnerable, but she negotiated his release and protected her city-state’s independence. Also, she not only survived the Sack of Rome in 1527 but even gave sanctuary to a number of nobles and diplomats, saving many.
Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her?
I have to admit she could be bloody-minded and at times behave badly to get what she wanted.
Can you see any parallels between her life and your own?
Hmm. She speaks a lot better Latin than I ever did. I’ve sadly forgotten all I learnt at school. Although like her, I’ve also had to deal with a few bolshie men in my time. What woman hasn’t?
What would you ask Isabella if you could meet her?
Which bloody cupboard did you put Michelangelo’s now-lost Sleeping Cupid sculpture in? I want to put it on my mantelpiece!
Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, critic and a former presenter of BBC Two’s The Late Show. Her latest novel, The Marchesa (Ravenna Press), is out in paperback now
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Is Sense and Sensibility a true reflection of life in Georgian Britain? The real history behind the new adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/sense-and-sensibility-real-history-new-adaptation-jane-austen/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:00:10 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/sense-and-sensibility-real-history-new-adaptation-jane-austen/ A dying Henry Dashwood is clear about his wishes. His son and heir, John, should provide for his stepmother and his three half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret. But John’s wife, Fanny, sees things differently, which leaves the quartet facing life in greatly reduced circumstances… Published in October 1811 in an edition that credited the text only to “A Lady”, Jane Austen first began working on Sense and Sensibility at the end of the 18th century. The first draft was written in epistolary form, a style popularised by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), a novelist she admired. The revised approach likely gave Austen more flexibility in exploring the world of the Dashwoods, and their struggles to adjust to a life where they are often reliant on the kindness and assistance of family and friends.
The new version is directed by Georgia Oakley. It’s her second feature after her acclaimed Blue Jean (2022), which was set in 1988 and focused on the effects of Section 28 legislation on a lesbian teacher. Sense and Sensibility stars Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Twisters) as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles (Hanna, The Chronology of Water) as Marianne, two young women with contrasting attitudes to life and love.
Is the new version of Sense and Sensibility faithful to Jane Austen’s novel?
Broadly, yes. Despite, for example, the timeline differing from the novel in key respects, the sweep of the film will be familiar to anyone who has read the novel. It shows the Dashwoods swapping a grand country house existence in Sussex for a modest cottage in Devon, cheaply rented to them by a second cousin, Sir John Middleton (Turlough Convery). The future for the Dashwood girls, including Margaret, who is still a child, is uncertain. Living in genteel semi-poverty, they are unattractive matches for any man looking to increase his family’s fortune, not an easy situation for young women dreaming of finding happiness in marriage.
A few plot points have been tweaked by the film’s scriptwriter, Diana Reid, but the overall trajectory of film and book are similar. Where some Austen purists may quibble is in the extent to which the film draws out the contrasts between Elinor, a pragmatist who represents ‘sense’, and Marianne, a romantic who embodies ‘sensibility’. In particular, this version of Marianne has something of the wildness of a heroine from a Gothic romance. Or perhaps the Victorian-era novels of the Brontës. It doesn’t seem coincidental that, in choosing Devon locations, the filmmakers headed for the windswept uplands of Dartmoor.
Conversely, perhaps this is in its way authentic to Jane Austen. For all she satirised potboilers such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in Northanger Abbey (completed in 1798–99, but published posthumously in 1817), Austen did so from the perspective of an avid reader who devoured all kinds of books.
WATCH | Becoming Jane Austen: the early life of a literary legend
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How difficult were Georgian laws on inheritance for women?
Georgian society was patriarchal and vast estates routinely passed to the eldest son, but that doesn’t mean women couldn’t inherit as is sometimes supposed. Indeed, look beyond the Dashwoods and, while some of these nuances are not as clear in the new screen version as in the novel, women whose circumstances are shaped by financial settlements do much to drive the plot of Sense and Sensibility.
Elinor’s love interest, for example, is Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), whose mother is a widow with control over her own fortune and holds the power to disinherit her children, with which she spitefully threatens them.
Mrs Jennings (Fiona Shaw), the widowed mother-in-law of Sir John Middleton, is also independently wealthy, able to invite Elinor and Marianne to London, where she has a townhouse, and travel around in her own carriage. Contemporary readers would have understood that, because her money came from ‘trade’, she was considered less genteel than those who derived their incomes from land. Expansive, big-hearted and having used her money to guide her own daughters towards socially advantageous marriages, Jennings herself doesn’t give a hoot about what the world thinks. This helps to make her an immensely attractive character in both novel and film.
Is Sense and Sensibility autobiographical?
Not directly, but you don’t have to look far to find parallels with Austen’s life. Austen’s father, George, a Church of England cleric, died suddenly in 1805. This left his widow, Cassandra, and the couple’s unmarried daughters, Cassandra and Jane, in a difficult financial situation. Family members helped financially, but the trio spent a lot of time visiting relatives. They didn’t really settle in a new home until 1809, when Jane’s wealthy brother, Edward, offered them the use of a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire.
Further financial issues lay ahead for the wider family. In 1816, a bank where Jane’s brother, Henry, was a partner, Austen, Maunde & Tilson, failed amidst the economic slump that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Other members of the family, including Edward, who had acted as a financial guarantor for his brother, lost out too.
Where did Jane Austen herself stand on sense versus sensibility?
Watching Sense and Sensibility, Elinor has many of the attributes we associate with her creator, notably a dry wit and a high degree of emotional control. And yet it would be a mistake to think of Austen as someone utterly unlike Marianne. Like Marianne, for instance, she loved the arts.
And perhaps this is anyway a false binary. In 1802, Austen accepted and then almost immediately turned down a marriage proposal from the improbably named Harris Bigg-Wither. Had she married, she would have gained financial security. You can as easily frame this as a decision born of sense (why share your life with someone when you are not certain it’s the right thing to do?) or sensibility (it seems likely she didn’t love him and, anyway, her most enduring passion was writing).
Did Austen base her characters on real-life people?
Looking beyond the Dashwoods, it has been speculated that Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), who is attracted to Marianne and has spent time out east, was partly based on Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India. Well-connected contemporary readers might have noticed, for example, how Brandon’s ward shared a first name with someone rumoured to have been Hastings’ daughter, Austen’s cousin (and later sister-in-law) Eliza de Feuillide. Hastings was noted for having taken up his pistol on a matter of honour and, without giving away spoilers, a duel is a key moment in the film.
A precise antecedent for Marianne’s other suitor, rakish and self-serving John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), is less easy to discern.
What was the attitude of Georgian society to proposals of marriage?
Marriage was a serious business in Georgian society. Break an engagement and, whether you were a man or a woman, you risked being sued for breach of promise because you had gone back on a binding contract. This is why it is so important for Elinor and Marianne that the men to whom they are attracted actually say the words and propose.
Sense and Sensibility is in UK cinemas now
]]> In 1895, a Chicago housewife left her family to cycle around the world. But was it all a hoax? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1895-a-chicago-housewife-left-her-family-to-cycle-around-the-world-but-was-it-all-a-hoax/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:30:28 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1895-a-chicago-housewife-left-her-family-to-cycle-around-the-world-but-was-it-all-a-hoax/ As the 19th century drew to a close, one young woman took on a cycling challenge like no other: to pedal around the globe solo. Peter Zheutlin traces her unbelievable journey On 12 September 1895, a young woman pedalled into Chicago. Not so remarkable, you might think, but at the time, it was astonishing. Not because the sight of a woman on a bicycle was a novelty – that decade saw a boom in female cyclists – but because this particular rider had completed a circumnavigation of the globe on her steed.
Or had she really? That’s the $10,000-dollar question. That cyclist, already world famous, was Annie Londonderry. Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, and she was a married Jewish mother of three children, all under the age of six at the time she set out. Her odyssey was, according to the New York World, “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman”.
Born in 1870 or 1871 near Riga in Latvia, Annie Cohen had come to the US with her family in 1875. She married Simon ‘Max’ Kopchovsky in 1888, and within six years had three small children and a job selling advertising space for newspapers. The family lived in Boston’s West End, where immigrants packed into tenement houses, speaking their native languages and cooking traditional foods. It may well have fired the imagination of a young woman curious about the world.
In the 1890s, the bicycle craze was peaking, and round-the-world adventures were capturing the public imagination. Londonderry joined in, not to score a victory for women, though she later cast herself in that light, but because she didn’t want to stay “home with a baby under my apron every year”.
The world for a wager
Londonderry’s improbable journey was reputedly set in motion by a wager between two “wealthy clubmen of Boston”. A $10,000 prize awaited a woman who succeeded in travelling around the world on two wheels; she was to start penniless and earn $5,000 en route, accept no gratuities, make the trip in 15 months, and cover 10,000 miles by bicycle. This was a test not just of a woman’s endurance but also of her ability to fend for herself in unfamiliar lands.
At first glance, Londonderry seemed an unlikely candidate. For a woman of the 1890s to leave her husband and children was scandalous. She was physically unprepossessing – 1.6m tall and weighing around 47kg, although she subsequently claimed there was “nothing better than a wheel to build a woman up” – and had never ridden a bicycle in her life. But riding was a learnable skill. The other traits required – courage, cunning, willpower and chutzpah – could not be taught, but Londonderry, a skilful creator of her own myth, had them in spades.
- Read more | "She saw off bandits with her revolver": the unbelievable adventures of Fanny Bullock Workman
On Monday 25 June 1894, in front of a crowd gathered at the Massachusetts capitol, Londonderry climbed onto a Columbia women’s bicycle produced by the Pope Manufacturing Company – to the delight of that company’s owner, Colonel Albert Pope, who was actively marketing bicycles to women, and for whom Londonderry’s journey would represent a public relations triumph.
After various speeches were delivered, a representative of the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire hung an advertising placard on Londonderry’s bicycle (paying her $100 for the privilege). With a sports marketing savvy rare in the 1890s, she adopted the Londonderry name, which also served to conceal her Jewish heritage.
Turning her bicycle, body and name into a mobile billboard was a moneymaking and publicity strategy Londonderry employed in cities around the world. She solicited advertising, attaching banners, placards and ribbons to her bike or clothing to be seen by the thousands who watched her pedal by. She also courted the press. “A bright, vivacious woman, a good talker… in fact, all fired smart,” declared the El Paso Daily Herald. And a French newspaper proclaimed: “She seems made only of muscles and nerves and in spite of her petite size gives the impression of remarkable energy.”
When she set out on her adventure in June 1894, Londonderry “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street”, according to the Boston Evening Transcript. Carrying only a change of undergarments and a pearl-handled revolver, her plan was to ride west. But progress was slow: her bike weighed a whopping 19kg, her long skirts and tailored jacket were ill-suited for the exertions of cycling, the weather was hot, and the physical demands were formidable.
- Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Three months later, having got only as far as Chicago, she decided to abandon the trip, realising that she wouldn’t make it across the continent before winter set in. But her fortunes quickly changed. The Sterling Cycle Works offered her a men’s bicycle half the weight of her Columbia, and she adopted radical new riding attire: bloomers. Enjoying a second wind, Londonderry reversed course and headed to New York. By then, nearly four months had elapsed and she was, in terms of circling the Earth, starting from scratch.
French leave
On 24 November, Londonderry boarded the liner La Touraine for Le Havre. Then she took a train to Paris, where she lingered for several weeks earning money as a human billboard. She left on 30 December, riding through wintry weather over poor roads. It was mid-January by the time she reached Marseilles. Londonderry now had just eight months to compete the circuit – and most of the world still lay ahead. She boarded a French mail boat, the Sydney, and hopped across various seas and oceans, via Alexandria, Yemen and Singapore. Three weeks later, she was in Saigon. From there, she sailed on to Hong Kong and Shanghai, en route to Japan.
On 9 March 1895, Londonderry sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco. By the time she made landfall in the US, she had a series of hyperbolic, apocryphal stories to tell, including being caught up in the Sino-Japanese War. Breathless sensationalism was characteristic of American journalism in the 1890s and Londonderry was on song. Writing in the New York Sunday World in October 1895, she described being imprisoned by the Japanese: “The cell was merely a hut with lattice-work sides. There was no protection from the bitter cold and I suffered keenly. [A] Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese prisoner up to my cell and killed him before my eyes, drinking his blood while the muscles were yet quivering.”
Charge for Chicago
In April, Londonderry left San Francisco accompanied by Mark Johnson, a well-known cyclist from the city. Having reached Los Angeles on 18 May, she headed east alone, following the Southern Pacific Railway nearly 200 miles across the desert. Or did she? The Los Angeles Times reported that “if certain railroad men were asked how she crossed the desert, ‘they would wink their other eye’”.
Such was the anticipation in Tucson that spectators clambered up a bell tower clutching telescopes hoping for a glimpse of Londonderry as she came over the horizon. In El Paso, she was the featured attraction at a bicycle meet, riding a tandem with several cycling enthusiasts. “The way Miss Londonderry pulled Bart Allen around the track… greatly amused the crowd,” said the El Paso Daily Herald.
With little more than two months left on the wager clock, Londonderry was still 1,800 miles from Chicago. She headed north, reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming on 19 August. Then, partly by rail and partly by bike, she arrived in Chicago on 12 September – not quite 15 months after leaving Boston.
“I am a journalist and ‘a new woman’ – if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.” So begins Londonderry’s account of her trip, published in the New York Sunday World. She’d ridden thousands of miles, often alone. But did she truly pedal around the world? The evidence suggests not – but, even so, it was no small feat for an anonymous Jewish mother from the tenements of Boston to turn herself into a global celebrity, inspiring countless women along the way, without the modern tools of social media. And the wager? Most likely another of Londonderry’s fictions – a brilliant device to add drama to her singular adventure.
Soon after her return, Londonderry moved her family to New York City, where she had a brief career writing sensational features for the New York World under the byline ‘The New Woman’. She had a fourth child in 1897, and died on 11 November 1947, a year after her husband.
In her scrapbook is a handwritten note to the Sunday editor of the New York World that speaks volumes: “Mr Brisbane, I am not afraid. I’ll take the risk myself.”
Peter Zheutlin is Annie’s great-grand-nephew, and the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press, 2007)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> "In the 1640s, people searched for the devil’s followers”: hunting witches in the Civil War https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-the-1640s-people-searched-for-the-devils-followers-hunting-witches-in-the-civil-war/ Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:20:50 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-the-1640s-people-searched-for-the-devils-followers-hunting-witches-in-the-civil-war/ Marion Gibson speaks to Charlotte Vosper about her new book exploring the epidemic of witch trials that ravaged Britain during the 17th century Charlotte Vosper: You open your book with the story of a man called Meggs who was hanged for witchcraft in 1645. Why did you choose to start with him?
Marion Gibson: I found Meggs’s name in an account by the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who writes, flippantly, words to the effect that: “This man Meggs, a baker, voluntarily came to be tested for witchcraft, and we hanged him for his trouble – ha ha ha!”
It’s such a horrible way to be remembered. So I set out to find the real Meggs – actually called Henry Maggs – and to tell his story with dignity and respect, to give him back his voice. Throughout the book I’ve looked for the victims of the 1640s British witch trials and tried to tell their stories as they might have wanted them to be told. I want my readers to hear from the victims themselves – for the first time, in many cases – rather than the sneering voices of witchfinders that often dominate accounts.
Can you set the scene for these mid-17th-century witch trials?
The context is pretty horrible. The Civil War was raging and Britain was tearing itself apart. Not only were there battles being fought but there was economic dislocation and there were refugees moving around, many needing immediate charity. People were anxious, miserable and frightened – and all of those emotions fed into witch trials and witch accusations. It’s also important to note that this Britain was a very religious and very magical place. People were steeped in the idea there were angels and devils in the world, and tended to think in quite a binary way: if you were not on God’s side, you must be on the devil’s. This belief system predisposed people to believe that witches might be living among them.
How did that 1640s witch-hunting epidemic start?
Witch hunting had been ongoing in Britain for quite some time, but the temperature rose in the 1640s. One of the first cases was that of a nameless water-witch who was killed on a Civil War battlefield at Newbury in Berkshire in 1643. A group of soldiers, foraging for food after a long march, spotted a woman floating on a plank on a nearby river, and thought: “She’s walking on water – she must be a witch.” They dragged her off to their commander who, after an interrogation, had her shot. After that, interest in witchcraft swept across Britain.
What sort of things were these ‘witches’ accused of having done?
Initially, claims often grew out of something simple, like a neighbourly dispute: “You did this to me, then my cow died, so I don’t like you.” But in the 1640s, authorities actively went looking for people they suspected of working with the devil by offering their soul, body or allegiance in return for some sort of power. Some ‘witches’ were accused of having a little demonic familiar, supposedly feeding it with their blood to seal their pact with the devil. This was thought to leave a ‘witch mark’ on the accused’s body, so during interrogation the accused might be strip-searched to look for physical evidence.
- Read more | Scotland's season of the witch
Many of the accused confessed. Why?
A lot of pressure was put on these people. In addition to a physical bodily search – in itself, an invasive, terrifying process – these ‘witches’ would be kept awake and told to balance on a stool for hours on end while being questioned. These sound like torture techniques, and they broke down people’s resistance.
Social context also played into procuring these confessions. Against the backdrop of war and fear, local church ministers preached that British people must have sinned to bring about such hardship, and that they must do penance and be wary of the devil.
This combination of context and interrogation prompted a lot of people to confess. Maybe some of them were users of magic – perhaps they’d practised healing rituals. Either way, these ‘witches’ were often apt to agree with the interrogating minister or magistrate and say: “Well, yes, actually I think I am a witch.”
When did the phenomenon develop into a mass witch hunt?
It really kicked off in Essex in 1645. In Manningtree, a young man called Matthew Hopkins and his slightly older friend, John Stearne, together started to suspect that there were witches in the area. In nearby Lawford, a clergyman called John Edes also began questioning women from his community, including mother and daughter Anne and Rebecca West.
Anne was a widow who had been tried for witchcraft a few years earlier, accused of killing a sow owned by Thomas and Prudence Hart, but had been acquitted and allowed back to Lawford. You can imagine the Harts’ horror: the woman they believed to be a witch was again in their village. So when Hopkins and Stearne started asking questions in Essex, the Harts again accused Anne, believing her responsible when Prudence suffered a miscarriage in the churchyard. They also turned on Anne’s daughter, Rebecca – who, according to the records, seems to have fallen out with Prudence.
Rebecca was probably about 30 years old, unmarried and, like her mother, pretty poor. Interestingly, both Anne and Rebecca seem to have been quite religious. Despite this, John Edes questioned Rebecca, and she confessed that both herself and her mother were witches who’d met with others in Manningtree. They were all rounded up, sent to the assize court and imprisoned in Colchester Castle while awaiting trial. There they were questioned further as Hopkins continued to build evidence against them.
Anne was found guilty and executed. The records about Rebecca aren’t clear, though: either she wasn’t put on trial or she was acquitted. Historians have long suspected that, because Rebecca chose to give evidence against other people, she was spared. Either way, as far as we know, she wasn’t executed.
By this time, the witch-hunting campaign reached far across Essex. Some 28 or 29 people from other villages, all of them women, were put on trial alongside Anne West; 19 of them were convicted. Soon the phenomenon spread across eastern England, with the witchfinders moving onto Suffolk, Norfolk and the Midland counties.
How did Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne come to wield such authority?
Hopkins was the son of a Suffolk vicar, but moved to Manningtree when his widowed mother married a clergyman there. He was a religious young man, and his family seems to have been afflicted by illness. His brother John died very young, probably from tuberculosis or another lung condition.
Hopkins had a burning conviction that his destiny was to be a witchfinder, and started thinking that people were meeting near his house for witches’ sabbaths with their animal familiars.
Stearne was another Suffolk man, married and with a family – in many ways a more conventional and seemingly stable figure. But he, too, seems to have been excited by the idea there were witches in his community, and he had a range of methods for testing them.
- Read more | Tudor England's witch hunts killed hundreds of women. The death toll was nearly even worse
Together, Hopkins and Stearne deprived the suspects of sleep, keeping them in constant motion and waiting for their animal familiars to come, all the time bullying, questioning and watching them. These men roped in other villagers from Manningtree and Lawford, and that’s what really kicked off the trials and got stories flowing from the suspects.
The men didn’t have official positions and weren’t recognised by the government, but were self-appointed moral police. Hopkins gave himself the rank of ‘Witchfinder General’. I suspect he was an egotistical, difficult young man.
Stearne was keen on ‘ducking’, in other words throwing suspects into water. If they floated, they were pulled out and interrogated. Essex magistrates told him not to do it but, as he moved through Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and some of the Midland counties, he did use this test.
Of course, if you’d been partly tied up and thrown into water wearing very little, maybe a sort of undergarment, and everybody was standing around pointing and shouting, and you’ve been drowning in front of them, it’s likely that if you were pulled out you’d be terrified and physically under a lot of stress, so much more likely to confess.
Why were women and poor people so much more likely to be accused?
Across the history of witch trials in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, the accused were women in about 75 per cent of known cases. That seems to be because women tended to be more associated with the devil, perhaps because, in the Bible, Eve commits the first sin.
In the 1640s, society came under tremendous strain and people reached for old beliefs. Believing Satan must be behind their problems, they searched for the devil’s followers, or witches. Of course, at that time almost everything was run by men, which made women vulnerable. In some cases, 100 per cent of the accused people in a particular town – Framlingham in Suffolk, for example – were women.
A lot of these people were also poor, not well educated or in positions of influence in their society. Imagine if a powerful man came to see you in his velvets, silks and ruff, and was writing things down, and maybe you already knew him as an important figure in your community – a magistrate or a minister, perhaps – and he said: “You know, Margery, you’re a witch,” you might well have replied: “Well, yes, sir, if you say so I must be a witch.” There was a tendency to simply say what the authorities wanted you to say.
Many ‘witches’ show up in parish charity records, too; in times of war and economic crisis, people tend to get angry with those they see as a drain on their taxes and community.
But not all ‘witches’ were female or poor, were they?
The stereotype is broadly true, but other people did get caught up. One victim from the Suffolk village of Brandeston was a clergyman, which is quite astonishing. The Reverend John Lowes seems to have been a turbulent fellow who often quarrelled with parishioners over many years, taking them to court, fighting them over land and buildings, and accusing them of moral crimes. Back in 1615, he had defended a woman accused of witchcraft, which proved to be a fatal mistake.
When the panic reached his village, Lowes was accused, thrown into water, deprived of sleep, effectively tortured – and he confessed. By the time he was in court, he had recovered and recanted his confession, but it was too late. He was convicted and hanged on 27 August 1645 at Bury St Edmunds, along with 17 other convicted people.
Similarly, Henry Maggs was quite a respectable figure in his Norfolk community – a churchwarden, chosen to be part of the religious leadership. But by the time Hopkins and Stearne arrived in Norfolk,
the idea that anybody might be a witch had become widespread, and Maggs was accused, searched for witch marks and hanged.
Were there people who were accused but acquitted, and what was life like for them afterwards?
The experience of Anne West, who was tried but not executed in the early 1640s, then accused again in 1645, suggests that the accused were not readily accepted back into their communities even if found not guilty.
The case of Ann Jefferies is also fascinating. A young woman living in Cornwall, she was 19 or in her early twenties when accused, so in that sense not a stereotypical ‘witch’. She claimed that she had started seeing fairies who gave her prophecies and healing abilities. She probably thought that she could make a living from this and that it would make her valuable in the community.
Maybe Jefferies did have visions; she certainly seems to have seen herself as a kind of religious mystic, believing that the fairies were associated with God. But in the climate of the 1640s, that was a dangerous claim. During questioning, the magistrates and clergymen said to her that the fairies were really evil spirits, and that she was a witch. However, she seems to have been acquitted at the assizes, and lived to a ripe old age.
I think that there was a higher tolerance of magical belief in the west of England than in the east where most cases were recorded. Jefferies’ age probably helped, too: some juries were reluctant to convict younger people if they could make a good case for themselves, and Jefferies was an articulate young woman. It seems that she was accepted back into her community more easily than Anne West, but I’m sure suspicions continued to dog her. Even later in life, Jefferies was very reluctant to talk about her witch trial because she assumed that people would turn on her again.
How and when did this spate of witch hunting in Britain decline?
The big witch trials of eastern England and the Midlands seem to have petered out by late 1647, for a variety of reasons. One might have been simply that people started questioning the vast numbers accused. John Stearne wrote in his account of the trials, A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1648, that he was responsible for having about 200 people executed – an astonishing figure. If you consider all those accused, questioned or charged but not executed, there were many hundreds and hundreds of people. Understandably, people who were not as convinced as Stearne and Hopkins that the world is full of witches started asking questions. Are these people really all witches? Can there possibly be so many in Britain?
Questions also arose about the motives of the witchfinders, especially Hopkins and Stearne, who charged for their services. They asked to be put up in a hotel, given money to feed their horses and themselves, and funds to pay people to search suspects for witch marks. So the costs for communities racked up – and people with an eye on their taxes started to think: maybe a witch trial is not such a good investment.
In 1647, Hopkins fell ill and died. He was still young – probably in his mid-twenties – and it seems likely that he succumbed to the same disease that killed his brother, perhaps tuberculosis. That helped to bring to a decisive end that wave of witch hunts in which he and Stearne were involved, though they continued elsewhere in Britain. There was another big campaign in Scotland in the 1650s, for example. Ripples carried on across the period of the Civil War and beyond. Hundreds more people were accused and executed, and their cases were often undocumented.
How did the legacy of these witch hunts spread beyond Europe?
Most famously, during witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, some 30 people were found guilty and 19 were hanged; others died under torture or in jail. So events in England and Scotland had impacts more than 3,000 miles away.
That’s because colonists in the New World – many of them Puritans seeking religious freedom – travelled from communities in Britain where witch trials had been held earlier that century. We have specific examples of people from Framlingham and Great Yarmouth carrying with them to New England the idea that the world is full of witches who need to be hunted. Witch trials were also held in Connecticut and Virginia, in colonies where settlers or their descendants recalled stories of witches they’d heard in Suffolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Newcastle or Cornwall.
Are there any modern parallels to those 17th-century witch trials?
When people are scapegoated and blamed for problems in our communities today, there is an echo of the witch trials: it’s often poorer people and perceived outsiders who are picked upon. And, of course, we still have problems with misogyny – any woman in public life will tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of accusations from conspiracy theorists or others who think that women are generally a problem.
For example, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that satanists wield power in American politics, particularly Democratic women, offering a close parallel with the witch trials of the 1640s.
There’s a legacy of suspicion and finger-pointing that isn’t justified but which is easy to whip up into hysteria, particularly in times of economic crisis and war. So I think we still live in a society where, in a sense, we hold witch trials.
Marion Gibson is emerita professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter. Her previous books include Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> 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/ Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:52:56 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/ For centuries, romances between actors and royals have captivated the public. With rumours that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is exploring a return to her former career, Catherine Curzon explores nine other notable relationships between performers and members of royal families 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
]]> Fooling around in front of royalty: the extraordinary escapades of Europe's female jesters https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fooling-around-in-front-of-royalty-the-extraordinary-escapades-of-europes-female-jesters/ Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:30:30 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fooling-around-in-front-of-royalty-the-extraordinary-escapades-of-europes-female-jesters/ From a devout Catholic jester dressed as an Amazonian warrior to a court dwarf immortalised by Velázquez, Rachel Ashcroft profiles five remarkable women who carved out extraordinary lives at the centre of power The Château de Fontainebleau is packed with courtiers awaiting the arrival of King Henry IV’s jester. But while modern onlookers might expect a man in a harlequin costume to appear, Henry’s court is different.
Instead, an Amazonian warrior bursts onto the scene, clad in battle armour and wielding a wooden sword and shield. Mathurine ‘la Folle’ was one of France’s most eccentric court jesters. Known for her quick-witted japes and outrageous costumes, Mathurine was also, perhaps surprisingly to modern audiences, a woman.
Although most jesters in medieval and early modern Europe were men, female ones like Mathurine were not uncommon. Women jesters feature prominently in some of Europe’s most famous courts, from Henry VIII’s household to the travelling court of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Many were much-loved by their monarchs and granted special favours, including gifts of land and fine clothing. As such, female jesters occupied an unusual niche within medieval and early modern society.
They were often unmarried, childless women who came from humble origins. But if they served their monarch well, these women enjoyed a life of relative luxury and privilege at the heart of the royal household.
Here we present five of the most famous female jesters who made a living entertaining royalty.
Jane Foole (fl. 1537-1558): Mary I’s most beloved natural fool
Jane Foole is the most well-known female jester from the Tudor period. While we know very little about her early life, Jane enters the historical record during the reign of King Henry VIII, when she joins the household of Princess Mary (later ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary I).
Jane was what was known at the time as a ‘natural’ fool i.e. she had mental and/or physical disabilities that resulted in her being unable to control her faculties.
As historian Beatrice Otto has noted, it is tempting to assume that natural fools were mistreated by their employers and used as objects of ridicule. However, none of the evidence from the time bears out this assumption. Indeed, Jane was a much-loved member of Mary’s royal entourage.
A lot of what we know about female jesters comes from the financial records of their benefactors. The accounts from Queen Mary’s reign recorded between 1553 and 1558 show that Mary spent a lot of money on lavish clothes for Jane. One entry reads “Item, for furring of a gowne of the same Vellat with size white hare skynnes for Jane our fool”.
Fur for costume trimming was expensive and would have cost roughly £300 in modern terms. Furthermore, Jane was gifted the same dresses as Mary’s ladies-in-waiting: the only difference being that her gowns were cut in the Dutch style and not the more fashionable French style.
Mary also ensured that Jane wasn’t short of footwear. Another entry from the royal accounts reads: “Item, for 12 peire of shewes for the said Jane.”
Even a court fool, who would regularly be employed in various stage performances, could not have worn out this many shoes in a year. Therefore the quantity of shoes gifted likely reflects Mary’s deep affection for Jane.
We also know a lot about Jane’s ailing health during the 20 years she spent in Mary’s household. From March 1543 onwards, Jane suffered from a skin infection which necessitated a monthly shaving of her hair. Records show that a barber was paid 4d (four pence) on each occasion.
We also have a striking snapshot of what Jane would have looked like at this time thanks to the 16th century painting The Family of Henry VIII. A woman, whom most experts believe to be Jane, is standing to the left of Princess Mary wearing a cap over her shaven head.
Furthermore, in 1555, Mary sent a gift to a woman healer in Bury St Edmunds for healing one of Jane’s eyes.
If there was any doubt about the high status that Jane enjoyed as a court fool, we also know that she was included in the St. Valentine’s Day lottery. This was a festival in which noble men drew lots among the ladies of the court to see who would be their partner for that evening’s dancing.
Sometime between 1554 and 1556, a Mr Herte was given “three yerdes of black satten” for being Jane’s Valentine, while a Mr Barnes was given the same quantity of satin in 1558.
All of this special attention was given to Jane, but why? In the Tudor period, people with learning disabilities were prized for their truth-telling abilities. The public believed natural fools were more child-like and, as such, they were closer to God.
Kings and queens valued fools like Jane for their perceived ability to speak divine truth, and this is why we so often see a close relationship form between a monarch and their natural fool.
Although life would have been hard for peasants who suffered from learning disabilities, those who were lucky enough to enter court life enjoyed incredible privilege.
Lucretia the Tumbler (fl. 1542 - 1543): The acrobatic ‘saltatrix’ of the Tudor court
Lucretia the Tumbler is another female jester from the same period who had a close connection to Jane Foole. We know far less about Lucretia, but some historians guess that she may have been of Italian origin, considering her Italianate first name.
Until his execution in 1540, Thomas Cromwell was responsible for vetting all of Princess Mary’s appointments while her father was king, and at some point, he approved the appointment of a ‘chamberer’ intriguingly known as Lucretia the Tumbler.
Lucretia was not a natural fool but a ‘saltatrix’, i.e. a female performer who entertained the court with acrobatic dancing, contortions and gymnastics. She was kept in Mary’s household and likely performed for both Mary and her sister, the young princess Elizabeth (and future Queen Elizabeth I), during their visits to the Manor of the More in Hertfordshire.
In the early 1540s, Lucretia appears in financial records under the name of Lucrece. She is mentioned alongside Jane the Foole regularly, and the pair often received identical items of clothing.
In December 1542, a record lists a “payr of shoes for Jane & an other for lucrece” as well as identical smocks for the two women. This may mean that the pair performed alongside each other in a double act.
Historian John Southworth has also suggested that the matching clothes indicate that Lucretia may have been Jane’s companion or ‘keeper’. Keepers were responsible for looking after natural fools, since they could not take care of themselves.
It was not unusual for jesters to perform dual roles within a royal household. Henry VIII’s tumbler Stephen Tosso combined these duties with other domestic roles. Sadly we don’t know what became of Lucretia as she disappears from the public record after 1543.
Mathurine la Folle (fl. 1589 – c1620s): The jester who dressed as an Amazonian warrior
Mathurine first appears in court annals during the reign of Henry III. She was recorded as a plaisante, the appointed title for female jesters in France at that time (the Queen of Navarre employed a plaisante called Mademoiselle Sevin). While most female jesters were attached to the Queen’s household, Mathurine bucked this trend, serving as a jester within Henry’s household.
One famous anecdote about Mathurine involves a lady-in-waiting complaining that she did not like having to be seated on the right side of a mere fool. Mathurine promptly jumped up and sat on the lady’s other side, remarking “I don’t mind it at all.”
Some sources highlight how during her lifetime, satirists would sometimes refer to themselves as a ‘Mathurine’. She also influenced a type of burlesque writing called mathurinade which was associated with her particular brand of comedy.
Furthermore, Mathurine was known for her devout Catholicism. Reformers at the time were strongly opposed to what they perceived as the extravagant practice of keeping court fools. A fiercely Catholic woman who enjoyed dressing up in full Amazonian warrior regalia would have attracted a lot of negative attention from religious dissidents during a turbulent period in France’s history.
Mathurine’s most well-known feat involves her role in detaining Henry IV’s assassin, Jean Châtel. But there is a plot twist which underscores just how unusual it was that Mathurine remained a court jester for so long.
Despite her bravery, the king initially suspected her of being part of the plot and arrested her. However, in a rare display of generosity, Mathurine was allowed to prove her innocence and was then warmly welcomed back to court, serving Henry and his son, Louis XIII.
She made a few appearances in the mid 1620s, but after that Mathurine la Folle disappears from history.
- Read more | Wandering womanisers? These charismatic bards took the medieval world (and its women) by storm
Maria Bárbola (fl. 1651 - 1700): The court dwarf who was immortalised in a Baroque painting
Maria Bárbola was a court dwarf who served the Spanish royal family for nearly half a century from 1651 to 1700. Dwarfs were often employed as entertainers in medieval and early modern palace courts.
Madame d’Or, a ‘very graceful fool’, was a popular dwarf entertainer in the 1400s in France, while several female dwarfs served in the court of Isabella d’Este, the wife of the marquis of Mantua, Italy.
King Philip IV of Spain was a big fan, and Maria was actually one of 110 dwarfs in his entourage. Dwarfs took on a variety of roles depending on their talents. Some were tumblers or joke-tellers, while others were employed as natural fools.
While even court dwarfs suffered prejudice from others in society due to their stature, Maria was much-loved by her benefactors. Once again, we see evidence of lavish treatment towards jesters via royal financial records. However, this time it isn’t clothing that is gifted to Maria, but snow!
- Read more | What did Elizabeth I really think about Anne Boleyn? These secret symbols might unlock the truth
In 1658, she received four pounds of snow every summer’s day in order to keep her cool. This was a regular gift for long-serving court dwarfs. In 1678, Bernada Blasco, a dwarf who served for 25 years, received four pounds of snow a day in the summer and four pounds of coal in winter.
Maria is particularly well-known due to her appearance in Diego Velázquez’ famous painting Las Meninas (‘The Maids of Honour’) from 1656. In the painting, Maria is treated with reverence by Velázquez, despite the lesser-rank of dwarfs at this time.
While dwarfs were commonly depicted in artwork as figures of ridicule, Maria stands staring boldly and confidently out at the viewer, clearly represented as a core member of the royal household thanks to her proximity to the young infanta Margaret Theresa.
Maria’s employment ended when Philip V decided to reorganise the Spanish court. He believed that court dwarfs were outdated relics and promptly ended their service. Despite living in Spain for nearly 50 years, the last we know of Maria is that she returned to her native Austria to see out the rest of her days.
Nichola La Jardinière (fl. 1560 - 1570): Faithful companion to Mary, Queen of Scots
Nichola ‘La Jardinière’ was a female fool who underscores the importance of women jesters as valued companions to a monarch (particularly a queen).
La Jardinière was a natural fool who first served in the household of Queen Mary of Guise and later joined the court of her famous daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. When Mary returned to Scotland from France after the death of her husband, Francis II, La Jardinière left her native country to accompany her royal mistress.
We know that La Jardinière was treated well by Mary. For example, in October 1565 the queen ordered a luxurious bedding set for her faithful jester which included a bed, mattress, sheets and a lined green plaid cover.
Many fools remained long in the memory of their benefactors, even after their services were no longer required. After Mary was forced to abdicate in 1567, she ensured that La Jardinière and her keeper, Jacqueline Critoflat, both received fine clothes and money for three years while Mary was imprisoned in England.
She eventually sent the pair a sum of money, “expensis and fraucht” in 1570, so that they could return to France. Such behaviour is reminiscent of other European nobility, such as Isabella d’Este, who ensured that her dwarfs were paid 50 scudi each for the rest of their lives after retirement.
Rachel Ashcroft is a freelance journalist with a PhD in 16th century history. She specialises in arts and culture reporting
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