British queens

From Eleanor of Aquitaine to Anne Boleyn, these queens shaped British history...

Queen Victoria with Prince Albert and their children in 1846. After a painting by F Winterhalter. Victoria’s husband, Albert, “carved out for the crown a moral kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family,” says Sarah Gristwood. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Retaining the royals: why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived?

Mary, Queen of Scots and her ladies-in-waiting. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Mary, Queen of Scots: what happened to her ladies-in-waiting?

A portrait of Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland.

Your guide to Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs

Queen Victoria of Great Britain with her husband, Prince Albert, and their nine children. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Queen Victoria’s children

Katherine Parr (also Catherine), the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII, c1543. Engraving after a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Katherine was no middle-aged frump but a clever, devout and passionate wife, says Derek Wilson. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Katherine Parr: the truth about the wife who ‘survived’

Elizabeth I, shown in a portrait commemorating victory over the Armada. (Photo by Photo 12/UIG via Getty Images)

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Elizabeth I

Elizabeth is borne from Westminster Abbey in a gold coach first used for the state opening of parliament by George III in 1762. (Getty Images)

Becoming Queen: Elizabeth II’s coronation

Portrait of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was born in around 1501 in Norfolk and executed by decapitation at Tower Green on 19 May 1536. (Photo by The Print Collector/Alamy Stock Photo)

11 things you (probably) didn’t know about Anne Boleyn

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria. (Getty Images)

Queen Victoria timeline: 9 milestones in the monarch’s life

Most widely seen photographs of Queen Victoria, pictured here in c1870, depict a short, stony-faced and humourless matriarch dressed in black, but this does the queen a disservice, says Helen Rappaport. (Photo by The Royal Photographic Society Collection/Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Getty Images)

‘Dumpy’ dowager or vibrant beauty: what did Queen Victoria really look like?

Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo by PHAS/UIG via Getty Images)

The lost heirs of Henry VIII: Alison Weir on Katherine of Aragon’s failed pregnancies

The opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851. (The Print Collector/Getty Images)

A big day in history: Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition at the famous Crystal Palace

Josephine Baker with her adopted children. She called them the ‘Rainbow Tribe’. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

History’s most memorable mums