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What did Anne Boleyn REALLY look like? Our new research could change everything
Dark or brunette? Fair or swarthy? A paragon of beauty or a refined charmer? Our picture of Henry VIII’s ill-fated second queen has become distorted over five centuries – but new research by Owen Emmerson and others comes closer to revealing her true appearance
Close your eyes and picture Anne Boleyn. Chances are you can conjure up a pretty clear and detailed image in your imagination – because few figures in English history seem as visually familiar as Henry VIII’s second queen. Representations of her face appear everywhere: in films, television dramas and novels, in museum gift shops and digital reconstructions. She is often depicted in popular culture as an elegant brunette whose sophistication distinguishes her from others at court. Over time, this image has hardened into something close to fact. Anne Boleyn, we are told, was devastatingly beautiful. Yet this certainty is built on fragile foundations, and surviving evidence provides a less concrete understanding of Anne’s appearance. No formal painted portraits from life survive today, though images in a number of smaller, more intimate formats – particularly miniatures – are candidates for having captured her true likeness based on contemporary encounters. The more-familiar portraits featuring the now-iconic ‘B’ pendant necklace, meanwhile, were likely created decades later, influenced by politics, artistic convention and hindsight. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/DXFXNM-38bec64-e1773309603951.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman with long dark braids, wearing a white period-style gown, sits on a cushioned bed and gently holds a baby wrapped in richly patterned blue and gold fabric. Dark wooden furniture and white bedding frame the intimate, historical-feeling scene" title="Natalie Dormer played Anne Boleyn in the television series The Tudors, which perpetuated modern ideas of the ill-fated queen as a dark-haired beauty (Image by Alamy)" /> For generations, historians assumed that any accurate representations created during Anne’s life had been lost altogether, erased after her execution in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII. That story is compelling, but it is wrong. My research – which underpins Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn, a new exhibition at Anne’s childhood home, Hever Castle – suggests that her true likeness remained visible long after her dramatic death. Her image circulated widely in several different forms: in print, on medals and in drawings that outlived her. Alongside written descriptions left by those who saw her, these sources allow us to come close to understanding how Anne Boleyn looked. They also prompt a more revealing question: during her lifetime, was Anne admired for beauty – at least, as the 16th century understood it? And how much did beauty really matter in a court where power, conviction and function carried far greater weight? Ideals of beauty Today, audiences are encouraged to believe that Anne Boleyn must have been very beautiful indeed to have displaced Queen Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII’s affections, and to have inspired him to reshape England’s religious and political landscape in order to marry her. This assumption reflects modern ideas about attraction and agency far more than it does the reality of Tudor mores. Different priorities shaped ideals of female beauty then: light colouring and complexion were widely admired. In 16th-century England, though, beauty alone rarely secured influence. At court, education, connections and presence mattered far more than looks. Intelligence, conversation and the ability to command attention in a highly performative environment were prized qualities. Anne excelled in these attributes. Read more | Anne Boleyn’s fatal French connection Anne stood out, but not because she perfectly embodied an ideal of beauty. Her continental education, her penchant for French fashions and her finely honed courtly manner set her apart in a milieu still shaped by conservative English expectations. Contemporary responses to her appearance consistently suggest moderate attractiveness rather than conventional beauty. To understand that distinction properly, we must turn to the accounts of her appearance and demeanour from people who saw her. Consistent picture Contemporary descriptions of Anne are limited but broadly consistent. Simon Grynaeus, a German humanist who visited the English court in 1531, wrote to a compatriot that she was “young, good-looking, of a rather dark complexion”. In October 1532, the Venetian ambassador Carlo Capello, in a report later recorded in Marino Sanuto’s Diarii, described her as “not one of the handsomest women in the world… of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised… and her eyes, which are black and beautiful”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/PD1438753-1778ee6-e1773309357932.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Engraved profile portrait of a man with long hair and a full beard, wearing high‑collared, layered Renaissance garments. The image is rendered with fine linework and cross‑hatching" title="An 18th-century engraving of German scholar Simon Grynaeus who, having met Anne Boleyn, described her as “young, good-looking, of a rather dark complexion” (Image by Topfoto)" /> Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French ambassador in London, wrote a long poetic account of Anne’s fall and execution in 1536, emphasising her expression and presence rather than physical features. Even sympathetic observers were measured: the reformist cleric John Barlow described her as “reasonably good-looking”, a phrase that in Tudor usage suggested composure and refinement rather than striking beauty. What emerges is not the image of a woman celebrated for physical perfection but of someone whose appearance was animated by intelligence and presence. Observers repeatedly returned to her eyes and manner. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carle said of her eyes that she “knew well how to use [them] with effect”, capturing a sense of engagement, wit and command that made her captivating in person. For centuries, the absence of a painted portrait from Anne’s lifetime was explained by a dramatic story: that Henry VIII ordered every likeness of her be destroyed after her execution. The image of a furious king erasing the woman for whom he had broken with Rome is powerful, but has no basis in contemporary sources. The story appeared first in the 19th century, when historians sought an explanation for Anne’s apparent visual disappearance. What happened after the queen’s fall was administrative rather than vengeful. Anne’s badges and monograms were removed from royal buildings and replaced with those of her successor, Jane Seymour, just as Catherine of Aragon’s emblems had earlier been replaced by Anne’s. The King’s Works accounts for September 1536 list payments for removing Anne’s devices alongside those of Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s former chief minister, by then long dead. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3BDA0P2-4f33c37-e1773310304248.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Gilded wooden sculpture of a bird holding a staff. Intricate carved motifs and textured wings stand out against a red display background." title="A falcon badge from Hampton Court. This emblem of Anne Boleyn remained in place after her demise, despite claims that Henry ordered all traces of her be removed (Image by Alamy)" /> No orders to destroy Anne’s portraits have been found, and even the command to remove her emblems was carried out only partly. Many of her falcon badges remain in the roof of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, blackened with paint but intact. Moreover, inventories taken after Henry’s death show that he continued to own objects that had once belonged to Anne and were decorated with her iconography, albeit packed away in chests. Anne herself had become valueless to him, but the gold and silver fashioned into her goods had not. He did not destroy them, just ensured that they were no longer seen. The people’s prints Though no painted panel portrait survives from Anne’s lifetime, images of her certainly do. Some of the most revealing were created not for the elite interiors of palaces but for public circulation. In the summer of 1533, the prolific printer Wynkyn de Worde was employed to publish a pamphlet titled The Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Quene Anne. Its cover features a small woodcut long dismissed by historians as a generic courtly scene. However, in collaboration with historian Jessica Carey-Bunning, I have identified this as a narrative composition including three contemporary images of Anne Boleyn at distinct stages of her relationship with Henry VIII. The woodcut provides a visual sequence affirming the validity of the union. To the left, Henry courts Anne; in the centre, the couple are joined in marriage; and in the most prominent image, at the right, Henry and Anne are crowned beneath a cloth of estate, the king’s hand resting on his queen’s stomach. To a contemporary viewer, this was an explicit declaration of pregnancy. When the pamphlet was published, Anne was about six months pregnant with the child who would reign as Elizabeth I. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL3286974-85c45de-e1773310578859.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detailed black and white woodcut showing the same two figures three times over, in different positions, facing each other, standing and sitting" title="A 1533 woodcut shows three stages in the relationship between Henry and Anne, from left to right: wooing, the wedding, and a tender moment apparently signalling pregnancy (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This woodcut image operated as a tool of legitimacy, fertility and dynastic hope. It was intended not to capture Anne’s features but, rather, to put her face to work. It was circulated deliberately and widely at the most politically sensitive moment of her queenship. Other contemporary images reinforce this visibility. A lead prototype or proof known as the ‘Moost Happi’ medal, likely commissioned in anticipation of a male heir and struck in 1534, depicts Anne in part profile wearing a gable hood, and bears the initials AR (for Anna Regina). Edward Hawkins, keeper of antiquities at the British Museum in the 19th century, suggested that another surviving lead prototype showing Henry was a companion to Anne’s medal. My discovery of a fully cast example of the companion medal of Henry, fashioned as a hat pin in modest tin, indicates that these likenesses were destined for a wide distribution beyond the court – an effort to disseminate images of the king and his new queen. Read more | Tudors in turmoil: deciphering Hans Holbein’s masterwork The Ambassadors Another contemporary image of Anne survives in a sketch of her coronation banquet, depicting her crowned beneath a cloth of estate in Westminster Hall, the focal point of an elaborate theatrical display. Even in this crude drawing, Anne is unmistakably the axis around which the ceremony revolves. Together, these show that Anne was among the most visually represented queens of early Tudor England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip2593496-f6287f1-e1773310819221.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detailed pencil and chalk profile portrait of a person wearing a wrapped head covering, shown against a lightly toned background." title="Hans Holbein the Younger's drawing, likely depicting Anne, shows a number of key similarities to Hollar's picture (below) (Image by Topfoto)" /> Something rarer also survives: a glimpse of Anne Boleyn as she may have been seen by those who knew her personally. A chalk drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, depicts a woman in a fur-trimmed nightgown with a simple coif, her eyes lowered in contemplation. Though its subject has long been debated, recent scholarship by Dr Kate Heard has fundamentally reshaped understanding of this work, strongly supporting its identification as Anne Boleyn. The drawing dates securely to Holbein’s second period in England, when he was working at the heart of the Tudor court, producing preparatory studies for both painted portraits and miniatures – and, crucially, working extensively under Anne’s patronage. The apparent informality of the portrait, once used to argue against the identification, now strengthens it. Comparable works by the Horenbout workshop similarly depict elite sitters such as Henry VIII’s son, the Duke of Richmond, in a state of undress, intended for private viewing. Technical examination by the Royal Collection Trust has revealed that the sitter’s hair was originally far darker than it appears today. Layers of red, brown and black chalk have been largely worn away, with only remnants visible. Most compelling, however, is the later inscription identifying Anne as the sitter, based on an attribution by Sir John Cheke, who had met Anne in 1534, benefited from her patronage, and was closely connected to her circle through his wife, Mary Hill. If identified correctly, which now seems highly likely, this drawing represents the most direct surviving contemporary likeness of Anne. It shows her not as a crowned emblem of dynastic hope, as her public image had been crafted, but as a thinking, contemplative and private individual. The Windsor drawing also unlocks the meaning of a later engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar titled Faith, or St Barbara, produced in 1647. This print, based on a now-lost Holbein design once in the Earl of Arundel’s collection, depicts a crowned female figure holding a chalice and wafer set against a landscape of cliffs and water. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2TCATRR-055fb42-e1773310923192.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A finely detailed historical engraving depicting a crowned woman in elaborate robes. She stands holding a large chalice with a smooth sphere balanced on its rim. The line work is delicate and textured, and the background features soft shading and cloudlike forms, giving the scene a symbolic or allegorical tone." title="Wenceslaus Hollar based his engraving Faith, or Saint Barbara on a picture by Hans Holbein the Younger (Image by Alamy)" /> When compared closely with the Windsor drawing, the resemblance is striking: they share the same profile, jawline, eye shape and cranial structure. The correspondence between the two strongly suggests that Holbein’s use of Anne’s face for Saint Barbara was drawn from his preparatory study. In this reading, the Windsor drawing was not an isolated likeness but part of a broader artistic conception. The choice of that saint is significant because, like the reformist Anne, Barbara was associated with steadfast Christian faith and resistance to coercion when compelled to revert to traditional beliefs. In Anne’s book of hours, King’s MS 9, the illumination of Saint Barbara shares compositional similarities with the Windsor sketch and Hollar engraving, including a distinctive looped plait, indicating direct visual continuity. Portraying Anne in this guise would have aligned her queenship with conscience and reform. Seen in this light, the image becomes both devotional and political. It presents Anne not simply as consort but as belief embodied. Saint Barbara was martyred and executed by the sword – a parallel that later viewers of this image could hardly have missed. The tragic irony is inescapable, though clearly it lies beyond the image’s original intent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL7392888-edf5339-e1773314139385.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A circular portrait miniature of Anne Boleyn framed in gold. She wears a richly decorated Tudor headdress with gold embroidery and pearls, a dark gown with a square lace‑trimmed neckline, and a chain necklace, set against a deep blue background" title="Other portrait miniatures – including this one now in the collection of the Duke of Bucchleuch – share "a striking physiognomy" with other paintings (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> The possibility that Anne’s contemporary likeness survives in smaller, more intimate painted formats is strongly supported by this pairing of the Windsor sketch and the image of her as Saint Barbara. Two other near-identical portrait miniatures – one now in the collection of the Duke of Bucchleuch, the other in the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada – long associated with Anne, share a striking physiognomy with these two. When viewed together, the alignment of the facial structures is too close to be dismissed as a coincidence. These works appear to preserve a recognisable likeness circulating within and shortly after Anne’s lifetime, intended for private recognition rather than public proclamation. Though we can’t be absolutely certain of the person whom they portray, these miniatures stand as the most plausible painted candidates for capturing Anne Boleyn’s likeness from life. Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love Changing faces After her execution, Anne’s image fell out of use. When it re-emerged during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I, it was in a radically altered political landscape. One of the most familiar images of Anne today is the portrait painted c1584 and catalogued as NPG 668 in the National Portrait Gallery. Long treated as a posthumously created likeness of Anne herself, it preserves something else: Elizabeth’s face. Art historian Lawrence Hendra has identified the creator of this famous panel painting as the as-yet-unnamed ‘Pearl Artist’. Comparing this artist’s other works – including portraits of Elizabeth I, her half-sister Mary I and her great-grandfather, Edward IV – it is clear that the painter used the same facial pattern for each sitter, including Anne Boleyn. The elongated facial structure, refined nose and controlled expression closely mirror Elizabeth’s physiognomy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-92818829-f98bc7d-e1773311146880.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A richly detailed Tudor portrait of Anne Boleyn shown against a dark background. She wears an elaborate pearl‑studded headdress framing her face, a dark gown decorated with gold embroidery and pearls, and a necklace with a prominent gold “B” pendant. At the top of the painting, Latin text identifies her as “Anna Bolina, wife of Henry VIII.”" title="The 'Pearl Artist' painting of Anne. This was produced c1584 (Image by Getty Images)" /> This effort to make Elizabeth’s relatives, some of whom likely bore no resemblance to one another, look alike was deliberate. In the 1580s, Elizabeth’s position was vulnerable. She was unmarried, without an heir, and facing both internal Catholic resistance and external threat. So repainting her ancestors with her own facial features anchored her visually as the rightful queen at a time when her legitimacy was again in question. Ensuring that Elizabeth looked like her father’s relatives as well as her mother, who had been accused of adultery, was a covert attempt to transform Anne from a condemned queen into a dynastic foundation stone, visually legitimising her daughter’s rule. A different but equally deliberate innovation appears in the so-called Hever Rose portrait. Recent multi-modal scientific analysis by the Hamilton Kerr Institute, combined with dendrochronology (the dating of the wooden panel), places its painting in c1583, just one year before the famous picture in the National Portrait Gallery. Infrared reflectography reveals that the artist initially followed a pre-existing design but then interrupted it, inserting fully articulated hands holding a rose. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Anne-Boleyn-16th-Century-Hever-Rose-24ca6bb-e1773311339212.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A richly detailed Tudor portrait of Anne Boleyn shown against a dark background. She wears an elaborate pearl‑studded headdress framing her face, a dark gown decorated with gold embroidery and pearls, and a necklace with a prominent gold “B” pendant. She has her hands held up against her chest. At the top of the painting, Latin text identifies her as “Anna Bolina, wife of Henry VIII.”" title="The Hever Rose portrait, painted c1583, is notable in deliberately depicting Anne’s hands – probably an attempt to nullify defamatory claims that she had possessed six fingers (Image by Hever Castle)" /> This moment matters, because it marks the first time Anne’s hands appeared in her posthumous iconography – a choice that was almost certainly polemical. In the early 1580s, defamatory claims by Nicholas Sander alleging that Anne possessed a sixth finger were already circulating widely in manuscript, years before they appeared in print. By depicting elegant, unblemished hands, with each finger made carefully visible, the artist offers a quiet but pointed rebuttal to this claim. Both portraits respond to the same anxiety. In a period when Elizabeth’s legitimacy was under attack, Anne’s image was re-engineered to defend it: her face reshaped to mirror the queen’s, her body corrected to refute slander. Art became a form of political repair. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL872290-3b47074-e1773313278928.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A highly detailed Elizabethan portrait showing a figure in an opulent gown covered with pearls, gemstones, and intricate gold embroidery. A tall, floral-patterned lace ruff frames the neck, and the sitter’s tightly curled hair is topped with a pearl‑ and jewel‑encrusted headdress. The dark background emphasizes the elaborate textures and craftsmanship of the clothing and accessories." title="Contemporary portraits, like the one of Elizabeth I above, were clearly based on the same facial pattern used in the 'Pearl Artist' painting of Anne (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Lost likeness Nearly five centuries after her execution, we may never know precisely what Anne Boleyn looked like. Her face survives only in fragments, refracted through prisms of politics, art and memory. Yet this uncertainty is not a failure of evidence; it is part of her history. The images and descriptions that survive show that Anne was not invisible, and not admired solely for her beauty. She was compelling because of her presence, intelligence and conviction. She understood the power of being seen, and used imagery, print and ceremony to assert her place in the world. In the end, the question of her appearance matters not because it satisfies curiosity but because it restores agency. Anne Boleyn was not merely a face shaped by others but an active participant – through her patronage of Holbein and the Horenbout family, not least – in how she was represented, remembered and contested. Approaching 500 years on, we are still learning to see her clearly. Unpicking locks What colour was Anne Boleyn's hair? Modern portrayals often depict Anne with jet-black hair, reinforcing an image of dark, exotic beauty. The historical record, however, is more ambiguous. Contemporary descriptions mention dark eyes and darker complexion, but none explicitly describe hair colour – likely because it may not have seemed remarkable enough to comment upon. Some later sources describe Anne as “witch-like” with black hair; others suggest chestnut or reddish tones. The poet Thomas Wyatt may have been referring to her when he wrote of a “brunet” woman. In Tudor usage, that could refer to dark hair, darker skin or both, and was often used to signal complexion rather than colouring alone. Genetics adds more uncertainty. Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was red-haired, as was Henry VIII in his youth. Red hair is linked to variants of the MC1R gene expressed only if inherited from both parents, so Anne must have carried at least one such variant. Though not proof that she herself was red-haired, this significantly increases the likelihood, and makes chestnut or auburn tones entirely plausible. Later portraits often show Anne with lighter reddish-brown hair. These may reflect attempts to align her appearance more closely with Elizabeth’s, reinforcing dynastic continuity. In a culture where fair hair was associated with virtue, this shift was politically advantageous. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-544168286-132885d-e1773314361550.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A richly detailed Tudor portrait of Anne Boleyn shown against a dark background. She wears an elaborate pearl‑studded headdress framing her face, a dark gown decorated with gold embroidery and pearls, and a necklace with a prominent gold “B” pendant." title="A late 16th-century portrait shows Anne with reddish hair, again perhaps tying her to Elizabeth (Image by Getty Images)" /> This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
What was the most important year in history? We asked 9 experts – and this is what they said
Our crack team of historians, broadcasters and authors offer their takes on a conundrum that continues to divide opinions
AD 1000 Norse power: when worlds collide This moment is surely imbued with the most global symbolism. It was when, according to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, adventurers sailed across the north Atlantic from settlements on the west coast of Greenland to the edge of the North American continent. There they met inhabitants of coastal regions of what’s now Canada: ancestors of peoples such as the Beothuk and Algonquin. The circle of humanity was closed for the first time in recorded history. In the 1960s, archaeologists found a Norse overwintering site at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. This backed up what the sagas had already described: a series of voyages west from Greenland, the discovery of new lands and resources, and increasingly violent encounters with the people they called Skrælingar – an unpleasant name meaning ‘wretched ones’. These cross-cultural encounters began promisingly enough, with red cloth and dairy products traded for animal pelts. Eventually, though, relations disintegrated into distrust, violence and murder – an uneasy foreshadowing of what would follow centuries later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2RA49CHwebready-675b6fb-e1772549042852.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cluster of reconstructed Viking buildings with sod-covered roofs sits inside a white wooden fence near a rocky coastline. The turf-walled structures vary in size and line a central dirt path, with wooden beams and tools displayed outside. Low hills and open water frame the background, evoking the historic Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland." title="Viking dwellings reconstructed at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, likely the site of the first Norse settlement in North America (Image by Alamy)" /> This is, of course, a moment of retrospective significance. Those voyagers didn’t realise that they had reached an entirely new continent. Their expeditions did not make big news around the world. For me, that makes this moment in history even more interesting. Because when we’re being carried along by the churning currents of time, it’s not always possible to tell which events and dates will mean the most to those looking back. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024) 1066 Conquest, castles, class shifts and chivalry For British history, at least, the answer is 1066. This might seem surprising to people who remember only the battle of Hastings, the death of King Harold and the accession of William the Conqueror, but the regime change that followed the Norman takeover went far beyond just a new royal dynasty. As Domesday Book shows, by 1086 the old ruling class of Anglo-Saxon England had been replaced almost entirely, and more than 90 per cent of the land was now held by continental newcomers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HYH4NP-CMYK-04891b5-e1772549396426.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry shows soldiers attacking a fortified structure. Armoured figures with spears and shields climb ladders toward battlements, while others fight at the gate below. The stylized medieval architecture frames the action, and a line of Latin text runs above the figures." title="A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry depicts a motte-and-bailey. The proliferation of castles was among the major changes that swept England after the Norman conquest (Image by Alamy)" /> This had an immediate effect on the country’s physical appearance. Castles, which had hardly existed in England at all before 1066, were constructed in their hundreds. Cathedrals and abbeys were ripped down and rebuilt in a new Romanesque style. Notoriously, the north was brutally harried into submission and turned into a desert. Less perceptibly, but even more importantly in the long run, the Conquest also introduced new ideas about how society should be regulated. Slavery, which had been commonplace among the Anglo-Saxons, disappeared over the next half-century. The custom of sparing the life of a defeated opponent became the new norm among the ruling elite. The rapid adoption of these new attitudes by the English set them apart from their insular neighbours, who continued to slaughter their enemies and practise war as slave-hunt. The novel perception of the Welsh, Scots and Irish as uncivilised barbarians was a direct result of the Norman conquest, and fuelled the aggressive English colonisation of those countries in the centuries that followed. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Read more | Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066 1945 World war, international aftermath At a global scale, the Second World War was the most momentous period in history. So it follows that the year of its conclusion – 1945 – was the most important year. The list of transformations that took place because of that war is truly astonishing. There were massive advances in computer technology, radio technology, plastics research, jet planes, rocket science and the production of antibiotics. Nuclear power quite literally exploded into our consciousness in 1945. Super Glue was discovered during the war, as was the technology behind microwave ovens. And it was the final victory in 1945 that allowed such innovations to be released from the secrecy of wartime and into the wider world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2161195064webready-ac6bc7d-e1772538184798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of a man seated at a large round table signing a document while several men in formal military and civilian attire stand behind him. Numerous national flags hang in the background along with a large United Nations emblem." title="Delegates from 50 nations gather in San Francisco in 1945 to agree and sign the United Nations Charter, part of a postwar process to restore international order (Image by Getty Images)" /> Alongside new technologies came huge social and geopolitical changes. It was in 1945 that today’s map of Europe was drawn during the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. At the same time, the communist takeover of eastern Europe began. This was the year when the nations of Asia and Africa, inspired by wartime rhetoric, began their final push towards decolonisation. The international order was reborn with the establishment of the United Nations that summer, and a whole network of affiliated organisations followed. The list goes on. The Second World War cast a shadow on the world so long that it still affects us to this day. The memory of 1945, and of all that it represents, is preserved in our culture of storytelling, movie-making and novel writing, and we still commemorate it annually. No other single year in history has ever held such power over us – nor is ever likely to do so again. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) 31 BC Actium: turning the tide of Roman history At noon on 2 September 31 BC, Marcus Agrippa stood aboard his flagship and gazed towards the Greek promontory of Actium. Some 60 of his enemy’s warships were speeding over the Ionian waves in the direction of the 400 vessels led by him and Octavian, who was watching from an advantageous point on land. Those approaching were part of the fleet of 230 led by Mark Antony, Octavian’s former Roman ally, and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. As they reached the melee, Cleopatra’s ships sailed straight into the middle of the battle line – and for a moment it seemed as if the tide might turn. Instead, they surged straight through and into the open sea: Cleopatra was escaping. Panicked, Mark Antony abandoned his flagship and followed her with several smaller vessels, leaving their remaining fleet to face the onslaught alone. Surrender followed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/E75F2Xwebready-cd56f0d-e1772549167562.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A carved marble relief shows several ancient ships packed with soldiers in battle. Warriors hold shields and weapons as the vessels move through stylized waves. One ship carries a large horse, and fortified walls and towers rise behind the fighting, suggesting a coastal city under attack." title="Octavian’s forces triumph at the battle of Actium, shown in a first-century AD Roman relief (Image by Alamy)" /> At the time of the battle, the Roman empire was divided between Octavian in the west and Mark Antony in the east. With the suicides of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 30 BC following their defeat at Actium, Octavian became sole ruler of Rome and conqueror of Egypt. Three years later, the Roman senate conferred on Octavian the title Augustus, officially marking the end of the Republic and the start of the Roman empire. Had Antony prevailed, Rome’s centre might have shifted eastwards. Alexandria might have become a second capital, Rome’s ambitions would likely have turned towards Mesopotamia and Persia rather than Germania and Britannia, and today Europe might instead have a Greek rather than Latin language base. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author 1453 Bye bye Byzantines, all hail the Ottomans It is, of course, an impossible task to select one specific year. Momentous happenings do occur, but they’re made possible by structural changes – political, economic, cultural – over many decades or even centuries. Having said that, I’d pick 1453. That was the year in which the Hundred Years’ War ended – but also, even more significantly, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. That marked the end of the Byzantine empire – the last remnant of the Roman realm – which had lasted for more than 1,000 years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/JR3129webready-fd2997a-e1772549266648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustrated battle scene shows two opposing armies fighting outside a fortified city. In the foreground, soldiers in turbans and bright clothing wield curved swords, while behind them a dense line of armored troops with helmets advances. Domed buildings and towers rise in the background, suggesting the clash is taking place at a city’s walls." title="A 19th-century illustration shows Ottoman troops surging into Constantinople, sealing the fall of the Byzantine empire (Image by Alamy)" /> The city became the capital of the growing Ottoman empire, which endured until 1922 as a major global power. The religious make-up of the region changed dramatically, though it remained a melting pot of peoples of different cultures and faiths. The fall of Constantinople led to an influx of Greek scholars to Europe, who brought deep learning and fresh ideas that added extra stimulus to the Renaissance. It also represented a tectonic shift in global geopolitics, changing the balance of power in the Middle East and radically reconfiguring trade routes between Europe and Asia. Some argue that growing complications involved in trading along overland routes through Eurasia stimulated European Atlantic exploration. It also contributed to a reconfiguration of the medieval slave trade. As it became harder for European traders to traffic people via the Black Sea, they turned increasingly to the coast of west Africa – fuelling the growth of one of the most appalling and tragic phenomena in human history. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford 1533 The wedding that reshaped England’s religious, social and political life It’s for good reason that the dawn of the Tudor era has widely been considered to mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern age. The 118 years when this celebrated dynasty occupied the throne witnessed unprecedented change in every aspect of English life. And no single year was more transformative than 1533. In 1527, Henry VIII had first petitioned the pope for an annulment from wife number one, Catherine of Aragon. He was driven by his all-consuming desire for a son and his obsession with Anne Boleyn, a woman of his wife’s household who had told him that if he wanted her, he’d have to put a ring on it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463925937webready-63091c6-e1772538301249.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painted portrait of a woman in Tudor‑style dress, shown from the waist up. She wears a dark gown with a square neckline, a pearl necklace with a gold pendant shaped like the letter B, and a black headdress trimmed with pearls. She faces forward against a dark background." title="Henry VIII's determination to marry Anne Boleyn (above) had lasting consequences (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry eventually took matters into his own hands by breaking with Rome and setting up a new Church of England, with himself as the supreme head. On 25 January 1533, he married Anne Boleyn. In May, his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was formally annulled and Anne was confirmed as his legitimate queen by the archbishop of Canterbury. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 1 June, by which time she was visibly pregnant. On 7 September, the new queen gave birth – not to the hoped-for son but to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I. This proved to be the beginning of the end for Anne. But her marriage to Henry had sparked a seismic shift in England’s religious, political and social life that would reverberate down the centuries. It also produced a monarch who ruled for longer than any of her Tudor predecessors and blazed a trail for future queens regnant. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Read more | Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn: the Tudor queen’s undying love for her mother 1858 Dawn of the Information Age On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria sent a message to US president James Buchanan. Ordinarily, it would have taken about 10 days for such a communication to cross the Atlantic by ship – but this one arrived in only 16 hours. It was sent to mark the connection of the first transatlantic telegraph cable – a direct line between the Old World and the New. Shorter connections had already been completed between Britain and mainland Europe, including a cross-channel line in 1850, but the Atlantic presented a tougher challenge. For years, engineers including Samuel Morse had debated whether it was possible to lay 2,500 miles of cable beneath the ocean. The first attempt in 1857 failed when the line snapped. But now, at last, it was done. Some commentators hailed it as the Eighth Wonder of the World. An excited newspaper in Boston announced simply: “THERE IS NO MORE SEA!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-90739586webready-a414067-e1772538374282.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A wooden display case with a blue background holds several cross‑sections of thick telegraph cables and related components. Each piece is mounted with a small printed label, and the items are arranged in two rows, including cable segments from different years and a metal grapnel model used for cable recovery." title="Submarine cables and grapnels used in 19th-century attempts to lay transatlantic telegraph lines (Image by Getty Images)" /> This first transatlantic cable failed after only three weeks, and it wasn’t until 1866 that a permanent line was established. But a precedent had been set: it would now be possible to connect every corner of world in an ever more extensive network of telegraph cables, eventually allowing huge volumes of information to pulse around the globe at previously unimaginable speeds. It was many years later before this vision was fully realised, but in 1858 we see the beginning of the new Information Age – a recognisably modern moment that culminated in the arrival of the internet. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University 1917 When revolution reshaped alliances, identities and ambitions In this pivotal year, Russia stopped fighting in the First World War and the US entered it. Neither country ranked much as a world power at the time, but wartime actions sparked global transformations. President Woodrow Wilson’s championing of international cooperation and American-style democracy (universal in rhetoric but deeply racialised in practice) signalled US ambitions for the world stage. But the big story was Russia: its economy shattered by the war, its people toppled the tsar in March (February in the Julian calendar then in use), setting the stage for the Bolsheviks to seize power in November (Julian: October). The Russian Revolution – the most important event of the 20th century – was complete by the end of 1917, and the Soviet Union was secured by 1922. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526928472webready-bdd9558-e1772538521653.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stylized poster shows a red figure raising a large hammer above their head, standing over broken black chains. The figure wears clothing marked “1917.” Red star shapes around them contain English and Russian words including “Socialism,” “Democracy,” and “Peace.” The background is light with bold graphic contrasts." title="A Soviet poster celebrates the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa (Image by Getty Images)" /> Neither the civil rights movement nor decolonial struggles would have unfolded as they did without the Soviet Union, whether as foil or ally. In the US, for example, communist organising and Soviet propaganda forced segregationists to either justify or modify their system of racial division. In the world subject to European empire, Soviet communism offered intellectual and material resources to anticolonial nationalists. Cold War historians tend to focus on the ascendant US and its Soviet nemesis duking it out for global hegemony via conflicts in Latin America, Africa and Asia. More salient are the ways in which the revolutionary model and the revolutionary challenge pushed communities, groups and nations to articulate who they were and who they wished to be. The Russian Revolution helped remake the world – and we live out its legacy. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University Read more | Why does Putin think Ukraine should be Russian? It’s all to do with the Vikings 490 BC Marathon: a victory for democracy Six decades after Cyrus the Great had founded the Achaemenid empire, the Persian forces of King Darius I – also ‘the Great’ – were pushing west to conquer all of Greece. Their primary aim was to lay waste to Athens, which had had the temerity to support a revolt against the empire that by then controlled swathes of the region. But they hadn’t banked on the determination and tactical nous of their opponents. By September 490 BC, the Persian fleet had landed on the coast of Attica about 17 miles north-east of Athens, its troops disembarking onto the plain of Marathon. Around 10,000 Athenian men mustered in the surrounding hills, joined by 1,000 from Plataea – but were still vastly outnumbered. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-475596641webready-ac6297a-e1772538584504.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A carved stone relief showing several human figures in a crowded, dynamic scene. At the center, an older bearded man sits upright while other figures around him lift, support, or carry objects resembling large torches or cornucopias. A reclining figure appears at the lower right. The relief is detailed with drapery, musculature, and expressive poses, and a decorative frieze of circular and floral motifs runs along the top edge." title="The battle of Marathon, in a sarcophagus relief from the second century BC (Image by Getty Images)" /> On learning that the Persian cavalry was absent, Greek warriors led by Athenian general Miltiades swept down on the enemy. Against the odds, the Persian troops were routed – reputedly at the cost of only 192 Athenian dead. This was a critical moment in ancient history: it gave confidence to the Greeks that they could stand up to the mighty Persian empire and, thanks to their part in the victory, the Athenians emerged as the most important polis in Greece. It also provided momentum for Athens’ emerging democracy. In the mid-19th century, English philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that “as an event in English history, the battle of Marathon was more important than the battle of Hastings” because Greek (and, particularly, Athenian) victory in that clash was so linked to the development of democracy. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Who is the most overrated person in history? 9 experts reveal their choices
In the first of a new monthly series, we asked an expert team of historians to tackle one of the big questions about the past
Homer Composite figment of imaginations The writer credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, and often regarded as one of the most important authors of all time, is to my mind the most overrated historical figure. That’s mostly because it’s likely that there was no one person called Homer. Careful study of those works, as well as other surviving epic fragments, has shown that they weren’t written at a single time by one person. Instead, it is likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed over generations by poetry performers known as rhapsodes. Each of these improved on the work of their predecessors, curating these epics and honing them to a point of perfection. From that time, probably around 700 BC, these works started to be transmitted in a more stable format. By around 550–500 BC, they were written down for the first time. By then, the belief was circulating that their genesis lay with one particular poet, Homer – not least because the idea of a single, genius author is simpler and more attractive than a slow process of evolution involving hundreds. A whole narrative was woven about the likely fictitious Homer: that he lived on Chios, that he was blind, even that he may have had some divine parentage. In fact, the notional Homer became so popular that later rhapsodes, doing performances of these now ‘finished’, stable poems, liked to claim themselves as ‘sons of Homer’ to give themselves more gravitas and fame. Ancient historians even wrote biographies of Homer as a historical figure, and busts were created of him. Yet, as a single man, he probably never existed at all. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Charles Dickens Verbose Victorian who distorted views of his era At the risk of being tarred and feathered next time I show my face at a Victorian history conference, I’d have to say that Dickens is overrated. It’s not that I dislike his work. Critics usually object to his long-winded prose, or baulk at the mawkish sentimentality of characters such as Little Nell, but I enjoy his writing. The callous way he treated his wife is harder to forgive – but his claim to greatness never rested on his qualities as a husband. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-171097572webready-65ad489-e1770634197183.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a middle aged man with a beard, wearing a three piece suit, and sitting at a desk. He is facing the camera, with one arm resting on the back of his chair and the other on the desk" title="“Many people see the 19th century purely through a Dickensian lens: as a world of cruel workhouses, smoke-filled factories and desperate poverty,” says Bob Nicholson (Image by Getty Images)" /> No, my objection to Dickens is one that he – always a relentless self-publicist – might actually enjoy. He is simply too famous. Dickens is often feted as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol have been inflicted on generations of schoolchildren and adapted into endless period dramas (the best of which feature Muppets). As a result, many people see the 19th century purely through a Dickensian lens: as a world of cruel workhouses, smoke-filled factories and desperate poverty. I’ve spent my career as a historian trying to reveal the lighter sides of Victorian life – to prove that things weren’t as miserable as some of Dickens’ more pointed critiques suggest. Dickens was just one of many great writers who made their names in the Victorian era. I’m not suggesting that we consign him to the dustbin of history – but perhaps the time has come to stop him from hogging all of the limelight. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University Mary, Queen of Scots Unwise architect of her own downfall Some historical figures, such as Richard III and Anne Boleyn, attract a cult following. Mary is another. She’s typically presented as a tragic heroine: a woman of courage who battled against adversity throughout her life, only to have it savagely cut short by her cold-hearted cousin, Elizabeth I. Yet the truth is far removed from this beguiling image. Yes, Mary was dogged by tragedy in her life, but much of it could have been avoided if she had shown greater wisdom and restraint. Instead, she made a series of catastrophic decisions that eventually lost her the crown – and her life. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/gr0174359Hwebready-fecd19a-e1770634443642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a woman in a black dress with a white ruff and gold chains, holding a small child dressed in red and gold. Both are staring at the viewer" title="A 16th-century painting of Mary with her infant son, later King James VI & I. “She made a series of catastrophic decisions that eventually lost her the crown – and her life,” says Tracy Borman (Image by Topfoto)" /> After a pampered upbringing in France, Mary returned to her native Scotland in 1561, aged 18. She then married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, one of the most unsuitable consorts in history, before eloping with the chief suspect in his murder, James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell. Read more | Mary, Queen of Scots: your guide to her life and times Having lost all credibility, and been forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James, Mary fled to England, naively expecting that Elizabeth would help her regain her throne. She spent almost 19 years a prisoner there, during which time she was involved in numerous plots against the English queen, finally leaving a paper trail exposing her parts in conspiracies. Mary’s execution in 1587 propelled her to the status of Catholic martyr and tragic heroine. In truth, she was not the hapless victim of circumstance but the architect of her own downfall. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Petrarch Painted a dim picture of the Middle Ages The writing of early Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) is certainly not overrated. He was responsible for an exquisite body of lyric poetry, an extraordinary scholar who rediscovered the letters of Cicero, and one of the greatest contributors to the Italian language. Reading or listening to his poetry truly feeds the soul. As a medieval historian, though, I am bound to take issue with Petrarch’s comments on the nature of history – because these truly are overrated. His remarks have long misled and deceived, producing a vision of world history that has become embedded in the European and American historiographical imagination. It was Petrarch who came up with the idea of the ‘Dark Ages’. He described the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual obscurity in which the glories of the great Roman empire had been forgotten, inhabited by benighted and stupid people. “This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever,” he opined. “When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.” This condemnation of 800 years of history was taken up by 16th-century Protestants and then 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. It’s still common today, with the Middle Ages often dismissed as poorly documented, boring and dogmatic. It’s just not true! These were centuries of extraordinary intellectual discovery, of philosophical thinking about the nature of the self and society, of artistic vibrancy and sophisticated political theory. The Middle Ages matter: we study them to challenge our assumptions and better understand our common humanity. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford Cicero Rome’s most shameless self-promoter The first-century BC Roman statesman and writer is often hailed as the voice of Republican virtue and a defender of democracy, justice and reason in a corrupt age. But this reputation owes more to his own words than to his actual achievements. In truth, Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of history’s most successful self-publicists. Cicero was elected consul in 63 BC. It was a remarkable achievement for a novus homo (‘new man’ without aristocratic ancestry) – and he never stopped reminding people of it. That same year, he crushed a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic, and had several citizens executed without trial – an act he later declared showed moral courage. In reality, it was a serious abuse of power, and deeply divisive. Despite his modest background, Cicero consistently sided with Rome’s conservative elite, opposing reforms that might have redistributed wealth or power to the poor. He praised virtue, yet defended the clearly guilty Milo on a murder charge. He was undeniably a gifted speaker and writer, but as a statesman he was relatively irrelevant. He had no army, no loyal faction and little influence over the major figures of his time, such as Caesar, Pompey and Octavian (later Augustus). More than 800 of his letters and 58 speeches survive, far more than those left by any contemporary, giving his version of events an over-amplified voice. Through them he cast himself as the Republic’s moral guardian – but without them he’d be remembered as what he truly was: a gifted lawyer with more bluster than power. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author Winston Churchill A flawed leader who could never live up to his idealised image Churchill is one of Britain’s greatest heroes. He’s the subject of countless movies and television shows. His statue stands in Parliament Square. In a nationwide poll in 2002, he was voted the greatest figure in British history. Ever. Though I have great respect for Churchill as a symbol of British courage and determination during the Second World War, the man himself cannot possibly live up to this image. In many ways, he was a terrible politician. Even by the standards of the time, his views were objectionable. He actively opposed equal rights for women, and he frequently made racist comments – particularly about Indians, calling them a “beastly people with a beastly religion”. During most of the 1930s he was shunned by the political establishment, including many in his own party. He was often drunk on the job. There is no question that Britain needed a leader with Churchill’s energy to see it through the war. Yet his own Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, claimed that Churchill often made it impossible for the armed forces to do their work. He came up with ridiculous plans, then acted “like a spoilt child” when military experts pointed out that they were impossible. Read more | Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history? Churchill was certainly a heroic figure. He was one of the very first to oppose Hitler, and his inspiring speeches galvanised the country in its hour of need. But can he live up to our idealised image of him? Of course not. How could anyone? Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) Erik Bloodaxe Spectacular nickname, underwhelming legacy I love a Viking-Age hero with a dramatic nickname as much as the next person, but let’s not kid ourselves: they were masters of their own propaganda. Look for the men behind the myths (and we are mostly talking men here) and the historical reality can be a little… underwhelming. Take Erik Bloodaxe, twice ruler of Northumbria in the mid-10th century. Most of what we think we know about his colourful life comes from the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, recorded long after his lifetime. In these, he’s portrayed as a larger-than-life character: favourite son of King Harald Fairhair, slayer of his own brothers, locked in a bitter feud with Icelandic poet Egill Skallagrimsson. His wife, Gunnhild, is depicted as a shapeshifting, murderous sorceress said to have commissioned another source for Erik’s life – or, rather, afterlife – the poem Eiríksmál (‘The Lay of Erik’), in which the god Odin orders his warriors and Valkyries to prepare Valhalla for the arrival of this great hero. But beyond the vivid details of his legend, what do we know about the historical figure? Coins and chronicles tell us that he was a key political player in 10th-century Northumbria. But his brief reigns (947–48 and 952–54) were turbulent, to say the least, challenged by Anglo-Saxon Wessex to the south and Viking Dublin to the west. In 954, he came to a sticky end, driven from York and ambushed in the wilds of Cumbria. His death brought an end to Viking rule in the north of England. So, not a brilliant legacy. But still a great nickname. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024) Ronald Reagan Seemingly a candidate for sainthood – but with questionable principles Making heroes out of historical figures requires some selective forgetting. In the US, where the cult of Ronald Reagan has many adherents, forgetting is almost an art form. Popular writing treats Reagan as a principled example of free-market rectitude who ended the Cold War and heralded morning in America. Critics of the contemporary Republican Party often invoke Reagan to signal how far his heirs have gone astray. The GOP is “no longer the party of Reagan”, critics lament in publications such as The Washington Post, Time or USA Today. Rhetorically, harking back to Reagan makes a claim of legitimacy and ideological fidelity. To invoke Reagan is to touch the hem of the saints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515176604webready-fb0e4e7-e1770638568611.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a man in a grey suit and red tie, standing alongside a woman in a black and white checked dress. They are holding a series of papers between them, looking at a speech" title="Ronald and Nancy Reagan prepare a 1986 speech. Modern rhetoric “gives Reagan too much credit for accomplishments that were not his”, says Adriane Lentz-Smith (Image by Getty Images)" /> This gives Reagan too much credit for accomplishments that were not his, and overlooks wrongdoing that was. Did Reagan end the Cold War? Many would argue that dynamics within the USSR – Mikhail Gorbachev’s embrace of democratic socialism, for example – sparked the transformation of the Soviet Union more than any external force did. Was Reagan’s administration principled? Anyone recalling the manipulative illegality of the Iran–Contra Affair might marvel at the question. Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'? Did Reagan mean “morning in America” to apply to all Americans? As candidate, he gave a speech celebrating “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi near where three voting rights activists had been murdered in 1964. For years, he publicly ignored the decade-defining public health crisis that was the HIV epidemic. He scaled back on social programmes while intensifying the war on drugs. He busted unions while preaching ‘trickle-down’ economics. Without selective forgetting, the Reagan era feels less like the antithesis of our present and more like its progenitor. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University Simon de Montfort A history of violence Some 760 years after his death, Simon de Montfort still enjoys a fairly sturdy reputation as a social reformer – the man who summoned what’s claimed to have been the first English parliament. A portrait of him is carved above the doors of the US House of Representatives, among a pantheon of democratic worthies. An English university was named after him as recently as 1992. But this reputation rests almost entirely on modern myth. Kings of England had been summoning consultative assemblies for hundreds of years before Montfort did so in 1265, and were calling them parliaments as early as 1236. Montfort’s contribution was long reckoned to have been the introduction of representation by including knights and townsmen, but both these groups had already been attending parliaments for several decades. Montfort was undoubtedly a skilled politician – clever, persuasive and quick-witted – but his preferred method of getting things done was usually violence. He had put himself into power in 1263 by leading attacks on the supporters of his brother-in-law, Henry III, and he reduced Henry to a puppet the following year by defeating him in battle. Montfort was also a pioneering antisemite. As soon as he became Earl of Leicester in 1231, he expelled all of the Jews from that town – the first such expulsion in England – and in the 1260s he led violent massacres of other Jewish communities. A capable warrior and a charismatic leader, Montfort was expert at exploiting the grievances of others for his own ends. A founder of parliamentary democracy he was not. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries
The prince, the brothel and a culture war Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria’s grandson On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother’s house in Camden Town. Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London’s Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it “very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free… Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.” Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any “gross indecency”, and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL11686324webready-dfc0737-e1770036564257.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A newspaper depicting several scenes of men in top hats and young boys standing in the street" title="The Cleveland Street Scandal, as reported in The Illustrated Police News on 25 January 1890. The affair – which embroiled Prince Albert Victor – “evolved into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> We still don’t really know why Prince Albert Victor – or ‘Eddy’, grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales – became linked to the story. Arthur Somerset had been his father’s equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy’s propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys. The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove’s revelations into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices, unequal treatment before the law, and the public’s right to private revelations. Prince Eddy was a potent symbol in a class culture war that pitted aristocratic privilege against aspiring youths in a modernising city. The rumours were enough to spark royal intervention. The Prince of Wales instructed courtiers to keep his son’s name out of the British press, and crown prosecutors used coded language to discuss the persistent suggestion that Eddy was involved. Eddy’s death of pneumonia in 1892 quashed any further need to protect his reputation – but something shady still clings to his memory. Katie Hindmarch-Watson is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University Did Queen Victoria marry her servant? When the widowed monarch fell for the son of a farmer, the nation was scandalised, says Fern Riddell Just a few years after Prince Albert died, the widowed Victoria found herself in the middle of a huge scandal. She was accused of falling in love – and even marrying – her Highland servant, John Brown. For the Victorians, the idea that their monarch might be having a passionate love affair with the son of an Aberdeenshire farmer was truly shocking. Their society was ruled by class, and John was very clearly outside Victoria’s. Her court despised John for his ordinary background, and her government was convinced that he was a threat to both her security and that of the crown. Rumours filled the newspapers that Victoria was mad, and that John was her keeper. Meanwhile, gossips insinuated that he was using supernatural powers to control her and make her fall in love with him. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: historian Fern Riddell explains all For 20 years, John stood at Victoria’s side in silence, enduring personal attacks in the press and the threat of violence from Victoria’s public, who believed that he was the reason she was living in seclusion. But Victoria refused to listen to the criticism. She didn’t care who hated John – her family, her court, her government or her people. She refused to be parted from him. By the time John died in 1883, many were convinced that they had privately married. When Victoria attempted to publish a manuscript exposing their life together, the papers were seized and burned by her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, to avoid another terrible scandal. Twenty years later, when Victoria left private instructions for her own burial, she directed that she should be buried with John’s mother’s wedding ring on her finger, and with a lock of his hair and his photograph in her hand. For the next 150 years, John’s family kept a secret archive of Victoria’s letters, jewellery and artefacts about their relationship. They believed that it was too dangerous to expose the truth of their love for one another – until today. Luckily for us, what was scandalous for the Victorians has now been revealed as the greatest love affair of Victoria’s reign. Fern Riddell’s latest book is Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (Ebury, 2025) Edward VIII puts love before duty The king’s insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson caused a constitutional crisis, writes Alexander Larman The expulsion of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) from the royal family has undoubtedly been the most scandalous story that ‘the Firm’ has weathered in decades. But it does not even come close to 1936 in constitutional significance. Andrew is, after all, the second son of the late Elizabeth II, whereas Edward VIII was king – albeit a reluctant one. After ascending to the throne following the death of his father, George V, he made it clear that ruling was of secondary importance to his love affair with the married American socialite Wallis Simpson. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-141556826webready-4b8a928-e1770036748150.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" title="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" /> It was a sign of the respect in which the monarchy was held at the time that no mention of that relationship was ever made in the British papers, despite it being common knowledge (and freely speculated upon in the European and American media). Had the king been content to keep Wallis as his mistress, the press magnates Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere would have continued to keep the potentially embarrassing story quiet. Yet Edward would not agree to be crowned king in 1937 unless Wallis could become queen. This was impossible for both religious and social reasons, so he announced his intention of abdicating. Constitutionally, this was more difficult than he had imagined, because of the settlement following the deposition of James II & VII, which ensured that the king ruled by consent of parliament. Only the interventions of the king’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, and prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, allowed Edward to quit the throne, assume the title of Duke of Windsor, and marry Wallis. He left England still well regarded by his subjects, but later revelations about his alleged support for the Nazis irrevocably tarnished this affection. The Duke of Windsor is today regarded as one of Britain’s least popular – if most consequential – monarchs. I suspect that Edward and the abdication will be remembered long after Andrew has become a footnote in royal history. Alexander Larman is a historian, journalist and author of books including The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication (W&N, 2020) The Prince Regent’s marital misery Few royal marriages can have been more hellish than that of Caroline of Brunswick and the wastrel Prince Regent, writes Nigel Jones Thanks to the brilliantly illustrated scandal sheets of Regency Britain, the disastrous marriage of the Prince Regent, later King George IV, to Princess Caroline of Brunswick kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century. George, a spendthrift wastrel, was hopelessly in debt. Though secretly married to the Roman Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, in 1795 the prince reluctantly took (sight unseen) a legitimate, Protestant bride – his first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick – in the hope that her money would pay off his creditors. It was hate at first sight. George told Lord Malmesbury, who had brought his bride from Germany, “Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass of brandy.” Equally unimpressed, Caroline found her husband fatter than she’d been led to believe. Meanwhile, Malmesbury noted her poor personal hygiene. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464476543webready-588f5c4-e1770036889924.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful cartoon showing a couple in the centre, each being dragged in opposite directions by other couples" title="An 1820 cartoon pokes fun at George IV’s attempt to dissolve his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. The disastrous union “kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century”, says Nigel Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Despite drinking for three days before their wedding, George performed his marital duties: nine months later Caroline gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte. But he made his wife’s life so hellish that she soon went into exile in Europe. She settled in a lakeside villa near Como, met (and joked about having sex with) the pope, and reportedly threw parties at which she danced topless. Read more | The illness and decline of King George III George sent spies to report on her misdeeds, hoping to obtain evidence for a divorce. Caroline’s lovers reputedly included a young Italian and – more scandalously still – Marshal Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and ruler of Naples, at a time when Britain was at war with France. When George III died in 1820, Caroline returned to claim her place as queen. But not only did the new king have her tried by the House of Lords for adultery, he had the doors of Westminster Abbey barred when she tried to attend his coronation. The hypocritical adultery accusations having been dropped, Caroline was cheered by the London mob, who saw her as a symbol of opposition to the king. Broken by her humiliation, though, she died three weeks later. Nigel Jones is a historian and writer. His books include Kitty’s Salon (John Blake, 2023) Georgian Britain’s disobedient rake The disreputable Duke of Cumberland caused no end of trouble, writes Felicity Day George III started his reign with noble ambitions: to be a moral leader, faithful to his wife and head of a united royal family. Regrettably, not all of his clan got the memo. George’s younger brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland was notionally a naval officer but in reality a rake-about-town. A dispute with a courtesan had already dragged him into the newspapers before he hit the headlines in 1769 over a more scandalous affair with Lady Grosvenor. The couple were caught by her husband’s servants in a bedchamber in a coaching inn in St Albans, their clothing in disarray. Henry was hauled into court to account for his ‘criminal conversation’ with another man’s wife. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL416311webready-df88fb0-e1770036955185.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a young woman in a gold dress, with a high, grey hairdo" title="In 1771, George III’s younger brother Henry secretly married widow and commoner Anne Horton (shown in a c1777 portrait). Henry’s spirited antics strained the public’s tolerance for the monarchy (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> With revelations ranging from the disguises he donned for secret trysts to the inarticulate and ungrammatical style of his love letters, the duke was made to look ridiculous. A £13,000 bill for damages and costs had to be covered from the Civil List – and, to the king’s further shame, the press was filled with comment about un-princely conduct dragging the nation into disrepute. Then, in 1771, it emerged that Henry had secretly married. His bride was the widow Anne Horton – a commoner, and daughter of a notorious libertine. Furious, the king exiled them from court, and refused to provide financial support. In an attempt to prevent any further such disobedience, he pushed his government into passing the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which made it illegal for royals under the age of 25 to wed without the monarch’s consent. Read more | Charlotte and Diana: the parallel lives of two Princesses of Wales whose deaths sent the nation into mourning It didn’t stop the outcast couple causing trouble. The Cumberlands set up a lively rival court, consorting with opposition politicians and befriending the future George IV and his eldest brothers – who followed their uncle into lives of gambling, womanising and general extravagance, causing countless more PR crises and pushing public support for the royals to the brink. The determined respectability of Victoria’s court was without doubt a direct reaction to their steady drumbeat of scandals. Felicity Day is a journalist and author of The Game of Hearts: True Stories of Regency Romance (Blink Publishing, 2024) Elizabeth II misreads the public mood When the Queen seemed to stay silent in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, she was seen as out of touch, says Shrabani Basu It was meant to be a lazy Sunday at the end of the summer holidays. But on 31 August 1997, Britons woke to the shocking news that Diana, Princess of Wales had died following a car crash in a Paris tunnel. Her friend Dodi Fayed and the car’s driver Henri Paul had also lost their lives. Diana had rarely been away from the headlines. From the Panorama interview in which she famously said that “there were three of us in this marriage”, to the latest round of holiday photos with Dodi Fayed, the end of her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles had fuelled tabloid sales for years. Now a pall of gloom descended over Britain. Within hours of the crash, Kensington Palace had turned into a shrine for the late princess. Everyone from Mother Teresa to heads of state was expressing their grief. But though a short statement expressing shock and distress was issued from Buckingham Palace, Diana’s former mother-in-law remained at Balmoral Castle, 500 miles from London, seemingly unmoved. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-73389657webready-1d8b4e5-e1770037044850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing lots of flowers and written tributes along a spiked metal fence. To the right, a young boy ties something around one of the fence posts" title="A boy attaches a tribute to the railings of Kensington Palace following the death of Princess Diana, 1997. This would “become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign”, writes Shrabani Basu (Image by Getty Images)" /> The Queen was following the rule book – Diana was technically no longer a royal. But the press reflected public sentiment. “Where is our Queen?” screamed The Sun. “Show us you care,” demanded The Express. For once, Elizabeth had not read the national mood. Speculation mounted in the vacuum, with some blaming Charles for his infidelity and for driving Diana into Dodi’s arms. All in all, it would become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign, when the monarchy seemed to have lost the plot. Eventually, an intervention by the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, convinced the Queen that she needed to be heard. Four days later Elizabeth appeared at the gates of Balmoral and looked at the wreaths. Five days after Diana’s death, she finally made a live broadcast from Buckingham Palace, speaking as a “Queen and as a grandmother”. The people forgave her, and faith in the monarchy was restored. Shrabani Basu is author of Victoria & Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant (The History Press, 2010) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers: Britain's 8 most haunted houses
From tragic Tudor queens to restless Roman soldiers, Caitlin Blackwell Baines introduces us to the terrifying cast of phantoms said to dwell within the nation’s spookiest homes
1. Stirling Castle, Scotland From elusive sea monsters to shrieking banshees, Scotland is home to a host of supernatural beings – including, of course, ghosts. One of their best-known spectral celebrities is the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, who is said to haunt a staggering 10 properties, making her, perhaps, the best-travelled ghost in the nation. Among her main haunts is Stirling Castle, her childhood home in central Scotland. Perched atop a volcanic crag, surrounded by cliffs overlooking the River Forth, Stirling Castle was constructed in the early 12th century, originally as a military stronghold, acting as a strategic line of defence during the Wars of Scottish Independence (1296–1357). However, almost from the very beginning, Stirling was also a favourite royal residence. By the time a young Mary Stuart lived there in the 1540s, it was as much a palace as it was a fortress: her father, James V, had transformed it into one of the most opulent homes in Renaissance Britain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Stirling-Castle-Bannockburn-1-8d83973.jpg" width="1200" height="960" alt="A large brown castle stands on a tree-covered hill, against a dark grey cloudy sky" title="Stirling Castle is one of several historic buildings said to be haunted by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots – the ill-fated monarch who was imprisoned – and executed – upon the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I (Image by SpookyScotland.net)" /> Whatever happy childhood memories Mary may have had of Stirling would be tainted by the events of 21 April 1567. It was here on this day that the embattled queen would see her infant son (the future King James VI & I) for the last time. Soon after, she was forced to abdicate, flee the country, and eventually, in 1587, she was executed for treason under the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Perhaps it is for this reason that the melancholy monarch returns to the castle, perpetually searching for her long-lost child, even in the afterlife. She is said to be kept company by a dutiful servant – a young woman in green, who purportedly died in a fire while attempting to save her mistress. They are also joined by Stirling’s notorious ‘Highland Ghost’ – a mysterious man adorned in full Highland regalia, who is often mistaken for a costumed tour guide. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Raynham-Hall-ghostWHB5WT-f2f1e5a.jpg" width="4218" height="5059" alt="A black and white photograph of a staircase with a white ghostly figure in the middle" title="This photograph of Raynham Hall’s ‘Brown Lady’ – purportedly the ghost of former resident Lady Dorothy Townshend – caused a stir when it was first published in 1936 (Image by Alamy)" /> 2. Raynham Hall, Norfolk At its height in the Georgian period, Raynham Hall was nationally renowned for its innovative architecture, priceless art collection and powerful owner. Though originally constructed in the early 1600s, the stately red-brick manor we see today was largely the work of eminent early 18th-century architect William Kent, acting under the direction of Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend, a leader in the House of Lords. Like the house he lived in, Townshend was an imposing figure, known for his fiery temper and blustering delivery in parliament. And rumour had it, his aggressiveness was not solely reserved for political opponents. His long-suffering wife, Dorothy, may have also been a target of his ire. The story goes that Lady Dorothy Townshend (née Walpole, sister of prime minister Robert) endured an unhappy marriage. Some say she was unfaithful, while others claim it was her extravagant spending that incurred her husband’s wrath. In any case, she purportedly died under mysterious circumstances and continues to roam Raynham’s halls to this day. Read more | Five shocking tales from Britain’s royal palaces Over the years, there have been numerous reported sightings of Lady Townshend – or ‘The Brown Lady’ as she has come to be known, on account of the colour of her silk brocade dress – but perhaps none so dramatic as the encounter of photographers Hubert Provand and Indre Shira. In the autumn of 1936, while on assignment for Country Life magazine, Provand and Shira prepared to take a photo of Raynham’s main staircase. Just as they were setting up the shot, they suddenly caught sight of an ethereal, veiled form floating down the stairs. Acting fast, they snapped their photo and captured what is widely considered to be one of the most famous examples of ‘spirit photography’ in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/50-Berkeley-SquareK07JMM-ffef8a3.jpg" width="743" height="1153" alt="A black and white photograph of a dark front door. Either side of it are iron railings, and there is an arch over the two steps leading up to it" title="Dare you open the door? Visitors to 50 Berkeley Square have been reporting strange goings-on since the mid-19th century (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. 50 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, Greater London With its elegant Georgian townhouses, luxury boutiques and Michelin star restaurants, the upscale district of Mayfair in central London may not seem like the natural setting for a ghost story. And yet, it is home to a property once christened the ‘Most Haunted House in London’. The offending structure can be found on Berkeley Square, a residential block first laid out in the mid-1700s by architect William Kent (the man behind Raynham Hall). From the outside, there’s nothing much to distinguish the townhouse at No 50 from its neighbours – but don’t let its staid, neoclassical façade fool you. The first reports of unusual activity at No 50 occurred in the mid-1800s. Nearby residents noticed strange sounds and smells, lights flickering in the windows at all hours of the night, and the noticeable signs of decay and abandon. Sceptics chalked this up to the eccentric habits of its owner, Thomas Myers, a recluse left heartbroken by the rejection of his fiancée. Nevertheless, rumours soon swirled that the house was haunted. View Green Video on the source website Some believed the ghost was a young woman who had jumped from an upper-storey window. Others claimed it was Myers himself, who had locked himself in the attic and driven himself mad. Still others maintained it was a preexisting entity that had possessed both Myers and the suicidal woman. Whatever the case, most Londoners came to fear and avoid No 50 – all save for a brave and foolhardy few. One such daredevil was Lord George Lyttleton, a Conservative statesman, who, in 1872, accepted a bet to stay a night alone at the house. Though incredulous of the stories, Lyttleton packed a pistol and was probably quite pleased he had done so, for when a dark, tendrilled apparition advanced towards him, he was able to defend himself. Firing a few rounds, he was certain he’d hit his mark. Yet, when the smoke settled, it revealed only spent shell casings and an empty attic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Chillingham-Castle2BYB32Y-e4a1674.jpg" width="5081" height="3381" alt="A black and white photograph of a large castle with crenellated towers" title="This photograph of Chillingham Castle may be in black and white, but the building’s paranormal history is certainly colourful: its most famous ghoul is a boy in blue who appears to visitors inside a pink bedroom (Image by Alamy)" /> 4. Chillingham Castle, Northumberland Touted as Britain’s ‘Most Haunted Castle,’ Chillingham has a long and violent history. Once one of nearly 100 fortifications that dotted the bleak borderlands of England and Scotland, this 13th-century fortress served a pivotal role in the centuries-long rift between the two warring kingdoms. It was here, in 1298, that King Edward I launched his attack on William Wallace during the First War of Scottish Independence. Over the years, hundreds of England’s enemies were killed at Chillingham, many of them by torture in the castle’s dungeon and torture chamber – a cramped windowless pit located in a cellar beneath what is today a public tearoom. Strangely, however, these prisoners are not among the castle’s best-known ghostly residents. Instead, the most familiar phantom faces are those of women and children. There is the mysterious ‘Radiant Boy’ – an unknown child in blue who materialises before guests in the castle’s ‘Pink Bedroom’. And the legendary ‘Grey Lady’ – believed to be the ghost of Lady Mary Berkeley, whose husband, Ford Grey, 1st Earl of Tankerville, reportedly jilted her for her younger sister, leaving her alone and heartbroken in the castle. Modern visitors report the sounds of sobbing, the rustling of a heavy gown dragging along the castle’s corridors, and the faint aroma of rosewater. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Blickling-HallBPB4N5-54b2853.jpg" width="5637" height="3775" alt="A large red brick palace lit up from below by floodlights. Behind it, there are many trees in shadow and the sky is deep blue" title="Anne Boleyn is said to haunt several palaces and stately homes, including Blickling Hall near Norwich. The Tudor queen is thought to have been born at the manor that previously stood on the site (Image by Alamy)" /> 5. Blickling Hall, Norfolk Blickling Hall might be considered the English counterpart to Scotland’s Stirling Castle – though, on the face of it, they would seem to have little in common. Where Stirling is a medieval citadel looming over the gateway to the Scottish Highlands, Blickling is a Jacobean manor nestled in the heart of the Norfolk Broads. Just 20 miles east of Raynham Hall, one would think it would have more in common with its ‘haunted’ East Anglian neighbour. But as the presumed birthplace of Anne Boleyn, Blickling has a far stronger symbolic link to the childhood home of Scotland’s own tragic queen. Read more | Your history guide to Frogmore Cottage: who has lived there before? The existing structure, built for Sir Henry Hobart in 1616, was erected atop the ruins of a Tudor manor house once belonging to Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire – whose youngest daughter had the unfortunate honour of becoming Henry VIII’s second wife. On 19 May 1536, after just three years of marriage, Anne Boleyn was beheaded for adultery and treason. Like her Scottish counterpart, Anne is thought to haunt a number of historic properties, including Hever Castle (another childhood home), Windsor Castle (a brief residence), the Tower of London (the site of her death), and, of course, Blickling. Here, she is said to appear every year on the anniversary of her death, in a carriage driven by headless horses. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Heol-FanogGettyImages-1281060558-a4fffad.jpg" width="6000" height="4000" alt="A black farmhouse stands on a hill, with a single light shining in the middle. The farmhouse has a chimney at either end of the roof and behind it, the sky is dark grey" title="A spooky farmhouse. One such building, Heol Fanog (Welsh for ‘Road to the Peaks’), gained notoriety in 2022 when it became the subject of hit podcast The Witch Farm (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. Heol Fanog, Brecon Beacons, Wales A relatively recent entry into the annals of haunted historic Britain, Heol Fanog farmhouse in South Wales has gained contemporary notoriety thanks to the exposure of the hit BBC Sounds podcast, The Witch Farm (2022). The series focuses on the occupancy of the Rich family, who lived on the farm for a seven-year period from 1989, during which time they claim to have experienced a litany of terrifying events. From cold spots to disembodied footsteps, inexplicable power surges to noxious odours, and even full-blown apparitions and demonic possessions, the experiences of the Rich family have been likened to that of the Lutz family of Amityville Horror fame. While these stories are relatively new – and, indeed, the farmhouse itself is less than a hundred years old – legends about the isolated rural property have circulated for well over a century. The area’s strong association with witchcraft, occultism and Celtic mysticism, combined with the dark legacy of a gruesome local murder in the 19th century, have earned the property its nickname: ‘The Witch Farm’ or ‘Hellfire Farm’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Hampton-CourtG37YX0-eab2b03.jpg" width="4458" height="2903" alt="Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, is supposedly one of Hampton Court’s many resident phantoms. Early 20th-century postcards depicted the queen’s ‘ghost’ using a crude double-exposure effect (Image by Alamy)" title="Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, is supposedly one of Hampton Court’s many resident phantoms. Early 20th-century postcards depicted the queen’s ‘ghost’ using a crude double-exposure effect (Image by Alamy)" /> 7. Hampton Court Palace, Greater London Historic Royal Palaces certainly have their hands full. In addition to managing some of the nation’s highest profile heritage landmarks, catering to some 4 million visitors each year, they also have ghosts to contend with. Several properties in their portfolio – including the Tower of London, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace – are allegedly haunted. And while it’s hard to say which one of them is the most haunted, Hampton Court is definitely a strong contender. Construction on the iconic Tudor palace began in 1515 under the direction of Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York – Henry VIII’s chief advisor. At the time, Wolsey was one of the kingdom’s richest and most influential figures and he intended to build a home to reflect his position. In this he succeeded; however, within just a few years of his home’s completion, Wolsey had fallen from favour. Shortly before he died in 1530, he was ordered to surrender the palace to the king. Just 15 miles from London, the palace quickly became a favourite royal retreat. Read more | Seven of history's most disturbing ghost ship stories that will haunt your dreams While many monarchs have resided in Hampton Court over the centuries, the palace is indelibly linked with the reign of Henry VIII. As such, it should come as no surprise that the most familiar phantoms are members of the Henrician court. There’s Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, who died from complications of childbirth, and allegedly still holds a solemn vigil on the palace’s Silverstick staircase; Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, whose ghost is said to run screaming down the aptly-named ‘Haunted Gallery’, endlessly replaying a failed attempt to reach her husband to beg him to spare her from execution; and maybe even Old King Hal himself. Some believe it was the ghost of the king who was captured on the viral CCTV footage that made headlines around the world in the winter of 2003. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/Treasurers-HouseTopfoto0780551-5b87db0.jpg" width="3442" height="2284" alt="A cellar with dirty brick walls. To the left, there is an empty fireplace with a dark tunnel, and on the right, there are two boxes stacked on one another" title="The infamous cellar at the Treasurer’s House, York. In 1953, a young plumber’s apprentice claimed to have witnessed Roman soldiers marching through a wall (Image by Topfoto)" /> 8. Treasurer's House, York, North Yorkshire Beneath the soaring spires of York Minster, scores of visitors amble along pedestrian thoroughfares lined with gastropubs, gift shops and historic buildings. The din of casual conversation is occasionally interrupted by the booming oratory of tour guides who lead groups of tourists down winding cobble-stoned lanes and narrow alleyways (idiosyncratically referred to as ‘snickleways’ by the locals). These merry little bands are on the hunt for haunted houses, and in York – reputedly the ‘Most Haunted City in Britain’ – they will not be disappointed. Dozens of properties compete for the title of ‘Most Haunted House’ in York, and while there is no clear victor, there is one property that can lay claim to what is, perhaps, the best authenticated ghost story in British history. That is the Treasurer’s House – a Grade I listed National Trust property with foundations dating all the way back to the early 12th century. Its best-known ghost story, however, has nothing to do with its medieval history. In 1953, an 18-year-old apprentice plumber called Harry Martindale was hired to install a boiler in the property’s ancient cellar. Working alone and in silence, Martindale was startled by the distant sound of a trumpet. The sound grew closer, and suddenly, what appeared to be a Roman soldier with a plumed helmet emerged from a wall, followed by a cart horse and a band of other soldiers, all dressed in green and carrying round shields. If this weren’t strange enough, the soldiers appeared to be cut off at the knees. Though Martindale’s claims were initially dismissed as hallucinations, the subsequent discovery of the Via Decumana, a Roman road lying about 15 inches below the cellar floor, gave credence to his story. What’s more, his description of the soldiers’ attire – originally deemed inaccurate based on existing historical knowledge – was later confirmed to be consistent with the regiment stationed at the Roman outpost of Eboracum (i.e. modern-day York). Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025) This article was first published in the Apple News October 2025 bonus issue
The lie of succession: did James I steal Elizabeth I's crown?
Did James I ‘steal’ Elizabeth I’s crown? Tracy Borman considers evidence that the transition from Tudor to Stuart dynasties may not have been quite as seamless as we’ve been led to believe
Richmond Palace, 22 March 1603. Elizabeth I – the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen who had ruled England for 44 years, seeing off the Armada, healing religious divisions and creating a court so magnificent it was the envy of Europe – lay dying. Her anxious advisers clustered around her bedside, urging her to do the thing she had resisted throughout her long reign: name her successor. Rousing herself from her stupor, the 69-year-old queen declared: “I will that a king succeed me, and what king, but my nearest kinsman, the king of Scots?” Wanting to make completely sure, her chief minister, Robert Cecil, asked whether that was her “absolute resolution” – to which she irritably retorted: “I pray you trouble me no more, I’ll have none but him.” That “kinsman” was James VI of Scotland, son of Elizabeth’s old rival Mary, Queen of Scots. Her closest surviving blood relative, he had emerged as the front runner in the race for the English crown. He had the support of Cecil and most of his fellow privy councillors, who had been working behind the scenes to smooth James’s path to the throne. The queen, too, had shown him favour, sharing the pearls of her monarchical wisdom during their 20-year correspondence, as if grooming him as her successor. But she had always flinched from actually naming him as such. Now, almost with her last breath, she had. Elizabeth died two days later – and the Tudor dynasty gave way peacefully to the Stuarts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-544183312webready-e7c6f5b.jpg" width="3727" height="2485" alt="A portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots. She had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth's throne, but her son would go on to be the next monarch (Image by Getty Images)" title="A portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots. She had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth's throne, but her son would go on to be the next monarch (Image by Getty Images)" /> This dramatic depiction of Elizabeth’s last-gasp naming of the Scottish king as her heir is based solely on an account by the contemporary historian and antiquarian William Camden. He had begun writing his monumental work Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth (first published in Latin in 1615) during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Camden was close to some senior members of the queen’s court, and had access to the voluminous state papers of her reign, so historians have relied on his manuscript as one of the most important and accurate sources for the period. However, none of those present at Elizabeth’s deathbed testified that she had spoken the words Camden quoted in his account, only that the dying queen had raised her hand to her head when James’s name was mentioned – an ambiguous gesture at best. Rewriting history Now, groundbreaking new analysis of Camden’s original manuscript by a team at the British Library has revealed that key passages were covered over and rewritten after Elizabeth’s death to make them more favourable to her successor. No fewer than 200 pages have been pasted in, 65 of which replaced original text with a new version. The use of imaging technology has enabled researcher Helena Rutkowska to see the words underneath for the first time in 400 years. Among the findings are that Elizabeth’s naming of James as her heir was a work of fiction, designed to make his accession appear more predetermined than it had been. In fact, she had been the only monarch in English history not to make provision for the succession. Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love If this had been more widely known at the time, it might have had profound repercussions for the Stuart dynasty. Rather than welcoming James as the king to whom ‘Good Queen Bess’ had given her blessing, the people of England might have refused to accept him. After all, England and Scotland had been bitter enemies for centuries, with fleeting periods of peace cut short by the clash of arms or threat of invasion. And James was by no means the only candidate with a strong claim to Elizabeth’s throne. Holding on by his fingertips Camden had first been commissioned to write his history of Elizabeth’s reign in 1596 by William Cecil (Robert’s father), Lord Burghley – Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, whom she dubbed her ‘Spirit’. It was not a task that the author had embraced with any alacrity, grumbling about the “piles and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts” that had been placed at his disposal. He made only a faltering start during Elizabeth’s lifetime and, as soon as she died, he quietly set down his quill, hoping that the idea would be forgotten. Fast forward to 1607 and James VI & I had been on the English throne for four years. The initially peaceful transition from Tudors to Stuarts had given way to turbulence and uncertainty, conspiracy and persecution, witchcraft and gunpowder. With the accession of England’s first Stuart monarch, everything had been transformed – from court culture to royal ceremony, religious tolerance to parliamentary authority, morality to witch-hunting. Two countries that had been fierce rivals for centuries were now forged into an uncomfortably united kingdom. The fleeting popularity that James had enjoyed as the “bright star of the north” had been extinguished, and he was holding onto his new crown by his fingertips. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/William-Camden-MMTP8W-a7d2cb2.jpg" width="938" height="1302" alt="A painting of a bearded man dressed in dark clothing with a grey ruff, sitting against a black background" title="A portrait of William Camden, based on a work of 1609, the year after James ordered him to finish his history of Elizabeth’s reign (Image by Alamy)" /> It was at this moment that James heard about Camden’s stalled biography of his predecessor, and spied an opportunity. To have a published account of Elizabeth’s reign – and, in particular, the succession – written by one of the most esteemed historians of the age would help silence any whispers of usurpation. If, that is, the author was prepared to write it to the king’s satisfaction. It was with good reason that Camden expressed reluctance when first approached by the king to restart his history of Elizabeth. Quite apart from the heavy burden of research it entailed, writing the history of a queen who, even in death, was eclipsing her unpopular successor was fraught with difficulty. Camden knew that James would not want an unbiased appraisal but one written in his favour. Only the previous year, the king had ordered an account of the gunpowder plot to be rewritten so that it was even more complimentary towards him. Restarting the history of Elizabeth was the very definition of a poison chalice, and Camden tried everything to avoid drinking from it. But James gave him no choice. At the king’s command, work on the book resumed in 1608. Camden was his subject to command, and the succession was his to rewrite. Reviving the queen By the time Camden again took up his quill, rewriting sections to James’s benefit, the cult of ‘Gloriana’ was already in full swing. Elizabeth’s former subjects were quick to forget that they had grown tired of “an old woman’s government” and had longed to have a king ruling over them. One contemporary reflected that, a few short years after Elizabeth’s death, “when we had experience of the Scottish government, then… in hate and detestation of them, the queen did seem to revive. Then was her memory much magnified.” It was not long before praising the last Tudor queen became a powerful weapon used to attack her Stuart successor. Donning their rose-tinted glasses, her former subjects harked back to a halcyon time when England had enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity, triumphed over the might of Spain, and was presided over by a glorious queen and her court. The anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, began to be celebrated each year with “joyful ringing of bells, running at tilt, and festival mirth… in testimony of their affectionate love towards her”. Read more | Why was King James VI and I obsessed with witch hunts? But this sentimental reverence masked the intense uncertainty that had been generated by the persistent refusal of ‘Good Queen Bess’ to name her heir. It’s worth revisiting the history of this reticence and the concerns it had fomented among court and populace. On 10 February 1559 Elizabeth had told the first parliament of her reign that “in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”. She then declared that God would provide for the succession and would name an heir “peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me”. This was all very well but, without the wisdom of hindsight, Elizabeth’s subjects had no idea that she would reign longer and more successfully than any of the other Tudor monarchs. Her three predecessors, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I, had reigned for six years, nine days and five years, respectively, and there was no reason to suppose Elizabeth would escape the ill health that dogged the Tudor dynasty. Indeed, nearly four years into her reign she almost died of smallpox. This catapulted the succession to the forefront of people’s minds and, once there, it would not be forgotten. “Now all the talk is who is to be her successor,” reported the Spanish ambassador, Bishop Álvaro de la Quadra, in 1562. Elizabeth’s determination not to name her heir was born of direct experience. Being heir presumptive during her sister Mary’s brief, bloody reign had placed her in great jeopardy, including a spell in the Tower under threat of execution. “I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me,” she told a delegation from parliament in 1566 that had been sent to persuade her to settle the succession. Elizabeth feared that, as soon as she named her heir, the individual chosen would be the focus of plots and rebellions, just as she herself had been during Mary’s reign. “Think you that I could love my winding-sheet?” she demanded to an ambassador, likening a named heir to a shroud. Fierce rivalry In remaining tight-lipped about the succession, Elizabeth gave rise to fierce rivalry between the blood claimants to her throne. Principal among them were Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI; his cousin Arbella Stuart; Lady Katherine Grey and her descendants; Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon; and the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain. As Elizabeth’s reign progressed, most of the rival claimants fell by the wayside, either through natural death, disinheritance or execution. In the race for Elizabeth’s throne, it was less a case of ‘who dares wins’, more ‘survival of the fittest’. In 1600, the English government official and keeper of records Thomas Wilson opined: “This crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it.” Although he admitted that it was “straightly prohibited” to discuss the succession, he went on to give an account of at least 12 people with some kind of claim to the English throne who, in his words, “gape for” Elizabeth’s death. Of these, eight were home-grown candidates and four were from overseas. James VI might have emerged as the odds-on favourite, but his accession was by no means certain. As her long reign wore on, Elizabeth showed through her subtle, steady guiding of the king of Scots that he was, if not her ideal candidate, then at least the best of a bad lot. In the years leading up to her death, she did as much as she could to secure the succession without placing herself in danger by naming an heir. For all the anxiety, intrigue and rivalry that this engendered, the wisdom of her policy was proved by the fact that, to her last breath, her personal power in England had not been challenged by any “rising sun”. But the ultimate success of Elizabeth’s plan depended on James following the advice she had drip-fed him over the years. And that is where it fell apart. It soon became clear that the king had paid only lip service to Elizabeth’s guidance, and proceeded to flout it altogether when he took her throne. He refused to “play the king”, as she had urged, by investing in the magnificence of his court and public appearances, and instead spent most of his time in private with just a handful of favourites. Parliamentary revolt More ominously, James had no intention of sustaining the delicate relationship between crown and parliament that had been the cornerstone of Elizabeth’s success. Instead, he stood firmly by the Stuart belief in the divine right of kings, which in his view gave him the right to ride roughshod over the wishes of his people and his parliaments. This soon sparked resistance from his new English subjects. After a series of bad-tempered exchanges, parliament refused to agree to James’s plan for a formal union between his two kingdoms. Undeterred, he announced that a shared currency would be issued – a 20-shilling piece known as the ‘unite’ – and commissioned a new flag, the ‘Union Jack’ (for Jacobus, or James). Thereafter, rather than working in partnership with his government, he abandoned it altogether, spending his days hunting and cavorting with his favourites. One contemporary noted that this was “the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the king’s subjects, who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign”. Read more | King James VI and I: your guide to the first Stuart monarch of England Meanwhile, growing popular resentment against the king erupted in numerous conspiracies to remove him from the throne. In June 1603, just three months after his accession, the ‘Bye’ plot came to light, involving a group of Catholics who planned to kidnap the king and secure concessions for the practice of their religion. More serious was the ‘Main’ plot to oust James and replace him with his cousin Arbella Stuart. The most dangerous conspiracy of all came in 1605, when a group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby schemed to blow up the king and his parliament. It was only thanks to an anonymous tip-off that Westminster was searched by the royal officials, and Guy Fawkes was discovered with a huge cache of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament just hours before he was due to light the fuse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-51245104webready-cdc8473.jpg" width="2844" height="1896" alt="A black and white woodcut shows a young man kneeling down, being embraced by an older man, who is the king. Behind them, there is a group of men and" title="Prince Charles is welcomed by his father, James VI & I, in a 1623 woodcut. The second Stuart monarch of England took seriously the divine right of kings, and alienated his people and parliament (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lessons not learned All of this might have made James pause to consider that perhaps he ought to follow his predecessor’s advice after all. Instead, he doggedly continued his preferred style of monarchy, no matter the cost. Worse still, in preparing his son and heir, Charles, for the throne, James passed on none of the lessons that Elizabeth had tried to teach him. Charles would be a king in the mould of his Stuart father, not his Tudor predecessor. He took his divine right to even greater extremes than his father, and dissolved parliament whenever it refused to carry out his will. As Charles’s turbulent reign wore on, the spectre of uncertainty over the Stuarts’ right to the Tudor throne – uncertainly that, we now know was all too valid – was thrown into sharp relief. By 1642, he had pushed the supremacy of the royal will too far on both sides of the border. The kingdom was plunged into bitterly fought civil wars that culminated in Charles’s execution and the destruction of the monarchy. In the space of half a century, the crown that had glittered so brightly on Elizabeth’s head had been consigned to the flames. CONTENDERS FOR THE CROWN There was no shortage of people with designs on Elizabeth I’s English throne. But who had the best chance of success? The Scottish thorn Mary, Queen of Scots had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth’s throne. She was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland. As a Catholic, she enjoyed considerable support among those in England who opposed their queen’s Protestant faith. But Henry VIII’s will had barred his Scottish relatives from inheriting the crown of England. Furthermore, a law passed in 1350, during the reign of Edward III, decreed that “aliens” (those not born on English soil) could not inherit any land there. Nevertheless, Mary campaigned tirelessly to be named heir, and was executed for trying to take the English throne by force. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10) The front runner James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded to his mother’s throne when she was ousted from it in 1567. He also inherited her claim to Elizabeth’s throne, though Mary’s execution in 1587 threw that into jeopardy, because those related to a convicted traitor were tainted by association. In his favour was the fact that by the time of Elizabeth’s death he had a proven track record of ruling a kingdom and, even better, was male. He also enjoyed the strongest support within the English government, and the tacit support of Elizabeth herself – though Henry VIII’s and Edward III’s statutes meant that James’s accession in 1603 was technically illegal. (Contender rating: 7 out of 10) The arrogant orphan Like James, Arbella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, but had the advantage of being born on English soil. Team Arbella was also bolstered by the efforts of her two indomitable grandmothers, Lady Margaret Douglas (Henry VIII’s niece) and Bess of Hardwick, who promoted the claim of “poor orphan Arbella”. Arbella, though, was her own worst enemy. Haughty and arrogant, she alienated Queen Elizabeth, and her unstable temperament made her ill-suited for the throne. During James’s reign, she secretly married another blood claimant, William Seymour, grandson of Lady Katherine Grey (see below), and spent the rest of her life a prisoner in the Tower. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10) The marrying type Henry VIII had decreed that, in the event that his three children died without issue, the crown would pass to the descendants of his younger sister Mary. This gave Katherine Grey (Mary’s granddaughter) and her descendants the strongest legal basis for their claim, strengthened by the fact that Edward VI had made the Greys his primary heirs. Katherine sought to boost her chances further by secretly marrying Edward Seymour, the nephew of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour. But this backfired: Elizabeth condemned Katherine to life behind bars, and had her two sons declared illegitimate. However, they and their descendants continued to be seen as strong contenders for Elizabeth’s throne for years afterwards. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10) The "nearest in blood" Lady Margaret Stanley was the daughter of Eleanor Brandon, younger daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary. Margaret alleged that her cousins were debarred from the succession because of Lady Jane Grey’s treason, leaving her next in line by Henry VIII’s will and “as the nearest in blood… legitimately of English birth”. Also in her favour was the fact that she had two living sons, Ferdinando and William. She was, though, Catholic. (Contender rating: 4 out of 10) The uninterested Yorkist Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon was of the old Yorkist line. His great-great-grandmother was Lady Margaret Pole, niece of King Edward IV. His grandfather had for a time been a close personal friend of Henry VIII. In stark contrast to all the other contenders, though, Hastings showed no interest in the crown, and spent his life in loyal service to Elizabeth. Still, she didn’t trust him, and it was only after years in the political wilderness that she finally appointed him to office. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10) The Spanish princess When his own attempts to seize Elizabeth’s throne by force failed, Philip II of Spain promoted those of his daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. She was said to be “of the ancient blood royal of England” through her mother, Elisabeth of Valois. As such, she was a legitimate descendant of John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III, whereas the Tudors were descended from his illegitimate line. But the people of England were notoriously xenophobic, viewing even James of Scotland as an “alien”, and unlikely to ever accept a Spanish queen. (Contender rating: 3 out of 10)
How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all
There have long been whispers of a romance between the queen and her Scottish servant John Brown, but nothing concrete to support them. Now Fern Riddell, author of an explosive new book, reveals how she turned sleuth to track down evidence of their secret passion
The story that’s consumed my life for much of the past few years has it all: family dysfunction, political intrigue, royalty, the rewriting of our national history. A secret hidden for generations. These are the sort of things historians can get carried away by. When we’re undertaking historical research, it often becomes clear that the relationship between fact and fiction can be a murky one. There’s often a gap between what we want the truth to be and the reality of the lives that have been lived. So it was with my latest project. After four months of research, I couldn’t quite believe what I’d uncovered. I’d been tracing the footsteps of both historians and historical people, and I was finally convinced that what I’d found came close to representing irrefutable proof of a remarkable secret – one offering an answer to a 160-year-old question. But making the breakthrough didn’t come without risk – one faced by nearly every historian who had got so far before me, and who turned back at the final hurdle, unable to bring their research to light. WATCH | Fern Riddell on her quest to discover the secrets of Victoria's later love life View Green Video on the source website So, before I pushed ahead, I called a trusted friend and mentor to discuss what I thought I’d discovered. “I’ve found it,” I exclaimed. “I’ve found the lost archive of Queen Victoria and John Brown.” Royal inspiration Towards the end of 2021, my agent, Kirsty McLachlan, had set me a challenge. “You need a new project,” she declared. “What can you say about Queen Victoria?” “I don’t do the royals,” I retorted, instantly rejecting the suggestion. “Anyway, most royal historians face censorship the moment they find anything interesting.” My focus has always been on the stories of ordinary people – what we call ‘history from below’. These are the lives that fascinate me, not those of the wealthy and powerful. Victoria felt like a lost cause. After all, what could be left to discover about one of history’s most famous women? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/TOPFOTO-hip2652872-2webready-c8032de.jpg" width="1500" height="916" alt="A painting shows Queen Victoria dressed all in black on top of a black horse. To the left, John Brown, dressed in black with a kilt, stands holding the horse's reign. By him, two dogs lay on the ground. On the far left, two women, dressed in blue and beige are seated on a bench. In the background, there is a large yellow manor house" title="A painting of Victoria and John Brown at Osborne House, her private family home on the Isle of Wight, in 1865. Brown began accompanying the queen more frequently after Albert’s death, first joining her at Osborne in 1864 (Image by TopFoto)" /> But there has always been something fascinating about Queen Victoria. She is an enigma: a woman who became the cornerstone of an empire, a queen, a wife, a mother and an icon of an entire age. Her life with her husband, Prince Albert, has been the subject of multiple dramas and documentaries, as has her grief-stricken widowhood after his death in 1861, aged only 42. But what this passionate mother of nine did for her own comfort in the lonely decades that followed has only been whispered about, until now. There have long been rumours surrounding Queen Victoria’s relationship with her Scottish Highland servant, John Brown. Were they lovers? Did they marry in secret? Did they even have a child together? However, no one had been able to establish the truth. This, I decided, was something that piqued my curiosity – a thread to pull and see where it led. John Brown is often relegated to a footnote in Victoria’s history, glossed over as a servant, or awkwardly portrayed as ‘just a friend’. Yet for almost 20 years he stood at Victoria’s side as her “strong right arm”, her “best friend” – and, as I discovered, her “beloved John” and her “true and devoted one”. But as I carefully set out on my research, I had little comprehension of the journey I was about to take, nor the astonishing secret it would reveal. Read more | “There was a general perception that Queen Victoria’s mourning was neither normal nor acceptable” Searching for sources With the thought of perhaps writing about Victoria’s mid-life, I ordered every book ever written about John Brown. Modern historians have long believed this to be a pointless effort, knowing that most of John’s original documents – his diaries, letters and more – were destroyed by members of Victoria’s court after his death in 1883. But I felt sure that something must remain somewhere. I started with Queen Victoria’s John Brown by EEP Tisdall, which was published in 1938. It’s gossipy and fun, but entirely devoid of references or sources – useless for my purposes, except for insights into how John was seen 50 years after his death. Next up was Tom Cullen’s The Empress Brown: The Story of a Royal Friendship, released some three decades later. This turned out to be a goldmine. In its pages are a series of letter facsimiles from Victoria, the original documents faithfully reproduced for readers. They showcase such a tenderness between Victoria and John, as well as his family, and I felt an itch – a historian’s twitch – that there was much more to this history than I had been aware of before. While combing Cullen’s acknowledgements, I saw a reference to John’s descendants, and a brief mention that they held a family archive. This is also hinted at by Raymond Lamont-Brown, author of John Brown: Queen Victoria’s Highland Servant (2000). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-514896440webready-5a9d214.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of Victoria and Albert. He sits on the left, dressed in a black suit and bow tie, with one arm leaning on the back of the seat and the other holding a scroll. Victoria, dressed in a long white dress, sits on the right, looking slightly away from Albert and the camera" title="Victoria and Albert in 1854, some 14 years after the queen married her first cousin. By the time this photograph was taken, she had already borne eight of the nine children they would have together (Image by Getty Images)" /> That was when things started to become interesting. Although rumours of a family archive, kept safe by John’s surviving relatives, have long swirled, no one would say where it was held or if it still existed. This felt like a mystery I wanted to solve. These letters must be real, I thought – more than one person claimed to have seen them – yet only Cullen provided evidence. No historian since had been able to bring them into the public eye. Had they been destroyed? Lost? Or were they still out there, waiting to be found? I started by tracing John’s surviving family: the descendants of his brothers James, Donald, William, Hugh and Archie. Hugh and Hilda Lamond, grandchildren of John’s second-youngest brother Hugh, appear in historians’ acknowledgements more than once, and I became convinced that they must have been the guardians of the family archive. But their own descendants emigrated to the US in the 1970s, and I had no idea how to contact them. I reminded myself that modern historians need to be able to utilise many different tools and skill sets for our research. One of the most powerful resources we have today is the internet, providing access to digitised records. In the space of a single afternoon, using the gigantic global databases available via Ancestry and Scotland’s People, I mapped out John Brown’s entire family – including his brothers and cousins – through births, marriages, deaths and census records. This led me to Minnesota, and a burning question: did John Brown’s great-great-great-nieces still hold on to their family’s precious collection, packed carefully in moving crates, carried down the generations and now possibly on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Long shot At that point, the pandemic continued to hold the world in its grip. How was I to get in touch with Brown’s relatives some 4,000 miles away in the US? Genealogy can get you only so far, and I had no up-to-date contact information. And yet… might they be on Facebook? It seemed like the longest of shots but, as I typed their names into the search bar, a result flashed up instantly. A connection to the descendants of Hugh Brown – the only people who might, just possibly, hold the keys to the John Brown family archive – was right in front of me. I opened up Facebook’s messenger app and began to type, unsure if I would get a response. Eventually I hit send – and sat back to wait. Days and weeks went by, with no response from Minnesota. So I returned to the documents I could access – those letters uncovered by Cullen more than 50 years ago – for hints that some of John Brown’s papers must have survived somewhere. On a whim, I typed lines from the letters into Google – and, to my shock, a link to an archive in Aberdeen appeared. Suddenly, there it was in high definition, staring back at me: an original letter, kept safe by Aberdeen City Archives. As I gazed at the screen, the realisation slowly dawned on me that I could confirm for the first time the existence of part of the John Brown family archive. Surely it couldn’t be simply sitting there, waiting to be discovered? But I learned a long time ago that, with a history and a nation as diverse as ours, and with correspondingly bulging archives, answers are often to be found sitting in plain sight. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain Within an hour I found two more letters in the archives, digitised and perfunctorily labelled. There was nothing to give away their significance, no indication of their importance. But if I could confirm that at least some of the archive had survived, then might that prove there was more out there to find? And why, after John Brown’s family had kept this secret for so long, was some of it now available in a public archive with little information and no fanfare? I booked a research trip to Aberdeen. Meanwhile, I began the forensic work of raking through the city’s entire online library, collections and archives. I realised that references to John Brown, both artefacts and letters, are scattered across Aberdeen’s new Treasure Hub, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Town House archive. On my first research trip to the city, I held the original letters in my hands, reading in Victoria’s own handwriting her memories of John: “So often I told him no one loved him more than I did… and he answered, ‘nor you than me, no-one loves you more’.” I was awestruck by this powerful declaration between Victoria and John. In Town House, the team allowed me to rifle through the collection of the writer, artist and historian Fenton Wyness. I’d found a passing reference that this included some material on Brown, but what I found there astonished me. At some point in the 1950s or 1960s, Wyness – a local Aberdeenshire historian – decided to write about John Brown. Like Tom Cullen, he was given access to the John Brown family archive, which he then proceeded to photograph in its entirety. Now, in the archive in Aberdeen, I realised that a record of the letters, documents, cards and gifts from Victoria to John and his family was sitting in boxes all around me. It’s an incredible resource to study – a reference collection that is utterly unmatched. Pieces of the puzzle Over the three years that followed, as I travelled to Aberdeen and to other archives and private collections across the country, Victoria and John’s life together began to unfold. And the story is vastly different to the one we have been told before – as I reveal in my new book, Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen. The documents I unearthed and studied provide undeniable proof of an intense love affair and, I believe, evidence that John Brown and Victoria did indeed marry – as well as of a determined and ongoing campaign to eradicate him from her history after their deaths. The language Victoria used in her letters to describe her relationship with John deepened as the years went by. She called him her “darling one”, “faithful and devoted”, while describing herself as his “true and devoted one”. Cards she sent him, recorded in the John Brown family archive, are printed with the words “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” and poems such as “I send my sewing maiden / with new year’s letter laden, / its words will prove / my faith and love, / to you my heart’s best treasure, / then smile on her and smile on me, / and let your answer loving be / and give me pleasure.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/Alamy-3BJNGW8webready-262dc4c.jpg" width="1500" height="1911" alt="A man sits facing the left. He has a thick beard and brown hair and has a blue collared jacket" title="Norman Macleod, Victoria’s Scottish chaplain, portrayed in a posthumous painting. He reportedly confessed on his deathbed to marrying the queen and John Brown (Image by Alamy)" /> Also revealed in Victoria’s Secret is the possibility that Victoria and John had an ‘irregular marriage’, a legal marriage under Scottish law that involved an exchange of vows and potentially rings, the evidence of which sits in portraits and photographs of John from 1873 onwards. Add to this the fact that Victoria’s Scottish chaplain, Norman Macleod, confessed on his deathbed to marrying them, and that Victoria went to her grave wearing John’s mother’s wedding ring – a point that was hidden from her children at the time – and it feels to me like solid, irrefutable evidence of their relationship. Floored by photos Although I tried to remain clinical and dispassionate as I weighed the material that I was collecting, a couple of objects floored me. In Treasure Hub sits a photographic album Victoria dedicated and gifted to John’s mother, Margaret Leys. It is bursting with pictures of both Brown’s family and her own, side by side – a record of all of the people who mattered to them. But nothing prepared me for the revelation that, in the week after John’s death, Victoria had his hand cast and then carved in stone. The photograph of this object in Fenton Wyness’s collection – the tender placement of John’s hand on a pillow, the importance given to a signet ring that he wore every day from 1873 onwards – felt like a gut punch. Finally, there is a pair of four-leafed clovers that Victoria and John collected, and which he dried and taped into a scrapbook, their stems crossed over one another for eternity. In the Victorian language of flowers, this has a singular meaning: Be Mine. I still had unanswered questions, though – and the only people who might have been able to help answer them were thousands of miles away in America. Fortunately, at that stage Angela, one of Hugh Brown’s descendants whom I’d attempted to contact via Facebook, got in touch. She is bubbly and forthright – and, with the agreement of her family, was happy to discuss their history and the stories she had heard while growing up. Read more | Queen of spies? Inside Queen Victoria’s secret intelligence network Over a series of calls, emails and texts, she slowly began to trust me with a secret her family had kept for a very long time. Not only do they have the final remnants of the John Brown family archive, including original documents, such as Victoria’s own investigation into John’s family history, but they also guard a story that is fantastical and amazing. Angela was sanguine, telling me that “it’s just what I’ve always been told – I don’t know if it’s true”. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: could this be the final missing piece of the puzzle for which I’d been searching so long? Throughout my research, and across John’s life, one of his siblings featured more prominently than all of the others: Hugh, whose family became the guardians of John and Victoria’s legacy. As I was writing and researching, it became increasingly clear that, though all of John’s brothers and their families mattered to Victoria, Hugh and his wife, Jessie, were most dear to the queen. Unusually among John’s extensive clan, they had only one child – a daughter, Mary Ann, Angela’s great-grandmother. According to Angela, Mary Ann was the secret child of John Brown and Queen Victoria. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1450268872webready-5502a62-e1753974720717.jpg" width="1488" height="1010" alt="Victoria pictured with her children and a bust of Prince Albert, 1863. Beatrice was the last of her babies officially recorded – but did the queen later give birth to another daughter, fathered by John Brown? (Image by Getty Images)" title="Victoria pictured with her children and a bust of Prince Albert, 1863. Beatrice was the last of her babies officially recorded – but did the queen later give birth to another daughter, fathered by John Brown? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Whispers of a love child have swirled since the 1860s, but historians have always been quick to dismiss such rumours. They claim that Victoria was unable to have more children after the birth of her last acknowledged daughter, Princess Beatrice, in 1857, as she suffered from a prolapsed uterus. However, this condition was only discovered after the queen’s death in 1901. None of Victoria’s doctors reported any evidence that she suffered it in the aftermath of Beatrice’s birth. As a prolapsed uterus is common – nearly half of women over 50 will experience some form of pelvic organ prolapse during their lifetime – I believe this ‘fact’ has become historical misinformation, used to discredit any chance of a child between Victoria and John. Moreover, as I discovered during my research, although Victoria was advised not to have more children after Beatrice, it had no connection to her physical health. After her repeated battles with severe post-partum depression, including hallucinations and possibly even psychosis, Victoria’s doctors were terrified that another pregnancy would send her mad. This was the reason why she was advised against having any further children. But there is even evidence to suggest that she was planning to have another baby before Prince Albert died in 1861. “Mama so longed for another child,” her eldest daughter, ‘Vicky’ (Victoria), wrote after Albert’s death. So it is perfectly possible that Victoria could have had a child with John in 1865, the year of Mary Ann’s birth. The queen was healthy, fertile and only 45. Many of John’s female relatives – indeed, Victorian women more generally – had children into their mid- to late forties. Journey of discovery It was not the end of the story, of course. But that discovery set me on a long journey to try to separate family memory from historical fact. My research took me from the glorious glens of the Scottish Highlands to the wildness of 1860s Otago in New Zealand’s South Island, and back again. The reality of Victoria’s secret was long buried by panicking politicians, government campaigns, cowardly courtiers and family rebellion. Without DNA evidence, we may never know the truth – but, every time I speak to Angela, I find myself surreptitiously looking for any resemblance to Victoria in her face. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/10508806webready-4fb264a-e1753974815126.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="A statue showing an man with white hair, dressed in a jacket and kilt" title="A statue of John Brown at Balmoral. “The revelation that the queen chose the son of a Scottish crofter as her second husband, and potentially had a child with him, would have rocked Victorian society like a nuclear explosion,” writes Fern Riddell (Image by Mary Evans)" /> The revelation that the queen chose the son of a Scottish crofter as her second husband, and potentially had a child with him, would have rocked Victorian society like a nuclear explosion. Her world did not believe that a common man could look at a king as an equal, let alone marry a queen. Yet, based on the evidence I’ve found, I believe that this is exactly what Victoria did. Far from remaining the grieving widow for the rest of her days, she spent her passionate mid-life privately joined to a man who saw her as “his only object in life”. Now it is time for John and his family to take their rightful place in history once again. Dr Fern Riddell’s new book, Victoria’s Secret (Ebury Press), is out now in hardback. The book has inspired a Channel 4 documentary, Queen Victoria: Secret Marriage, Secret Child?, which is available to stream now This article is in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
In 1579, the queen embarked on a romance with a French duke she affectionately dubbed her “frog”. The pair seemed destined for marriage. Yet, writes Elizabeth Tunstall, the people of England had other ideas…
On 17 August 1579, a ship sailed up the Thames and dropped anchor in Greenwich. Moments later a duke emerged, dressed in the finest clothes that money could buy, and conversing with his entourage in French. The prince’s nationality might have provoked the suspicion – if not the outright hostility – of many residents of Tudor London. Yet this Frenchman was about to be welcomed into the heart of Richmond Palace. There he would be entertained lavishly, wined and dined at parties and balls. And all with good reason. For this Frenchman was being lined up to marry Queen Elizabeth I. Over the centuries, Elizabeth’s romantic travails have become one of the great soap operas of English history. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558 as a 25-year-old, it was widely expected that she would find herself a husband and produce an heir to carry on the Tudor dynasty for another generation. However, while the queen had several suitors over the years, each proposed match hit the rocks before she could be tempted to offer her hand in marriage. From English earls to Scandinavian kings, none quite fitted the bill. And so, by the time the party of Frenchmen disembarked in Greenwich in the summer of 1579, Elizabeth was well on her way to securing her place in the history books as the ‘Virgin Queen’: the woman who would, so we’re told, sacrifice her heart for the good of the nation. Yet she wasn’t done with trying just yet. As her 46th birthday closed in, Elizabeth would embark on one final bid to find a husband. And this one would take her closer to marriage than perhaps any courtship yet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/FFWM82-cmyk-WL-0294cdd.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A cow stands in the middle of the image, being ridden by a man in a dark cloak and hat. Behind the cow, a man wearing light pink holds its tail, while another man milks the cow. In front of the cow stands Elizabeth I, dressed in white and another man dressed all in black" title="his painting, dating to the 1580s, depicts the fraught diplomatic backdrop to Elizabeth I’s courtship with the Duke of Anjou. The queen feeds a cow (representing the Dutch Provinces), which defecates on the duke (left). Philip II of Spain attempts, in vain, to ride the cow away, while Dutch leader William of Orange holds the animal steady by its horns (Image by Alamy)" /> So who was the Frenchman who almost changed the course of English history? And why – as she entered the embrace of middle age – was the queen considering marrying him now? The suitor’s name was François de Valois, Duke of Anjou, fourth son of King Henri II of France and Catherine de’ Medici. Anjou had begun life as a royal also-ran, with little prospect of ascending the French throne. Yet, by the early 1570s, he found himself heir to his childless brother, Henri III. The duke was now odds-on to succeed his sibling as King of France. That made him a figure of immense importance. Read more | Elizabeth I's accession day celebrations Anjou was also eager to make his mark on Europe by campaigning against Spanish forces in the Netherlands. And it’s this last fact that brought him into Elizabeth’s orbit in the late 1570s. With England becoming increasingly isolated from Europe – and relations with Spain deteriorating fast – Elizabeth’s advisors were desperate to forge enduring ties with allies across the channel. What better way to achieve exactly that than by suggesting a match between Elizabeth and the French duke? The union had been proposed as early as 1572, but it wasn’t until 1579 that Elizabeth herself fully committed to the courtship. At the outset, the queen’s interest in Anjou was purely the product of political necessity, for a marriage alliance with France would help stave off the growing military threat presented by Spain. But, as the two got to know one another in August 1579, the relationship became personal, the first courtship to do so since the queen’s flirtation with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester two decades earlier. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/BAL106934cmyk-WL-17415c0.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A portrait of Elizabeth I in c1575–80. The middle-aged queen was 21 years older than her French suitor (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="A portrait of Elizabeth I in c1575–80. The middle-aged queen was 21 years older than her French suitor (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> French connections While Anjou was not a physically impressive figure – possessing bandy legs and a scarred face from a bout of smallpox – Elizabeth undoubtedly grew fond of him, calling him her “frog” on account of his appearance and his gravelly voice. He was highly attentive, which she very much enjoyed. The two conversed in French, as it was the only language they shared. And, despite the fact that Anjou was 21 years younger than the queen, they found plenty to talk about. Also playing to the duke’s advantage was the fact that he had made the journey to England at all. Throughout her many courtships, Elizabeth had stuck to the firm position that she “would never marry with any person whom she should not first herself see”. Her demand to meet a potential husband before committing herself to marriage was viewed at the time with astonishment. Royal courtships were long-distance affairs in the 16th century – to such an extent that even the marriage itself could be carried out with ambassadors standing in as proxies for the bride. Through each courtship Elizabeth had held her ground, yet no suitor had chosen to make the journey to her court. All that changed with Anjou. Read more | Anne Boleyn's youth: how her years on the continent made her a match for Henry VIII Violent opposition The duke could not stay in England for long and, on 29 August, sailed back to France. His visit had, to all intents and purposes, been a diplomatic and personal success. Yet there was a catch. And it was a major one. This had been a trip that the English government had attempted to keep secret. Anjou had travelled to London under a pseudonym: Seigneur du Pont de Sé. However, it didn’t take long for the true identity of the queen’s guest to seep beyond the confines of the court – and, once it did, it triggered a firestorm of opposition. But why? In short, Elizabeth was a Protestant; Anjou was a Catholic. And in a Europe riven by the Reformation and religious war, marriage between two people of differing beliefs was, to most, simply unthinkable. Within one week of Anjou’s visit, England was awash with a public outcry against the match. London preachers decried the marriage from their pulpits. Popular ballads made their rounds. Anonymous verses and pamphlets lampooned the match. Threats to meet French attention with violence began to appear in public spaces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/J2WF3A-WL-ce28264.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The English court laid on lavish dinners and balls at Richmond Palace (shown in an engraving) to impress the duke during his 1579 visit (Image by Alamy)" title="The English court laid on lavish dinners and balls at Richmond Palace (shown in an engraving) to impress the duke during his 1579 visit (Image by Alamy)" /> It was into this tumult that John Stubbs, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, published a pamphlet with the catchy title ‘The discovery of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof’. Stubbs’ work argued that the clandestine nature of Anjou’s visit demonstrated a “very strange this unmanlike, unprincelike, secret, fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy French kind of wooing in monsieur”. It wasn’t only the French duke who Stubbs pursued in his work. He also questioned why Elizabeth would consent to marry “an imp of the crown of France”. In his view, and many others, at Elizabeth’s age any pregnancy would likely result in her death. If a child was born it was feared that it would result in England becoming a vassal state to France rather than securing an independent future for the Protestant realm. Upon learning of Stubbs’ pamphlet, Elizabeth was furious. For her, the matter of her marriage was deeply personal and a matter of royal prerogative. And it didn’t escape her notice that Stubbs’ arguments mirrored those that had also been raised against the Anjou match within her Privy Council. Could her own councillors have leaked information to the wayward lawyer? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/HIP2806978WL-d5e2fa6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man with a ruff collar and wearing a black hat with a feathered embellishment on the left of it stands against a black background" title="A portrait of the future Duke of Anjou from 1572. The prospect of Elizabeth I marrying a Catholic Frenchman triggered a firestorm of hostility across England (Image by TopFoto)" /> It wasn’t long before the authorities attempted to suppress public opposition to the match. Stubbs was tried for seditious writing and taken to the public scaffold in the marketplace of Westminster on 3 November. There his right hand was removed with a cleaver before an unusually silent crowd. It was not only the wider public that challenged Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Anjou. Sir Philip Sydney, the courtier and poet, wrote a letter to his queen that circulated in the court, and though he did not face the same punishment as Stubbs, he shared much of the same fears over the match. He argued that, should Elizabeth marry Anjou, her people’s “hearts will be galled, if not alienated, when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman, a papist, in whom, howsoever fine wits may find further dangers or painted excuses, the very common people well know this: that he is the son of the Jezebel of our age”. To Sydney, Anjou represented the worst possible suitor, a Catholic Frenchman who would only lead Protestant England to ruin. A name but no power Despite the ferocity of these objections, the marriage negotiations continued. In late November, a delegation of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, led by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, worked with Anjou’s representative, Jean de Simier, to create a draft marriage contract. This document was based on the union of Elizabeth’s sister, Mary I, with Philip II of Spain, and would see Anjou granted the title of king but little real power in England. But it did have one new clause: it gave Elizabeth the right to withdraw within two months of signing the contract. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/RCXA6Xcmyk-WL-c6aab09.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting shows Elizabeth I being carried through the streets, surrounded by a large crowd of courtiers" title="Elizabeth I surrounded by her courtiers. The queen’s Privy Council ploughed on with marriage negotiations, even when it was clear that the public despised the idea (Image by Alamy)" /> And sign the contract is exactly what Elizabeth did. Now, with 1579 drawing to a close, the queen was further along the road to marriage than she would be at any point in her reign. Yet she wasn’t married yet. And such was the continuing strength of the hostility towards the match that within a few short weeks she felt she had no choice but to turn back. She wrote to Anjou that “I do not want this negotiation to trouble you thus any more”, but still hoped “that we may remain faithful friends and assured in all out actions”. Her contractual get-out clause was duly activated. Elizabeth’s change of heart would, you might think, signal the end of her courtship with Anjou. But it was revived on one more occasion. In April 1581 a French delegation arrived in England to discuss once more the prospects of a marriage alliance between the two kingdoms. Elizabeth herself had turned away from the courtship, but – with Spain still threatening English security – she allowed the negotiations to recommence. Those negotiations reached an impasse and would have faded away – but for the return of Anjou to England. Read more | “Elizabeth I was in charge of her fate. Perhaps that’s why Catherine de Medici despised her” On 31 October 1581, the duke arrived at Rye and then travelled onwards to Richmond Palace. In contrast with his first visit, he moved openly and spoke more of alliance than marriage. Both the duke and queen were fully preoccupied by the issues of their nations’ finances and conflict with Spain, but the question of marriage had not disappeared entirely. Three weeks after his arrival, as Elizabeth and Anjou walked along a gallery, they were approached by the French ambassador. The ambassador asked the queen what he could tell his king about the chances of her marrying. In response Elizabeth smiled and replied: “You may write this to the king: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband.” She then proceeded to give Anjou a ring from her finger, accompanied by a kiss. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/T1ME64cmyk-WL-72572d1.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man and a woman sit opposite each other, both dresses in orange and black. They are on a black and orange checkered floor with an orange wall behind them" title="Like Philip II (shown with Mary I), Anjou would have been called ‘king’, but given little power in England (Image by Alamy)" /> Elizabeth’s response to the ambassador sent her court into uproar. That night her ladies expressed their shock. The next morning saw members of her council advising strongly against the match, as it would undermine her relationship with her people. With doubts playing on her mind in the cold light of day, Elizabeth performed yet another volte face, withdrawing her offer to Anjou and telling him that she would be a better friend than a wife. Anjou left London for the Netherlands on 1 February 1582. However, he did not travel the whole way alone. Elizabeth accompanied him as far as Canterbury where she said her farewell to her final suitor. As the duke sailed away from England, he took with him the queen’s last chance at marriage. Anjou’s departure also closed the door on the queen’s youth: at 48-years-old, the games of courtship were no longer hers, and her unmarried state would now define her reign. Today, more than 400 years after these events, it’s tempting to assume that Elizabeth was always destined to be the Virgin Queen – and it was a role in which she revelled. But in the first half of her reign, she engaged in numerous courtships and came close to marrying twice. These two men – the Earl of Leicester and Duke of Anjou – found a special place in the queen’s heart, even when it was unwise for her to allow them that space. On each occasion it was the resistance of her people that prevented her from taking that final step towards matrimony. Elizabeth understood that without the support of her subjects, she risked deposition and civil war. It was this cold, hard reality that prevented her from taking a husband. So maybe it’s time to look upon the Virgin Queen in a new light: as the creation of the people rather than the queen herself. The image of an untouchable woman who preserved the state through her own person was crafted, it seems, not by an individual but a nation. It was a role Elizabeth committed to as she bid Anjou farewell. And it was one that she would play until her final days. Romancing the throne Three other men who were in the frame to marry the Virgin Queen The dashing favourite When Elizabeth took the throne there was some support for the queen to marry an Englishman. But while most looked to the peers of the realm, it was Robert Dudley who had caught both her eye and her heart. Indeed, she once commented that “she thought she could find no person with better qualities”. Dudley was made Master of the Horse shortly after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, a position that allowed him frequent access to his queen. After Dudley’s wife, Amy, died in September 1560 it appeared that Elizabeth might marry her dashing favourite. However, the suspicious circumstances of Amy’s death made the marriage impossible. While their chance was lost, the two would remain close friends until Leicester’s death in 1588. The controversial Catholic After closing the door on marriage with Leicester, Elizabeth consented to the opening of a courtship with Archduke Charles of Austria, the third surviving son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I. For the English, the archduke was seen as a means of easing the escalating tensions with Spain (based on his family ties with the king of Spain), while providing some safety from France. This idea of the match was first raised in 1559 but was only seriously explored from 1563. As with so many of Elizabeth’s foreign courtships, the question of religion proved unresolvable. The potential marriage of Elizabeth to a Catholic caused unrest, leading her to observe that “two persons of different faiths could not live peaceably in one house”, even if that house was England itself. At the end of 1567 she turned Charles down. The eager Swede Elizabeth was first approached by Swedish ambassadors about a courtship with Erik XIV of Sweden in 1558 while still a princess. Erik presented fewer difficulties than many of her other suitors, being a Protestant – and wealthy. This courtship was also elevated by its timing, as leading members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council sought to use his suit to counter that of Dudley. Erik was highly persistent and offered to travel to England to meet Elizabeth in person. Upon hearing of Erik’s intentions, Elizabeth wrote to him, asking “that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship”. Elizabeth was thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments in favour of the match, and it all came to an end in 1562. Elizabeth Tunstall is a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Mary I: your guide to the life and rule of Henry VIII's daughter – plus a timeline and 7 little-known facts
Mary I, aka Mary Tudor or 'Bloody Mary', was the daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The first queen regnant of England, she succeeded the English throne following the death of her half-brother, Edward VI, in 1553. But how much do you know about her? From her phantom pregnancy to her military accomplishments, we bring you the facts about her reign
For centuries, Mary Tudor has been known as a Catholic tyrant who burned nearly 300 people during her short, five-year reign. However, in recent years, historians have attempted to re-evaluate Mary’s reputation, and have argued that Mary deserves more recognition for her work than previously thought. Here, we look back at the queen’s life… Mary I: A brief biography Born: 18 February 1516 at the Palace of Placentia, London Died: 17 November 1558 at St James's Palace, London Remembered for: Being the first queen regnant of England, and for burning nearly 300 Protestant men, women and children during her reign. Ruled: 1553–58 Family: Mary's father wasHenry VIII and her mother was Catherine of Aragon. After Henry’s divorce from Catherine in the 1530s, Henry married five more times. Mary had one half-sister, Elizabeth, and one half-brother, Edward. She also had an illegitimate half-brother called Henry Fitzroy, and it is possible that she had other illegitimate siblings that were not publically acknowledged by Henry VIII. Mary married Philip of Spain (later King Philip II of Spain) in July 1554. The couple had no children, so Mary was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth. Mary I's childhood Born in 1516, Mary received an impressive education from a young age. She was able to speak Spanish, French and Latin, and contemporaries commented that she was a remarkable dancer, and often showed off her talents to ambassadors when they visited Henry VIII at court. When Mary was nine years old, Henry VIII sent his daughter to Wales with her own personal court to act as a royal representative. With this newfound position, many believed that Mary would succeed her father, despite being a girl. However, by the end of the 1520s, Henry VIII had become frustrated with having no male heir to succeed him. The king hoped to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled in order for him to marry someone else and produce a male heir. During her parents’ divorce proceedings, Mary was forbidden from seeing her mother. By 1533, Henry successfully divorced Catherine, made himself the head of the Church of England and married the noblewoman Anne Boleyn. As a result, Mary lost her title as ‘princess’, and was given the lesser title of ‘the Lady Mary’. After Anne gave birth to a baby girl called Elizabeth in September 1533, Mary was declared as illegitimate by an Act of Parliament and was removed from the line of succession. Mary was then forced to join Princess Elizabeth’s household, but frequently stated that she was too ill to attend court in order to avoid the new queen. View Green Video on the source website What was Mary's place in the line of succession? After Anne Boleyn’s fall from power and execution in May 1536, Mary was invited back to court. However, Mary, who was a staunch Roman Catholic, refused to accept her father’s position as the head of the Church of England. Eventually, Thomas Cromwell – Henry VIII’s chief minister – persuaded Mary to submit to Henry’s will and she returned to court during the late 1530s. Mary was then returned to the line of succession in 1544, where the Act of Succession stated she would ascend the throne if her younger brother Edward, who was born in 1537, were to die without issue. Read more | What was Mary Tudor and Thomas Cromwell's relationship – did they plan to marry? After Henry VIII died in 1547, Edward ascended the throne at the age of nine. Mary and Edward had a tempestuous relationship as they differed greatly in their religious views – Edward was a Protestant, while Mary was a Roman Catholic. Shortly before his premature death in 1553, Edward VI removed both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession in favour of his cousin, the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. After Edward’s death in July 1553, Jane was proclaimed queen in London. Despite this, many did not recognise her as such, and saw Mary as the next legitimate heir. Receiving the news of her brother’s death, Mary fled to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, where she gathered her supporters and members of the local gentry. Mary then assembled troops and prepared to fight for her crown. In what many historians recognise as the only successful coup d’état of the 16th century in England, Mary demonstrated that she held great popularity with the public and proved that she was the legitimate heir to the throne. On 19 July 1553, Mary overthrew Lady Jane Grey and was officially proclaimed queen. Contemporary accounts state that people celebrated in the streets and bells were rung across the country. When did Mary I become queen? Mary was 37 and unmarried when she ascended the throne in 1553. She knew that in order to prevent her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth from succeeding her, she needed to marry and produce an heir to secure a Catholic succession. As a result, Mary and her closest aides quickly negotiated a marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain – the heir to the Spanish throne. Read more | When Mary met Philip: a Tudor queen in love However, members of Mary’s council and the public did not approve of this match. Prior to Mary and Philip’s marriage, in early 1554, a group of rebels assembled in London to demonstrate their retaliation to the marriage, led by prominent Protestant landowner Thomas Wyatt the Younger. Mary refused to hide away from this rebellion, and confronted the rebels by making an extraordinary speech at the Guildhall in London. Mary rallied the rebels to support her and asserted her authority as their anointed queen. As a result, the rebels dispersed, and Wyatt was later executed at Tower Hill. Despite these protestations, Mary married Philip of Spain on 25 July 1554 at Winchester Cathedral. By the end of 1554, Mary was convinced that she was pregnant and preparations were made in the birth chamber at Hampton Court. In April 1555, bells rang and bonfires were lit around England as news spread that the queen had given birth to an heir. However, Mary was not pregnant. Despite this, she continued to claim that she was pregnant, and stayed in confinement until August 1555. After her physicians convinced her that she was in fact not pregnant, Mary eventually returned to court. Read more | Mary I's 'phantom pregancy' Why is Mary I known as 'Bloody Mary'? During her reign, Mary revived the heresy laws, which stated that a person who did not follow the faith of the realm would be burned to death. During three years of Mary’s reign, nearly 300 men, women and children were burned at the stake across England for not converting to Catholicism, including Thomas Cranmer, who had been the Archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VIII and Edward VI’s reigns. However, Mary did make great advances during her reign. She restored the navy, renewed the coinage and increased crown revenue, and also established new hospitals, improved the education of the clergy and increased the authority of local government. Despite this, many of her achievements have been overlooked. In 1557, England was dragged into a war with Spain against France. This was a disastrous campaign for Mary’s troops and England officially lost possession of Calais in January 1558, which was its last stakehold in France. Read more about Mary's reappraised reputation | Mary Tudor: brutal but brilliant When did Mary I die? Mary’s health deteriorated soon after the Crown lost possession of Calais, and she died, possibly from cancer, on 17 November 1558, aged 42. She was succeeded by her half-sister, who ruled as Elizabeth I. Mary was then buried in Westminster Abbey, despite claiming she wanted to be buried next to her mother in Peterborough Cathedral. King James V and I arranged for Elizabeth I to be dug up from elsewhere in the abbey three years after her death and moved into Mary’s grave. Timeline: Mary Tudor’s turbulent life 18 February 1516 Mary is born in Greenwich. She is the only child of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon (pictured above), to survive infancy 23 May 1533 Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine is declared invalid five months after he marries a second wife, Anne Boleyn. Mary is deemed illegitimate and stripped of her succession rights 28 January 1547 Henry VIII dies and is succeeded by his son, as Edward VI. Mary repeatedly defies her fervently Protestant half-brother by refusing to renounce her Catholicism 6 July 1553 King Edward VI dies, aged 15. Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant relation of Mary’s, is proclaimed queen four days later 3 August 1553 Having gathered a military force in Suffolk and outmanoeuvred her rivals, Mary rides into London in triumph, accompanied by her half-sister Elizabeth. Lady Jane Grey is imprisoned in the Tower of London 1 October 1553 Mary is crowned queen by her lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, at Westminster Abbey 12 February 1554 Lady Jane Grey is executed on Mary’s orders. Her fate is sealed by the so-called Wyatt rebellion against Mary’s rule, in which her father is implicated 18 March 1554 Mary has her half-sister, Elizabeth, imprisoned in the Tower of London, after it’s alleged that she too supported the Wyatt rebellion. Yet lacking firm evidence of her sister’s guilt, Mary refrains from ordering Elizabeth’s execution 25 July 1554 Despite the reservations of some of the most powerful figures in the English court, Mary marries Philip of Spain at Winchester Cathedral April 1555 Thanksgiving services are held in London after erroneous rumours spread that Mary has given birth to a son. Mary, it seems, has experienced a false pregnancy 21 March 1556 Thomas Cranmer, former archbishop of Canterbury, is burned at the stake. He is one of more than 280 ‘heretics’ executed during Mary's reign 17 November 1558 Mary dies, aged 42, during an influenza epidemic. The English crown passes to her half-sister, Elizabeth 7 facts about the life of Mary I 1. Mary I was declared illegitimate by her father, Henry VIII The only surviving child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Mary I was effectively bastardised when her father divorced her mother in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII claimed that the marriage had been incestuous and illegal, as Catherine had been married to his late brother, Arthur. Following the birth of Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I), in September 1533, an Act of Parliament declared the 17-year-old Mary illegitimate and removed her from the succession to the throne (though she was reinstated by the 1543 Third Act of Succession and by Henry’s will). Mary was denied access to her mother, who had been sent by Henry to live away from court, and never saw her again. Henry VIII’s six wives: your guide to the Tudor king’s queen consorts 2. Mary I remained a devout Catholic Mary was later named heir to the throne after her younger half-brother Edward – but only after she had agreed to recognise their father as head of the church. Nevertheless, Mary remained a devout Catholic. She and her brother had a tempestuous relationship as they differed greatly in their religious views. When, aged nine, Edward VI inherited the throne in 1547 and confronted Mary’s Catholicism, she declared that she would rather lay her head on a block than forsake her faith. 3. Mary was the orchestrator of an extraordinary coup d’état The first queen to rule England in her own right (rather than a queen through marriage to a king), Mary acceded the throne following her brother’s death in July 1553 in what Anna Whitelock describes as “an extraordinary coup d’état”. Edward had written Mary out of the succession and instead named his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne, but Mary enjoyed widespread popular support and days later, on 19 July, she was proclaimed queen. Writing for BBC History Magazine, Anna Whitelock argued: “The scale of [Mary’s] achievement is often overlooked. Mary had led the only successful revolt against central government in 16th-century England. She had eluded capture, mobilised a counter-coup and, in the moment of crisis, proved courageous, decisive and politically adept.” The Tudors: 51 moments that shaped the royal dynasty 4. Mary I is remembered as a bloody queen Mary I is remembered for attempting to reverse the Reformation and return England to Catholicism. As her reign progressed, Mary “grew more and more fervent in her desire”: she restored papal supremacy, abandoned the title of Supreme Head of the Church and reintroduced Roman Catholic bishops. Mary also famously revived old heresy laws to secure the religious conversion of the country – heresy being a treasonable offence. Over the next three-and-a-half years, hundreds of Protestants – most accounts say around 300 – were burned at the stake. 5. Mary I suffered a 'phantom pregnancy' Aged 37 and unmarried when she ascended the throne, Mary knew that in order to prevent her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth from succeeding her, she needed to marry and produce an heir. Mary’s decision in July 1554 to marry Philip of Spain, who in 1556 was to inherit that nation’s throne from his father, Charles V, was “politically expedient”, says Anna Whitelock. In an article for BBC History Magazine, Whitelock wrote: “The marriage treaty was as ‘favourable as possible for the interest and security and even the grandeur of England’, with Mary’s legal rights as queen preserved and Spanish influence kept to a minimum.” In January 1554 Mary faced – and later defeated – a Protestant rebellion led by landowner Thomas Wyatt that aimed to prevent the match with Philip. Wyatt was later executed at Tower Hill. Mary imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth at the Tower of London in 1554, suspecting her of involvement in Wyatt’s plot against her. Elizabeth was later released into house arrest in the country. A peculiar episode in Mary’s reign was her phantom pregnancy of 1555. On 30 April “bells rang, bonfires were lit and there were celebrations in the street, following news that Mary I had given birth to a healthy son. But in reality there was no boy, and eventually all hope of a child died out.” The marriage was childless and Philip eventually deserted Mary, spending most of his time in Europe. 6. Mary I was a highly impressive queen Historians have long focused on the negative aspects of Mary’s five-year reign, branding her a religious bigot and a military failure, but in recent years Mary has been largely reappraised. Anna Whitelock says: “Mary’s accession had changed the rules of the game, and the nature of this new feminised politics was yet to be defined, yet in many respects Mary proved more than equal to the task. Decisions over the details of the practice and power of a queen regnant became precedents for the future. In April 1554 Mary’s parliament passed the Act for Regal Power, which enshrined in law that queens held power as ‘fully, wholly and absolutely’ as their male predecessors, thereby establishing the gender-free authority of the crown.” Mary also restructured the economy and reorganised the militia, rebuilt the navy and successfully managed her parliament. By securing the throne, Mary ensured that the crown continued along the legal line of Tudor succession. Read more | Mary Tudor and her five stepmothers: what was their relationship like? 7. Mary I was not such a military failure Mary is remembered for her unsuccessful war against France that led to the loss of Calais, England's last possession in France, in January 1558. But before the loss of Calais, Mary enjoyed military successes. For example, in August 1557 English and Spanish forces captured Saint-Quentin, an action in which some 3,000 French troops were killed and 7,000 captured, including their commander Anne de Montmorency, the constable of France.
From ‘Bad King John’ and the debauched Gaius Caligula to the “useless” Mary, Queen of Scots, historian Seán Lang rounds up nine of the worst kings and queens in history…
History has no shortage of disastrous kings, queens, and other rulers; such a list could easily have been filled with the worst Roman emperors alone. Some have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; simply incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France or Tsar Nicholas II. But who are truly the worst of the worst, and why? From maniacal medieval monarchs to Habsburg horrors, Dr Seán Lang makes the case against the 9 worst king, queens, and various other leaders from across history... The worst monarchs from history Gaius Caligula Pope John XII King John King Richard II Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ Mary, Queen of Scots Emperor Rudolf II Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar King Leopold II of Belgium Gaius Caligula (AD 12–41) There are plenty of other contenders for worst Roman Emperor – Nero and Commodus for example – but Caligula's mad reign sets a high standard. After a promising start to his reign he seems to have set out specifically to intimidate and humiliate the senate and high command of the army, and he gave grave offence, not least in Jerusalem, by declaring himself a god; even the Romans normally only recognised deification after death. Caligula instituted a reign of terror through arbitrary arrest for treason, much as his predecessor Tiberius had done; it was also widely rumoured that he was engaged in incest with his sisters and that he lived a life of sexual debauchery, and this may well be true. The story of his making his horse a consul, meanwhile, may have been exaggerated, but it was not out of character. Caligula’s unforgivable mistake was to jeopardise Rome's military reputation by declaring a sort of surreal war on the sea, ordering his soldiers to wade in and slash at the waves with their swords and collecting chests full of seashells as the spoils of his ‘victory’ over the water god Neptune, king of the sea and by his failed campaign against the Germans, for which he still awarded himself a triumph. He was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in AD 41. Caligula’s successor, Claudius, was an improvement but, despite the favourable picture in Robert Graves's famous book I, Claudius, not by much. Pope John XII (954–964) Even by the lax standards of the medieval papacy, John XII stands out as a disaster of the highest order. He was elected pope at the ripe old age of 18 as part of a political deal with the Roman nobility, and he inherited a conflict for control of Italy between the papacy and the Italian king Berengarius. John had the support of the powerful German emperor Otto I, who swore to defend John's title, but John himself was too taken up with a life of drunken sex parties in the Lateran to care too much either way. He recovered from his hangover enough to accept Otto's oath of undying loyalty and then promptly linked up behind Otto's back with his enemy, Berengarius. Understandably annoyed, Otto had John overthrown and accused, among other things, of simony (clerical corruption), murder, perjury and incest, and he replaced him with a new pope, Leo VIII. However, John made a comeback and had Leo's supporters punished ruthlessly: one cardinal had his hand cut off and he had a bishop whipped. Full-scale war broke out between John and Otto, until John unexpectedly died – in bed with another man's wife, or so rumour had it. Read more | The murderous history of Bible translations King John (1199–1216) The reign of King John is a salutary reminder that murder and treachery may possibly be forgiven in a monarch, but not incompetence. John was the youngest and favourite son of Henry II, but he had not been entrusted with any lands and was mockingly nicknamed John Lackland. He tried unsuccessfully to seize power while his brother Richard I was away on crusade and was sent into exile upon Richard's return. On his accession John had his own nephew Arthur murdered, fearing Arthur might pursue his own, much better, claim to the throne, and he embarked on a disastrous war with King Philippe-Auguste of France in which he lost the whole of Normandy. This singular act of incompetence deprived the barons of an important part of their power base, and he alienated them further with arbitrary demands for money and even by forcing himself on their wives. Read more | Was King John murdered? In exasperation they forced him to accept Magna Carta; no sooner had he sealed it, however, than he then went back on his word and plunged the country into a maelstrom of war and French invasion. Some tyrants have been rehabilitated by history – but not John. King Richard II (1377–99) Unlike Richard III, Richard II has good reason to feel grateful towards Shakespeare, who portrayed this startlingly incompetent monarch as a tragic figure; a victim of circumstances and of others' machinations rather than the vain, self-regarding author of his own downfall he actually was. Learning nothing from the disastrous precedent of Edward II, Richard II alienated the nobility by gathering a bunch of cronies around him and then ended up in confrontation with parliament over his demands for money. His reign descended into a game of political manoeuvre between himself and his much more able and impressive uncle, John of Gaunt, before degenerating into a gory grudge match between Richard and the five Lords Appellant, whom he either had killed or forced into exile. Richard might have redeemed himself by prowess in war or administration, but he possessed neither. Henry Bolingbroke's coup of 1399, illegal though it no doubt was, brought to an end Richard's disastrous reign. Richard II has his defenders nowadays, who will doubtless take issue with his inclusion in this list, but there really is very little to say for him as a ruler. Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the houses of Lancaster and York Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ (1547–84) Prince Ivan Vassilyevitch grew up at the hazardous court of Moscow, his life often in danger from the rivalry of the boyars – nobles. It gave him a lifelong hatred of the nobility and a deep streak of ruthless cruelty – aged 13 he had one boyar eaten alive by dogs. Ivan was Prince of Muscovy from 1533, and in 1547 he was crowned Tsar (Emperor) of all Russia – the first ruler to hold the title. He crushed the boyars, stealing their lands to give to his own followers; he also condemned millions of Russians to a permanent state of serfdom. Ivan took a vast area of Russia as his personal domain patrolled by a mounted police force with carte blanche to arrest and execute as they liked. Distrusting the city of Novgorod he had it violently sacked and its inhabitants massacred, and he embarked on a disastrous and ultimately unsuccessful series of wars with Russia's neighbours. Ivan beat up his own pregnant daughter-in-law and killed his son in a fit of rage. Ivan was in many ways an able ruler, but his ruthlessness, paranoia and taste for blood earn him his place in this list. Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–67) We are so familiar with the drama and tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots' reign that it is easy to overlook the blindingly obvious point that she was absolutely useless as queen of Scotland. Admittedly, ruling 16th-century Scotland was no easy task, and it was made harder still for Mary by the stern Presbyterian leader, John Knox, and her violent, boorish husband, Lord Darnley. Nevertheless, Mary showed none of her cousin Elizabeth I's political skill in defusing religious or factional conflict, and she headed into pointless confrontation with Knox and the Presbyterians. At a time when female rule was generally regarded with suspicion in any case, she played up to the stereotype by appearing to live in a cosy world of favourites – including her unfortunate Italian guitar teacher, David Rizzio. Read more | How did Mary, Queen of Scots fall from grace? Mary’s suspected involvement in the spectacular murder of Darnley on 10 February 1567 was a political mistake of the first order; her marriage three months later to the main suspect, the Earl of Bothwell, was an act of breathtaking stupidity. It is hardly surprising that the Scots overthrew Mary and locked her up. Having escaped, she was mad to throw away her advantage by going to England, where she could only be regarded as a threat, instead of to France, where she would have been welcomed with open arms. Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612) Some historians are kinder to Rudolf than in the past, but by any standards he was a disastrous ruler. He was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1576, though he was prone to long bouts of deep depression and melancholia and he spent most of his time dabbling in alchemy and astrology. A staunch Catholic, Rudolf tore up the religious settlement that for the past 20 years had kept Germany's Catholics and Protestants from each others' throats, and embarked on a crusade to eradicate Protestantism from Germany's towns and villages. On the podcast | Everything you need to know about the Holy Roman Empire When the Protestants formed a self-defence league, the Hungarians rose in revolt and the Turks launched an offensive, Rudolf shut himself up in Prague Castle and refused to speak to anyone. Eventually the Habsburgs had to agree to replace Rudolf with his brother, Matthias, who restored the religious peace in Germany and signed treaties with the Turks and Hungarians, only for Rudolf to fly into a rage and start up the Turkish war again. Rudolf reluctantly signed the letter of majesty granting freedom of worship to Protestants in Bohemia but then embarked on a programme of persecution. The Bohemians appealed to Matthias for help, and in 1611 Rudolf was forced to hand power over to his brother. He died a year later, having laid the foundations for the disastrous Thirty Years’ War that would tear Europe apart within six years of his death. Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar (1828–61) At a time when the Europeans were spreading their colonial holdings around the world, Queen Ranavalona was able to keep Madagascar free of British and French control, but she did so by establishing a rule so ruthless that it has been estimated that the population of her kingdom was halved during her reign. Queen Ranavalona maintained her power by retaining the loyalty of the Malagasy army and imposing regular periods of forced labour on the rest of the population in lieu of taxation. On one notorious occasion she organised a buffalo hunt for herself, her nobles and their families and followers, and she insisted that an entire road be built in front of the party for them all to advance to the hunt in comfort: an estimated 10,000 people died carrying out this particular piece of folly. Queen Ranavalona faced several plots and at least one serious coup attempt; as she grew more paranoid she forced more people to undergo the notorious tangena test: eating three pieces of chicken skin before swallowing a poisonous nut that caused the victim to vomit (if it did not actually poison them, which it often did). If all three pieces were not found in the vomit, the victim was executed. Having encouraged Christianity at the start of her reign, Queen Ranavalona changed policy and instituted ruthless persecution of native Christians. She survived all plots against her and died in her bed. King Leopold II of Belgium (1865–1909) Leopold's place in this list results not from his rule in Belgium, but from the crimes committed in the enormous kingdom he carved out for himself in Congo. He obtained the territory by international agreement and named it the Congo Free State; it was not a Belgian colony, but the king's personal fiefdom. The CFS was presented to the world as a model of liberty and prosperity, devoted to the elimination of slavery. Only gradually did the world learn that it was in fact a slave state in which the Congolese were ruled by terror. As Leopold raked in the riches from Congo's enormous reserves of copper, ivory and rubber, the Congolese were forced to work by wholesale mutilation of their wives and children, usually by chopping off their hands or feet. Mutilation was also widely used as a punishment for workers who ran away or collected less than their quota. Read more | How to be a successful monarch An investigation by the British consular official Roger Casement revealed that the Belgian Force Publique regarded the Congolese as little more than animals to be killed for sport. The king fought a high-profile legal battle to prevent details of his regime in Congo from being made public, and it took an international campaign to force him to hand Congo over to the Belgian government. Leopold's name is forever associated with the Congolese reign of terror, and that alone justifies his inclusion in this list.