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Did Rasputin really bring down the Tsars? The truth behind the dark legend of the Russian mystic
Danny Bird speaks to Antony Beevor about the extraordinary influence the mystic Rasputin had on the imperial Romanov family and the role he played in its ultimate demise
Danny Bird: When people hear the name ‘Rasputin’, they tend to picture an almost cartoonish villain shrouded in myth and scandal. What drew you to his story and is there anything you want your readers to unlearn about him from the get-go? Antony Beevor: Grigori Rasputin was an extraordinarily influential figure. Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government after the February 1917 Revolution, famously said that “without Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin”. That raises a compelling question: how did a virtually illiterate Siberian peasant play such a significant role in the downfall of the greatest autocracy the world had ever known? From that perspective, he is a phenomenally fascinating character and one that is crucial to understand. Rumour also played an enormous role in Rasputin’s story. Even today, we tend to underestimate the power of rumour and its effects, and historians have often done the same. What was it about Rasputin’s personality, beliefs or timing that made his rise to the apex of the Russian empire possible? At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, there was a widespread fascination with spiritualism, shamans and, often, outright frauds. St Petersburg society at the time was deeply corrupt and became even more so once the First World War began. When a so-called ‘man of God’ arrived on the scene, people were obsessed. Rasputin undeniably possessed extraordinary qualities. We know of his seductive power, but he also presented himself as a healer. This remains a subject of debate: how he was able, not to cure, but at least to alleviate the suffering of Tsar Nicholas II’s heir, Alexei Nikolaevich, who had haemophilia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/05/GettyImages-566464353webready-87faff7-e1777628956654.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Several men in early‑20th‑century military uniforms stand with a young boy, while mounted soldiers appear in the background." title="Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarevich Alexei of Russia in 1915. The tsar had left Petrograd to take personal command of the armies (Image by Getty Images)" /> Where was Rasputin born and what was his early life like? He began life as a ne’er-do-well in a village called Pokrovskoye in western Siberia, surrounded by vast forests and rivers. His father was a peasant; the family owned a few animals and worked in winter transporting goods by sledge. As a teenager, Rasputin was reputedly a heavy drinker. After marrying a simple but intelligent woman, he underwent what he believed to be a spiritual transformation and felt he had received a calling from God. Whether one accepts this or not, there is little doubt that he was sincere in that belief. This did not alter other aspects of Rasputin’s character, which later emerged more clearly. He was profoundly contradictory: genuinely religious and intensely spiritual, yet also deeply lascivious and a lecher of the worst order. He claimed to love women but was predatory and a rapist. Yet he had an extraordinary ability to convince women that he alone truly understood them. When he arrived in St Petersburg, many society women, often neglected by their powerful husbands, were drawn to him with remarkable devotion. Read more | Why does Putin blame this infamous Russian revolutionary for Ukraine’s independence? Such contradictions are deeply Russian, and are one reason he remains such an intriguing figure. As the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev famously observed, “Russia cannot be understood by the mind alone.” There is a powerful current of spiritual emotion at its core, although one corruptible by cruelty and excess. Rasputin embodied this paradox. He could be generous, giving money away freely, yet at the same time accepted bribes and cash from all sides. To portray him simply as a figure of pure evil is as misleading as depicting him solely as the holy man adored by the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. What were the circumstances that brought him to the capital of the Russian empire, St Petersburg? He announced to his wife that he was leaving her to become a wandering pilgrim, setting out in search of God and enlightenment. At the time, around 1903–04, this was far from unusual. There were perhaps a million Russians on the roads, dressed in rags, carrying chains, practising a form of bodily mortification. They walked from monastery to monastery, praying, doing odd jobs and receiving just enough food to reach the next stop. Rasputin travelled not only to holy sites across Russia but as far as Mount Athos in Greece. He later arrived in Kazan, on the river Volga, one of Russia’s ancient cities. There he attracted the attention of a wealthy and influential woman who became convinced he was both a healer and a man of God. But he was already behaving appallingly, persuading young women, including, reportedly, girls as young as 15, to wash him intimately in the bathhouse. This was central to his method of seduction and led many to suspect him of belonging to the Khlysty, a sect that believed sin was a necessary path to redemption. The logic was seductive: sin together and be redeemed together. Despite this, the woman in Kazan introduced him to a powerful bishop in St Petersburg. This proved decisive. The bishop, like many others, was swept away by Rasputin’s ability to break down resistance through an intense, if often incoherent, spirituality. He could be rambling and barely intelligible, yet the less people understood him, the more fervently they invested meaning in his every word. He soon gained the support of senior churchmen, including the confessor to the royal family, as well as two Montenegrin princesses in the Romanov circle. Through them, Rasputin was introduced to the tsar in November 1905, a critical moment. Nicholas II had just been humiliated by Russia’s disastrous defeat to Japan, which had triggered revolutionary unrest. Rasputin was able to present himself to the tsar and tsaritsa as a simple man of the people, someone they could trust and confide in. Both were drawn to him. Interestingly, this was not without precedent. A few years earlier, a French mystic known as ‘Monsieur Philippe’ (Nizier Anthelme Philippe) had gained similar influence at court. He, too, was referred to as ‘our friend’ and credited with extraordinary powers. When he left, he reportedly foretold that another would come after him. In the empress’s subconscious, Rasputin seems to have fulfilled that prophecy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/05/BAL5369501webready-9253dc0-e1777629283514.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="People gather around small market stalls by a riverbank while boats are docked nearby, with a town of spires and buildings visible across the water." title="An 1861 painting, View of the City of Kazan on the Volga in Russia. Rasputin met an influential woman in Kazan who ultimately led him to the Romanov circle (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> The tsar and tsaritsa were nostalgic for a Russia that predated Peter the Great’s westernising reforms. Do you think they saw Rasputin as a manifestation of this older, primal version of Russia? Absolutely. This was the core of Rasputin’s appeal: he was a man of the people, a living embodiment of ‘old Russia’. One must remember a fundamental tension within Russia itself: the split between slavophiles and westernisers. The slavophiles rejected the idea that Russia should follow a ‘western’ path. Instead, they believed it was rooted in an ascetic spiritual tradition unique to Russia and were suspicious of European influence. This helps explain why Nicholas and Alexandra loathed the legacy of Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who founded St Petersburg as a ‘window on the west’ and sought to modernise the country. Those reforms, and the brutal repression that accompanied them, created a recurring cycle in Russian history: modernisation followed by savage backlash. This mindset was clearly visible during the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov in 1913. The tsar insisted that courtiers dress in traditional boyar costume rather than in the western dress of Peter the Great’s era. For Nicholas and Alexandra, Moscow represented the spiritual heart of Russia, while St Petersburg symbolised corruption and dangerous European decadence. This outlook helps explain why they increasingly isolated themselves from Petersburg society altogether. Rasputin became indispensable to Nicholas and Alexandra because of his ability to ‘heal’ complications arising from their son’s haemophilia. Do you think he believed in his powers or was he exploiting a desperate family? This is a subject that may never be fully understood. I recall being advised, after injuring my back, to see someone who could apparently pass their hands over it without touching yet have a remarkable effect. It’s a bit like that with Rasputin. Whether one believes in it or not, some phenomena defy explanation. There is no doubt that even the doctors were fascinated and at times embarrassed, as they were unable to relieve the suffering of the tsarevich. On several occasions, during crises such as when the family was in a Polish forest, the child suddenly calmed when Rasputin’s voice reached him via telephone. Doctors attributed it to coincidence, or perhaps to psychosomatic factors. Yet contemporaneous accounts describe the child being soothed by Rasputin’s presence and voice, despite his terrifying appearance. Read more | Did Anastasia survive the massacre of the Romanovs? The real history that debunks the conspiracy Whether this was genuine healing or charlatanism is impossible to prove, but there is no doubt that Rasputin held extraordinary influence. He gave the empress a sense of power over her son’s wellbeing, and by extension over her husband, the tsar – a psychological authority no one else possessed. Rasputin took advantage of the sexual excess and hypocrisy of Russia’s aristocracy in the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution. How vital was this ‘moral decay’ to his grip on high society? It’s striking how sex and revolution often intertwine. Think of the French Revolution, with its lurid fantasies about Marie Antoinette and noble women. There are clear echoes in Russia in the early 20th century. Rumours that the empress was sleeping with Rasputin, or that he was involved with her daughters, were entirely false. Yet in a patriarchal society, such scandals could utterly undermine the tsar’s authority. Nicholas II was naïve in allowing Rasputin unrestricted access to the empress and the palace, which inevitably fuelled gossip. Because the rumours were false, both he and the empress rejected them, refusing to acknowledge the growing tide of resentment and revolt that was mounting around them. How far was Rasputin able to influence tsarist rule during these years? Rasputin’s influence began modestly, but after 1915 it escalated dramatically. Persuaded by Rasputin and the empress, the tsar took personal command of the armies – a disastrous decision. He left Petrograd (the new name for St Petersburg after 1914), giving the empress and Rasputin free rein over government appointments. They removed or replaced dozens of provincial governors with loyal supporters and even intervened in the selection of prime ministers and the minister of the interior, effectively shaping the administration according to their will. But Nicholas II’s mother, the empress dowager Maria Feodorovna, was against Rasputin. She was strongly opposed to him, and there was a long-standing reason for her distrust. A diary reputed to have belonged to Rasputin, preserved in the Russian archives, contains material corroborated by other sources. According to it, when Nicholas’s mother was pregnant with him, she had a terrifying dream: she and her husband were climbing a hill when a baby appeared in her arms. She was told it was her future son. The baby then leapt from her arms and scrambled ahead, only to be confronted by a peasant in a blazing red shirt, wielding an axe, who beheaded the child. Traumatised, the empress consulted a family wet nurse to interpret the dream, who offered a benign reading. Yet decades later, when she learned that her son and daughter-in-law were enthralled by a Siberian peasant, she was horrified. She recognised Rasputin’s presence as potentially dangerous and became the leading voice of opposition within the imperial family. This account was also shared with me by Princess Olga Romanoff, whose father had told her the story of the dream. Her father was the brother of Princess Irina Alexandrovna, who was married to Felix Yusupov, the man who later murdered Rasputin, linking the family’s memory of these events directly to the dramatic arc of Rasputin’s influence and demise. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/05/GettyImages-1404448018webready-a98f6c1-e1777629077731.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated older woman in formal attire, including a dark jacket, high‑collared blouse, pearls and a decorative brooch, poses in a room with framed artwork and curtains behind her." title="Maria Feodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, was vehemently opposed to Rasputin (Image by Getty Images)" /> How did Russia’s involvement in the First World War amplify Rasputin’s influence at court and the sense that the system was in jeopardy? Rasputin’s influence grew dramatically with Nicholas II absent at the front. The tsar hated politics and decision-making; he was weak but obstinate, a dangerous combination. He preferred life at the army headquarters, far from Petrograd, leaving the empress and Rasputin effectively in charge of domestic affairs. Rasputin and the empress made political appointments according to their preferences, which created chaos. One notable example was Alexander Protopopov, who initially seemed a competent, liberal candidate and was vice president of the Duma. He became obsessed with the empress and was afflicted with advanced syphilis, which affected his judgment. Persuaded by Rasputin, he was given control over Russia’s rail network, a role critical for moving food to cities. Mismanagement here meant that food could not reach urban centres, notably Petrograd, contributing directly to the unrest that sparked the February Revolution in 1917. The circumstances of Rasputin’s assassination are almost legendary. Could you talk us through what happened and what effect it had on Russia? Rasputin was assassinated by extreme rightwing reactionaries in December 1916. The key figures were Prince Felix Yusupov, married, as I’ve said, to the tsar’s favourite niece, Princess Irina, and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a popular and dashing cousin of the tsar. They were joined by Vladimir Purishkevich, an arch-monarchist, antisemite and leader of the ultraconservative Black Hundreds. Their plan relied on luring Rasputin to the Moika Palace, home to the Yusupov family, in Petrograd under the pretext of meeting Irina, who was, in fact, still in Crimea. Read more | Did a British agent murder Rasputin? The conspirators first tried to poison him with cakes laced with cyanide, but Rasputin appeared unaffected. Panicked, they shot him multiple times, finishing him off at close range. The autopsy later confirmed the chaotic and incompetent nature of the assassination. The murder shocked the tsar and empress, who feared it might be part of a wider palace coup. In Petrograd, the public reaction was paradoxical: some celebrated, but the broader effect was destabilising. Rasputin’s death, rather than restoring order, accelerated the decline of the Romanov autocracy. What do you think Rasputin’s extraordinary life tells us about the tsarist system in its final years? This episode illustrates the extreme strain on Russian society at the time. A reactionary state, forced into an unprepared war, was already fragile. Logistical chaos, military incompetence, and corruption compounded the crisis. Socially, the aristocracy and elite were widely seen as decadent and morally corrupt, with rampant infidelity, divorces and exploitation of women. Even prominent industrialists, while patrons of the arts, were implicated in corruption and vice. Against this backdrop, Rasputin’s influence and eventual assassination were both symptoms and accelerants of a failing system, highlighting how power, truth and leadership were vulnerable under extreme societal strain. Antony Beevor is a bestselling writer and historian, with four novels and 13 works of non-fiction already to his name. His books include Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921 (W&N, 2022) and Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking, 2018) This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Long to reign over us: how did Queen Elizabeth II survive seven decades of dizzying change?
When Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952, she could barely have conceived the currents – imperial retreat, multiculturalism, de-industrialiation – that would transform the nation during her reign. On the centenary of the Queen’s birth, David Cannadine explores how she navigated seven decades of dizzying change
When I was born in September 1950, King George VI had just over a year to live. I have no memory of him or his reign, and my first royal recollection was of the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth – or, more precisely, of images of her state coach and horses, which I cut out of a souvenir magazine. My parents did not own a television set, and did not know anyone who did, so it was only in 2012, the year of Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, that I watched the remastered version of the original coronation broadcast from Westminster Abbey. Richard Dimbleby’s reverential commentary, suffused with ardour and optimism, did indeed belong to that earlier time. When the Queen celebrated her platinum jubilee in 2022, few people in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth could remember when she had not been on the throne. Like Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II had become part of what Victoria’s biographer Lytton Strachey called the “indissoluble” scheme of things, which made it impossible for many people to imagine the world without her. Apart from just over a year at the beginning, and (thus far) four years at the end, my own life has coincided exactly with the 70 years of her reign. I was no part of her life, and never met her, but she was certainly a part of mine, as she was of millions of people in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and far beyond. Joining Shakespeare I never imagined it would one day fall to me to tell Queen Elizabeth’s life story, but in 2014 I was appointed editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it seemed likely that the Queen would die on my watch. The convention established for the ODNB’s predecessor, the original Dictionary of National Biography, was that when the monarch died, the editor would contribute the entry on him or her, and it duly fell to me to write the life of Elizabeth II. I did so in two forms: as a short book of 50,000 words, published late in 2025 by Oxford University Press; and as her entry in the ODNB, available online from April this year, which was cut to 35,000 words, putting the late Queen in the company of her namesake Queen Elizabeth I, along with Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. The ODNB entry is a tightly written biography, while the longer book historicises the Queen by setting her more fully in the context of her times. Read more | Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it? Producing these two different versions reminded me how biographers and historians take different approaches when writing individual lives. Some of the most outstanding recent biographies have been by historians – among them Ian Kershaw on Hitler, Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck and Diarmaid MacCulloch on Thomas Cromwell – but it is a genre about which many scholars remain sceptical. The political and constitutional historian Geoffrey Elton spent his life determined not to produce a biography of Thomas Cromwell, even though he greatly admired him; and in writing his life of Hitler, Ian Kershaw noted that biography ran the risk of “over-emphasising the role of the individual in shaping and determining events”, and “ignoring or playing down the social and political context in which those actions took place”. These risks most certainly apply to biographies of monarchs, though they are less acute when dealing with kings and queens who proactively make history. But sovereigns who reign reactively, rather than rule proactively, create serious expositional challenges, anticipated by Karl Marx, when he observed that “men [and women] make their own histories, but they do not do so under circumstances of their own choosing”. Elizabeth II was just such a circumscribed monarch, living out her life against trends and trajectories in many ways far from friendly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-120520595webready-f7c08c2-e1776683608167.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a person seated at a table with a BBC microphone in front of them, wearing a light blouse and a pearl necklace while holding a sheet of paper." title="In a speech broadcast to mark her 21st birthday – while she was touring South Africa – Princess Elizabeth pledged herself to a life of duty (Image by Getty Images)" /> Decline and fall One indication of this hostile 20th-century environment is that many monarchies were history’s victims rather than its victors. By the end of the First World War, the great-power thrones of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany had disappeared. The Second World War led to a further royal conflagration, as the Yugoslavian, Italian, Bulgarian and Romanian crowns were subsequently abolished, while the survival of the Japanese emperor was the exception that proved the rule. Thereafter the king of Egypt was driven out, the king of Iraq was murdered; Libya, Afghanistan, Greece, Abyssinia and Iran dispensed with their sovereigns, and only the return of a Spanish monarch in 1975 bucked that trend. This widespread royal retreat was accompanied by imperial dissolution, as the maritime empires of Portugal, Belgium the Netherlands and France disappeared during the second half of the 20th century. And so did the British empire, which had been the biggest of them all. Kipling had anticipated this retreat at Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, when his poem Recessional stressed the ephemerality of empire and the transience of global dominion. Between the partition of India and the return of Hong Kong to China 50 years later, the British empire went into full recessional mode. Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was the last British monarch to be Emperor of India, and she ‘gave away’ even more territory than George III. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613457692webready-3319b3d-e1776682784658.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows six people in formal ceremonial dress. At the centre stand a man in a decorated military uniform and a woman in a gown with a long train and veil. Two seated figures and two standing figures wear military uniforms with medals or elegant gowns and jewellery. Draped curtains and a carpeted floor form the backdrop." title="A family portrait from the wedding day of Elizabeth II’s parents, 26 April 1923. (From l to r): the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, the Duchess and Duke of York (the future Queen Mother and George VI) and Queen Mary and George V (Image by Getty Images)" /> A royal rebranding Such was the broader, confining global context against which Princess Elizabeth, born in 1926 as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, lived out her life. One further indication of these changing and challenging times was that only one of her parents was royal. Before the First World War, Europe’s ruling houses constituted an international, inter-connected elite, as exemplified by Queen Victoria’s children, most of whom wed their continental (especially German) relatives. But the First World War, which ranged the British and German royal dynasties against each other, put an end to that, and in 1917 George V rebranded the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as the House of Windsor, and decreed that his descendants might select marriage partners from among British families, by which he meant members of the aristocracy. Read more | The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queen The Duke of York duly wed Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Scottish grandee the Earl of Strathmore, which meant Princess Elizabeth was only ‘semi-royal’, whereas both the parents of Prince Philip of Denmark and Greece, whom she would later marry, were royalty. Philip may have belonged to the rootless and impoverished interwar diaspora of minor princelings, but his lineage was grander than Princess Elizabeth’s. At the time of her birth, there was no realistic likelihood Elizabeth would become the queen regnant of the United Kingdom. Like all Europe’s remaining royal houses, the British monarchy was patriarchal and patrilineal, which meant that if the Duke and Duchess of York produced a son, he would immediately leapfrog his elder sister and become first in the line of succession. And Princess Elizabeth’s uncle, the Prince of Wales, who would accede to the throne on the death of his father, George V, might yet marry and father a boy who would eventually follow him as king. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514080420webready-b1c182a-e1776682680633.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows two people standing together: one wearing a light dress with a brooch and a fur‑trimmed hat, the other in a dark suit with a patterned tie, light vest, and a flower pinned to the lapel. A stone wall with a metal window grille is behind them." title="The former Edward VIII marries Wallis Simpson in June 1937 after abdicating the throne. In doing so, says David Cannadine, he put “self and love before service and duty” (Image by Getty Images)" /> This meant there was every initial expectation that Princess Elizabeth would live out her life as a minor member of the royal family, marrying a British aristocratic landowner, doing good works in the local community, and enjoying the company of her horses and dogs. But she would not be the first member of the British royal family in modern times to inherit the throne unexpectedly. The same had been true of Victoria, of George V, and of her father, George VI. All three, like Elizabeth, were unanticipated monarchs who became successful sovereigns – as she would do to an even greater extent. This unexpected turn in Elizabeth’s life took place in 1936, when she was 10 years old. Her uncle, who had succeeded George V as Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, putting self and love before service and duty. But this obliged Elizabeth’s father to put service and duty before self and love, by becoming the sovereign, as George VI, he had never wanted to be. Having sired no son, this meant his elder daughter became heiress presumptive, and she fully assimilated her parents’ ethos of duty and service. In 1947, on her 21st birthday, when she was accompanying her parents on a tour of South Africa, Princess Elizabeth delivered a broadcast, pledging her life, “whether it be long or short”, to the service of the empire and Commonwealth, and it was a pledge she honoured and kept all her life. But that was not the only reason why 1947 was so important a year. India became independent, and was partitioned, portending the end of the British empire and its evolution into the voluntary community of association known as the Commonwealth. That same year, Elizabeth wed Prince Philip, beginning a more than 70-year union that would be perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613465636webready-d118ece-e1776682342956.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a bride in a lace wedding gown, tiara, and pearl jewellery holding a bouquet, smiling at a man in a formal military uniform with medals. Dark curtains form the background." title="Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten on their wedding day, 20 November 1947. Their 73-year union was, writes David Cannadine, “perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history” (Image by Getty Images)" /> British revolution Thereafter there were many milestones in Elizabeth’s long life and reign, extending across an astonishing 70 years. Here are just a few of them. 1952: the death of her father, her accession as the second Queen Elizabeth, and the widespread belief that a ‘new Elizabethan age’ had dawned. (Due to Britain’s diminishing status in the world, that belief would prove to be mistaken.) 1960: Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change speech’ delivered in South Africa, portending the end of what remained of the British empire. 1964: the advent of the Queen’s first Labour government, led by Harold Wilson. 1965: Winston Churchill’s state funeral, both the last rites of the great man and a requiem for Britain as a great power. 1979: Margaret Thatcher took office, as the Queen’s first female prime minister. 1997: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, delivered a jolt to the monarchy and the nation. 1999: the Queen opened devolved legislatures in Wales and Scotland. 2011: she visited Ireland and expressed sympathy for “those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past”. 2016: 43 years after Britain joined the EEC, an EU Referendum ended in Brexit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1450414706webready-b13781c-e1776682235671.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a group of formally dressed people standing on steps outside a building. Some wear military uniforms, others fur coats or ceremonial robes. One naval officer salutes while others hold programs." title="The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill" /> Significantly, none of these events were initiated by Elizabeth II, but she had to adapt to all of them. That is what monarchs who reign but not rule must do. At the same time, there were many milestones in her own life, as she celebrated a unique grand slam of four jubilees. 1977: her silver jubilee (25 years) – not yet even halfway through the Queen’s long reign, taking place during James Callaghan’s premiership, nearing the end of a difficult decade. 2002: her golden jubilee (50 years) – initially anxious, following the dismal 1990s and the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, but turning out to be an unexpectedly successful amalgam of royal tradition and Blairite ‘cool Britannia’. 2012: her diamond jubilee (60 years) – perhaps the happiest of them all, following the marriage of William and Kate Middleton, preceding the successful opening of the London Olympics, and instantiating the Queen’s own hard-won apotheosis. 2022: her platinum jubilee (70 years) – inescapably elegiac, as the Queen was largely absent from the celebrations, and her last years had been hard, with Covid, the death of Prince Philip and the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the US. But she made a final appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where she had first been glimpsed as a baby in her mother’s arms 95 years before. The Queen’s long reign meant her closest relatives were obliged to adapt in unprecedented ways. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother became a dowager queen for half a century. Prince Philip gave up a promising naval career and subordinated his life to supporting hers. Prince Charles had to wait until his early 70s before he became king. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, found neither personal happiness nor a fulfilling public role. In different ways, this must have been difficult for all four of them. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3335882webready-e52ecc4-e1776682455805.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a woman in a light outfit, hat, gloves, and pearls holding a bouquet as she interacts with a crowd of adults and children waving flags." title="The Queen meets children during her silver jubilee celebrations, 1977. Despite the smiles, Britain was suffering a crisis of confidence at this point in her reign (Image by Getty Images)" /> Unlike their parents, but like their Aunt Margaret, three of the Queen’s children – the Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew – divorced, which meant the (dysfunctional) royal family increasingly became a scandal-ridden soap opera. Prince Andrew’s excessive sense of entitlement, and his close friendship with the convicted American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were deplorable displays of bad behaviour and demonstrated still more deplorable and damaging lapses of judgment. The Duke of Sussex denounced his father in public for being cold and aloof, while his wife branded members of the royal family as uncaring, unsympathetic and racist. “Recollections may vary,” was the Queen’s response. As someone who belonged to the generation that had gone through the Second World War, she was ill at ease with the emotional incontinence that had become widespread during the closing decades of her reign. Total transformation During her 70 years on the throne, Britain changed significantly. In the early 1950s, the traditional aristocracy still counted in the corridors of power, the middle classes were closely linked to the empire, the military and the civil service, and working-class men were overwhelmingly employed in such heavy industries as coal mining, steel making and ship building. Except for the Queen, women knew their (subordinate) place, social mobility was limited, higher education was restricted to a minority, Britain was, to a large extent, ethnically homogeneous, the Church of England was a significant force, and the Victorian moral code still prevailed. Read more | The royal family and their right to privacy: who should have access to the records? But by the end of the Queen’s reign, the aristocracy was no longer the power elite, the middle class sought alternative employment, and the de-industrialisation of Britain meant most men no longer undertook hard manual labour. Rising standards of living and the expansion of universities made the country a more mobile and less deferential society, women occupied prominent positions in public and professional life, the influence of the Church of England had declined, the Victorian moral code had been dismantled, and the influx of immigrants from the dissolving empire meant Britain became an increasingly multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multicultural society. To all this the Queen adapted, slowly and not always enthusiastically, but overall, wisely and well. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-530137388webready-eab239c-e1776682946240.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people at a formal event: one in a sequined gown with a tiara and jewellery, one in a patterned dress with gloves and pearls, and one in a light traditional outfit. They appear to be conversing in an ornate indoor setting." title="With Margaret Thatcher at a Commonwealth meeting in Zambia, 1979. The Queen placed great store on Britain’s membership of this association of more than 2.7 billion people (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the United Kingdom diversified, the British empire diminished, until by the end of her reign it had almost completely disappeared. However much she cared about it, and however hard she worked at it, being Head of the Commonwealth was scarcely the same as being Empress of India. In 1952 Britain was still – just – a great global power; 70 years later, it was a middle-sized nation that had sought to compensate for the loss of empire by joining the European Economic Community, a venture that was abandoned following the referendum of 2016. It thus fell to Elizabeth to preside, not only over domestic devolution, diversification and de-industrialisation, but also over imperial retreat and international withdrawal. This meant that although in later life she became, like Victoria before her, a justly venerated matriarch, the uplifting, expansive narrative widely proclaimed in 1887 and 1897 found no echoes in 2002, 2012 and 2022. Queen Elizabeth II’s greatest achievement was, perhaps, to make recessional majestic. These were not circumstances of her own choosing, but she made history, all the same. Sir David Cannadine is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His latest book is Queen Elizabeth II: A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign (OUP, 2025) This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother?
Throughout her long reign, the late Elizabeth II juggled being a mother and grandmother with royal duty. But with careful judgment, hard work and a mischievous sense of humour, she forged a dynasty and inspired a nation
They might not be the first monikers to spring to mind when thinking of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch who was renowned for her sense of duty and her dignified demeanour, but “Gary” and “Cabbage” are two of the nicknames bestowed upon her by her family. “Gary” was how Prince William knew his grandmother as a youngster, apparently confusing the word with “Granny”, while the Queen’s great-grandchildren Prince George and Princess Charlotte know the Queen affectionately as “Gan-Gan”. As for “Cabbage”, this was the fond nickname used by her husband Prince Philip – which might come from the French term of endearment, “mon petit chou”, translated to “my little cabbage”. Was Elizabeth II a mother when she came to the throne? As matriarch of “The Firm” (the insider name for the royal family) and the oldest monarch in British history, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952 at the age of just 25, the mother of two young children. Thrust into royal duties, she faced the immediate challenge of balancing the work of monarchy with the demands of motherhood, a battle which was present throughout her reign. Read more | A brief guide to the British royal family, by The Crown historian Robert Lacey Just 18 months after her accession in 1952, Elizabeth II was called upon to tour 13 countries, including Australia, over six months, without Charles, age five, and Anne, age three. The young children were famously greeted with handshakes upon the return of their parents, and though she dispensed with some of the more formal royal traditions – the children were not required to bow or curtsey to their mother – their childhoods were marked by absence. The prince and princess were largely raised in their younger years by governesses and other household staff, in the same way that Elizabeth and Margaret had been by “Crawfie”, in keeping with the manner of many upper-class families of the time. The children were required to understand that travel and time were part of the monarch’s commitment to rule. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1450650980-a8ef201-e1776646626706.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II holds baby Prince Edward on a balcony as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, stands beside her in military uniform, smiling." title="The Queen holds a very young Prince Edward in her arms as she stands on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with the Duke of Edinburgh, June 1964. Edward was the most recent child to be born to a reigning British monarch (Photo by Getty Images)" /> It was a decade after Anne that the Queen gave birth to her third child, Prince Andrew, in 1960. Prince Edward followed in 1964, making the two sons the first children to be born to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria. Ten years after her accession, many noted a difference in the Queen’s relationship with her two younger sons. Royal historian Robert Lacey suggests the Queen became “warmer and flexible”, able to step back a little from her duties. What were Queen Elizabeth’s relationships with her children like? Both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip agreed that their children should not be hampered, as they saw it, by the social and educational constraints of homeschooling, which had previously been the norm for royals. Yet Charles’s education was far from straightforward. Prince Philip wished Charles to be sent to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, hoping to make his son in his own image. The Queen Mother (who favoured Eton, close to Charles’s Windsor home) wrote to the Queen in 1961, saying, “it is miles and miles away, he might as well be at school abroad. He would be terribly cut off and lonely up in the far north.” The Queen Mother’s fears for her sensitive grandson were not unfounded. Two years after the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992 (which saw the marriages of three of her children break down amid tabloid scandal, as well as a fire at Windsor Castle) an authorised biography of Prince Charles dealt perhaps the harshest blow to the Queen’s reputation as a mother. Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now The 1994 account, written by Jonathan Dimbleby, described the bullying and “crushing loneliness” Charles experienced at school, and a childhood characterised by long periods of his mother’s absence. Charles was said to feel “emotionally estranged” from his parents and yearning for affection that, in his view, they were “unable or unwilling to offer”. The book declared Charles’s bonds of affection to be much stronger with his nanny Mabel Anderson and detailed how the Queen would spend short windows of allotted time with her son in the morning before his daily walk and before bedtime. Historian Piers Brendon has suggested that in contrast to the “tremendously affectionate, and very welcoming and warm” Queen Mother, with whom Charles had a close relationship, Elizabeth II was “a very distant mother”. Read more | A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth Yet in a 2002 BBC documentary, Princess Anne said: “We understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch, in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make. “But I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.” What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a grandmother? If the Queen’s reputation as a mother has been characterised as distant by some, there was a more palpable fondness for her eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. From the birth of her first grandchild – Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, born in 1977 – the Queen took on a new persona; the dutiful grandmother who inspired by example. “I’ve always been very close to my grandmother, and we speak often,” Peter Phillips told The Telegraph in 2016. “She has been an inspirational person throughout my life.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1241123935-47c9c5f-e1776646682863.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II, wearing a bright green coat and hat, smiles at her great-grandson Prince George during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations." title="The Queen shares a moment with Prince George of Cambridge during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022. George is now second in line to the throne following his great grandmother’s passing (Photo by Getty Images)" /> In 2018, Princess Beatrice told of how her grandmother “goes out into the community with a genuine curiosity as to how she can be a force for good in the world”. Though duty evidently came first, there was also an enduring sense of fun that she shared with those close to her. Many royal sources have recounted how the Queen was an excellent mimic, and particularly fond of impersonating former prime ministers and US presidents she had known through the years (some favourite impressions were reported to be René from TV show ’Allo ’Allo! and Labour politician Tony Benn). One royal aide, Angela Kelly, shared how the Queen has “a wicked [mischievous] of humour”. Read more | The 8 most famous royal weddings in British history The Queen proved herself an adept grandmother in the 21st-century online world too, no more evident than when she joined her grandson Prince Harry in 2016, recording a sassy comedy video message to US president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama in order to promote the Invictus Games. At Christmas, even as her descendants started their own families, the Queen remained at the centre of the royals’ festive celebrations, bringing together the whole family at her Sandringham residence. At 6pm sharp, the tradition was for adults to exchange cheap joke gifts and Prince Harry could clearly get away with a little extra cheekiness towards his grandmother. On one such occasion he gave the Queen a shower cap with the slogan: ‘Ain’t life a bitch’. Elizabeth II’s ancestor Queen Victoria was notoriously meddlesome in the marriages of her grandchildren – as ‘Grandmama Queen’ she felt uniquely placed to orchestrate the marriages of her 42 grandchildren, manoeuvring them into seats of European power. The Queen did hold the power to exercise control over her descendants’ marriages­ – though not all; since 2013, the Succession to the Crown Act has meant that only the first six royals in line to the throne require the monarch’s permission to validate their marriages. So in 2018, Princess Eugenie could marry without the Queen’s consent (though it’s unlikely that she wasn’t consulted), whereas Prince Harry still had to obtain the monarch’s permission. This the Queen duly bestowed, writing in her official capacity: “My lords, I declare My Consent to a Contract of Matrimony between My Most Dearly Beloved Grandson Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Rachel Meghan Markle.” It’s clear though that her grandchildren valued the Queen’s approval beyond an official seal. And it seems that a sure way to impress the monarch was by getting on with her beloved corgis. “For the last 33 years, I’ve been barked at,” Harry told the BBC ahead of his 2018 wedding. That apparently wasn’t the case for the Duchess of Sussex. “This one walks in,” the prince joked, indicating his bride-to-be, “Absolutely nothing. Just wagging tails.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-960056422-947df8c-e1776646732976.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Prince Harry and Meghan Markle smile during their wedding ceremony inside St George’s Chapel, Windsor, surrounded by guests." title="The Duchess of Sussex wore a tiara owned by Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother, Queen Mary, during her wedding in May 2018 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The Queen also publicly showed her support and welcome to her grandsons’ wives by lending them two significant family heirlooms for their weddings. The Duchess of Sussex wore the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary’s platinum and diamond bandeau tiara for her wedding in May 2018. The Duchess of Cambridge wore the Queen’s Cartier scroll tiara, purchased by the Queen’s father King George VI and given to Elizabeth on the princess’s 18th birthday. Long to reign over us More than seven decades after starting her own family, it’s clear that the late Queen imbued her dynasty with her own strong sense of duty and service. She served as the figurehead of the family, an inspiring example by which to measure their own public activities. Despite the familiarity, it’s also clear that the Queen was still able to keep her family on their toes. In 2018, Prince Harry gave the following advice to a group of visitors to Buckingham Palace: “If you suddenly bump into her in the hallway, don’t panic. I know you will. We all do.”
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
“Literally whipped”: the boys who took the beatings meant for royal bottoms
Naughty young royals would escape punishment from their teachers by having someone else nearby to take the whipping… or did they? Were ‘whipping boys’ even real?
In medieval and early modern Europe, the education of a young royal was an important business. If they weren’t already sitting on the throne and having to quickly learn the ropes, they had to be prepared to one day wear the crown. The tutors of royal students faced a difficult issue: how to chastise their charges. How would they use the tried-and-tested corporal punishments, like whipping, without laying a hand on a prince or even a divinely ordained monarch? The answer was a proxy. What was a whipping boy? A whipping boy was a young boy who accompanied a prince throughout his education and received any necessary punishment. The name ‘whipping boy’ was literal. Today, the term refers to someone who is scapegoated or constantly blamed for the wrongdoing of others. Read more | Schools of hard knocks: Georgian and Victorian public schools There may have been a hope that the young royal, upon seeing their friend unfairly beaten, would feel enough remorse to correct their behaviour (and, as we all know well, European monarchs during these periods were well regarded for their empathy, so it must have worked a treat). However, being a whipping boy did come with incentives. They could form a close bond with their royal schoolmate, which might see them rewarded with titles and honours. It may have even been a coveted position, similar to the equally un-glamourous Groom of the Stool – the man who helped the king with his daily ablutions. How common were whipping boys? Henry VIII’s son Edward VI was said to have a whipping boy. So too, it is believed, did his illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy, as well as the future Charles I a century later. The 13th-century king of Jerusalem, Conrad II, reportedly had 12, while France’s Louis XV (r1715-74) was apparently partnered with the son of a cobbler at Versailles to take his punishments. The practice could be seen as far away as China, too. The young Guangxu Emperor began his education in the late-19th century with the assistance of a 'ha'hachutsze. According to a report in the Peking Gazette, “Whenever the Son of Heaven is naughty or inattentive, the 'ha'hachutsze is beaten or disgraced”. Were whipping boys real? There is no solid evidence that whipping boys were ever actually used, other than circumstantial or speculative commentary. Historians are divided on whether they existed at all. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus wrote two treatises in the 16th century on how young royals should not be physically chastised, but without mentioning the whipping boy loophole. Many of the supposed examples of whipping boys, like those above, are based on nothing more than rumour that became accepted as fact over time. Read more | Off to school: how do the royal family educate their children? The idea, which may have taken root as a means of illustrating just how out of touch or uncaring a maligned monarch of the past could be, was established more through literature than record. Edward VI’s whipping boy may have first appeared in a 1604 play by Samuel Rowley, When You See Me, You Know Me. Whipping boys then show up with increasing frequency in the 19th century, such as in Sir Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Fortunes of Nigel, and Mark Twain’s 1881 historical fiction The Prince and the Pauper, both without grounding in fact. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore more medieval history with exclusive content from our archives Medieval manners and etiquette: dos and don’ts of the Middle Ages Medieval England's political miracle: how the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for modern Britain How to go on a medieval pilgrimage Why there’s no such thing as a typical medieval peasant Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
The other prince in the Tower: the tragedy of Edward of Warwick
The 1499 execution of Edward of Warwick snuffed out the final embers of the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Norton introduces the last male heir to the House of York – and explains why he “had to perish” to secure the crown for Henry VII
On 28 November 1499, Edward of Warwick – the 24-year-old heir to the House of York – finally left the Tower of London. It was only the third time in 14 years that he’d been outside the infamous Norman fortress – but he wasn’t able to appreciate the moment. He was not striding out towards freedom but instead, flanked by two men, being marched the short distance to Tower Hill, where an executioner waited on a temporary wooden scaffold. Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, Warwick was beheaded for treason. His execution marked the culmination of years of political instability. For much of the 15th century, England had been embroiled in civil war as the houses of York and Lancaster vied for the throne. After Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III in 1485, Warwick was taken to the Tower, aged just 10. He was not the first Yorkist prince to meet this fate, of course. His cousins, the better-known princes in the Tower, had been similarly imprisoned here in 1483 – and their subsequent disappearance remains the most infamous cold case in medieval and early modern English history. Listen | All eight episodes of our podcast series, The Princes in the Tower: a Medieval Murder Mystery In comparison, the story of Edward of Warwick has been largely overlooked – perhaps because of the absence of mystery and conspiracy in his tale, which is no less tragic. The “unhappy boy”, as he was called by contemporary Italian scholar and diplomat Polydore Vergil, was one of the longest-standing residents in the Tower’s near-thousand-year history. So how did this third prince come to be in the Tower? To understand, we must go back to the beginning of his tale – because his execution brought to an end a lifetime of tumult. His story reflects the turbulent times through which he lived, when brother fought brother and cousin met cousin in battle. Edward of Warwick: early life in the Wars of the Roses On his birth in February 1475, Warwick was fourth in line to the throne. He was orphaned just days before his third birthday, when his father, George, Duke of Clarence, was executed for treason. Relations between George and his brother, Edward IV, had long been fraught. George had rebelled against the king once already, in 1470; though forgiven, he was never again fully trusted by that monarch. Following his wife’s death in December 1476, several weeks after giving birth, George became convinced that she had been murdered by one of her ladies-in-waiting, Ankarette Twynho. Next April he had Ankarette abducted, tried and unlawfully executed – thereby infringing upon the rights of the king in exacting justice. Read more | The Wars of the Roses: the 15th-century clash of kings that heralded the dawn of the Tudor dynasty George’s error was compounded weeks later when one of his retainers, Thomas Burdett, was arrested for necromancy and, despite his denials, was executed. The following day, George burst into the king’s council chamber to protest – which was the last straw in the brothers’ relationship. Edward was in no mood to forgive George another transgression and, in a grim precursor to his son’s fate, George was arrested and kept in the Tower awaiting trial, at which he was found guilty of high treason. He was executed on 18 February 1478. An act of attainder against Clarence stripped Warwick of his inheritance, and he was tainted by his father’s crime for the rest of his days, “barred from all right and claim to the crown”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL5937945web-30462d1-e1731336289933.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="George, Duke of Clarence, father of Edward of Warwick. Fraught relations with his brother Edward IV culminated in George’s execution in 1478 (Photo by Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)" title="George, Duke of Clarence, father of Edward of Warwick. Fraught relations with his brother Edward IV culminated in George’s execution in 1478 (Photo by Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)" /> In 1480, care of the boy was given over to the king’s stepson, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, who paid £2,000 for Warwick’s wardship. Edward may have lived at the Tower during this time – Dorset was constable there for a period – but, if he did, it was certainly not as a prisoner. He seems to have been cared for reasonably well despite his father’s treason: Edward IV’s wardrobe accounts show that the boy was given costly gifts. In summer 1481, he received “for his wear and use” nine pairs of shoes – four of the expensive, higher-quality double-soled kind – and a pair of “tawny Spanish leather” boots. Was Edward of Warwick a threat to Richard III? However, 15th-century English politics were nothing if not unpredictable. In April 1483, Edward IV died suddenly. His heir was Warwick’s cousin, the 12-year-old prince set to become King Edward V – but the boys’ uncle Richard moved to seize power. In June, Edward IV’s children were declared illegitimate and, with Warwick also ineligible, Richard was next in line. Edward V, who was at the Tower while ostensibly preparing for his coronation, was joined there by his brother, Richard of York. They were never again seen beyond its walls. Read more | Philippa Langley on the Princes in the Tower: “It was clear we had to consider the possibility that they survived” Though legally invalid, Warwick’s claim to the throne was stronger than his uncle’s, and an act of parliament could easily have reversed George’s attainder. But, rather than joining his cousins in the Tower, Warwick was moved to the royal household. He even attended Richard’s coronation on 6 July 1483. The new king did not seem to view Warwick as a threat; indeed, Richard even seems to have begun planning for his future. Knighted in York that September, the boy was then moved to Sheriff Hutton in north Yorkshire. This was not a quiet, remote estate where he and other royal children lived in obscurity. On the contrary: in 1484, it was one of two administrative centres for Richard’s Council of the North, a body established to give subjects in that region access to the king’s justice, and one on which Warwick was even given a position. The castle was essential for the running of the council and, though Warwick’s role was minimal – he was only nine years old – it was no doubt expected that it would increase as he grew older. Richard was clearly setting up his nephew for a position of importance in the north, and for a while Warwick’s future seemed bright. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL1066157web-ba5fc79-e1731336142289.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Richard III, in a c1520 portrait. The last Yorkist king seems to have seen his nephew as an asset rather than a threat (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" title="Richard III, in a c1520 portrait. The last Yorkist king seems to have seen his nephew as an asset rather than a threat (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" /> What happened to Warwick under the Tudors? That all changed when, in August 1485, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven on the Pembrokeshire coast. With an army of mercenaries and Lancastrians at his back, Henry made his way into England, meeting the king in battle at Bosworth Field. Richard III was killed and, as the sun set on 22 August, the crown that – according to legend – had been found by the victor in a hawthorn bush now belonged to Henry VII. Though still only 10 years old, Warwick represented one of the most significant threats to the new king. Despite the attainder, with the princes in the Tower missing, presumed dead, Warwick was next in line. He was taken into custody almost immediately and, as London prepared for another coronation, he was incarcerated in the Tower – for no crime save his royal blood. Little is known about where Warwick was kept in the Tower, but chronicler Edward Hall wrote that he was kept “out of all company of men and sight of beasts”. Whereas the other princes in the Tower had been seen roaming the grounds and “taking the air” during the early stages of their stay in 1483, Warwick was not granted this liberty. Indeed, he would never taste true freedom again. What did Warwick have to do with Lambert Simnel? It is testament to the security under which he was kept that the first pretender to Henry VII’s throne initially claimed to be Warwick, escaped from captivity. That boy, later identified as Lambert Simnel, was also about 10 years old, and was guided by Richard Simons, an Oxford priest. Simons took the boy to Ireland, where Yorkist support could still be found and where, in May 1487, Simnel was crowned king at Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. Clearly, the real Warwick was so well sequestered that Simnel’s supporters had no trouble believing – or claiming to believe – that he was not imprisoned at all. But the episode also demonstrated that significant support could still be amassed for a Yorkist heir – even one whose claim was void. This was exactly why Warwick was being held in the Tower: even as a child with no legal right to the crown, his very existence threatened Henry VII. To put to bed the “foolish notion that the boy was in Ireland”, Henry had the real Warwick paraded through London to St Paul’s Cathedral along a route lined with citizens. After hearing a sermon and – on Henry’s instruction – speaking to several men, Warwick then returned to the Tower. This demonstration of his real location did not stop Simnel, though, who invaded England, reinforced by prominent Yorkists such as Warwick’s cousin John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. The matter came to a head in June 1487 at the battle of Stoke Field, where it is thought that as many as 7,000 died, Lincoln among them. Simnel was captured and, having received a pardon in recognition of his young age, was sent to work in the royal kitchens. Warwick, however, remained in the Tower despite his innocence. Perkin Warbeck, another princely pretender In 1490, another pretender to Henry’s throne burst onto the political scene overseas. This was Perkin Warbeck, born in Tournai (today in Belgium), who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the princes in the Tower. He was endorsed by Charles VIII of France, James IV of Scotland, and Warwick’s aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. Like Simnel before him, Warbeck tried to take the crown, invading England several times after 1491 – always unsuccessfully. In 1497, he landed in Cornwall and, though he was declared King Richard IV at Bodmin Moor, he was soon captured by the king’s forces and taken to the Tower. After confessing that he was not really the son of Edward IV, Warbeck was – like Simnel – treated remarkably fairly by Henry VII. Not only was he moved to the royal household, he was even allowed to attend banquets. It was captivity of a different kind, yet one much more lenient than Warwick’s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/W862FJweb-033a334-e1731336544469.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Edward of Warwick joined his cousins the princes in the Tower, and numerous other royals in being incarcerated in the Tower of London over the centuries (Photo by Steve Vidler/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Edward of Warwick joined his cousins the princes in the Tower, and numerous other royals in being incarcerated in the Tower of London over the centuries (Photo by Steve Vidler/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The contrast is stark: the latter had been imprisoned for over a decade, whereas those who had actively attempted to usurp the crown lived far more comfortably. Their lack of royal blood meant that, though Simnel and Warbeck had raised armies and invaded, Warwick remained the biggest threat to Henry’s security. It was only when Warbeck tried to escape in 1498 that he was taken back to the Tower. Here his story intersects with Warwick’s, putting them both on a path to destruction. In a rare glimpse of the latter’s character, he reportedly spoke to Warbeck through a hole in the ceiling, urging him to “be of good cheer and comfort”. In the event, he would have neither; within months, a plot was uncovered to break out both men, involving stealing from the treasury and blowing up the Tower’s gunpowder store. On trial, Warwick reportedly confessed that he “consented to break prison and depart out of the realm with Perkin” – though, Hall noted, “because of his innocence... many men” doubted Warwick had agreed to the plot “of his own free will”. Indeed, a life in seclusion may have led to naivety on Warwick’s part, and he may not have understood the full extent of what he was agreeing to when he was “made privy [to] the enterprise”. Why was Edward of Warwick sentenced to death? Both men were tried for treason, and Warwick was found guilty on 12 November 1499. The trial records state that he was to be “drawn and hanged” – the most brutal method of execution, reserved for traitors. Warbeck had been similarly sentenced. This did not come as a surprise. Some believed that the scheme had been “the king’s device” – that “Perkin was but his bait to entrap the Earl of Warwick”. Though there is no evidence that the plot was fabricated, it is not outside the realms of possibility. At the time, Henry was negotiating the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, whose parents were hesitant. Francis Bacon later claimed that her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon, “had written to the king in plain terms, that he saw no assurance of [Arthur’s] succession as long as the Earl of Warwick lived; and that he was loth to send his daughter to troubles and dangers”. Hall, too, noted that Ferdinand “imagined that as long as any Earl of Warwick lived, England should never be cleansed or purged of civil war”. To secure the alliance with Spain, Warwick had to die. Why isn’t Warwick as well remembered as the Princes in the Tower? On 23 November, Warbeck suffered a traitor’s death at Tyburn, and his head was set on a spike on London Bridge; Warwick’s nobility spared him this grisliest of punishments. Instead, his sentence was commuted to beheading on Tower Hill. Afterwards his body, “with the head laid into a coffin”, was taken for burial at Bisham Priory, the resting place of his Neville ancestors. “The entire population mourned the death of the handsome youth,” Vergil wrote later, “who was committed to prison not for any fault of his own but because of his family’s offences.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/H6E0GYweb-e17b277-e1731336606887.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 1505 portrait of Henry VII. He may have schemed Warwick’s death to secure the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon (Photo by Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A 1505 portrait of Henry VII. He may have schemed Warwick’s death to secure the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon (Photo by Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Despite reported public grief, there were no reprisals for Henry VII. Richard III had been maligned for the alleged murder of the other young royals, but there was no great uproar at the death of this third prince. It is impossible to say why, but perhaps it was because of his age. At 24, his death was tragic – but much less shocking than those of the princes in the Tower who, if they did indeed die in 1483, had been just 12 and 9 years old. Perhaps, too, it was also because there were few left who could take up the Yorkist mantle. Though John de la Pole’s brothers Edmund (nicknamed the ‘White Rose’) and Richard (the ‘Last White Rose’) both tried, neither succeeded in raising the same kind of Yorkist spirit that tormented Henry VII in the latter years of the 15th century. And though the Tudor quest for security would spill more Yorkist blood in the years to come, the direct male line of the House of York died with Warwick. In Vergil’s words, “Edward had to perish in this fashion in order that there should be no surviving male heir to his family”. Read more | The Tudors: 51 moments that shaped the royal dynasty A life without freedom Henry VII had paid for the Spanish alliance with Warwick’s blood – and it proved to be a poor investment. Arthur died in 1502, and in 1509 Catherine of Aragon married Henry VIII. But when Henry’s plan to divorce her was revealed, Catherine “used some words that she had not offended, but it was a judgment of God, for her former marriage was made in blood; meaning that of the Earl of Warwick”. Though she argued that her marriage remained valid, Warwick’s death clearly lay heavy on her mind. Henry VII had justified the young man’s execution with the accusation of treason, but there remained some – like Catherine – who saw the tragedy in it. For the sole reason that he was Clarence’s son, Warwick was forced to live a life without freedom – and, just like the thousands who died during the Wars of the Roses, ultimately lost it. Sarah Norton is a historian specialising in kingship in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Mary & George: the real history behind the new drama
Benjamin Woolley introduces the mother-and-son duo who changed the face of the royal court in the early 17th century
New drama Mary and George has just arrived on Sky Atlantic, transporting us back to the intrigues and scandals of the court of King James VI and I. Author and historical advisor Benjamin Woolley introduces Mary and George Villiers, the mother-and-son duo who changed the face of this early 17th-century royal court. Speaking to Elinor Evans, he explores what we really know about George's relationship with King James, and the lingering question over the Villiers' hand in the monarch's death.
Queen Victoria's unhappy childhood: life under the 'Kensington System'
What was Queen Victoria like as a child? And did she have a normal childhood? Here, historian Lucy Worsley explores the monarch’s youth at Kensington Palace – where she lived under the rules of the 'Kensington System' – and finds that it might not have been as unhappy as Victoria herself would have had us believe
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born at Kensington Palace. It was then the least fashionable of the royal palaces, hidden away behind the lime trees of its wide green gardens to the west of London. The arrival of Alexandrina Victoria, as she was christened, did cause some excitement. A long line of carriages calling for news about the health of the mother, the Duchess of Kent, reached all the way to Hyde Park Corner. But at that point the new baby, King George III’s latest granddaughter, was fairly low down the royal pecking order. As the years of her childhood passed, however, and as her elder cousins failed to thrive and died, Alexandrina Victoria grew in importance. It gradually emerged that the little girl growing up quietly behind closed doors at Kensington Palace would one day reign over the whole of the British Isles, including Ireland. And, in due course, a quarter of the globe’s landmass. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/05/GettyImages-513688265-347013e-e1703672371102.jpg" width="621" height="406" alt="The young Victoria with her mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, in an 1821 portrait by William Beechey. "My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much," said Victoire. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)" title="The young Victoria with her mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, in an 1821 portrait by William Beechey. "My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much," said Victoire. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)" /> The death of Queen Victoria's father Just as Queen Victoria’s path to the throne was not obvious at the time of her birth, her education and training for the position seem at first sight to have been quite shockingly inadequate. One of the problems was the early loss of her father, the Duke of Kent. He had terrible debts, caused partly by an expensive refurbishment of his apartment at Kensington. In the winter of 1819–20, he tried to save money by taking his beloved wife and baby daughter to live cheaply in a rented holiday house, out-of-season, at Sidmouth in Devon. There he caught pneumonia and passed away. This left his widowed duchess, whose name was Victoire, in a difficult position. German, and only recently married to her duke, she spoke no English and felt ostracised by the rest of the royal family. She had few resources, either financial or intellectual, on which to fall back for the care of her daughter. View Green Video on the source website One person who knew Victoire, Duchess of Kent, described her as “very delightful, in spite of want of brains”. If she was scatty and disorganised, she was also warm and loving. Her late husband’s will now placed Victoire in an unusual situation. Normally, a child in the line of succession would be handed over to the reigning monarch for education and guardianship. But the Duke of Kent had loved and trusted his wife, and made her guardian of their daughter instead. This was a duty Victoire intended to carry through. The rest of the royal family would perhaps have preferred it if she’d slipped back off to her native Germany – but Victoire remained. The daunting implication was that, if her daughter came to the throne before she was 18, Victoire herself would become regent of Britain. She would effectively be reigning over a country of which she could not even speak the language. Unfortunately, Victoire lacked confidence in herself. “I am not fit for my place, no, I am not,” she would say. “I am just an old stupid goose.” No wonder that she now fell into the outstretched hands of a man on whom she would come greatly to rely: her late husband’s adjutant from his army days, John Conroy. Who was Sir John Conroy? Conroy was a 6ft, black-haired, good-looking chancer from an Irish background. It's easy to see how Victoire was forced by necessity, loneliness and incapacity to depend on the man who became her advisor and factotum (an employee who takes on several types of work). Her husband's death had left her both distraught and penniless. Her brother Leopold came down to Sidmouth to help out, but failed to bring her any ready money. "Gut, gut Leopold," as Victoire called him, in her German accent, was nevertheless "rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions". It was Conroy, with his "activity and capability", who arranged a loan for her at Coutts bank. And Conroy could see, as the duchess’s chief advisor, that he might one day become the power behind the throne. He encouraged Victoire and the little Victoria to go back to live at Kensington Palace, and there devised something called the ‘System’, a set of strict rules under which the princess would live. What was the Kensington System? It sounds rather sinister, and on some levels it was. At its most basic, the System (as Conroy himself called it, with capital S) was for the young Victoria’s personal safety. It demanded she be kept in semi-seclusion at Kensington Palace. Behind the garden walls, she’d be isolated from both disease and assassination attempts. Secondly, the fact that she was rarely seen at court distanced her, in people’s minds, from the unpopular regime of her uncles, Kings George and then William IV. As a possible future queen, she’d remain untainted by association with them. She would be a fresh start – or, as Conroy put it, “the Nation’s Hope”. But thirdly – and sinisterly – the System also seems to have been about breaking Victoria’s spirit, and getting her to submit. It contained an element of surveillance: she wasn’t allowed to sleep alone, play with other girls or even walk downstairs without having someone holding her hand. And each day she had to write in her ‘Behaviour Book’ how well – or badly – she’d behaved (see more rules below). On the podcast | Professor Jane Ridley reveal lesser-known aspects of Queen Victoria's life Accounts of Queen Victoria’s childhood usually take at face value her adult recollections of this period in her life, in which she complained of trauma and loneliness. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that she did have a natural tendency to make a drama out of her own life. And perhaps there were some elements of the System that helped to make her reign a success. There is no doubt that Conroy was indeed a manipulative bully, but there is also something more to his poor reputation among historians than just Victoria’s well-recorded dislike. The snobbish court establishment looked down on his lack of an aristocratic background. Born in Wales to Anglo-Irish parents – his father was a barrister – Conroy had reached his position of influence entirely by his own efforts, which contemporaries found troubling. Read more | ‘Dumpy’ dowager or vibrant beauty: what did Queen Victoria really look like, and how tall was she? Secondly, if the System Conroy had devised had three components, the first two were wildly successful. He did keep Victoria safe. And, through a carefully stage-managed series of public appearances in her teenage years, he did manage to create an enormous groundswell of warmth for her when, eventually, she became queen. The Kensington System that governed Queen Victoria's childhood Victoria was not allowed to spend time by herself and she always had to sleep in her mother’s room. Victoria could not walk downstairs without holding the hand of an adult in case she fell. (It sounds melodramatic, but Victoria did actually confirm in later life that this was a rule she had to abide by.) Victoria was not allowed to meet any strangers or third parties without her governess being present. The young Victoria had to write in a ‘Behaviour Book’ how well she’d behaved each day, so that her mother could assess her progress. Sometimes it was good, sometimes “VERY NAUGHTY”. Victoria could only appear in public on carefully stage-managed ‘publicity tours’. This was to distance her from the unpopular regime of her uncles, Kings George IV and William IV, and to present her as “the Nation’s Hope”. Victoria was not allowed to dance the scandalous and intimate new dance called the waltz, not even (as is often said) with other royal relations. She would never waltz until married to Prince Albert. Victoria had to build up her strength by exercising with her Indian clubs [a pair of bowling-pin shaped wooden clubs] and a machine with pulleys and weights, and was mandated to have plenty of fresh air. She would be a life-long devotee of open windows, to the extent that her courtiers would always be shivering. The young Victoria was not allowed to gorge on her food. She was allowed to eat bread with milk and plain roast mutton, and was restricted from eating her favourite things: sweetmeats and fruit. Young Victoria's publicity tours One of the items on display in an exhibition at Kensington Palace is the small wooden travelling bed that Victoria used for another strand of Conroy’s System: the country-wide ‘publicity tours’ that he organised for her. Taking her on closely choreographed visits to provincial towns and nobleman’s houses around Britain gave her future subjects an intriguing glimpse of their future monarch. It was a strategy that paid off entirely. When, in the early hours of 20 June 1837, the 18-year-old Victoria was woken up at Kensington Palace with news that her uncle had died in the night, she was able to emerge – as Conroy had planned – as a fresh start for the monarchy. Victoria's journey to the throne was a struggle. But once she was queen, she would not long remain at Kensington Palace. She removed herself as quickly as she could to the relative freedom of Buckingham Palace instead. There’s a well-known and compelling narrative that sees Victoria, on her accession day, cutting free of the System to the extent, even, of changing her name. Read more | Victoria’s great palaces: 5 of the queen’s grandest and most significant homes When called on to sign her name, the new queen put just plain “Victoria” – not the “Alexandrina Victoria” of her christening. It’s widely believed that she was called “Drina” in childhood, rather than Victoria, and that the change symbolised a break from the past. But her mother had some time earlier agreed that the “Alexandrina” should be dropped quietly, and her toys are marked with a “V”. The duchess had, in any case, also called her daughter by the pet name of “Vickelchen”. How did the Kensington System affect Victoria? So the System was not entirely a black-and-white affair. Even the most unpleasant aspect of it, that of surveillance, perhaps had an unintended benefit. It toughened Victoria up. She would have to face a lifetime of being watched and judged. The Behaviour Books were just the start. As her mother explained to her: “You cannot escape… from the situation you are born in.” Victoria might as well be given the chance to get used to living under watch and under pressure. This was far from normal for a 19th-century girl, who was expected by society to shrink away from attention. But even Victoria’s Uncle Leopold, an enemy of Conroy’s, likewise coached his niece about the element of performance that would be so central to her role as a constitutional monarch. “High personages are a little like stage actors,” he explained. “They must always make efforts to please their public.” Harsh judgement has sometimes been heaped upon the Duchess of Kent for not standing up to Conroy when he bullied her. But while Victoire lacked moral fibre, that did not make her a bad person, and this too is something that Victoria herself in later life came to appreciate. As Victoire explained, she’d simply done her best for her daughter. “My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much,” she said. And what Victoire did bequeath to her daughter was a huge capacity for love. Most royals of the early 19th century could not afford to look for love in their marriages, which were pragmatic affairs undertaken for blood or politics. Yet Victoire, creature of an age in which romantic novels were beginning to provide a new template for living, had sought and found a soulmate in her husband. She brought up her daughter to desire the same thing – and Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert was a love match. Read more | Love before Albert: Queen Victoria’s suitors Victoria came in later life to realise the love her mother had felt for her – despite the System – and she also spent her childhood watching her mother defer so much to the advice of a man. The result of this was that she herself, in due course, would cling all the more closely to her own family. And in doing so, Queen Victoria would model for the media and the nation a domestic life that was more than acceptable to the age in which she lived. The dutiful queen The industrial revolution had allowed a man, working in industry or business, to earn enough money to keep his wife at home, untroubled by the outside world. In her own family life, Victoria would become a kind of super-Victorian: submissive to her husband, Prince Albert, apparently devoted to her children – the perfect pin-up for a populace tired of the debauchery, the mistresses and the general excesses of previous kings. Read more | Who were Queen Victoria's children? Everything you need to know about her sons and daughters But while the young Victoria was loved to the extent of being spoilt, there were still terrible gaps in her more formal education. The System had given her nothing more than the standard education for a genteel young lady being prepared for marriage. The majority of her time was spent on music, drawing (at which she excelled), dancing, religion, French and German. Her tutors reported her as “indifferent” at spelling, but “good” at most other subjects. “The rest of her education,” one of Victoria’s prime ministers later noted, “she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness.” But there was also a curious advantage to having a queen who relied on her “natural shrewdness”. It made her an instinctive, populist politician in a way that her classically educated male court and cabinet could never really appreciate. When she did ultimately come to write a book, for example, it was far from a learned tome. She published an account of holidays she’d taken in Scotland, which became a huge success and a runaway bestseller. Its rather banal content appealed directly to the people among her subjects who mattered, the people who held the balance of political power in the 19th century: the middle class. Read more | Friends, family and rivals: Queen Victoria and the European empires While other monarchies across Europe were being threatened by revolution, the British monarchy survived the 19th century unscathed. This was not least because the middle classes thought that their undereducated, dutiful, home-loving queen simply wasn’t worth overthrowing. It was not the result that Conroy’s strange ‘System’ was intended to achieve. Victoria would look back on her Kensington childhood with horror and regret. But far from being the breaking of her, you could argue that Victoria’s unusual childhood was in fact the making of her reign. This article was first published in the June 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Off to school: how do the royal family educate their children?
How should a young prince or princess be best prepared for their unique role? From private palace tutors to the school of hard knocks, each generation of royals has chosen new and different ways to educate their children
Beyond the ABCs and time tables, educating a young royal comes with unique challenges as they are prepared for a life of constant media scrutiny. They need to be prepared for their responsibilities as national ambassadors and, in the case of the heirs themselves, the burden of wearing the crown. Yet each generation of post-war Windsors has made bold moves away from centuries of traditional royal schooling. In fact, far from the private tutoring of the future Queen Elizabeth, there have been calls by newspaper columnists for the newest arrival to date, Louis, to be sent to a public school. Much like many royal children before them, Elizabeth and her sister Margaret received their education at home. Tutors were brought in to cover specialist subjects, but the core of their teaching was entrusted to their governess Marion Crawford, nicknamed “Crawfie”, under the supervision of their mother. Mornings covered history, language, literature and music before afternoons were spent on games, dancing and singing. While the dutiful Elizabeth showed a propensity for learning, home-schooling did not stretch her academically, although she now speaks fluent French and some German thanks to native speakers working at the palace. The young princess had not been expected to ascend to the throne, so it was only after the abdication of her uncle in 1936 that Elizabeth’s education gained pace, with private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, vice-provost of Eton, and religious instruction by the archbishop of Canterbury. Margaret, however, was not privy to such lessons, and later in life she resented her lack of serious education. Still, Elizabeth never sat an exam or earned a formal qualification. Read more | The Queen’s “rebel sister”: 8 facts about Princess Margaret Breaking with tradition Perhaps frustrated by her own limited education, the Queen wished for her children to go to school, marking a significant change for the royal family. Read more | What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother? Charles had brief spells at Hill House School and Cheam — where the headmaster suggested he play football as the other boys would certainly show him no preferential treatment when going for the ball. Later, Prince Philip sent Charles to his own former school, which was notoriously tough. Gordonstoun, in the north of Scotland, championed physical and mental fortitude with unorthodox teaching. Its students took cold showers, slept on hard beds and went on morning runs whatever the weather. Prince Philip hoped it would have the same effect it had done on him, and turn the sensitive and timid Charles into a man. From arriving at age 13 as a boarder, though, Charles hated Gordonstoun and called it a “prison sentence” and “Colditz in kilts”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-592603145cmyk-bb98eab.jpg" width="813" height="1040" alt="A black and white photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and son Charles at Gordonstoun." title="The Queen visits Charles at Gordonstoun. The school’s physical regime was tough but the prince went on to appreciate its challenges. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Charles struggled with bullying and loneliness. This only worsened when the detective guarding him, Donald Green, was sacked for letting the young Charles drink a cherry brandy, not knowing a tabloid reporter was watching. Yet Charles, as his father had hoped, would end up praising Gordonstoun, saying: “I believe it taught me a great deal about myself and my own abilities and disabilities. It taught me to accept challenges and take the initiative.” From there, he went to Cambridge where, in 1970, he became the first heir to the throne to be awarded a university degree. The life of a royal nanny What does it take to look after the heir to the throne? Changing cloth diapers, keeping the nursery spotless, and being trained in martial arts, anti-terrorism tactics and defensive driving—it’s all in a day’s work for a royal nanny. Considering they care for future monarchs, duties go far beyond childcare and come with a host of regulations and protocols. Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo, nanny to William and Kate’s children, was trained at the prestigious Norland College in Bath. She is always on call, accompanies the family on visits and has a role in their education, notably teaching them Spanish. Their constant presence means a nanny becomes close to their charges, but sometimes too close. Hands-on mother Diana clashed with a string of nannies, including Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who referred to the children as “my babies”. It is a well-paid, illustrious job, but can be ended on the whim of the royal parent. Charles’s favourite nanny was Mabel Anderson, but another, Helen Lightbody, was dismissed after a disagreement with the Queen over a pudding. The Queen’s own nannies were Clara Knight, affectionately called “Allah” (a child’s pronunciation of her first name), and Marion Crawford, who incurred the palace’s wrath by publishing a book about her experiences caring for the princesses. If there is one quality the nanny must embody above all, it is discretion. Read more | Life in the royal nursery: growing up as a young prince or princess Diana’s influence The education of Charles’s own sons, William and Harry, was heavily influenced by their mother, Diana. Not only did they join her on official visits from an early age, where seeing homeless shelters and clinics for AIDs-related conditions instilled in them a philanthropic spirit, but instead of Gordonstoun they went to Eton, the school Diana’s father and brother had attended. William fully immersed himself into his time at school, which began in 1995, becoming a member of the Eton Society, the elite group of prefects who had the unique privilege of wearing whatever design of waistcoat they wanted. On Sunday afternoons, he would walk the short distance to Windsor Castle to have tea with his grandmother, as well as lessons on his royal duties. The Queen would take him through the documents in the state boxes. Harry enjoyed his time at Eton less than his brother and, always prone to mischief, admitted he wanted to be the “bad boy” at school. While he may not have been the strongest student academically, Harry certainly thrived in sports, playing rugby and polo, and being made House Captain of Games. He also became a member of the Combined Cadet Forces. View Green Video on the source website After leaving Eton, both boys kept up the tradition for male royals to go into the military, with Harry completing officer commissioning training at Sandhurst after first spending some time abroad. William joined him there after graduating from the University of St Andrews, where he met Kate. As is fitting for the “new royals”, William and Kate have chosen new schools for their children. In 2018, Charlotte started at the exclusive Willcocks Nursery, near Kensington Palace, from which she may join her older brother George at Thomas’s Battersea. The young prince had previously gone to a Montessori nursery school, favoured for its emphasis on independence and social development. Thomas’s Battersea, an £18,000-a-year preparatory school, will promote above all else its primary ethos of “be kind”, and offer George an extensive curriculum unlike anything his great-grandmother would have had. We’ll have to wait and see where William and Kate will choose for Louis, or what Harry and Meghan intend for their first child, but the days of traditional home-schooling are long gone as the new royals seek to give their children as normal a start in life as possible. Read more | From Nell to Meghan: 10 romances between actors and royals
The real history behind Becoming Elizabeth
Becoming Elizabeth tells the story of the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn before she became Elizabeth I, as she navigated the tumultuous reigns of her half-siblings. But how historically accurate is the drama? Discover the real history behind the show and the life of the teenage Princess Elizabeth
What is Becoming Elizabeth about? Becoming Elizabeth dramatises the life of the young Elizabeth I, daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The princess was born on September 1533 as heir-presumptive. Three years later, she was declared illegitimate and ousted from the succession, after her mother was executed on fabricated charges of adultery. From there on, she was largely ignored by her father, permitted to see him on only a handful of special occasions. But, against all expectations – and Henry’s best-laid plans – Elizabeth did eventually become Queen of England. And she would be arguably the greatest monarch of the entire Tudor dynasty. That is another story. Becoming Elizabeth is a tale of Elizabeth’s days before the throne, before she became the Virgin Queen, Gloriana or Good Queen Bess. It is the story of her precarious life during the reigns of her step-siblings, Edward VI and Mary I, during a period of polarising religious tensions. The drama begins in the immediate aftermath of Henry VIII’s death when Elizabeth is sent to live with dowager queen and Henry’s sixth wife Katherine Parr, and her new husband – the rakish Thomas Seymour (brother of Edward’s mother Jane Seymour). Below we explore the real history behind the drama. What was the true nature of Elizabeth’s relationship with Thomas Seymour? What did Elizabeth really think of her mother, Anne Boleyn? And could she really trust her stepmother, Katherine Parr? Read on for the real history behind Becoming Elizabeth – warning, there will be spoilers. View oEmbed on the source website How to watch Becoming Elizabeth Becoming Elizabeth was first broadcast on Starz in the US and STARZPLAY in the UK in June 2022. The series is currently airing weekly on Channel 4 in the UK, with new episodes available stream on Channel4.com shortly after. Becoming Elizabeth is still available to stream in full on Lionsgate+, the new name for STARZPLAY, which is available as an add-on channel for Amazon Prime Video. Sign up for a 7-day Lionsgate+ trial. If you don't have Prime Video, you can sign up for a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. Is Becoming Elizabeth a true story? The real history behind the drama What was Elizabeth’s relationship with Thomas Seymour? When Elizabeth is sent to live in Chelsea with Katherine Parr (an event that occurs both in the drama and real history), the princess comes into the orbit of Thomas Seymour – brother of the Lord Protector, uncle to the King, and Parr’s new husband. He is 25 years her senior. Elizabeth, we see, holds some infatuation for the dashing Thomas, and Thomas returns those affections. There are lingering looks, and stolen glances. “We’re not meant to marry princesses,” his brother Edward, Earl of Hertford (later the Duke of Somerset) intones to his brother, serious as a death knell. Thomas, we are soon to learn, cares little for whom that bell tolls. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/eli1-105-040821-0060-a-1--ad120a7-e1654875750637.jpg" width="620" height="415" alt="The relationship between Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) and Princess Elizabeth (Alicia von Rittberg) is a focal point for the drama" title="The relationship between Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) and Princess Elizabeth (Alicia von Rittberg) is a focal point for the drama (Photo courtesy of Starz)" /> To modern sensibilities, what follows is uncomfortable viewing. More than once we see Thomas stride into Elizabeth’s bedchamber in his underclothes. There are quiet rendezvous in hidden corners, and in one particularly unsettling scene, Katherine Parr joins in with Thomas to rip a dress from Elizabeth’s body piece by piece. It is left ambiguous as to the extent of Elizabeth’s willingness throughout these events, but much of what is portrayed is rooted in the truth, as much as sources suggest. Most of the detail come from Elizabeth’s own servants, who gave evidence to a Privy Council investigation after Thomas was caught in the act of attempting to kidnap Edward VI – a 1549 inquiry that ultimately concluded that Thomas was also planning to wed Elizabeth without the council’s consent, and culminated in his execution. The servants told of how Thomas would “strike her on the back or the buttocks familiarly”, how sometimes she would shrink from him, and how he would climb into her bed to tickle her, and that sometimes Katherine would join in. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/eli1-101-121020-0016-a-p-a2ec40a.jpg" width="980" height="653" alt="Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) and Katherine Parr (Jessica Raine) in Becoming Elizabeth" title="Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) and Katherine Parr (Jessica Raine) in Becoming Elizabeth. Exactly what the real Parr made of Thomas's horseplay with Elizabeth remains unclear (Photo courtesy of Starz)" /> The scene in which Thomas shreds Elizabeth’s dress with a sword within the halls of Chelsea is in reality said to have taken place in the gardens at Hanworth Park, one source stating (as portrayed in Becoming Elizabeth) that Katherine “held her” as Thomas savaged her finery. “The nature of Katherine’s holding is not clear,” notes historian Suzannah Lipscomb. “Held her down? Held her to protect her? Laughingly participated in mere horseplay? We don’t know how Elizabeth reacted.” As to whether Elizabeth returned any of Thomas’s attentions, Lipscomb adds: “Kat Ashley [Elizabeth’s governess] said that Elizabeth blushed when Seymour was spoken of, but this might not indicate affection, or fancy, so much as shame.” Though as historian Helen Castor points out, there may have been a reason for Elizabeth engaging with Seymour’s advances: “If this was an adolescent crush on a handsome and attentive older man – a father-figure who was not sexually out of bounds, should he ask for her hand – it is only likely to have been intensified by the fact that the prospect of marrying Seymour would spare Elizabeth the usual fate of royal daughters: to be sent abroad, in permanent exile from all that was familiar, to make a new life with a stranger for a husband.” Read more | Did Thomas Seymour sexually abuse the teenage Princess Elizabeth? Was Katherine Parr a friend or foe to Elizabeth? Katherine Parr is largely given short shrift in Becoming Elizabeth. Perhaps the most misunderstood of Henry VIII’s six wives, she is often relegated to being ‘the one who survived’ – when in fact, she thrived. During Henry’s lifetime, she played a prominent role in state affairs and published books under her own name. Here, the view we are given is she was in love with someone else at the time of Henry’s demise – Thomas Seymour, with whom she was smitten in real history long before the king called upon her to be his sixth wife. Her intentions surrounding Elizabeth’s wellbeing once she engages in Thomas’s horseplay are portrayed as clouded, to say the least. “Was she jealous,” asks Lipscomb. “Did she think Elizabeth was just a young girl infatuated with her handsome husband? Did she see it as mere high jinks? Or did she resist seeing what was happening in front of her face?” As with Elizabeth herself, it is impossible to say how Katherine truly felt, but the result was the same – the princess was ultimately sent away from Parr’s household in May 1548. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/eli1-101-121020-0084-a-p-7eab304.jpg" width="980" height="653" alt="Jessica Raine as Katherine Parr, the wife who 'survived' Henry VIII and took on the mantle of Elizabeth's stepmother" title="Jessica Raine as Katherine Parr, the wife who 'survived' Henry VIII and took on the mantle of Elizabeth's stepmother (Photo courtesy of Starz)" /> “It is possible that Katherine sent Elizabeth away in order to protect her, as the heavily pregnant Katherine knew that she would soon have been going into confinement and would not be able to stop Seymour’s advances,” says Lipscomb. It’s also not apparent in the show, but before the period portrayed, it was Katherine Parr who was responsible for rekindling the relationship between Elizabeth and her father, and for convincing Henry to restore both Elizabeth and Mary to the line of succession. Katherine became queen in July 1543. “Within a few months she arranged for Henry's children to pay visits to their father and thus provide him with some semblance of the home life he had never had,” writes historian Derek Wilson. “Extant letters, written between 1544 and 1547, bear witness to a very warm relationship between the royal children and their stepmother. Whether sending a court musician to perform for Mary or correcting the Latin exercises of Edward and Elizabeth, Katherine took a keen interest in their wellbeing.” Read more | Did Henry VIII love Katherine Parr? Was there a rumour that Elizabeth became pregnant by Thomas Seymour? “I’m late,” the drama’s Elizabeth announces flatly to her governess and confidant, Kat Ashley. Not long after, she asks: “Shall we fetch a woman?” It is never stated what the ‘woman’ might do. Nothing is explicitly shown as having happened between Thomas and the teenage princess, nor is anything explicitly said. But the significance Elizabeth puts on her lateness – and the extent of her relief when her period arrives – is intended to speak louder than words. As she waits, the story is put out that Elizabeth, who by this point has left Parr’s household, is unwell. In reality, Elizabeth was certainly ill during the summer of 1548, after she had been sent away from Chelsea – but the suggestion that she might have been pregnant was not contemporary, emerging some 60 years later. “The evidence [for a pregnancy] is laughably slender and easily refuted,” writes Lipscomb. “It seems more likely that Elizabeth was stressed and traumatised by the separation from her stepmother and the sexual harassment by her stepfather.” The Tudors on screen The real history behind ‘The White Princess The real history behind The Spanish Princess The time travelling Tudor: Anne Boleyn’s most surprising representations in film, TV and literature Did Thomas Seymour really try to marry Elizabeth? Following Katherine Parr’s death after childbirth, the drama has the grasping Thomas Seymour asking Elizabeth to marry him. But did it ever happen? It is plausible. The same Privy Council investigation into Thomas Seymour’s attempt to kidnap Edward VI concluded that Thomas had conspired to marry the princess in secret. Whether the real Elizabeth knew the extent of Thomas’s machinations is unclear. There is one significant detail that the show omits: Thomas had asked Elizabeth to marry him once before, prior to his marriage to Katherine Parr. “Thomas Seymour asked the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth to marry him by letter in February 1547, within a month of Henry VIII’s death,” writes Lipscomb. “Elizabeth rejected his proposal elegantly, also by letter, saying she was too young and would be in mourning for her father for two years.” Within a month or so, Thomas was married to Katherine Parr. “Katherine had been in love with him since before her marriage to Henry, but it is possible that Thomas married her to get closer to Elizabeth,” Lipscomb adds. Read more | What happened to Katherine Parr’s daughter, Mary Seymour, after her mother’s death? What did Elizabeth think of her mother, Anne Boleyn? In the drama, Anne Boleyn casts a long shadow over the teenage Elizabeth. History may have rehabilitated the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, but in Becoming Elizabeth, Anne is almost universally reviled as “the Great Whore”. And with rumours of affections between Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour, that shadow comes into even sharper relief. Elizabeth seems sanguine about her mother and her reputation, at one point threatening to visit court wearing Boleyn’s now-iconic ‘B’ necklace – an act of provocation that draws shock from both Katherine Parr and governess Kat Ashley. But do we have any idea of what Elizabeth made of her mother? “The popular misconception is that Elizabeth didn't really regard her mother at all,” and that “she only mentioned twice in her life,” writes Tracy Borman. “In fact, Elizabeth mentioned her a good deal more than that.” She had to be careful, but Elizabeth expressed her affinity to Anne in subtle ways –promoting her Boleyn relatives at court, for instance. She also possessed a locket ring that contained two portraits, one of herself and the other of Anne. “That locket ring was kept in a locked casket by Elizabeth until the day she died. It was clearly one of her most treasured possessions,” says Borman. Read more | What did Elizabeth I think of her mother, Anne Boleyn? Learn more about Elizabeth I as Queen of England A Tudor love triangle: Elizabeth I, Lettice Knollys and Robert Dudley Queens at war: Elizabeth I vs Mary, Queen of Scots Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-1354452119web_ready-7c63418.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted to honour her victor over the Spanish in 1588 (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted to honour her victor over the Spanish in 1588 (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Who was Edward Seymour? In the Parr household, Thomas Seymour looms large, but at court it is his brother who dominates proceedings. On the night of Henry VIII’s death, it is Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford who rides off in the dead of night to Prince Edward’s side, and in being the first to reach him, cements his position as the new king’s closest confidant. Though Henry envisaged his son ruling under the influence of 16 councillors, Hertford manages to make himself pre-eminent among them, as Edward’s Lord Protector. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/eli1-101-020321-0015-a-p-8598ff4.jpg" width="980" height="653" alt="The fates of Henry VIII's children are dominated by two men in the immediate aftermath of his death: Edward and Thomas Seymour (John Heffernan and Tom Cullen), who brothers to his third wife, Jane Seymour" title="The fates of Henry VIII's children are dominated by two men in the immediate aftermath of his death: Edward and Thomas Seymour (John Heffernan and Tom Cullen), who brothers to his third wife, Jane Seymour (Photo courtesy of Starz)" /> “Over the centuries historians have offered many explanations as to why the councillors agreed to Seymour’s power-grab,” writes historian Derek Wilson, “including the need for a strong government to fend off any conservative reaction, the fact that Seymour was Edward VI’s uncle, and the dishing out of sweeteners to pliable supporters. “Whatever the reason, Seymour was now Protector of the Realm. Soon, he was consulting the council less and less and ruling by decree in his nephew’s name.” Like so many overmighty subjects, that would prove his undoing – and 1552 the Lord Protector was executed. Read more | Who decided Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, should be executed? Was Edward VI anything like Henry VIII? In each of the first three episodes, Edward feels the need to exclaim, loudly, “I am the king!” On one occasion, as he adds an intermediary expletive for added emphasis, leading Edward Seymour and his ally Lord Dudley to acknowledge that this new boy king could end up very much like his father – a perspective that historian Tracy Borman agrees with. Though often regarded as a sickly child, the real Edward VI, writes Borman, was a hearty lad who could have been as terrible as his father had he not died early – at just 15 years old – in 1553. “Far from being dominated by ambitious councillors such as the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland [as Dudley was later known], he had strong opinions, ideas of his own and all the makings of a tyrant. In short, he was a chip off the old block.” Read more | Why wasn’t Henry VIII’s son crowned as Edward V? Why is Edward called the new Josiah? As Edward plunges ahead with religious reform in the guise of the Reformation, the king is hailed, more than once, as the ‘new Josiah’. But why? Josiah was a young king of ancient Judah, who reigned in the mid-to-late 7th century BC, and took great pains to fight idolatry and ensure that God was truly worshipped. And it was his example that the archbishop Thomas Cranmer is said to have urged Edward to emulate at the young king’s coronation in February 1547. “Cranmer’s exhortation was a sign of things to come: far from reversing Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Edward would go on to quicken the pace of his father’s religious reforms,” writes Ralph Houlbrooke. “The result was that England would, for the first time, become an officially Protestant country during the six-year reign of the boy king.” Read more | Edward VI: boy king and religious zealot Was there a plot to marry Jane Grey to Edward VI? A significant subplot in Becoming Elizabeth centres around Thomas Seymour and Katherine Parr’s attempts to gain influence at court by introducing Edward VI to Lady Jane Grey – another ward in their household. This was yet another charge levied at Thomas Seymour after the Privy Council investigation that ultimately cost him his head, but Jane would get closer to the throne that even Thomas had imagined. For nine days, she would be England’s (disputed) queen. “The seeds of Jane’s spectacular fall from grace were sown, earlier in 1553, by one of Edward VI’s last acts as king of England, writes Nicola Tallis. “Championing Protestantism in his lifetime wasn’t enough for Edward. He wanted the work to continue after his death, and that meant preventing his fiercely Catholic elder half-sister, Mary, from succeeding to the throne. “His solution was to author a famous document, ‘My Devise for the Succession’, in which he excluded both Mary, and his other half-sister, Elizabeth, on the grounds of their illegitimacy (as his father had done before him). Lady Jane Grey, a fellow Protestant who had sat third in the line of succession, suddenly found herself anointed Edward’s heir.” Edward’s death, in July 1553, thrust Jane into the halls of power, but her reign would be tumultuous and brief. Read more | Who was Lady Jane Grey? The tragic story of the 'Nine Days Queen' Why is England at war with Scotland? In the drama, it seems that no sooner than has Edward Seymour become Lord Protector, that he leaves court to battle the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh – a catastrophic real-life defeat for Scotland that was fought in September 1547 and saw thousands killed, wounded or captured. That the battle was fought at all was Henry VIII’s doing, who in the last years of his reign tried to break the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France by securing a betrothal between Prince Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. When diplomacy failed, Henry turned to war – which would be later romanticised by literary figures such as Walter Scott as the ‘Rough Wooing’. It didn’t work and, fearing for Mary’s life, her guardians arranged for a marriage pact with the French dauphin instead. 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