HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-02-02T15:31:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
items: Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life
items: Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?
items: Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a day
items: From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
items: Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
items: Did Queen Victoria and John Brown have a SECRET child?
items: Tudor love and sex: inside the 16th-century bedroom
items: What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century
items: The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys

The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
type: item
date: 2026-02-02T15:30:45.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: British queens
subject: Georgian
subject: Historical people
subject: Royal children
subject: Royal weddings
subject: The royal family
description: 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
encoded: 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 pred…

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Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life
type: item
date: 2026-01-25T16:00:59.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical people
subject: Holocaust
description: Last year, the results of a groundbreaking study into Adolf Hitler’s DNA were revealed to the world. The project’s senior historical consultant, Alex J Kay, looks at what the findings might be able to tell us about the Führer’s relationship with Eva Braun and the other women in his life
encoded: In November 2025, I was lead historian on the television documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which revealed the results of a world-first analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA. The results – as explained by the project’s lead geneticist, Turi King – revealed that Hitler had a disorder known as Kallmann syndrome. Among other things, this condition can result in impaired testosterone production, low libido, underdeveloped reproductive features and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. The revelation that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the likely implications for his private life. This finding strongly suggests a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, Hitler had a very traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the time he turned 19. He later wrote in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf that his mother’s death had been “a dreadful blow, particularly for me”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2-Traumatic-childhood-248974imagno-5c13625-e1769175795531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two black and white photos alongside each other. A woman is on the left, wearing a high collar and looking straight at the camera. On the left there is a man, wearing a jacket with several buttons down the middle. He is facing the left, and has a large moustache" title="Hitler’s parents, Klara and Alois, pictured around 1890. The future Nazi leader would go on to describe his mother’s death in 1907 as “a dreadful blow” (Image by Topfoto)" /> The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, subsequently remarked: “While [Hitler] was not a ‘mother’s boy’ in the usual sense, I have …

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Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?
type: item
date: 2025-12-29T16:00:12.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: He’s reviled as a cruel tyrant who killed his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned. But was Nero’s descent into madness triggered by his failed romance with a former slave? Edward J Watts tells a story of murder, incest and political intrigue
encoded: It is difficult to feel empathy for the emperor Nero, a man who did such unquestionably terrible things that he has become a prototype for the monstrous Roman ruler. During his lifetime he was labelled a matricide, an arsonist and a persecutor of Christians who also killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. After his death, these stories grew into terrifying legends about his cruel madness. By the Middle Ages, chroniclers even detailed a tale in which Nero commanded doctors to make him give birth. Fearing for their lives, the terrified doctors “made up a potion in which they put a frog and gave it to the emperor to drink”, while prescribing him a special diet that would cause his stomach to expand. When Nero vomited the animal out, he “commanded that the foetus be fed and kept in a domed chamber” as his imperial heir. Some manuscripts even featured an image of Nero on a birthing chair beside his frog-child to illustrate his “evil madness”. And yet it is not hard to imagine a different life for Nero. This is because, before Nero became a monster, he was a heartbroken boy prohibited from marrying Acte – his one true love. Family trauma The tragic history of Nero’s family made it all the more surprising that he found such a romantic partner. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – the man whom Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, hoped would assume imperial power following his planned retirement. When Germanicus predeceased Tiberius, however, his wife and children became potential rivals and were ultimately arrested. Agrippina’s mother starved to death in captivity, while her brother took his own life by eating the mattress in his cell. Their fates taught the princess that real financial and political security came only from a strong connection to some devoted, powerful male figure. She married thrice, each time to a rich and powerful suitor. Her first marriage, which was celebrated in AD 28 when she was just 13 years old, joined Agrippina to …

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Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a day
type: item
date: 2025-12-05T17:00:37.000Z
creator: Tracy Borman
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Henry VIII's wives
subject: Historical people
subject: Tudor kings and queens
subject: Tudor life
description: Ever wondered what Tudor England’s most famous monarch ate for breakfast? (Or whether breakfast was even a thing?) Tracy Borman examines Henry VIII’s daily routine – and sexual proclivities – during the year that he married Anne Boleyn
encoded: The year 1533 was a big one for Henry VIII. It began with his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, followed a few months later by the annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The new queen was crowned in June, then in September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for male heir. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Reformation parliament passed radical religious legislation that would separate the country from Rome and make Henry supreme head of the new Church of England. Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it. In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock. But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/13AAW7T4-d152d6f-e1764861462989.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch of a man holding a large bow and arrow, with arrows across his body too. A man stands behind him and another kneels down on the ground next to him" title="A Victorian image depicts a youthful Henry VIII enjoying a spot of arc…

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From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
type: item
date: 2025-11-29T18:00:37.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
encoded: This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or si…

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Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
type: item
date: 2025-11-05T09:00:32.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval life
description: What did medieval physicians prescribe for stomach ache? And could weasels’ testicles really help you conceive? James Freeman delves into the sources to find eight curious cures from the Middle Ages
encoded: My urine has turned black! What does your wee say about your health? Well, plenty – but perhaps not in quite the way medieval physicians understood it. Before the in-depth study of anatomy and physiology, establishing the causes of symptoms relied on theories that today seem primitive or foolish. However, they were often based on long-established ideas about the body and its function. Medieval treatises on uroscopy – the study of urine – identified up to 20 colours, each indicating certain diseases. Many texts on this subject were accompanied by drawings of glass flasks filled with liquid coloured with an appropriate pigment. These might be arranged in a circular shape with descriptive labels, helping readers to memorise the key diagnostic details. Perhaps unsurprisingly, black was the worst possible colour, and was generally agreed to indicate imminent death. Why was urine so significant? Because of prohibitions against opening the body (which extended to postmortem dissections), medieval doctors were reliant on external indicators. This included variations in a patient’s pulse but also the colour, texture, layers, smell and even taste of their urine. The doctor’s role was to understand a patient’s nature: specifically, the four fluids or ‘humours’ inside the human body. In the treatise De Natura Hominis (‘On the Nature of Man’), by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c460–c375 BC) or his pupil Polybus, it was determined that there were four such humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Disease was caused by imbalances in these humours, or when they became ‘corrupted’ or concentrated in a part of the body. Read more | It felt like the end of the world, but this medieval ‘apocalypse’ left a legacy no one saw coming This theory was developed further by Galen of Pergamon (c129–c216), who likened digestion to the cooking process: food was converted into life-giving liquid, the humours were generated by the vital organs, and waste products – including ur…

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Did Queen Victoria and John Brown have a SECRET child?
type: item
date: 2025-10-22T05:19:17.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: A clandestine royal marriage and a secret baby smuggled to distant shores: is this the true story of the relationship behind Queen Victoria and her Highland servant, John Brown?
encoded: In conversation with HistoryExtra’s Ellie Cawthorne, historian Dr Fern Riddell presents her groundbreaking research into one of the most tantalising royal rumours in British history. In this video, Riddell explores decades of speculation and overlooked evidence, sharing how she went in pursuit of the truth when writing her new book Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (Ebury, 2025). The official line has long cast Brown as merely a devoted servant and friend, but new sources – including intimate letters, photographs, and a forgotten family archive – paint a far more romantic (and possibly scandalous) picture. Even more striking are the signs of a child curiously unmentioned in the royal record but treated with unusual importance by the Queen. Was this child hers? Riddell weighs up newly uncovered documents and historical context that offers a compelling challenge to the long-held narrative of Queen Victoria’s widowhood – and opens the door to one of the most explosive theories in royal history. View Green Video on the source website

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Tudor love and sex: inside the 16th-century bedroom
type: item
date: 2025-10-20T16:17:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
description: In the final episode of her Tudor Life series, Ruth Goodman explores love, sex and marriage in Tudor England
encoded: When it came to sex, the Tudors had plenty to say — about what was acceptable, what wasn’t, and how it should be controlled. In the final episode of Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman explores relationships in the 16th century View Green Video on the source website Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm

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What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century
type: item
date: 2025-10-08T15:53:59.000Z
creator: Isabel King
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Discover / Apple News
subject: Historical people
subject: Tudor life
description: From the importance of female pleasure to why you might need ribbons in the bedroom, historian Ruth Goodman explores the world of Tudor sex
encoded: Is there any better way to understand the deadly politics and high drama of the Tudor era than through the lens of their audacious romantic entanglements? After all, King Henry VIII had six wives, instigating the Reformation in the name of love (and presumably lust, too), meanwhile Queen Elizabeth I grew a cult of personality around her virginity, developing it into a sharp instrument of power and control. Sex, or lack thereof, was clearly important to the Tudor royals. But away from the courts of kings and queens, what role did intimate romance play in the lives of ordinary Tudors; the people who were farmers, millers, bakers and blacksmiths? What did they get up to in the bedroom, and what was the role of sex in their lives? Good vs bad sex “[Sex] was seriously important to people in Tudor Britain,” says Ruth Goodman, speaking in her newest HistoryExtra Academy course, Tudor Life, “it marked the moment of adulthood. A single person [as opposed to someone who was married] wasn’t considered to be fully adult”. Watch now | Ruth Goodman on Tudor life As a watershed moment in a person’s life, sex was incredibly important, both practically and symbolically. However, it wasn’t necessarily straightforward – there were social norms that dictated how people should be having sex. Sex was only considered ‘good’ if it took place within marriage and, as Goodman explains, “so long as it fulfilled one of two purposes: one was to bond a couple together, and the other was procreation”. No matter what sort of sex it was, if it happened outside of the marital bed, it was immoral. Anything that fell outside of the “traditional marriage picture of a man and a woman creating babies” was a transgression and ‘bad’ sex. But that didn’t mean that the Tudors discouraged pleasure. The importance of pleasure One of the main Tudor beliefs about sex was that a woman could only conceive if she was enjoying the act, and this would ideally include a female orgasm. “Just as a man needed to be intere…

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The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys
type: item
date: 2025-09-12T08:00:15.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
description: His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence
encoded: Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era. But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-660416773webready-b8ec9d0.jpg" width="3680" height="2453" alt="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" title="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" /> Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance. His diary entry – tell…

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