HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-10-21T15:27:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
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
items: How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all
items: Paint your own pot, like an ancient Etruscan
items: The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
items: Are Bertha and George Russell real? Inside the real Vanderbilt divorces that rocked the Gilded Age
items: A timeless love story? Abélard and Héloïse’s passionate affair
items: Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans

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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How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all
type: item
date: 2025-08-01T08:00:40.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: British queens
subject: Historical people
subject: Royal weddings
description: There have long been whispers of a romance between the queen and her Scottish servant John Brown, but nothing concrete to support them. Now Fern Riddell, author of an explosive new book, reveals how she turned sleuth to track down evidence of their secret passion
encoded: The story that’s consumed my life for much of the past few years has it all: family dysfunction, political intrigue, royalty, the rewriting of our national history. A secret hidden for generations. These are the sort of things historians can get carried away by. When we’re undertaking historical research, it often becomes clear that the relationship between fact and fiction can be a murky one. There’s often a gap between what we want the truth to be and the reality of the lives that have been lived. So it was with my latest project. After four months of research, I couldn’t quite believe what I’d uncovered. I’d been tracing the footsteps of both historians and historical people, and I was finally convinced that what I’d found came close to representing irrefutable proof of a remarkable secret – one offering an answer to a 160-year-old question. But making the breakthrough didn’t come without risk – one faced by nearly every historian who had got so far before me, and who turned back at the final hurdle, unable to bring their research to light. WATCH | Fern Riddell on her quest to discover the secrets of Victoria's later love life View Green Video on the source website So, before I pushed ahead, I called a trusted friend and mentor to discuss what I thought I’d discovered. “I’ve found it,” I exclaimed. “I’ve found the lost archive of Queen Victoria and John Brown.” Royal inspiration Towards the end of 2021, my agent, Kirsty McLachlan, had set me a challenge. “You need a new project,” she declared. “What can you say about Queen Victoria?” “I don’t do the royals,” I retorted, instantly rejecting the suggestion. “Anyway, most royal historians face censorship the moment they find anything interesting.” My focus has always been on the stories of ordinary people – what we call ‘history from below’. These are the lives that fascinate me, not those of the wealthy and powerful. Victoria felt like a lost cause. After all, what could be left to discover about one of history’s m…

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Paint your own pot, like an ancient Etruscan
type: item
date: 2025-07-27T09:00:19.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Ancient Greece
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical people
description: Silence your inner critic and forget about perfectionism. That's the life lesson we should learn from the Etruscans and their artistic habits, Dr Lucy Shipley tells Dr David Musgrove
encoded: There’s a place I used to go to with my children where you could unleash your creative zing by painting a pot. You picked your pot, you painted your pot, and then they fired it for you and you came back and retrieved your handiwork a few days later. I’m no artist, so my pot designs were always distinctly average. But I enjoyed it, and so did my kids, and in that, we were unwittingly drawing on the mindset of the ancient Etruscans. Dr Lucy Shipley is an expert on this overlooked people, and her life lesson that we should draw from them is simple: paint your own pot. The overlooked Etruscans Before we go into that, let’s have a quick recap of who the Etruscans were. They are the people who lived in parts of what is now Italy, particularly in Tuscany and Umbria, in the period before the rise of ancient Rome, in the first millennium BC. They were neighbours and rivals of the Romans and the Greeks. They lived in cities spread across the region, and from their ports they traded widely across the Mediterranean. The Etruscans pop up in ancient sources quite often, but we only ever have accounts of them from an outside perspective, because their own texts do not survive beyond short inscriptions and one religious text. We have to rely on those accounts, along with archaeology, to get to grips with who they were and how they lived. Most of their cities are hard to excavate as they sit under modern settlements, but new excavations are revealing more of their world. Read more | The history of Florence: Italy's Renaissance powerhouse Etruscan tombs also provide a fascinating insight into Etruscan culture, and some feature remarkable wall paintings. These paintings show scenes from everyday life, religion and myth, but also some graphic sexual acts, which has surprised modern eyes (I’ll come back to that). Though Etruria was eventually subsumed into the Roman empire in the fourth and third centuries BC, echoes of their culture persisted. According to Shipley, there is something a…

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The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
type: item
date: 2025-07-04T08:00:14.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in Elizabethan England
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: In 1579, the queen embarked on a romance with a French duke she affectionately dubbed her “frog”. The pair seemed destined for marriage. Yet, writes Elizabeth Tunstall, the people of England had other ideas…
encoded: On 17 August 1579, a ship sailed up the Thames and dropped anchor in Greenwich. Moments later a duke emerged, dressed in the finest clothes that money could buy, and conversing with his entourage in French. The prince’s nationality might have provoked the suspicion – if not the outright hostility – of many residents of Tudor London. Yet this Frenchman was about to be welcomed into the heart of Richmond Palace. There he would be entertained lavishly, wined and dined at parties and balls. And all with good reason. For this Frenchman was being lined up to marry Queen Elizabeth I. Over the centuries, Elizabeth’s romantic travails have become one of the great soap operas of English history. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558 as a 25-year-old, it was widely expected that she would find herself a husband and produce an heir to carry on the Tudor dynasty for another generation. However, while the queen had several suitors over the years, each proposed match hit the rocks before she could be tempted to offer her hand in marriage. From English earls to Scandinavian kings, none quite fitted the bill. And so, by the time the party of Frenchmen disembarked in Greenwich in the summer of 1579, Elizabeth was well on her way to securing her place in the history books as the ‘Virgin Queen’: the woman who would, so we’re told, sacrifice her heart for the good of the nation. Yet she wasn’t done with trying just yet. As her 46th birthday closed in, Elizabeth would embark on one final bid to find a husband. And this one would take her closer to marriage than perhaps any courtship yet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/FFWM82-cmyk-WL-0294cdd.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A cow stands in the middle of the image, being ridden by a man in a dark cloak and hat. Behind the cow, a man wearing light pink holds its tail, while another man milks the cow. In front of the cow stands Elizabeth I, dressed in white and another man dressed …

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Are Bertha and George Russell real? Inside the real Vanderbilt divorces that rocked the Gilded Age
type: item
date: 2025-06-22T07:35:26.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: Julian Fellowes, the creator behind HBO’s The Gilded Age, has taken plenty of cues from real history for the characters of Bertha and George Russell, seemingly turning to the lives of Alva and William K Vanderbilt in plotting much of their story. Discover the real history, and what this could mean for everyone’s favourite power couple in series three
encoded: Bertha Russell is the undisputed queen of Julian Fellowes’s drama The Gilded Age. In the story so far, glamorous ‘new money’ socialite Bertha (played by Carrie Coon) has conquered New York society through means both fair and foul, and risen to the top of the so-called ‘Four Hundred’. And she’s done it all while holding the steady hand of her husband, ruthless ‘robber-baron-with-a-conscience’ George (played by Morgan Spector). To date, her plot has mirrored many key moments in the life of a real historical figure in New York’s Gilded Age history: Alva Vanderbilt. In the show, Bertha has befriended Ward McAllister (who was a real contemporary of Alva); thrown a grand ball in her Fifth Avenue mansion to signal to Mrs Caroline Astor and the Four Hundred that she means business (as Alva did in 1883); and she has triumphed in the War of the Operas (as Alva claimed victory too). For Bertha, life is perfect, right? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/12/0750TheGildedAgeS02-1-3c0deb0-e1702915513531.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell & Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell. Bertha is thought to be based on Alva Vanderbilt, who secured the marriage of her daughter, Consuelo, to the 9th Duke of Marlborough." title="Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell & Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell. Bertha is thought to be based on Alva Vanderbilt, who secured the marriage of her daughter, Consuelo, to the 9th Duke of Marlborough." /> Far from it. When we left the Russells in season two, Bertha had successfully courted the Duke of Buckingham, a British aristocrat visiting New York, and welcomed him publicly as her guest to the opera, evidence that she had finally been accepted by the highest echelons of society. But beneath the surface, all is not well, with others speculating over the lengths to which she had gone in securing the Duke’s alliance. Meanwhile, she and George were at loggerheads over the marital prospects of their daughte…

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A timeless love story? Abélard and Héloïse’s passionate affair
type: item
date: 2025-05-04T08:00:36.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Abélard and Héloïse’s passionate affair in 12th-century Paris captured imaginations in France and far beyond. Yet, writes Yvonne Seale, there was a dark side to this true-life tale of forbidden love
encoded: Many millions of visitors have streamed through the gates of the sprawling Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris since they first opened in the early 19th century. Some come to pay their respects to the many modern cultural icons buried here, leaving flowers on the grave of the singer Édith Piaf or lipstick kisses on the monument to Oscar Wilde. Some, though, are drawn to a memorial tucked away in a corner just to the right of the cemetery’s main entrance. This tomb supposedly houses the remains of two people who had already acquired semi-legendary status many centuries before the first grave was dug at Père Lachaise. It is the reputed resting place of the 12th-century abbess Héloïse of Argenteuil and her husband, philosopher Pierre Abélard. The neo-Gothic tomb, with its effigies of the couple reclining peacefully, is a picturesque stone monument to love’s persistence. For that reason, it became something of a pilgrimage site in the 19th century. The writer Mark Twain rolled his eyes at the crowds of “memento-cabbaging vandals” who travelled to the tomb from all over France “to weep and wail and ‘grit’ their teeth over their heavy sorrows” and hope for beyond-the-grave intervention in their own unhappy love lives. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/OF-TOL-25004905-cmyk-22bdaa1.jpg" width="3446" height="2295" alt="A 15th-century illustration shows a couple, one dressed in brown, the other dressed in blue, having a conversation. They are sitting on an orange bench against a red background" title="The love-struck couple shown in a 15th-century manuscript illustration. Abélard’s targeting of such a young woman seems troubling today (Image by BNF)" /> The story that draws so many visitors even today is a tale of a doomed clandestine medieval romance – that of Abélard, the rising academic star who fell for his most gifted student, Héloïse. It involves a forbidden love, a hidden pregnancy, a secret marriage, an escape in the guise of a n…

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Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans
type: item
date: 2025-04-25T08:00:59.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: In the 18th century, some sex workers elevated their status to that of a courtesan, servicing an upper-class clientele and becoming celebrities of their day. Historian Julie Peakman examines the lives of four of these women
encoded: Sexy, flirtatious, witty and beautiful, the best-known female courtesans in the 18th century made a name for themselves by having numerous affairs with wealthy or titled men. Unlike their sisters selling sex on the streets or in common brothels, these women often lived in luxurious apartments with maids and liveried servants. They were the pin-ups of their day and set many fashionable tends around London. Many courtesans became famous as a result of a new cult of celebrity in the 18th century. Changes in technology allowed for mass printing and the circulation of news about these social butterflies, leading the public to clamour for information on courtesans’ love affairs and their scandalous behaviour. Famous painters such as George Romney and Sir Joshua Reynolds even made portraits of celebrated courtesans, which became available in cheap prints. But who, among all the courtesans of 18th century London, was the most famous? Read more | The real Harlots: Hallie Rubenhold on Covent Garden's courtesans Kitty Fisher: London’s golden girl Her shocking escapades drew the attention of elite men around Europe – including Cassanova himself <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-77944601-9bcdfa2.jpg" width="855" height="1024" alt="A portrait of Kitty Fisher by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted between 1723 and 1792 is pictured at Sothebys auction house, in London, 16 November 2007. The painting is expected to fetch between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 pounds (2,793,496.24 and 4,190,362.13 Euros). AFP PHOTO / CARL DE SOUZA (Photo credit should read CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images)" title="A portrait of Kitty Fisher by Sir Joshua" /> Sought after by some of the wealthiest men in Europe, the courtesan Kitty Fisher was at the top of her game. Such was her fame that poems were written about her (such as Kitty’s Stream and A Sketch of the Present Times); satirical prints were made of her (like The Merry Accident, which depicted her fall …

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