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England's mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhouse
Nell Gwyn became famous for her love affair with Charles II, and for her love of drinking, gambling and carousing. Yet, writes Sophie Shorland, this upwardly mobile celebrity was also a canny political operator who wielded substantial power in court
On a first date with the king of England, you might reasonably expect him to pay the bill. Yet Nell Gwyn’s relationship with Charles II started as it went on: unconventionally. The celebrated actress met the king for the first time in 1668 at a London playhouse, where Gwyn caught his eye from an adjacent box; according to reports, they flirted throughout the performance. Afterwards, Gwyn and her companion joined Charles and his younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), at a hostelry. There, legend has it, once the party had eaten and drunk their fill, the landlord presented them with the tab. Upon searching his pockets, we’re told, Charles found that he had no money with him, and was forced to lean on one of the royal hangers-on to pay up. Gwyn’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events was typically droll: she joked that she had got into “the poorest company that ever [she] was in!” Across her extraordinary life, that acerbic wit never let her down. Pepys’ pin-up Nell Gwyn was, quite literally, the pin-up girl of Restoration England. Above his desk at the Admiralty, the diarist Samuel Pepys kept an engraving of the actress posing as Cupid. In it, with wings her only attire, one perfectly toned arm made an ineffectual attempt to preserve some modesty. Pepys was clearly enchanted by Gwyn – as was King Charles. Despite that inauspicious first liaison in the London tavern, the actress and the monarch embarked upon a scandalous love affair that produced two sons and set tongues wagging across the kingdom. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1751434017-f189007-e1775638623277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A monochrome engraving shows a winged, classical figure from the waist up. The figure has curled hair, holds an arrow in one hand, and gazes slightly toward the viewer." title="An engraving of a c1672 painting depicts Nell Gwyn as Cupid. A copy of this image hung above Samuel Pepys’ desk at the Admiralty, demonstrating the renowned (and lascivious) diarist’s appreciation (Image by Getty Images)" /> That relationship – coupled with Gwyn’s beguiling looks, spellbinding stage performances and razor-sharp wit – helped cement her reputation as one of the most alluring figures of the late 17th century. Her contemporaries were beguiled by her, and historians, novelists and film-makers remain just as intrigued today. But when we look back, are we celebrating the real Neil Gwyn? Is there more to this Restoration-era socialite than meets the eye? Over the three and a half centuries since she first exploded into the public’s consciousness, Gwyn has been seen mostly as an apolitical character – one more interested in living the high life than in the affairs of state. In fact, at a time when Charles’s other mistresses were widely derided for meddling in the business of government – and spending too freely from the public finances – Gwyn’s apparent lack of interest in politics only served to supercharge her popularity. One popular verse of the time perfectly captures public sentiment: “Hard by Pall Mall, lived a wench called Nell; King Charles the Second, he kept her. She hath a trick to handle his prick, But never lays hands on his sceptre. All affairs of the state, from her soul doth she hate, And leave to the politic bitches.” If this poem is to be believed, Gwyn never tried to influence the king in the affairs of state. Yet take a closer look at her life and a different picture emerges. Nell’s early years are contested: Hereford, London and Oxford all lay claim to be her birthplace. The identity of her father also remains obscure; he may have died in debtor’s prison, or may have been an army captain who lost everything to the Civil War. Read more | Making of a monarch: how the young Charles II endured war, defeat and exile before the Restoration What we do know is that, in her youth, Nell Gwyn worked as an ‘orange wench’, selling fruit and other sweet treats (possibly alongside sexual favours) to theatregoers, before becoming one of the first actresses on the English stage. She quickly became known for her appearance, endowed as she was with luxuriant auburn hair, a fashionably long nose and a slight figure. Gwyn was also blessed with killer comedic timing and a quick wit, cracking out one-liners both on and off the stage. In John Dryden’s tragic drama Tyrannic Love, Gwyn spoke the final lines of the play as herself, struggling from her character’s deathbed to declare: “As for my epitaph when I am gone, I’ll trust no poet, but will write my own. Here Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a slater’n, Yet dy’d a princess acting in St Cathar’n.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/0713633-c64800a-e1775638715191.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white illustration shows a street vendor in period clothing holding a shallow tray of round fruits, with a larger woven basket balanced on their head. Handwritten text above reads “fine Oranges fine Lemons.”" title="Mono PrintBefore forging a successful career on the stage, Nell Gwyn worked as an orange ‘wench’, selling fruit outside theatres (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gwyn’s magnetic presence onstage made her a star and attracted the attention of the king. Yet it was neither mere coincidence nor simply sexual attraction that triggered her affair with Charles, though her famed physical allure was certainly important. The two were introduced by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham – reputedly the richest man in England after the king. Buckingham was always scheming, and was described as a haphazard scapegrace who “could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it”. By pushing Gwyn in Charles’s direction, Buckingham’s intention was to curtail the influence at court of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine. The voluptuous, violet-eyed Castlemaine had long been Charles’s chief mistress – and made plenty of enemies in the process. Buckingham’s plan was to replace her with Gwyn. His plan worked a treat – so much so that, in January 1668, Pepys reported that “the king did send several times for Nelly”. After being rowed up the Thames by ferrymen, Gwyn made her way up the back stairs into Charles’s private apartments in Whitehall Palace. By the spring of 1669, she was accompanying the king to the races at Newmarket, and they were seen wandering around together in old clothes, like a married couple. She also reputedly taught him how to fish, though quite where she learned the skill is a mystery. What is certain is that their relationship endured in a way that the king’s other affairs didn’t, and their first son – named Charles to make no mistake over his paternity – was born on 8 May 1670. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463978635-7c7277f-e1775638945132.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in 17th‑ or 18th‑century dress wears a light blue gown with a low neckline, pearl jewellery, and curled hair. Behind them is a landscape on one side and rich red drapery on the other." title="Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine was Charles II’s long-standing mistress – but was edged out by Nell Gwyn after courtiers became irked by the countess’s influence over the king (Image by Getty Images)" /> Life of luxury A life of comparative privilege had begun for Gwyn. She kept an open table, and enjoyed gambling, drinking and going to the races. She was a dyed-in-the-wool socialite who embraced all of the earthly pleasures that life in the Restoration court had to offer. Hence she has mostly been seen by posterity as a good-time girl with a heart of gold. Read more | The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys Yet she also had the ear of the king, and she undoubtedly used that hotline to power to shape the course of events in the Restoration era. For example, early in her relationship with Charles, she began playing a diplomatic role, hosting the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy at her comparatively modest house off Kingsway near the City of London. Hosting ambassadors is a soft-power role typically associated with the queen – a way to be involved in diplomatic discussions and advise the king without overtly steering foreign policy. Persuading the king to commit to affairs of state wasn’t always easy. Though quick-witted and clever, Charles abhorred work, preferring to play cards and eat pigeon pie while he should have been discussing diplomacy. The king routinely brought his meetings with de Croissy to an early end so that he could take a nap. Courtiers despaired of him ever taking his job seriously. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155867058-8f6d163-e1775638818819.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A regal figure sits on a throne wearing a jewelled crown, long curly wig, and an ermine‑lined red velvet robe. The monarch holds a golden sceptre in one hand and an orb in the other, with an ornate tapestry behind." title="Charles II, probably painted in the 1670s by John Michael Wright. Never fond of work, the king was steered into important meetings by Nell Gwyn, who was his mistress from early 1668 until his death in 1685 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Not Gwyn. She laid a wager of £100 that she could get the king to attend a meeting. Then she recruited the actor and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew. Dressed for a long pilgrimage. Killigrew burst into Charles’s closet, telling the king that he was off “to hell… to fetch back Oliver Cromwell that he may take care of the affairs of England, for his successor takes none at all”. It was a bold move, but it did move Charles to go to the meeting. Gwyn won her £100. However, her influence was soon to be curbed – by another woman. Louise de Kérouaille arrived in England in 1670, charged by French king Louis XIV to report back on Charles’s affairs, and to steer the English monarch towards policies that favoured the French. With a continental elegance and a reputation as an excellent hostess, it wasn’t long before de Kérouaille caught the English king’s eye. Yet Gwyn wasn’t about to allow her French rival to wrest away the monarch’s affections without a fight. At one riotous dinner, Nell’s old friend Buckingham pretended to be Charles while she mocked de Kérouaille’s accent, saying: “Me no bad woman. If me tout me was one bad woman, me would cut mine own trote.” Though she tried to spar with Gwyn, de Kérouaille’s tongue was never quite sharp enough: she always came out second best. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL5403391-1c1ea22-e1775639143886.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in elaborate 17th‑century clothing sits with one arm resting on a surface and the other holding a small black‑and‑white dog. They wear pearl jewellery and a richly detailed blue‑and‑gold gown, with architectural elements and distant figures in the background." title="Louise de Kérouaille was encouraged to start a relationship with Charles II in order to further French and Catholic interests (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> According to a (probably apocryphal) anecdote, one day in Oxford Nell’s coach was surrounded by a mob who, taking her to be de Kérouaille, angrily harangued her for her influence over the king. Sticking her head out of the coach, Gwyn twinkled: “Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore.” (Not, in other words, the Catholic one, de Kérouaille.) The crowd blessed her and allowed her to continue on her way. Did she genuinely advocate for Protestant interests? Or were her words fired purely by a bitter personal rivalry with de Kérouaille? In November 1678, Gwyn demonstrated her allegiance to a Protestant agenda, hosting a pope-burning party at her house. At such popular pageants, effigies of the pope and other hated (usually Catholic) figures were mocked and paraded through the streets before being set alight, to great whoops of vengeful joy. Guests at Gwyn’s party taunted the likeness of the pope, who “sat in a great chair, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs [small fireworks] at it”. Gwyn also interceded effectively with the king on behalf of her friends. Among her successes was getting Buckingham released from captivity in the Tower of London after yet another of his madcap schemes backfired – in this instance, trying to force the dissolution of parliament. Controversially, the duke stayed at Gwyn’s house after his release. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period She also played a part in the fall from favour of the lord treasurer, the Earl of Danby. She and Buckingham formed a double act, Gwyn’s perfect imitation of Danby’s wife making the king laugh. As Danby’s position became more precarious, one of his supporters wrote to his father: “All this has been brewing since those entertainments at Nelly’s… and the scenes of abuse there passing on Lord Treasurer.” Danby was eventually replaced by one of Gwyn’s close friends, whose career she promoted: Laurence Hyde, a heavy drinker who “swore like a cutler”. Choppy waters Gwyn’s political interventions sometimes plunged her into dangerous waters. In 1679, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, arrived back in England from the Hague. Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, Monmouth made little secret of his desire to succeed his father to the throne. The king himself was less keen on that prospect, but he had a problem: Monmouth was not just charismatic but also a Protestant – unlike the Duke of York who, without any legitimate heirs born to Charles, was next in line. When Monmouth arrived ‘home’, he was welcomed by throngs of cheering people. And where did the wannabe king choose to stay in London? At the house of his good friend Nell Gwyn. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL7207607-88d96e1-e1775639274233.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person with long, dark, curly hair wears an elaborate historical outfit with a white lace collar, a deep red velvet robe, and a jeweled chain. The dark background highlights the figure’s face and clothing." title="The 1st Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, angled to take the throne – and was housed in London by Nell Gwyn (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> By then, she had become a popular symbol of anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment, and was staunch in her advocacy for Monmouth, even as he rebelled with increasing vigour against his father’s rule. Yet her support for him ultimately proved in vain. Charles stripped him of his titles and banished him from court. In response, Monmouth doubled down, conspiring to overthrow the king. Those plans discovered, Monmouth threw himself on his father’s mercy. He would not tilt for the throne again until after Charles’s death. Any damage to her relationship with Charles didn’t prevent Gwyn from continuing her diplomatic efforts. In 1681, a Moroccan embassy arrived to negotiate control over Tangier and the release of English slaves. The embassy was headed by the dashing Mohammed ben Hadou, whose excellent manners and spirited riding in Hyde Park made him an instant celebrity. Who better to entertain him than Nell Gwyn? They passed a magnificent evening together – though, it has to be said, a rather sedate one by Restoration standards: the Moroccan embassy drank only milk and water, and resolutely resisted staring at the ladies. Aware that her popularity with the English public was based on her reputation as a royal mistress who did not meddle in politics, Gwyn was careful not to visibly overstep the mark. Yet she was a canny influencer behind the scenes, advising the king and providing a means through which others could access his ear. Not just the 17th century’s good-time girl, Nell Gwyn was a political operator with hidden depths. The common touch How an actress became the toast of the nation Nell Gwyn enjoyed extraordinary popularity during her lifetime and afterwards, remembered as a kind of people’s princess – a commoner who rose through the ranks. It helped, of course, that she represented working, Protestant England in contrast to the perceived idleness, Catholicism and profligacy of the Restoration court. Gwyn never forgot either her roots or her friends. She kept up with her fellow actors, and had her difficult, alcoholic mother come to live with her. It was partly her quick wit and lack of pretension, always acknowledging her stratospheric rise, that secured Gwyn’s popularity. But she also showed glimpses of a compassionate inner self that – despite her experience as an actress – appeared to be spontaneous and added to her ‘woman of the people’ persona. She is said to have helped persuade Charles II to found the Royal Hospital Chelsea for soldiers “broken by age and war”. An excellent tipper, she had a reputation for an open table and generous giving. As one popular satire, comparing Gwyn favourably with her French rival Louise de Kérouaille, put it: “I neither run in court nor city’s score, / I pay my debts, distribute to the poor.” In fact, Gwyn ran up plenty of debts, but it was appearance that mattered: she had a reputation as someone who did not cost the public purse too much, and who gave freely and compassionately. Following her death in 1687, Gwyn left £20 a year in her will to release debtors from prison on Christmas Day, and £50 to poor Catholics “for showing my charity to those who differ from me in religeon”. After years of taunting “the Catholic whore”, Gwyn had decided on one last magnanimous act. Even today, her legacy is evident in places sprinkled around London: the Nell Gwyn pub just off the Strand, an art deco apartment block in Chelsea, a blue plaque on her former home on Pall Mall. In her story, people could – and can still – see themselves: a commoner made good, and who made the world remember her name. Sophie Shorland is a former research fellow at the University of Warwick. Her books include Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England (Atlantic, 2024) This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Think you know everything about the Tudors? Here's 15 facts that will prove you wrong
Tracy Borman shares a selection of surprising insights into England’s most famous royal dynasty – from Mary I’s love of gambling to the truth about Henry VIII’s extramarital affairs
1. The Tudors weren’t known as the Tudors Although we use ‘Tudor’ as a nifty shorthand for both the era and the dynasty, it wasn’t used at the time either by the monarchs or their people. Neither did they see it as a distinct period: in fact, Henry VII went to great lengths to emphasise the continuity with his royal predecessors, even down to using the same tailor whom Edward IV had employed. He also emphasised his Lancastrian roots and tried to downplay his Welsh origins, aware that his grandfather Owen Tudor had married well above him when he bagged Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois as a bride. Throughout the period 1485–1603, the people identified as subjects of each successive king or queen, as well as taking pride in their local affiliations, rather than seeing themselves as ‘Tudor people’. 2. They had a pretty dodgy claim to the throne When Henry Tudor won the crown from Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, he was quick to stress his legitimacy. But there was more than a hint of protesting too much. In fact, the Tudors were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, and his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford. Moreover, Henry VII’s father Edmund was the child of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh attendant. With such a dubious bloodline, it’s little wonder that England’s first Tudor king wasted no time in marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest child of Edward IV. Their marriage united the warring houses of York and Lancaster and, crucially, gave the Tudors some much-needed legitimacy. 3. Henry VII was no miser The first Tudor king has a reputation for penny-pinching. But while he kept a close eye on his expenditure, he knew how to splash the cash when it was to his advantage. In the early years of his reign, when he was under constant threat from rivals and pretenders and many of his subjects questioned his right to be king, he spent lavish sums on dressing the part. Just over a week after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, he ordered a set of new gowns fashioned from cloth of gold, satin and royal purple velvet at a cost of £336, which roughly equates to £225,000 in today’s money. During the two years that followed, he spent an eye-watering £5,386 (£3.6 million) on his wardrobe. But his generosity had its limits. His wife, Elizabeth of York, struggled to make ends meet throughout their marriage. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/3-GettyImages-173317469-b1ae837-e1775575599556.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="A painted portrait of Henry VII wearing a red fur‑trimmed robe and cap, holding a gold sceptre against a plain background" title="A 19th-century depiction of Henry VII. The first Tudor monarch spent vast sums of money on looking the part when he was newly crowned (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. You would smell Henry VIII before you saw him For the last 20 years of his life, Henry was tormented by pain from a chronic leg ulcer, which was aggravated by a serious fall from his horse while jousting in 1536. The ulcer often became inflamed and – unsurprisingly – Henry was a difficult patient, refusing to rest for long enough for it to heal. At its worst, the suppurating wound could be smelt from three rooms away. Read more | Was this the moment Henry VIII became a tyrant? 5. Henry VIII’s love of hawking was almost the death of him Henry’s love of sport was well known throughout the court. As a young king, he would spend hours hunting, jousting, shooting arrows and playing tennis. Hawking was another of his favourite sports and his private apartments contained an impressive array of falconry equipment. But in 1525, Henry was almost killed while pursuing his hawk. Attempting to pole vault over a ditch, instead he fell headfirst into it and almost drowned. Thankfully, his quick-thinking footman, Edmund Moody, managed to pull him out in the nick of time. 6. Henry VIII was a bit of a prude Contrary to popular belief, Tudor England’s most-married monarch wasn’t much of a lothario. In fact, he had twice as many wives as mistresses. There is only evidence of three extramarital affairs. The women involved were Bessie Blount (the mother of Henry’s not-so-subtly-named illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy), Mary Boleyn (sister of his second wife Anne) and ‘Mistress Shelton’, who was either Margaret or Mary Shelton, both cousins of Anne Boleyn. Although there was a rumour that he once had an affair with Anne’s mother Elizabeth, he stoutly denied it: “Never with the mother!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/6-2F1GM47-eea3c47-e1775575675952.jpg" width="1500" height="1486" alt="A painted portrait of a teenage boy in a light garment and patterned head covering, shown against a deep blue background with gold lettering identifying him as Henry, Duke of Richmond, aged fifteen." title="Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Henry VIII from his affair with Bessie Blount. For a king – especially one who married six times – Henry was surprisingly prudish (Image by Alamy)" /> 7. Anne Boleyn did not have a sixth finger on one hand This oft-repeated tale is based on scurrilous gossip written almost 50 years after Anne’s death. A host of hostile Catholic tracts about Anne appeared in the 1580s as part of a smear campaign against her ‘heretic’ daughter, Elizabeth I. Nicholas Sander was one of the most influential and claimed that Anne had been Henry VIII’s daughter as well as his wife, the result of his clandestine affair with her mother. Feeding on the rumours of witchcraft that had circulated at the time of Anne’s demise, he asserted that she had a sixth finger on her right hand and a large ‘wen’ (a boil or mole) under her chin. Such blemishes were commonly thought to be the ‘Devil’s Mark’ – a symbol of having made a pact with Satan. In fact, Anne was proud of her long, slender fingers and always took care to show them off to best effect… all 10 of them. 8. Anne of Cleves was not ugly You may have heard the story: Henry VIII fell in love with Anne of Cleves’ portrait and immediately signed on the dotted line of the marriage contract. But when he met his bride in person, he was appalled that she was nothing like her profile picture. So, he had the marriage annulled before you could say ‘off with her head’. In fact, Holbein’s portrait was faithful to Anne, and many contemporary accounts praise her beauty. If anyone had cause for complaint about their betrothed’s physical assets, it was Anne. Henry was no oil painting by the time she married him in January 1540. Pushing 50, he was bloated, ulcer-ridden and almost certainly impotent. It was with understandable haste that Anne agreed to an annulment just six months later. Read more | Why did Henry VIII send Anne Boleyn to the block? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/8-AnnedeCleves-3a7323a-e1775635785574.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="A Renaissance portrait of a richly dressed figure in a red‑and‑gold embroidered gown with ornate jewellery and a jeweled headpiece, standing against a blue background with hands clasped to show rings and lace cuffs." title="The famous Anne of Cleves portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1539. Contrary to popular belief, Anne was not ugly; in fact, she was praised for her beauty" /> 9. Edward VI kept a diary The boy king was the only Tudor monarch to leave behind a private journal. But if you’re expecting a tell-all exposé full of secretly expressed desires, grudges and hopes, you might be disappointed. In fact, it’s a rather dry summary of the events of his reign. Even the execution of his once-cherished uncle is afforded only the following curt line: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off today.” Overall, the diary reveals a boy who was precociously intelligent, as might be expected for Henry VIII’s “precious jewel”, who had the best of everything growing up. But he also appears cold, unfeeling and uncompromising – a dangerous blend of traits that might have made him an even greater tyrant than his father if he lived to maturity. 10. Lady Jane Grey was queen for 14 days, not nine Jane has gone down in history as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. But while it’s true that she was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and deposed by Mary Tudor on 19 July, her reign technically began as soon as Edward VI had breathed his last on 6 July. On his deathbed, Edward changed the succession in favour of his Protestant cousin Jane to prevent his Catholic half-sister Mary claiming her right. He was heavily influenced by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had married his son Guildford to Jane. Even so, Edward’s ‘Device’ for the succession was legally-binding, so Jane was the rightful queen as soon as the young king died. Yet she is always referred to as ‘Lady’ rather than ‘Queen’ and is often omitted from the roll call of English monarchs altogether. That owes much to Mary Tudor’s propaganda: to seize the throne, she had to present Jane as a usurper. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/10-GettyImages-2226518693-829fe72-e1775636087938.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman in Tudor dress stands against a plain backdrop, wearing a velvet gown with puffed sleeves, gold embroidery, and multiple strands of pearls. She has a pearl‑lined headdress framing her centre‑parted hair and holds a small ornament or flower in one hand." title="Despite being known as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’, Lady Jane Grey actually ruled for 14 days (Image by Getty Images)" /> 11. ‘Bloody Mary’ wasn’t all that bloody Mary I’s obsession with returning England to the Roman Catholic faith spurred her to have around 300 Protestant heretics burned at the stake. But while there is no doubting the horrific nature of their deaths, Mary acted out of conscience rather than brutality. Blinded by her own faith, she genuinely believed that she was saving her subjects from eternal damnation by bringing them into the Roman Catholic fold. Furthermore, the number of people who died on Mary’s orders was just a fraction of those who suffered at the hands of her far bloodier father, Henry VIII. He sent more men and women to their deaths than any other Tudor monarch. Anyone who refused to fall in with his will was sent to the block – commoners, statesmen and wives alike. It even became a crime to think differently from the king. Contemporary records are patchy and inconsistent, so it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many deaths Henry was responsible for. Estimates vary from a few thousand to as many as 72,000. 12. Mary Tudor was a bit of a party girl Despite her reputation for sober-mindedness and piety, Mary loved to have fun. One of her favourite companions was Jane Fool, a female jester. The queen was also an avid gambler and loved to play cards and board games. She also entertained lavishly and spent huge sums on feasting and drinking. A scandalised Spanish ambassador reported: “There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river [known as the Pisuerga river today]… The ladies and gentlemen put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/12-GettyImages-1309904166-9ab877f-e1775636163844.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="Seven people in Renaissance dress gather around a table playing cards. Gold coins lie across the dark tablecloth, and one player holds up the seven of hearts while another displays several cards. Shelves with bottles and a small vase of flowers sit in the background." title="The Card Players, c1550–99. Mary I was an avid gambler, who loved to play cards and host lavish parties throughout her reign (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Queens of bling: the importance of jewellery to Henry VIII's six wives 13. Elizabeth I employed the original James Bond The queen’s personal astrologer Dr John Dee was one of her closest advisers. She would regularly consult him about the most apposite moment to undertake key events, such as her coronation. An astrologer, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Dee was one of the most learned men of the age. But he also carried out more covert assignments for his royal mistress. She employed Dee as a spy, and he would report on intrigues abroad using complex codes. He signed his letters with the numerals ‘007’. 14. Elizabeth I was (apparently) a man The ‘Bisley Boy’ legend states that in 1542, the future Elizabeth I (then aged around nine) was sent to Overcourt House in the Cotswold village of Bisley to escape the plague in London. Whilst there, she sickened with a fever and died. Knowing that Henry VIII was on his way to visit his daughter, her panic-stricken governess searched the village in vain for a girl who resembled Elizabeth closely enough to fool the king. The only child of the right age and colouring was a boy, so in desperation she dressed him in the princess’s clothes and the deception was complete. This unlikely tale dates from the 1800s and was made popular by Dracula author Bram Stoker in his book Famous Impostors. There is no contemporary evidence to support it and more than a whiff of misogyny about the whole thing. How else could Elizabeth have ruled so successfully for so many years? She must have been a man. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Bram-Stoker-famous-Imposters-ABE-Books-6975c56-e1775636264617.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An open book rests on a wooden surface. The left page shows a black‑and‑white illustration captioned “Elizabeth as a Young Woman.” The right page is the title page of Bram Stoker’s Famous Impostors, published in 1910 by Sturgis & Walton." title="A copy of Bram Stoker’s 1910 book Famous Impostors. The tome helped popularise the ‘Bisley Boy’ legend, suggesting that Elizabeth I was actually a man (Image by Best of Books Store)" /> 15. Elizabeth I didn’t leave her throne to James VI But as she lay dying at Richmond Palace in March 1603, she finally settled the matter, gasping that she would have none but “my nearest kinsman the King of Scots”. This deathbed scene was recorded by the contemporary historian William Camden, who had been commissioned to write a biography of the celebrated queen during her lifetime. But dramatic new research by the British Library has proved that Camden was forced to rewrite it on the orders of the new king to make his accession look more predetermined than it had been. Using transmitted light, the researchers found that in his original manuscript, written at the time of Elizabeth’s death, Camden had recorded that she died without naming a successor. But a few years later, his words were covered over with the lie that ushered the Stuarts to the Tudor throne.
The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solution
In the first half of the 19th century, England’s population doubled. With many families struggling to survive, the picture had to change – and the solution came in an innovative treatment of one material: rubber. But as the question of ‘respectable’ reproduction emerged, Ruth Goodman explains how the invention also widened an already broad class divide
The air in Victorian London was thick with smog. In the narrow streets of the rapidly industrialising city, where the city’s poorest families lived cheek by jowl, every child born stretched meagre resources thinner still. For those in the working class, wages were uncertain and the cost of living presented constant challenges. Yet, despite the hardship, children kept coming – one after another, year after year. With most families lacking access to contraception, there was no realistic alternative. Big families: the Victorian ideal? “One of the things that we all think we know about Victorian families was that they all had huge numbers of children”, explains historian Ruth Goodman in her HistoryExtra Academy series on Victorian Life. This is true: between 1800 and 1850, England’s population had doubled, and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, families across the social spectrum were getting bigger. Victoria herself had nine children with her husband, Prince Albert, providing an example for others to follow. But outside of the royal family, this birth rate boom placed huge pressure on the resources of families who were scraping by on meagre livings amid the industrial revolution. But as the century progressed the image of the archetypal Victorian family – respectable, hardworking and moral – began to change. Now, smaller, controlled families were becoming the ideal. This had a noticeable effect on the population. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-464466975-aca8503-e1775055434278.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful Victorian pop‑up illustration opens to reveal Queen Victoria seated with a child while Prince Albert plays on the floor with two others in an ornate domestic interior." title="A c1845 depiction of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at home, playing with their children. The royal couple and their nine offspring were seen as the perfect example of a Victorian family (Image by Getty Images)" /> “From the 1880s, you can actually see the effects of contraception turning up in family size,” Goodman says. “In the census and the records, you can see that middle class families are getting smaller.” Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you Early Victorian contraception This was largely down to new discussions about family limitations. Shrouded in euphemism, the understanding of sex and how to prevent pregnancy was starting to be framed as a health concern. Goodman explains how it was often covered by the phrase: “Being kind to your wife”. Framing contraception in this way placed the onus on parents to prevent excessive numbers of children for their own good. The idea was that a respectable family wouldn’t have more children than they could feed, and a decent father would ensure his children had a mother to look after them. “Quiet discussions are had within certain groups of society about [not letting] your wife have too many children,” says Goodman. One argument was that “it’s not healthy for her, she should be around in good health to bring up the children you already have.” What contraception was available? In today’s world, there’s an array of accessible contraception. In the Victorian era, the options were more limited. However, there was one development that changed the game: the vulcanisation of rubber. Vulcanisation – the process of improving the durability and pliability – of rubber was patented by British inventor Thomas Hancock in November 1843 and became more widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century. The progress and innovation that characterised the Industrial Revolution helped accelerate its commercial success – and one of its most practical uses was for condoms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90732016-2629d99-e1775055647469.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A circular relief sculpture shows a man in formal 19th‑century clothing, with detailed facial features and visible surface cracks." title="A medallion portrait of Thomas Hancock, who obtained the first British patent for vulcanised rubber in 1843 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Condoms in some form had been available for centuries. They had variably been made from sheep guts, linen or other materials – intact condoms made from animal membrane dating to the 1640s were discovered at Dudley Castle – and were almost exclusively used for preventing the spread of venereal disease. The vulcanisation process made rubber “flexible and soft” says Goodman, “so then condoms became made of a softer, more cleanable material.” Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys The introduction of cleanable, reusable rubber condoms in 1855 was revolutionary – and people started to see the possibilities for using condoms in family planning too. Vulcanised rubber also led to the creation of the female cap – a forerunner to diaphragms and cervical caps – which, as Goodman states, “made it possible for a woman to begin to take control of her own fertility”. Due to the hierarchical ‘male breadwinner’ structure of Victorian families, the reality was that decisions regarding reproduction, or lack thereof, were still primarily made by men. However, this development in female contraception did allow women a little more autonomy over their bodies and futures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90763429-9b45b35-e1775056110601.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small, rounded brown object resembling a bowler hat sits on a dark surface, with worn texture and the words “Racial Trade Mark” printed in white on the top." title="A cervical cap, c1920s. The introduction of this contraception gave women a degree of power over their own fertility (Image by Getty Images)" /> A mirror of the class divide Despite the incredible innovations, access to these new methods of contraception was far from equal. “Doctors found their way to manage their own families”, explains Goodman, “but they were not keen on passing that information on to the working classes.” While there was a widespread belief in the need to reduce family sizes, many of those in power tried to stop it. Attempts to make contraceptive advice more accessible through pamphlets were often unsuccessful as it was “decided that these were obscene publications”. Ideas of propriety and morality – as well as objections from the Catholic Church to any ‘unnatural’ birth control – prevented access to communication about sex in any straightforward terms, and in turn, limited people’s understanding of it. In 1877, The Fruits of Philosophy (an 1832 book that advocated for birth control) was the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in London. Activist Annie Besant stood in her own defence, dubbed a “filthy woman” for selling it. As Michael Meyer explained on a previous episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “[the jury decided it was a] dirty, filthy book, [but] absolved the defendants of any malicious intent in publishing it”. Regardless of intent, Besant and her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh were found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Later, their convictions were overturned, and both continued to campaign, with Besant publishing her own birth control pamphlet, The Law of Population. The problem with The Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t its contents – the information inside was nothing that Victorian medical professionals didn’t already know – but that it was being sold at a low enough price for the average person to buy it. The middle classes believed that the pressure of rising population numbers forced the working classes (who they presumed were naturally lethargic) to work harder. This prejudiced – and incorrect – assumption about the nature of working-class people led to deliberate limitations on their access to contraceptive information. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3089859-b6a0f97-e1775056364693.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photo shows two women, a man, and three children standing outside a small shop with jars and baskets visible inside." title="Impoverished people gather in front of a rag shop, c1877. The working classes faced many hardships – some of which were exacerbated by their lack of access to contraception (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even with these rather aggressive attempts to prevent contraceptive advice from being disseminated, the knowledge did spread. Throughout the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, medical pamphlets, marital guides and private consultations offered methods to regulate conception. For those who could afford discretion and access to physicians, family planning became a means of greater control over their future. For those who couldn’t afford it, though, nothing much changed. In Victorian England, birth control was a mirror of the class divide. It revealed who had enough money to dictate the size of their family, and who had no such luxury.
"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions illustrate key themes of everyday life
“There shall be no more cakes and ale” Puritan hypocrisy Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy. Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-171071495webready-c1637ad-e1774448528234.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A figure dressed in theatrical, jester‑style attire poses against a sepia, textured backdrop. They wear a tall hat with a pom‑pom, a large ruffled collar, and a voluminous dark cloak. One hand holds a slender staff; the other holds a small object topped with a circular shape" title="Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This pompous Puritan is ridiculed for censuring ‘ales’ (festive social gatherings) (Image by Getty Images)" /> In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper. In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle. As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip1620562webready-fd246db-e1774448660973.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A formal banquet scene shows richly dressed figures seated and standing around a long table covered with a white cloth. Servants and guests interact as food and drink are served, with architectural details and a distant landscape visible in the background." title="A 19th-century illustration of a banquet scene in The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare’s play, Petruchio hopes to soften his wife Katherina’s ‘choler’ (ill-temper) by restricting her diet (Image by Topfoto)" /> “Did he marry me to famish me?” Balancing humours In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It. In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger. Read more | Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true? Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable. At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”. Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.” By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1314701597webready-3135879-e1774448807729.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A humorous scene shows three soldiers in colourful Renaissance clothing. One sits on the ground grimacing beside a broken sword, with a leek stuck in his mouth while the central standing figure lifts a stick as if scolding or threatening him. A third soldier in blue stands behind them holding a spear and smiling. Rows of tents and distant mountains form the backdrop." title="A Georgian print shows proud Welshman Fluellen forcing the sneery English ensign Pistol (left) to eat a raw leek – with potentially unpleasant health consequences – in Henry V (Image by Getty Images)" /> "If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek" National pride In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks. For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff. In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.” Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ali051530webready-d1a9ba0-e1774448887475.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illustration depicts two adults working at a wooden table, kneading a large round mass of dough. A child in blue stands in a doorway to the left, observing, while a white dog drinks from the ground beneath the table. The building has patterned walls and two leafy trees stand nearby." title="Women make butter in an illustration from a medieval health treatise. People from the Low Countries were known for their love of butter, which was thought to ward off colic (Image by Topfoto)" /> “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter” Attitudes to immigrants Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter. Read more | The simple secret that kept the ordinary Tudor diet surprisingly healthy Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.” That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL179666webready-51e7483-e1774448962531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A side‑by‑side botanical illustration shows a yam (Dioscorea alata) on the left and a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) on the right. Each plant is drawn with its brown tuber, green leaves, and distinctive flowers—small buds on the yam and pinkish‑purple funnel‑shaped blooms on the sweet potato." title="Sweet potato, shown here, was an exotic luxury in Shakespeare’s time, and believed to have aphrodisiac properties (Image by Bridgeman)" /> “Let the sky rain potatoes!” Exotic aphrodisiacs Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech. The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater. One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at? Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/MARXC2webready-a3df156-e1774449069447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval-style scene depicts two figures seated together in a large wooden tub beneath a blue canopy. The person on the right is reaching across to touch the breast of the other person in the tub. Two attendants in long gowns stand beside them, one carrying a jug and the other a plate. A brick wall and window frame the setting" title="A colourised 16th-century woodcut shows a couple being served food and drink while frolicking in a bath. Stewed prunes were associated with brothels, possibly based on a belief that they helped protect against sexually transmitted diseases (Image by Alamy)" /> “I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since” Witty innuendo While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks. For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”. Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.” Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous. So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”? Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue. Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
12 modern trends with surprisingly ancient roots
From dance competitions to viral memes, there are some features of everyday life that feel firmly rooted in the 21st century. However, there are plenty of fads and crazes that are much older than you think, as Hilary Mitchell reveals
1. Cooking competitions Long before MasterChef, cooks in medieval Iraq also competed for culinary glory. In the 10th century, a collection of recipes from eighth and ninth-century Baghdad were compiled into a recipe book called Kitāb al-ṭabīkh (‘The Book of Dishes’) by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq. As well as recipes, the book also includes fascinating accounts of what could be described as very early cookery competitions. They weren’t long-running, weekly tournaments like those we see on TV, but they were still prestigious culinary events, usually staged in elite households, which allowed rival chefs to showcase their talents. In one section that sounds very much like a challenge from The Great British Bake Off, al-Warrāq describes banquets where different chefs’ versions of the same dish were compared and judged by their patrons. There’s also another anecdote (recounted in later culinary literature) about the caliph al-Ma’mūn challenging his cooks to produce dishes using unexpected ingredients – like an early version of Ready Steady Cook. 2. Online gossip These days, gossip pages like Deuxmoi – a popular, mostly anonymous Instagram account that shares insider info about well-known people – are a staple of social media sites. However, it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. People in ancient Mesopotamia were gossiping about the elite and writing down the most salacious rumours about them. Cuneiform tablets written around 1800–1760 BC record a Mesopotamian mayor’s shocking affair with a married woman. An official spills the tea, writing to the king to say that the mayor of the city has been “lying with another man’s wife”, and explaining that the citizens are all outraged; everyone in the city is talking about the scandal. The tablet is part of a group of Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets found at ancient Mari – modern Tell Hariri – in Syria, the majority of which take the form of messages sent to King Zimri-Lim about various goings-on in his country. It’s not quite an Instagram gossip column, but it’s clearly an early example of a very personal scandal spreading through social networks. Read more | Was there a real Lady Whistledown? The true stories of Mrs Crackenthorpe, Bridgerton’s scandal sheets and the golden age of gossip 3. Memes Memes, defined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as a cultural idea, behaviour or style that spreads by imitation, are usually thought to be a uniquely online, modern phenomenon. However, plenty of things went ‘viral’ long before the internet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-Memes-0c8f60e-e1772539948697.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A medieval manuscript illustration shows a knight in armor kneeling with a sword raised toward a large snail with a patterned shell. The scene is set inside an ornate decorated initial with gold, red, and blue detailing, and stylized foliage extending into the margins" title="A knight fights a snail in the Gorleston Psalter, c14th century. The image became a popular motif in medieval texts (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Some of the strongest contenders for the earliest memes are the recurring images that medieval manuscript illuminators often filled their margins with: everything from rabbits jousting with snails to cats playing bagpipes. These weren’t random; they were part of a shared visual language that spread from one workshop or region to another – much like memes do online today – partly due to travelling artisans. The knight versus snail motif appears in manuscripts from England, France and Flanders between the 13th and 14th centuries. No one knows exactly what it symbolised; perhaps cowardice or another form of social satire, but the fact that it appears repeatedly, across borders, suggests it went ‘viral’ among medieval illustrators, in a way. 4. Customer complaints Long before review sites or consumer watchdogs, people were already putting their grievances in writing. The world’s oldest known commercial customer complaint comes from ancient Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, and survives on a clay tablet now in the British Museum. It was written by a copper merchant named Nanni, who was furious with another trader, Ea-nāṣir, for delivering substandard copper ingots and treating his messenger rudely. “You have treated me with contempt,” Nanni scolds in Akkadian cuneiform, before demanding the return of his money and warning that he will never accept such poor service again. The infamous Ea-nāṣir lived in the city of Ur (modern Tell el-Muqayyar, southern Iraq) and his house, excavated by archaeologists in the 20th century, contained dozens of tablets relating to his copper trade. Many of them record debts and complaints, suggesting that his bad customer service may have been a bit of a pattern. The famous tablet, with its dry fury and insistence on fair dealing, certainly reads like a modern complaint email, which in turn has led to Ea-nāṣir becoming a popular meme about bad customer service nearly 4,000 years later. 5. OnlyFans OnlyFans – an online platform founded in 2016 where creators share exclusive, paywalled and often pornographic content for subscribers – might seem distinctively modern. However, like the other examples on this list, the concept of subscribing for privileged access or intimacy is nothing new. In classical Greece, higher-status hetairai (courtesans) cultivated circles of wealthy patrons who paid retainers or gave gifts for their company, conversation, and, sometimes, sex. Unlike lower-status sex workers (pornai), these women were admired for their education, wit and influence, with some even able to move in elite, male-dominated political circles that were closed to most Athenian women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-OnlyFans-2CG1KKR-dbeeca0-e1772540157727.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 19th-century painting showing Aspasia of Miletus (left), perhaps the most famous hetaira in classical Greece (Image by Alamy)" title="A 19th-century painting showing Aspasia of Miletus (left), perhaps the most famous hetaira in classical Greece (Image by Alamy)" /> The most famous was arguably Aspasia of Miletus, companion to the statesman Pericles, who was celebrated for her eloquence and rumoured to have advised some of Athens’ greatest thinkers, according to later writers. Satirical poets mocked her as a mere brothel-keeper, but others respected her intellect. Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys 6. 'Diss' tracks When you think of ‘diss tracks’ (short for ‘disrespect’), your mind probably conjures up the combative hip-hop feuds of the 1980s and 90s, when angry lyrics sometimes spilled into real-world violence. But the practice of using music to mock, ridicule or attack rivals has a much longer history. Well before rap battles and chart-topping beefs, composers and songwriters were crafting satirical songs aimed squarely at opponents. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-Diss-Tracks-KREKX4-30bfeef-e1772540262384.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration of a man dressed like Uncle Sam riding a galloping horse, kicking up clouds of dust. He wears a tall feathered hat, a blue coat with white stars, and red‑and‑white striped trousers. Behind him, a crowd of men, women, and children cheer and wave hats, with an American flag flying on a pole among green trees and a blue sky." title="A cartoon depicting Uncle Sam on horseback. One of the best-known diss tracks is the 18th-century ‘Yankee Doodle’, which mocked American colonists as being uncultured (Image by Alamy)" /> In the 18th century, for example, musical ridicule was a common feature of political life. One of the best-known examples is ‘Yankee Doodle’, first sung by British troops during the Seven Years’ War to mock American colonists as uncultured and naive. The famous line “Stuck a feather in his cap / And called it Macaroni” lampooned the colonists’ attempts to imitate London fashions, portraying them as pretentious fools. It’s not exactly ‘Hit ’Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur, but the aim was still to ‘diss’ the enemy. 7. Personal trainers Even if you don’t get to the gym as often as you’d like, your fitness ambitions have a very proud and ancient heritage. In ancient Greece, fitness wasn’t just about physical strength; it was a cornerstone of culture, identity and civic pride. The Greeks believed in the ideal of kalokagathia, the harmony of body and mind, and saw exercise as essential to both moral and intellectual development. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-Personal-trainers-2CE72A7-dad62a3-e1772540528580.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="illustration in the style of ancient Greek pottery showing several human figures and horses arranged around a central warrior. The central figure holds a shield patterned like animal skin and a spear. Other figures stand or ride horses around him, each labeled with Greek inscriptions. The scene is rendered in black and orange tones with detailed linework." title=". Greek athletic sports and festivals . Fig. 173.?R.-f. kylix. Canino Coll. the ground are planted poles and picks. The poles are usedas javelins for practice, and perhaps as measuring-rods; or asposts to mark the lines from which the jump is practised, o" /> Gymnasia, open-air training grounds where men gathered to run, wrestle and practice discus or javelin, were also vibrant social hubs, much like today’s gyms. Athletes even trained with personal trainers (paidotribai) and coaches (gymnastai) who supervised their charges and advised them on diet and exercise. In many ways, our modern obsession with health, aesthetics and community around fitness is a direct descendant of this ancient Greek ideal: proof that the pursuit of a buff body has a long history. Our ancestors couldn’t post their rock-hard abs on social media, but statues of the time preserve the ideal of physical perfection they were striving for. 8. Influencers The next time you see a well-dressed young person doing a complicated viral dance in public while their friend records them on their phone, take a moment to contemplate the original ‘influencer’, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, who lived in the sixth century. She was the wife of Emperor Justinian I and rose from humble origins as an actress to become one of the most powerful – and influential – women in the Byzantine empire. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-Influencers-GettyImages-122221539-LEAD-WL-d7c4886-e1772541520864.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Byzantine-style mosaic showing a central crowned woman in a richly patterned robe, flanked by two attendants. The attendant on the left wears a patterned garment and jewelry, while the one on the right holds a gold chalice and wears a white robe with geometric designs. The background is filled with gold and green architectural motifs" title="Empress Theodora of Byzantium (centre) presented a carefully curated image of herself, much like modern-day influencers (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mosaics and contemporary accounts show her wearing lavish, bejewelled outfits that set the example for court fashion. She was a particular fan of imperial purple (an elite colour manufactured from rare and expensive murex shellfish) as well as heavy jewellery and elaborate headpieces – all of which became aspirational goals for other aristocratic women. Her image was also very carefully curated – demonstrating a blend of sensuality, intellect, and authority – much like a modern social media influencer’s personal brand. 9. Dancing contests Much-loved autumn TV staple Strictly Come Dancing is, in many ways, a more polished, spangly descendant of ancient Greek dance contests. By the sixth century BC, choreographed group dances (choreiai) were central to major religious festivals honouring gods such as Apollo, Athena and Dionysus. Festivals like the City Dionysia and the Panathenaic Festival featured formal dance contests, in which trained groups performed elaborate dances in honour of the deities. These contests were often sponsored by wealthy patrons, and participants were judged and awarded prizes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-Dancing-Contests-2YXX7J9-fb21492-e1772540731582.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Roman mosaic showing four figures dancing in a circle around a veiled central figure. One person on the right holds a small tablet or scroll. Decorative garlands run along the top, and part of the mosaic on the right is damaged, revealing the surface beneath." title="A group dance depicted in a sixth-century AD mosaic from Ravenna, Italy. Routines like this were an integral part of religious festivals (Image by Alamy)" /> Also, if that wasn’t ancient enough, there’s evidence of ritual dance events much earlier, in the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation (c1600 BC). Frescoes and artefacts from Knossos and Phaistos depict groups of dancers performing in ritual circles, sometimes with acrobatic elements. While there’s no formal evidence that these were competitive in the sense of judged contests, some scholars suggest they may have involved displays of skill or athleticism. Not quite Strictly Come Knossos, but coordinated, organised group dance certainly has a history stretching back over 3,500 years. Read more | Forbidden dances and deadly marathons: 5 facts about the history of dancing 10. Fake news In this age of online misinformation, doctored images and AI videos, we hear a lot about ‘fake news’, but propaganda is nothing new. The use of exaggerated or misleading accounts to shape public perception goes back at least to 1274 BC, with Pharaoh Ramesses II and his so-called ‘victory’ at the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10-Fake-News-EgyptAbouSimbel6-498c77e-e1772540946949.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A carved ancient Egyptian relief showing a large standing figure with one arm raised holding a weapon and the other gripping a smaller, kneeling figure. Additional subdued figures appear below. Hieroglyphic inscriptions frame the scene in vertical and horizontal bands." title="A relief portraying Ramesses II slaying an enemy and trampling another — part of an ancient PR campaign" /> In reality, the battle was a stalemate. Despite this, Ramesses commissioned bombastic, braggadocious inscriptions and temple reliefs across Egypt depicting him single-handedly defeating the enemy, crushing chariots, and leading triumphant processions. These highly flattering depictions were essentially ancient PR: they reinforced his image as an unbeatable warrior-king for anyone who saw them, leaving a lasting impression of triumph, power and invulnerability that didn’t match the facts. 11. Nail art and manicures When you get your nails done, you’re participating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years, to the civilisations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence suggests that male Babylonian warriors tinted their nails with kohl and crushed minerals before battle: black or green for nobles, lighter shades for other fighters. In Egypt, nails were tinted with henna, with deeper red shades signalling higher status. Cleopatra, according to later sources, favoured a deep crimson. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/11-Nail-art-LadyTjepu-GoogleArtProject-copy-6d5e038-e1772541183187.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A fragment of an ancient Egyptian wall painting showing a woman in profile facing left. She wears a long black wig with a decorative headband, a white pleated dress, and blue‑and‑gold jewellery. She holds one hand up in front of her face, showing her painted nails" title="An artwork from the 14th century BC shows an Egyptian noblewoman examining her painted nails" /> Wealthy elites did not paint their own nails; attendants or servants prepared henna pastes, shaped nails with small metal tools, and applied the coatings. Tomb depictions from the New Kingdom (c1500 BC) show servants grooming noblewomen, offering evidence of manicure-like services. While these attendants weren’t professional ‘nail technicians’ in the modern sense, they performed many of the same functions: mixing cosmetic pastes, shaping nails, and applying a pop of colour for aesthetic effect. 12. Cancel culture We hear a lot about so-called ‘cancel culture’ these days, with many people – often outspoken ‘free speech’ advocates with controversial views – claiming their careers have been “ruined” because of a backlash to something they’ve said or done. However, they should probably count themselves lucky that, in 2025, ‘cancellation’ rarely includes formal banishment from your home city, which is the fate that faced ostracised Athenians in the early fifth century BC. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/12-Cancel-culture-AGMAOstrakonThemistocle1-3d1f4f9-e1772541235338.jpg" width="620" height="603" alt="A black‑glazed ancient Greek drinking cup seen from above, with a ring of lightly incised Greek letters etched around the inner rim" title="An ostrakon from 482 BC, reading “Themistocles, son of Neocles”. Anyone whose name was etched onto one of these pottery sherds faced a 10-year exile" /> Ostracism was a formal mechanism that allowed citizens to exile public figures for 10 years. It was intended as a safeguard against tyranny: if an individual was deemed a threat to democracy, the citizen body could vote to remove them without resorting to legal prosecution. Each year, the assembly would decide whether to hold an ostracism; if so, citizens scratched the name of the person they wished to exile onto a pottery sherd called an ostrakon. The ancient sources are slightly unclear, but it seems either a minimum threshold of 6,000 votes was required to validate the process, or a person needed 6,000 votes against them to be banished. Those exiled retained their property and legal rights, returning home once the 10-year period ended; possibly feeling a bit miffed about being shunned for a decade.
"It wasn't very open about its queer connections": the hidden history of the National Trust
Michael Hall speaks to Charlotte Vosper about the long-hidden stories of LGBTQ people whose lives were connected to the properties owned by the National Trust
Charlotte Vosper: In A Queer Inheritance, you explore histories of sexual difference connected to the National Trust. What drew you to those historical figures and their stories? Michael Hall: That goes back a long way. For quite a few years I worked for Country Life magazine, and in that role I wrote articles about country houses. I actually began with one of those I mention in my book: Packwood House in Warwickshire. It was acquired in 1904 by an industrialist for his son, Graham Baron Ash, who spent years renovating and transforming the property. It struck me that he never got married – and the idea that a bachelor might do up a house and then give it to the National Trust to look after seemed quite intriguing. I didn’t really spot that it was part of a pattern until I wrote a similar article on Anglesey Abbey. That’s when I realised that there was a story about the National Trust that hadn’t really been told before. It’s important to mention that I’ve never worked for the Trust, and A Queer Inheritance isn’t an official National Trust book in any way. I don’t speak on the Trust’s behalf – and indeed they may very well disagree with a lot of what I say. The National Trust was founded in 1895, when homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ were still illegal in Britain – yet in your book you suggest that the Trust had queer connections from its very beginnings. Can you expand on this? That’s actually quite a complicated question. The origins of the National Trust were rooted in an anxiety about London’s urban poor and how they could be morally improved. Its founders thought that if the urban poor could be given access to architectural and natural beauty, this would do away with what they saw as their worrying vices – of which homosexuality was a rather prominent example. Yet several people on the Trust’s original council and executive committee were in fact queer. They included the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was worried that he might be named in the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, and Octavia Hill, who had a long and loving relationship with Harriot Yorke. Can you tell us about some queer landowners connected to the Trust’s estates? William John Bankes, who inherited the great estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, had to go into exile in 1841 after he was caught having sex with a guardsman in London’s Green Park. He then redecorated and remodelled the house remotely, while living in Venice. It’s a very interesting story about a gay man shaping a house even when away from home. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2DYY3JXwebready-4a1b91d-e1772550724428.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large historic mansion stands behind a wide green lawn, with a central dome flying a flag, tall chimneys, and symmetrical stone façades. Mature trees frame the view, and a few people walk near the building alongside a small green tractor." title="Kingston Lacy in Dorset was redesigned as a classical palace in the 19th century by its owner William John Bankes, who was forced into exile after facing prosecution for a same-sex act. The house is home to his collections of art and Egyptian artefacts (Image by Alamy)" /> In the book I also talk about Clumber Park, site of a lost house that was demolished in 1938. Several generations of the Dukes of Newcastle were based there. One of the 5th Duke’s sons, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, enjoyed relationships with a famous pair of young Victorian men who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella; later, the 7th Duke, ‘Linny’, was friends with Oscar Wilde. I should emphasise that the book is not primarily about country houses. The National Trust manages a wide range of buildings, one of which is Clouds Hill, a little cottage in Dorset that was home to TE Lawrence (of Arabia). His sexuality has been hugely debated, and I draw my own conclusions about this in the book. Read more | Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man A site that’s much less controversial is Smallhythe Place in Kent, home of the great 19th and early 20th-century actress Ellen Terry. Her daughter, Edith Craig, was a theatre director of considerable eminence who lived next to that early 16th-century house with two close lesbian friends. They welcomed lots of their likeminded friends there, so you can discover a lot of lesbian history in the 20th century just by visiting Smallhythe. How do we know that these people were queer? Would the historical figures you discuss have understood themselves in that way? Not particularly as queer, I don’t think. But as a historian, you have to look at the story and ask: how can I best interpret this? I think the advantage of the term ‘queer’ is that it avoids attaching very precise labels to people. The word itself goes back to the 16th century, when it just meant odd or unusual. Around the end of the 19th century, though, ‘queer’ was becoming a term of abuse, meaning homosexual. But by the 1980s, ‘queer’ was very much taken back by gay activists, particularly during the Aids crisis, as a way of reclaiming their identity. Today, ‘queer’ is the term preferred by most historians. One of the issues historians face is how to talk about people who didn’t have access to the terms we would use now, such as ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’. I think ‘queer’ is quite useful because a modern audience knows what that means, but it’s also not imposing something on the past. I also think that the fact it’s clearly anachronistic is actually rather helpful, because it emphasises the difference between the past and the present. There is an amazing amount of argument about these terms, and you can debate these things forever, but as a historian you just have to get on and do the history. And when you do, there’s a lot of anxiety about finding evidence that people were gay – but I think the response must often be, well, what’s your evidence that they were heterosexual? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2PAFXGXwebready-559b568-e1772551882888.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait of a person with wavy, shoulder‑length hair looking slightly upward against a dark background. Soft lighting highlights their face, creating a dramatic, classic studio style." title="The writer and poet Vita Sackville-West’s same-sex relationships were not always acknowledged (Image by Alamy)" /> How have National Trust estates been influenced by the queer people who lived in them or were connected to them? I wanted to write about places that queer people had shaped in some way – by building them, decorating them, furnishing them or making them part of their life history. This isn’t always obvious. Today, lesbians visit Knole, a country house in Kent, because our contemporary perception of the building is shaped by our knowledge of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West, who lived there, and Virginia Woolf. Yet there’s almost no evidence of Vita’s influence that you can see on the property, other than the original manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando, which she inspired. Returning to TE Lawrence’s Dorset cottage, Clouds Hill, there are just two rooms upstairs, one of which he used as a guest bedroom. In the 1930s, he curiously lined that room with metal foil – a rather art deco look. I became intrigued by the fact that Siegfried Sassoon, a gay writer who was a friend of Lawrence, visited Clouds Hill with his lover, Stephen Tennant. Now, one of the best-known photographs of Stephen (shown above), by Cecil Beaton, shows him in his own bedroom – which he had lined with silver paper. I thought it was an interesting queer link which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t been made before. It says something about Lawrence’s own sense of identity in terms of sexual orientation, and also about networks. Early on in my research, I began to realise that many of these houses and people linked up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/0516118webready-d0bc43f-e1772550648873.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a young man wearing a collared shirt, tie and a coat with a large collar. He is looking directly at the camera with a serious look on his face and has a silver foil wallpaper behind him" title="This photo of the socialite Stephen Tennant in front of distinctive silver wallpaper helped piece together the story of TE Lawrence’s Clouds Hill (Image by Topfoto)" /> A lot of the queer people associated with the Trust’s properties were connected, and many came from a privileged background. Is there a relationship here between class and queerness? Yes, definitely – though I don’t write only about elite people in the book. The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, who lived at the family seat of Plas Newydd on that island, is a good example of such privilege. On the death of his father in 1898 he inherited a huge fortune, which funded his love of dressing up. He liked to put on theatrical productions and go to fancy-dress parties in a very gender-bending way. This got him into the newspapers, and he was laughed at and ridiculed relentlessly. Eventually, he went bankrupt. In a sense, Paget was able to dress up and perform because he was very, very rich. But the downside of his wealth was that he attracted an enormous amount of public curiosity. Endless stories about him appeared in the press. He wouldn’t have suffered such a blow to his reputation if he had been an obscure commoner. Clearly, although privilege could facilitate queer experiences, it could also attract much unwanted attention and expose scandal. Read more | The new radicals: how the Bloomsbury Group transformed British culture When exploring past queer experiences, we are often dealing with the feelings and emotions of historical figures. What sources did you use to explore these? Sources pose a massive question for any historian, but queer topics have always been particularly hedged with problems. Prior to 1967, all homosexual acts between men were illegal in England and Wales [even then, they were permitted only between two consenting adults over the age of 21], and this creates obvious issues with the sources from before that period. But what struck me was that if you go back to the original sources – the contemporary biographies and letter compilations of these late 19th and early 20th-century figures – it seems that many people probably knew what was going on. The Victorians weren’t fools. You just have to tune in when reading the sources, and you’ll learn a lot. The National Trust has faced some backlash for trying to reclaim minority history more widely. How has its attitude towards queer people evolved? Traditionally, the Trust wasn’t very open about its queer connections – but then nobody was terribly open about these issues for many decades. Homophobia played a role in the modernisation of the National Trust. From the 1950s, it began trying to run its houses on a more professional basis, appointing curators. There was a bit of a standoff between the land agents – the traditional men in tweeds who dealt with forestry and estates – and the curators, who dealt with hanging the pictures and arranging the furniture. This division reflected an essential binary within the Trust: whether it should be concerned primarily with places of historic interest or of natural beauty. One of the ways that people who thought the National Trust wasn’t paying enough attention to nature directed criticism against the curators was through homophobia. This made life rather tricky for any gay men within the organisation, and by the 1960s and 70s the Trust attracted considerable criticism, accused of being run by queer aristocratic men. To be fair to the critics, there was considerable truth in that. Beyond its employees, the Trust remained coy about queer connections to the houses it acquired. For example – and it’s extraordinary to say now – it wasn’t until 2008 that any official publication by the National Trust about Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s later home, also in Kent, mentioned her same-sex relationships. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-182926080webready-82eb4db-e1772551730353.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A tall brick tower with two conical roofs rises above a landscaped garden of trimmed bushes, flowers, and a wide lawn. Climbing greenery covers part of the structure, and a flag flies from the top. Tree branches and a wrought‑iron gate frame the scene under a bright, partly cloudy sky." title="The Tower at Sissinghurst Castle is set in the gardens designed by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson (Image by Getty Images)" /> So it’s only pretty recently that the organisation has been open about this kind of history. In 2017, it made a big effort to catch up and tell these stories, and I think generally there was a feeling that this was going in the right direction. It did, however, bring up an interesting dilemma. Objections were raised by relatives and friends of some of the people who were being described as queer, criticising the National Trust for ‘outing’ them. Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history I don’t think that it makes any sense to talk about historical figures in terms of ‘outing’ – because, really, if you object to somebody in the past being described as queer, or raising the question about whether or not they were what we would now call gay, that might imply that you find homosexuality shameful. It’s interesting that the controversy around ‘outing’ these historical figures hasn’t applied so much to queer women. I don’t think people find women’s sexuality as threatening as they find men’s sexuality. And it’s most often men who get upset about other men being described as gay. Look at Lawrence of Arabia: dozens of biographies have been written about him, almost all by men and almost all hostile to the idea that he was gay. What impact do you hope A Queer Inheritance will have? I hope that people will realise that queer history is a very rich subject, and that there’s a huge amount more that can be said about the queer lives connected to the National Trust. Everyone I’ve spoken to about my book says: “Oh, but you haven’t said anything about X.” So, there’s lots more to explore, and different approaches that could be taken. A woman or a young person would have written a completely different book, I think. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a brief history of dating
From calling cards and corsets to 'the pill' and the sexual revolution, we have always found inventive ways to find and further love. Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, takes us on a whistle-stop tour of courtship through history
When I first began writing about the history of dating, what struck me most was how similar the problems of today are to the 1930s, the 1840s, and even the 1780s. From worrying about a partner’s financial standing, or whether someone was going to stick around long enough for you to have children with them, to persuading your parents they are indeed a good fit, the means by which we go about finding love may have changed, but not the hopes, dreams and anxieties we’ve had about discovering it. In the Georgian era, for example, the advice was clear: looks matter but value them at the peril of your long-term happiness: “She, who, intoxicated with flattery, protracts the triumphs of her beauty in youth, may live to lament the barren spoils of it in age.” Indeed, throughout history, grooming and dressing as well as you possibly can has always been a better strategy than ruminating on what you don’t have. Victorian women wore dresses cut just above the nipples, with pearl necklaces draped lasciviously in their décolletage, while some Edwardian men favoured wearing corsets and delighted in the sensation of tight lacing. When the mini skirt was invented in the early 1960s, some men even tried it out, including 16-year-old trainee brick layer Tony Liggard whom the Daily Mail reported was convinced it would catch on among men. It didn’t – but long hair, floral patterns, make-up and jewellery all eventually did. So much for the myth that male grooming is a recent phenomenon! <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/2GettyImages-559574483-24ee5fb-e1770990862524.jpg" width="1499" height="1000" alt="A Victorian advertisement showing black and white sketches of men wearing corsets. Across the top is an address and an advert for Madame Dowding" title="Some Victorian and Edwardian men experimented with wearing corsets, as this 1899 advertisement reveals (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once you were suitably styled, you needed to get a date’s attention. The Georgians were mad for ‘lonely hearts’ adverts, which they would write and post via newspapers including The Times, later in matrimonial gazettes, circulated around London’s coffee houses, while the Victorians settled on the idea of the marriage bureau, an agency designed to match the middle classes, via photos and details about their hobbies. In the 1930s, gay men and women would use the fan columns of movie magazines to drop hints about their sexuality by referencing Hollywood stars such as Bette Davis and Montgomery Clift. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Chaperones and calling cards In the flesh, of course, the best seduction tool has always been dancing. From Regency square dancing to secret Victorian drag balls, from the 1910s ‘turkey trot’ to the 1980s and 1990s acid house rave scene, the vertical expression of the horizontal desire has rarely failed a trier. As playwright and actor Steven Berkoff reminisces about the Tottenham Royal dance hall in his autobiography Free Association: “You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice.” But if you couldn’t dance, witty conversation and excellent manners have always served as a good substitute. Meeting a lady on the street in Victorian England was a fraught business. As the etiquette manual Manners for Men put it, you were never to introduce a lady to a gentleman, but always the gentleman to the lady, and must never offer an umbrella to a woman on the street on the basis that “No lady would accept the offer from a stranger, and the other sort of person might never return the umbrella.” WATCH | Fern Riddell's presents her groundbreaking research into one of the most tantalising royal rumours in British history View Green Video on the source website Middle-class Victorians embraced a complicated ritual of giving out calling cards, and of making home visits according to a strict etiquette. However, even if you succeeded getting an audience with your potential amour, you would never be left unattended. Chaperones were in full force until the First World War, when the exodus of Britain’s young men left women to parry and party on their own. Etiquette manuals were swapped for magazine problem pages, and by the 1930s, handbooks on sex were as easily purchased as those on hosting. When we think of the early 20th century, we may imagine courting couples meeting one another on realistic terms, their expectations untroubled by the imagery of dream homes and impossibly honed bodies that haunt contemporary media. However, we’ve always idealised glamour. From the birth of the celebrity-courted gossip column in the 1920s and the boom in cinema from the 1930s, our aspiration to marry the richest and most beautiful has long intruded upon our daily contentment. Today, with living standards so much higher, and the cost of clothes and cosmetics cheaper, it’s actually easier than ever before to replicate celebrity standards of grooming. And while we frequently flagellate ourselves for living in an increasingly narcissistic, selfie-obsessed culture, we aren’t the first generation to be so concerned with the vagaries of appearance. In fact, the Victorians even had their own version of Instagram, exchanging cartes-de-visite – small portrait prints which would be organised into albums also containing images of celebrities and royalty. These albums were exchanged in flirtation but also as a means of asserting one’s social standing. The trick was to guess whether someone showcasing a royal portrait had in fact met the royal in question. Sex before marriage Perhaps the biggest surprise about our dating history is that pre-marital sex has often been the norm for most people. Apart from the revival of a long-practised behaviour called ‘bundling’ – cuddling with clothes on – which was a response to the 1834 Poor Law penalising women who found themselves pregnant as single mothers, it seems our ancestors always found a way to “try the goods before you buy them,” as I remember my grandmother once joking to me. Condoms that could be washed out with carbolic soap were used from the mid-19th century, while contraception campaigner Annie Besant was tried for obscenity for publishing a pamphlet on the topic in 1877. Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys When Marie Stopes published her sex manual Married Love in 1918, it was just as widely read by single girls as married ladies. In her book, Stopes advocated the benefits of conjugal love, and physical pleasure within marriage. “I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance,” she says in the preface, “that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.” In the 1930s, Marjorie Hillis, the author of Live Alone and Like It, recommended that women stay away from affairs before the age of 30 while acknowledging that plenty of single ladies were inviting gentleman callers back to their homes at night, and that societal attitudes were changing: “A woman’s honour is no longer mentioned with bated breath and protected by her father, her brother and the community. It is now her own affair.” Meanwhile, in the 1960s, ‘the pill’ didn’t quite provide the immediate revolution it has been credited with. Originally it was only prescribed to married women, and even in the 1970s, doctors could refuse women a prescription on moral grounds – something my own mother remembers happening when she went, as an engaged woman, to seek it out. What’s more, the downside of women procuring the pill was that men, who had originally assumed responsibility for acquiring condoms, stopped taking as much responsibility for contraception. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/4BXPEMP-2d507fc-e1770991054847.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a young woman. She is sitting at a desk, looking at the camera, while bent over a microscope. In front of her is a large glass globe" title="Birth control pioneer Marie Stopes pictured in her laboratory, 1904. Stopes advocated the benefits of “conjugal love and physical pleasure within marriage” (Image by Alamy)" /> Long before apps like Tinder widened the dating pool, developments in travel and technology have been crucial to navigating the course of true love. When the stream train came into everyday use in the mid-19th century, rail travel reached the masses. Women now shared dimly lit, cramped carriages with men, and even if you were venturing to visit a maiden aunt, there was every chance you could enjoy a verbal dalliance or three along the way with people you wouldn’t necessarily ever clap eyes on again. “Surprise visits by moonlight” The bicycle, meanwhile, also improved romantic opportunities. Contrary to the tricycle, which saw women wearing full skirts and accompanied by a chaperone, the two-wheeler required women to get their leg over, and was effectively the first mode of transport that they could use entirely independently of men. Etiquette guides of the period recognised that people could now pay “surprise visits… by moonlight” and that seaside flirtations could be enhanced by romantic bike rides together. While there was fear about exactly what kind of excitations might be invoked by the bike riding, 1897’s Manners for Men advised that men encountering female cyclists “help ladies as much as possible by pushing their machines up the hills for them”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/5GettyImages-3292776-48250fa-e1770993875813.jpg" width="1500" height="1912" alt="A black and white photograph a woman in a long coat, wearing a hat. She is sitting on a bicycle with her arms crossed. Behind her, there are some trees and a road" title="A young woman enjoys a ride on a ‘scorcher’, a type of bicycle, c1897. Etiquette guides from the era suggested that courtship could be enhanced by romantic bike rides with your partner (Image by Getty Images)" /> Of course, when circumstances called for it, people have travelled to far-flung lands to find a mate. In the 1930s middle-class women that found themselves ‘left on the shelf’ still travelled to colonial India in search of husbands. Nicknamed ‘the fishing fleet’, these women travelled by boat to colonial outposts along with ambitious young men seeking work. In some cases, they’d often coupled up before the vessel had even docked, or used the voyage as an opportunity to scope out who would be available on dry land. This was encouraged by local Indian churches who did not approve of ‘loose’ women flitting about the provinces. Read more | A timeless love story? Abélard and Héloïse’s passionate affair There was even a tale of one 36-year-old woman named Kitty Irwin who was invited to stay with a married friend in Karachi. During her six months ‘on tour’, she met an exporter called Sam Raschen who became more or less besotted with her at first sight. When she arrived at the booking office to arrange her passage home, she was escorted to see Raschen in his office at the dock and he subsequently persuaded her to delay her return indefinitely and, instead, marry him. In the 1950s, the first package holidays opened up the possibility of a ‘holiday fling’ to the general populace. The 1970s, meanwhile, saw the invention of 18–30s holidays, which began with the same insalubrious reputation that they ended up with. A Sunday Times reporter from the end of the decade wrote: “I spent one night on the beach until 4am waiting for Chas to finish and let me get back to bed. But he did give me 1,000 pesetas to amuse myself with. As for my other room-mate, he was sick in the sink on the second day. Too much sangria. Despite that, he managed five girls in our seven nights there. And one girl, I found out, had tackled an equivalent number of blokes.” Later, the film Shirley Valentine would inspire a flock of similarly inclined women, including female sex tourists who were courted by young Caribbean men called ‘rastitudes’, and men who sought mail-order brides, on a ‘no-try-before-buy’ basis. Today, dating organisations like Inner Circle connect peripatetic singles at events in multiple capital cities. And with advances in digital messaging and virtual reality technology, it’s never been easier to start a relationship across a distance. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/62JRHC3E-8ac18b1-e1770994863561.jpg" width="1500" height="1003" alt="A photograph of a couple looking lovingly into each other's eyes. The woman has a pink top on and curly hair. The man is in a dark blue shirt and has a moustache. Behind them is a large beach" title="Pauline Collins and Tom Conti in Shirley Valentine (1989). The award-winning film, based on a Willy Russell play of the same name, inspired women to pursue their own holiday romances (Image by Alamy)" /> Nor has it ever been easier to date according to broader gender preferences, sexual orientation or erotic peccadilloes. Much of that is as a result of the relaxation of some of the laws discriminating against LGBTQI individuals and so-called ‘alternative’ relationships, but also a cultural shift in how we define gender, and who gets to decide what kinds of couplings and throuplings (or more) are permitted. But some of it is the dating industry’s desperate attempt to cast the net ever wider as dating app fatigue sets in and users become cynical of taglines such as ‘Designed to be Deleted’. The future of dating Finding an appealing alternative to dating apps is proving tough; experimental in-person dating events in places like bookshops just don’t yet have the same reach or appeal, and younger users are frequently finding apps such as Snapchat and TikTok a much better way to connect. And if AI is set to pose a bigger shift to how we live since the Industrial Revolution, that includes dating. That could be your AI bot talking to another AI bot to streamline the process of making a partner shortlist for you, but also AI’s increasingly sophisticated ability to dredge the internet for information about specific individuals, collated from a lifetime of social media posts. However, as we've seen throughout history, dating as simply yet another commodification has never stuck – and certainly never managed to fulfil the wild longings of the heart. And while marriage rates flounder, dating as not just entertainment but self-fulfilment has a rose-tinted future. Nichi Hodgson is a journalist and the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder (Little, Brown, 2017)
High society’s most DANGEROUS liaison | Henrietta Grosvenor and the king's brother
Scandals: The Georgians (podcast series)
In a tavern in 1769, aristocrat Henrietta Grosvenor was discovered in a comprising position with a man who was not her husband
In a tavern in 1769, aristocrat Henrietta Grosvenor was discovered in a comprising position with a man who was not her husband. Her lover was none other than the king’s own brother – and their illicit affair promptly kicked off one of Georgian Britain’s messiest divorce cases. In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne revisit this 18th-century soap opera and explore what it can tell us high society marriages in the era. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
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
Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life
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
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 never witnessed a closer attachment.” Hitler was at his mother’s bedside when she passed away. Dr Bloch later observed: “In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.” Experiencing such loss during his formative years would have had a lasting impact on Hitler’s character. A portrait of adolescence As we have known since the medical file resurfaced at an auction in 2010, a physical examination during Hitler’s time in Landsberg prison in 1923, following his arrest for the failed Munich putsch that November, revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” – that is, an undescended testicle. This physical abnormality might help to explain the account given by Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence, August Kubizek. While living in Vienna, Hitler and Kubizek shared a room from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “my friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/4-August-Kubizek-GettyImages-1371458593-bbe65ce-e1769175883617.jpg" width="1500" height="2106" alt="A black and white photograph of a man, wearing a black suit with a black bow tie." title="A photograph of August Kubizek, Hitler’s former roommate. Kubizek would later claim that his friend had shown an “obvious indifference to the opposite sex” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed), when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” None of the accounts of Hitler’s remaining years in the Austrian capital suggests anything changed in this regard. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Tellingly, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, Ernst Hanfstaengl, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of the Nazi leader: “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” The German historian Peter Longerich, in his own biography of Hitler, goes one step further: “In view of Hitler’s personality, it seems altogether plausible that his life was asexual: any intimate relationship would simply have been incompatible with his arrested emotional development with regard to other people and with his self-perception as a public figure through and through with an extraordinary historic mission.” No room for a wife Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation. Medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. Although the serological tests carried out in 1940 did not exclude neurosyphilis, recent medical research has concluded that the suggestion that Hitler may have had neurosyphilis is unsustainable. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. As Hanfstaengl observed, Hitler must have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain Hitler’s absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children; some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw once wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public reflexes.” The identification and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may now explain why. The fact that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome surely played a part in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. According to Christa Schroeder, who served as one of Hitler’s secretaries for the entirety of his 12 years in power: “Undoubtedly Hitler enjoyed the company of beautiful women and was inspired by them. He used eroticism, but not sex. Because of the great objective he had set himself and to which he was totally committed, sexual gratification occurred mentally.” Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes may have played a bigger part in his decision not to marry and have children than he was willing to admit. Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers "Saturated with jealousy" It is with two women that Hitler is most closely associated: Geli Raubal and Eva Braun. Geli, born in 1908 (and thus 19 years younger than Hitler), was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Raubal. Geli’s father died two years after her birth, and Hitler became her legal guardian in 1923. Six years later, Geli moved into Hitler’s nine-room apartment in Munich. Hitler was overbearing and jealously possessive of his half-niece. He took her everywhere with him, and if she went out alone, she was chaperoned and had to be home early. To all intents and purposes, Geli was a prisoner. And she resented it bitterly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/6-Geli-Raubal-GettyImages-541794949-f720675-e1769176093295.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in a suit, asleep in a deckchair. To his right, a woman in a patterned dress sits on the floor, looking at him" title="Hitler with his half-niece, Geli Raubal. The former medical student would take her own life in the Nazi leader’s apartment (Image by Getty Images)" /> On 18 September 1931, Geli shot and killed herself in the apartment, using Hitler’s own pistol. According to Ian Kershaw, his emotional relationship with Geli was “more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after”. Anni Winter, Hitler’s housekeeper in Munich from 1929 to 1945, summed it up, according to Christa Schroeder, as “a platonic love saturated with jealousy”. In the autumn of 1929, the same year that Geli Raubal moved into his Munich apartment, Hitler first met Eva Braun at the Munich studio of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she worked as an assistant and, later, as a photographer herself. Eva, born in 1912, was nearly 23 years younger than Hitler. The two began spending more time together from early 1932, after several months had passed since Geli Raubal’s suicide. One of Hitler’s closest political associates, Franz Xaver Schwarz – who had joined the Nazi Party in 1922, taken part in the failed Munich putsch the following November, and then served as treasurer of the Nazi Party from 1925 to 1945 – told Allied officers in July 1945 that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun since 1931 had been “platonic”. Heike Görtemaker, the biographer of Eva Braun, is right to point out that Schwarz “had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators”. However, many other people who spent years in close proximity to Hitler said the same as Schwarz. Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker at the Berghof for eight years, claimed that there was never any evidence that the two had sex. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/8-Eva-and-sister-Gretl-GettyImages-109852808-30f2189-e1769176211496.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of two young women sitting on top of a wall, alongside a black dog" title="Eva Braun (right), with her sister, Gretl. Hitler had first met Braun at the Munich studio of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, in 1929 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The aforementioned Christa Schroeder insisted in her memoir that “Hitler was not the lover of Eva Braun”. Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced Hitler – “a personally modest and intensely shy person” – to Eva Braun, wrote in his memoir that she “became the constant companion of his leisure hours and, to the best of my knowledge, that was all there was to it”. He added: “there never was any love story”. While physical intimacy between them cannot be ruled out entirely, all available evidence suggests that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was not sexual. In Hitler’s Munich apartment, his suite of rooms in the Reich Chancellery, at the Berghof and, later, in his Berlin bunker, Eva Braun always had her own separate bedroom. Keeping secrets One disturbing fact is worth pointing out here: Geli Raubal was not the only woman intimately associated with Hitler to attempt, or die by, suicide. His brief flirtation with Maria ‘Mimi’ Reiter, born in 1909 (and thus 20 years younger than Hitler), began in the autumn of 1926 when they met in Berchtesgaden. According to Kershaw, Hitler’s letters to her “were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronising fashion”. Their friendship ended after a few months when Hitler broke off contact. Mimi Reiter unsuccessfully attempted to hang herself the following year. During her relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun attempted suicide not once but twice, in November 1932 and May 1935 (before finally killing herself, alongside Hitler, in the Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 – less than 40 hours after they had married). A few months after the second suicide attempt, she and her sister Gretl moved into a house that Hoffmann had bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. By the following year, Eva Braun had become a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler. Read more | The real Unity Mitford: meet the high society British Nazi who was rumoured to have had Hitler's child Nonetheless, whatever the nature of their relationship, most German people did not know about it until after the war. She was only once caught on camera with Hitler in public, when she sat directly behind him during the women’s skating competition at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Otherwise, Hitler never allowed her to be seen in public with him. Christa Schroeder may have succeeded in explaining both the longevity and Hitler’s true motivation in entering into his long-term companionship with Eva Braun when she wrote that “Hitler as a politician could not afford a second suicide of a young woman in his close circle… This protected him against future suicide attempts and was also a shield against all his other ardent female admirers”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/9-Hitler-and-Eva-GettyImages-514679166-302118e-e1769176611254.jpg" width="1500" height="2461" alt="A black and white photograph of a man standing in a double breasted suit, along side a woman in a dress, sitting in a chair to the right" title="Most German people did not know about Hitler and Braun’s relationship until after the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though he was, by all accounts, fond of Mimi Reiter, Geli Raubal and Eva Braun (as well as other women) in his own way, they were all much younger women whom Hitler could – and did – dominate. Heinrich Hoffmann’s assessment of Hitler's view of Eva Braun likely applied to all those women with whom he formed some sort of attachment: “To him, she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought.” Christa Schroeder concludes for all these relationships that “Hitler appears to have kept his love life platonic throughout”. In his own account, August Kubizek leaves the reader in no doubt as to his belief that Hitler was a pronounced misogynist. According to Kershaw: “Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality.” Alex J Kay is a reader in modern history at the University of Potsdam. He recently served as the senior historical consultant and co-lead on the Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. Alex J Kay and geneticist Turi King spoke to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast about their involvement in the DNA research. Listen to the full conversation.