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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
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.
Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?
He’s reviled as a cruel tyrant who killed his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned. But was Nero’s descent into madness triggered by his failed romance with a former slave? Edward J Watts tells a story of murder, incest and political intrigue
It is difficult to feel empathy for the emperor Nero, a man who did such unquestionably terrible things that he has become a prototype for the monstrous Roman ruler. During his lifetime he was labelled a matricide, an arsonist and a persecutor of Christians who also killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. After his death, these stories grew into terrifying legends about his cruel madness. By the Middle Ages, chroniclers even detailed a tale in which Nero commanded doctors to make him give birth. Fearing for their lives, the terrified doctors “made up a potion in which they put a frog and gave it to the emperor to drink”, while prescribing him a special diet that would cause his stomach to expand. When Nero vomited the animal out, he “commanded that the foetus be fed and kept in a domed chamber” as his imperial heir. Some manuscripts even featured an image of Nero on a birthing chair beside his frog-child to illustrate his “evil madness”. And yet it is not hard to imagine a different life for Nero. This is because, before Nero became a monster, he was a heartbroken boy prohibited from marrying Acte – his one true love. Family trauma The tragic history of Nero’s family made it all the more surprising that he found such a romantic partner. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – the man whom Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, hoped would assume imperial power following his planned retirement. When Germanicus predeceased Tiberius, however, his wife and children became potential rivals and were ultimately arrested. Agrippina’s mother starved to death in captivity, while her brother took his own life by eating the mattress in his cell. Their fates taught the princess that real financial and political security came only from a strong connection to some devoted, powerful male figure. She married thrice, each time to a rich and powerful suitor. Her first marriage, which was celebrated in AD 28 when she was just 13 years old, joined Agrippina to her 30-year-old cousin, Domitius Ahenobarbus. Nero was born to the couple in AD 37, and the child not only inherited his father’s fortune when Ahenobarbus died in AD 41, but also that of Agrippina’s second husband, Passienus Crispus, who died six years later. In AD 49, Agrippina wed her uncle, the elderly emperor Claudius. She persuaded Claudius to name Nero as his heir and to marry his natural-born daughter Octavia to Nero in AD 53. Between her husband and her son, Agrippina finally seemed to have the security she had long craved. Read more | Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations? As Claudius’s natural-born son Britannicus entered adolescence, however, the emperor began to reconsider Nero’s appointment as successor designate. But Claudius suddenly died on 13 October AD 54, poisoned by a mushroom that Agrippina may or may not have arranged for him to eat. The 16-year-old Nero was now Roman emperor. Britannicus would be dead within a year. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/7-NeronyAgripina-6f8fc45-e1766490879177.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue showing a woman crowning a man. Both are dressed in Roman clothes" title="A relief shows Agrippina crowning Nero with a laurel wreath. The 16-year-old boy became emperor following the death of his mother's third husband (and uncle), Claudius (Image by Wiki Commons)" /> Acte enters the scene Everyone in Rome, except perhaps for Nero himself, understood that Nero’s status as Claudius’s legitimate heir derived in large part from his marriage to Octavia. It was then essential for the young couple to remain together. Nero, however, found his wife physically repulsive, and began searching for more attractive and interesting sexual partners. This is how Acte entered his life. The girl, who had been bought as a slave in the Roman province of Asia, was seen by the men around Nero as someone who “could fulfil his desires without harm to anyone” since, as the historian wrote, “it was feared that he might rush into scandalous behaviour with noble ladies, if he were not permitted this indulgence”. Tacitus’s words reflect the Roman idea that enslaved people like Acte were, in a sense, disposable commodities whose bodies could be used by noble men to fulfil the urges their wives could not. When the men tired of “the debaucheries… that vice made overwhelmingly attractive”, they were supposed to dispose of the slaves who had serviced them. This is how elite men often behaved, but no one anticipated that, instead of using and dismissing the girl, Nero would fall in love with Acte. Not only had she quickly won Nero’s affections, but their intense connection would lead to her emancipation and talk of Nero’s desire to marry her. Agrippina was incensed when she learned that this sexual dalliance had evolved into a genuine romance. Tacitus says that she “raved with a woman’s fury about having… a slave girl for a daughter-in-law”, but that “the fouler her reproaches, the fiercer the passion Nero felt”. Read more | One of ancient Rome’s most notorious emperors murdered his own mother, and there's a dark reason why Finally, Agrippina snapped and yelled at her son: “It was I who made you emperor!” This entirely true but extremely unwise outburst was too much for the headstrong teenage emperor to bear. It was at that point, writes Tacitus, that Nero “threw off all respect for his mother”. Rise of the sycophants Sensing an opportunity, men like the future emperor Otho and the senator Seneca stepped forward to exploit the emperor’s hurt feelings and growing estrangement from Agrippina. Otho, a fashionable party boy from an aristocratic family, offered emotional support to Nero during wild drinking sessions, in which the emperor confessed to Otho far more than was wise. Meanwhile, Seneca offered more practical aid by enlisting an associate who was willing to pretend to be in love with Acte, so he could “serve as the ostensible giver of the presents secretly sent by the emperor to the girl”. The appreciative emperor was too naïve to realise that these men encouraged his love affair precisely because it weakened his bond with Agrippina and made him more likely to reward them in the future. Agrippina was not so foolish. “Changing her tactics,” Tacitus writes, she went to her son and “pleaded guilty to an ill-timed strictness”. She even “offered the seclusion of her chamber” for Nero and Acte to use so that their activities did not further embarrass Octavia. This shift in Agrippina’s attitude was sensible politics and good parenting, but Nero’s “most intimate friends… begged him to beware of the arts of a woman” who, they claimed, “was always daring and was now lying”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/8-gettyimages-1157131481-594x594-528e6a8-e1766491080872.jpg" width="579" height="413" alt="A painting showing a group of Roman" title="An 1881 book illustration imagines Nero participating in a bacchanal. The young emperor indulged in marathon drinking sessions, in which he told acquaintances of his desires for Acte (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Agrippina’s views softened, Nero’s sycophants became even more strident in their support of Nero’s relationship with Acte. According to the historian Suetonius, one group of senators even “perjured themselves by swearing that she [Acte] was of royal birth”, so she would quickly become a suitable imperial spouse. The senators were rewarded by Nero, even though it is not clear if anyone besides Nero expected their claim to be persuasive. Murder, intrigue and incest Not long after the predictable failure of this gambit, Nero realised that despite his love for Acte, the gulf between their social statuses was too great for them to ever wed. The affair then ended and both people moved on. Inscriptions from Italy reveal that Acte had a good, productive life, in which she used the profits from some of Nero’s gifts to become a wealthy patron of several towns. Nero’s story, of course, has a much sadder ending. As the years passed, the emperor grew ever more estranged from his mother and became enmeshed in the intrigues of sycophants like Otho, who enticed the emperor into a scandalous love affair with his wife, Poppaea. Tacitus reports that Otho embarked on the scheme “to inflame Nero's passion, in the hope of adding to his own influence by the further tie which would arise out of possession of the same woman”. The affair led Nero to divorce Octavia and force the dissolution of Otho’s marriage so that he could marry Poppaea – the wife he is later rumoured to have killed while she was pregnant with his child. This chapter in the emperor’s romantic life was, of course, much more shocking and tragic than his relationship with Acte. Meanwhile, the senator and Neronian associate Cluvius Rufus reports an even more appalling sexual incident that Nero only just escaped. He tells of how Agrippina tried seducing Nero “in her eagerness to retain her influence”. Seneca then hurried in Acte, who told Nero that the incest was “notorious” and that the soldiers would never endure the rule of an “impious sovereign”. While Rufus’s unreliability as a narrator ought to make one suspect whether Agrippina’s seduction really happened, his description of Acte as the one person who could be counted on to restrain Nero’s worst impulses rings true. She seemed capable of getting Nero to accept uncomfortable truths, because the emperor knew that she alone was genuinely concerned about his best interests. Read more | Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise Descent into madness Despite Nero’s increasingly poor decisions and unrestrained behaviour over the last decade of his life, it seems that Acte was never again summoned to the palace to check his worst impulses. She was not there when Nero arranged for Agrippina to be killed in AD 59, or when he burned Christians alive following a fire that devastated Rome in AD 64. She was not consulted before he went to Greece in AD 67 to compete in rigged Olympic competitions while popular anger boiled over at home. She seems not to have been involved as Nero bungled his response to the rebellion of the future emperor Galba, when he spent more time figuring out how to transport his water organ to the front than he did planning military strategy. Most heartbreaking of all, she was absent when Nero took his own life, virtually alone, after the senate stripped him of his imperial power in AD 68. And yet Acte clearly still loved Nero until the very end of his short life. After his death and public condemnation, Acte joined with the two nursemaids who had raised Nero as a baby to ensure that he had a proper burial. According to Suetonius, the ceremony cost “two hundred thousand sesterces”, an immense sum equal to the annual salary of more than 220 Roman soldiers. Nero was “laid out in white robes embroidered with gold” and, after his cremation, Acte and the two other women “deposited his ashes… in the family tomb of [his father’s family] the Domitii” in a “sarcophagus of porphyry, with an altar of Luna marble standing above it, and enclosed by a balustrade of Thasian stone.” We cannot know whether Acte’s affection, forthrightness and intelligence would have been enough to save Nero from infamy had the pair been permitted to marry. The emperor is fully deserving of the cruel reputation for which he is now remembered. What is certain, though, is that Nero’s descent into madness began when his relationship with Acte ended: the first woman he ever loved, and perhaps the only woman who ever loved him back. Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the book The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a day
Ever wondered what Tudor England’s most famous monarch ate for breakfast? (Or whether breakfast was even a thing?) Tracy Borman examines Henry VIII’s daily routine – and sexual proclivities – during the year that he married Anne Boleyn
The year 1533 was a big one for Henry VIII. It began with his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, followed a few months later by the annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The new queen was crowned in June, then in September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for male heir. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Reformation parliament passed radical religious legislation that would separate the country from Rome and make Henry supreme head of the new Church of England. Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it. In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock. But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/13AAW7T4-d152d6f-e1764861462989.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch of a man holding a large bow and arrow, with arrows across his body too. A man stands behind him and another kneels down on the ground next to him" title="A Victorian image depicts a youthful Henry VIII enjoying a spot of archery at the Field of the Cloth of Gold – the extravagant summit he hosted with Francis I of France in 1520. While the king no longer enjoyed a life of “continuous festival”, he was still physically active in his early forties (Image by Alamy)" /> An “improbably large codpiece” To get Henry ready for whatever the day held, his privy chamber staff had to rise even earlier than he did. Having cleaned the king’s chambers, the grooms would wake the esquires of the body, who slept in the ‘pallet chamber’ next door to the royal bedchamber. The esquires would enter their royal master’s bedchamber to “array him and dress him in his [under]clothes”, which were strewn with fresh herbs to keep them sweet-smelling. Having been “loosely dressed” by his esquires, Henry would step into the privy chamber so that his six gentlemen could complete the ceremony of robing with whichever garments he had chosen for that day. Henry loved to show off his physique – as well as his riches – in the quality and quantity of the cloth from which his garments were fashioned. His broad shoulders were emphasised by padded and embroidered sleeves, the curve of his calf muscles was shown off to best effect by white silk hose, and his improbably large codpiece symbolised his masculinity and power. Clearly, he pulled it off. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Guistinian, described Henry as “the best dressed sovereign in the world”. Hair, ear wax and urine When the king was dressed for the day, his barber would begin shaving his royal master and dressing his hair. He had to be a man of infinite trustworthiness: after all, he would be holding sharp blades to the king’s throat! During the early years of his reign, Henry was clean-shaven, as Catherine of Aragon preferred. But what she liked mattered less by 1533, when he sported a fine beard, which the barber would ensure was neatly trimmed. Read more | The swordplay’s the thing: Henry VIII's Masters of Defence and the thrilling world of 16th-century fencing Luxury pervaded the business of hairdressing and shaving, as it did every other element of Henry’s daily routine. Inventories of his possessions list silver basins for shaving and facecloths trimmed with black silk, as well as a comb of “gold garnished with… stones and pearl”, a toothpick case of gold, and an “ear pick of silver”. Among the many gifts that the king had showered Anne Boleyn with during their courtship was a gold ear wax scoop. Who says romance is dead? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2GettyImages-544278466-a6f7064-e1764861641975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing Henry VIII, bearded with a large hat on, wearing maroon robes and a large gold chain" title="A copy of Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous 1536–37 portrait of Henry VIII. The king’s neatly trimmed beard and “improbably large codpiece” are very much present in this depiction (Image by Getty Images)" /> Next up, Henry would be examined by one of his team of physicians. They came armed with bladder-shaped flasks for inspecting the king’s urine and would also examine his stools. In submitting himself to the frequent attentions of his medics, the king was following royal protocol – after all, a sovereign’s health was of the utmost importance to the state. But Henry had always been prone to hypochondria and would be thrown into a panic at any sign of illness at court. The French ambassador described him as “the most timid person in such matters you could meet”. Mrs Cornwallis’s sweet treats Having been washed, groomed, dressed and examined, the king was at last ready to go out into the court. The first meal of the day was generally served at around 10.30 or 11 o’clock, although sometimes it was as late as midday (breakfast was not a thing until the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth). This was known as ‘dinner’ and was substantial enough to maintain the king and his courtiers until late afternoon. It comprised an array of different meats, such as boar, pork, lamb and venison, as well as game birds like pheasant and rabbit, swan and more unusual fare like conger eel and porpoise. The king had a sweet tooth, too, and regularly gorged on custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and quince marmalade. His favourite confectioner was a woman named Mrs Cornwallis, whom he rewarded with a fine house close to the Tower of London. In contrast to the popular image of Henry seated at the top table of a great feast, devouring endless chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulder, he was a very fastidious eater and preferred to take his meals in private. He didn’t like to linger over his meals, either, because he was impatient to get on with his day. WATCH | Kate Williams discusses the origins of Henry VIII's vast leisure complex, Hampton Court Palace View Green Video on the source website Hunting, archery, bowling and tennis took up several hours. Sir William Kingston, who was a regular at Henry’s court (and was later Anne Boleyn’s gaoler at the Tower), observed that even after more than 20 years on the throne: “The king hawks every day with goshawks and others… both before noon and after.” Having practised these sporting pursuits from childhood, Henry was highly skilled, particularly at tennis. The Venetian ambassador enthused: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play.” “Tedious and painful” The distinction between work and play was blurred during Henry’s reign. He would discuss politics with ambassadors and ministers while enjoying a game of bowls or practising archery, and would hold more private audiences with his advisors while being dressed or undressed, taking his meals or bathing. The privy council was the beating heart of Henry’s government and would meet almost every day at around noon. By 1533, Henry was attending those meetings much more frequently than during the carefree early years of his reign. They would discuss all the most pressing matters of the day – of which there was no shortage in the year that the king rid himself of one wife, took another and separated England from Roman Catholic Europe. Thomas Cromwell was the most influential member of the privy council and worked closely with Henry, often holding private meetings with the king. Read more | The lie of succession: did James I steal Elizabeth I's crown? Supper was served between three and four o’clock each afternoon and would typically comprise soups, pottage, roasted meats, tarts, custards, fruits, nuts and cheeses. If Henry was peckish in the evening, his cooks would prepare a snack known as a ‘rear night’ or ‘all night’, which was usually served between eight and nine o’clock. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/3GettyImages-2198973715-a81c1a0-e1764861900600.jpg" width="1500" height="972" alt="A lavish display of fruit, vegetables, nuts, poultry and meat depicted by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, c1560–65. Henry would have been treated to similarly sumptuous spreads, although he preferred to eat his meals in private (Image by Getty Images)" title="A lavish display of fruit, vegetables, nuts, poultry and meat depicted by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, c1560–65. Henry would have been treated to similarly sumptuous spreads, although he preferred to eat his meals in private (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry was renowned for his piety and spent a significant part of every day in worship. One ambassador reported: “He hears three masses daily when he hunts and sometimes five on other days.” This had been encouraged by his first wife, a devout Roman Catholic. By contrast, Anne Boleyn was a reformer and introduced Henry to radical religious texts that encouraged him to break from obedience to Rome. Although he admitted to finding writing “tedious and painful”, the king was a voracious reader, and his private library was filled with classical and theological texts from across the world. Long trips to the loo Every so often, the king would take a bath in his private apartments. But the leading physicians of the age cautioned against regular bathing in hot water because it opened the pores and allowed deadly diseases such as the plague, sweating sickness and smallpox to enter the body. Instead, cold water was used for washing the king’s hands and face first thing in the morning and before and after every meal. Even if Henry’s baths were infrequent, they were predictably luxurious. At the palaces of Richmond and Whitehall, Henry had steam baths installed, fragments of which are still preserved at Hampton Court. Henry had his own private close stool (a type of portable toilet) in each palace. His ‘stool chambers’ at Greenwich and Hampton Court were kitted out with pictures and bookshelves to keep the king amused during the long hours that he spent there. His close stools were covered in embroidered velvet, stuffed with swan’s-down and studded with gilt nails. To emphasise his magnificence, Henry staged lavish evening entertainments at court. His Master of the Revels devised plays, pageants and musical interludes to be performed in front of the king and his guests. Some of the more ambitious set-pieces involved mock battles and the famous ‘Château Vert’ pageant of 1522, when a certain young lady called Anne Boleyn made her first appearance at Henry’s court. As well as being an accomplished musician, Henry loved to show off on the dance floor. He “exercised himself daily in dancing” and “does wonders and leaps like a stag”, reported an astonished onlooker. Most evenings, the king and his courtiers would indulge in gambling. Huge sums would be won and lost at cards, dice and board games. Between the years 1529 and 1532, Henry squandered a staggering £3,243 (equivalent to £2.36 million today). But there was always a jester or ‘fool’ on hand to cheer the king after his losses. Henry’s favourite fool was Will Somer, who entered his service in 1525 and kept the king entertained for the next 20 years. It was said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than was this fool”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/5GettyImages-463967531-c9338ca-e1764862158221.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A scene of revelry and merriment published in the 1902 book Henry VIII by AF Pollard. According to Tracy Borman, Henry “loved to show off” on the dance floor (Image by Getty Images)" title="A scene of revelry and merriment published in the 1902 book Henry VIII by AF Pollard. According to Tracy Borman, Henry “loved to show off” on the dance floor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry’s bedroom antics The king rarely retired before midnight, “which is our accustomed hour at court to go to bed”. An elaborate ceremony of disrobing began as soon as he stepped into the bedchamber. His gentlemen and esquires of the body would carefully untie, unbuckle and remove every item of clothing and then put on his nightgown. Another attendant would bring a basin of water and a cloth so that he could wash his face and clean his teeth. The king’s body servants would then comb his hair and cover it with a ‘night-bonnet’ of scarlet or black embroidered velvet before helping him into bed and lighting a candle next to it. Their work complete, all but one of the privy chamber attendants bowed low and backed out of the room, leaving their royal master to his rest. Every detail of this protracted routine would be observed each night without fail. It only differed when Henry chose to visit his wife. On such occasions, he would summon his grooms of the chamber, who would dress him in his nightrobe and escort him with lighted torches to the door of the queen’s bedchamber. The king would rarely spend the night there, though, and would return to his own bedchamber once his, erm, ‘business’ there had been concluded. But given that Anne Boleyn was almost certainly pregnant at the time she married Henry in January 1533, these conjugal visits would have been rare or non-existent until she gave birth in September. The wisdom of the day dictated that sex during pregnancy was harmful to the unborn child, so instead Henry found comfort with other women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/6GettyImages-533506999-960aef2-e1764862263626.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large man standing in gold regal clothing and a large cloak, being served a goblet on a tray by a man kneeling on the floor. Other people stand around and watch" title="An 1835 painting imagines Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s first meeting. Despite his early obsession with Anne, the king’s affection for his second wife waned only a few months into their marriage (Image by Getty Images)" /> This caused the first serious rift between the newlyweds in August 1533, when Anne was about to enter her ‘confinement’ – the month-long period when a royal wife would live in complete seclusion to await the birth of her child. “The king’s affection for her [Anne] is less than it was”, reported the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. “He now shows himself in love with another lady, and many nobles are assisting him in the affair.” When she heard of this, Anne was “very jealous” and confronted her royal husband. To her dismay, rather than offering placatory assurances, he spat back that she must “shut her eyes and endure” as more “worthy” persons had done. Henry’s affection for his new wife took another nose-dive when she gave birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) on 7 September, rather than the hoped-for son. Read more | Inside the six wives' bedchamber: the stories of Tudor ladies-in-waiting Adultery, treason and execution As the year 1533 drew to a close, the court moved to Greenwich for the Christmas celebrations. “The King’s Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”, one guest observed. There was a good reason for Henry to be cheerful: Anne Boleyn was pregnant once more. Her New Year gift to the king was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds and pearls. Designed by Hans Holbein, it featured three naked women standing at the foot of a fountain, water issuing forth from their nipples – a clear allusion to her impending motherhood. WATCH | HistoryExtra's Kev Lochun explores the story of the wife of Henry VIII who had a lucky escape View Green Video on the source website Sadly, the queen lost the child a few months later and miscarried twice more in the two years that followed. The king, who in the early days of their courtship had been so enraptured that he had overturned his entire kingdom in order to marry Anne, now “shrank from her”. In May 1536, Anne was condemned on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and treason and executed. Earlier that year, Henry had suffered a serious accident whilst jousting, which brought the physical activities that had filled so many of his days at court to an abrupt end. Plagued by pain and humiliated by his expanding girth, this most famous of kings became the bloated tyrant of legend.
From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or sixth century AD. 3. Goat eyelids Texts from ancient China describe penis rings made from a rather unusual material: goat eyelids, often with the eyelashes left intact. These were reportedly used between the third and fifth centuries AD to enhance sexual pleasure and performance by trapping blood within the penis. The elasticity of the goat eyelid was presumably the major selling point, but leaving the eyelashes on suggested they played a part too, potentially providing extra stimulation for both parties. By the 1600s, some Chinese men had upgraded their penis ring technology. These more modern devices were made from materials like jade and ivory, and were ornately carved, often depicting dragons. The dragons’ tongues usually extended to form a protruding nub, which could be placed against the woman’s clitoris to enhance her pleasure during intercourse – a forerunner to today’s clitoral stimulators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1052933946-4c20b47-e1764240604387.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" title="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. Apadravya (‘apparatus’) Even if you’re not remotely interested in the history of sex and sexuality, you’ll have likely heard of Vātsyāyana’s third-century AD tome, the Kama Sutra. As well as guidance about living a healthy sex life, the Sanskrit text also extols the virtues of using apadravya (‘apparatus’) to enhance one’s pleasure, describing the use of dildos, penis extenders and other sex aids made of wood, rubber, gold, silver, copper and ivory. Some of the devices are particularly unusual: one is shaped like a flower bud, while another resembles an elephant’s trunk. If that wasn’t enough, the Kama Sutra also contains instructions for creating artificial vaginas made of “hollowed-out pumpkins” and bamboo moistened with oil or ointment. Sounds a bit more effective than bread… 5. The Science Museum’s luxury ivory dildo One of the best-documented early modern sex toys is currently in the care of London’s Science Museum. Labelled “ivory dildo with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation”, the 18th-century device takes the form of an erect penis and includes a small pump and reservoir, seemingly intended to cause fluid to shoot out at an opportune moment. Curiously, the catalogue entry also states that the item was “found in the stuffed seat of a Louis XV armchair, which was in a convent on the banks of the Seine, near Paris”, but how it got there is a mystery sadly lost to the mists of time. 6. George Taylor’s steam-powered ‘Manipulator’ he ivory dildo might have been very novel in many ways, but one crucial thing that it didn’t do was vibrate. So where did the concept of the vibrator come from? The answer, it appears, lies in a steam-powered device from 1869 known as the ‘Manipulator’. Invented by American physician George Taylor, the Manipulator was not a theme park ride as its name suggests, but a large, padded table connected to vibrating ball, which would be positioned against the patient’s pelvic area as they lay on the device. The ball – which was powered by a coal-fired steam engine – provided continuous mechanical stimulation and was described as a “medical vibrating and kneading machine”. The Manipulator was an adaptation of a similar machine created by Swedish physical therapist Gustaf Zander; Taylor merely improved on Zander’s ideas by attaching his ‘Medical Rubbing Apparatus’ to what was, in effect, a stationary steam engine. However, Taylor warned physicians who bought the device that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the Manipulator should be supervised to prevent “overindulgence”. 7. ‘Rubber women’ Rubber, in its natural form, has been known and used for thousands of years, but modern rubber as we know it today was developed much later. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation, a process that made rubber strong, elastic and weather-resistant, paving the way for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications – some of which were later exploited for erotic purposes. Selected accounts suggest that, by the 1850s, manufacturers were producing rubber items that could be interpreted as early forms of sex dolls. These items have been described as ‘rubber women’ or femmes en caoutchouc in French, though they were not explicitly advertised as sex toys. The first mention of manufactured sex dolls in academic literature appears in Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), where he claims they were marketed primarily to sailors. However, modern scholarship suggests that Bloch relied heavily on fictional sources and exaggerated advertising, calling into question the book’s accuracy. Given the modern popularity of sex dolls, however, it seems plausible that variations on the theme may have existed in the early 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7.Femme-en-Caoutchouc-c16ea73-e1764241535367.png" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows a man holding a rubber woman in his arms" title="A 19th-century French song, La Femme en Caoutchouc (‘The Rubber Woman’), tells the story of a sailor’s ‘relationship’ with a sex doll. The affair does not end well, as indicated by the illustrations adorning this edition of the sheet music" /> Read more | Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans 8. Granville’s ‘Percuteur’ Large, steam-powered vibrators like George Taylor’s ‘Manipulator’ were far too bulky and costly for most physicians, so British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville decided to invent a smaller, spring-driven electromechanical vibrator known as the ‘Percuteur’. After patenting his device in the early 1880s, Granville was adamant that it should only be intended for therapeutic use on men, stating: “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion… simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked… by the vagaries of the hysterical state.” It’s not clear whether fellow doctors heeded Granville’s advice, but it’s important to note that vibrators at the time were viewed primarily as medical instruments rather than sexual devices. Indeed, Dr Carol Queen – curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco – has cautioned against calling these early vibrators ‘sex toys’, saying: “The vibrators were not marketed and sold for this purpose. They were healthcare devices that just happened to cause orgasm if you knew where to apply the vibration… there is no evidence that people who owned or used them knew this… though there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.” 9. Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators Modern butt plugs did not originate as sex toys, but as treatments for a range of ‘rectal ailments’, including constipation and ‘nervousness’. They were first patented in 1892 and marketed as ‘Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators’ from 1893 to 1940. They were sold in sets of four, in increasing sizes, and advertisements and surviving sets show that each dilator had an olive or bullet-shaped tip and a flanged base to prevent full insertion – a shape strikingly similar to today’s butt plugs. The devices were made of rubber, and the instructions suggested they be used with either Dr Young’s Piloment lubricant or Vaseline. Like early vibrators, they were marketed as ‘healthcare devices’, but back then – as now – the human anus contained a great deal of nerve endings, meaning inserting the dilators into the rectum will have caused many ‘patients’ to experience sexual pleasure. To paraphrase Dr Carol Queen, there’s no evidence to suggest that people did use these dilators during sex – but, equally, there’s nothing to say they didn’t. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Credit-CreepyCuteTreasuresEtsyDr-Youngs-Rectal-Dilators-7f08bac-e1764241593117.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" title="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" /> 10. Louis B Hawley’s Patented Penis Stiffener In 1907, US inventor Louis B Hawley sprang into action to quite literally support men with erection problems. Hawley’s patented ‘surgical appliance’ took the form of an external splint to keep the penis erect, with a covering to help hold it in place. Unfortunately, there are no first-hand accounts of how comfortable the device would have been for both parties, though given later patent writers’ critiques about its design being bulky and awkward, it’s probably fair to speculate that the answer may well have been “not very”. However, this early prototype did pave the way for more modern penis ‘stiffeners’, most notably Dr F Brantley Scott’s inflatable device, which was first sold in the 1970s and made up of two inflatable silicone cylinders with a reservoir and pump. That, in turn, led to the advent of surgically implanted and inflatable prostheses, which are still helping people enjoy robust and vigorous sex lives today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10GettyImages-837400890-547dfa0-e1764241628703.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" title="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex 11. Hand-cranked ‘massagers’ The earlier question of “but did people really use these things to masturbate?” raises its head again as we look at hand-cranked vibrators like Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator, which was sold throughout the early 1900s and could deliver 6,000 vibrations per minute. At this time, masturbation was widely viewed as shameful, and ‘obscene’ content was illegal in the US under the 1873 Comstock Act. This meant that vibrators could not be openly advertised as sexual products. However, according to sex toy historian Hallie Lieberman, “it’s impossible to deny that sexual uses for vibrators weren’t known”. The makers of the Bebout Vibrator, for example, made their target market very clear in a 1908 advert, describing their device as “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing [and] invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs”. Interestingly, many of these hand-cranked devices came with dildo-like attachments – though these were ‘officially’ intended to treat uterine complaints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11-2RX45AW-0c62c65-e1764241663308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" title="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" /> 12. The Oster Stim-U-Lax This scalp massage device, marketed to barbers, promised to deliver “several thousand rotating-patting Swedish-type massage movements per minute” via the operator’s fingers. But it wasn’t only used on scalps. A frank first-hand account by US sex educator Betty Dodgson (1929–2020) describes using an Oster Stim-U-Lax with her lover in 1966, explaining: “One day he was getting a haircut when his barber ended with a scalp massage using a vibrating machine that was strapped onto the back of his hand. Grant got the bright idea that it would be great for sex. On our next date, Grant brought out his new toy for us to try. Although I wasn't all that crazy about getting off on a mechanical device, my motto is to always try everything at least once.” It was, according to Dodgson’s account, extremely effective, and led her to become a keen advocate for vibrators from that point onwards. Dodgson is even credited with helping to bring such sex toys into the mainstream, promoting devices such as the now-ubiquitous Hitachi Magic Wand, first marketed in 1968.
Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
What did medieval physicians prescribe for stomach ache? And could weasels’ testicles really help you conceive? James Freeman delves into the sources to find eight curious cures from the Middle Ages
My urine has turned black! What does your wee say about your health? Well, plenty – but perhaps not in quite the way medieval physicians understood it. Before the in-depth study of anatomy and physiology, establishing the causes of symptoms relied on theories that today seem primitive or foolish. However, they were often based on long-established ideas about the body and its function. Medieval treatises on uroscopy – the study of urine – identified up to 20 colours, each indicating certain diseases. Many texts on this subject were accompanied by drawings of glass flasks filled with liquid coloured with an appropriate pigment. These might be arranged in a circular shape with descriptive labels, helping readers to memorise the key diagnostic details. Perhaps unsurprisingly, black was the worst possible colour, and was generally agreed to indicate imminent death. Why was urine so significant? Because of prohibitions against opening the body (which extended to postmortem dissections), medieval doctors were reliant on external indicators. This included variations in a patient’s pulse but also the colour, texture, layers, smell and even taste of their urine. The doctor’s role was to understand a patient’s nature: specifically, the four fluids or ‘humours’ inside the human body. In the treatise De Natura Hominis (‘On the Nature of Man’), by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c460–c375 BC) or his pupil Polybus, it was determined that there were four such humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Disease was caused by imbalances in these humours, or when they became ‘corrupted’ or concentrated in a part of the body. Read more | It felt like the end of the world, but this medieval ‘apocalypse’ left a legacy no one saw coming This theory was developed further by Galen of Pergamon (c129–c216), who likened digestion to the cooking process: food was converted into life-giving liquid, the humours were generated by the vital organs, and waste products – including urine – were expelled. Examining urine could therefore inform the physician about the state of a patient’s digestion and of any possible humoural imbalance and the disease that might result from it. I’ve got an excruciating pain in my bottom Medieval knights and noblemen could spend significant amounts of time on horseback. And who can blame them? This was, after all, the quickest way to get around. But it could also be extraordinarily painful. Occupy the saddle for too long and you could start to suffer from an anal fistula – a condition that causes an abscess or an abnormal opening between the anal canal and the surrounding skin. This is as unpleasant as it sounds – which is why some sufferers called on the services of a medic called John Arderne. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-587494702-CMYKWeb-Ready-a626f03.jpg" width="5178" height="3452" alt="A painting showing two men dressed in red and pink riding horses. They are following several brown dogs through the woods and on the ground, three more men walk through the grass, holding spears" title="Nobles hunt a fox in a 14th-century miniature. Spending long periods in the saddle could lead to a painful condition for which surgeon John Arderne devised a novel treatment (Image by Getty Images)" /> Arderne was one of the most famous English surgeons of the 14th century. Among the novel developments he described in his writings, he came up with a procedure for treating anal fistulas that involved a surgical dilator called a tendiculum and a kind of flattened needle called an acus rostrata. Arderne also illustrated the stages involved in the operation, and described medicines that could be injected into the rectum in a bid to promote healing. One of these – made up of rose oil and the single yolk of a raw egg – should be administered with the aid of a hollow wooden instrument called a nastare ligneum. This needed to be lubricated with rose oil and “gently inserted into the anus”. “This,” Arderne promised, “effectively mitigates and mollifies any burning, stinging, itching and pain.” His patients would, no doubt, have prayed that he was good to his word. I’m about to go into labour Childbirth was perhaps the most perilous event in any medieval woman’s life. This was a primary focus of Gynaecia, a treatise perhaps written in the fifth or sixth century and ascribed to an author known as ‘Muscio’ (who was possibly from north Africa). Gynaecia explained how normal and abnormal births should be managed, prioritised the role of midwives, and described different malpresentations of the foetus – and what should be done to ease the birth in such cases. In one manuscript from the Middle Ages, passages from the Gynaecia are accompanied by illustrations showing these various positions of foetuses in wombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-566452471-CMYKWeb-Ready-47f4bbc.jpg" width="3763" height="2509" alt="An illustration showing a woman in a long red dress sitting on a chair. Around her, there are four other women, touching various parts of her body" title="A manuscript illumination shows a woman in childbirth. The fifth or sixth-century treatise Gynaecia provided detailed advice for deliveries (Image by Getty Images)" /> Some women who “travaileth of child” might turn to magic for help. Recipe books and medical guides both contained instructions for preparing protective amulets that should be lain on a woman’s belly or thighs. Designed to be viewed, worn and read, these objects were believed to protect their wearers from harm by association with holy bodies and the pains they suffered. One typical text from the late 14th or early 15th century invokes the names of holy mothers and their children: “Saint Mary bore Christ, Saint Anna bore Mary, Saint Elizabeth bore Saint John the Baptist.” Another example contains images of the instruments of Christ’s Passion and of his wounds and blood; a measurement of the length of the Virgin Mary’s body; and prayers to early fourth-century mother-and-son martyrs Saint Julitta and Saint Quiricus. I can't stop farting What did our medieval ancestors do when they were afflicted by stomach pains? And what remedies could they deploy if, worse still, that pain was accompanied by an attack of flatulence? One option was to take an electuary, a type of orally administered remedy sweetened, usually with honey, to make it more palatable. A recipe for one such remedy contained a dizzying number of ingredients – some more familiar to the modern eye than others. These included sugar, chebulic myrobalan (fruits from an Asian tree), nuts, anise, caraway, fennel, cloves, the wood of aloes, mastic, French muscat and syrup. “You will,” so the recipe instructed, “give this in the form of a hazelnut [ie as a hazelnut-sized pill], at morning and night with warm water and wine or with wine alone.” This recipe comes from a compilation of over a thousand remedies known as the Antidotarium Magnum, which was compiled in the 11th century by a monk of north African heritage known as Constantinus Africanus, who lived at the abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy. Innovatively, the text advised how much of each ingredient was required, using a system of symbols to denote measurements such as drams, scruples, pounds, sixths and halves. The Antidotarium Magnum’s ingredients suggest that it was inspired by Islamic, Byzantine and classical sources. Yet that didn’t stop a copy reaching Durham Cathedral Priory, where – judging by the presence of a key to explain the meaning of these symbols – the monks tried to make some of the medicines that it describes. Read more | Victorian medicine: why the 19th century was a time of seismic medical change I’m feeling feverish In the modern world, fevers are understood to be symptoms of the body’s immune response to infection. In the medieval period, however, a fever was thought to be a disease in its own right – an overheating of the body caused by malfunctioning digestive processes. And, in an attempt to turn down the heat, medieval medics often went on a charm offensive. Today, science and magic tend to occupy separate spheres. In the Middle Ages, though, it was widely believed – even among learned medics – that words and rituals possessed healing potential, and many medieval manuscripts from the Middle Ages contain instructions for the recitation of magical charms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/G2NJEX-CMYKWeb-Ready-aaedadc.jpg" width="3088" height="2058" alt="Doctors treat an ailing king, as depicted in an illumination in a 14th-century French manuscript. Charms were often used to treat conditions such as fevers (Image by Alamy)" title="Doctors treat an ailing king, as depicted in an illumination in a 14th-century French manuscript. Charms were often used to treat conditions such as fevers (Image by Alamy)" /> One example instructed the reader to make three signs of the cross “on the right ear of the feverish, and with each cross, say in succession: ‘Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands.’” The reader was then advised to write a series of charms involving the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – not to mention a lamb, a sheep and a lion (all of which appear in a prophetic passage in Isaiah 11) – on the patient’s palms. But perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this charm was that its healing power was only realised when the patient drank the ink with which it was written. This may not have been particularly pleasing to the palate but the patient could at least console themselves in the promise that, “without doubt, he will be cured”. I’m suffering from menstrual cramps Not everyone could afford to pay for the services of elite medics such as John Arderne. For the vast majority of people in the Middle Ages, finding a cure for illness meant relying on healers, their family or neighbours. These do-it-yourself doctors used everyday ingredients and common wild plants, which were crushed, chopped, boiled and strained with simple equipment found in the home. And, by the 14th and 15th centuries, this local medical knowledge bank was increasingly being collated and disseminated in hundreds of simple medicinal recipes written in vernacular languages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-148796224-CMYKWeb-Ready-8093d13.jpg" width="3003" height="2002" alt="A medieval handbook shows a woman gathering medicinal plants. They were commonly used by ‘do-it-yourself doctors’ at this time (Image by Getty Images)" title="A medieval handbook shows a woman gathering medicinal plants. They were commonly used by ‘do-it-yourself doctors’ at this time (Image by Getty Images)" /> The medicines contained within these recipes were often administered in draughts – liquid concoctions for patients to drink. Or they could be applied via sticky salves applied to the skin on pieces of fabric or leather. Some cures – such as one for “grinding and aching in the womb”, found in a 15th-century English recipe – employed both. “Take five-leaf and stamp it and temper it with stale ale,” it counselled, “and giveth the sick to drink thereof, five spoonfuls at once, and seethe and bind it to her navel as hot as she may suffer.” I’ve lost my hearing If you opened a medical manuscript in the Middle Ages, then you may have been confronted by the sight of ‘Vein Man’. No, ‘Vein Man’ wasn’t a medieval superhero but a visual aid, designed to help readers locate veins in the human body. He makes for an interesting figure – chiefly for what he tells us about medieval people’s attitudes to their health. In order to cure many diseases, physicians might attempt to restore the correct humoural balance, often through purging the body of an excess or corrupted humour. A common method for this was phlebotomy, or bloodletting: the controlled release of blood from a patient’s veins. That’s where ‘Vein Man’ came into his own. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/USE-THIS-Vein-ManMS-ADD-03303-00003-000-00001Web-Ready-dc0ba1f.jpg" width="2630" height="1754" alt="An illustration of a man laying on a red surface with squares on it. Several organs in his body are labelled and there are notes all around the diagram" title="A c15th-century illustration of ‘Zodiac Man’, showing the influence of constellations on different parts of the body (Image by Cambridge University Library)" /> Accompanying labels described the ways in which bloodletting could alleviate a variety of ailments. For example: “Opening the vein next to the nostrils purges the head and aids and strengthens the hearing.” However, timing such interventions carefully was crucial. It was believed that each part of the body was governed by a sign of the Zodiac: Aries was linked to the head, whereas Pisces was connected to the feet. If the moon was in conjunction with a particular constellation, it was considered perilous to operate on the area governed by that sign of the Zodiac. This principle was summarised in a second kind of diagram, ‘Zodiac Man’. This comprised a human figure appended with the names (and sometimes miniature drawings) of the Zodiac signs. Again, accompanying labels provided advice – for example, when the moon was in Aries, you should “avoid incisions in the head or face and do not open the capital vein”. Read more | This dynasty of medieval kings had a secret weapon – and you probably have it too I can’t conceive Have you ever procured a weasel testicle from your local pharmacy? Or burned half a handful of young mouse-ear in an earthenware pot? No, thought not. But if you’d lived 800 years ago – and been struggling to conceive – the answer may have been different. Weasel testicle and mouse-ear (which, for those who don’t know, is a plant found all over Britain and Ireland) were two of the main ingredients in a medieval treatment for infertility. One remedy instructed users to grind and combine them into a “soft pill” which should be placed “so deeply in the private parts that they touch the uterus”. This was to be left for three days, during which the woman was advised to abstain entirely from sex. After this, the recipe continued, “she should have intercourse with a man and she should conceive without delay”. Medieval people believed that their world was divinely created and organised, with plants, animals and even stones placed there for the benefit of humans. It was thus logical that parts of an animal’s body, or plants shaped like vital organs, might have curative properties for corresponding parts of a human body. Treatments for infertility often employed bits of animals known to be prolific breeders. The remedy above was one of dozens compiled in the notebook of a Carmelite friar, Richard Tenet, in the early 15th century. Unlike monks, who were cloistered within their abbeys and priories, mendicant friars travelled between towns and cities; they relied on charitable alms, which they earned by preaching and hearing confessions. This brought them into contact with ordinary people, including women, from whom they appear to have learned common treatments. James Freeman is a medieval manuscripts specialist at the University of Cambridge. He is curator of Curious Cures: Medicine in the Medieval World, which is running at Cambridge University Library until 6 December This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine