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.

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.

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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?

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.

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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.

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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.

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”.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

In this video, Riddell explores decades of speculation and overlooked evidence, sharing how she went in pursuit of the truth when writing her new book Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (Ebury, 2025). The official line has long cast Brown as merely a devoted servant and friend, but new sources – including intimate letters, photographs, and a forgotten family archive – paint a far more romantic (and possibly scandalous) picture.

Even more striking are the signs of a child curiously unmentioned in the royal record but treated with unusual importance by the Queen. Was this child hers?

Riddell weighs up newly uncovered documents and historical context that offers a compelling challenge to the long-held narrative of Queen Victoria’s widowhood – and opens the door to one of the most explosive theories in royal history.

Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here

Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here

Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm

After all, King Henry VIII had six wives, instigating the Reformation in the name of love (and presumably lust, too), meanwhile Queen Elizabeth I grew a cult of personality around her virginity, developing it into a sharp instrument of power and control. Sex, or lack thereof, was clearly important to the Tudor royals.

But away from the courts of kings and queens, what role did intimate romance play in the lives of ordinary Tudors; the people who were farmers, millers, bakers and blacksmiths? What did they get up to in the bedroom, and what was the role of sex in their lives?

Good vs bad sex

“[Sex] was seriously important to people in Tudor Britain,” says Ruth Goodman, speaking in her newest HistoryExtra Academy course, Tudor Life, “it marked the moment of adulthood. A single person [as opposed to someone who was married] wasn’t considered to be fully adult”.

• Watch now | Ruth Goodman on Tudor life

As a watershed moment in a person’s life, sex was incredibly important, both practically and symbolically. However, it wasn’t necessarily straightforward – there were social norms that dictated how people should be having sex.

Sex was only considered ‘good’ if it took place within marriage and, as Goodman explains, “so long as it fulfilled one of two purposes: one was to bond a couple together, and the other was procreation”.

No matter what sort of sex it was, if it happened outside of the marital bed, it was immoral. Anything that fell outside of the “traditional marriage picture of a man and a woman creating babies” was a transgression and ‘bad’ sex.

But that didn’t mean that the Tudors discouraged pleasure.

The importance of pleasure

One of the main Tudor beliefs about sex was that a woman could only conceive if she was enjoying the act, and this would ideally include a female orgasm. “Just as a man needed to be interested in order to produce seed, a woman needed to be interested in order for that union to occur”, explains Goodman.

It may seem surprising that there was such a focus on women’s pleasure in what was a largely patriarchal society. But, while some good husbands may have used this belief to ensure their wives had a good time, there were some more sinister repercussions to this too.

“The bad side of [this belief] is that if a woman is forced [to have sex] and she conceives, then nobody in society believes she was raped; they think she must have been enjoying it,” explains Goodman.

So, while female pleasure was considered to be a crucial part of sex, and essential to procreation, it was a double-edged sword that had inadvertent negative consequences too.

Getting the position right

But pleasure wasn’t the only thing needed for procreation, according to Tudor ideas about sex. There was some biological backing to their understanding of reproduction too.

“It’s thought in the Tudor period that a woman’s reproductive organs are a mirror image of a man’s … if you want to have children, you should [be positioned in] a nice straight line to allow the seed to get where it needs to go”, says Goodman.

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This meant that the ultimate position to optimise conception was the missionary position. The idea was that the straighter the couple’s bodies were lined up, the more likely they were to conceive.  “Any [position] in which the bodies were bent, particularly a woman’s body, which might prohibit the movement of the seed [was] not so good,” notes Goodman.

It wasn’t just the position of the couple that mattered, though. The Tudors had detailed notions about how the testicles affected the success of conception and the gender of the baby.

Tudor understandings of the body proposed that the right-hand side of the heart carried fresh, more vigorous blood around the body, so the right side had more energy than the left. It followed that the more ‘powerful’ right testicle would therefore be responsible for creating male children – and the left, female.

As we know from Henry VIII’s succession crisis, having male babies was of great importance. So, what did Tudor men do if they wanted to ensure a male heir?

Well, as Goodman reveals, “if you wanted to be sure of having a boy, it was a really good idea to tie a ribbon around the left-hand testicle, just to ensure that the correct seed made the journey”.

Although we now know that this would not have had any impact on a baby’s sex, it’s intriguing to think that men in the 16^th century – including King Henry VIII himself – may have been tying ribbons around their genitals in an attempt to conceive a much-wanted boy.

What did Tudors think was sexy?

While the main reason for sex in the 16^th century was to conceive a child, that doesn’t mean people were only having sex to procreate. Many couples were simply in love and just wanted to have fun. To do that, they had to be attracted to each other.

But what was considered sexy in the Tudor period?

According to Ruth, linen was considered a very sexy material because it was the “layer that sits next to the skin, [highlighting] that intimacy between you and your clothes”.

• Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn't know about Tudor fashion

The same principle applied to a woman’s hair. As something that would usually be either covered or pinned back in polite society, a woman unveiling her hair to a man was considered a great honour and an intense act of intimacy.

“A woman’s hair is her crowning glory and her husband’s delight”, says Goodman. “It is a private sexual pleasure, not something to be shown to [just anyone]”.

For Tudor women, they might be drawn to a man’s legs. Those tight stockings that are a familiar image of the Tudor period were a way for men to show off the shape of their “nicely turned calf”.

The Tudors had rules – but they weren’t prudes

With all these rules and expectations, and the notion that hair and calves were sexy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Tudors were prudes. In reality, they were quite open about sex.

Tudor society had its deep-rooted beliefs about what sex was for, who could have it and how they should do it, but they weren’t shy about it. As Goodman explains, “The Tudor world was not particularly prissy. There was an awful lot of talk, and quite open talk, about relations between men and women, about attractiveness and sexiness”.

Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today

Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here

But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages.

Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance.

His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.”

The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious.

Ignoring infidelities

Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825.

Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.)

• Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys

Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries.

Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades.

By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted.

That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is.

Out of kilter

When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned.

Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings.

In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’.

Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him.

As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them.

Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down.

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Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer.

On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell.

On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].”

The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back.

Controlling behaviour

These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye.

Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again.

He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children.

Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669.

By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants.

One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering.

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Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.”

Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto.

Lost voices

The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details.

These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know.

It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants.

Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries.

Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth.

Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. 

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025)

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

When we’re undertaking historical research, it often becomes clear that the relationship between fact and fiction can be a murky one. There’s often a gap between what we want the truth to be and the reality of the lives that have been lived. So it was with my latest project. After four months of research, I couldn’t quite believe what I’d uncovered.

I’d been tracing the footsteps of both historians and historical people, and I was finally convinced that what I’d found came close to representing irrefutable proof of a remarkable secret – one offering an answer to a 160-year-old question. But making the breakthrough didn’t come without risk – one faced by nearly every historian who had got so far before me, and who turned back at the final hurdle, unable to bring their research to light.

WATCH | Fern Riddell on her quest to discover the secrets of Victoria's later love life

So, before I pushed ahead, I called a trusted friend and mentor to discuss what I thought I’d discovered. “I’ve found it,” I exclaimed. “I’ve found the lost archive of Queen Victoria and John Brown.”

Royal inspiration

Towards the end of 2021, my agent, Kirsty McLachlan, had set me a challenge.

“You need a new project,” she declared. “What can you say about Queen Victoria?”

“I don’t do the royals,” I retorted, instantly rejecting the suggestion. “Anyway, most royal historians face censorship the moment they find anything interesting.”

My focus has always been on the stories of ordinary people – what we call ‘history from below’. These are the lives that fascinate me, not those of the wealthy and powerful. Victoria felt like a lost cause. After all, what could be left to discover about one of history’s most famous women?

But there has always been something fascinating about Queen Victoria. She is an enigma: a woman who became the cornerstone of an empire, a queen, a wife, a mother and an icon of an entire age. Her life with her husband, Prince Albert, has been the subject of multiple dramas and documentaries, as has her grief-stricken widowhood after his death in 1861, aged only 42. But what this passionate mother of nine did for her own comfort in the lonely decades that followed has only been whispered about, until now. There have long been rumours surrounding Queen Victoria’s relationship with her Scottish Highland servant, John Brown. Were they lovers? Did they marry in secret? Did they even have a child together? However, no one had been able to establish the truth. This, I decided, was something that piqued my curiosity – a thread to pull and see where it led.

John Brown is often relegated to a footnote in Victoria’s history, glossed over as a servant, or awkwardly portrayed as ‘just a friend’. Yet for almost 20 years he stood at Victoria’s side as her “strong right arm”, her “best friend” – and, as I discovered, her “beloved John” and her “true and devoted one”. But as I carefully set out on my research, I had little comprehension of the journey I was about to take, nor the astonishing secret it would reveal.

• Read more | “There was a general perception that Queen Victoria’s mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”

Searching for sources

With the thought of perhaps writing about Victoria’s mid-life, I ordered every book ever written about John Brown. Modern historians have long believed this to be a pointless effort, knowing that most of John’s original documents – his diaries, letters and more – were destroyed by members of Victoria’s court after his death in 1883. But I felt sure that something must remain somewhere.

I started with Queen Victoria’s John Brown by EEP Tisdall, which was published in 1938. It’s gossipy and fun, but entirely devoid of references or sources – useless for my purposes, except for insights into how John was seen 50 years after his death. Next up was Tom Cullen’s The Empress Brown: The Story of a Royal Friendship, released some three decades later. This turned out to be a goldmine. In its pages are a series of letter facsimiles from Victoria, the original documents faithfully reproduced for readers.

They showcase such a tenderness between Victoria and John, as well as his family, and I felt an itch – a historian’s twitch – that there was much more to this history than I had been aware of before. While combing Cullen’s acknowledgements, I saw a reference to John’s descendants, and a brief mention that they held a family archive. This is also hinted at by Raymond Lamont-Brown, author of John Brown: Queen Victoria’s Highland Servant (2000).

That was when things started to become interesting. Although rumours of a family archive, kept safe by John’s surviving relatives, have long swirled, no one would say where it was held or if it still existed.

This felt like a mystery I wanted to solve. These letters must be real, I thought – more than one person claimed to have seen them – yet only Cullen provided evidence. No historian since had been able to bring them into the public eye. Had they been destroyed? Lost? Or were they still out there, waiting to be found?

I started by tracing John’s surviving family: the descendants of his brothers James, Donald, William, Hugh and Archie. Hugh and Hilda Lamond, grandchildren of John’s second-youngest brother Hugh, appear in historians’ acknowledgements more than once, and I became convinced that they must have been the guardians of the family archive. But their own descendants emigrated to the US in the 1970s, and I had no idea how to contact them.

I reminded myself that modern historians need to be able to utilise many different tools and skill sets for our research. One of the most powerful resources we have today is the internet, providing access to digitised records. In the space of a single afternoon, using the gigantic global databases available via Ancestry and Scotland’s People, I mapped out John Brown’s entire family – including his brothers and cousins – through births, marriages, deaths and census records. This led me to Minnesota, and a burning question: did John Brown’s great-great-great-nieces still hold on to their family’s precious collection, packed carefully in moving crates, carried down the generations and now possibly on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean?

Long shot

At that point, the pandemic continued to hold the world in its grip. How was I to get in touch with Brown’s relatives some 4,000 miles away in the US? Genealogy can get you only so far, and I had no up-to-date contact information. And yet… might they be on Facebook? It seemed like the longest of shots but, as I typed their names into the search bar, a result flashed up instantly. A connection to the descendants of Hugh Brown – the only people who might, just possibly, hold the keys to the John Brown family archive – was right in front of me. I opened up Facebook’s messenger app and began to type, unsure if I would get a response. Eventually I hit send – and sat back to wait.

Days and weeks went by, with no response from Minnesota. So I returned to the documents I could access – those letters uncovered by Cullen more than 50 years ago – for hints that some of John Brown’s papers must have survived somewhere. On a whim, I typed lines from the letters into Google – and, to my shock, a link to an archive in Aberdeen appeared. Suddenly, there it was in high definition, staring back at me: an original letter, kept safe by Aberdeen City Archives.

As I gazed at the screen, the realisation slowly dawned on me that I could confirm for the first time the existence of part of the John Brown family archive. Surely it couldn’t be simply sitting there, waiting to be discovered? But I learned a long time ago that, with a history and a nation as diverse as ours, and with correspondingly bulging archives, answers are often to be found sitting in plain sight.

• Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain

Within an hour I found two more letters in the archives, digitised and perfunctorily labelled. There was nothing to give away their significance, no indication of their importance. But if I could confirm that at least some of the archive had survived, then might that prove there was more out there to find? And why, after John Brown’s family had kept this secret for so long, was some of it now available in a public archive with little information and no fanfare?

I booked a research trip to Aberdeen. Meanwhile, I began the forensic work of raking through the city’s entire online library, collections and archives. I realised that references to John Brown, both artefacts and letters, are scattered across Aberdeen’s new Treasure Hub, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Town House archive. On my first research trip to the city, I held the original letters in my hands, reading in Victoria’s own handwriting her memories of John: “So often I told him no one loved him more than I did… and he answered, ‘nor you than me, no-one loves you more’.” I was awestruck by this powerful declaration between Victoria and John.

In Town House, the team allowed me to rifle through the collection of the writer, artist and historian Fenton Wyness. I’d found a passing reference that this included some material on Brown, but what I found there astonished me. At some point in the 1950s or 1960s, Wyness – a local Aberdeenshire historian – decided to write about John Brown. Like Tom Cullen, he was given access to the John Brown family archive, which he then proceeded to photograph in its entirety. Now, in the archive in Aberdeen, I realised that a record of the letters, documents, cards and gifts from Victoria to John and his family was sitting in boxes all around me. It’s an incredible resource to study – a reference collection that is utterly unmatched.

Pieces of the puzzle

Over the three years that followed, as I travelled to Aberdeen and to other archives and private collections across the country, Victoria and John’s life together began to unfold. And the story is vastly different to the one we have been told before – as I reveal in my new book, Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen. The documents I unearthed and studied provide undeniable proof of an intense love affair and, I believe, evidence that John Brown and Victoria did indeed marry – as well as of a determined and ongoing campaign to eradicate him from her history after their deaths.

The language Victoria used in her letters to describe her relationship with John deepened as the years went by. She called him her “darling one”, “faithful and devoted”, while describing herself as his “true and devoted one”. Cards she sent him, recorded in the John Brown family archive, are printed with the words “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” and poems such as “I send my sewing maiden / with new year’s letter laden, / its words will prove / my faith and love, / to you my heart’s best treasure, / then smile on her and smile on me, / and let your answer loving be / and give me pleasure.”

Also revealed in Victoria’s Secret is the possibility that Victoria and John had an ‘irregular marriage’, a legal marriage under Scottish law that involved an exchange of vows and potentially rings, the evidence of which sits in portraits and photographs of John from 1873 onwards.

Add to this the fact that Victoria’s Scottish chaplain, Norman Macleod, confessed on his deathbed to marrying them, and that Victoria went to her grave wearing John’s mother’s wedding ring – a point that was hidden from her children at the time – and it feels to me like solid, irrefutable evidence of their relationship.

Floored by photos

Although I tried to remain clinical and dispassionate as I weighed the material that I was collecting, a couple of objects floored me. In Treasure Hub sits a photographic album Victoria dedicated and gifted to John’s mother, Margaret Leys. It is bursting with pictures of both Brown’s family and her own, side by side – a record of all of the people who mattered to them.

But nothing prepared me for the revelation that, in the week after John’s death, Victoria had his hand cast and then carved in stone. The photograph of this object in Fenton Wyness’s collection – the tender placement of John’s hand on a pillow, the importance given to a signet ring that he wore every day from 1873 onwards – felt like a gut punch. Finally, there is a pair of four-leafed clovers that Victoria and John collected, and which he dried and taped into a scrapbook, their stems crossed over one another for eternity. In the Victorian language of flowers, this has a singular meaning: Be Mine.

I still had unanswered questions, though – and the only people who might have been able to help answer them were thousands of miles away in America. Fortunately, at that stage Angela, one of Hugh Brown’s descendants whom I’d attempted to contact via Facebook, got in touch. She is bubbly and forthright – and, with the agreement of her family, was happy to discuss their history and the stories she had heard while growing up.

• Read more | Queen of spies? Inside Queen Victoria’s secret intelligence network

Over a series of calls, emails and texts, she slowly began to trust me with a secret her family had kept for a very long time. Not only do they have the final remnants of the John Brown family archive, including original documents, such as Victoria’s own investigation into John’s family history, but they also guard a story that is fantastical and amazing. Angela was sanguine, telling me that “it’s just what I’ve always been told – I don’t know if it’s true”. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: could this be the final missing piece of the puzzle for which I’d been searching so long?

Throughout my research, and across John’s life, one of his siblings featured more prominently than all of the others: Hugh, whose family became the guardians of John and Victoria’s legacy. As I was writing and researching, it became increasingly clear that, though all of John’s brothers and their families mattered to Victoria, Hugh and his wife, Jessie, were most dear to the queen. Unusually among John’s extensive clan, they had only one child – a daughter, Mary Ann, Angela’s great-grandmother. According to Angela, Mary Ann was the secret child of John Brown and Queen Victoria.

Whispers of a love child have swirled since the 1860s, but historians have always been quick to dismiss such rumours. They claim that Victoria was unable to have more children after the birth of her last acknowledged daughter, Princess Beatrice, in 1857, as she suffered from a prolapsed uterus. However, this condition was only discovered after the queen’s death in 1901. None of Victoria’s doctors reported any evidence that she suffered it in the aftermath of Beatrice’s birth. As a prolapsed uterus is common – nearly half of women over 50 will experience some form of pelvic organ prolapse during their lifetime – I believe this ‘fact’ has become historical misinformation, used to discredit any chance of a child between Victoria and John.

Moreover, as I discovered during my research, although Victoria was advised not to have more children after Beatrice, it had no connection to her physical health. After her repeated battles with severe post-partum depression, including hallucinations and possibly even psychosis, Victoria’s doctors were terrified that another pregnancy would send her mad. This was the reason why she was advised against having any further children. But there is even evidence to suggest that she was planning to have another baby before Prince Albert died in 1861.

“Mama so longed for another child,” her eldest daughter, ‘Vicky’ (Victoria), wrote after Albert’s death. So it is perfectly possible that Victoria could have had a child with John in 1865, the year of Mary Ann’s birth. The queen was healthy, fertile and only 45. Many of John’s female relatives – indeed, Victorian women more generally – had children into their mid- to late forties.

Journey of discovery

It was not the end of the story, of course. But that discovery set me on a long journey to try to separate family memory from historical fact. My research took me from the glorious glens of the Scottish Highlands to the wildness of 1860s Otago in New Zealand’s South Island, and back again. The reality of Victoria’s secret was long buried by panicking politicians, government campaigns, cowardly courtiers and family rebellion. Without DNA evidence, we may never know the truth – but, every time I speak to Angela, I find myself surreptitiously looking for any resemblance to Victoria in her face.

The revelation that the queen chose the son of a Scottish crofter as her second husband, and potentially had a child with him, would have rocked Victorian society like a nuclear explosion. Her world did not believe that a common man could look at a king as an equal, let alone marry a queen. Yet, based on the evidence I’ve found, I believe that this is exactly what Victoria did. Far from remaining the grieving widow for the rest of her days, she spent her passionate mid-life privately joined to a man who saw her as “his only object in life”. Now it is time for John and his family to take their rightful place in history once again.

Dr Fern Riddell’s new book, Victoria’s Secret (Ebury Press), is out now in hardback. The book has inspired a Channel 4 documentary, Queen Victoria: Secret Marriage, Secret Child?, which is available to stream now

This article is in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

I’m no artist, so my pot designs were always distinctly average. But I enjoyed it, and so did my kids, and in that, we were unwittingly drawing on the mindset of the ancient Etruscans. Dr Lucy Shipley is an expert on this overlooked people, and her life lesson that we should draw from them is simple: paint your own pot.

The overlooked Etruscans

Before we go into that, let’s have a quick recap of who the Etruscans were. They are the people who lived in parts of what is now Italy, particularly in Tuscany and Umbria, in the period before the rise of ancient Rome, in the first millennium BC. They were neighbours and rivals of the Romans and the Greeks. They lived in cities spread across the region, and from their ports they traded widely across the Mediterranean.

The Etruscans pop up in ancient sources quite often, but we only ever have accounts of them from an outside perspective, because their own texts do not survive beyond short inscriptions and one religious text. We have to rely on those accounts, along with archaeology, to get to grips with who they were and how they lived. Most of their cities are hard to excavate as they sit under modern settlements, but new excavations are revealing more of their world.

• Read more | The history of Florence: Italy's Renaissance powerhouse

Etruscan tombs also provide a fascinating insight into Etruscan culture, and some feature remarkable wall paintings. These paintings show scenes from everyday life, religion and myth, but also some graphic sexual acts, which has surprised modern eyes (I’ll come back to that). Though Etruria was eventually subsumed into the Roman empire in the fourth and third centuries BC, echoes of their culture persisted.

According to Shipley, there is something about the ancient Etruscans that speaks of a people who weren’t afraid to make mistakes, nor who were intimidated by the people around them. They painted their own pots in an inimitable style, and that is something we can draw on today.

Painters, potters and perfectionism

Aside from the wall paintings, in Etruscan tombs archaeologists have found great quantities of red- and black-figure pottery (when the background is black and the details are left in the colour of the clay). This is the sort of material you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever looked at ancient Greek vases in a museum. It was originally made in Greece, but inspired Etruscan potters to make their own versions.

Some of it was good, but some of it was, well, I’ll leave it to Shipley’s assessment: “They are churning these things out. There is a market for these things, but some of them are terrible. I try not to have value judgments about artefacts, but some of this material looks like somebody has made it with an atrocious red-wine hangover.”

There is one particular example that Shipley highlights, of a red-figure vase with a depiction of a hippocamp, or sea beast, which you would have to be very generous to describe as well-executed.

“I love Etruscan archaeology. I’m really passionate about it, but even I am almost laughing at some of this Etruscan red-figure material. Yet it seems they were perfectly happy with it. It’s just that way of being able to express yourself. Do what you’re going to do – you paint that bad dragon.

“Sometimes the human forms are a bit blobby. They’re not as neat and precise as the ones that you see imported from Greece, but that’s okay. Someone was very happy with that, and I think that’s a really important lesson. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. But sometimes it’s time to tell your internal critic to shut up and accept that actually what you’ve done is totally fine.”

WATCH | Dr Lucy Shipley on letting go of perfectionism

Everyone’s an artist

That’s a good sentiment, but can we really read that broader sense of a cultural carefree spirit among the Etruscans from some sub-par pottery? According to Shipley, there’s ample evidence of this mindset when you look for it. She recalls an archaeological site that she worked at just outside Siena. “Back when Poggio Civitate was a flourishing Etruscan site, this was home to one of the largest buildings of the ancient world, and it was a craft centre. It burnt down in an accidental fire. You can see that people just literally dropped what they were working on and got out before the flames came.

“The result is that you have incredible preservation of the material they were working on. Some of it’s really beautiful, high-quality carving, and terracotta tiles and all sorts of other things. And some of it is really not so much. There’s a whole spectrum of what people were working on, all these different individuals working together in this place.

“Everybody’s doing their best and that’s enough. After that fire, they rebuild in an adjacent area. They build this incredible complex, which has terracotta statues on the roof. If you are looking at, say, the Parthenon marbles, you are going to think that these architectural terracottas are a little bit rustic. They’re quite big and chunky and they don’t have that ‘classical refinement’. But they’re so alive and they’re really enchanting – the famous one is a cowboy figure with a huge hat, and he’s seated on a throne on the roof.”

Standing out from the crowd

Shipley sees similar confidence in Etruscan tomb painting, which some early art historians have described as quite coarse, but which she sees as being alive and full of natural detail. From all this, we can perhaps take the ‘paint your pot’ idea a little further and infer that these people in ancient Etruria were not only content to produce work on their own terms and to their own standards, but also happy to stand out from the crowd, be a little different, and not be worried about unfavourable comparisons with other people, or indeed other cultures. Shipley adds that while Etruscan depictions of Greek myths are often described as being wrong, they’re not – they’re just an Etruscan version and absolutely right to the person telling that story.

• Read more | Meet the people the ancient Romans and Greeks desperately tried to hide

“I'm going to stick my neck out here,” says Shipley, “and this could be my bias because I’m enchanted by the Etruscans, but I think if we look at their actions, we can see that these are confident, capable people who are absolutely viewing themselves as equal with the Greek people that they’re trading with and other trading partners.”

So, in Shipley’s assessment, the Etruscans were a people comfortable in their own skins, not overawed by others, and content with creating the things they wanted to create. That sounds like a good place to be – you might express those sorts of characteristics if you were trying to describe a positive, resilient outlook today.

There’s one more example that typifies this sentiment. It’s a funeral urn from Chiusi, which you can see in the British Museum today, and it shows the woman whose skeleton is buried in the tomb beneath.

“She is represented in a very realistic way. Her face is quite youthful, and they’ve done analysis on her skeleton, so we know she died in her early fifties, but she’s not an idealised form. They’ve done facial reconstruction of her, and it’s recognisably her,” says Shipley. “She’s happy to be depicted in the afterlife as yes, her best self, but as herself. So there’s that idea of being yourself – and unashamedly yourself. And also of not being intimidated by what other people are doing elsewhere and continuing to do the things that have been valuable to your community for a really long time. It’s all wrapped up in that one artefact.”

We shouldn’t be rose-tinted about Etruscan society. It wasn’t some utopian land of creative free choice for all its people. As Shipley admits, not everyone would have been able to model this sort of confident, empowered life.

“Etruscan society seems to be highly stratified, with people very much divided by access to wealth and luxury goods. While women seem to have had more independence and recognition than in Greece or Rome, this is a long way from being an egalitarian society, and we can’t assume everyone had equality of opportunity or the chance to make their own choices.”

But from those who held agency, we can take some life lessons today: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Enjoy being yourself, painting your own pot in whatever milieu you are doing it and just own it. Be proud of what you can do rather than constantly comparing yourself to somebody else.”

Sex, death and the meaning of life

I love the fact that Shipley’s interpretation casts us back into the minds of these people so vividly, and I definitely subscribe to the pragmatism over perfectionism approach to life. But what about sex? We can’t leave the Etruscans without seeing if they can help us with our sex lives.

Let’s go back to those sexy tomb paintings that I mentioned at the start of this essay, which to modern viewers, can be disarming: “It’s quite shocking to walk into a tomb and see an image of a threesome on the wall. You’re not necessarily expecting that”.

What’s going on here? Why were graphic sexual scenes painted on the walls of tombs? It’s been much discussed, but Shipley’s view is that it could be reflecting the generational long-view of the rich and important families that were entombed. Sex leads to children, and thus the continuance of the family line, and the passing down of power and wealth. On that basis, why wouldn’t you want to show your legacy literally being ensured through sexual acts in your place of eternal rest?

• Read more | Are you healthier than a Roman? These ancient secrets for longevity are still shockingly relevant

They’ve been interpreted as great sexual libertines because of these graphic paintings on their tombs and their vases, but that’s not necessarily the case if you follow Shipley’s argument. I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone to start adding pornography to their gravestones now, but I think we can assume that the Etruscans were comfortable with sex and sexuality, and also placed great value on it. We tend to be pretty buttoned-up about talking about sex, and about death, in western culture today, so maybe there’s something else we can draw from them too.

To conclude, let’s step back from sex and death, and review Dr Shipley’s wider lessons from the ancient Etruscans: be your authentic self, take risks, don’t be afraid of making mistakes, and don’t let perfectionism stop you from getting things done. As I read them back, I could be chanting the mantra of a modern business, facing up to the hurtling head-rush of the 21st century. Those are the same sentiments that we need today to cope with a world that’s changing before our very eyes. Maybe the people of the Italian peninsula in the first millennium BC felt the same sort of pressures, and maybe we can take a bit of solace and guidance from that.

Paint your own pots, people, paint your own pots.

This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

The prince’s nationality might have provoked the suspicion – if not the outright hostility – of many residents of Tudor London. Yet this Frenchman was about to be welcomed into the heart of Richmond Palace. There he would be entertained lavishly, wined and dined at parties and balls. And all with good reason. For this Frenchman was being lined up to marry Queen Elizabeth I.

Over the centuries, Elizabeth’s romantic travails have become one of the great soap operas of English history. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558 as a 25-year-old, it was widely expected that she would find herself a husband and produce an heir to carry on the Tudor dynasty for another generation. However, while the queen had several suitors over the years, each proposed match hit the rocks before she could be tempted to offer her hand in marriage. From English earls to Scandinavian kings, none quite fitted the bill.

And so, by the time the party of Frenchmen disembarked in Greenwich in the summer of 1579, Elizabeth was well on her way to securing her place in the history books as the ‘Virgin Queen’: the woman who would, so we’re told, sacrifice her heart for the good of the nation. Yet she wasn’t done with trying just yet. As her 46th birthday closed in, Elizabeth would embark on one final bid to find a husband. And this one would take her closer to marriage than perhaps any courtship yet.

So who was the Frenchman who almost changed the course of English history? And why – as she entered the embrace of middle age – was the queen considering marrying him now?

The suitor’s name was François de Valois, Duke of Anjou, fourth son of King Henri II of France and Catherine de’ Medici. Anjou had begun life as a royal also-ran, with little prospect of ascending the French throne. Yet, by the early 1570s, he found himself heir to his childless brother, Henri III. The duke was now odds-on to succeed his sibling as King of France. That made him a figure of immense importance.

• Read more | Elizabeth I's accession day celebrations

Anjou was also eager to make his mark on Europe by campaigning against Spanish forces in the Netherlands. And it’s this last fact that brought him into Elizabeth’s orbit in the late 1570s. With England becoming increasingly isolated from Europe – and relations with Spain deteriorating fast – Elizabeth’s advisors were desperate to forge enduring ties with allies across the channel. What better way to achieve exactly that than by suggesting a match between Elizabeth and the French duke?

The union had been proposed as early as 1572, but it wasn’t until 1579 that Elizabeth herself fully committed to the courtship. At the outset, the queen’s interest in Anjou was purely the product of political necessity, for a marriage alliance with France would help stave off the growing military threat presented by Spain. But, as the two got to know one another in August 1579, the relationship became personal, the first courtship to do so since the queen’s flirtation with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester two decades earlier.

French connections

While Anjou was not a physically impressive figure – possessing bandy legs and a scarred face from a bout of smallpox – Elizabeth undoubtedly grew fond of him, calling him her “frog” on account of his appearance and his gravelly voice. He was highly attentive, which she very much enjoyed. The two conversed in French, as it was the only language they shared. And, despite the fact that Anjou was 21 years younger than the queen, they found plenty to talk about.

Also playing to the duke’s advantage was the fact that he had made the journey to England at all. Throughout her many courtships, Elizabeth had stuck to the firm position that she “would never marry with any person whom she should not first herself see”. Her demand to meet a potential husband before committing herself to marriage was viewed at the time with astonishment. Royal courtships were long-distance affairs in the 16th century – to such an extent that even the marriage itself could be carried out with ambassadors standing in as proxies for the bride. Through each courtship Elizabeth had held her ground, yet no suitor had chosen to make the journey to her court. All that changed with Anjou.

• Read more | Anne Boleyn's youth: how her years on the continent made her a match for Henry VIII

Violent opposition

The duke could not stay in England for long and, on 29 August, sailed back to France. His visit had, to all intents and purposes, been a diplomatic and personal success. Yet there was a catch. And it was a major one. This had been a trip that the English government had attempted to keep secret. Anjou had travelled to London under a pseudonym: Seigneur du Pont de Sé. However, it didn’t take long for the true identity of the queen’s guest to seep beyond the confines of the court – and, once it did, it triggered a firestorm of opposition.

But why? In short, Elizabeth was a Protestant; Anjou was a Catholic. And in a Europe riven by the Reformation and religious war, marriage between two people of differing beliefs was, to most, simply unthinkable.

Within one week of Anjou’s visit, England was awash with a public outcry against the match. London preachers decried the marriage from their pulpits. Popular ballads made their rounds. Anonymous verses and pamphlets lampooned the match. Threats to meet French attention with violence began to appear in public spaces.

It was into this tumult that John Stubbs, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, published a pamphlet with the catchy title ‘The discovery of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof’. Stubbs’ work argued that the clandestine nature of Anjou’s visit demonstrated a “very strange this unmanlike, unprincelike, secret, fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy French kind of wooing in monsieur”.

It wasn’t only the French duke who Stubbs pursued in his work. He also questioned why Elizabeth would consent to marry “an imp of the crown of France”. In his view, and many others, at Elizabeth’s age any pregnancy would likely result in her death. If a child was born it was feared that it would result in England becoming a vassal state to France rather than securing an independent future for the Protestant realm.

Upon learning of Stubbs’ pamphlet, Elizabeth was furious. For her, the matter of her marriage was deeply personal and a matter of royal prerogative. And it didn’t escape her notice that Stubbs’ arguments mirrored those that had also been raised against the Anjou match within her Privy Council. Could her own councillors have leaked information to the wayward lawyer?

It wasn’t long before the authorities attempted to suppress public opposition to the match. Stubbs was tried for seditious writing and taken to the public scaffold in the marketplace of Westminster on 3 November. There his right hand was removed with a cleaver before an unusually silent crowd.

It was not only the wider public that challenged Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Anjou. Sir Philip Sydney, the courtier and poet, wrote a letter to his queen that circulated in the court, and though he did not face the same punishment as Stubbs, he shared much of the same fears over the match. He argued that, should Elizabeth marry Anjou, her people’s “hearts will be galled, if not alienated, when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman, a papist, in whom, howsoever fine wits may find further dangers or painted excuses, the very common people well know this: that he is the son of the Jezebel of our age”. To Sydney, Anjou represented the worst possible suitor, a Catholic Frenchman who would only lead Protestant England to ruin.

A name but no power

Despite the ferocity of these objections, the marriage negotiations continued. In late November, a delegation of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, led by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, worked with Anjou’s representative, Jean de Simier, to create a draft marriage contract. This document was based on the union of Elizabeth’s sister, Mary I, with Philip II of Spain, and would see Anjou granted the title of king but little real power in England. But it did have one new clause: it gave Elizabeth the right to withdraw within two months of signing the contract.

And sign the contract is exactly what Elizabeth did. Now, with 1579 drawing to a close, the queen was further along the road to marriage than she would be at any point in her reign. Yet she wasn’t married yet. And such was the continuing strength of the hostility towards the match that within a few short weeks she felt she had no choice but to turn back. She wrote to Anjou that “I do not want this negotiation to trouble you thus any more”, but still hoped “that we may remain faithful friends and assured in all out actions”. Her contractual get-out clause was duly activated.

Elizabeth’s change of heart would, you might think, signal the end of her courtship with Anjou. But it was revived on one more occasion. In April 1581 a French delegation arrived in England to discuss once more the prospects of a marriage alliance between the two kingdoms. Elizabeth herself had turned away from the courtship, but – with Spain still threatening English security – she allowed the negotiations to recommence. Those negotiations reached an impasse and would have faded away – but for the return of Anjou to England.

• Read more | “Elizabeth I was in charge of her fate. Perhaps that’s why Catherine de Medici despised her”

On 31 October 1581, the duke arrived at Rye and then travelled onwards to Richmond Palace. In contrast with his first visit, he moved openly and spoke more of alliance than marriage. Both the duke and queen were fully preoccupied by the issues of their nations’ finances and conflict with Spain, but the question of marriage had not disappeared entirely.

Three weeks after his arrival, as Elizabeth and Anjou walked along a gallery, they were approached by the French ambassador. The ambassador asked the queen what he could tell his king about the chances of her marrying. In response Elizabeth smiled and replied: “You may write this to the king: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband.” She then proceeded to give Anjou a ring from her finger, accompanied by a kiss.

Elizabeth’s response to the ambassador sent her court into uproar. That night her ladies expressed their shock. The next morning saw members of her council advising strongly against the match, as it would undermine her relationship with her people. With doubts playing on her mind in the cold light of day, Elizabeth performed yet another volte face, withdrawing her offer to Anjou and telling him that she would be a better friend than a wife.

Anjou left London for the Netherlands on 1 February 1582. However, he did not travel the whole way alone. Elizabeth accompanied him as far as Canterbury where she said her farewell to her final suitor. As the duke sailed away from England, he took with him the queen’s last chance at marriage. Anjou’s departure also closed the door on the queen’s youth: at 48-years-old, the games of courtship were no longer hers, and her unmarried state would now define her reign.

Today, more than 400 years after these events, it’s tempting to assume that Elizabeth was always destined to be the Virgin Queen – and it was a role in which she revelled. But in the first half of her reign, she engaged in numerous courtships and came close to marrying twice. These two men – the Earl of Leicester and Duke of Anjou – found a special place in the queen’s heart, even when it was unwise for her to allow them that space.

On each occasion it was the resistance of her people that prevented her from taking that final step towards matrimony. Elizabeth understood that without the support of her subjects, she risked deposition and civil war. It was this cold, hard reality that prevented her from taking a husband.

So maybe it’s time to look upon the Virgin Queen in a new light: as the creation of the people rather than the queen herself. The image of an untouchable woman who preserved the state through her own person was crafted, it seems, not by an individual but a nation. It was a role Elizabeth committed to as she bid Anjou farewell. And it was one that she would play until her final days.

Elizabeth Tunstall is a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide

This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine