Whether it’s the debauchery of ancient Roman emperors, the Tudor crime family, the shenanigans behind the Chair of St. Peter, or the Austrian elites’ attempts to save themselves by trading their daughters to other royal houses, it turns out that our betters have always been among our worst. Join Alicia and Stacie from Trashy Divorces as we turn our jaded eyes to a different kind of moral garbage fire: Trashy Royals! Thursdays. Brought to you by Hemlock Creatives.
Avsnitt
124. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor | Baby Bessie and Breaking Baltimore
Welcome to a whole spider of a series - Wallis, Duchess of Windsor!
We know her story, or we think we do. In this first episode, we meet Bessie Wallis Warfield, just a tiny girl making her way in the world surrounded by a whole lot of family drama, on both sides. Between her mother Alice and her uncle Sol, it is no wonder Wallis wants to break free to see a different world than the one she knows.
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123. Hera and Zeus with Alicia King Anderson, Ph.D.
Alicia is joined by a very special guest this week Alicia King Anderson to break down the story of the original trashy royal couple from mythology, Hera and Zeus. Their story is loaded with tricks, subterfuge and a little revenge too. They take the cake as the trashy couple in mythology, no doubt.
Find more of Alicia K. Anderson, Ph.D. in these links:
Her upcoming class on "The Dark Feminine for Dark Times"
Fairy Tale Retellings now available for pre-order!
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122. Catherine Parr | The Queen Who Survived (Part Four)
Free from Henry at long last, and with Thomas Seymour home from his European duties, Catherine quickly, but discretely, found her way back to her old flame. They married in secret, which displeased both the new king, Edward VI, and Princess Mary, Catherine's good friend. Thomas's brother Edward - by then the 1st Duke of Somerset - was more or less running the country for his nephew, then nine or ten years old, and presented a foil to Thomas, and ultimately led to his downfall.
This was a dicey period for Thomas Seymour, because upon his return to England, he fired off a letter to 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth proposing marriage. Catherine must not have known this when, once their marriage was public, she invited both Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey to live in their household, and it is here where Thomas's personality and proclivities take a dark turn. A member of their household would later testify about inappropriate visits he would make to Elizabeth's bed chamber, inappropriate touching, and, as a last straw, a time when Catherine discovered the pair in an embrace. Elizabeth was sent to live in another noble home in May 1548 - which was the last time she would ever see her much beloved stepmother.
Catherine Parr gave birth to a daughter on the 30th of August, 1548, and died on September 5, 1548, of "childbed fever" - a catchall term for any of a number of post-partum infections that were common in the era. Her beloved, but betraying, husband only lived a few months longer. Thomas Seymour was arrested and charged with treason in February 1549, and executed on March 20 of that year.
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121. Catherine Parr | The Queen Who Survived (Part Three)
Though the twice-widowed Catherine's heart was definitely with Thomas Seymour, Henry VIII had other plans for his future and final wife. He took to spending time at his daughter Princess Mary's court, where Catherine was part of the household, and eventually dispatched Seymour on an important - and open duration - diplomatic mission on the Continent.
It took some wooing, but Catherine finally accepted the King's marriage proposal, and the couple were wed in July 1543 at Hampton Court Palace. Catherine was an exceptional Queen for him. She was deeply engaged in loving relationships with Henry's children, and her influence went a long way to stitching together some sort of family dynamic after the traumas of his exile of Mary's mother and his murder of Elizabeth's.
And she thrived in the role. Catherine is the first woman in England to publish a book in her own name, and stood for the first full-length portrait of an English queen, with a rare and fabulously expensive Turkish rug under her feet, as a king would be presented. She was a reformer at heart who only landed seriously on Henry's bad side once, it seems, but was also enough of a diplomat to smooth things over and, let's be honest, possibly save herself from a bad morning on the Tower Green.
We leave this episode with Henry's death, but that's not the end of Catherine Parr's story.
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120. Catherine Parr | The Queen Who Survived (Part Two)
As Lady Latimer after her second wedding in 1534, Catherine, her husband, and her step-children found themselves enmeshed in the growing public anger at Henry's moves to impose his new religion, as well as various other political gripes. In 1536 and 1537, a genuine uprising occurred, with Catholic rebels dragging Lord Latimer - a fellow Catholic - from their home to be pressed into service against the King.
Catherine and her step-children were held hostage for months, and Lord Latimer found himself slung up in the Tower of London for some time on suspicion of conspiring with the rebels. The whole episode was enough to leave the family wary of their digs in North Yorkshire and set their sights on olde London town. Finally, Catherine was back in civilization - and at court - and though her much older husband would succumb to ill health in 1543, her adventures in the capitol city were only just beginning.
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119. Catherine Parr | The Queen Who Survived (Part One)
The last of Henry VIII's wives, Catherine Parr's story is absolutely fascinating. A daughter of a noble family from the north of England, Catherine was raised by a doting, independent mother who urged her daughters to take a similar approach. Maud Green Parr, Catherine's mother, was a confidant of Queen Catherine of Aragon, and Catherine's younger sister Anne would go on to be a lady in waiting to all six of Henry's wives - including her sister. Catherine was, by all accounts, extremely bright and deeply invested in education, especially languages.
Unlike most of his brides, Catherine Parr had been married prior to their relationship. Twice, in fact, and in each case, the marriages presented Catherine with circumstances that shaped her; into a fully fledged Protestant in the first case, and into a devoted step-mother in the second - a circumstance that would be sorely tested by the religious rivalries shaking Henry's England in the aftermath of his break with Rome. But that's a story for the next episode.
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118. Katherine Howard | The Doomed Queen of Henry VIII
Even before Henry VIII succumbed to pressure and wedded Anne of Cleves, his attentions had turned to another lady at his court, Katherine Howard. The romance was supported by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who had been trying to win back Henry's good graces ever since another one of his nieces, Anne Boleyn, had been dispatched in a Cromwellian conspiracy a few years earlier.
Norfolk was clearly having a run of bad luck though, because it turns out that the teenaged Katherine - Henry was pushing 50 when all this got started - had been poorly used by a music teacher at the boarding home where she had been sent because of her family's deep poverty, and had been intimate with an age-appropriate boyfriend before being sent to Henry's court to serve as a lady-in-waiting.
None of which was known to Henry when he finally wed her on July 28, 1540, the same day that he had Thomas Cromwell executed. The honeymoon was not to last, however, as by the following spring, Katherine was sharing the affections of royal counselor Thomas Culpeper, whose secret assignations with the queen were being facilitated by Jane Boleyn, Katherine's lady-in-waiting and the widow of George Boleyn, who had been executed with Anne.
Everything went disastrously, of course, and Katherine Howard and Jane Boleyn were executed on the Tower Green on February 13, 1542, a few months after Culpeper and her boarding house boyfriend had experienced the same fate at the Guildhall.
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Sources
Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford, by Julia Fox (amazon.com)
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117. Anne of Cleves | The Woman Who Lived
After the death of Jane Seymour in 1537, Henry VIII was once again single and looking to mingle. But he was a man with a bit of reputation by then, and perhaps the daughters of England weren't in a hurry to roll those particular dice. Artist Hans Holbein was dispatched to Europe to paint the portraits of eligible royals and nobles for Henry's consideration. In the Duchy of Cleves (part of modern Germany), Henry found both his next bride and a Protestant ally against increasing pressure from a French-Spanish Catholic alliance.
But it's Henry VIII, so you know the relationship didn't go as was expected. Though Anne of Cleves came to England and was wed to the king, she committed a faux pas in their first bizarre meeting, which hurt Henry's feelings. Henry never recovered, the marriage was annulled after six months, but for whatever reason, the famously vengeful king gave his would-be wife an extremely generous settlement. Anne of Cleves, notably among Henry's wives, was able to live her best single life well into the reign of Queen Mary I.
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116. The Murder of Anne Boleyn
On May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on the Tower Green at the Tower of London, following months of scheming by Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Alicia follows the final, pivotal months of the one-time Queen consort of England, the woman Henry had broken with the Catholic Church to wed, and the mother of the future Elizabeth I, from celebrations of the death of Catherine of Aragon in January to the blade of a hired swordsman from Calais in May.
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115. The Court of Two Queens | Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s Royal Love Triangle
Oh my! Our week of All Things Anne Boleyn continues here at Trashy Royals with Alicia bringing you all the details of the very troubled and sticky love triangle of Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn. There was a time when Catherine and Anne were friends, however Henry was always a monster. This episode covers the period of 1527 to 1531 in this Court of Two Queens, setting up for the conclusion of this arc this weekend, with the story of the murder of Anne Boleyn.
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114. Anne Boleyn’s Birth Year | The 1501 or 1507 Debate
In this continuing week of All Things Anne Boleyn we ponder the real birth year of Anne Boleyn. History has declared 1501 is the year of her birth, but there is some very powerful evidence that the year of her birth was 1507. Alicia breaks it down from all sides in this episode from the trashy past, with a little after-life action too from St. Peter Ad Vincula.
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113. The Love Letters to Anne Boleyn from Henry VIII
It is an exciting week here for Alicia, and she wants to share her love, passion and fervor of the Tudor Era with you, and especially her love of Anne Boleyn. Next week marks the 489th anniversary of Anne’s death, and it is her time to shine within our trashy universe this week.
In this episode, we explore the 17 surviving love letters that King Henry VIII penned during his courtship and early relationship with Anne Boleyn in the latter half of the 1520s, particularly noting that for quite a long time, it seems like Anne wasn't really that into him.
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Introducing: Psychedelic Women
Hey friends, Alicia and Stacie here to tell you about a new show that we're really excited about. Our friend Rainbow Valentine has been collecting the stories of the first generation of women to have access to The Pill, Rock n Roll, and LSD.
In her podcast Psychedelic Women, Rainbow talks to the women who lived and made the counterculture in 1960s San Francisco and, eventually, the world. It's a fascinating, beautifully crafted show featuring real-life stories that'll blow your mind.
Coming up is the trailer for Psychedelic Women, and Episode 1 lands today. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening.
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112. Mary, Queen of Scots | Exile, Imprisonment, Execution
In this final installment of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, we follow Mary's flight from Scotland into England, the domain of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, in 1568. Historians believe that Mary thought - or at least hoped - that her cousin would assist in returning her to the throne in Scotland, but instead, Mary and her retinue would spend a strange decade and a half imprisoned - in some of the finest homes in England. In the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess of Hardwick, Mary gradually became a unifying figure for English Catholics chafing under the rule of a Protestant queen.
A prolific letter writer throughout her time in the custody of Elizabeth, she became enmeshed in the Babington Plot to assassinate her cousin in 1586. She was convicted at trial and sentenced to death; a situation that Elizabeth struggled with. She feared the precedent it set and certainly the impacts on her conscience and her relations with James VI of Scotland, Mary's son and Elizabeth's eventual successor, but in the end, she signed the death warrant of her cousin. Mary, Queen of Scots, one-time Queen of France, and aspirant to the English throne, was executed by beheading on February 8, 1587.
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111. Mary, Queen of Scots | Queen of Scotland, Wife of Darnley, Wife of Bothwell
In this second installment of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, Alicia follows Mary back to Scotland after her tenure as teenaged Queen of France. A young widow, she returned to a Scotland that had gone through the Reformation, making her Catholicism a notable feature.
In 1565, after about four years back at home, she married her half-cousin, the ambitious Lord Darnley, which produced a son the following year. The marriage was troubled, with Darnley openly seeking to become King and not just the Queen's consort, and to succeed Mary should she - and he certainly was not plotting to make this happen, no no - die.
The problem resolved itself in February of 1567, when the home that Darnley was staying in suddenly exploded and his body, and that of one of his servants, was discovered nearby, seemingly untouched. It was speculated that they had been smothered, and suspicion soon fell on James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, a confidant to the Queen and an ambitious climber himself. The whole thing was hugely suspicious, and Mary's reign fully fractured just months later when she married Bothwell.
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110. Mary, Queen of Scots | Her Childhood to Widowed Queen of France
This week, we begin our Trashy Royals journey into the life and times of Mary, Queen of Scots. She has been a long time coming as a missing link on our ride of the naughty nobles in her time.
In this episode, we journey from Mary’s birth in 1542, with her becoming Queen of Scotland at the tender age of 6 days old to Mary, three days before her 18th birthday as a widow of the King of France. Her first husband, Francoise II does pass away just as the couple's reign was beginning, leaving Mary with an uncertain future with not much else to do but come on back to the country that is rightfully hers in 1560.
In the middle of Mary's lifepath from 1542 to 1560, there are so many European power plays and plots, trashy uncles on all sides, a girl squad forming, religious strife in all the ways, an evil Mother-in-Law, and a little astrology too. Mary’s story really does contain multitudes. Her story begins here. Get ready for a very trashy ride as this one has everything you adore in a royals romp!
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109. Arbella Stuart | A Tragic Tale of Tudor Times
Come with us this week as we take a journey into the Tudor Court with perhaps the most tragic story of the time. Arbella Stuart is our focus this week, and her tale is ever so tragic. It could have been a regular life for this girl, except that she was related to every single person in the royal line-up, and that makes for very dangerous times to be a girl in the 16th century.
So many connected players, so many spiderwebs in this one – buckle up for some Big Royal Energy!
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108. Happy Valley Set: The Life, Loves, and Murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Lord Erroll
Good nobles, we have a real treat for you this week as we journey down into Africa - Kenya specifically - to begin the trashy tales of the Happy Valley Set. This group of self-absorbed, wealthy British expatriates is legendary in history for all of the sins that occurred in their heyday, from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Today’s episode serves as a great introduction to this heap of hedonism, as we explore the life, the loves, and the mysterious murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll. After a life of great debauchery, he is found dead at a lonely crossroads near Nairobi on January 24, 1941. There are no lack of suspects in this case, as mostly everyone would like Josslyn more dead than alive. The is an arrest and a trial though of a jealous husband, Sir Jock Delves Broughton. It doesn’t go how you think it might.
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Sources
White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll, by James Fox (Amazon)
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107. Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione | The Too-Much Countess
Turns out that selfies aren't really a new phenomenon, and as cameras emerged as a new technology in the 19th century, there was a nearly perfect subject who made the form her own. Meet Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, spy, diplomat, model, courtesan, art director, and one-time mistress of Emperor Napoleon III. It's quite a resume and a heck of a story - a minor noble whose beauty was legendary but whose arrogance and self-importance certainly rubbed the Parisian upper crust the wrong way.
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106. Stanislaw II August, the Last King of Poland
As a young man, Stanislaw Poniatowski arrived at the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, a Polish noble in the service of an English diplomat. An affair commenced with the future Catherine the Great, whose affection (and malign influence in the politics of Russia's neighbor) resulted in Stanislaw being elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in in 1764.
It was a good news/bad news reign for Stanislaw, who saw his country partitioned not once, not twice, but three times, by the greater powers on his borders. His efforts to modernize and liberalize Poland - including the creation of an American-style constitution in 1791 - were all for naught, as his former lover finally annexed what remained of Poland in 1795. It would be more than a century before Poland re-emerged as a nation, and one which views Stanislaw II August in an understandably mixed way.
Thanks to listener Ray for contributing this banger of a tale.
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105. Persephone and Hades, ft. Alicia King Anderson
This week, Alicia invited Alicia King Anderson Ph.D. to talk all things Persephone and Hades, the Queen and King of the Underworld.
We unpack the myth of this royal couple down below. How does a young girl, Kore, complete the transformation into Persephone? Who is Hades and why is he messing with his niece, Kore? How does the whole snatching of the beautiful maiden go down, and what happens in the Underworld?
It's a story with complicated supernatural family ties, a kidnapping, a mother's grief, famine, a marriage, and - big headline - the introduction of seasons into the human world. And this myth was a foundational piece of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which helped initiates of the cult of Demeter and Persephone abandon their fear of death.
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Explore More with Alicia King Anderson
Alicia King Anderson Ph.D.'s website
Join Alicia's Patreon community, Myth and Fairy Tale Nerds Unite!
Sign up for Alicia's March 22 workshop, The Return of Persephone: Spring Equinox Workshop
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104. The Wives of Julius Caesar: Cossutia, Cornelia, Pompeia, and Calpurnia
As we roar towards the Ides of March, it just makes sense to spend a little time with Rome's OG, Gaius Julius Caesar. But since it's also Women's History Month, we're taking stock of his life and times through his marriages, both the ones we're sure happened, the one we aren't sure happened - and of course, Cleopatra makes an appearance.
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Introducing The Glamorous Gabors!
The Gabor sisters were some of the most iconic cultural figures in the second half of the 20th century, having arrived on our shores from Nazi-occupied Hungary, where they experienced loss and engaged in heroic resistance. Along with their mother, Jolie, sisters Eva, Zsa Zsa, and Magda, stormed the mid-century zeitgeist and lived through extremely complicated family dynamics, as well as complicated romantic entanglements - including, between them all - 23 marriages, 18 divorces, two widowhoods, and two annulments. They were allies and rivals, poly-linguists, artisans, and entrepreneurs. But mostly, they were women possessed of a drive to succeed and an eternal willingness to bend their stories to suit the moment at hand.
This month, Trashy Divorces is proud to present the lives and loves of The Glamorous Gabors, an eight-episode arc bringing these four amazing women into focus in the 21st century. Listen online or wherever you get your podcasts!
The Glamorous Gabors was researched and written by Melanie Shawn, with our deep gratitude.
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103. Queen Cynethryth of Mercia
Just in time for Women's History Month here in the US, Alicia has a story as old as time - an 8th century Queen of the central English kingdom of Mercia during the Anglo-Saxon period who maybe was the victim of a smear campaign centuries later. Obviously, contemporaneous records of the period are sparse, but what we do think we know is that Queen Cynethryth and her husband King Offa had a contentious relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury in that period. Mercia confiscated some of the Archbishop's lands, and the Archbishop supported an uprising that saw Kent liberate itself from King Offa's rule. Things went far enough south between them that Offa eventually created an entirely new Archdiocese in Lichfield that would presumably be a bit more compliant with his wishes.
And while Offa and Cynethryth would outlive that Archbishop of Canterbury, it seems that the Church would have the final say over Cynethryth's story. Coincidentally, that portrayal became extremely negative right around the time, centuries later, that Empress Matilda was attempting to exert her righteous claim to the English throne after the death of her father, King Henry I.
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Sponsors
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/trashyroyals.
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102. Nero, ft. Agrippina the Younger (Encore)
We're on break this week, so we're delving into Trashy Royals history (see what we did there!) with an encore of one of our earliest episodes, Roman Emperor Nero. While things started out relatively well when he took the reins from Claudius at just age 16, his attention and priorities quickly spiraled to pointless things and private grievance. As one does.
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101. Trashy Tabloids | "The Fantabulous Imam of Yemen," Ahmad bin Yahya
Back in 1959, a writer named Samson Rebaldi gave an autocrat and despot a real glow-up in the pages of Confidential, a gossip rag of the era. Yemen's second-to-last hereditary ruler, Ahmad bin Yahya - known as "Ahmad the devil" within Yemen - was in Rome at the time, receiving medical treatment for a variety of ailments, and Rebaldi delighted in the news that he had traveled with his multiple wives, dozens of concubines, and maintained a stable of "slave girls" back at home. In Rome, Rebaldi says that doctors limited the ailing dictator to six female visitors a day, though Yahya's age, health problems, and various drug addictions may have made these visits less exciting that Rebaldi believed.
Yahya died in his sleep three years after the piece was published, at the age of 71, and was briefly succeeded by his son, Muhammad al-Badr. The Badr reign came to an end after just a week, when disaffected soldiers launched a coup and declared Yemen a Republic. It is, very tragically, still working on that.
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100. SIX The Musical!
Last summer, Alicia was finally able to catch SIX The Musical on Broadway, and last weekend, Stacie got to see the US Tour version. A pop spectacular featuring the wives of Henry VIII, the play's back story is every bit as cool and fun as the show itself is. In this episode, we talk SIX The Musical, and we pull a Patreon Royal-Tea Time episode from August where Alicia got into what it's all about.
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99. Chatsworth and The Duchesses of Devonshire
This week, join us for a journey 500 years in the making! Off to Derbyshire we go to spend some time at Chatsworth, the ancestral home of the Cavendish family and the Dukes and Duchesses of Devonshire through time.
There were many women who claimed the Duchess title, and a few who did not. We explore them all - from Bess of Hardwick, the lady who begins it all, to Georgiana Spencer and Deborah Mitford, the ones who did attain the title, as well as the ones who did not, including Lady Caroline Lamb, Adele Astaire, and Kick Kennedy.
- Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1646–1710), wife of the first duke
- Rachel Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1674 – 1725), wife of the second duke
- Catherine Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1700–1777), wife of the third duke
- Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), first wife of the fifth duke
- Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1759–1824), second wife of the fifth duke
- Louisa Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1832–1911), wife of the eighth duke
- Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1870–1960), wife of the ninth duke
- Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1895–1988), wife of the tenth duke
- Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1920–2014), wife of the eleventh duke
- Amanda Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (born 1944), wife of the twelfth duke
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98. Bring Out Your Dead: Royal Fascinations with Dead Bodies
We regret to inform you that today's legal regime of protecting corpses from desecration is a modern development, and even worse, royals have a rich history of relying on them for all sorts of things. Today we get into the alleged curative powers of corpses, especially among Spain's Hapsburg leaders a few centuries back.
Don Carlos himself, whom we covered last week, is said to have recovered from that serious head wound he received with the help of a local miracle-maker named Diego de Alcala - a Franciscan lay brother who had died some hundred years before.
Apparently the Spanish royals frequently slept beside the corpses of the venerated long dead. For instance, Isidore the Farmer was born around 1070 in Madrid and, over the course of his life, developed a bit of a legend for alleged miracles and feeding the poor. In death, his legend continued to grow, resulting in him being declared a Saint in the Catholic Church in 1619, then having his teeth pulled out to be placed under Charles II of Spain's pillows to aid his many ailments in 1696.
Speaking of Charles IIs, England had one, too, and he also had a penchant for human body parts. In his case though, the medicinal aspect was attained through consuming a tincture made from human skull fragments. And best of all, "The King's Drops" became all the rage across Europe for a century or more, which was certainly one way to put the remains of your ancestors to work for you.
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97. Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias
We've often marveled at the incestuous nature of royal marriages in Europe, but the inbreeding really came to a head in 16th century Spain, when King Philip II married and had a son with his double first cousin, Maria Manuela of Portugal. Carlos, their baby boy, came into the world with significant disadvantages; his legs were different lengths and his spine curved abnormally, causing problems with his gait and posture.
These are issues to be compassionate about, but Carlos's behavior from infancy forward tended toward the violent and sadistic. He injured his wet nurses by biting them, and was known to torture animals and humans alike as a child and adolescent. It's unclear whether his behavioral issues might have been inherited as well; among his four great-grandparents (most people have eight) and six great-great-grandparents (most people have sixteen) was Juana I of Castile, better known to us as Juana the Mad.
While Carlos was clearly unfit to become a monarch, Philip II was in a bit of a bind because he had no other sons, and his wives - he would be married four times in total - kept dying on him. Carlos's mother, Philip's first wife, died from complications from delivering him, Mary I of England died four years into their childless marriage, Elisabeth of Valois - originally betrothed to Carlos - died after nine years of marriage and several daughters, and finally, Anna of Austria was able to produce a living heir before she died after ten years of marriage. In the meantime, Philip found himself going to extreme lengths to protect his kingdom from his son - perhaps even by murdering him.
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96. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury
One of the more fascinating women of the Tudor era was actually one of the last Plantagenets, Margaret Plantagenet, later Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (he of Malmsey wine fame), and a niece to both King Edward IV and King Richard III, Margaret and her brother were taken into the care of King Henry VII after Richard's defeat at Bosworth Field. Henry's wife, Elizabeth of York, was Margaret's cousin, and perhaps because of his insecurities about his claim to the throne, Henry preferred to keep the remaining Plantagenets close.
As a consequence, Margaret had a front-row seat to some of the most consequential moments in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, including as a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, who would become a close a friend across the decades. But she also suffered mightily; Henry VII imprisoned and then executed her brother, and after the death of her husband, Hank VII kept her nearly destitute through the confiscation of the Salisbury estate, rightfully her brother's Earldom. When Henry VIII succeeded his father - and Catherine of Aragon made a big return - Margaret was made whole, becoming one of only two women in 16th century England who was a peer in her own right.
Her success as a landowner did not sit well with the increasingly paranoid Henry VIII, who spent her last decade cracking down on her children, and eventually put Margaret into the Tower of London for a couple of years before Henry ordered her executed on the Tower Green on May 27, 1541. A contemporary report has it that she taunted her inexperienced executioner to the last.
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95. The Swiftory of Catherine of Aragon
Alicia is leading a Swiftory takeover! To celebrate the launch of her newest podcast, Swiftory, she's taking you into one of its origin stories - the life of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, through a five-song arc of Taylor Swift songs. This one will sate the palate of both Trashy Divorces and Trashy Royals listeners!
Subscribe to Swiftory on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
Here are lyrics and live performances for you to enjoy your own musical journey!
Links with lyrics
- This Love: Taylor Swift - This Love (Taylor's Version) (Lyric Video)
- Long Live: Taylor Swift - Long Live [Lyrics] (Taylor’s Version)
- Gold Rush: Taylor Swift - gold rush (Official Lyric Video)
- Death By a Thousand Cuts: Taylor Swift - Death By A Thousand Cuts (with LYRICS)
- Peter: Taylor Swift - Peter lyrics
Links to live performances
- This Love, live from 2015: [Remastered 4K] This Love - Taylor Swift - 1989 World Tour 2015 - EAS Channel
- Gold Rush, Live from Philly: gold rush live at the eras tour (surprise song)
- DBATC, Tiny Desks: Taylor Swift - Death By A Thousand Cuts (Performance Legendada - Live)
- Peter, from Stockholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZt7nrE6GIo
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94. Elizabeth Bathory, The Blood Countess (Or Maybe Not)
Legend has it that at the turn of the 17th century, in a small corner of the then-Kingdom of Hungary, a noblewoman preyed on her peasant tenants, torturing and murdering them for her own sadistic pleasure high up in her castle in the Little Carpathian Mountains. Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Erzsebet Bathori, or Alzbeta Batoriova, in Hungarian and Slovakian, respectively) has been described as history's most prolific female serial killer - her death toll was said to be as high as 650 - until she was finally stopped on the order of the King of Hungary.
But the story is more complicated than the tale that's been passed down. The daughter of an extremely powerful and wealthy family, Elizabeth and her husband had loaned the crown significant sums to keep it afloat during a long war with the Ottoman Empire. She herself was a Calvinist in a time when Lutherans were agitating for greater authority in post-Reformation Europe, and one Lutheran minister in particular seems to have been diligent in spreading rumors of Elizabeth's bad conduct. After Elizabeth became a widow - thus a rich and powerful independent noblewoman who was owed a large sum of money from the King - the rumors intensified significantly. Is this because Elizabeth's murder spree picked up steam, or because, for reasons ranging from sexism and sectarianism to simple power politics and repayment avoidance, it was convenient to destroy Countess Bathory's reputation for all of history?
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93. More Bizarre Royal Deaths | Viking Sigurd the Mighty, Qin Shi Huangdi of China, Bela I of Hungary, Martin I of Aragon, George II of England, Philip the Fair's Unhappy Afterlife
It turns out that Royals have been enjoying (?) bizarre deaths a lot more often than we first realized! Among this set's methods of departure from the world: getting a little too cozy with your enemy's severed head, life-extension mercury (don't try this at home!), poorly constructed furniture, laughter, constipation, and, in a bit of a twist, a story about the arguable desecration of Philip the Fair's corpse by his too-loving widow.
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92. Bizarre Royal Deaths | Alexander I of Greece, Roman Emperor Valerian, Herod the Great, Henry I of England, and Adolf Frederick of Sweden
Like the rest of us, the world's royals are mere mortals who meet our universal fate in the end. But for some, that end came about in unusual ways - infected simian bites, the ingestion of liquid gold, genital maggots, a surfeit of lampreys, and the sweetest, perhaps: death by pastry.
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Introducing Swiftory!
New from Hemlock Creatives: Swiftory, a not-so-typical Taylor Swift podcast, perfect for any Swiftie, literature lover, or history buff.
Hosts Alicia and Melissa explore Taylor Swift’s music as a jumping off point into a wider world of fascinating figures and iconic literature. Join us as we romp through Taylor’s stories, visiting the places, personalities, and – of course – the eras, that her songs evoke.
Coming 12/31/2024, wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe here on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.
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91. Princess Michael of Kent, Part Three: Say Less, Way More Often
And in the concluding episode of the (ongoing) story of Princess Michael of Kent, we watch aghast as the Anglican and Catholic churches battle over the pending nuptials of Prince Michael and his sweet Marie-Christine, and then Alicia tries (and seems to largely fail) to explain to Stacie why British law and custom required Prince Michael of Kent to marry Princess Michael of Kent, and not Baroness Marie-Christine. Seems like Prince Michael's cousin Queen Elizabeth II could have done him - and his fiance - a solid here with some alternative title, but I guess not.
Then, we again watch aghast as Princess Michael of Kent unloads on the deceased Princess Diana (and the then-Prince of Wales, by proxy) and lobs some racist displays in the general direction of Meghan Markle. Why? It's just a matter of tradition, apparently. Yikes, this one is trashy.
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90. Princess Michael of Kent, Part Two: The Road to Royalty
This week we continue our journey into the life and times of Princess Michael of Kent. In this middle episode of her arc, we explore her teenage years, her first marriage and subsequent divorce, and her romance with Prince Michael of Kent. This love affair is assisted by a familiar character, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who manages with charm and royal politics to attain the Queen's permission.
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89. Princess Michael of Kent, Part One: Papa Will Nazi See You Now
We begin our exploration of the UK's surprisingly controversial Princess Michael of Kent with a little back story. And given that Princess Michael of Kent started life in January 1945 as a German baroness named Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, you can bet the Nazis had a hand in it!
The daughter of Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, a Nazi Party member who spent time at the Russian front during the war, Princess Michael's mother, Austro-Hungarian Countess Maria Anna, was stridently anti-Nazi, enough that it got her in trouble. Her father's allegiance to the party was pretty loose by the time the war came around, and he was eventually kicked out of the Nazi party entirely. This was helpful when he was later investigated by the Appeals Tribunal for Upper Bavaria after the war ended.
Meanwhile, Gunther's somewhat impromptu wartime marriage to Princess Michael's mother turned out to be a bigamist marriage, since old Gunther had never had his first marriage annulled in the Catholic Church, which declared Princess Michael and her older brother legitimate, but essentially ended things between Gunther and Maria Anna. He skipped out on the whole "wreckage of Europe" thing and moved to Mozambique and a third marriage there.
This left Countess Maria Anna in the post-war wreckage of Europe with two very young children. She did what aristocrats always do: she packed up a bunch of gemstones - Europe was flooded with gemstones from out of luck rich folks at the time - boarded a boat for Australia, and set her family up in their next chapter by selling the stones into a much more favorable market.
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88. James I of England | More Money, More Problems
We return this week to the Stuart Dynasty, and King James VI of Scotland, coming on in as King James I of England. His reign begins in 1603 and runs through 1625, you might be surprised what you can pack into 22 years to trashy administrating, but James makes the most of it.
Included: Rewriting of The Bible, Witch Hunting, More Pamphlets, Gunpowder Plots, and Jimmy's Maybe Lovers, with a little treason and murder on the side too. The Howard Family resurrects themselves and spiderwebs are everywhere!
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87. James VI in Scotland | Sitting, Waiting, Wishing
In this exciting installment of our past selves bringing you current episodes, we continue with the thread of the Trashy Stuarts. It is time to explore the life of James VI from his birth to the age of 39 when he assumes the English Throne in 1603. Oh my – so many things before he even assumes the throne in England after the death of Elizabeth. James is dealing with dead parents, mad -lunatic and angry uncles, and a child bride, Anne of Denmark. Feuds with countries and religions. Kids, and witches, and pamphlets too.
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86. Witch Hunting with King James VI (A Trashy Divorces Crossover Bonus)
In this week's double Trashy Royals, past-us brings an episode out of the Trashy Divorces side of the world, as it really does all connect in history.
It is back to April 2021 when we took a trip into the late 16th Century to do some witch hunting with King James VI of Scotland, long before he makes it to England as James I. His new hobby is no way a valid pursuit of anything worthwhile - just a king's manic fevered dream which is pretty terrible for the old, poor, or single women of both Scotland and England.
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85. Succession Problems | Launching the Stuart Dynasty
In this exciting episode of Trashy Royals, we are jumping into the future a bit from our Tudor timeline into the beginning of the Stuart Dynasty. How does the crown go from Elizabeth I to James I, and who were the other contenders in play? Everyone is related in this one – pull out your yarn and have some family tree fun!
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84. As the Tudors Turn | Sweating Sickness (I'm Horrified! Crossover)
The Tudors are still turning, friends, but with the spooky season upon us, Alicia thought it would be a wonderful time to share the scariest thing the Tudors themselves dealt with: a mysterious illness called Sweating Sickness. Fortunately for people alive today, the disease vanished centuries ago, leaving modern scientists to puzzle over what it might have been. For this episode, Alicia sat down with our friends Sam and Allie at I'm Horrified!, another perfect spot to showcase a horrifying and deadly disease.
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83. As the Tudors Turn | The Roaring 1520s: The Field of the Cloth of Gold
By 1520, Europe found itself in an interesting moment. The most significant leaders in the endless jostle for power and influence were all young kings - Henry VIII in England, around 30 years old; Francis I in France, around 26 years old; and Charles V as King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, at about 20 years old.
You can imagine how potentially unstable an axis of entitled, army-commanding young kings might be, but it's noteworthy that there were cooler heads with bigger visions than wars of conquest moving pieces on the field of politics even then. Henry's England was still something of a third wheel in the spheres of influence of the era, but both Francis and Charles were eager to count the island nation as an ally in their machinations against each other.
Henry's right hand man, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, had the idea that it could be possible to produce an enduring peace among the Christian nations, particularly in light of the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire. Following the 1518 Treaty of London, a non-aggression pact between most of Europe's states, Wolsey wanted to showcase both the majesty and the (largely imaginary) friendship between England and France, resulting in a three-week-long summit between Henry VIII (and many thousands of courtiers, artisans, soldiers, and others) and Francis I (and many thousands of courtiers, artisans, soldiers, and others) on a large turnip field outside of Calais, then an English holding.
The two sides spent months ahead of the June meeting building elaborate, but fake, castles, stadiums and other infrastructure to house, feed, and maintain the influx of people, horses, livestock, and goods that were soon to arrive. The Cloth of the Field of Gold was heralded as an event of great import, and Henry VIII would consider it a high point of his reign, but as we know, the dream of a peaceful Europe would not be realized for many centuries to come, and even now, remains a fragile and threatened thing.
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Sources
Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII, by Karen Lindsey (Amazon)
The Distinctive 'Habsburg Jaw' Was Likely the Result of the Royal Family's Inbreeding (smithsonianmag.com)
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82. As The Tudors Turn | Margaret Tudor
Life after the death of her husband, King James IV of Scotland, was not simple for Margaret Tudor, at least not at first. Her quick marriage to Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, happened while she was unaware of his long relationship with another woman. Her royal status in Scotland was complicated - fairly massively - by the fact that her brother, King Henry VIII, was responsible for the battlefield death of her husband, The King.
The Archibald Douglas marriage didn't help either, as allying herself with the Douglas family ignited factionalism in the Scottish court, resulting in her regency being revoked. When she became pregnant, she fled to England, and while Archibald returned to Scotland soon after, her brother welcomed her to court in London. After a year-long negotiation, she returned to Scotland, where she learned what a lout her second husband truly was.
Meanwhile, her sister Mary in London was busy having babies with her second husband, Charles Brandon, and Henry VIII was beginning to explore relations outside of his marriage, having failed to obtain a living son with Catherine of Aragon. Their messy, messy story continues next week here at Trashy Royals on As The Tudors Turn!
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81. As The Tudors Turn | Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon
After his father shipped his sister Margaret off to be the Queen of Scotland, it fell to Henry VIII to manage his baby sister Mary's love life. A genuine beauty, France's King Louis XII, then 52, was undoubtedly happy to walk down the aisle with the 18-year-old English princess. The bliss would not last, as just three or so months later, Louis was dead, with salacious whispers in the French court that Mary had "intercoursed" him to death. Ah, the 16th century.
But this wasn't the end for Mary's heart, not by a long shot. It turns out that she had long nurtured a desire for Tudor courtier and man-about-town Charles Brandon. Charles's father had been a loyal partisan of Henry Tudor's claim to the throne before he became Henry VII, and Sir William Brandon had died at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Young Charles was raised at court, a few years older than Henry VIII, and enjoyed a bit of hero worship from the future king.
He was also a scoundrel who fleeced a number of rich women (and girls) through the hazy definitions of marriage and engagement in the period. Still, in spite of Henry making him promise not to marry his sister, Charles was dispatched to France after the death of Louis XII to negotiate the young queen's return to England, and once there, the long-suffering Mary convinced the dashing man of her dreams to abandon the pledge and marry her anyway. Her brother was, to put it mildly, displeased.
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80. A Tale of Two Sisters: Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor
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79. Henry VIII | The Wonder Years
The much-discussed and much-reviled English King Henry VIII is best known, of course, as one of history's worst husbands. There were famously six wives, two of whom were lucky enough to outlive him. But before whatever madness began to take hold of him in his 30s, he was a dashing, popular young king with a devoted wife and, as far as historians can tell, a fairly limited number of mistresses.
These wonder years were not without obstacles and tragedies. Catherine of Aragon, his first and longest-married wife, suffered miscarriages and stillbirths throughout their years together, finally producing just a daughter, the future Mary I, or, for the Protestants in the audience, Bloody Mary.
Still, these years seemed to be a time of optimism for both Henry and the people of England. Who could have predicted the social and political earthquakes that were to come?
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Sponsors
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78. Grace O'Malley, Ireland's Pirate Queen
A century and a half before the "Golden Age of Piracy," an Irish woman of noble birth was conquering the inland seas and coastlines on the western edge of the island. Gráinne Ó Máille, anglicized to Grace O'Malley, hailed from the Umhaill line, a seafaring clan of Connacht, and while the family did conduct legitimate forms of trade, they also ran protection rackets on boats that tried to fish their waters, and sometimes plundered merchant vessels in the area, as well as settlements belonging to neighboring clans.
Her life almost perfectly overlapped Queen Elizabeth I's, and during Grace's life, the English Crown was deeply invested in the conquest of Ireland, mostly by seducing its nobles into servitude with fancy English titles. Barons and Earls proliferated around Dublin for years, but English shenanigans finally reached the West of the country when Grace's first husband was cut out from the line of succession to his family's Chief of the Name. Then he was assassinated, leaving Grace ready and willing to enact violent revenge on his killers.
The Crown continued eroding the alliances she was building. Her second husband was demoted from his role as regional king of Connacht while Grace was jailed on a plundering trip. When the Crown-supported king died, Grace and her husband teamed up to raise an army of 2,000 men to insure his succession. He not only got the title, but was named a Baron as well, in exchange for his promise of fealty to English law.
But Crown agents had already set their sights on Grace O'Malley as the kind of noteworthy adversary whose arrest or death would send a message throughout the Emerald Isle, and Grace was eventually forced to sail to London to seek an audience with Queen Elizabeth herself, an effort in which she prevailed handily.
Grace's story is full of courage, vengeance, and daring-do, but it's also a story rooted in specific moment in time, when the longstanding society of Ireland was changing and being changed. Ireland's Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley saw it all up close, and as a most unconventional woman, charted her own course through.
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77. The Difficult Sister | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden
When Queen Elizabeth II was born in 1926, there were years of her childhood that were, compared to other future monarchs, quite normal. After all, she was never supposed to be the Queen. Her father was a second son; her Uncle David would succeed her grandfather, and certainly other male children would come along.
And then, in 1930, Elizabeth's parents waited with anticipation to find out the gender of Elizabeth's impending sibling. A boy would be in the line of succession. But the child who arrived was Princess Margaret, who was never supposed to be the daughter and sister of Queens herself, but for the fateful choice her Uncle David would make when Margaret was just six, when everything changed.
This episode follows Margaret through a tumultuous childhood, an early doomed romance, and her long, if ill-fated marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, eventually the Earl of Snowden. We visit Mustique, the Caribbean island where Margaret's only personal land holdings resided, and meet some of the guests she entertained there. Plus, an assortment of stories about the social life of a notoriously difficult Princess - and why hanging with Margaret wasn't everything it was cracked up to be.
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76. Royal Family Feud: Charlemagne's Great-Grandkids & Pope Stephen VI's Cadaver Synod (ft. Pope Formosus)
Charlemagne, The Father of Europe, died in the year 814 and left only one surviving son to take the helm of the Carolingian Empire, which spanned the lion's share of the European continent. But his heir, Louis the Pious, had three sons, who each got a parcel of the empire when he died. Then those kings had children of their own, dividing the kingdom up until factions and branches of Charlemagne's lineage occupied independent power centers from the border of modern Denmark all the way down to Italy south of Rome.
Our story today involves several of those Carolingian kings, and two priests who would become popes. Bishop Formosus served the Vatican as a diplomat on numerous missions in Europe, developing close ties to the Frankish kings to the north of Rome, the sons of the sons of Charlemagne. When his winding road to the Papacy finally made him Pope Formosus, he found himself at odds - even militarily - with the southern wing of the family, the Dukes of Spoleto, the sons of the daughters of Charlemagne.
After Formosa's death, the Dukes of Spoleto reasserted their power, installing a new pope, Stephen VI, who exacted the southern family's revenge on Formosus and their northern kin by exhuming Formosus's rotten corpse and holding an infamously gruesome public trial. Formosus was obviously convicted, but the episode condemned Stephen VI in the moment and for the ages.
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75. Sultan Ibrahim the Mad of the Ottoman Empire
Content note: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and coercion that may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Though only in power for eight years, the Ottoman Empire's Ibrahim the Mad made his own mark on history as a notoriously bad ruler, a sexual deviant, but also a bit of a fashion plate. He loved his furs and sparkly jewels.
He also made unwise decisions in foreign affairs, as when he responded to pirates by launching what would turn into a 24-year-long war with the Republic of Venice. As wars do, this led to supply chain disruptions and tax increases that eventually led to angry mobs and mass upheaval in Constantinople. Ibrahim was deposed in an uprising of the Janissary corp, the elite household guard of the Ottoman Sultans. He was strangled to death, as was the custom, in August of 1648.
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Introducing American Prankster: Wavy Gravy's Life Story
We are excited to share a show we're loving with you! American Prankster: Wavy Gravy's Life Story pairs the legendary entertainer and activist with our friend, podcaster Rainbow Valentine, following the incredible ride of a life that Wavy Gravy has been on through decades of American counterculture. Enjoy this sample, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!
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74. Empress Wu Zetian, China's Only Female Monarch
In its many thousands of years of history, China has had only one official ruling monarch who was a woman. Sure, there were powerful Empress Consorts who pulled the strings of weak Emperor husbands, but Empress Wu Zetian ambitiously, and ruthlessly, upended convention to claim the throne in her own name.
Born to a prosperous and well-connected family sometimes in the first half of the 620s, Wu joined the Imperial Court at the age of 14 in the privileged position of concubine to the Emperor. Instead, she became a trusted scribe and advisor who was sent to live out her life in a monastery after his death.
But his son, Emperor Gaozong, brought her back to court, where she promptly began having babies with him, something his official wife was never able to do. It took many years, but through devious, even violent means, Wu Zeitan would clear the Court of all rivals to her power and become Gaozong's legal wife, and Empress Consort of China. This was an open door to full control of China; Wu Zeitan only needed to walk through it - and she did.
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73. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, The Luckiest Romanov
As the Romanov era closed, some family members were more fortunate than others. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, youngest daughter of Tsar Alexander III and baby sister of the doomed Tsar Nicholas II, may be the most fortunate of the Romanov clan, escaping the country and living out a happy life in Denmark and Canada.
Born into a large, loving, royal family that summered with the horde of European royal relatives at her grandfather's castle in Denmark - this was Christian IX, the so-called "father-in-law of Europe" - where she and her cousins, including Queen Victoria's nine children, spent genuinely happy family time together.
An arranged marriage was had, but suited neither Olga nor her gay husband, Peter. When she did eventually fall in love with a young soldier named Nikolai, Peter refused to grand the divorce Olga asked for, but hired Nikolai into the household and seemingly approved of their relationship.
Her brother, perhaps sensing the rising tide that would sweep Imperial Russia away, finally annulled her marriage in 1916, allowing her finally wed Nikolai after more than a decade. As the Bolsheviks advanced, Olga and Nikolai, her mother, and her sister, fled to Crimea, and eventually escaping to Denmark.
Decades later, World War II put the Soviet army on the move in Europe, and fearing for their safety, Olga and her family made one last big move, to Canada.
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72. Ming Dynasty Emperors Hongwu, Yongle, and Zhengde
Most Americans have at least a basic sense of key elements of European history, but that's not necessarily true when it comes to places like China. And that's true for us, too. Today we take our first dive into China's extremely long history - 4,000 years by some accounts! - to meet three notably trashy emperors of the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 to 1644.
Hongwu Emperor was the first Ming Emperor, who seized the throne after a long-running rebellion against the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. He is credited with various reforms, which unfortunately often took the form of purges, which were carried out as bloodily as you would fear. Yongle Emperor unseated his own nephew to take the throne, then dispatched everyone associated with his short reign. Zhengde Emperor was a foppish drunkard who preferred visiting the animals and people he'd installed in his Imperial Zoo to governing, and met a ridiculous end at just 29 years old.
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71. Irene of Athens, First Empress of Rome
Powerful women have always had to play the game a little differently than their male counterparts, but the story of Irene of Athens, who played politics with enough dexterity to become Empress of the Byzantine Empire for about 20 years in the 8th century, is extraordinarily complicated. The daughter of a prominent Greek family, she was brought to Constantinople as a possible bride for the future Emperor Leo IV. The marriage happened, a son was produced, but religious factionalism ultimately tore the marriage apart.
Upon Leo IV's death, Irene - as one would - stepped in as regent for their young son, the future Constantine VI. She outwitted Leo's half-brothers who were attempting to install the eldest to the throne by having them ordained as priests, and then took unusual steps to unify her kingdom's faith and pursue friendlier relations with the Carolingian empire in Europe.
New conflicts emerged when Constantine VI came of age, a situation that Irene met by undermining his rule and eventually ensuring he met an untimely and painful end. Irene was eventually deposed in 802 and was exiled to the Isle of Lesbos. She spent her final year spinning wool to support herself.
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70. Meet the Bonapartes: Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, Spain, and New Jersey
To round out our Meet the Bonapartes series, we turn to Napoleon's eldest - and apparently coolest - brother, Joseph. Affable, charming, and comfortable in his own skin, he was a contrast to most of his siblings, including Napoleon. His easygoing nature made him popular even with political opponents, and Joseph was an important player in Napoleon's rise.
As a reward, Emperor Napoleon named Joseph the King of Naples, where he fashioned himself a man of the people and governed them well, implementing various government reforms, fighting crime, and creating jobs by building infrastructure. His reign in Naples was short lived, however, as Napoleon replaced him with their sister Caroline and her husband, Joachim Murat.
Napoleon then dispatched Joseph to govern occupied Spain, where the public mood was very different. Not only was Spain's King Joseph reviled by commoners and elites alike, he himself became fairly burned out with the family business in this era. After Napoleon's defeat, he hopped a boat for New York and in a lot of ways, never looked back. He spent decades mostly living a quiet, prosperous life in New Jersey, before returning to Europe to be closer to his remaining family in his later years.
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69. Meet the Bonapartes: Elisa Bonaparte, Grand Duchess of Tuscany
Napoleon's eldest sister shared many of his more imperious personal qualities, but would prove to be surprisingly gifted at governance after her brother named her Princess of the Italian principalities of Piombino and Lucca. More territories would be added to the holdings she governed, eventually including the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with Florence as its capital.
Napoleon made Elisa its Grand Duchess, but also added new strings to her ability to govern independently. She was obligated to enforce Napoleon's decisions without modification, and the period of being a popular sovereign making well-received reforms and investments in her lands came to a close. As with the rest of her siblings, her fortunes fell as her brother's did, and died following an illness a few months before Napoleon himself.
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68. Meet the Bonapartes: Lucien Bonaparte, Head and Shoulders Above the Rest
It never hurts to have a hype man, and Napoleon's younger brother Lucien just happened to be a talented writer and orator. One could even say he was his brother's propagandist and co-conspirator in a ballot stuffing operation that led to Napoleon's initial domination of the government of France.
But Lucien, who was also the tallest of the Bonaparte siblings, came to have significant differences with his brother. The two were at odds for a number of years, with Lucien marrying secretly - twice - and refusing to divorce for strategic marriages Napoleon hoped to engineer. The brothers did eventually reconcile, with Lucien advocating strongly for Napoleon after the disastrous Hundred Days - effectively accusing France's ruling class of disloyalty - but the die was cast, and Napoleon's time as ruler of France was done.
Like several of his siblings, Lucien lived out his days in Italy, succumbing to stomach cancer in 1840.
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67. Meet the Bonapartes: Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais
Napoleon's meddling in his siblings' lives was the source of considerable angst for several of them. Napoleon had high expectations for his younger brother Louis, but Louis chafed at his brother's authority. Still, he ultimately agreed to marry Napoleon's step-daughter with Josephine, Hortense de Beauharnais, a marriage that would become notable most for the profound unhappiness of its spouses.
Four years into their terrible marriage, Napoleon decided that the territory of the modern Netherlands was a bit too independent, and installed Louis as its new king. The French Emperor expected his brother to serve merely as a titled governor of the region, but Louis really stepped up in the position. He began learning Dutch, renounced his French citizenship and declared himself Dutch, and demanded that his mostly-French ministers do the same. He also demanded it of his wife, who had only reluctantly accompanied her husband to Holland.
But Hortense also thrived in her role as Queen, and her popularity among her Dutch subjects irritated her jealous husband - who was also popular and effective, to be clear - irrationally. And the couples' success as monarchs there - Louis was known as 'Louis the Good' in Holland - irritated Napoleon irrationally. In 1810, their four year reign ended when Napoleon took it away from them by annexing it into France.
This effectively ended the sham of their marriage and the couple would spend the remainder of their lives apart. Neither lived long enough to see their youngest son become France's last monarch, Napoleon III.
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66. Meet the Bonapartes: Caroline Bonaparte Murat, Queen of Naples
If Pauline was Napoleon's most loyal sister, Caroline was undoubtedly his most scheming. As a child, she took orders from her big brother, but as he rose from celebrated military commander to Emperor, she made sure he never forgot to improve her fortunes, as well. After she married one of Napoleon's military advisors - a match he was only persuaded to support by his wife Josephine - Caroline swiftly moved up the odd intra-family career ladder.
In 1804, with Napoleon on his self-appointed throne, Caroline and her sisters became Imperial Princesses. In 1806, she became a Grand Duchess of two German principalities in Napoleon's portfolio. In 1808, she became Queen Consort of Naples, with her husband Joachim Murat becoming its flamboyant king.
Obviously, these titles and positions of power would not hold. After Napoleon's fall, and Joachim's death, she styled herself a countess from her exile in Austria, then lived out her life in Florence.
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65. Meet the Bonapartes: Pauline Bonaparte
It's probably no surprise that in a family with as much internal intrigue as the Bonapartes had, Napoleon had a favorite among his three sisters. Pauline Bonaparte was eleven years younger than her brother, but was similarly ambitious and was generally happy to take part in his plans for himself and her. A natural beauty with a flirtatious, if slightly sinister, reputation, Napoleon pushed her into two strategic marriages, and ended up with the titles Princess consort of Sulmona and of Rossano - this through her second, unhappy marriage - and Princess of Guastalla. This title referred to a Duchy her brother granted her in Italy, but upon finding out that the place was basically backwater, she organized its sale to Parma for six million francs and a courtesy title.
Pauline was the only one of Napoleon's siblings who visited him in exile, and their bond was so strong that there were rumors of incest throughout their lives. Pauline enjoyed them, believing that such stories implied that she had far more influence over her brother than she probably really did. As a woman who constantly courted scandal and attention, Pauline made an important contribution to the Italian art world when, during her marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese, she commissioned sculptor Antonio Canova to create a statue of her as the goddess Venus, and insisted on posing nude in Catholic Rome while the work was produced. Upon the Venus Victrix's arrival at their home at Palazzo Salviati-Borghese in Florence, Camillo immediately had it moved to a storage area, far from the eyes of guests.
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64. Meet the Bonapartes: Jerome Bonaparte and Betsy Patterson Bonaparte
Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome was an endless headache for him. Lacking ambition but loving luxury, he fled a stint in the French navy (after nearly sparking a war with England) for America to wait out his brother's wrath.
It was in Baltimore that he met the woman who would become his first wife, socialite Elizabeth Patterson. Marrying her against both her father's wishes and his brother's permission created quite a conundrum for all involved. Worse, when the young couple, now pregnant, tried to return to Europe to smooth things over, Jerome abandoned Betsy in order to be brought back into the fold - and eventually made King of Westphalia.
Betsy gave birth to their son in London, the only harbor that would let her ship dock, and returned to America to build a fortune through canny real estate investing. She and her son spent decades splitting their time between America and Europe, where the Bonaparte women decided - finally - that they liked the headstrong Betsy, though she and Bo really wanted nothing to do with them. Perhaps that was the secret all along.
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63. Meet the Bonapartes: Napoleon and Marie Louise of Austria
When it came time for Napoleon to find a successor to Josephine as his wife, pickings were slimmer than you might expect. Russia's Alexander I wouldn't entertain the idea of a marriage between the French emperor and Alex's youngest sister, Anna Pavlovna. Austria, which had spent years battling - and losing to - France, became the unlikely solution to Napoleon's problem. Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria was 19, suitable in rank, and available. The fact that she was Marie Antoinette's grand-niece was perhaps not brought up by the French side during negotiations for her hand.
Her marriage to Napoleon in April 1810 started badly, but things would level out between the couple and she gave birth to their son, Napoleon II, on March 20, 1811. The heir situation handled, Napoleon resumed his increasingly disastrous military campaigns, including a failed invasion of Russia that cost him half a million soldiers. After a thorough defeat by unified European armies - including Austria's - in 1814, Napoleon was exiled to Elba, and Marie Louise and her son made their way back to Vienna, and what would become a surprising new chapter of her life.
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62. Meet The Bonapartes | Napoleon and Josephine
Part of the joy of history is how resonant it often is. Imagine an ambitious if dysfunctional family with some minor claim to nobility in some far off backwater rising to power - to the highest office in the land - on the strength of a charismatic son known as much for his professional acumen as his arrogant, sometimes outrageous behavior.
Welcome to revolutionary France! When the Italian-by-way-of-Corsica Bonaparte family arrived in France in 1779, when young Napoleon was 9, it set into motion a course of events that would change history. Trained in prestigious French military academies, Napoleon would become a military hero and an influential supporter of the French Revolution and the various governments that followed - including the ones that had nearly beheaded, and then released, Josephine de Beauharnais.
It is a historical irony that Josephine, Empress of France, was not even Josephine until her relationship with Napoleon, and Beauharnais was her first husband's name. Napoleon didn't like her given name of Rose, so he changed it, and Josephine's first extremely unhappy marriage was ended by the revolutionaries' guillotine to her husband's neck. Born in colonial Martinique, Josephine made her way to France in place of her recently deceased sister, who had been betrothed to the Viscount of Beauharnais.
Napoleon and Josephine had a passionate, if rocky, marriage that his family always detested. His mother referred to his wife in highly derogatory terms, and his brothers turned themselves into the Hardy Boys of Gossip Against Josephine. Napoleon's sisters hated Josephine as well, so it's a wonder that the couple made it 14 years. Still, once you go from Republican-leaning military officer to Emperor, you have to give your country an heir, and while Josephine entered the marriage with two children from her first, Napoleon had been notably childless both with her and his many mistresses.
Then - like a miracle, and possibly through his own family's trickery - one of his mistresses gave birth to a baby he believed was his own! Josephine's time as his wife was clearly limited; they annulled their 14-year-long marriage in 1810, and Josephine lived out her days at the Chateau de Malmaison outside of Paris, tending a lavish garden of roses and remaining close to her former husband until her death in 1814.
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61. Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo Free State, and Villa Leopolda
Long a vassal state to its much larger neighbors, Belgium only became independent in 1830, at which time it decided that what it really needed was a (constitutional) monarchy! Its first king, Leopold I, earned the gig by virtue of being born a Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld prince who had cultivated his relationships with Europe's royal houses during a distinguished military career. Like his son, he was not a paragon of family values, which prompted his second wife, Louise of Orleans, to lash out at their children.
When Leopold II succeeded his father in 1865, he was hot to trot in acquiring colonial possessions, something that his father had attempted to achieve but never managed to. This led to a world-changing catastrophe and a crime of truly historic proportions. Leopold II engineered a private scheme by which he became the sole owner of the territory that is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he essentially enslaved the population and forced them to pillage their own land - rubber and ivory were especially valuable at the time - for his enrichment. Failure to meet quotas was punishable by death. Rape, mutilations, destruction of settlements, and taking workers' families as hostages to force them to work harder were all common.
Leopold was savvy enough to recognize that this state of affairs wouldn't fly with the public in Belgium, so he invested heavily in a propaganda effort to mask the reality on the ground. For the average person in Belgium, the stories of the Christianization of the people of the Congo and the improving social and economic conditions there supported their king's enterprise entirely. Meanwhile, writers and journalists around the world began to realize through their own travels what was really going on. But even millions of deaths, a horrifying population-wide immiseration, and the slimy personal enrichment Leopold had attained through those practices didn't cause the Belgian Parliament to rush to correct the situation. It wasn't until 1908, a year before Leopold's death, and decades into his brutal domination of the Congolese people, that Belgium's elected government took control of what would become the Belgian Congo, and later, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
His involvement with the Congo wasn't the only thing damaging Leopold's image at home. He was a terrible husband to his wife, Queen Marie Henriette, and at the age of 65, in 1899, very publicly took a 16-year-old mistress who he lavished with money and properties around Europe, including the famous Villa Leopolda.
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60. King Umberto II and Queen Marie-Jose of Italy and the Fall of the House of Savoy
One of the outcomes of the 20th century's two world wars was the widespread abolition of monarchies across Europe. Some of these events were brutal, as in Russia, but others, like Italy, happened bloodlessly and through the popular will.
After a long reign that saw the Kingdom of Italy enthralled by Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship, World War II, and King Victor Emmanuel III aiding and abetting it all, the Italian people were exhausted. In an effort to preserve the institution, Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in 1946, elevating his son, Umberto II and his wife Marie-Jose of Belgium, to the throne.
A referendum on the future of the monarchy was already scheduled, so Umberto and Marie-Jose, whose marriage had been uniquely unhappy, barnstormed the country trying to salvage public opinion and hang onto their thrones. It didn't work; by a 54-46% vote, Italians chose to create the Republic of Italy, and the reign of King Umberto II and Queen Marie-Jose ended after just over a month. They and their four children were exiled to Portugal, but it wasn't all bad news. After all, the independent and curious Marie-Jose had been strategically wed to a dullard who happened also to be gay. Once free of her role as anybody's Queen, she left Umberto on the Portuguese Riviera and took the kids to a new life in Switzerland and never looked back.
Unfortunately, their one son, Vittorio Emanuele, did not exactly live his best life in the aftermath of it all. While just a child when the monarchy ended, he had a strained relationship with his father, fell into arms dealing and shady international finance as an adult, and managed to get himself into - and out of - serious legal trouble a number of times.
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59. Queen Ranavalona I, The Mad Queen of Madagascar
If you worried that royal houses had gotten a little too genteel by the 19th century, the story of Ranavalona I of Madagascar will disabuse you of that pretty quickly. Seizing the throne in 1828 after the death of her husband, King Radama - despite not being the rightful heir to it - she immediately launched a campaign of murder against her political rivals and potential successors, and summarily ended friendly relations with European nations, including expelling missionaries who had established schools. She didn't merely promote the local customs and faith traditions of the Malagasy people; she eventually banned the practice of Christianity entirely and executed those who practiced it. In fact, she executed a lot of people, in a variety of creative ways, and historians believe that in her 33-year reign of terror, she depopulated Madagascar by about half. It's no wonder that she's considered Madagascar's Bloody Mary, and Madagascar's Caligula.
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58. Elizabeth and Leicester, Part Two
When she assumed the throne in 1558, she made it clear to the members of her court that they shouldn't plan to have their wives or female companions around the place. She intended to be singular as she consolidated power, but perhaps she had another motive as well; by banishing the wives, Robert Dudley, newly appointed Master of the Horse to Her Majesty the Queen, was not required to send for his wife, Amy Robsart, to join him in London.
Elizabeth and Robert were not overly discreet in their enjoyment of one another's company, while the young queen's advisors, especially William Cecil, her Secretary of State, grew more and more insistent that Elizabeth find a suitable strategic marriage to enter into with some titled European. This, of course, was not to be. Her relationship with Robert became such a scandal that Cecil himself decided it would cause her government to fall, and everything carried on very precariously until the morning of September 8, 1560, when Amy Robsart was discovered dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs at her home at Cumnor Place. The scandal banished Robert from court for more than a year, and while he and Elizabeth would remain close for the rest of his life, the intense romance that characterized the beginnings of her reign was over.
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57. Elizabeth and Leicester, Part One
While Queen Elizabeth I of England famously never married, her close relationship with Robert Dudley began when the two were small children together in the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was a princess who was downgraded to a lady after her mother, Anne Boleyn's, death. Robert was the grandson of an advisor to King Henry VII who was executed for treason upon the ascension of Henry VIII, forcing the Dudley family to struggle mightily to rehabilitate its noble image at court.
All of which is to say that these two could really relate to each other, tossed about as they were by their families' fortunes and the whims of a King both had reasons to love and hate. But when Mary I seized the throne in 1553, everything changed for both of them. Robert's father had engineered the ascension of Lady Jane Grey, his daughter in law, to the throne over Henry VIII's eldest daughter, Mary, and after The Nine Days' Queen was deposed, the male Dudleys were imprisoned in the Tower of London, condemned to death.
Catholic Mary also imprisoned her protestant half-sister Elizabeth, fearing a credible challenge to her reign. Alicia imagines - with the help of some Taylor Swift lyrics - what the months Elizabeth and Robert spent together in The Tower must have been like, doomed as they both believed themselves to be, confidants since they were toddlers.
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56. The William Shakespeare Mystery (Trashy Divorces Crossover)
It's a big week for Tortured Poets, so we decided to take a long look at history's most famous one: William Shakespeare himself. Alicia explores the mystery around the true identity of the author of some of the world's most famous pieces of literature. Was it really the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon penning Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and all the sonnets, or was that a convenient pseudonym for someone else, or a group of someone elses?
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55. The Tortured Tudor Poet: The Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn
As Taylor Swift launches her latest era with The Tortured Poets Department, Alicia dives into her favorite era: Tudor England. We explore the 17 surviving love letters that King Henry VIII penned during his courtship and early relationship with Anne Boleyn in the latter half of the 1520s, particularly noting that for quite a long time, it seems like Anne wasn't really that into him.
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54. Elisabeth of Wied, First Queen of Romania, and Literature's Carmen Sylva
However much 'protocol' may attempt to intervene, the truth is that eccentricity is a trait that even royals have. This is certainly the case for Elisabeth of Wied, a German princess who became Romania's first queen, wife of Romania's King Carol I.
Politics in Europe were extra complex in the latter half of the 19th century. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II had concluded his father's Crimean War in 1856, but even with the defeat of Russia in the conflict, the Ottoman Empire was in retreat. As Ottoman influence waned, former vassal states, including what would become modern Romania, were shaped by the other great powers and their own internal politics, which led to the unification of several formerly Ottoman principalities into what is now Romania.
And what does a newly independent player on the European stage need? A royal house, of course! And wouldn't you know it - the Germans had so many of those lying around that it was easy pickings to find some stuffy but qualified guy to 'elect' king. King Carol I was both a liberalizing influence on the new nation's politics, as well as personally fastidious and, according to accounts, quite humorless.
Which must have been tough on his wife, Elisabeth, a flamboyant writer with an artist's temperament who is better known by her nom de plum, Carmen Sylva. She was enough of a handful in the Romanian court that her husband once exiled her back to Germany for a couple of years, from which she sent letters to the Romanian Crown Prince's wife, Marie of Edinburgh, that she hoped Marie's forthcoming baby would turn out to be a girl!
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53. King Pedro I of Portugal and Inês de Castro
The fourteenth century was full of challenges to marital bliss, especially for nobles. Travel was complicated, especially during times of war, but royal houses still needed to cement alliances through marriage - often among woefully young princes and princesses who, again, were separated by vast distances and perhaps had never met.
So it was for Portugal's young prince Pedro, born 1320. Proxy-married to Constanza Manuel, a Castillian noblewoman, the union was made so Portugal's king, Alfonso IV, could register his disdain for the ruler of Castile, King Alfonso XI. Yes, it's a little confusing. And also, there was a war on in Europe, so it would be five long years before young Constanza could safely make the journey to Portugal to meet her young husband. For Pedro, encountering his bride for the first time was an experience of fireworks and butterflies - because of the presence of her lady-in-waiting, Inês de Castro, a Galician noblewoman with whom he fell madly in love.
This was obviously not an ideal situation for anyone, and while various machinations were tried to end the affair between Pedro and Inês, it was genuinely true love, with an extremely tragic and violent eventual outcome that lives on as a story of deep cultural resonance in Portugal to this day.
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52. Caroline of Brunswick, featuring Sam from I'm Horrified!
We touched on England's King George IV in our episode about Queen Victoria's Trashy Hanoverian Uncles (episode 17), but there's so much more to the story of his misspent youth and his cataclysmic marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. To help out, we asked our friend Sam from the podcast I'm Horrified!, who recently delivered this banger of a story over there.
The daughter of King George III's eldest sister, Caroline was raised in the German duchy of Braunschweig, or Brunswick in English. Her family situation was fraught; while her parents remained married throughout their lives, her father's undisguised and longstanding mistress made for difficult family dynamics, where a kind interaction with one parent led to rebuke and allegations of disloyalty from the other.
Upon meeting her soon-to-be new husband, Crown Prince George of England, the antipathy was mutual. Not only was George already illegally married, he also openly brought his mistress (to be clear, these are two separate women) to their introductory dinner. That would set the stage for the rest of Caroline's life.
They managed to have one child, Princess Charlotte, but quickly agreed to live separate lives at separate residences due to their mutual disdain. George seems to have spent a good amount of time trying to dirty his estranged wife's reputation, but she was quite popular with the public, especially balanced against his poor reputation as a drunkard and wastrel. Propaganda campaigns were waged against one another in the press and in Parliament, and as King George III's health deteriorated and Crown Prince George's power grew, Caroline left the country.
Her travels across Europe and the Holy Lands with a handsome Italian servant set tongues wagging everywhere, but when George III died in January 1820, Caroline realized that she had to return to England if she had any hope of blunting her husband's power - he was king now, and she was queen - and asserting any of her own. But it didn't go that way; George's mission with his new throne was to exclude his wife from everything and try to formally strip of her titles. Because of his own rampant infidelity, divorce was out of the question, but perhaps poisoning wasn't?
Thanks so much to Sam for sharing this banger of a story. Listen to new episodes of I'm Horrified! every Tuesday!
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51. Two King Frederiks of Denmark (Frederik VII and Frederik X)
This week, we take a look at a different European monarchy, that of Denmark, through two King Frederiks of Denmark. Frederik VII held the throne from 1848 to 1863, and was the last absolute monarch of the country, bowing to calls for reforms and signing Denmark's constitution, which implemented the constitutional monarchy that persists to this day. He was also a terrible husband, was divorced by two wives, and appears to have been part of a throuple with his third wife and their male lover for the last decade or so of his life. He died without legitimate heir, leading to a succession crisis and the reign of Christian IX, who became known as "the father-in-law of Europe."
Then we fast forward to this very year, when Christian IX's fifth-generation descendant - and Queen Victoria's, too - became King Frederik X of Denmark, succeeding his mother Queen Margrethe II after her surprise abdication. A one-time Playboy Prince, Frederik has matured into a down-to-earth leader with strong military credentials and a passion for the outdoors, but his recent history is not without a hint of scandal. Cheating rumors swirled last fall, a situation that seemed to deeply pain his wife, the Australian-born Mary Donaldson, who has since become the first Australian to become a European queen. Was the abdication an attempt to save Frederik and Mary's marriage?
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50. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Dickie Solo
After the death of Edwina Mountbatten in 1960, Dickie still had another 19 years of living to do, and while he was single, he was in no way alone. He had romances with plenty of women in his later years, and according to many, he had male lovers - including, it is alleged, boys - as well.
A mentor to Prince Charles, his advice to the young man may have contributed to what turned into the tragic marriage, divorce, and untimely death of Princess Diana, who was exactly the sort of woman that Dickie encouraged the playboy prince to settle down with. The men remained close through the end of Dickie's life, and Charles delivered the eulogy at both of Dickie's services in 1979.
Dickie was clearly a charming older man who counted Shirley MacClaine, Barbara Cartland, Christina Ford, and Sacha Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn, who was also his god daughter, among his paramours. Let's say it was all pretty complicated, but that would only be keeping with rest of his and Edwina's history.
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49. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Comrades in Arms
As Edwina took pains to lay low in Malta after the scandals of her affairs, Italy decided to exit the League of Nations and invade Ethiopia. To protect their children, she took them to Budapest and installed them in a hotel with their nanny and governess... and then forgot which hotel they were in. For months. As the summer of 1935 turned to fall, and then winter, they just stayed in their hotel until Edwina finally came across the paper she'd written the hotel's name on, tucked into the pocket of an outfit she hadn't worn in a while. Careless people.
But then World War II came, and with so much asked of ordinary Britons, the privileged were required to step up. For perhaps the first time in her life, the skills and networking that Edwina had spent her life developing could suddenly be applied to a grand purpose: fundraising, organizing, lobbying for help in the United States. Louis was in the fight as a Naval officer, but Edwina was equally engaged, and the experience brought them together as never before.
They would have further adventures together in India, overseeing the end of the Colonial period there, and form a distinct attachment to Indian Prime Minister Nehru that would last to the end of her life in 1960.
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48. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Careless People
Programming note: This episode is a bit more explicit than most, including strong language and descriptions of sex. If you listen with wee ones, use your judgment.
The early '30s were a roaring time for Edwina's various romances, though two in particular would have far-reaching implications for her lovers. The first, with American actor Paul Robeson, caused scandal in the London tabloids because Robeson was Black. The Royal Family considered the situation dire enough that they demanded that Louis and Edwina sue the tabloid that wrote it about for libel, and saw to it that the court would handle the case... carefully. An early morning hearing, of which no notice was given to anyone but the Mountbattens, resulted in a quick ruling in Edwina's favor, though the couple notably did not ask for damages. Paul Robeson himself was apparently quite wounded by the whole incident, having been close to Edwina and left to deal with the fallout on his own.
The second notable affair was with Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, a Grenada-born musician whom Edwina had met in New York City. She encouraged him to bring his talents to England, where he became a bona fide star of the 1920s and '30s, entertaining royals and society patrons, and his work gained national prominence with frequent airings on the BBC. During his dalliance with Edwina, there are rumors that the two became "stuck" in flagrante delicto, requiring transportation by ambulance in the pose that was causing them troubles.
Louis was outraged especially by Edwina's affair with Hutch, and as the scandal grew, Hutch found that his royal and society patrons had abandoned him. In spite of his celebrity, the Mountbattens appear to have had a role in his near erasure from history. It's all reminiscent of Fitzgerald's line in Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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47. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Unconventional Marriage
As the Roaring '20s turned into the '30s, Edwina's appetite for other lovers showed no sign of diminishing, and eventually led to a breaking point with her long-suffering husband, Louis. At one point, they decided that divorce was the best option, but quickly reconciled with new rules for their relationship: Edwina would be more discreet in her dalliances, which had previously been headline news, and Louis would be free to take lovers of his own. But a funny thing happened when he finally did - Edwina was jealous!
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46. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Let the Affairs Begin!
It didn't take long for Edwina, young, rich, and alone while her husband Louis was away with the Navy, to begin flirtations and then affairs with various suitors. There were the young men of her social strata, to be sure, but there was also a scandalous rumored fling with the notably female American entertainer Sophie Tucker, "The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas." These affairs took a toll on her marriage and her relations with the British Royal Family, but also laid the template for the Mountbatten marriage.
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45. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | The Wedding and The Honeymoon... Is Over
While Louis and Edwina Mountbatten would have a 38-year-long marriage, it isn't quite right to say it was a happy union. That first six months or so though - when they traveled through Europe and the United States, meeting Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and dining with President Warren G. Harding - was a magical time for the couple. Once they returned to England and settled into married life, things quickly went sideways. With Louis frequently at sea for long periods as a Naval officer, and Edwina living large on her huge pile of inherited money, perhaps they were destined to have an unusually promiscuous marriage.
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44. Louis and Edwina Mountbatten | Origin Stories and Engagement
As many will already know, it was the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine who would become a prominent figure in the lives of the modern world of the Windsors. Young Louis Battenberg, later Louis Mountbatten, was known as Dickie to his confidants, and was stung early when his father, First Sea Lord of the British Navy, was removed from his post at the outbreak of WWI because of his German origins. The episode would motivate his son to excel in a Naval career to reclaim the title, and the then-Mountbattens' familial closeness with the House of Windsor would give him an avenue to real political power and influence.
Edwina Ashley, future wife of Louis Mountbatten, was born into a family of means, but not of emotional connection. While her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, was kind and involved, her parents left her sister and Edwina to mostly be raised by governesses. After her mother's death, Edwina's father married for a second time to a woman Louis would later describe as "a wicked woman." Edwina was ultimately able to find refuge in her grandfather's home, where as a teenager she became a sophisticated society hostess and a friend to many in the monied elite. Sir Ernest Cassel's death, when Edwina was about 20, made her one of the richest women in England. Upon her engagement to the much-less-rich Louis Mountbatten, Sir Anthony Eden noted in his diary, "Edwina Ashley is engaged to Lord Louis Mountbatten. What a waste."
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Sources
The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, by Andrew Lownie (Amazon.com)
Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own, by Janet Morgan (Amazon.com)
Lord and Lady Mountbatten Wedding (townandcountrymag.com)
THE LIFE AND LOVES OF LADY EDWINA MOUNTBATTEN - The Washington Post
The Countess Who Counted - The Washington Post
Inside the scandalous 'bed-hopping' marriage of Louis and Edwina Mounbatten | The Sun
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43. The Mountbattens | George and Nada Mountbatten
Prince George of Battenberg, later the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was the third child of Louis Battenber and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and was by all accounts a pretty good dude. Like his father, he set his sights on a naval career, and excelled at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, entering the Royal Navy in time to participate in World War I.
His 1916 marriage to Countess Nadajda de Torby, called Nada by her friends, would become a source of significant scandal in 1934, when a former maid became a key witness in the high profile custody battle over young heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. The mail alleged on the stand that Nada and the girl's mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, were lovers, and the story was so salacious for its time that the judge cleared the courtroom entirely.
After the family dropped "Battenberg" in favor of "Mountbatten" in 1917, at the height of anti-German sentiment in England, George Mountbatten would continue being one of the few stable presences in the life of Prince Philip, and Queen Elizabeth II, his eventual niece-in-law, was extremely fond of George. His death at the young age of 45, from bone marrow cancer, was yet another tragedy in young Philip's life, while Nada would remain close friends with Edwina Mountbatten, her sister-in-law, and the wife of Philip's next mentor, Louis Mountbatten.
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Listen Now: Even The Royals
Admit it: you’re obsessed with royal families – watching them, gossiping about them, wanting to be them. It’s the stuff of fantasy. But for real life royals, the crown jewels can be more like shiny handcuffs. There are expectations and rules – and if you break them, the consequences are big, and very public. And no, we’re not just talking about Harry and Meghan. There are royal families and wild royal tales from around the world and throughout history that you have never heard before. From Wondery comes a new podcast called Even the Royals that will take you inside the cloistered world of royal families, past and present, where wealth and status often come at the expense of your freedom – and maybe even your life. This is just a preview of Even the Royals. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or at Wondery.fm/eventheroyals_trashyroyals
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42. The Mountbattens | Princess Louise of Battenberg
The second child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later, Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven) and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was Princess Louise, born July 14, 1889. While most royal were promptly shuttled into marriage, Louise was an independent, progressive young woman whose heart was set on marrying for love.
There were suitors, to be sure, but Louise was insistent that she would never marry a king or a widower, and of course, that the union be based on love. This led her down some blind alleys, most notably with a Scottish portrait and landscape artist living in Paris, whom she met when they worked together at a military hospital during the First World War. Alexander Stuart-Hill was charming but eccentric, and was decidedly not rich. Fearing her family's reaction, Louise kept the pair's engagement secret for two years; by the time she revealed her secret, her parents asked that she delay marriage until the war had ended.
After Alexander visited the Mountbattens a few times, earning the nickname 'Shakespeare' from his would-be in-laws, Louis Mountbatten had to sit his poor daughter down and explain to her that there were people called homosexuals, and he believed her fiance was one. It's unclear precisely how this resolved between Louise and Alexander, beyond the fact that the engagement ended in 1918.
Princess Louise would find love at last, however, and in a most unexpected place. Sweden's Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, recent widower of Louise's mother's cousin, visited London in 1923 and took a real shine to Louise, then into her 30s. Sure, he was a widower, and sure, he was destined to be King of Sweden, but at long last, Louise had fallen in love with someone who loved her back. Her new in-laws loved her, and she became the devoted step-mother of Gustav's children. As Princess and then Queen Consort, she was beloved by the people of Sweden for her rejection of royal airs, belief in gender equality and civil rights, humanitarian work during World War II, and democratic reforms to the monarchy.
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41. The Mountbattens | Princess Alice of Battenberg
After Louis Battenberg's (later Louis Mountbatten) successful campaign to marry Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, the couple set about having babies. The first of these, Princess Alice, was born in 1885, and came into the world congenitally deaf. Given the era, no particular accommodations were made for her, and while her condition caused many to underestimate her, she compensated by learning to lip-read (in several languages) and spoke English, German, French, and, later, Greek.
Her marriage to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark was happy only for a while, but the pair had five children. Alice occupied herself with charity work, and when hostilities broke out between Greece and Turkey, she served as a nurse at the front line, earning the deep affection of the Greek people. During the First World War, Greece exiled the royal family, and setting up in Paris, Alice and Andrew became estranged. He would ride out the rest of his life in the south of France with his mistress, while Alice's life became strange and complicated.
She fell in unrequited love, though history has not retained the identity of her affection, and developed a religious fervor. She was hospitalized in sanitariums and treated with cutting edge techniques for schizophrenia, like hitting her abdomen with X-rays to destroy her ovaries. During her convalescence, which she wanted out of, her daughters married without her knowing and her youngest son, Prince Philip, gradually grew from a child to a man, with no real connection to his mother or father.
Alice spent World War II in Athens, caring for the poor and hungry, and sheltering a Jewish family. When the Nazi occupiers came to search her home, she leaned into her deafness, pretending not to understand what they wanted until they were so bamboozled they left empty handed. She founded a religious order, but when Greece again abolished the monarchy, her son Philip, now married to Queen Elizabeth II, ensured her safe passage to Great Britain, where she lived out her days simply and humbly, as a quiet resident of Buckingham Palace.
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Sources
Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, by Hugo Vickers (Amazon)
The Extraordinary Life Of Princess Alice | Queen's Mother-in-Law | Real Royalty (YouTube)
No, Princess Alice Wasn't Really Interviewed by a Guardian Journalist Named John Armstrong (townandcountrymag.com)
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40. Meet the Mountbattens!
While royal houses are often insular and even incestuous (at least at the cousin-marrying level), new blood does manage to enter those gene pools from time to time. Meet the Mountbattens! The family's story begins in Russia, circa 1850, where the orphaned daughter of a Polish general named Julia von Hauke was serving in the household of Maria Alexandrovna, future wife of future Tsar Alexander II. Maria's brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, fell hard for the common-born Julia, a romance that was seemingly halted by Emperor Nicholas I, who wanted Prince Alexander to marry his niece.
Unable to shake off their love, the two eloped, which left Alexander persona non grata in the Russian court. Returning to his native Hesse, Prince Alexander's brother, Grand Duke Louis III of Hesse-Darmstadt, granted Julia the title of Countess of Battenberg, named for a town in the north of the duchy, and later, Princess of Battenberg.
But Europe's royal houses have both a long memory and an enormous snobbery, meaning that when Alexander and Julia's sons, The Battenberg Boys, began pursuing the granddaughters of England's Queen Victoria for marriage a generation later, the courtships - successful and unsuccessful - were rife with intrigue and scandal. But it was the marriage of Louis Battenberg to Queen Vic's granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine that would eventually transform the family from a tainted, common-born Battenberg lineage to the British Mountbattens, the house of Queen Elizabeth II's husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. But that's a story for next week.
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39. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mother of Europe
Eleanor's life was no less interesting following the death of Henry II. Rather than fade into the background, her son, King Richard I, instead made her his most powerful deputy in England while he went to the Holy Land on Crusade. In fact, Richard I was an extremely disinterested monarch and spent very little of his decade-long reign in the country. His brother, the future King John, at one point tried to raise and army and take the crown by force, but his mother put an end to that. Then there was the ransom of Richard the Lionheart, by Austrian Duke Leopold V. Eleanor personally traveled to negotiate with, and pay ransom to, Holy Roman emperor Henry VI.
Eleanor's final years were spent in the reign of her youngest son, King John, during which she traveled among her children in Europe, arranging marriages for her granddaughters. By the time she died in 1204, at the age perhaps of 82, she had seeded her offspring among the royal houses of the continent, where they and their offspring would be players for generations to come.
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38. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England
After Eleanor finally succeeded in ending her marriage to Louis VII of France, she had a brief turn of wedded bliss to the future Henry II of England. It's not that the marriage was short, just her happiness. Henry II, it turns out, was a king of questionable judgment, as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would find out. He was also loathe to cede power to their children, and little was helped when Henry's head was turned by a young noblewoman named Rosamund Clifford - an affair that contributed to Eleanor urging her sons to rise up against their father in England. For her treachery, Eleanor would spend more than a decade and a half confined; their sons were welcomed back into the fold in a "boys will be boys" way. But this was not the end for Eleanor. Upon the death of Henry II in 1189, she was the extremely involved Dowager Queen of England while her sons, Richard the Lionheart and King John, would take their turns on the throne. But those are stories for next week, in Part Three.
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37. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France
History is not without examples of powerful women, to be sure, but even in that pantheon, Eleanor of Aquitaine is a special case. In this first part of her story, Alicia takes us through her early life in the French province of Aquitaine, where her father was the ruling Duke, and her first, disastrous marriage to the future (it turns out by a matter of days) Louis VII of France. A marriage that would, after many unhappy years, be annulled, allowing Eleanor to create one of history's most audacious political romances: she married the future Henry II of England, son of Empress Matilda, paving the way for Eleanor to have been both Queen of France and Queen of England through separate marriages!
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36. Empress Matilda (But Not Queen Matilda of England)
After the unfortunate incident with the boating accident that killed Heir Presumptive William in 1120, King Henry I had a choice to make when it came to succession planning. While he had nephews through his sister and illegitimate children (galore), it was his daughter Matilda, Holy Roman Empress since her arranged marriage at the age of eight, that he tapped to take the throne when he shuffled off his mortal coil. There was a big gathering of nobles to mark the occasion, and in the presence of Henry and Matilda, they all swore fealty to their future lady king, presumably with their fingers crossed behind their backs.
Life went on for everyone for a few years yet. Matilda was re-married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and had a couple of babies, and it was in Ajou that she learned in December of 1135 that her father the king was dead. Long live the lady king!
But not really. Matilda's cousin Stephen acted with swiftness on the news of his uncle's death and, despite having sworn fealty to Matilda in the presence of said uncle back in 1127, got himself crowned King of England, with the support of all those nobles who had also sworn fealty to Matilda back in 1127! And this is how the First Cousins' War - better known as the Anarchy - began!
As you may know, there is no Queen Matilda in England's royal history, but after a protracted and draining conflict, Stephen agreed to pass the crown to Matilda's eldest son, Henry Plantagenet, launching a dynasty that would hold the English throne for centuries.
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35. Henry I of England
Today we travel back nearly a millennium to look at three of the sons of William the Conqueror. The first Norman (French) king of England, William of course defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, after which he was crowned King of England, but mostly administered the territory from his duchy in Normandy. An early example of remote work, perhaps.
William I implemented a plan of succession that ended up causing history-making trouble. His eldest son, Robert, with whom he had a difficult relationship, was given Normandy, while his second-eldest surviving son, William Rufus, was heir apparent to the English crown. His youngest surviving son, Henry, was given a hefty amount of money, which in no way satiated his ambition for power. Upon William I's death in 1087, Henry occupied himself by playing his brothers against each other. The situation would culminate in a disastrous hunting party in 1100, in which William II was killed by an arrow and the hunting party scattered to the wind. Younger brother Henry was present for what may have been William's assassination, and raced to Winchester, home of the treasury, to claim the throne in spite of his older brother Robert still living and, under the rules of primogeniture, being the more suitable claimant.
Henry I proved to be a fairly canny politician, and his marriage to Matilda of Scotland (born Edith), daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland, both strengthened his claim and enhanced the cultural status of his court. Everything was on track for a successful dynasty until 1120, when Henry's eldest son and heir apparent threw the kind of rager of a party that no one should ever drive after. To this day, it is illegal to operate watercraft while intoxicated.
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34. Maxine Elliott and the Château de l'Horizon
At the turn of the last century, the French Riviera was mostly a winter destination for those in colder climates. It turns out that "fun in the sun" and "playground for the rich" are fairly modern concepts, but in a brilliant real estate move, American actress Maxine Elliott created both. Her waterfront Château de l'Horizon, constructed in 1932, became a veritable clubhouse for the rich, famous, and powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. Alicia takes us through some of the more notable personages, stories, and affairs from the heyday of the Château de l'Horizon, under Maxine Elliott's ownership, and later that of Prince Aly Khan.
Among the luminaries who appear in this episode: Gerald and Sara Murphy; King Edward VII; William Montagu, 9th Duke of Manchester; George Keppel; Alice Keppel; Jennie Jerome Churchill; Winston Churchill; Elsie de Wolfe; Prince George, Duke of Kent; J.P. Morgan; King George V; King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson; Cecil Beaton; Cimmie Mosley; Picasso; Prime Minister David Lloyd George; the Aga Khan; Clark Gable; George Bernard Shaw; Lady Diana Cooper; Lady Doris Castlerosse; Daisy Fellows; Marion Davies; Edwina Mountbatten, Countess of Burma; The Mitford Sisters (and their brother); Randolph Churchill Jr.; Evelyn Waugh; Gloria Guinness; Kick Kennedy; Prince Aly Khan; Pamela Churchill; Rita Hayworth; Gianni Agnelli; JFK and Jackie Kennedy; Aristotle Onassis; Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, just to name a few.
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33. Monaco's Grimaldis and Princess Grace's Scorpio Party
The House of Grimaldi has ruled the tiny principality of Monaco since January 8, 1297, when Francois "The Spiteful" Grimaldi disguised himself as a monk and knocked on his uncle's castle door, launching a coup. In the violence that followed, according to legend, a woman - possibly a lover of Francois, possibly a witch he had wronged (can't it be both?) - issued a curse that has resonated across the centuries: "Never will a Grimaldi find true happiness in marriage."
The Grimaldi family was considered scandalous enough in Queen Victoria's time that she forbade any of her close relatives to marry into it, leading Prince Albert I of Monaco to marry an American heiress in 1889 - a precedent that would matter decades later when Prince Rainier III, urged on by none other than shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, began interviewing Hollywood A-listers for a very special role: Princess of Monaco. Which is how Grace Kelly abandoned the big screen for the Rock of Monaco, and would go on to celebrate her 40th birthday in High Scorpio style.
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Sources
The Grimaldis of Monaco: Centuries of Scandal, Years of Grace, by Anne Edwards (Amazon)
Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess, by James Spada (Amazon)
Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame, by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince (Amazon)
A Detailed Look at the Many Romances of Prince Albert of Monaco (esquiremag.ph)
Portrait of Princess Caroline: Love and Philanthropy (hellomonaco.com)
Who is Giving Prince Ernst August a little TLC During his Marital Strife? (vanityfair.com)
Is Princess Caroline the Latest Victim of the Grimaldi Family Curse? (vanityfair.com)
A Runaway Princess Bride and Feudal Feuds: Three Insane Royal Weddings (vanityfair.com)
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32. Ernie and Ducky, Part Two (Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha)
Once their grandmother, Queen Victoria, died in 1901, Ernie and Ducky were finally free to do what everyone sorta kinda understood they should: divorce. But sovereigns don't divorce, so the situation became a scandal in the Royal Houses of Europe, and in Russia, Ernie's sister, Empress Alexandra, blamed Ducky for it all. This became a significant issue for Ducky, who had rekindled her romance with Russian Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich (another first cousin), whose station and nationality meant that he required Tsar Nicholas II's permission to marry, and Nicky's wife was having none of it, at least until World War I broke out.
Ernie remarried into a happier union with Princess Eleonore of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich, but the decades that followed for Ernie and Ducky were marred by great tragedy, including the death of their daughter Elisabeth at just eight years old.
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Sources
Princess Victoria Melita: Grand Duchess Cyril of Russia, 1876-1936, by John Van Der Kiste (Amazon)
Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, by Hugo Vickers (Amazon)
Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria, by Theo Aronson (Amazon)
Queen Victoria's Matchmaking: The Royal Marriages that Shaped Europe, by Deborah Cadbury (Amazon)
Marie of Romania: The Intimate Life of a Twentieth Century Queen, by Terence Elsberry (Amazon)
Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters: 1860-1918, by Christina Croft (Amazon)
Queen Victoria's Grandsons (1859-1918), by Christina Croft (Amazon)
Seven Royal Marriages Almost as Disastrous as Catherine the Great’s | Vanity Fair
Princess Victoria Melita: the British princess who scandalised the royal family (historyextra.com)
Royal divorce: The princess whose divorce scandalised the royal family (express.co.uk)
DUCKY AND THE GRAND DUKE - The Washington Post
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31. Ernie and Ducky, Part One (Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha)
Queen Victoria's efforts to make suitable matches for her dozens of grandchildren was in no way a flawless endeavor. Take today's subjects, for instance. First cousins Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine (nickname: Ernie) and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (nickname: Ducky), became the subject of intense Royal meddling as Victoria pushed Ernie to propose to Ducky, not realizing that Ernie's interests ran more to the young men employed at his court in Hesse.
But the wedding did eventually happen in 1894, leading to a union so spectacularly unhappy that Queen Victoria swore off the matchmaking game entirely.
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30. Queen Victoria and Hemophilia
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a plan to use their nine children to unite Europe's various monarchies into one big, happy family. Unfortunately for those royal houses, Queen Victoria herself appears to have spontaneously developed a gene mutation for the inherited clotting disorder hemophilia.
With son Leopold affected, and two of her daughters as unwitting carriers of the disease, royal houses in Spain, Germany, and Russia all found themselves navigating a new terrain where the potential male heir to a dynasty could be at risk every day - with especially dire results in Russia.
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29. Prince Albert Victor of England
Before he was King Edward VII, Queen Victoria's son "Dirty Bertie" lived a few different lives. There was his endless womanizing and brothel-patronizing, which prompted that nickname, as well as "Edward the Caresser." But after a particular romantic scandal that Queen Victoria blamed for his father's death, Bertie married and fulfilled his duties to the empire to produce heirs (if not to produce a monogamous marriage).
Prince Albert Victor was the eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) and Alexandra of Denmark. As such, he was second in line to the English throne. A poor student, even his own siblings developed disdain for him, but for a time he seemed to come into his own in the Navy. This was cut short by his obligation to attend Cambridge, where his lackluster intellect again asserted itself.
All of this was awkward enough for Queen Victoria and The Prince of Wales, but things would only get more awkward for Prince Albert Victor. In 1889, after Metropolitan Police raided a male brothel, rumors swirled that the young man was a patron. While no charges were ever brought and no concrete evidence was provided, the blow to his reputation made finding a suitable bride difficult for his match-making grandmother. Even worse, as the reign of terror known as the Jack the Ripper Murders gripped London in 1888, Prince Albert Victor was floated as a suspect.
Whatever the truth, his story would come to an end in an influenza pandemic when he was just 28 years old, changing the course of the British Monarchy, and leaving his brother to ascend as George V.
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28. Young Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
As we continue looking at the lives and times of Queen Victoria's children and grandchildren, we're going to keep bumping into people who changed the course of human history, often for the worse. But when it comes to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria's first grandchild, events beginning with his breech birth lend a bit of context to emotional and moral deformities that he would inflict on the world in the form of World War I.
Wilhelm's mother, Princess Royal Victoria, very nearly died in childbirth when he was born in 1859, as did the young prince. The difficult delivery left him with a condition known today as Erb's Palsy, as well as possible brain damage from hypoxia during delivery. Because of his disabled and, eventually, significantly shorter left arm, his childhood was, in part, a series of painful physical ordeals. He was subjected to protracted sessions in binders and braces to try to strengthen or correct the injured arm, as well as folksier treatments like "animal baths." These are not the warm and fuzzy events you may be imagining.
Wilhelm adored his grandmother, and the feeling was quite mutual, but his mother's guilt over his injuries led to a level of estrangement between them as he grew up. The role of English doctors in his own birth, as well as in misdiagnosing his father's ultimately fatal throat cancer, appear to have fully curdled Wilhelm's feelings on England and the English. Add it all up, and by the time he ascended to the throne at 29, he was primed to do real damage on the world stage.
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27. Princess Charlotte of Prussia
While the thesis of this podcast is that our betters have always behaved badly, there are examples that really take it to the next level. Meet Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the first granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of Princess Royal Victoria, and sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose reputation for using people as pawns became legendary in her own time. From spreading rumors about her many cousins to dim their marriage prospects to hosting sex parties in order to blackmail the participants, Princess Charlotte was a headache to her family from the start.
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Sources
Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria, by Theo Aronson (Amazon link)
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters: 1860-1918, by Christina Croft (Amazon link)
The Prussian Princesses: The Sisters of Kaiser Wilhelm II, by John Van der Kiste (Amazon link)
ALL GERMANY TALKING OF IT.; The Kotze Scandal an Absorbing Topic Everywhere. - The New York Times
THE SCANDALOUS PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF PRUSSIA - Wap.org.ng
Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen - The unloved and misunderstood Princess - History of Royal Women
Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen (1879-1945) – Dearest Mama
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26. Queen Victoria's Nine Children
In her first decade and a half on the throne, Queen Victoria was pregnant for more than 40% of it. This was an irony, as she herself disliked the condition of pregnancy, and was no fan of small children, either. And yet, her lusty romance with her husband ultimately produced nine children, and a new project for the English monarchy: using matrimonial ties to stitch Europe into a friendly, peaceful future.
Well, it was a nice thought anyway. Aside from producing marriageable offspring, Victoria also inadvertently launched the gene for Hemophilia B into Europe's royal houses, a fact that becomes particularly significant to the Romanovs in just a couple of generations. More on that later.
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25. The Red Archduchess | Elisabeth Marie of Austria
Crown Prince Rudolf's death left a young daughter in mourning, but her grandfather, Emperor Franz Joseph, stepped into the breech to become guardian of young Elisabeth Marie, future Archduchess. Though the two were close, Elisabeth was a fiery child who balked at convention, much like her father.
She cajoled her grandfather into approving her first marriage, a union unsuitable for her rank, but he ultimately relented and allowed Elisabeth to wed Prince Otto of Windisch-Graetz. Otto was as surprised as anyone by the union, leading to an unfortunate incident where Elisabeth murdered his mistress with a handgun he'd given her.
Though they would have four children, the marriage floundered, and by 1918 they were separated. In 1921, always a radical, Elisabeth joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria - hence, The Red Archduchess - and met her next flame, Leopold Petznek. The two would remain together until his death in 1956, though only married for a short time - on account of Elisabeth and Otto remaining married until 1948!
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24. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and The Mayerling Incident
Content warning: Suicide
This week, we take a little trip over to the Austro-Hungarian Emprire in the latter half of the 19th century to meet one of the more scandalous figures of his age - and a man whose death most likely put the world on the path toward World War I.
Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria grew up in an emotionally and physically abusive environment, tormented by the military official in charge of his education and ignored by his mother, whose affection he craved.
Bookish and forward-thinking, young Rudolf clashed often with his father, Emperor Franz Joseph, and struck out on his own as a Playboy Prince, nurturing a close friendship with Queen Victoria's heir, Bertie, Prince of Wales. While forced into a loveless marriage, Rudolf didn't slow his extracurriculars for even a minute; he would later contract, and share with his unsuspecting wife, gonorrhoea, and it's thought that the Prince himself may have contracted syphilis as well.
These are all unseemly things, to be sure, but it is the murder-suicide that ended both Crown Prince Rudolf's life, as well as his 17-year-old mistress's, that shook up the line of succession, forged a tight alliance with Germany, and seems to have inevitably led to the beginning of hostilities in 1914.
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23. Victoria and Albert's True Romance and Unusual Victorian Pastimes
We tend to think of Queen Victoria attired in black, with a dour countenance, but as a young queen she was anything but. Her marriage to Prince Albert was the rare love match, and according to her surviving letters and journal entries, the two enjoyed a vibrant intimacy, albeit in an era where birth control wasn't really a thing. The nine children Victoria and Albert produced speaks to that.
Then, Alicia has some tales from the more ordinary lives of Victorians in England, most of which evinced an enduring - and in our day, a somewhat funny - fascination with death.
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22. A Scandalous Beginning: Sir John Conroy, Lord Melbourne, and the Lady Flora Hastings Affair
Queen Victoria was just 18 when she assumed the throne in the United Kingdom in 1837. She ruled for more than 63 years and is considered truly one of the great monarchs in history, but her reign did not start without a few hiccups. Looking at her first two years on the throne or so, we examine some of the personal politics that played out through the lenses of a few people in her orbit.
Sir John Conroy, her mother's comptroller (and possibly lover), had been integral to the much-loathed "Kensington System" under which she had been raised. While intended to make her meek and dependent on her mother and Conroy, the opposite happened, and when Victoria was finally liberated by the death of her uncle, King William IV, one of her first acts was to bar him from her presence. He remained her mother's comptroller, however, and would continue to attempt to exert malign influence for a few years to come.
The Whig Prime Minister at the time, Lord Melbourne, took a keen interest in the young Queen, and spent substantial amounts of time educating her on the finer points of politics in the Kingdom. This, of course, set less charitable tongues wagging, particularly given Lord Melbourne's fairly sordid background. Seriously - how did this guy manage to become PM?
In what became a genuine stain on Victoria's early years, the Lady Flora Hastings affair was a culmination of her enduring anger over the Kensington System, and gave John Conroy a last chance to attack the new Queen's judgment. When one of her mother's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, developed a swollen belly and other signs of pregnancy, rumors swirled that the unmarried Lady Flora was pregnant with John Conroy's child. Animosity ran deep on all sides, and Victoria ultimately made clear that Lady Flora would not be permitted in her mother's household until she submitted to an invasive examination by the royal physician. Tragically, Lady Flora was not pregnant; her true condition was an advanced cancerous tumor on her liver, and the whole scandal - including Lady Flora's death just months later - left Victoria personally ashamed and publicly damaged.
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21. Young Princess Victoria and the Kensington System
We tend to think of royal upbringings as fairly entitled, but for the future Queen Victoria, her childhood was more like a hostage situation. After her father's death when she was just an infant, her mother and (maybe) her mother's lover went to great lengths to control every aspect of her life. Young Victoria was simply never allowed to be alone, including sleeping in her mother's bedroom until the day she became Queen, and was not permitted to walk down stairs without holding the hand of either her mother or her governess. This so-called Kensington System, invented by her mother and Sir John Conroy, also kept her isolated from other children and her Hanoverian relatives, with the intent of making Victoria dependent on them for the rest of her life. In that, it was a colossal failure. As Queen, Victoria barely maintained a relationship with her mother, and Sir John Conroy was specifically banned from her apartments in one of her first acts as monarch.
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20. Alexander II of Russia
In the never-ending see-saw that was Romanov rule in Russia, a truly forward-thinking Tsar finally came to power in 1855. Alexander II accomplished Catherine the Great's never-achieved emancipation of Russia's serfs, among a host of other good-government reforms, leading his newly free and suddenly energized public to call him Alexander the Liberator.
Likely influenced by a grand tour of Europe when he was a young man (and during which he and a 20-year-old Queen Victoria may have had a bit of a romance), he took the throne amidst plenty of chaos left over from his father, Nicholas I's, rule. Russia was still bogged down in the Crimean War, for instance, a situation Alexander resolved by simply withdrawing Russia from the conflict and negotiating a disadvantageous peace that allowed him to focus on the stuff he really liked.
Under his leadership, with freedom in fairly full flower in Russia, new business formation went through the roof, new rail lines were built to expand commerce and promote defense, and municipalities and regions gained more rights for self-government. Trials by jury were the new fashion, and Russia even found a way to rid itself of a money-losing North American colony on the western coast of Canada.
But Russia remained Russia, and radical groups still chafed under Romanov rule. Alexander survived a number of assassination attempts during his reign, but in 1881, a bombing finally left him mortally wounded - and the bombers' stories would go on to intersect with Russian history in a profound way just a few decades later.
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19. Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich
Not every Romanov Nicholas got to be a Tsar. In the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century, the grandson of Nicholas I, Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich, drove his royal family absolutely batty. The first in his family to go to college (as we would put it today), the dapper military hero scandalized St. Petersburg with his affair with an American woman and his theft - for money - of a valuable religious icon from his mother.
He was banished repeatedly; first to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan; later to Crimea, and eventually found his way back to Tashkent, where he was instrumental in developing canals, art museums, and irrigation projects. His death in Tashkent in January 1918 was certainly set against the backdrop of the revolution in Russia that swept his family from the throne; his relatives back in St. Petersburg were murdered by the Bolsheviks six months later.
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18. Nicholas I of Russia
Upon the death (or departure?) of Russia's Alexander I in 1825, an unusual power struggle developed between his two surviving brothers. The eldest, Constantine, declined the opportunity to take power, leaving Nicholas, the youngest son of Paul I, the only legitimate candidate.
The delay, and apparent passing over of the next in line, prompted an uprising called the Decembrist Revolt, and while Nicholas successfully put it down, the rebellion likely heightened his more autocratic impulses, including the creation of an extensive secret police force whose job was to blot out any and all who might plot against his authority.
His efforts to control all facets of his subjects' lives led to horrifying outcomes. Russian Jews, in particular, were forced into military conscription, and Jewish children were often sent by the state to schools far away from their families and communities, where they could be indoctrinated in an effort at Russification. Strongly opposed to civil liberties and popular revolution, he engaged with Europe largely to back monarchs against their people. After Russia's military incompetence was revealed in the Crimean War, Nicholas died after a 30 year reign when he refused medical treatment for pneumonia. Contemporaries described it as "passive suicide," and a close aid wrote soon after, "The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake."
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17. Queen Victoria's Trashy Hanoverian Uncles
It's almost a historical accident that England's Queen Victoria, granddaughter of King George III, was born at all. Her father, George III's fourth son, shared his many brothers' predilection for the freedom of a bachelor's life, so when the heir apparent of the next generation, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth, the princes of England found themselves in a race to marry and produce legitimate offspring to eventually take the crown.
Victoria's father, Edward, Duke of Kent, was high up in the line of succession himself, but having succeeded in marrying and producing Victoria, he promptly died - meaning that there was no chance that he and her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, could produce a male heir to leapfrog her in the line.
It's safe to say that the sons of George III were a blight on the country and the monarchy, but somehow out of that whole mess, one of Great Britain's finest and most beloved monarchs emerged.
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16. Alexander I of Russia
In the see-saw nature of Russian leadership, Catherine the Great had died before establishing her grandson, the future Alexander I, as her heir, leaving Alexander's father, Paul I, to take the big chair in his stead. This... went poorly for Paul, who was assassinated by a group of his nobles after just four and a half years. Alexander I became Emperor of Russia in 1801, and spent the first part of his reign navigating a complicated relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte's France.
After helping the European alliance to victory in the Napoleonic Wars, he became drawn to mysticism, and gradually seemed to withdraw from interest in the duties of a monarch. When Alexander's wife, Louise of Baden, took ill and required a change of weather in 1825, the couple boarded a train heading south. Stories here diverge; in the official account, Alexander I caught typhus on the journey, dying in the southern town of Taganrog. But another story developed, too, and continues to captivate. A decade later, a mysterious monk named Feodor Kuzmich arrived in Siberia with a knowledge, bearing, and wisdom that grew the legend that the monk was in fact Alexander, having faked his own death to escape the bondage of his title.
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15. Emperor Paul I of Russia
As the long reign of Catherine the Great wound down, she made moves to ensure the succession of her grandson, Alexander, but those were still incomplete by the time she died. Instead, it was her estranged son Paul who became emperor, and while his reign was not long, it was spiteful and much reviled by both the public and the elites. In just four and a half years, Paul I passed nearly 8,000 laws engineered to roll back the achievements and advances made by his mother, who he blamed for his father's death, and plunge Russia backward.
It was only four and a half years before a conspiracy of nobles attempted to depose Paul by forcing him to sign papers of abdication. When he resisted, they beat him to death, leaving the throne to his son Alexander, who had known of the plot for a bloodless coup, and never forgave himself for not interceding in a plot that, in fact, led to his father's murder. We'll be back next week with the mystery of Emperor Alexander I.
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14. Catherine the Great
One of history's great ironies is that one of Russia's most successful periods occurred under the leadership of a monarch with not a drop of Russian blood. Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great, was a minor Prussian princess whose fairly horrible mother set her sights on achieving notoriety through her daughter.
Fortunately for young Catherine (who was born Sophie), Frederick the Great of Prussia had a political project to strengthen ties between his country and Russia, and Russia's Empress Elizabeth needed her heir, the future Peter III, to find a wife, have babies, and continue the Romanov line. All eyes turned to the 16-year-old from Anhalt-Zerbst.
The marriage went poorly, but the real surprise occurred on the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1762. While crowned as Empress Consort to her husband, Peter III, it was only a matter of months before Catherine deposed her husband, forced him to sign an abdication, and became Russia's sole ruler, and the longest-ruling Empress in Russia's history.
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13. Empress Anna of Russia
It feels safe to say that when Russians recall a leader's reign as a "dark era," we're into some deeply, deeply dark events. Empress Anna, a niece of Peter the (Not So) Great, had survived many humiliations before Russia's Supreme Privy Council elevated her to Empress; they thought she would be easy to control, but instead, her decade-long reign was characterized by Anna's cruelty and capriciousness. A career of personal vendettas was fueled by her limitless power and a secret police system she stood up to discover and end plots against her.
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12. The Time The Dutch Ate Their Prime Minister
For the Dutch Republic, 1672 was a series of existential catastrophes that nearly saw the nation swallowed by France's Louis XIV. But the internal push and pulls that culminated in the brutal murder and partial consumption of the man who'd run the place for a couple of decades actually began much, much earlier, when Martin Luther (perhaps) hammered his Ninety-Five Theses into a church door, sparking a flowering of dissonant thought across Europe, as well as a brutal regime of repression to try to tamp it down.
Across the 80 year struggle for Dutch independence from Spain, a succession of Princes of the House of Orange ably managed the country's political and military affairs. But once the war ended, Dutch nobility preferred to decentralize power through a Republican model of government, putting the House of Orange and its supporters on the margins. This went pretty well, right up until it didn't, and as the calamities of 1672 unfolded, public anger against the longtime administrator of the country, Johan de Witt, grew into the kind of blind rage that leads to dangerous mob violence. In The Hague that August, it led all the way to cannibalism.
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11. Queen Camilla
The last couple of years have been a time of enormous change for the House of Windsor, the United Kingdom, and the 14 nations that comprise the Commonwealth, and we are so grateful to be joined by podcasting superstar and Royal watcher extraordinaire Kristen Meinzer to discuss.
When Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022, Prince Charles, England’s longest-serving Prince of Wales, immediately fulfilled the obligation he had waited 73 years to meet: He became King Charles III, and his second wife, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, was coronated Queen alongside him on May 6 of this year.
It’s no secret that Charles and Camilla’s history is… complicated. Kristen walks us through the decades of history behind their 2005 marriage, as well as the toxicity of Camilla’s close friendships with some of the UK’s least savory media personalities.
Check out more of Kristen’s Royal (and more) watching at The Daily Fail podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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10. Peter The (Not So) Great
Pausing from the messiness of Plantagenet England, Alicia takes us on a trip to the east to visit Mother Russia, circa 1700, where the Romanov Tsar Peter the Great was busily acquiring lands, founding cities, and reforming the institutions of a country that - largely through his efforts - would become a major player on the world state for centuries to come. But with those accolades and accomplishments, it's important to recall that the dude was really, really trashy - as his two wives, many mistresses, and romantic rivals would attest to. At least, those whose heads didn't end up in jars.
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09. Catherine of Valois
Alicia continues with our inexorable march to the Tudor dynasty with yet another French princess contributing to the Plantagenet - now technically Lancastrian - line of the English monarchy. Her marriage to King Henry V, grandson of John of Gaunt and great grandson of King Edward III, was cut tragically short when Henry died on military adventure in France. Doubly tragically, Henry's child with Catherine, Henry VI, had been born just months before his demise.
What's a 21-year-old, beautiful, royal Dowager Queen to do? An early flirtation with a member of the Beaufort line was stymied by an act of Parliament, but all's well that ends well, because that left the door open for a (presumably) dashing young Welshman employed in the household by the name of Owen Tudor. Yes - through a possible secret marriage to Catherine - he became the grandfather of those Tudors.
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08. John of Gaunt
It's probably impossible to fully understand the events leading up to the Tudor dynasty without talking about perhaps the 14th century's most singular figure - at least from a historical perspective. John of Gaunt was the third son of King Edward III, and through beneficial marriages, became extremely rich in both land and money. His successes on the battlefield and the untimely death of his brother, Edward the Black Prince, made him a powerful political operator. But perhaps the most consequential thing John of Gaunt did was carry on a years-long extramarital affair with a woman named Katherine Swynford - resulting in four children who were given the surname "Beaufort." Theirs was a questionable lineage that would nevertheless have its day in the sun almost a century later.
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07. Joan of Kent
While the 14th century wasn't exactly a hotbed of feminist fervor in England, the place wasn't without its powerful and intriguing women. Joan of Kent was one. Though her family was caught up in the armed conflicts that ended the reign of Edward II, once Edward III threw off the restraints imposed by his mother, Isabella of France, he welcomed Joan's family - his relatives - back to his court.
This might have been the happy end of Joan's role in history except for the little matter of her bigamy - and eventual marriage to Edward III's eldest son, Edward, the Black Prince. While the Black Prince did not live long enough to succeed his father, his union with Joan made her the mother of the final Plantagenet King of England, Richard II.
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06. Isabella of France
The War of the Roses was hardly the first period of civil war in England. In fact, Edward III's father oversaw such a period long before Eddie III's kids kicked off a few generations of bloody sibling rivalry. Interestingly for the age, Edward II's wife, Isabella of France, had a starring role in ending his disastrous reign. Alicia has the full story, from the 12-year-old fully royal child bride to, many years later, her return to England with an invasion force provided by the Count of Hainaut (in modern day Belgium), with which she waged a successful campaign against her husband and, perhaps, his lover, Hugh Despenser.
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05. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Unsurprisingly, the French Revolution didn’t happen particularly spontaneously. Years of financial mismanagement, poor crops, massive unemployment, and a swelling population in Paris itself all contributed to a growing dissatisfaction with King Louis XVI and the monarchy in general. The King’s cause wasn’t helped at all by a lingering suspicion that his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, was a profligate spender and an Austrian spy, but Marie Antoinette’s reputation took a calamitous hit in 1785, when an ambitious con artist named Jeanne de la Motte hatched a plan to acquire one of the most expensive jewelry pieces ever crafted.
Playing on the vanity and avarice of one of her lovers, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Jeanne and her crew succeeded in boosting a piece worth $2 million – and forever ended any goodwill the French public had toward their Queen.
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04. The War of the Roses
Welcome to the Court of the Trashy Royals, friends! Today, Alicia takes us on a wild ride through the family values of the descendants of England’s King Edward III (1312-1377), who basically spent the next century-plus fighting over who would wear the big crown. The question was finally settled by the emergence of England’s first Tudor king, whose red- and white-rose motif represented a final coming together of the White Rose of the House of York and the Red Rose of the House of Lancaster.
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03. Nero, ft. Agrippina the Younger
Rounding out the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome is Nero, the fifth and final of his line. While his ascension was initially met with relief, it was only a few short years before Nero’s hands were as covered in blood as his predecessors’, but it was a fire that finally sealed his fate.
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02. Boudica
While Rome expanded its reach across Europe and onto the isles of Britannia, not everyone was on board with domination from a distant bureaucracy. Rebellions and uprisings in Roman-held territory were not particularly uncommon, but a series of missteps by Roman governors in what is now the United Kingdom amounted to a series of costly own-goals.
After Caligula’s successor, Claudius, gained a foothold in Britain in AD 43, his armies were forced to put down an uprising four years later, which likely laid the groundwork for a bloody insurgency that nearly cost Rome its entire occupation in AD 60 or 61.
Who was the fierce commander who set the legions of Rome on their heels? It was Boudica of the Iceni, a once Rome-friendly Queen of her people who became an icon of the fury of a woman pushed too far, and a keystone of the modern UK’s national identity.
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01. Caligula
Imagine being so destructive, and so capricious in your violence and sadism, that even two thousand years after you shake off your mortal coil, your childhood nickname still evokes wickedness, wantonness, and profound corruption among all who hear it.
Welcome to Trashy Royals, friends, where we begin with Rome’s third emperor – and among its most notorious – Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known to his parents as Caligula (“Little Boots” in their native tongue).
Caligula’s path to Roman Emperor was bloody and twisted, with his family murdered or exiled by Emperor Tiberius, who in turn became something of a sadism teacher to his receptive student. History is replete with examples of poor rulers and bad people, but few figures combine the worst of both as shockingly as Caligula.
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Trashy Royals - Coming May 4!
New from the team at Hemlock Creatives, Alicia and Stacie (Trashy Divorces) turn their jaded eyes toward the long history of Our Betters, only to find that they, too, are raging dumpster fires. Weekly episodes begin May 4 - subscribe now and never miss the trashcandy!
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Podcasten Trashy Royals är skapad av Hemlock Creatives. Podcastens innehåll och bilderna på den här sidan hämtas med hjälp av det offentliga podcastflödet (RSS).
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.