Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex & Scandal in Hampton Court

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

From Catherine Howard’s affairs whilst she was with Henry VIII, to Charles II’s mistress staging a lesbian wedding as part of a threesome… Hampton Court has seen it all. Today’s guest is Gareth Russell, historian and author of The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court, to explore a selection of the sex and scandal that’s taken place there at the hands of its royal residents. Who were some of the most popular and powerful mistresses to live there? What was Catherine Howard’s downfall with Henry VIII? Why was it more beneficial for James I to have mail mistresses? Let’s go Betwixt the Sheets to find out. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more with you to help you, help yourselves, help me, help you help everybody. Stay safe and untrigured as we continue. This is your fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty subjects in an adulty way. And you should be an adult too.

And now we've got that little lot out of the way. I am ready to do this if you are. Picture the scene, betwixters. It is a bracing winter in 1603 at Hampton Court, and as the winds howl outside, inside the Great Hall, a party is underway. But it's not just any party. Oh, no, no, no.

This is the mask of the Chinese magician. It's King James I's first's first New Year at the Palace, and let me tell you, this is a man who loved a knees up. He also loved his male lovers. We're not entirely sure what his wife, Queen Anne, thought about that, but at the very least, she seemed to tolerate them. One such lover, Sir Philip Herbert, is leading the entertainment with a dance. He is wearing a costume laden with heavy sapphires and emeralds. It is extra. There is one problem, however. Sir Philip hasn't rehearsed this, And as he dances his way through the Great Hall of Hampton Court,

the sheer weight of the costume means that by the end of it, he's struggling to even stand up. Can you even imagine the anxiety the next day? What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dam. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Throughout history, the royals have wanted to portray themselves a straight edge, wise, sensible, far better than us mere mortals. But if you pull back the curtain, you will see just how scandalous they really are. Joining us today is Gareth Russell, author of The Palace, from the Tudors to the Windsor's to the Windsor 500 years of history at Hampton Court. Which of Henry the 8's wives cheated on him within these very palace grounds? Which King had his mistress stage a lesbian wedding as part of a threesome

at Hampton Court? And which Hampton Court resident did Samuel Peep's describe as the prettiest girl in the world? I am ready to find out if you are betwixtors. Let's do it. So hello and welcome to betwixt the sheets. It's only Gareth Russell. How are you doing? I'm good, Kit. I mean, first of all, hats off for maybe my favourite podcast name ever. Love it.

I'm good. I'm very well. Yeah, it's always a bit surreal when the book hits the shelves and the first two weeks. It's just a bit of a odd feeling. But it's exciting. I'm holding it in my hand as we speak.

This is a chunky old book, Gareth. She is a chunky gal. She is. This is, I mean, it's such a beautiful, gorgeous witch book. I suppose my first question has got to be, what made you want to write this? Give me the full title, hang on, The Palace,

from the Tudors to the Windsors 500 years of history at Hampton Court. I think I have to sort of be honest about this and say that it was much better intuition than mine. I had written a biography of Catherine Howard a few years ago and my agent was over in England and I showed her and her husband around Hampton Court because it's mentioned in the Catherine Howard book.

And as he walked through it, my agent said, there's a book here about the whole history of this. And once I started looking into it, I just thought this is extraordinary. There hadn't been a social history. So there hadn't been a history of the people who had lived there since the 1880s.

There hadn't really been a history of Hampton Court that looked at the actual people who'd lived there across the year. So I thought it was just an embarrassment of riches and I'm so, so glad I did it because I was spoiled for choice with all the scandals and the politics and the personal things that just intersected. over the centuries there. So it was a wonderful, wonderful topic to write about.

Hampton Court is a place that I don't think I've actually been there, but it's definitely something that if you've studied history, British history, for even a minute it comes up. It's everywhere. There's kings and queens living there. There's political shenanigans happening. It just seems to be everywhere. But just for anyone who's listening to this, who also hasn't been there, or there might be people going, Hampton, what? Just explain to us what Hampton Court is. Where is it? Depending on where you start the centre of London on your map, it's about 17 to 19 miles outside the centre of London. It is a colossal, half-Tudor-era, half-Baroque palace in the Bank of the Thames. It was originally owned by monastic orders,

that then later became royal property. Between 1529 and 1760, it was one-off the royal family's main residences. And the reason why it's half-tudor is, and the reason why it's half-tudon, half baroque is that in the 16thieu the third tore down one shooter half of it and replaced it with a sort of middle finger to Versailles, that his rival Louis the 14th was nearly finished building in France. And so there's this fantastic juxtaposition

of different architectural styles for a book like this is a gift because it means you can walk through the centuries as you walk through it. The palace at one point was at the center of a really enormous hunting estate. It was about 10,000 acres called the Hampton Court chase. That's not a lot smaller. but there are still some smallness of cottages and houses in the grounds,

which they later used to house minor royals or people who had been admired by the royals and maybe they were in financial streets, so they give them home in Hampton Courts. So it has been after 1760 a really interesting place and before 1760 a really important place. And that's what keeps the history of it, chugging along and great for the writer and the reader. Do they still have the houses in there? I want to know who lives there now. So in 1986, there was a fire in the Baroque Wing that was restored, but it shone a light on, it's called the Grace and Favor system

that these people put up in it. And the newspapers got very angry about it and made people get very angry about it. And so there are still some namesplates, if you know where to look, if you see little sort of staircases or little nooks, you'll see sort of the right honourable so-so and so-and-so or the Dodger lady, whoever, their name plates, but they're not generally replaced. And actually, during the writing off it, I was taken into one where they'd been invocated by someone who passed away.

And I thought, oh, they're not going to put anyone else in here. They're kind of letting that system dwindle away, which seems a bit of a shame, partly because the justification for coming up with it was twofold. The first was that it helped the royals help people, like Michael Faraday, or a lady called Elizabeth Dockery, who was a Lord Chief Justice's widow, who found out at her husband's funeral.

mind wives had no access to their own money at this stage until they became widows. But she found out that her husband had invested and lost everything and never told her. Because she was a bishop's widow, she appealed to the Supreme Governor of the Church, which was Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was sort of so outraged on her behalf. She stepped in and gave her this apartment at a no longer used Hampton Court, you know, as the sort of compound. So it was a great place for people who were struggling.

But the other half of it was that when the system was being sort of investigated and set up in 1842, the Earl of Lincoln was one of the courtiers involved in setting it up. And he's told the parliamentary committee, this makes really good financial sense. Because if we give half the rooms, just sort of, you know, very wealthy people, Dodger County, as a cabin can have it because it's cheaper for her to run than these vast estates. She might be left as a widow. But it means that that section of the palace will be maintained by something other than the public purse. The people who get the flat will invest the money in keeping these rooms in good condition.

And that way these parts of our national heritage will architecturally stay sound, but we won't be liable for the cost of maintaining the whole thing. So I think it is a bit of a shame. The most interesting person to live there, the house that she lived in in the grounds is now privately bought residence.

But the last Tsar's sister, Grand Duchess Kisenia, was given a house there after she escaped the Russian Revolution. And they think that one of the reasons why she was put so far into the Hampton Court estate was that there was still a concern that the KGB or another communist organisation might try to kidnap her.

So they put her as far into the estate as they could. So it has, even after the royals stop living there and it becomes a sort of blue-blooded compound, it stays a really, really fascinating place. So it started off as a monastery, but who was it that kind of went, right, I'm going to turn it into... Is it a castle? Can we call it a castle?

Palace. It's usually to get, it just gets palace, partly because this, by the way, It could be me making a mistake. My understanding of it is because it's not fortified, it doesn't technically qualify as a castle. So it comes. Yeah, I think generally, by the time it's turned into your residence, there's no longer a risk of siege.

So it's not a defensive position. So basically, it's an estate for years. When there's a villa there when the Romans are there, then Liddy Godiva's son owned it. If anyone knows, they're riding naked through the streets. Yeah, Elfgar owned it. And then the Normans had other ideas. to a cousin of William the Conqueror who'd been at Hastings, and his family were big into the

Crusades. And when one of them was in Jerusalem, in one of the Crusades, he was very impressed by perhaps the most unique branding crossover to the Middle Ages, which was Warrior Monks, the Knights Hospitler. And he said, I will give you a piece of land in England. And that was Hampton Court. They were given this piece of land. So they turn it later into sort of monastic manner. and to keep their income nice and tidy, they start to rent the manner of Hampton out to well-to-do people. And then it becomes a bit like the leader Hampton's. Hampton becomes a place where you want to be seen being rich

and out of the city at the height of summer. And some of Henry the 7th quarter years rented, the last person to rent it is Cardinal Woolsey, Henry I's early chief minister. And because he's so influential, the monks give him a 99-year lease, which means basically it will be his for as long as he's alive. So yeah, he has this really long lease.

He has a lot of money. And he is allowed under the terms of this lease to do what he wants to it as long as he maintains a chapel there. Because it's still technically church property. So he transforms it into this cutting edge, very chic residence. But when he falls from favor, Henry the 8 takes it. And then, of course, all the monastic orders are closed down during the Reformation anyway. So it's absorbed into the royal property portfolio in the late.

1520s and early 1530s, and that's how we end up with it. It was Walsy that built it up and then Henry had it back. Yeah, Henry really, he had it for about four years. It's a sly bugger, wasn't he? He says it's a property exchange and he's like, I would love your palace and in return, I will give you the priory of St. Mary Magdalene in Essex and it's the equivalent of someone saying, if you give me your first class seat in British Airways, I'd love to give you this tricycle and saying that that's a fair exchange. The next really, really, big change, though, is when Henry marries his second wife, Anne Boleyn, she comes from two families, the butlers on her grandmother's side and the Billins on her fathers who are big into architecture.

So she has a lot of ideas and she basically adds 50% in size onto it, because she designs a whole new wing that will house the Queen, the Queen Consort's apartments. So that's how we end up with it being like at the peak size. The basic footprint of the palace is established by Anne Boleyn between 1533. in 1535. So it's interesting because I didn't, well, I don't know much about Hampton Court, really,

you don't know, but where I do know it from is more about Henry's otherwise Catherine Howard, who was said to have got up to all manner of naughtiness. Miss Chief, yeah. Yeah, she got in trouble,

didn't she? But I didn't know that Anne Boleyn had decked it up, which is even more of a power move. Now I think of it on Catherine's part that she moved into Anne Boleyn's house and fuck someone else.

Which is Christ. Anne had these very grand, grand specific plans. Anne was sort of the kind of person who no red world of interior or whatever the equivalent was. Amblin had she me alive would have been a very sort of understood Chanel jacket and the cover of

architectural digest saying about her lovely country homes. It was just finished around the time Amblin was executed and James Seymour literally gutted it. She gutted the apartments because they were too much like Anne. And so they weren't finished by the time Jane Seymour then died at Hampton Court in childbed. the first queen they're really finished for is Catherine

and things really don't go well because yet her downfall starts there so she comes back from this tour of the north in 1541 and everything's been going so well for her. She's about 18, 19 at this stage. Everyone's saying she's this great beauty, she's managed, she seems to be growing in confidence. Her husband, a few months earlier at Hampton Court,

had been very sick within probably like a malarial infection and nearly died. So I think she sort of is in a position where she's thinking, like, I just have to wait this out. The idea of every gold digger throughout history. I'm just going to hang in here. You just need to hate and wait, hon. That's all you need to do.

If only that plan had actually worked for her because she did not wait. Yeah, and so she, they get back. And when Henry went on tour, the whole Privy Council, so essentially the cabinet of the day went with him, apart from three who stayed in London. And while they had been in London, a former servant of the Queen's family

had gotten in touch and said, look, we didn't sign up to serve for her when she became queen because we know she lost her virginity to her fiancé before she came to court. And there's a really strict reason law under Henry at the means if you hear anything and don't report it, you become guilty in it. So the Archbishop of Canterbury in a tis

tells Henry the day after the royal family get back to Hampton Court, there's these investigations. So who was the snitch? Who was the person that told the bishop to start with? The snitch was by proxy. So this very serious former maid called Mary Lassels, who had worked in the nursery of Catherine's cousin, but had been friendly with one of the boyfriends. And her brother, John Lassels, had become a really strong evangelical preacher. And he was pressuring her to ask Catherine for a job. And she said, well, I'm not going to. Told him. And he then went and told the Archbishop. and he had access to the archbishop

because he was on the sort of preaching network that the archbishop supported. And I think in the Archbishop of Canterbury's defence, Lassel basically handed him a grenade and was like, by the way, it's your problem now, not mine. And what they did was, for a few days, Catherine is totally unaware that there's a problem hurtling towards her.

They divide the counsellors up into two groups. They divide the witnesses up into two groups so they can't cross-contaminate each other's testimony so that no one's any idea what questions they're being asked. But the really big problem that comes out of these early investigations, and bear in mind at this stage, what they're investigating is did Catherine lose her virginity to this fiancée before she came to court? Because under contemporary church law, if you said yes, you were going to marry someone and then slept with them, that was considered as legally binding as if you'd gone through a marriage service. You couldn't really be eligible to marry someone else. Ah, right.

So they are at this stage looking at, is she even queen? You know, has this happened? they have all the information collected and then it emerges the name of this boyfriend or fiancé whatever you want to say was a guy called Francis Durham and that rings a bell to one of the councillors who realizes

that Francis Deerum is now part of the Queen's staff Oh no! She recently appointed him as a gentleman usher who's sort of like the... Oh, Catherine. Yeah, it's sort of like the bouncers at their royal apartments. Never ever, ever fuck a bouncer, Catherine.

That's just... No. Have we learned not? Have we learned nothing, child? So they then start this investigation. They then come to her and she denies everything. And what then happens is they're given orders by the king to keep her in her apartments until the investigation is concluded.

But that sort of kicks her over the edge. And she starts to go into like a full spiral. Oh, you would. Yeah, you would. Of course you would. And in my biography officer, I argued I think it's in this mood that she makes a really question. decision where she tries to throw the Archbishop off the cent of Francis Deeran. And look, I don't think anything happened with Francis after the wedding. I really don't.

But she says, you know, Francis, I had finished with Francis long before I came to court, which I think she was telling the truth about. In fact, he thought I was in love with someone called Thomas Culpepper, which is equally ridiculous. And the archbishop, like, why on earth would you mention him? So they order a search of his room. in Hampton Court, and they find a love letter from her to him after she married the king. And they start to interrogate her ladies and wedding, and all of a sudden the investigation has shifted to post-marital matters, and it's become more serious. They torture Francis Durham, the pre-marital one, because they believe he hoped to marry her, and that means you

hope for the king's death, but they really go after Thomas Culpepper. And it turns out that Her and Culpeper have been meeting privately since Easter during the tour at night. What's interesting is one of the letters I found from one of the councillors said, we really were not interested in investigating whether she did it or not with him, because it doesn't matter, because all you have to do under the new treason laws is commit an action that looks like you're planning to commit treason. So her meeting with him at night, it's irrelevant whether they did it or did not, because it's enough.

And in fact, really interestingly, in one of the interrogations of Hampton Court, Thomas Culpepper says, we hadn't slept together. I can promise you that we wanted to, and we might have in the future. And it's the Earl of Hartford, one of the councillors,

he says, but that's already too much. Under the law, that's as good as a confession. So she is taken from Hampton Court in the middle of November and she's taken upriver to a former nunnery in Middlesex

called Sion House, where she's kept under house arrest. while they go through the rest of the investigations. Francis Derman Thomas Culpepper publicly executed two weeks before Christmas. There is a brief moment where it looks like she might get away with it or be divorced or annulled as Queen and sent away because the House of Lords kicks up a bit of a fuss after the new session of Parliament in January

because they point out she's a queen and she was a member of the aristocracy by birth. There needs to be a trial. And we've killed a few queens by this point, well, one. trip the other one out. Yeah, and basically people are saying like, you know, the Angolin trial didn't really go well for it. She actually basically turned everything around and had somebody quite clear she was being framed.

And by the end of the trial day, we're singing ballads about how much they loved her in the streets. Maybe not such a great idea that we do this again. But the difference was there wasn't really any evidence against Anne Boleyn. They had a mountain of evidence against Catherine. And so Catherine declines the offer of a trial. Oh. See, I think with Anne Boleyn, a lot of what she probably had been told was,

Anne was never subservient enough. Anne Henry often showed mercy if you threw yourself at his feet. I can see what's happening. Also, bear in mind, she had the examples of not just Anne Boleyn, but his first wife who divorced, fought on tooth and Neil,

and got basically shunted into exile. The fourth, who cooperated, got a very generous settlement. So I wonder, is she trying to think, look, just go with this. Just as short as possible. Yeah, just give him what he wants. Do not fight back.

And she finds out in the second. and week of February that it hasn't worked and they have to manhandle her into a winning barge when she realizes she's going to the Tower of London. You know, Catherine often is dismissed as sort of like an airhead or whatever people. But what I found was I just think she was in her late teens, early 20s,

and her private life was not any more colourful than most people's are, probably a bit unwise, very unwise, but publicly she was very aware of what positions she had. And so the night before her execution, she asks, well, they bring the block into her room. so that she can practice laying her head on it so she'll get it right on the day.

And the execution of the 13th of February goes off as smoothly as it can. And so that is the road. Hampton Court is the place where all the dominoes fall in on her. I'll be back with Gareth and Hampton Court after this short break. Do you think that she was,

guilty is the wrong word because really what were her crimes is that she fancied somebody else and that she might have fancied somebody before the king. Yeah. But like, do you think, Like the things that they were actually accusing her of were real because they did torture Culpepper and the other Francis person.

Well, they also tortured a guy called Damport, who was a friend of Frant Durems, which was monster. I mean, they ripped his teeth out, apparently. It was really just horrific. Because I'd say anything. I'd be like, yeah, he fingered me. Absolutely. Yeah, whatever. That's not.

Yeah. To give Francis credit, he would not budge on, no matter what they did to him. He would not budge nothing happened after the back. Oh, my God. What's really sad with him is everything that he said on the rack, he'd already said of his own free will in the first round of interrogations. He stuck to everything. And what was quite interesting with the way they did it,

I'm not defending the councillors because they're a fairly odious bunch usually. But to give them credit in this case, they were genuinely investigating it. I don't think when they started doing those questions early on to people who'd known the couple before and the people who'd worked for the family, they really kept them surprisingly compartmentalized. And part of the real tragedy of it was some of the servants were giving testimony that they thought would help,

but it actually was building the prosecution's case for them. So I think I can't be certain that Heron Culpeper never did it. But it's very possible that Culpeper was telling the truth when he said that day, like we haven't done it yet, it's possible. But under the terms of just how severe Henry V had made the treason laws where you could criminalise intent or credible intent. Just thoughts, really?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reason why people often say why Francis, why was he executed if he was just the pre-married or fiancé? The reason Francis was executed was his application for a job in her household after she became queen was used to say he's still in love with her and still hopes to marry her one day. And that by an extension of logic means you want the king to die. That's how they got him.

and Henry it still has some of his defenders or people who say it was all contextual.

I think you have to understand. No, I don't like him. No, the treason

laws that he implemented his children who were not exactly the softest bunch in

the world his children dialed them way back because they were so extreme that it created a world

in which what you thought was a great snitch charter for the last 15 years of his reign

fuck man oh even mad like just being there at that time and the suspicion, the paranoia. It's North Korea with cod pieces, yeah. Yeah.

What makes me so sad about Catherine's story is that there's a real naivety to her. I don't think she's stupid. It's like, she's too honest. It's like people were saying to her, did you fancy this guy? And she'd be like, yeah, but like everyone thought I fancied him. But then it was just like, shush, shush. That's it. I think it's really interesting that with Anne Boleyn, their big thing was

like they were concerned about what she would say because they kind of knew that if you gave Anne a rhetorical spoon, she'd fashion a shiv, like she have you. Whereas with Catherine, they wanted her mic, because also Catherine, you know, you're right, she wasn't stupid, this idea of her, so that's like, why I don't know isn't true.

But she hadn't been at court. Of all the wives, all the rest of them had more experience of life in a royal court or a noble court, it all kind of wove together into a rope. She only realized at the end it was a nurse. I don't think she thought it was going to choke the life out of her completely, which is there's such a tragedy to that.

Hampton Court has been home to happier times, other than some knobbed king murdering all of his wife, and to some quite surprising love affairs, like King James I of England and sixth of Scotland, who loved a bit of boy-on-boy time and had quite a bit of Hampton Court. Yeah, he loved a bit of M&M. James had married a Danish princess Anna of Denmark,

who's sort of fabulously unhinged. I mean, she really is, you know, Anna could be in the real housewives today and hold her own. Wow. She was a glamorous, magnificent creature. But she, I think, was very aware of where James' interests lay.

And after they had had the children, there seems to have been an agreement whereby she was like, I'll just be clear, I will be spending whatever I like. And you do what needs to be done. But if any of the twinks disrespect me, there's going to be a problem. See, that's how you.

you do it, Catherine. That is how you play that game. So Anna of Denmark, the Lisa Vanderpump of the shooter world is having a fabulous time at Hampton. Wow. Well played. Look, to give her credit and to give him credit, in some ways having a husband who prefers to have his love affairs

with men, there's a benefit to that because there's an element to which there will have to be a slight bit of discretion that mightn't be the case. It was a mistress. A mistress might become a rival and also a mistress might produce a bastard child that could threaten your own children. So for a queen, a bisexual or a gay husband

isn't always a disaster. It can actually be preferable. And Anna certainly, she gets lemons and makes lemonade and takes them to her magnificent parties. The main lovers he has at Hampton Court. He has one at the start who is, I was talking like country life cheeks, Philip Herbert, who is just an absolute dishy beef cake

of a posho but thick as chum. and by his own admission doesn't know anything except how to party dogs and horses. That kind of rugger, and in their first Christmas at Hampton Court, this is one of the sources I found that I just loved because obviously Philip was invited to dance in a mask, a masquerade in the Great Hall,

but he didn't rehearse with the costume. And they had sewn so many jewels into his costume that once he started doing the dance moves, it was so heavy, it nearly took him over. So he's lumbering way down by emeralds and sapphires through the Great Hall. Philip is then replaced by James, as you mentioned, was the sixth of Scotland. And it's a Scottish knight, Robert Carr, who in a jousting match at Hampton Court breaks his leg. And the king knows the family from his time in Scotland and starts to visit him when he's sick.

They fall in love. Robert said to be sort of, I think of the quote is strong, straight-limbed, etc. again like Philip good looking not much going on upstairs hymbows absolute hymbows yeah hymboes and his majesty are a perfect little match and they're together for quite some time and there's always this running joke that you know two men live together for 50 years and share a bed and historians say they're just good friends and sometimes you get this with james so in the book i made sure to quote letters between him and his lover where he says no i can't wait to pin your knees up against your chest again. I can't wait to be wrapped. Just good mates. Yeah. Absolute bros. And so James again is very

aware, though, of the need for them to marry. And he marries Robert to a very influential family, Catherine Howard's family. He marries. Wow. Here we go. And the Howard's have another whoopsie no-no at Hampton Court. They're not doing well, are they? Well, they're not. And they're so determined to get Francis married to the King's favourite. and up their credibility at court, that they persuade her to apply for an annulment from her current marriage to the Earl of Essex. And Francis insists that it's never been consummated.

And the Earth of Essex gets so angry at this that he pulls down his bridges and waves his erection in the face of his lawyers to say, no, I can perform, to which the lawyers are thinking this is kind of above my pay grade. And she gets the divorce, and Francis and Robert Marion become a bit of a power couple. But one of the things to James' credit is,

he's very openly affectionate with him. He will kiss Robert in front of people. There's no real attempt to hide this. And Robert amasses a significant amount of influence. But unfortunately, one of his new Howard in-laws, the Earl of Northampton, has a real issue with Queen Anna. He doesn't like the politics and the games that Queen Anna plays. And he starts to encourage Robert, nice but dim,

to try to undermine Anna's influence the government. and Robert at one point burst out laughing at her outfit in the gardens and Anna goes to James and says, look, this sweetheart is not the deal that we had negotiated for these men. Fucking isn't, no. No, and she gets so angry at how disrespectful she was in front of everyone in the garden that she cries, which she's not a crier. And she then says, well, it'll sort itself out.

We can't prove that Anna had anything to do with what happened next, but it's really strange timing if not. So Robert Carr had had a lover before James, a diplomat called Sir Thomas Overberry, who James was jealous of and had a very flammable temper. Unfortunately, an even more dramatic queen was Anna herself who decides this one's, that this is the weak link. They give Overbury an offer off an embassy abroad,

but unfortunately the one they give him is to Russia, which has just emerged from a civil war where two million people have died. And Overbury, as everyone expects, says no. James has a temper tantrum and throws him in the Tower of London. Overbury starts writing to nice but dim Robert saying, you've got to help me out here. Robert is so aware of how angry the king and queen are at this stage that he doesn't want to rock the boat.

So Overbury resorts to blackmail, and one of his last letters to Robert says, whether I die or live, your shame will never die. And it looks like the only person who's really showing him any kind of kindness is actually Robert's wife, Francis Howard, who's sending sort of baked tarts and pies in to prison. Overbury then dies in prison,

and the autopsy reveals he was poisoned. Oh, look at that. And at the trial, Francis admits she poisoned the tarts and the pies that went in. Did she do it with Robert's notice, with Robert's knowledge? All we know is that Robert and Francis are imprisoned in the Tower of London. James manages to lessen the execution centre, to imprisonment, but they can't come back to court because of the public outrage

of what has happened is too significant. Interestingly, one of the co-accused was a Scottish gentry member called Sir David Wood who was one of Anna's confidants who had apparently known all about this and then was all acquitted. So you wonder, was she kind of pushing pieces

around in a chessboard here and then all of a sudden through David Wood. And the hired faction are knocked out of play. Roberts knocked out of play. Francis is banished over Bree's dead and all of a sudden Anna has found a new young twink called George Villiers who she pushes in front of her husband and she is left roaming as untrammeled and unfettered for the rest of her life. So my instinct, and I sort of say in the book, this is what I think my instinct would be. I think she stood back. I think she probably could have stepped in

with what David Wood knew and stopped it but realized that it was in her best interest to let these people destroy themselves. I think the moral of this story and a moral of lots of things that happen at Hampton Court is side pieces know your place. There seems to be a lot of mistresses and side pieces at Hampton Court because one of my favourite kings, Charles II, the party boy, he seemed to stash loads of his mistresses in Hampton Court. He stashed an absolute mountain of mistresses. I mean, there was some very popular ones, the Cockney actress Nell Gwynne. She knew her place. She was a sidepiece who knew her place and knew how to play it. Nell was the queen of side pieces.

She was amazing. She was driving. She was driven in a carriage of the streets of Oxford. Her carriage is mistaken for that of Charles's Catholic mistress, Louise de Carrow. And the crowd start pelting it with rubbish saying, kill the Catholic whore, Catholic whore. And Nell pops her head out the window and says, Good people, you are mistaken.

I'm a Protestant whore. And Charles takes another myth. just another actress called Mall Davis and Nell actually sends her sweets to say, no hard feelings, but she laces them with laxative so that mall will be no competition that night. So she knows her place, but she guards her place.

But she never messed with the Queen. She'd be dripping with diamonds, but she wasn't like vicious and greedy like some of his other mistresses. No, and it's really important that the Queen is a big point because Catherine of Berganza, Charles's Portuguese wife, is generally forgotten. She was sort of a very nice lady

very dignified, popularised drinking tea in Britain, so there probably should be a statue of her everywhere. At the time, a lot of people at the court, and it was a very cynical, promiscuous court, but there were still things that you didn't do. And a lot of people at court never forgave Charles' mistress Barbara Palmer for how she humiliated Catherine at her Hampton Court honeymoon. Barbara wanted the prestige of being part of the Queen's household,

and she got Charles to give her a position as Lady in wedding. and when Catherine, Queen Catherine realised that she had to be witted upon by her husband's mistress at her honeymoon. She was horrified. That's nasty, isn't it? And I find a kind of some people who were there. He said, you know, the king thought she was going to be a pushover.

And she got so enraged with him that she did nosebleed, she wouldn't back down. Eventually she'd no choice, but she did not make it easy for either Charles or Barbara. And as a result, a lot of people felt that Barbara should have backed down and didn't. And Barbara is given a wing at Hampton Court by the King, where she raises their five illegitimate children

and also entertains her own lovers, including an actor, a circus acrobat, one of the first Churchill generals. Barbara has a busy life. Go Barbara. Barbara is the side piece who, you know, sometimes you go into historical investigations and you think, you know,

I'm going to find out that this person was just misunderstood, They weren't that bad. No, Barbara was... Mega bitch. Yeah, she was just a monster. Was she pretty, though? Was she... She was gorgeous.

She was gorgeous. She was gorgeous, yeah. She was gorgeous and apparently dynamite in the sack, and that'll do it. That'll do it, right? Yeah, she actually, she wrote the first English language letter, unambiguously organizing a three-way. What? Yeah, she wrote a letter in, just before she was married to her, on again, off-again, boyfriend, Lord Chesterfield, saying about her and her friend were in bed and wondering what they could do to have his company there in that afternoon.

Not after that. She was smart though when she was a bitch but she was smart. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she was glamorous but evil. I mean,

later, kind of horrible stuff like the actor she was sleeping with tried to poison to her children and she didn't break it off. Like really kind of appalling. Really fucking horrible.

Yeah, yeah. And like, I think the best defense people could come up with was, you know, he wasn't trying to kill them.

He was just trying to make them sick for a bit. You're like, oh, okay, well, that's fine. Oh, oh, well. We've all been there, right?

Samuel Pepes didn't like her, did he? described a number of Charlie Boy's mistresses. He was such a horn dog that one time at Christmas Eve Mass, he saw her and was so overcome he jism his pants. That's in his diary. He was like, I made myself do the thing of only by looking. And then he goes on to talk about how ridiculous. He's like, the Catholic religion is so ridiculous. I'm like, you're very confident in judging what's ridiculous given what's just happened. You've just sat there with jizz on your pants. I think that maybe we can just take the moralising down a notch, quite.

frankly. Barbara was so fascinated that I almost didn't find time to get in. Under any normal circumstances, this socialite Hortense Mancini would be a champion in her own right, but Barbara just about outshone her. So Hortense was a cross-dressing Italian socialite whose uncle had been France's prime minister.

And she was sent to a nunnery by her very jealous husband, where she slept with one of the other female guests and then escaped the skies as a highwayman. Brilliant. Made it to England where Charles rewards her with a everything's going really well. They start sleeping together. And then Hortense, who is sort of

bisexual being, takes a fancy to Charles and Barbara's eldest daughter, the Countess of Sussex, and has an affair with her. My God. Yeah. And also in the wider history of the palace, Barbara has a really interesting role to play because when Henry, sorry, Charles calls off the relationship, he is very conscious of the fact that she is the mother of quite a number of his children. And he lets them keep the wing of theirs at Hampton Court, which means that Charles doesn't really visit it for the last 15 years of his time as king. And the section that Barbara is in, she's not a very conscientious housekeeper. You know, she kind of spends her money on more transient things. She doesn't pay for the upkeep. And so by the time, three years after Charles dies, when his niece, Mary

the second, becomes queen, she comes back to see Hampton Court for the first time. since she was a child. And she said it's a place which has been much neglected. And that's why, Wayne, I told you about that sugar wing that's gone and replaced the Baroque wing,

that was the one Barbara had lived in. So it really is ramshackled and done. And it was the wing that Anne Boleyn had planned. So that whole wing goes with Mary the 2nd and William the 3rd, and they replace it with the Baroque wing because Barbara had let it run to rack and ruin. I could just sit here and just keep saying,

who else live there? Who else live there? This is fascinating. It seems to have been like a proper, just absolutely stuffed with sluts. what's kind of funny is you bounce. I'm like, you're writing on about that. And then you're the King James Bibles commissioned there. And then you have another slut fest. And then it's Oliver Cromwell's turned it into like the centre of Puritan government. Hampton Court reinvent itself more times than

Madonna. It moves with all the wheels of history. It was the most joyful place to write about it in a phenomenal time. Okay, final question. Who's your favorite person that lived at Hampton Court? Like, I change this every time. But floor betwixt the sheets, I have to say, Lord Harvey, because Lord Harvey was an MFM kind of guy and he was a Georgian socialite, Harvey the handsome, they called him. And he had almost certainly been sleeping with his best friend, George II's son, Frederick Prince of Wales.

They had shared a mistress, one of the ladies in wedding, and then they fell out. And Harvey decides, when you go low, I go lower. And so knowing that Prince Frederick had a very strained relationship with his mother, Queen Caroline. Harvey becomes her best friend and he becomes her political confidant, Frederick retaliates by befriending, Harvey's mother of the counties of Bristol, who he doesn't speak to. But Harvey is so interesting where he, you know, he goes to a masquerade ball at 4 o'clock in the

morning and at 5 o'clock he's sitting down to write a government report that has no mistakes in it. He's really kind of impressive. Yeah, there's no reason not to be as productive as Harvey. but he becomes genuinely friendly with Queen Caroline and so you have all this kind of rumpy, pumpy fun and then you have him writing about her dying and it's really heartbreaking where he says, you know, I know that everyone thinks because you're friends

with royalty that that's the only reason you like them but I actually really greatly admire her and he talks about the substance of the woman. He had a house and grew up Burlington Street with an MP called Stephen Fox and their love letters to each other are they're just so, so loving and there's a couple of saucy bits to it

but there's a wonderful bit where Stephen writes to Harvey. And Stephen was from a very wealthy family, but non-aristocratic. And he was brought up in the countryside. And he writes to Harvey, I worry that my rustic manners embarrass you. And Harvey writes back, I would like you better rusty than anyone else polished. Well, that's sweet. It is. And Harvey usually is a raging bitch.

But his letters are so, so funny. And then surprisingly intelligent and thoughtful. So that chapter, the Queen stares about the Georgian period at Hampton Court. with Lord Harvey was, I loved, love that. I think he would have been, everyone said he was, the most colossal fun to sit next to you at dinner. Oh, I love that. Darryth, you have been an insane amount of fun to talk to

about Hampton Court. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Not at Hampton Court, presumably. Yeah, probably, actually. I mean, like at this is, at one point, I think that people thought I lived there or was squatting there or was a ghost.

So I'm active on Instagram, underscore Gareth Russell. I also have my podcast, Single Malt History, if people want to hear more to pop up stories from history. So Instagram and Single Malt History, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Gareth for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, you can email us at Betwixt.

at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Caesar's sex life to the ancient goddesses of sex and war. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society,

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