I’m wrestling with a clanking, confusing bunch of keys issued to me only hours before.

This was the first evening of my new job as Chief Curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, and nobody had given me a manual for what to expect. At this point in my life, twenty years ago, I was just beginning my two decades of working at Hampton Court.

I’d spent all day meeting my new colleagues, and I’d just popped out to the petrol station to buy my dinner, to eat in my little flat deep in the Tudor kitchens of the palace, and had been challenged twice at security barriers on the way back in.

Eyebrows were raised both times when I said I was the new curator.

After all, I was twenty-nine, small, pale, and wearing a long dark coat I wrongly believed made me look grown-up.

And in fact, the very architecture of a palace is built to impress you and make you feel like a worm, and it doesn’t care whether you’re a visitor or the person meant to be in charge.

Once inside, I climbed my new crooked staircase, switching on lights room by room.

Out of one window I saw a cobbled courtyard, Lord Chamberlain’s Court, unchanged since Tudor times, filling with mist. Every so often the darkness was swept by the beam of a security patrol’s torch on its rounds.

I didn’t sleep especially well.

What nobody tells you about working inside a palace is how much of the experience is not so much intellectual, as you’d think a historian’s job might be, but sensory.

You can read every state paper in the archive and still be unprepared for the particular cold of Apartment 25, the curators’ office at Hampton Court for the whole of my time there: a draughty chimney, rattling casement windows, shutters that never quite closed, and one small electric heater fighting a losing battle against several centuries of stone.

It was, I’m fairly sure, the world’s coldest office. It was also, without question, the best one I’ve ever had.

As a palace insider, I got to check what used to be called “bunch 16” out of the security office each morning — the old name for the curatorial keys.

After that little ritual, I could go anywhere with my keys: through doors the public never sees, into a paintings store with windows permanently shuttered, its darkness stacked with racking, into the attics, into a geography that only makes sense once you’ve walked it for years.

The sounds of the palace will never leave me, and it’s a surprisingly noisy place.

Craftspeople doing building repairs. People pushing noisy trolleys along the stone corridors, with the post, or things for the cafe.

But also: the fountain playing in Fountain Court. The choir practising for evensong at twilight.

Footsteps on Silverstick Stairs, which groan and creak as you walk and which are definitely the most haunted staircase in the building.

The Haunted Gallery has a small hidden door that was the sneaky back way out of my office, and walking its length late in the evening, I’ll admit I sometimes wondered whether I could hear an echo of Katherine Howard’s voice, running towards the chapel to beg for a life that wouldn’t be spared.

Whether or not you believe in ghosts, and I don’t really, palaces are extremely good at making you feel as though something is always listening.

Smell is something else that stubbornly attaches itself to a place in your memory, and the smell I associate most with Hampton Court is woodsmoke.

Drifting over Tennis Court Lane from the vast fireplace in the Great Kitchen, its whitewashed walls stained black by centuries of fires, the cold striking up from the stone floor even as the flames roar.

At Kensington Palace, in what had once been Princess Margaret’s private apartment and later became our meeting room, the smell was dust and old cigarettes— we’d sit in her former bedroom planning exhibitions on a long table, with the carpet rolled up and the ghosts of her Fabergé still haunting the mantelpiece.

The Tower of London, though, offered heat rather than cold.

The old curators’ office there was known as “the Curatorial Sweatshop,” because its enormously thick medieval walls soaked up summer heat and refused to let it go.

Space there was so tight that sometimes I had to make a private phone call in the shower cubicle, which was used by a curator who cycled to work. I’d be accompanied by his damp tower.

There are textures I remember too, sometimes only becoming clear over time as I got to know the palace well.

Trail your hand along the inner walls of Fountain Court’s shaded colonnade at Hampton Court and your fingers will find three types of stone: rough, raggedy stone reused from Cardinal Wolsey’s day, a cheap golden Oxford limestone which Christopher Wren didn’t really like and hid away where no one would see it, then the proper white Portland stone that he loved.

Roaming the closed upper floors of the palace, through Georgian corridors that suddenly open onto a decaying 1960s kitchen wallpapered in pink roses, and I could always fall back on the “yellow brick road,” an actual escape route painted onto the floorboards, after I’d inevitably got lost.

Not everything up there was solemn. Our office hallway had a rotating cast of busts — Plato, Christopher Wren, occasionally the Sphinx — each taking a turn in a tinsel boa and a silly hat at Christmas.

It’s easy to imagine curatorial life as hushed and reverent. Mostly it was cold, funny, slightly chaotic, and full of people who loved nothing more than acquiring esoteric knowledge about the past.

Now, today, I sometimes look through old diaries, sighing regretfully at entries like “meet 11am front door, Kew Palace’ or ‘curators’ Christmas get-together, Apartment 25”.

But I still have my lifetime pass. And I’ll still have the privilege, for the rest of my life, of saying it plainly: yes, I was Chief Curator at Hampton Court.

Yes, you’re right. It was the best job in the world.

Looking forward to hearing what you think of my new book if you’ve had the chance to read it - do let me know!

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For twenty years I checked a ring of keys called “bunch 16” out of the security office every morning, and sat in what I’m fairly sure was the coldest office in England. This video explains what it actually felt like to be Chief Curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces — not the hushed, reverent job people imagine, but something colder, funnier, and a great deal noisier.

I arrived at Hampton Court aged twenty-nine, in the dark, wrestling with a set of keys I didn’t yet know how to use, having already been challenged twice at the security barriers by guards who doubted a curator could look like me.

And if you’re minded to do something really kind for a nervous author, trembling in fear of a public judgement - a book order would be wonderful. If that’s too much, just a ‘like’ on the order page would be grand. Thanks e…

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We covered the twenty years I spent working behind the scenes at Hampton Court, the Tower of London and Kensington Palace, and about why, after all that time, I decided the queens deserved the closer look.

Henry VIII came up, of course. He always does. But so did the women nobody bothered to name in the palace accounts, the terrifying etiquette of a Tudor lying-in, and Queen Anne, who I think has had rotten press for three centuries and doesn’t deserve it.

I told Anthony about the room in the attics of Hampton Court that’s full of ancient antlers, the Tudor piss pot that still, remarkably, contains Tudor piss, and the ghost in the Haunted Gallery. Then we dealt with lots of…

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Actual barricades, thrown up outside the publisher Stockdale’s shop in the Haymarket, to hold back the crowds trying to get each new number.

Every instalment ended with an advertisement listing the names of Harriette’s lovers which were about to appear in the next one, giving anyone mentioned the chance to buy themselves out first.

It was blackmail.

Legend has it that when the Duke of Wellington was offered the same choice, he growled ‘publish and be damned’ and left Harriette to do her worst.

It’s a wonderful line. It also appears to be invented. According to Harriet’s biographer Katie Hickman, Wellington simply brazened the whole business out, the way dukes generally did.

Some stories are too good to fact-check, aren’t they?

Harriette had a gift for going for the jugular while sounding perfectly cheerful about it.

One target, the politician Edward ‘Bear’ Ellice, refused to pay and instead published her ransom demand in the newspapers himself, spelling mistakes and all. ‘I attack no poor men,’ Harriette had written to him, with a perfectly straight face, ‘because they cannot help themselves.’

Harriette delivered a gleefully cruel verdict upon one of her business rivals, the memoirist Julia Johnstone, who had twelve children to Harriette’s none. Julia was ‘fat, fair and forty, even though her name did not begin with an F’.

Even the Cabinet couldn’t resist Harriette. George Canning found her Memoirs ‘very clever’, while Lord Melbourne pronounced them ‘extremely dull’. Walter Scott ordered his copy the moment he heard of them, certain the whole thing would be ‘a delicious scandal’.

It certainly was.

But read on to find out what a notorious Regency courtesan has got to do with Our Dear Jane!

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It’s not a career choice that I’d personally recommend.

But for some really regrettable royal lives, I’d look to the princesses of the eighteenth century.

Do you remember Queen Charlotte, from Bridgerton? One of her friends once wrote her a letter about her six daughters. (She also had nine sons!)

“What unhappy wretches are some Princesses!” went this letter, “how they are sacrificed! It is to be hoped that they all have not the tender affections of their happier subjects.”

Sadly, her hope proved wrong. These six girls, daughters of Queen Charlotte and George III, knew exactly how much affection was missing from their lives.

This Hanoverian royal family habit of being mean to its girls went back two generations earlier, to a quarrel between George I and his son George II.

The older king once punished the younger by taking away his three small daughters, Anne, Amelia and Caroline. The monarch did have the right to control the persons and education of his heirs.

“We’ve such a good father and such a good mother,” one of them said, “and yet we are orphans.” Asked whether their grandfather George I ever came to see them, she replied: “Oh no, he doesn’t love us enough.”

Anne, Amelia and Caroline’s lives were rich in almost everything else except love. Documents in the British Library record that they were given two embroidered coats each winter, sixteen dozen pairs of gloves a year, a personal staff of five apiece, money for tuning their harpsichord and seed for their pet birds.

There was just one thing missing: no allowance for ribbons.

They grew up and, in due course, were supposed to be get married. Now, as Europe never quite had enough appropriately Protestant princes to go round, there wasn’t much choice involved.

Anne accepted Prince William of Orange, whose breath - said one horrified courtier - was worse than anyone who hadn’t smelled it could possibly imagine.

But by now Anne was so desperate to escape palace life that she said she’d have accepted a proposal from a baboon.

Her sister Louisa was sent off to marry the king of Denmark and died there of complications after childbirth.

Caroline had what would now be called a mental health crisis and spent twenty years as a recluse in two rooms of St James’s Palace.

Their younger sister Mary, was married at seventeen to a German prince she described as brutal and inhuman. She only escaped him when his conversion to Catholicism gave her the excuse she needed.

Amelia, the one sister left unmarried, stayed home to nurse her father George II and an unrequited passion for an elderly courtier nicknamed “Booby Grafton.” She dealt with the tedium by being savagely sarcastic and occasionally sneaking off to the gaming tables of Bath to win huge amounts of money.

These girls had a German sister-in-law, whose life took a turn for the worse, I think, before she’d even unpacked her bags after arriving in Britain.

Sixteen-year-old Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was married to their brother Frederick a matter of hours after she first set foot in England.

She was marrying a man she’d never met, in a language she didn’t speak. Her mother had assumed everyone in Hanoverian England, with their German royal family, would simply have learned German by now, so she hadn’t bothered teaching Augusta any English. She had to have a translation of the marriage service whispered into her ear as it happened.

Things didn’t really improve. When Augusta went into labour at Hampton Court, her husband Frederick was determined to spite his parents (this was traditional in the Hanoverian royal family) by denying them their traditional right to witness a royal birth.

So he forced his screaming wife Augusta out of bed and down a staircase that you can still see at Hampton Court. He pushed her into a waiting carriage, and they drove fifteen bumpy miles to London in the middle of the night.

Augusta arrived with her skirts all soaked through with her broken waters; and with nothing ready to receive her in London, the baby had to be wrapped in a table napkin.

In due course, her own daughter, another Caroline, grew up to be married off to the mad king of Denmark, took the royal doctor as a lover to survive the experience, got caught, watched the lover get executed for the crime, and then got separated from her children and imprisoned for the rest of her own life.

Which brings us to her brother George III’s own six daughters, the ones the letter-writer felt so sorry for in the first place.

Having watched what happened to his sister, George loved his girls enough to refuse them permission to marry, for years on end. This meant, in effect, that they weren’t allowed to do anything else either. It left them in a state of suspended animation.

Several of the unmarried ones ended up squeezed into cramped attic rooms at Kew Palace, in Kew Gardens, a dinky little red-brick palace like a doll’s house, which they nicknamed the Nunnery.

One of them, another Amelia, was slowly dying there of consumption.

One of the sisters, Sophia, saying that they felt like “poor old wretches … a dead weight . . . like old clothes.” She suggested they should all be put in a sack and drowned in the Thames.

Those attic rooms at Kew still stand, deliberately left unrestored, their walls faded exactly as the sisters left them two centuries ago.

The silence up there has a particular sad quality to it.

Margaret’s cushion, I think, would have made perfect sense to every single one of them.

Here’s my new post on the difficulties of life as a Georgian princess!

It gives a flavour of my new book QUEENS AND KINGS, AN UNUSUALLY PERSONAL HISTORY, which is published very soon now, on 3 September.

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Fewer know that in 1781, enemy forces captured a letter in which he requested cleaning tools for his dentures. It gave away his whereabouts to British.

The smallest details of daily life, it turns out, might sometimes have the power to determine the fate of empires.

I once spent a week without using my bath, shower or washbasin, to see what I could learn about Tudor personal hygiene. What pleasantly surprised me about the experience was cleaning my teeth.

I discovered that Tudor methods were remarkably effective. Health manuals and conduct books of the period describe teeth being cleaned with water, salt, rosemary, even cuttlefish, rubbed on with cloths, twigs or sponges. I tried them all.

Powdered cuttlefish worked best, applied with a cloth rather than the splayed-out e…

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Down the staircase comes king Henry VIII. One servant is lighting his way, two more are for security, another, posher servant, is there for company. It’s quite the little procession passing through the silent palace.

No one’s supposed to talk about it – but everyone does. Everyone at court will soon know that tonight the king is visiting the queen’s bedchamber, to try to make a baby.

One of the reasons I’ve spent so much time researching queens and kings is because they tend to be, at any given moment, the best-documented people alive. The records are so very rich, not only for politics, but also for their physical bodies and daily lives.

Very few aspects of royal life remained truly private, and especially not the goings-on in the royal bed.

It’s staggering how much detail we can know. That’s because ambassadors’ letters, and courtiers’ memoirs, constantly harp on about it.

This very intense interest was actually for very good reasons. A monarch’s fundamental job was to provide peace and stability, which meant giving her or his subjects an heir, and preferably a spare too in case of accidents.

So royal reproductive health was the health of the nation.

Everyone had a stake in it, and took it seriously.

Henry VIII’s bed was treated with the same reverence as the terrifying king himself. Each day after making his bed with clean sheets, his bedchamber team rolled upon it, to check that assassins hadn’t concealed any daggers inside. Once made, his bed was blessed with the sign of the Cross and sprinkled with holy water. All this was done whether the king was going to sleep there – or not. He might, after all, be off to spend the night with the queen. Or, a mistress.

It wasn’t just whose bedchamber the king slept in that fascinated people. There was also the bedlinen. The servants who washed the sheets checked them carefully for evidence of what might be going on. A queen’s menstrual cycle in particular held international significance. If she conceived, ensuring the succession, it would be harder for a foreign power to invade England. If she didn’t conceive, foreign powers might find rival candidates for the English throne, creating factions ready to be exploited.

One of the most intriguing rooms at Hampton Court is the bedchamber used by Catherine of Aragon, and then Anne Boleyn, and then Jane Seymour. It’s not the grandest of rooms, as Henry was planning a new and better queen’s bedchamber, but the turnover of wives was so fast that it wasn’t completed in time for Anne, or Jane – only the later wives got to use it.

This room where three queens slept got messed around with in the eighteenth century, it’s up a lot of stairs, and today it’s just a meeting room.

But it still has the stone fireplace put there for Catherine of Aragon, and what happened – or didn’t happen here - there had enormous religious and legal repercussions.

I think of this room as being the very nexus of the Tudor dynasty.

It could well have seen many conceptions, neither Catherine of Aragon nor Anne Boleyn had a problem with that. But despite many pregnancies, neither woman gave birth to a healthy son.

It was also in this room that Jane Seymour, tragically, did finally manage to give birth to a male heir, the future Edward VI, in 1537. After this, she promptly died. Her body lay in state in her bedroom overnight, surrounded by lit candles, then was embalmed for its journey to her final resting place at Windsor Castle.

Before embalming, though, some of a corpse’s organs were removed, so they won’t rot and create gases. In Jane’s case, some of these organs were buried beneath Hampton Court’s chapel – which means that her heart still remains at Hampton Court.

The production of children was so vitally important that the consummation, or non-consummation of a marriage on a wedding night was particularly closely monitored. Sometimes this came to matter for legal reasons.

You’ll likely remember that Henry VIII grew anxious to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, believing God had denied them a son because she’d once been married to his elder brother Arthur. Henry believed this was forbidden under church law.

But Catherine insisted the marriage to Arthur didn’t count, she and he had been so young at the time – 15 - it had never been consummated.

This all got hashed out years later in court. Henry’s supporters drummed up various witnesses who said nonsense, the marriage had definitely been consummated. They recall the Spanish princess being ceremonially undressed and placed in bed ‘reverently’, before Arthur entered wearing only his shirt, accompanied by a whole crowd of courtiers and musicians. And the next morning, witnesses remembered him calling for wine, to refresh him after his “long journey into Spain and back.”

Catherine, though, said that on their wedding night, nothing had happened. It’s tempting to think that the feminist thing to do would be to believe her – right? Believe women.

But over time, I’ve come to wonder whether that’s patronising, and whether it’s perhaps more sisterly to believe Catherine capable of lying, to give her the credit for having the cleverness and courage to behave badly. I do wonder if she was more of a manipulator and a power player than the kind of tragic doormat the Victorians liked to think she was.

However, there’s also reason to think that the ceremony of putting young royal people in bed together, like Arthur and Catherine, wasn’t really expected to result in actual procreation. It was symbolic, and the consummation of their marriage could wait until their bodies were mature enough.

More than a century after Catherine of Aragon, ten-year-old Princess Mary endured a ritual public bedding with her fourteen-year-old husband-to-be, the Prince of Orange. They had to spend 45 minutes sitting up in bed together, “in presence of all the great lords and ladies of England.” These two were a very cute couple. Despite the strangeness of the situation, they seemed to get on well. ‘Although we were at first very solemn towards each other,’ he wrote, ‘now we feel more at ease.’ I’m sorry to tell you that both would die young.

But their son William, married to another Princess Mary, went on to rebuild Baroque Hampton Court. This part of the palace contains hidden evidence of the sexual fantasies, I think, of a bored young royal pageboy.

On a back staircase used by the household servants, someone has pencilled on the plaster wall a crude, anatomically inaccurate sketch of a naked lady – I believe the artist had never actually seen a naked lady - and beside it, the entwined initials of W and M, for William and Mary, which is how we know the date. When I first worked at the palace it was kept locked away, but it’s now on public display. That’s because the lascivious daydreams of a seventeenth-century servant tell us something about the boredom of life at court that’s missing from state portraits.

Marrying and reproducing purely for the Tudor or Stuart bloodline became much less important with the monarchy’s declining power, and by the twentieth century a lot of the drama had ebbed away.

But the palace walls remained as porous. Princess Margaret was snapped in the bath at Kensington Palace by her photographer husband Tony Snowdon, wearing nothing but the tiara from her wedding day. And his own bare leg is reflected in the mirror in the corner of the shot.

It’s a world away from checking for daggers in the mattress. But it’s still unmistakably the same story: a royal marriage that never quite manages to stay private.

This week I’m trying out something new for paid subscribers: you can now watch and listen to this post if you’d like to! What do you think, dear friends? Is this something I should do again? See you next week!

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When I first went to Egypt in 2022, it was for three breathless days in the awful heat of August, whirling round with my camera crew to make our series on Agatha Christie.

I knew before I’d even packed my bags to come home that I’d have to return and see things properly. So earlier this year, I did.

One of the great pleasures of going back was travelling as far south as Aswan, to the Old Cataract Hotel — the grande dame of the Nile, which Thomas Cook & Son built in 1899. The hotel stars as itself both in the book and in the famous 1978 film of Death on the Nile.

My visit confirmed something about Agatha Christie’s work that I’d long suspected, but had never quite been able to prove. More on that later.

Aswan itself surprised me. I’d always pictured Egypt as the Nile delta: green, lush, its riverbanks crowded with life. Aswan’s nothing like that. Deep in the south, you find granite boulders, blinding light, and a heat that presses in on you from all angles, and doesn’t let go.

Agatha Christie came here in the 1930s with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. As a young debutante on her first trip to Egypt, she’d been rather more interested in eligible young men than in ancient temples. By the time she returned as Mrs Mallowan, archaeology had entered her bloodstream.

In Death on the Nile, Hercule Poirot even describes his detective work in the language of archaeology. He talks of scraping away the loose earth until what remains is the truth — the naked shining truth.

The Old Cataract hotel today brims with colonial nostalgia. It is wonderfully luxurious, and if you’re that way inclined, it also gives you prickles of post-colonial guilt. Romance and reckoning both sit on the same terrace, looking at the same gorgeous view.

I came away thinking three things.

First: there is no end to the myth-making about where Agatha Christie actually wrote her books. I’ve now visited several hotels offering ‘Agatha Christie’s Room’ or ‘Agatha Christie’s Writing Cabin’ — I’m looking at you, Burgh Island Hotel, Devon, and you, the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. The Old Cataract is no exception; you get pointed to the room where she, um, wrote Death on the Nile. I don’t doubt she stayed in plenty of hotels. But placing the actual writing of a particular book in a particular room is a different claim entirely. I find myself asking: where’s the documentary evidence? A hotel ledger? A letter? A diary? Or just an excellent marketing department?

Second: Aswan itself is such an important part of the story. To European eyes in the 1930s, this was the edge of the known world. A boatload of travellers, suspended between river and desert with nowhere to go — that has something of the locked room about it already, before Christie’s plot even begins.

Third: this spectacular setting on the Nile explains exactly why Death on the Nile became one of Christie’s most popular novels. I think it’s a byproduct of the fact that it makes a great film. The setting, the theatrical Nile views and the ancient temples, do half the director’s work. When I interviewed the 1978 film’s producer while writing my biography of Christie, he told me he’d had to put up the extremely starry cast — plus their children, plus their entourages — at the Old Cataract for as long as they wanted to stay, or risk them balking at an extended shoot in Africa. And because more people watch films than read books, Death on the Nile conquers all.

But here’s my secret suspicion.

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Conscription doesn’t mean that women have to fight. No, this is conscription for war work — on the land, in hospitals, in canteens — so that men can be freed up to do the fighting.

Britain is in its darkest hour, the Blitz is flattening British cities, and patriotic feeling is running extremely high. So when a twenty-year-old parlourmaid from Newcastle writes back to the Ministry of Labour to say that she won’t be doing any war work at all, thank you, the Ministry doesn’t quite know what to do with her.

Her name was Connie Bolam, and she was about to become one of the first British women sent to prison as a conscientious objector.

You’re probably familiar with conscientious objectors in the First World War, but they were all male. The conscription of women meant, in World War Two, that women became part of the issue too.

Connie’s is one of our cases in Lady on Trial, which is a succession of exciting courtroom dramas but also, secretly, a feminist history of the law. Our team came across Connie Bolam as the tiniest archival scrap: literally a name, a sentence, a court report. It’s taken a huge amount of digging by the wonderful lady detectives on the case to get her back out again.

But it’s been worth it, because Connie turns out to be one of the more startling women of the war: not a Land Girl, not a Wren, not a Bletchley codebreaker, but someone who looked the entire apparatus of a wartime state in the eye and said ‘no’.

Connie went into service in 1939, working as a parlourmaid for the Alexander family of Station Road. They were prosperous, had a family decorating business, and - more to the point - also ran a small production line of conscientious objectors. Three of the Alexander brothers had refused to fight in the First World War, and one of them, Robert, had been imprisoned for it more than once. Connie’s employer Kitty Alexander was in her thirties, worked at an insurance firm by day, and was secretary of the Newcastle branch of the Peace Pledge Union in the remainder of her waking hours.

You might assume the maid simply picked up the mistress’s politics along with the silver polish.

But historian Dr Lyndsey Jenkins, our historian on this case, doesn’t buy it. Domestic servants were in ferocious demand throughout the 1930s — middle-class women complained constantly that they couldn’t get good ones — and a capable servant like Connie could have worked for anyone she chose. She probably chose the Alexanders.

Everything about her, Jenkins says, suggests “a very independent minded, very thoughtful and principled woman” — not someone led astray by an employer’s opinions, but someone who already held her own.

When her call-up papers arrived, Connie was ordered to the Newcastle Eye Hospital. She wrote back refusing outright: “I entirely disbelieve in war as a method of settling disputes and believe war to be futile.” This made her what conscientious objectors themselves called an absolutist —someone who wouldn’t do so much as roll a bandage if it was in service of the war effort.

Connie came before a court in Newcastle only weeks after the new law came into force. The Ministry of Labour, keen to make an example of somebody, chose her.

The judge, Sir Ralph Mortimer, pointed out — not unreasonably — that treating soldiers’ eyes was hardly the same thing as pointing a gun at them. Connie’s answer was that she’d never have been offered a job like that in peacetime, so the war must be the reason for it.

She was found guilty, fined forty shillings, and refused to pay. This meant a month in prison, and a crowd of well-wishers shouting “Good luck, Connie!” as she was led away.

During her time in Durham Gaol, Connie had only a straw mattress, one blanket and a bucket. She was, as far as anyone can establish, the only female conscientious objector in the prison, which meant no fellow travellers to compare notes with, and fellow inmates who very likely found her about as easy to sympathise with as a vegetarian at a butchers’ convention.

Inside, though, she kept it up. Prisoners were expected to knit socks for soldiers — about as minimal and uncontroversial a war contribution as could be devised.

But Connie wouldn’t do that either.

Personally, I have enormous sympathy for the principle, and absolutely none for the sock-refusal.

Refusing to fight, yes. Refusing to help defeat Hitler by means of knitwear feels, to me, like taking it a bit far.

But I do respect Connie’s opinion because - in a nutshell - Hitler wouldn’t have allowed her to have it. That’s part of why he needed to be defeated in the first place, right?

In Britain, only around a thousand women registered as conscientious objectors in the whole of the Second World War, against sixty thousand men.

But here’s a detail that blew my mind: about half of the women who registered ended up serving time in prison, a far higher proportion than the men. Being a female objector, it turns out, was not the soft option.

Prison did not chasten Connie in the slightest. She emerged and went straight to a tribunal to try for a full, unconditional exemption. It didn’t work. On 12 May 1942, in front of a courtroom packed with her supporters, a judge told Connie: “You must recognise that on the tribunal, we have some common sense, and you have none.”

Connie got only a conditional exemption — land work, canteen work, or hospital work. The very thing she’d just spent a month in prison refusing to do. Forty of her supporters, twenty of them from the Peace Pledge Union, responded with what the court reporter primly recorded as “derisive clapping.” The police had to be sent for.

Connie’s case had made the newspapers by then, photograph and all, and it brought her something she surely hadn’t expected: letters. Admirers, well-wishers, strangers moved by her stand, all writing in. One of them was a man named John. By the end of 1942, she’d married him.

Connie never framed any of this as a fight for women’s rights — pacifism was her cause, not equality. But in insisting on exactly the same legal right to freedom of conscience that men already had, she claimed that equality anyway, whether she called it that or not.

Connie’s story explains why I’ve loved working on the series Lady on Trial.

We’ve been able to share the story of a twenty-year-old parlourmaid from Newcastle, whose powerful refusal to knit socks was more or less unknown to history. Until now.

What do you think? Have you ever faced conscription? Do you think there are any circumstances in which you’d refuse to serve?

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So it makes me sad to imagine that if she’s ever given me a moment’s thought, it will be as “that ridiculous woman who claims Jane Austen is a lesbian.”

I never claimed that.

But the story got away from me, the way stories do!

‘Did she ever experience same-sex desire?’ is something I get often get asked about Jane Austen. But it’s the wrong question. Not because it’s improper, but because it can’t be answered. A yes/no question needs evidence that would let you say yes or no. We don’t have it. We never will.

That didn’t stop the story running. In 2017, when my book Jane Austen at Home came out, I made what I thought was a fairly dry, historian’s point at the Hay Festival: that Jane almost certainly never had sex with a man.

I don’t think that’s controversial, given her position in society. But to rule out whether she ever had sex with a woman seems to me to be more complicated, and that’s a door I’d like to keep open.

By morning it had mutated, in print, into Jane Austen had sex with women. Tomalin called it “absolute bollocks.” She wasn’t wrong to be irritated. That isn’t what I said, and isn’t what I think.

So what did I actually say & believe?

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Elvira’s house was rarely quiet. Early on the morning of the 31st of May, one of the long-suffering neighbours heard this:

“Get out of my house at once! I hate you! Get out! I will shoot you! I will shoot you!”

There was a shot, and a scream. Then: “Michael, come back to me! Michael!”

Elvira herself telephoned her doctor, who arrived to find Michael Scott Stephen dead at the top of the stairs, a bullet in his chest.

Elvira had an explanation ready: they’d been quarrelling, he’d picked up the revolver because he was afraid she’d shoot herself, they’d struggled over it, and — somehow — it had simply gone off.

What does Elvira’s story tell us about the way upper-class women between the wars used the new freedoms they’d so recently won? And would the case play out any differently today?

Elvira was twenty-seven, the daughter of Sir John Mullens, a former government stockbroker so grand his neighbour on Belgrave Square was the King’s own brother.

She didn’t work. She stayed in bed until noon and partied until dawn, funded entirely by her parents, cycling through lovers of both sexes and — the police would later discover — through car crashes that were almost certainly drink-driving. You’ll often also read that her drug of choice was cocaine, and while there’s no contemporary evidence for that available to support that, it wouldn’t have been surprising.

Michael Scott Stephen was twenty-three, a public-school boy whose family had cut off his allowance, so now he lived off Elvira instead. Friends of Elvira’s later hinted that their rows had an erotic charge to them; the police found what the papers coyly called “instruments of fetishism and perversion” in the house after his death.

Lurid rumour or truth? We had an enjoyable argument during Sunday’s show about whether the crime scene photos from Elvira’s flat — you can see them yourself on the National Archives website — show a toy monkey, or a sex toy. What do you think?*

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Elvira and Michael were members of the Bright Young Things: a generation that partied hard precisely because the generation before it had been slaughtered in the trenches. Some people see Elvira as the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies.

None of this explains away the facts that mounted against her.

The gun was hers, kept loaded, illegally, in the house. No one else was there. Three separate neighbours heard her shout ‘I will shoot you’ moments before the shot. And eleven days earlier, she’d fired the same revolver at Michael from an upstairs window during an identical row, shouting ‘laugh, baby, laugh for the last time’.

Surely, an open-and-shut case?

It wasn’t.

Elvira’s parents hired Sir Patrick Hastings, the most formidable barrister in London, and he performed something close to a magic trick.

It wasn’t even just the facts above that suggested Elvira was guilty. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the era’s most celebrated pathologist, and Robert Churchill, its foremost firearms expert, both testified that the fatal shot was fired from three to six inches away, and that the gun’s fourteen-pound trigger pull made an accident highly unlikely.

So Hastings went after the neighbours instead.

He drew out the key witness, a chauffeur’s wife called Mrs Hall, on the earlier shooting, and asked her, almost gently, whether she’d seen a puff of smoke from the gun.

She had.

Cordite cartridges, he told the court, don’t produce smoke.

Her evidence, and by extension her class, was demolished in a single question. ‘How awful it would be,’ he told the jury, ‘if the life of any one of us might depend upon the evidence of women like these.’

Hastings painted Elvira as a glamorous young woman, devastated at losing the man she loved, with her whole life still ahead of her. It took the jury less than two hours to acquit.

After Elvira was freed, she sold her story to the Sunday papers, and celebrated, magnificently badly, by getting drunk at the Café de Paris. She shouted at the reporters who’d followed her: ‘I’m the woman who shot her lover. Have a good look at me!’

You might well be disliking Elvira by now. Even if she didn’t mean to hurt Michael, this was pretty shoddy behaviour.

But she wasn’t going to get away with it for long.

Estranged from her parents, she moved to France, kept drinking, and died of a haemorrhage in a hotel room on Christmas morning 1936.

She’d been thirty-two.

And there’s a strange coda: in March 1941, her beloved Café de Paris — the club where she’d taunted the press, the club that symbolised that whole reckless, hedonistic set — took a direct hit from a German bomb. Thirty-four people died. It was, in its way, the end of the Bright Young Things for good.

Ninety-odd years on, I think Michael Scott Stephen’s death probably was an accident. The kind that happen when drunken people handle loaded guns.

But I can’t help feeling that if it had been one of those chauffeurs’ wives in the dock instead of a stockbroker’s daughter, the jury would not have taken two hours to decide.

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*as my guest, historian-of-sex Dr Kate Lister pointed out, it’s a silly question really. Anything, taken in the right spirit, might be considered a sex toy.

Their customers are army officers and merchants and the occasional respectable woman, and they go there in the mornings the way we might go to a coffee shop now. They sit, they eat their jelly, they leave.

None of this, in the daytime, is remarkable.

But at night, things change.

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I came across the dark side of the Georgian jelly house while we were filming in the quadrangle of the Bodleian Library last week. Suzie, the library’s head of publications, rushed out mid-shoot and pressed a copy of the latest Bodleian publication into my hands.

‘What’s that about?’ asked one of my team at lunch, finding me deep in it already.

‘Sexy jelly,’ I said.

The look on his told me everything I needed to know about what I should write this week.

Peter Ross’s Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London is the book in question, and it’s one of those books full of moments that make you think ‘why did no one tell me this before?’ It’s also beautifully produced — heavy paper, wonderful illustrations, the kind of object you want to own.

But it’s the jelly chapter I’ve enjoyed the most.

Jelly houses, it turns out, which sound rather jolly in the daytime, become much murkier places at night.

I want to introduce you to William Byrd, a Virginia merchant living in London in the 1710s, who ate a late-night jelly at least once a month and seems to have recorded it each time. Byrd’s diary is the kind of document historians like me love, because he tells you everything, including things he probably shouldn’t.

In March 1718 he went to the opera, ogled a Miss Mary Smith — a woman he’d been pursuing for years in the vain hope of marriage — and afterwards went to a chocolate house and ate a jelly. A few weeks later, having read the papers at Will’s Coffee House and eaten his jelly, he picked up a woman, dined with her on chicken and asparagus, and tried (unsuccessfully) to seduce her. Some weeks after that, he went with Lord Orrery to a brothel in Queen Street, where he met a Mrs C—rt—ny, went to bed with her, “rogered her two times,” rose at ten, walked to Will’s, and ate a jelly. Then he walked home and said Lord have mercy on me.

What an evening, William. Sex, then jelly, then guilt.

Byrd wasn’t alone in making this particular connection. In 1734 a sex worker called Martha Holcomb took a drunken client to a house that rented rooms, and before they went upstairs the pair consumed a bowl of punch, a bottle of wine, and three jellies. The Midnight Spy, in 1766, describes a late-night jelly house as “the prelude to every kind of debauchery.” By the 1790s, one guide to London reported women selling sex parading outside like cattle at a market.

So why jelly, specifically?

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We did it for a television programme, and it was all perfectly legal and carefully managed.

But the feeling of doing it, just for a few minutes, was not.

It was a feeling of wild joy that we were doing something completely outrageous, something I’d been told, my whole life, that women simply don’t do.

That rebellious feeling runs through the whole story of perhaps my favourite Suffragette of all, Annie Kenney, who features in the next episode of our new radio series about women who changed the law, LADY ON TRIAL.

Annie was born in 1879 in Saddleworth, near Oldham. She was one of an impressive twelve children in a churchgoing, working-class family. By ten she was working full days in a cotton mill, going to school part time. The hours were long, the noise was deafening, and at some point a machine took one of her fingers.

Annie noticed that the men around her got better pay and better conditions for the same labour. She filed the information away in her mind.

In 1905 she heard Christabel Pankhurst speak about votes for women, and from that moment she simply hurled herself into politics.

At a Liberal Party meeting in Manchester that October, Annie and Christabel stood up and asked a simple question: ‘will you give women the vote?’

While they were being thrown out of the meeting, Christabel did something shocking.

She spat at a policeman.*

It was as if she’d fired the starting pistol for a new and more militant phase in the campaign for votes for women.

Annie, standing right beside her, was arrested too, for the first time, but definitely not the last. At her trial a few days later, she unfurled a banner in the dock. She was twenty-six.

What made Annie different from the Pankhursts - and what made her enormously useful to their movement - was her class.

The Women’s Social and Political Union, the body campaigning for votes for women, needed to prove they weren’t just well-bred women with time on their hands.

Annie, who often dressed in her shawl and her workers’ clogs, became a sort of mascot for inclusion.

Historian Lyndsey Jenkins, in Annie’s episode of Lady on Trial, points out that Annie’s image could cut two ways. She could look fragile, the oppressed mill girl in need of protection. But she was also photographed in a nice dress for a more ‘respectable’ postcard. So demure Annie was sold alongside mill-girl Annie. She’d became a celebrity with various different personas, and her fans could collect the whole set.

By 1909 the WSPU had given up trying to persuade Parliament to change its mind and turned, instead, to breaking things. They carried out arson attacks on empty buildings, and poured ink into post boxes.

It’s worth saying that militancy didn’t always mean violence. For plenty of women, simply putting on a sash and marching down a public street was itself a militant act, a genuine risk to reputation and livelihood.

By the end of the decade, though, the WSPU had moved a long way past sashes.

“Every woman ought never go out without a hammer in her pocket,” Annie told a crowd, the better for smashing windows.

But by 1913, the authorities had had enough. Police raided WSPU headquarters and found evidence of planned attacks on mills and insurance offices. It turned out that detectives had been secretly spying on WSPU meetings for months.

Annie stood trial at the Old Bailey for five days that June, charged with conspiracy. But she said:

“I am a rebel and I will remain a rebel until women get the vote. If it means I will have to die to get the vote, then I will die.”

Sentenced to eighteen months in prison, she told the judge she’d go on hunger strike: “They have got to kill me or let me out.”

Her file from Holloway records that she starved herself.

Other women were held down and fed through tubes — a practice the government later abandoned not from compassion, but because of the terrible publicity it brought them.

Annie’s family always believed her hunger strike left her permanently damaged. After 1913, she was never quite healthy again.

But the coming of World War One changed everything for the movement. The Suffragettes halted their campaign.

From 1914, Annie toured Britain and America urging women into the factories, in support of a government that had imprisoned her, hunted her, and tried to starve her into submission.

It’s a swerve that looks rather strange to us today, but perhaps it isn’t.

Annie had always said she wanted what was best for Britain. What was best for Britain had included votes for women; now it included winning the war.

And eventually, some women did get the vote in 1918.

Was in a direct result of Annie’s actions?

Not really – it was the war that changed the rules about what was acceptable for women. But perhaps Annie and the Suffragettes had expanded what political scientists call the ‘Overton window,’ the space in which new ideas, even if you don’t agree with them, seem mainstream rather than completely mad.

After this we don’t hear much more from Annie. She married, had a child, wrote her memoirs, and died in 1953, aged seventy-three.

But what a wild and wonderful early life she’d had!

While Annie Kenney, in her shawl and clogs, was labelled a criminal, her real crime was refusing to accept her place.

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*when we filmed this scene for Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley, I learned how film spit is made. It was KY Jelly mixed with bicarbonate of soda. And what about vomit, which was needed for the force-feeding scenes? Cold chunky vegetable soup.

Some of the most enthusiastic historians I’ve known were the Historic Royal Palaces Security Advisor, the Head of Health and Safety, and the Head of Internal Audit.

I got to know the latter after an audit of collections management. Let’s say it could have gone better, but he nevertheless invited me to speak to his history club. It met at Hartwell House, now a wonderful hotel belonging to the National Trust, in Buckinghamshire.

Off I went, fell in love with Hartwell House, and immediately instigated an annual tradition of spending 24 hours there for a walk in the park, a swim and a sumptuous dinner.

This has been going for sixteen years now, so it’s pretty clear I’m a massive fan.

Hartwell House is Jacobean with Georgian additions and Rococo interiors that are quite frankly trying to upstage everything else. Set in peaceful parkland, it looks as though nothing exciting has ever happened here.

For the history lover, though, the connections are tumultuous and international.

One of the surprises Hartwell House has up its sleeve is the fact that the King of France lived here for five years.

To understand how Louis XVIII ended up in a rented house in Buckinghamshire, you have to go back to the night of 20 June 1791.

He was then the Comte de Provence — younger brother of Louis XVI, the king who would, two years later, lose his head to the guillotine, and brother-in-law of Marie Antoinette, who would lose hers shortly after.

That night, the whole royal family attempted to flee Revolutionary Paris in a coach, heading for the north-eastern border, disguised as the household of a Russian noblewoman. The king played the part of her servant.

Just forty miles from the border, at the small town of Varennes, Louis was recognised.

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Courtrooms are where society decides what sort of woman it approves of. Or doesn’t.

Which is why I became so fascinated by Caroline Norton.

Caroline’s is the first case featured in the new series from the Lady Killers team: Lady on Trial. Listen on Tuesday at 3 on Radio Four, or on BBC Sounds.

I talked about Caroline with Baroness Hale, aka Spider Woman, who was just as incisive and inspiring as I’d expected. Look how I gaze at her adoringly!

But on with the story…

It’s the twenty-second of June, 1836.

Westminster Hall is dangerously overcrowded. The spectators are packed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath the great medieval hammerbeam roof. Barristers are sweating. Journalists are scribbling.

At the centre of it all is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lord Melbourne, who’s been accused of adultery with a celebrated society beauty called Caroline Norton.

You can still stand in Westminster Hall today, and if you ignore the tourists and the security barriers, you can imagine the great political dramas that unfolded there, and the reputations which were made and broken.

The trial of Lord Melbourne was one of those moments.

And Caroline herself?

She wasn’t even allowed into court.

Lord Melbourne was being tried for so-called ‘Criminal Conversation.’ Basically, a husband sued another man for compensation for having slept with his wife. Rather like the wife herself was a piece of property the other lover had used, and damaged in the process.

Caroline’s husband George Norton had accused Lord Melbourne of having had ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife.

Caroline had married George when she was nineteen. They had ‘not exchanged six sentences’ before their engagement, she later recalled. Within weeks, he was violent towards her. He drank, shirked his work as a barrister, and lived increasingly off Caroline’s earnings as a writer.

Then he started hitting her.

When she was pregnant with her fourth child, he assaulted her so badly that she miscarried.

And then he did the most famously awful thing of all.

While Caroline was out of the house, George took their three sons away. Caroline went to visit them at their new home. As she sat downstairs, sobbing, she could hear her boys running about overhead.

She could hear them, but she couldn’t get at them.

But this was perfectly legal.

Meanwhile, her husband dragged her name through this enormous public scandal. In the adultery trial, servants testified that they’d seen Caroline and Melbourne kissing - but only on the cheek. A coachman described Caroline lying on a hearthrug with her clothes disarranged - but it turned out he’d been sacked for drinking. There was solemn discussion of marks on her underwear.

The jury eventually cleared Melbourne of adultery.

Caroline had won a moral victory. But she’d basically lost everything else.

She couldn’t see her children. And with no legal existence independent of her husband, who now hated her, she had almost no rights over the money she herself earned.

So she did something extraordinary.

She picked up her husband’s law books and started reading.

This is the part I love!

Caroline didn’t just complain that the law was unjust. She taught herself how it worked. She collaborated with sympathetic politicians. She wrote pamphlets that looked like legal textbooks. She learned to speak in the language the law respected.

And she became very, very good at it.

She was a very persuasive writer, asking, for example, whether ‘the woman who endures for nearly a year a tedious suffering, ending in an agony that perils her life’ truly had no rights over the child she bore.

It’s difficult now to imagine how radical that sounded.

Thanks to Caroline’s agitation, the Custody of Infants Act followed in 1839. It was limited and full of caveats, but it was a beginning. It was a step along a road towards emancipation, with later nineteenth century reforms allowing married women to keep their own earnings and property for the first time.

One of my favourite Caroline Norton moments came later, when tradesmen sued George Norton for debts she had run up in his name.

She’d discovered that if the law insisted husband and wife were one person, she could use that absurdity against him. Rather like getting revenge by maxing out your ex’s credit card.

The judge tried to silence her. ‘Madame, this is irregular!’

‘I will speak,’ replied Caroline.

And she did.

Caroline wasn’t totally awesome. She could be difficult, snobbish and contradictory. She always insisted she wasn’t a feminist, writing that women were naturally inferior to men. Perhaps she believed it. Or perhaps she understood perfectly well that she had to tone things down a bit in order to be listened to at all.

Today, in the rebuilt House of Lords, there is a huge mural representing Justice. The person asked to sit for the figure of ‘Justice’ was Caroline Norton. The woman who once had no legal existence became the image of the law.

This weekly history newsletter, My Life in the Past is where I bring you stories like this — the ones that fell out of the textbooks, or were never in them to begin with.

I’m interested in women who rewrote laws. Women who sat on the wrong side of courtroom doors. Women whose lives, when you look at them closely, turn out to be considerably more complicated, and considerably more interesting, than the official version.

Some posts are tied to my current projects — just as Caroline Norton’s story features in Lady on Trial. But other posts are just things I’ve become obsessed with for reasons I can’t entirely explain.

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History, it turns out, is full of women like Caroline Norton. We just haven’t been looking in the right places.

1. Dirty is good.

The twelfth-century monk who wrote An Apology for Beards argued that matted, greasy hair signals ‘interior cleanness’ and ‘divine virtue.’ The flagellant strain in Christianity found genuine virtue in suffering. So, an itchy, hairy, Mr-Twit-style beard was praiseworthy. Hm.

2. Know your place.

Medieval dress historian Margaret Scott points out that the ‘great chain of being’ — God, angels, kings, dukes, yeomen and peasants, in strict descending order — meant that the hairstyle you were allowed to wear was closely tied to rank. But it was a bit hard for knights to know where to fit in. Elite men who grew their hair too long were accused of looking like women, which was bad. But cut it short, and you might be mistaken for a monk. What a minefield!

3. A hairy diplomatic incident.

When the French king Francis I injured his head, Henry VIII shaved his own in sympathy. The bromance continued when the two kings then pledged that they would both grow their beards until they were able to meet in person. But Catherine of Aragon complained that her husband’s hairy face tickled her, and persuaded him to shave. Secretly, this was because she was dead set against his alliance with France and wanted to sabotage it. Only Francis’s mother averted the looming diplomatic catastrophe, by declaring that the two kings’ love for each other was ‘in the hearts, not the beards.’

4. Cavalier curls...

The Puritan William Prynne denounced the 1630s fashion for long, curling hair as — I quote at length, because you need the full experience — ‘unlawful, effeminate, vainglorious, evil, odious, immodest, indecent, lascivious, wanton, dissolute, whorish, ungodly, horrid, strange, outlandish, impudent, pernicious, offensive, ridiculous, foolish, childish’ and even ‘unchristian.’

5. ...and the Roundhead crop.

Short hair and radical politics have kept company across the centuries, from the Parliamentarians of the seventeenth century to the skinheads of both political extremes in the 1970s. A satirical caricature of around 1640 made the allegory literal: even the Roundhead dog in the picture sports the hairstyle of his master.

6. The rise of the wig.

Charles II returned from French exile in 1660 with a taste for false hair, and his subjects obligingly followed. Samuel Pepys resisted for years before eventually succumbing — on the practical grounds that he hated washing his hair. A French-style wig had become was the sign of a gentleman. And a welcome excuse to stop shampooing.

Enjoying this? Points 7–10 include my personal all-time favourite wig, the connection between the French Revolution and hair powder, and — best of all — the moment the British Empire ended not with a bang but with a tube of mascara. Paid subscribers read on!

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