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The Poissardes Demand Money
During the French Revolution, the poissardes freely went round demanding money from both wealthy aristocrats and foreign travellers, as Mary Berry, an Englishwoman who visited Paris in 1791 discovered...
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Marie Antoinette Acknowledges Madame Du Barry
Marie Antoinette first saw Madame du Barry, King Louis XV's mistress, at a dinner at La Muette. It was the day before her wedding to the Dauphin, and the mistress' presence at the event had caused a...
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Book Review: Am I Beautiful? By Chine Mbubaegbu
Am I beautiful? That's a question every woman asks herself. We all long to be seen as beautiful by others, and when we think we aren't, our self-esteem plummets to the ground. But what does beautiful...
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Elizabeth Linley Sheridan
Elizabeth, or Eliza as she was commonly called, Linley was born, in 1754, into a musical family. Her father was the famous composer Thomas Linley, who was said, at the time, to have restored the...
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History And Other Thoughts Turns 2!
Today History And Other Thoughts turns 2! I can hardly believe it. Times flies so fast! I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for making these two years of blogging such an amazing...
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Princess Charlotte Of Wales Turns Down The Hereditary Prince Of Orange
Charlotte, Princess of Wales, was one of the few lucky royal ladies to have married for love. But before she tied the knot with her beloved Prince Leopold, she had been briefly engaged to William,...
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Historical Reads: The Edwardian Gamekeeper
Author Evangeline Holland shares an interesting article explaining how an English gamekeeper lived during the Edwardian era. To quote:The position of a gamekeeper in England is a curious one....
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Birth Of Victoria, Princess Royal
On 21st November 1817, "a dark, dull, windy, rainy day with smoking chimneys", Queen Victoria gave birth to her first child, Princess Victoria. In her diary, the Queen claimed that she wasn't nervous...
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Henry VIII's First Jousting Accident
On 10th March 1524, King Henry VIII had his first serious jousting accident. George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey's gentleman-usher, related the event thus:On 10 March the king, having a new armor made to...
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Book Review: Queen's Gambit By Elizabeth Freemantle
Synopsis:Widowed for the second time at age thirty-one Katherine Parr falls deeply for the dashing courtier Thomas Seymour and hopes at last to marry for love. However, obliged to return to court, she...
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Marie Antoinette Meets Count Fersen
Much has been made about the meeting between the charming Marie Antoinette and the dashing Swede nobleman Axel was Fersen, but, as Antonia Fraser relates in her book "Marie Antoinette: The Journey", it...
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Short Book Reviews: Richard Wagner The Lighter Side, Max Ginsburg...
I haven't done some short book reviews in a while, so let's remedy that shall we? Here are three books that are worth checking out:Richard Wagner: The Lighter Side by Terry QuinnRichard Wagner has...
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Queen Victoria's Early Reminiscences
Queen Victoria reminisces about her childhood:My earliest recollections are connected with Kensington Palace, where I can remember crawling on a yellow carpet spread out for that purpose—and being told...
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Wedding of Princess Charlotte of Wales and Prince Leopold of...
On 2nd May 1816, Princess Charlotte of Wales married her soulmate, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield. Robert Huish, in his Memoirs of Her late Royal Highness Charlotte Augusta, Princess of Wales,...
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Historical Reads: Three Ladies In Waiting Of Marie Antoinette
Who were Marie Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting? Author Melanie Clegg briefly remembers three of them:Laure-Auguste de Fitz-James, Princesse de Chimay (1744-1804) was one of the numerous children of...
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Let Down Your Lappets, Or The Countess Will Expire
Madame De Noailles, Marie Antoinette's chief lady-in-waiting, was a stickler for etiquette. For that reason, her young mistress, who couldn't stand the rigidity of the old countess, nicknamed her...
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Gabrielle De Polignac: Loyal Friend Or Greedy Social Climber?
Gabrielle De Polignac was Marie Antoinette's best friend. And just like the Queen's, her reputation too was completely destroyed. She was accused of being greedy, spendthrift, pleasure-loving, of using...
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Book Review: The Assassination Of The Archduke By Greg King And Sue Woolmans
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, and his morganatic wife, Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, in...
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James Figg's Shirt Scam
James Figg was the first English bare-knuckle boxing champion. He was expert in the use of swords, cudgels and quarterstaffs, and opened a school to teach his craft. But he also sold many shirts,...
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Anne Boleyn: Beautiful Or Ugly?
Very few images, and none of them authentic (apart from her likeness in the ring her daughter Elizabeth I wore for her whole life), of Anne Boleyn survive, so it is very difficult to say what the...
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