If you worried that royal houses had gotten a little too genteel by the 19th century, the story of Ranavalona I of Madagascar will disabuse you of that pretty quickly. Seizing the throne in 1828 after the death of her husband, King Radama - despite not being the rightful heir to it - she immediately launched a campaign of murder against her political rivals and potential successors, and summarily ended friendly relations with European nations, including expelling missionaries who had...

When she assumed the throne in 1558, she made it clear to the members of her court that they shouldn't plan to have their wives or female companions around the place. She intended to be singular as she consolidated power, but perhaps she had another motive as well; by banishing the wives, Robert Dudley, newly appointed Master of the Horse to Her Majesty the Queen, was not required to send for his wife, Amy Robsart, to join him in London. Elizabeth and Robert were not overly discreet in their...

While Queen Elizabeth I of England famously never married, her close relationship with Robert Dudley began when the two were small children together in the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was a princess who was downgraded to a lady after her mother, Anne Boleyn's, death. Robert was the grandson of an advisor to King Henry VII who was executed for treason upon the ascension of Henry VIII, forcing the Dudley family to struggle mightily to rehabilitate its noble image at court. All of which is...

It's a big week for Tortured Poets, so we decided to take a long look at history's most famous one: William Shakespeare himself. Alicia explores the mystery around the true identity of the author of some of the world's most famous pieces of literature. Was it really the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon penning Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and all the sonnets, or was that a convenient pseudonym for someone else, or a group of someone elses? Listen ad-free at...

As Taylor Swift launches her latest era with The Tortured Poets Department, Alicia dives into her favorite era: Tudor England. We explore the 17 surviving love letters that King Henry VIII penned during his courtship and early relationship with Anne Boleyn in the latter half of the 1520s, particularly noting that for quite a long time, it seems like Anne wasn't really that into him. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

However much 'protocol' may attempt to intervene, the truth is that eccentricity is a trait that even royals have. This is certainly the case for Elisabeth of Wied, a German princess who became Romania's first queen, wife of Romania's King Carol I. Politics in Europe were extra complex in the latter half of the 19th century. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II had concluded his father's Crimean War in 1856, but even with the defeat of Russia in the conflict, the Ottoman Empire was in retreat. As...

The fourteenth century was full of challenges to marital bliss, especially for nobles. Travel was complicated, especially during times of war, but royal houses still needed to cement alliances through marriage - often among woefully young princes and princesses who, again, were separated by vast distances and perhaps had never met. So it was for Portugal's young prince Pedro, born 1320. Proxy-married to Constanza Manuel, a Castillian noblewoman, the union was made so Portugal's king, Alfonso...

We touched on England's King George IV in our episode about Queen Victoria's Trashy Hanoverian Uncles (episode 17), but there's so much more to the story of his misspent youth and his cataclysmic marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick. To help out, we asked our friend Sam from the podcast I'm Horrified!, who recently delivered this banger of a story over there. The daughter of King George III's eldest sister, Caroline was raised in the German duchy of Braunschweig, or Brunswick in...

This week, we take a look at a different European monarchy, that of Denmark, through two King Frederiks of Denmark. Frederik VII held the throne from 1848 to 1863, and was the last absolute monarch of the country, bowing to calls for reforms and signing Denmark's constitution, which implemented the constitutional monarchy that persists to this day. He was also a terrible husband, was divorced by two wives, and appears to have been part of a throuple with his third wife and their male lover...

After the death of Edwina Mountbatten in 1960, Dickie still had another 19 years of living to do, and while he was single, he was in no way alone. He had romances with plenty of women in his later years, and according to many, he had male lovers - including, it is alleged, boys - as well. A mentor to Prince Charles, his advice to the young man may have contributed to what turned into the tragic marriage, divorce, and untimely death of Princess Diana, who was exactly the sort of woman that...

As Edwina took pains to lay low in Malta after the scandals of her affairs, Italy decided to exit the League of Nations and invade Ethiopia. To protect their children, she took them to Budapest and installed them in a hotel with their nanny and governess... and then forgot which hotel they were in. For months. As the summer of 1935 turned to fall, and then winter, they just stayed in their hotel until Edwina finally came across the paper she'd written the hotel's name on, tucked into the...

Programming note: This episode is a bit more explicit than most, including strong language and descriptions of sex. If you listen with wee ones, use your judgment. The early '30s were a roaring time for Edwina's various romances, though two in particular would have far-reaching implications for her lovers. The first, with American actor Paul Robeson, caused scandal in the London tabloids because Robeson was Black. The Royal Family considered the situation dire enough that they demanded that...

As the Roaring '20s turned into the '30s, Edwina's appetite for other lovers showed no sign of diminishing, and eventually led to a breaking point with her long-suffering husband, Louis. At one point, they decided that divorce was the best option, but quickly reconciled with new rules for their relationship: Edwina would be more discreet in her dalliances, which had previously been headline news, and Louis would be free to take lovers of his own. But a funny thing happened when he finally did...

It didn't take long for Edwina, young, rich, and alone while her husband Louis was away with the Navy, to begin flirtations and then affairs with various suitors. There were the young men of her social strata, to be sure, but there was also a scandalous rumored fling with the notably female American entertainer Sophie Tucker, "The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas." These affairs took a toll on her marriage and her relations with the British Royal Family, but also laid the template for the...

While Louis and Edwina Mountbatten would have a 38-year-long marriage, it isn't quite right to say it was a happy union. That first six months or so though - when they traveled through Europe and the United States, meeting Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and dining with President Warren G. Harding - was a magical time for the couple. Once they returned to England and settled into married life, things quickly went sideways. With Louis frequently at sea for long periods as a Naval officer,...

As many will already know, it was the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine who would become a prominent figure in the lives of the modern world of the Windsors. Young Louis Battenberg, later Louis Mountbatten, was known as Dickie to his confidants, and was stung early when his father, First Sea Lord of the British Navy, was removed from his post at the outbreak of WWI because of his German origins. The episode would motivate his son to excel...

Prince George of Battenberg, later the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was the third child of Louis Battenber and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and was by all accounts a pretty good dude. Like his father, he set his sights on a naval career, and excelled at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, entering the Royal Navy in time to participate in World War I. His 1916 marriage to Countess Nadajda de Torby, called Nada by her friends, would become a source of significant scandal in...

Admit it: you’re obsessed with royal families – watching them, gossiping about them, wanting to be them. It’s the stuff of fantasy. But for real life royals, the crown jewels can be more like shiny handcuffs. There are expectations and rules – and if you break them, the consequences are big, and very public. And no, we’re not just talking about Harry and Meghan. There are royal families and wild royal tales from around the world and throughout history that you have never heard before. From...

The second child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later, Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven) and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was Princess Louise, born July 14, 1889. While most royal were promptly shuttled into marriage, Louise was an independent, progressive young woman whose heart was set on marrying for love. There were suitors, to be sure, but Louise was insistent that she would never marry a king or a widower, and of course, that the union be based on love. This led...

After Louis Battenberg's (later Louis Mountbatten) successful campaign to marry Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, the couple set about having babies. The first of these, Princess Alice, was born in 1885, and came into the world congenitally deaf. Given the era, no particular accommodations were made for her, and while her condition caused many to underestimate her, she compensated by learning to lip-read (in several languages) and spoke English, German, French, and, later, Greek. Her...

While royal houses are often insular and even incestuous (at least at the cousin-marrying level), new blood does manage to enter those gene pools from time to time. Meet the Mountbattens! The family's story begins in Russia, circa 1850, where the orphaned daughter of a Polish general named Julia von Hauke was serving in the household of Maria Alexandrovna, future wife of future Tsar Alexander II. Maria's brother, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, fell hard for the common-born Julia, a...

Eleanor's life was no less interesting following the death of Henry II. Rather than fade into the background, her son, King Richard I, instead made her his most powerful deputy in England while he went to the Holy Land on Crusade. In fact, Richard I was an extremely disinterested monarch and spent very little of his decade-long reign in the country. His brother, the future King John, at one point tried to raise and army and take the crown by force, but his mother put an end to that. Then...

After Eleanor finally succeeded in ending her marriage to Louis VII of France, she had a brief turn of wedded bliss to the future Henry II of England. It's not that the marriage was short, just her happiness. Henry II, it turns out, was a king of questionable judgment, as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would find out. He was also loathe to cede power to their children, and little was helped when Henry's head was turned by a young noblewoman named Rosamund Clifford - an affair that...

History is not without examples of powerful women, to be sure, but even in that pantheon, Eleanor of Aquitaine is a special case. In this first part of her story, Alicia takes us through her early life in the French province of Aquitaine, where her father was the ruling Duke, and her first, disastrous marriage to the future (it turns out by a matter of days) Louis VII of France. A marriage that would, after many unhappy years, be annulled, allowing Eleanor to create one of history's most...