74. Empress Wu Zetian, China's Only Female Monarch

The Tudors are still turning, friends, but with the spooky season upon us, Alicia thought it would be a wonderful time to share the scariest thing the Tudors themselves dealt with: a mysterious illness called Sweating Sickness. Fortunately for people alive today, the disease vanished centuries ago, leaving modern scientists to puzzle over what it might have been. For this episode, Alicia sat down with our friends Sam and Allie at I'm Horrified!, another perfect spot to showcase a horrifying and deadly disease. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By 1520, Europe found itself in an interesting moment. The most significant leaders in the endless jostle for power and influence were all young kings - Henry VIII in England, around 30 years old; Francis I in France, around 26 years old; and Charles V as King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, at about 20 years old. You can imagine how potentially unstable an axis of entitled, army-commanding young kings might be, but it's noteworthy that there were cooler heads with bigger visions than wars of conquest moving pieces on the field of politics even then. Henry's England was still something of a third wheel in the spheres of influence of the era, but both Francis and Charles were eager to count the island nation as an ally in their machinations against each other. Henry's right hand man, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, had the idea that it could be possible to produce an enduring peace among the Christian nations, particularly in light of the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire. Following the 1518 Treaty of London, a non-aggression pact between most of Europe's states, Wolsey wanted to showcase both the majesty and the (largely imaginary) friendship between England and France, resulting in a three-week-long summit between Henry VIII (and many thousands of courtiers, artisans, soldiers, and others) and Francis I (and many thousands of courtiers, artisans, soldiers, and others) on a large turnip field outside of Calais, then an English holding. The two sides spent months ahead of the June meeting building elaborate, but fake, castles, stadiums and other infrastructure to house, feed, and maintain the influx of people, horses, livestock, and goods that were soon to arrive. The Cloth of the Field of Gold was heralded as an event of great import, and Henry VIII would consider it a high point of his reign, but as we know, the dream of a peaceful Europe would not be realized for many centuries to come, and even now, remains a fragile and threatened thing. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Sources Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII, by Karen Lindsey (Amazon) The Distinctive 'Habsburg Jaw' Was Likely the Result of the Royal Family's Inbreeding (smithsonianmag.com) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Life after the death of her husband, King James IV of Scotland, was not simple for Margaret Tudor, at least not at first. Her quick marriage to Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, happened while she was unaware of his long relationship with another woman. Her royal status in Scotland was complicated - fairly massively - by the fact that her brother, King Henry VIII, was responsible for the battlefield death of her husband, The King. The Archibald Douglas marriage didn't help either, as allying herself with the Douglas family ignited factionalism in the Scottish court, resulting in her regency being revoked. When she became pregnant, she fled to England, and while Archibald returned to Scotland soon after, her brother welcomed her to court in London. After a year-long negotiation, she returned to Scotland, where she learned what a lout her second husband truly was. Meanwhile, her sister Mary in London was busy having babies with her second husband, Charles Brandon, and Henry VIII was beginning to explore relations outside of his marriage, having failed to obtain a living son with Catherine of Aragon. Their messy, messy story continues next week here at Trashy Royals on As The Tudors Turn! Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After his father shipped his sister Margaret off to be the Queen of Scotland, it fell to Henry VIII to manage his baby sister Mary's love life. A genuine beauty, France's King Louis XII, then 52, was undoubtedly happy to walk down the aisle with the 18-year-old English princess. The bliss would not last, as just three or so months later, Louis was dead, with salacious whispers in the French court that Mary had "intercoursed" him to death. Ah, the 16th century. But this wasn't the end for Mary's heart, not by a long shot. It turns out that she had long nurtured a desire for Tudor courtier and man-about-town Charles Brandon. Charles's father had been a loyal partisan of Henry Tudor's claim to the throne before he became Henry VII, and Sir William Brandon had died at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Young Charles was raised at court, a few years older than Henry VIII, and enjoyed a bit of hero worship from the future king. He was also a scoundrel who fleeced a number of rich women (and girls) through the hazy definitions of marriage and engagement in the period. Still, in spite of Henry making him promise not to marry his sister, Charles was dispatched to France after the death of Louis XII to negotiate the young queen's return to England, and once there, the long-suffering Mary convinced the dashing man of her dreams to abandon the pledge and marry her anyway. Her brother was, to put it mildly, displeased. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The much-discussed and much-reviled English King Henry VIII is best known, of course, as one of history's worst husbands. There were famously six wives, two of whom were lucky enough to outlive him. But before whatever madness began to take hold of him in his 30s, he was a dashing, popular young king with a devoted wife and, as far as historians can tell, a fairly limited number of mistresses. These wonder years were not without obstacles and tragedies. Catherine of Aragon, his first and longest-married wife, suffered miscarriages and stillbirths throughout their years together, finally producing just a daughter, the future Mary I, or, for the Protestants in the audience, Bloody Mary. Still, these years seemed to be a time of optimism for both Henry and the people of England. Who could have predicted the social and political earthquakes that were to come? Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Sponsors This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/trashy today to get 10% off your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A century and a half before the "Golden Age of Piracy," an Irish woman of noble birth was conquering the inland seas and coastlines on the western edge of the island. Gráinne Ó Máille, anglicized to Grace O'Malley, hailed from the Umhaill line, a seafaring clan of Connacht, and while the family did conduct legitimate forms of trade, they also ran protection rackets on boats that tried to fish their waters, and sometimes plundered merchant vessels in the area, as well as settlements belonging to neighboring clans. Her life almost perfectly overlapped Queen Elizabeth I's, and during Grace's life, the English Crown was deeply invested in the conquest of Ireland, mostly by seducing its nobles into servitude with fancy English titles. Barons and Earls proliferated around Dublin for years, but English shenanigans finally reached the West of the country when Grace's first husband was cut out from the line of succession to his family's Chief of the Name. Then he was assassinated, leaving Grace ready and willing to enact violent revenge on his killers. The Crown continued eroding the alliances she was building. Her second husband was demoted from his role as regional king of Connacht while Grace was jailed on a plundering trip. When the Crown-supported king died, Grace and her husband teamed up to raise an army of 2,000 men to insure his succession. He not only got the title, but was named a Baron as well, in exchange for his promise of fealty to English law. But Crown agents had already set their sights on Grace O'Malley as the kind of noteworthy adversary whose arrest or death would send a message throughout the Emerald Isle, and Grace was eventually forced to sail to London to seek an audience with Queen Elizabeth herself, an effort in which she prevailed handily. Grace's story is full of courage, vengeance, and daring-do, but it's also a story rooted in specific moment in time, when the longstanding society of Ireland was changing and being changed. Ireland's Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley saw it all up close, and as a most unconventional woman, charted her own course through. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Queen Elizabeth II was born in 1926, there were years of her childhood that were, compared to other future monarchs, quite normal. After all, she was never supposed to be the Queen. Her father was a second son; her Uncle David would succeed her grandfather, and certainly other male children would come along. And then, in 1930, Elizabeth's parents waited with anticipation to find out the gender of Elizabeth's impending sibling. A boy would be in the line of succession. But the child who arrived was Princess Margaret, who was never supposed to be the daughter and sister of Queens herself, but for the fateful choice her Uncle David would make when Margaret was just six, when everything changed. This episode follows Margaret through a tumultuous childhood, an early doomed romance, and her long, if ill-fated marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, eventually the Earl of Snowden. We visit Mustique, the Caribbean island where Margaret's only personal land holdings resided, and meet some of the guests she entertained there. Plus, an assortment of stories about the social life of a notoriously difficult Princess - and why hanging with Margaret wasn't everything it was cracked up to be. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charlemagne, The Father of Europe, died in the year 814 and left only one surviving son to take the helm of the Carolingian Empire, which spanned the lion's share of the European continent. But his heir, Louis the Pious, had three sons, who each got a parcel of the empire when he died. Then those kings had children of their own, dividing the kingdom up until factions and branches of Charlemagne's lineage occupied independent power centers from the border of modern Denmark all the way down to Italy south of Rome. Our story today involves several of those Carolingian kings, and two priests who would become popes. Bishop Formosus served the Vatican as a diplomat on numerous missions in Europe, developing close ties to the Frankish kings to the north of Rome, the sons of the sons of Charlemagne. When his winding road to the Papacy finally made him Pope Formosus, he found himself at odds - even militarily - with the southern wing of the family, the Dukes of Spoleto, the sons of the daughters of Charlemagne. After Formosa's death, the Dukes of Spoleto reasserted their power, installing a new pope, Stephen VI, who exacted the southern family's revenge on Formosus and their northern kin by exhuming Formosus's rotten corpse and holding an infamously gruesome public trial. Formosus was obviously convicted, but the episode condemned Stephen VI in the moment and for the ages. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Content note: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and coercion that may not be appropriate for all listeners. Though only in power for eight years, the Ottoman Empire's Ibrahim the Mad made his own mark on history as a notoriously bad ruler, a sexual deviant, but also a bit of a fashion plate. He loved his furs and sparkly jewels. He also made unwise decisions in foreign affairs, as when he responded to pirates by launching what would turn into a 24-year-long war with the Republic of Venice. As wars do, this led to supply chain disruptions and tax increases that eventually led to angry mobs and mass upheaval in Constantinople. Ibrahim was deposed in an uprising of the Janissary corp, the elite household guard of the Ottoman Sultans. He was strangled to death, as was the custom, in August of 1648. Listen ad-free at patreon.com/trashyroyalspodcast. To advertise on this podcast, reach out to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices