The Execution the Axeman Could Not Finish
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was among the last Plantagenets and the mother of Cardinal Reginald Pole, an opponent of Henry VIII's religious policy. She spent more than…
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London
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The Death of Henry VI in Wakefield Tower
Henry VI was deposed during the Wars of the Roses and returned to the Tower after the Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury. The official story said that he died of displeasure and…
Sir Walter Raleigh's Thirteen Years in the Bloody Tower
Walter Raleigh did not live in the Tower as an anonymous prisoner. During his first long confinement he wrote, cultivated plants and worked on his History of the World, while…
Charles I's Last Walk
On 30 January 1649 Charles I passed from St James's Palace through the Banqueting House to a scaffold erected outside in Whitehall. The execution of an anointed reigning king…
The Gunpowder Plot Beneath Parliament
On the night of 5 November 1605 the authorities found Guy Fawkes in an undercroft beneath the House of Lords near barrels of gunpowder. The Catholic conspiracy led by Robert…
Catherine Howard's Scream in the Haunted Gallery
Catherine Howard was arrested at Hampton Court in November 1541 as the investigation into her past reached the king. In the palace's best-known legend she escaped her guards and…
The King's Madness at Kew
Kew Palace is associated with severe periods of George III's illness, particularly in 1804 and 1810–11, when the king's behaviour created a crisis of government. Contemporaries…
Elizabeth I's Last Night at Richmond
Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603 after a reign of forty-four years. Accounts of her final days describe a queen reluctant to take to her bed and sitting for…
Mitre Square and the Night of the Double Event
In Mitre Square early on 30 September 1888 the body of Catherine Eddowes was found, the second woman killed during the so-called “double event.” The square lay within the City…
Mary Jane Kelly's Room on Dorset Street
Mary Jane Kelly was murdered on 9 November 1888 in a small room in Miller's Court off Dorset Street. Unlike the other canonical victims, she was indoors, and the crime-scene…
The Ratcliffe Highway Murders
In December 1811 two households were murdered near Ratcliffe Highway, provoking fear of random violence and an extraordinary London manhunt. The suspected sailor John Williams…
Dr Crippen and the Hilldrop Crescent Cellar
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen lived with his wife Cora at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. After her disappearance in 1910 he sailed for Canada with Ethel Le Neve disguised as a boy, but the…