Last night, Anthony Delaney and I sat down to talk about QUEENS AND KINGS, my new and very personal history of the British monarchy. (It’s out THIS WEEK - on Tuesday in America, Thursday in the UK!) If you missed us live, or you just want to watch Anthony trying not to laugh at me again, please enjoy the recording.
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…
