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Lucy Worsley had the keys to the palace. Now she’s telling its stories
Historian Lucy Worsley has written a book about what the history books leave out — affairs, phantom pregnancies, and one badly behaved monkey
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Years after everyone else, I finally started watching The Tudors. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Henry VIII and Natalie Dormer is Anne Boleyn, and the familiar story of the king and his six wives unfolds through sex, intrigue, and beheadings.
The series also sent me back to Lucy Worsley. For 21 years, Worsley worked at Historic Royal Palaces, becoming Chief Curator in 2003. Her work gave her access to some of Britain’s best-known royal buildings, including Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London. In 2025, she cleared out her office at Hampton Court and left to become, as she puts it, a “historian at large”.
Her new book, Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History (Hodder & Stoughton), draws on those years. It covers a thousand years of British monarchy, but Worsley cares less about reigns and dates than about the details behind them: love letters, phantom pregnancies, adultery, bodily functions, and even a monkey that apparently terrorised a royal household.
“The complete and utter lack of privacy you get as a queen or king!” she says, when asked what working inside palaces taught her.
“Spending time inside palaces has taught me that walls have ears, and it’s impossible for a monarch to be off duty. And even a queen or king’s bodily functions are closely observed by foreign ambassadors. A queen’s menstrual cycle matters, because if she’s pregnant, and the monarchy has an heir, it’s less likely there’ll be a civil war. A king’s adultery, a new royal mistress: all these things are deeply political.”
A life inside the palace
Worsley was born in Reading and studied ancient and modern history at New College, Oxford, before completing a PhD in art history at the University of Sussex. She worked at Milton Manor in Oxfordshire, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, English Heritage, and Glasgow Museums before joining Historic Royal Palaces.
“This book just spilled out of me,” she says. “I didn’t sit down and do a period of very detailed research, because in fact it turns out I had been researching it for the last 21 years!”
“When I left Hampton Court, I wanted to record all the best and most memorable stories and discoveries that I’d made during my time within palace walls -- basically in the hope of sharing some of the same delight I felt in researching them over two decades.”
Being inside these places has also made historical events more tangible to her. Hampton Court Palace, for instance, reveals Henry VIII’s preoccupation with producing an heir. “The brick walls reveal how much Henry VIII’s quest for an heir mattered to him, because he kept building new wings of the palace in response to his love life.”
“He was planning a new wing for Queen Anne Boleyn, but he didn’t get it finished in time before he chopped her head off. So, the new wing was going to be for Queen Jane Seymour,” she says.
Henry VIII completed another new wing for Jane’s son, Edward, but Jane’s wing wasn’t finished when Jane herself died after giving birth. “The new queen’s wing was only finally finished and used by wives numbers 5 and 6, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr,” she says.
The messy monarchs
Worsley’s new book is subtitled An Unusually Personal History, and its stories reflect what she has learned from years of talking to people about royal history.
“I’ve got used to talking to people, over the years, about the history of the monarchy, so I’ve got a good feeling for what interests people, and what they find funny, or tragic, or human,” she says.
She adds that she feels that sometimes people come to an impressive place like Hampton Court thinking they ‘ought’ to ask questions about politics or aesthetics, but “actually they really want to know about ghosts, or the toilet arrangements, or how often the queen slept with the king”.
That interest in private life shows up across her television and writing too. Her programmes include Six Wives, Empire of the Tsars, Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors, and A Very British Murder. Her books include Courtiers, If Walls Could Talk, A Very British Murder, and Jane Austen at Home. She won a BAFTA for Specialist Factual for the documentary Suffragettes in 2019.
But Worsley says she is not trying to make every monarch seem relatable. For some of the most successful rulers remain difficult to read.
“I think that in a way the greatest monarchs are the least human,” she says. “Some of the most successful, like Elizabeth I, were inscrutable. It’s like she’s still playing or toying with us, 500 years later.”
Worsley has a particular fondness, though, for rulers whose lives were less controlled. “But I love a messy monarch! Someone like George IV, whose personal life was a complete car-crash, is to me an absolutely addictive life story,” she says.
History for people who don’t know they like history
Worsley’s approach to history often starts with the detail that might not make it into a textbook: a royal affair, a strange domestic arrangement, an unexplained story that has survived for centuries.
“I’m not against history as solemn record at all! That’s very important. It’s just not the kind of historian I personally am,” she says.
“I try to be a historian for people who don’t even know that they like history … yet. That means setting aside my dignity, doing whatever it takes to get people over the threshold and into the world of the past -- which can, let’s face it, be quite a boring or forbidding place.”
The historian believes this kind of history has become more popular over the years. “I would say that the type of history I personally like, and like to do, has become even more popular than when I started, and that makes me history’s luckiest historian! Or, at least, it feels that way.”
Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History brings together the stories Worsley collected over two decades inside Britain’s royal palaces. They are about kings and queens, but also their private lives, their anxieties, and the mistakes that could shape a succession or a marriage.
After leaving Hampton Court, she has finally had the chance to put all those stories in one book.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.
