Alice Hunt

In her​ early 15th-century conduct book for women, Christine de Pizan advised a princess, not yet married, to ‘love her husband and live in peace with him, or otherwise she will have already discovered the torments of hell’. Tough advice for the 23-year-old Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza. Soon after her arrival at the Restoration court in 1662, as the wife of Charles...

In his​ History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from.’ The execution of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted...

For Mendoza​, the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more...