Five shocking tales from Britain’s royal palaces

The duke set off across the palace to investigate and found his valet, Joseph Sellis, dead in his room, his throat cut.

What on Earth had happened? An inquest declared Sellis had tried to kill the duke and then turned the blade on himself.

But the public wasn’t so sure. In 1832, a book declared that the duke had murdered Sellis to silence him following allegations including blackmail and adultery. Alarmingly for Cumberland, plenty of people agreed. They didn’t believe that the duke, one of the most unpopular royals in history, could possibly be innocent.

James VI’s devilish obsession

In 1590, Holyrood Palace was the scene of a fateful meeting between James VI of Scotland and a local midwife, Agnes Sampson. The king wanted to find out if Sampson was a witch, and if she had tried to sink his ships as they sailed home to Scotland from Denmark. Sampson denied all charges.

But after she was taken away and tortured, she said that she had met the devil and “took him for her master”, and attended a witches’ sabbath. The king, who would later write his own witch-hunting guide, interrogated her again. This time, Sampson told James that she knew what he had said to his wife on his wedding night. He promptly ordered Sampson’s death.

Palaces were often dangerous places for women. A generation before, James’s own mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been kidnapped at Holyrood while dining with friends and her secretary, David Rizzio. A group of lords seized Rizzio and fatally stabbed him, before imprisoning Mary – who was heavily pregnant – at the palace in order to depose her. But then her second husband, Lord Darnley, who’d had a hand in the plot, changed his mind and freed her.

Within a year of the birth of James, Darnley died in Edinburgh, apparently smothered, while his house was blown up. Holyrood resounded to the explosion.

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A taste for corpse medicine

Fascinated by science, King Charles II had a laboratory of potions and bottles built at Whitehall Palace. One of his quests was to find the secret to long life, and he decided the answer was skull medicine, a practice known across Europe. It required taking a human skull from someone who had died a violent or surprising death, then grinding it down and mixing it with ingredients such as hartshorn. Voila: ‘skull drops’.

The drops didn’t save him. Charles II died at his beloved Whitehall at the age of 54 after suddenly falling ill, apologising for “being an unconscionable time dying”.

The palace, constructed as Henry VIII’s party palace, is all lost now, built over by the government. The modern-day cabinet office is on the site of Henry VIII’s cock-fighting ring.

Anne Boleyn sails into danger

It was a beautiful present, but it would have terrible consequences. Henry VIII fell in love with Anne Boleyn in 1526 and besieged her with letters. She took refuge at her childhood home, Hever Castle, while the king begged her. What Anne did next would set her on an impossible course.

Anne decided to send Henry a new year gift for 1527. She chose a jewelled trinket of a ship featuring, in the words of Henry himself, a “costly diamond” and the figure of a “solitary damsel” tossed about on the seas. The king interpreted the gift as a big yes and embarked on his mission to make Anne his queen. It ended with her execution at the Tower of London – the most famous of all imprisoned queens.

Perhaps to Anne, the gift didn’t only represent her submission to Henry, rescuer of a lonely damsel, but was a hint that she thought she might drown.

When Edward VIII ‘stole’ his own crown

Palaces surely have more lost property than the London Underground. When the Prince Regent staged a giant party at Carlton House in 1811, there was such a crush that two women had dresses torn from their backs and 40 pairs of shoes were found in the hall.

Some years later, the Duchess of Abercorn lost the then biggest pearl in the world, La Peregrina, in a sofa in Windsor Castle. Luckily, it was found again and later owned by Elizabeth Taylor (who also nearly lost it).

Perhaps the greatest object ever lost in a palace is a crown. When Edward VIII abdicated at Windsor in 1936, he made off with royal items – including the Prince of Wales Coronet, which wasn’t returned to the country until Edward’s death in 1972.

That meant that our current king, Charles, had to have a coronet specially made for his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, a TV spectacle at Caernarfon Castle.

This coronet is topped with a golden globe to represent the world. The 1969 viewers might have been surprised to learn that the globe is actually a gold-plated ping-pong ball!

This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine