Is it a draught or is it... a Tudor ghost? Secrets from 20 years behind the scenes at Hampton Court!

Anthony Delaney and I sat down to talk about my new book QUEENS AND KINGS, A VERY PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE MONARCHY, ahead of its publication on both sides of the Atlantic this week. We covered haunted galleries, my twenty years working behind the scenes at Hampton Court, and the truth about a very old chamber pot. It was lovely to tell him some of the best bits of 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. Anthony and I discussed 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 questions from my lovely subscribers to my weekly history newsletter MY LIFE IN THE PAST (thank you!) and very good ones they were too. Wish me luck for my publication week, dear friends - I’m nervous! And of course, if you don't subscribe to MY LIFE IN THE PAST at lucyworsley.substack.com I'd argue that you're really missing out! That's where all the videos drop first, and you get a weekly history newsletter straight into your inbox from me, containing the riches of the world of the past. Join 68,000 other history lovers!