My Life in the Past

Hello! I’m Lucy Worsley. My work as a historian takes me to some old and beautiful places, and into some surprising corners of the past. Subscribing means that you can come along too for the ride! 2025 was a bit of a turning point in my life. After 21 years as Chief Curator at the charity Historic Royal Palaces in London, I cleared out my office at Hampton Court to begin new adventures as a historian at large.

It’s February, it’s dark, and I’m standing at a front door I don’t yet know how to open. I’m wrestling with a clanking, confusing bunch of keys issued to me only hours before. Let’s meet next week too? This was the first evening of my new job as Chief Curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, and nobody had given me a manual for what to expect. At this point in my life, twenty years ago, I was just beginning my two decades of working at Hampton Court.

It’s publication day today for my new book QUEENS AND KINGS, AN UNUSUALLY PERSONAL HISTORY! It’s a history book but also a bit of a memoir, and here’s a taster for you! For twenty years I checked a ring of keys called “bunch 16” out of the security office every morning, and sat in what I’m fairly sure was the coldest office in England.

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.

When The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson - who was what used to known as a ‘courtesan’ - began appearing in instalments between January and April 1825, London reacted the way nineteenth-century cities generally react to tumult: by building barricades. Actual barricades, thrown up outside the publisher Stockdale’s shop in the Haymarket, to hold back the crowds trying to get each new number.

It's now only a week away from publication, so I'm excited to give you a glimpse of what's to come between the covers of QUEENS AND KINGS, AN UNUSUALLY PERSONAL HISTORY, which is out next week. Have you ever visited Hampton Court Palace?

Princess Margaret once let herself be photographed in her Kensington Palace dining room holding up a cushion embroidered with the words: “It’s not easy being a princess.” It’s not a career choice that I’d personally recommend. But for some really regrettable royal lives, I’d look to the princesses of the eighteenth century. This is a taste of my new book QUEENS AND KINGS, out 3 September. Like any author in the month before publication, I’m feeling the anxiety of public judgement to come.

One eighteenth-century princess was so desperate to escape palace life she said she'd even have married a baboon. The fiancé she ended up with had breath that was apparently an even worse fate. Here’s my new post on the difficulties of life as a Georgian princess! It gives a flavour of my new book QUEENS AND KINGS, AN UNUSUALLY PERSONAL HISTORY, which is published very soon now, on 3 September.

Every American schoolchild knows that George Washington, first President of the USA (1732–1799), wore false teeth made from human teeth, cow teeth, hippopotamus ivory and even a tooth from a horse. Fewer know that in 1781, enemy forces captured a letter in which he requested cleaning tools for his dentures. It gave away his whereabouts to British. The smallest details of daily life, it turns out, might sometimes have the power to determine the fate of empires.

You’d be amazed just how much we know about what went on in the palace bedchambers of the past. Join me to hear how Henry VIII’s bed was made, why Jane Seymour’s heart still remains at Hampton Court, and who might have drawn the anatomically-inaccurate naked lady on the staircase wall. We’ll even take an intimate glimpse into Princess Margaret’s bathroom. Enjoy!