After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Exploding Kings & Red Hot Pokers: Gruesome Deaths of Monarchs

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Edward II died by red-hot poker. William the Conqueror exploded on his way into the coffin. Mary II went down covered in so many pustules she was unrecognisable.Kings and Queens are more much more likely than the rest of us to meet a grizzly end. Sometimes it's because they're murdered. Sometimes it's that we try too hard to keep them alive. And sometimes it's because we don't stick them in the ground soon enough once they've gone.Edited by Tean Stewart-Murray, Produced by Stuart Beckwith and Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout/subscribe/purchase?code=afterdark&plan=monthly

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Hello and welcome to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, the podcast that takes you to the darker side of history. Now, they have been beheaded, they've been stabbed, they've been killed by arrows, they've been poisoned, tortured, blown up by cannon, they've been splattered all over our

history books. Who might we be talking about but the violent and gruesome deaths of kings and queens? Yes, you're going to hear all about them with our guest today, Dr Susie Edge. Now, Susie is, as well as being a historian, she's actually a real medical doctor. Compared to Anthony and I, our PhDs are not medical in any sense of the word. Susie is perhaps best known from TikTok, and you can follow her there where she has a huge amount of followers. Let's leave it to Susie to explain the ins and outs of the gruesome deaths of monarchs in this week's episode of After Dark. Hello and welcome to this episode of After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.

I'm Dr Anthony Delaney. And I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And on today's episode, we are delighted to be joined by the one and only Dr Susie Edge. Now, Susie came to history in a really interesting way training first as a molecular cell biologist which as you do before moving on to clinical medicine and working as a junior doctor. She then turned the whole thing on its head and undertook an emlet in modern history. Now you may be familiar with Susie from TikTok where she has more than 420,000 followers. And she's also the author of Mortal Monarchs, 1000 Years of Royal Deaths, and her newest book, Vital Organs, a history of

the world's most famous body parts. Susie is joining us today from her cottage in the Scottish Highlands, where she lives with her husband, her two teenage daughters, and their dog Scout. And we must not forget Scout. Scout is obviously of the utmost importance in this conversation. Susie, thank you so much for joining us. Hello, what a lovely introduction. Thank you. Susie, we're absolutely delighted to have you on. So let's just do a little bit of scene setting. You were a doctor and you've since moved into being a historian. So how did you get into this area of history, specifically look at monarchs, and as we're going to chat about, pretty gruesome monarch deaths. So

how did you come to be a historian of this very niche and pretty bloody part of history? I mean, it started a very long time ago, because I wanted to, I was interested in studying history when I was at school. And it was one of those scenarios where I also happened to mention that I enjoyed the sciences. And of course, I was told, well, absolutely, you must go down that line, you can't possibly study history, that's not going to take you anywhere, the humanities generally don't do it. And so I was channeled off into studying medicine. And one has to give up really, academically, one has to give up, really. Academically, one has to give up all those things for a while. And I read and had other interests while I was studying medicine and working as a doctor.

One day I went along to the history department and I knocked on the door and said, let me in. And they said, no, go away. I went away with my tail between my legs. And I came back again and I tried again a few years later. And I think they got fed up with me and let me in. I come at history from another background as well. So before I did my PhD, I, well, I'm still now, I'm an actor, but my kind of other discipline definitely informs how I do history and how I interact with history. So I'm just wondering, I mean, obviously we're going to talk about mortal monarchs and the death of monarchy here, but how do you think

those prior experiences inform your historical investigations? I think when it comes to just the basic the superficial level of going into the the history department and starting I really had no idea what I was letting myself into in fact one day I walked into a classroom and there was a quote on the screen and it said something in German and all the other students were laughing and I had to get them to explain it to me and at that point I felt really like I was up against it because these guys had all been from the age I started studying medicine they had been studying those other things those other languages and I beat myself up a bit but for a while there I didn't

realize that when one studies medicine you're learning a completely different language it's a different way of doing things and you're right I do maybe come at history differently. I think the way it informs me is not necessarily how I go about research or study. It's more that my interests. And so going back to Maddy's initial question, it's more about what I'm interested in and what I'm going to tell the stories about what's going to excite me and hopefully what's going to excite others as well. So Susie, we're in a moment where there's real historical interest in recovering something of bodies of the past and bodily experience. So not just in archaeology in terms of recovering human remains, but in terms of uncovering in the archive people's experience of sleep, of sex,

of all kinds of sensory experiences, eating, drinking, drug taking in the past, amongst many other things. And I just wonder if you maybe approach that in a slightly different way as someone who's medically trained, and if that shapes your experience in the archive and the kinds of bodies that you're looking for and the kind of historical figures that you're maybe drawn to. That whole idea of the current direction of study, the current thinking really excites me, but it's not how I came to it, if you like. I didn't go out there and think, what's the current thinking? I want to join in with that. It really wasn't like that at all. But it was exciting to find that, for instance, when I have looked at what I might do

further study wise and looked at what's the interest in places like the Wellcome Trust and what have you, those things going on there are really exciting to me. So the thought of further study in that regard is brilliant. So yeah, I seem to be on a sort of level playing field there with other people. But when it comes to what I'm looking for, I think a lot of people seemed quite surprised when they read Mortal Monarchs as to how much of the human body was in there and how much medicine was in there and how much I was trying to extrapolate is probably the wrong word. Although it probably is because really there's only so far you can go with words that have been used in the past or phrases or ideas. There's only so far you can go. Everything has

to come with this caveat it does make me a little bit nervous because i do come at it as a medic i do worry that perhaps people are thinking i'm not going to be as rigorous i'm not a rigorous historian enough i've been told that but you know i do i do have to point back to them and say look i'm a medic and it's the human body side that really excites me as much as anything else. You see, I don't buy into this either. I mean, I come from a kind of a similar place and this kind of idea of rigor and what is rigor in one sense. Like, I find it rigorous to reach as many people as possible with new histories that

they might not ever have experienced before. And without a shadow of a doubt, you and your work is doing that. And I just think that's invaluable. without a shadow of a doubt, you and your work is doing that. And I just think that's invaluable. You could research the most intensely worthy piece of historical research that 10 people are going to read, or you can do something new in a very narratively engaging way, which I think you do excellently, and reach a much bigger audience, get people talking about history, and give them that kind of insight into a part of the past that they had never really experienced before. I'm really glad you said that. And this is how I feel about it. I make very short videos online and you have to edit, you have to decide what you put in.

And you have to have an understanding as the viewer, I think, that that's the case, that you can only say so much in 60 seconds or three minutes and I hope that these are perhaps a gateway to if people are interested to go away and have a look read more quite often I get people saying oh you forgot this and you missed that and I say well no I didn't it was a deliberate editorial choice if you like to give certain information because that's all the time we've got and hopefully that comes across as fun because I think somewhere along the line, some people have squeezed the joy out of some things. I'm trying to be diplomatic and I try and be fun. And that sometimes that can be interpreted as me not taking everything so seriously.

And fair enough. Maybe I don't, but I do as well. You asked me earlier how my being a medic informed what I do and what I read and what I write. my being a medic informed what I do and what I read and what I write. And it does actually inform it in that I have spent a lot of years doing and seeing things that are really rough, really hard to deal with. Really, you know, people go through a lot when they're in hospital. And if I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing something like this, then chief amongst my goals is to have a bit of fun along the way. I think as well, like it's not even, I mean, they are great gateways, but I was reading Vital Organs yesterday. There's stuff in there I've never heard of.

So it's not just a gateway for me. It's filling out a world. It's colouring in things that I hadn't known previously and that other people hadn't known previously. So I think it's really interesting and really, well, vital. I keep saying vital because I'm looking at your book right now but it's really vital information but let's take us to some of those deaths and some of those bodies that you have written about so well and talked about so well on tiktok are there any particular deaths or or bodies that you have had a particular interest in when it comes to the

monarchy or the ways in which they died anything give us the most gruesome one you can think of if you look at over the thousand years that i looked at, because again, I had to, even in a book that was 70, 80,000 words long, I still had to edit out, I still had to choose who was going in there. But if you look back at the thousand years, it starts off, there's a lot of trauma, it turns into infectious problems, and then we get to the lifestyle-related conditions that we tend to suffer from more now. And it does reflect society as a whole, which I really, I really liked seeing that line, if you like. At the moment, there's this huge chat around vaccines, isn't there? And so I really love to tell the story of what happened to Mary II, Mary who was married to William of Orange.

So William and Mary ruled together for a little while, but she died a long time before him. And she died of smallpox. She didn't just die of smallpox. She died of hemorrhagic smallpox. And that's something that raises an eyebrow because people say, well, surely smallpox is bad enough. And I go, oh, no, no, no, no. It gets worse. Take us through some of these horrendous and grisly symptoms then, Susie. Yeah. So what happened with Mary was that she felt that she was ill. She had those those flu like symptoms that you always get at the beginning of any sort of illness like that. She was headachy and felt sore. Her joints were aching. She knew something was wrong. She thought she had measles.

She liked to catastrophize, but she burned a lot of diaries and papers and what have you, because she thought that this was the end. I mean, she was right, but it's just lots of things were lost because she was like, oh no, I'm going to die. But then the pustules came and the pustules were a sure sign that this was not measles, but this was a smallpox infection. And these are raised on the skin and they're full of pus.

They're very red and painful and sore. And they didn't just rise up, but they would almost join together. There were so many of them and she bled into them. So when that happens, this is the hemorrhagic part that she bled into them so when that happens this is the hemorrhagic part that she bled into all these pustules that were joining together and she became

covered in these big red hemorrhagic pustular blackening plaques it happened as well not just on her skin but also on the mucous membrane so we're talking about the lining of the mouth into the throat and also other orifices as well so she she was peeing blood, she was spitting blood. Her body really swelled up, her face swelled up to an unrecognisable mess. And on top of that, the Stuarts were very good at making a right mess of people when they were dying. So they were trying to raise more blisters on her skin to try and fix the humours. They would have shaved her head and they were pressing red hot irons against her feet and they were bleeding her using emetics that would make her sick and purges that would empty out at the other end. So she would have been completely unrecognisable when she died.

The one thing that's occurring to me is going, wow, Susie, you have picked a glamorous area of study, haven't you? You're just like pustules and fistulas and all different types of things. fistulas and all different types of things. But what it does do, right, as I was listening to you talk there, it really hit home this idea of monarchy and this idea of absolute monarchy or the power of monarchy sitting side by side with the real kind of human element of that death and suffering and how their bodies kind of turn on them, which in a way they're not supposed to do, right? So it takes something from them, obviously their lives, but it takes something in terms of that kind of status from them. It does, doesn't it? I've never really thought of it that way. They're as vulnerable as the rest of us. But when others have written

about these deaths, they've used them as a commentary on that status, you know, that some of them had really grisly, nasty deaths, so we're told, because this is a commentary on how they lived their lives and how they treated people and therefore they deserve to go that way. Mary, not so much. But, you know, some of the others and the opposite is true as well. So some of them, you know, had strokes were seen as fairly gentle, strangely, but they were. And so, you know, somebody died of a gentle stroke in their bed that they were a good person. They were a nice person and were supposed to think that about them. It does take away some of that status. And I think that a lot of the writings about the deaths of the monarchs were doing just that. I think that's so fascinating,

Susie, that we're all kind of familiar with this idea of the health of the body of the monarch being somehow related to the health of the nation and that the person wearing the crown is a symbol, but also a human being as well. And just to get into some of these cases where the details of monarchs deaths and the realities of them and how the gap begins to widen you know how that takes place so I know in your book you talk about for example King John who's I think universally remembered as a pretty bad king Edmund II II as well. Can you speak a little bit about their deaths and this distance between the reality of them dying and how it is narrativised for people in the decades afterwards? I think the John one's really interesting because you can link him and

his death to other monarchs who went out a similar way. And yet we're told really different stories about them. So with King John, we're told that he died of dysentery. And dysentery is a very quick, nasty death of pooping yourself to death. And it's painful and it's grim. And therefore, he deserves to go out that way because we don't like him very much. And yet, when you look at Henry V, for instance, who supposedly died of the same thing, we go, oh, he died the soldier's death. Like a lot of his soldiers died that way. What a hero, what a great guy to go out that way. So yeah, King John's dysentery and Henry V's dysentery, ultimately the same pathophysiology, but we're told to think about them in a very different way. I find that fascinating.

Interesting. We're being sold something about the lives of the monarchs based on how they died. And and sometimes isn't there like somebody being stabbed on the loo or something yeah well this was before my book started in 1066 just again because that's where i had to draw a line yeah before that edmund ironside the story about him was that he was sitting on the toilet one day pulled up his robes and lowered his bum and up came a sword up his rear end and that was the end of him and there were others as well there were a couple of bohemian kings that were supposedly died in this way i have this idea that there's this specialist assassin who that's the way he

does it but yeah again he must have been paid well i think but i again i think these are just stories of you know this this is a nasty grisey, smelly, stinky death because we don't like him. I think we're obviously very drawn to these tales of very undignified and quite gory ends. And they do make for great stories and they endure down the ages. But I suppose the reality is for most monarchs, death is a very public thing. There are probably people in the room with you your death is reported your death is has a political significance the moment of your death who is who will succeed you so i suppose in some ways the publicity of that the publicness

has enabled a record to be kept whether you know you know, and we can take some of these accounts with a pinch of salt, but there is a record of those deaths in a way there aren't of other peoples. Is that what drew you to the deaths of monarchs specifically, Susie? Was it the sort of the wealth of information that's there in the archive? Yeah, when I, as you say, a pinch of salt, I like to bring a whole cartload of salt along with me to some of these stories. Yeah, the thing is that the Mortal Monarchs, this book is essentially deep down a book about all the different ways we can die. But it's written through this lens of looking at the monarchs because they're characters that people know and they were written about. written about. And if there wasn't a story, if there wasn't a decent story of somebody actually sitting there writing it down in front of them as it happened, then they were made up and they were embellished. And so, you know, there were often poison stories. And yet I couldn't really find any decent poisoning stories going on. But if anything happened, people weren't quite sure

what happened because it was behind closed doors or they thought they were being fed a lie. Everyone turns and says, oh, this was poisoning. It must have been. And we see that for hundreds of years. So yes, they were written about more extensively. I like to tell the story of a specific person and going back to my other book, Vital Organs, I did that as well. So if there were stories that came up about the human body in history, for instance, I would read a lot about, you know, someone stealing something might have their hands cut off or whatever. But if that wasn't associated with an actual person, then it didn't make the cut for me because I like to have the person in the context. And so the monarchs worked really well for that. But yeah, absolutely. If there wasn't a decent story,

then it would often be made up and it would often be more gruesome. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour. Anne of Cleves.

Catherine Howard. Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. we've talked about the status of the monarch's body while they're living but there's also something that must kind of happen once the monarch dies then and this person passes away and you're left with a corpse

essentially and all that divinity I guess is has left or is in the process of leaving is there a formula through which people approach the monarch's dead body then or does that change case to case time period to time period I'm guessing I think it changed but it also changed not necessarily through time period through sort of society's views of the dead body. It changed more through, you know, the actual individual cases. And again, it goes back to the stories we're being told to believe about these bodies. There weren't many that have been left in peace to just be under the ground and be left alone. Many of them were dug up and prodded and poked and bits taken away.

Or, you know, there's always a story of them being thrown in rivers when nobody knew really what happened to them and the stories of what happened to the bodies after death sometimes are even more interesting than than how they died you know for instance this story that we've got about william the conqueror who died a few weeks after being thrown from his horse or thrown into the pommel of his horse and rupturing something inside of him, probably his bowel. And after his death, there's, people love to tell this back to me, William the Conqueror exploded because his body just grew and grew that took so long to bury him. And when they tried to shove his body into this stone coffin, the body gave way, not the stone, and the whole thing

exploded and went up in the air. And I think there's maybe something in that, maybe because they took so long, there was a bit of stuff seeping from him. But the whole idea of this massive explosion to me is perhaps a little bit too far-fetched. But this is put onto it because, you know, we're supposed to not like the king. So he's gone, he's dead. And we're still telling these stories about how bad he was, talking about his body and what happened to his body after his death. And there are quite a few of those. It goes on as well. His son, so Henry I, the same thing with him, that he died of this surfeit of lampreys. But then his body had to get home from France. He wanted to be buried at Reading. And on the way, he was wrapped in ox hides and he wasn't embalmed

very well. And he started to drip out the bottom of these ox hides henry the eighth as well there's a similar story with him that on his way to being buried that there was so much king putrefied stuff dripping out the bottom of his coffin that the dogs came and were lapping up at the dead king's body and so there are so many post-mortem stories as well they don't stop they don't just go oh the king's dead we've got to tell more about that because there's this idea that um a pious king someone who was saintly wouldn't rot and so edward the confessor probably still looks the day looked when he died according to all these stories because he was just so saintly that he wasn't nothing was going to happen to him post-mortem but these other guys you know they were going to explode and rot and drip and yeah so we have this narrative that's emerging here about how the death of the monarch is absolutely linked to their identity once they

have passed and how we relate to them in history we've talked a lot about monarchs who have died accidentally or died these very gruesome deaths. Specifically thinking about monarchs that get murdered and how that becomes wrapped up in their identity. We know there's obviously a lot of famous examples of monarchs who have been killed and maybe you can take us through some of those. But I think there's also the monarchs who maybe have been murdered. We're not quite sure. And do you look at their deaths and find evidence of that? And if so, will that allow us to maybe reassess them as figures and what their death meant at the time? I think the most obvious one that springs to mind is going to have to be Edward

II. We'll have to go there, don't we? The story of Edward II was that he was deposed by his wife and her lover and that he was held down under a door or something heavy, which isn't the first thing you'd think to grab, is it? But, you know, that's the story. And that he had a red hot poker shoved up his rear end. A classic. Yeah, classic. Yeah. I heard that story probably when I was about seven or eight years old. I think that's very strange now that somebody would be telling me that. But it's a story that has been told for hundreds of years and it still goes on nowadays it comes with that oh it probably didn't happen but we're still going to tell it anyway and that's that's the route that I took because again it's a bit of a gateway isn't it and I did

talk about how one might die from having a red hot poker shoved up the rear end medically physiologically maybe a better way of putting it you can fiddle around with a red hot poker and it might be a bit sore, but you've really got to go for it. And it's going to be a very bloody and a very painful death. The reason for it was supposedly because it wouldn't have any outward signs. So you could look at the rest of his body and say, oh, I don't know how he died. You can't pin it on someone. You can't blame it on someone. There's this idea that the screams were heard beyond the walls of the castle well yeah if you're trying to keep it quiet you probably wouldn't do something that's going to

cause massive screaming massive blood loss so yeah there's a lot of reasons why it's all a little bit far-fetched in that way and again of course we're trying to comment on his life and and that is a commentary from the religious men who wrote it that this was about a homosexuality and and and that again i i mean i was told that when i was seven or eight but that bit didn't come up funnily enough that was something that came up later on with the oh it probably didn't happen side of things yeah it's it's always one that intrigues me about because usually my area of speciality is gender and sexuality in the 18th century granted but still you can see links back in terms of edward ii's reign and the the fact that it is

a poker up the arse is basically it's pointing towards something very kind of sexual and gender driven and it's interesting because i hadn't known that about the screaming that you mentioned but the screaming also could be associated with that kind of effeminacy right that he wasn't like it's almost that he wasn't man enough to take it and that the death was, it's real. He deserved that kind of death. Obviously, that's not what I think, but what they might've been thinking at the time.

They start to take on this mythical quality more than everyday deaths, don't they? They start to become, they start to enter folklore almost in the ways in some of these deaths are recounted. They really do. You know, going back to um was he murdered wasn't he murdered by his brother william the second out hunting in the new forest one day in 1100 took an arrow to the chest and was left there and his brother ran off to winchester and then on to london to be crowned king and was he killed wasn't he killed and it's one of these things that

people are really really adamant sometimes in their comments when we start making content online especially about these things I don't know whether it's because comments sections are really short and you only get a certain amount of space but we were talking at the very beginning about the study of history and how sometimes I feel very tentative and nervous almost to talk about some things because I know I'm going to get it. Oh, you forgot this. What about that? But people are very, very sure of themselves. And if I were to make a video about William II's death, half of the comments would be he was absolutely killed by his brother. And half of the comments would be, no, he wasn't. And they're so, so sure of themselves. And I sit in the middle thinking,

should I be sitting on this fence or is that just the way of the world just now I'm quite comfortable with sitting on a fence with a lot of these things because I understand that seven eight hundred years later we're not going to know and there could be arguments either way I think there's such value in the content that you make and it being public facing and it's obviously something people have a huge appetite for yeah what's really interested me there that you've just said is about how in a hundred a thousand years time we may be able to answer some of these debates we've spoken about the monarch's body immediately after death but it makes me think in the future will we have access to these bodies in ways that we don't currently i'm thinking thinking about the fact that, you know, Catherine Parr,

the wife of Henry VIII, was dug up, I think, in the 18th century. And there was claims that she was still miraculously preserved and all of that. But there are instances where, I think it's one of the Edwardses also dug up in Windsor Chapel in the 1780s, you know, that there are instances where the monarch's bodies become available in different ways in the future. Do you foresee that as something that might happen? Do you think

because of the nature of the office that these people hold, these human beings, that their bodies are off limits and will continue to be so? The Georgians and the Victorians really did like to dig up bodies and have a prod and a poke, didn't they? But they didn't have the technology, the technology of DNA analysis or CT scanners, carbon radio 14 dating. They didn't have all of that. So the bodies were put back and they made some assumptions and they did measurements and did drawings and put the bodies back. Of course, now we have so much more at our fingertips to be able to do things. And we did when the bones of Richard III were found. I was all over that. The work that they did on it was absolutely phenomenal, to the point where they put him through a CT scanner and you could see where a weapon went in the back of his head, went through

his brain and nicked the skull on the underside on the other side. We could see that with the CT scanner. He could be dated to within, I think it was 50 years, either side of the death of Richard III. And then came the DNA analysis, the mitochondrial DNA that took it to no doubt, really, that this was the body of Richard III. And we have all this data. And there are cases where people really want to know more using this technology. For instance, Edward V. So Edward V was one of the princes in the tower. Some people think he was killed by Richard III. Some people think he wasn't. But some bones were found in the

tower some years later in the 17th century. And it was assumed that these were the boys, the missing princes, and these were interred in an urn at Westminster Abbey. And you can go and see them there. So the question now is, we have the technology, we have the DNA from their uncle, we have possibility that we could identify whether or not these bones belong to these boys. The question is, should we? Because now, you know, we have this idea that when you have a, certainly a Christian burial, that you should be left alone to rest in peace. That's the idea. when you have a, certainly a Christian burial, that you should be left alone to rest in peace. That's the idea. Should we go digging up these bodies, to me, is the question. And I, again,

I really find myself sitting on the fence because on the one hand, I'm not particularly religious, but I do believe that, you know, when somebody's buried in that way, leave them alone, leave them be, move on. But on the other hand, we have this technology. And seriously, if somebody knocked on my door and said, we're away to do this, do you want to be part of it i would be out the door as quick as a flash probably wouldn't take my coat so you know that i really do sit on the fence as to whether or not we should but we certainly do have the technology now to have a look at people's bodies but you know that question to me that question isn't just you talked about whether or not the the bodies of the monarchs particularly should be dug up and had a look at i mean to me that same argument about having a burial and being left in

the ground should be for everybody where do you draw the line because an archaeologist might come along and find a body and i'd be very excited to see that they can have a look at you know plague pits one example you can have a look at them and find out more about the disease and what happened and that's wonderful are they any different to Edward V, who could or could not be in the tower? We have a very immediate example of this, right? Because following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we saw that kind of veneration for the body of the monarch unfold in real time. And I mean, if you think about it, the body of the monarch and the way we were supposed to interact with the body of the monarch nearly cost people their jobs at times because they hadn't, it was felt by some people they hadn't queued long enough. I'm not mentioning names. You had

to queue for a certain amount of time to be worthy of standing in the presence of the monarch's body. I think it's really easy for us to think, you know, oh, these things, they're happening in the 11th century, they're happening in the 18th century. But we're observing some of those rituals ourselves. I can imagine, Susie, you were glued to that television when that happened. We just saw everything that I'd been writing about for the previous 12 months, we saw it all happening in real time. And until that point, there had been an almost abstract nature about it, a storytelling nature and there it was happening and and certainly you know when i described the funerals and the deaths of the

monarchs of the last century the more recent ones it was exactly the same and the pictures were the same and my book mortal monarchs actually was due to be published three weeks after the queen's death and so there was a certain me me me i'm really worried about my book about it but when i saw all that happening i just because it hasn't happened in our lifetime. It's only something that we'd seen in history books or on grainy black and white Pathé pictures. When we're talking about the deaths of monarchs, but more specifically, the ways monarchs were murdered, it's very easy to think that these were all very far in the past histories. But actually, there's a far more recent example, right? This is a really interesting one, because, you know, I talked earlier about Mary II and this current discourse around vaccines.

Well, there's also a current discourse about other medical ethical situations, one of them being euthanasia and end of life care. And it's not that long ago, it was within a century, that George V died. Now, George V was sick. had lung cancer he'd been a smoker all his life he was at the end of his life and his doctor who was called Lord Dawson of Penn recognized that that was coming he understood it but the thing is no matter how hard you try you cannot look at somebody who is actively dying we put it and say exactly when it's going to happen you just can't so So Lord Dorsner Penn was sitting there with the king and thought, he's on his way out, I'm not sure when. And he was worried

because there are two different times of day that newspapers are printed and released. And one of them is the tabloids and the other is the broadsheets. And he did not want the news of the king to be in a tabloid paper. So he decided that he was going to time the king's death. And the only way to time someone's death is to do it yourself. So he told his wife to go and phone the Times and tell them that the king was dead. And he loaded a syringe full of cocaine and morphine and he injected it into the king's, the big vein in his neck. And that was the end of the king. Now, this really does feed into this current discussion of medical ethics doing no harm, euthanasia, end of life care. We're still having this discussion as to whether or not that was him helping the king on his way or whether it was murder.

Now, legally, this was regicide. This was murder. He murdered the king. He wrote about it in his diary and that's how we knew about it. He was very explicit about it. The other thing was that Lord Dawson of Penn, it wasn't a one off. I mean, he stood up in the House of Lords and advocated euthanasia. He actually was very much against lawyers. He said, we should be doing this, but we don't want lawyers involved. It should be at the discretion of the medical men. He did it to other people as well, other members of the royal family as well. But yeah, this was regicide. He killed the king. And there are people that get upset with me when I say that, because they're saying, oh, no, no, no, he did it to help the king and there are people that get upset with me when i say that because they're saying oh no no no he did it to help the king along the king might have been in pain the king

was at the end of his life but in truth he was killed and it was not that long ago well we're gonna have to have you back on susie because i want to hear more about lord dawson of penn if this is something he's going around doing more often i think there's there's something in that we'll definitely have a chat about that on another episode sometime. But my favourite one is favourite. And then I want to hear everybody else's favourite one, by the way, as well. So start thinking about what your favourite monarch's death is. But I'm kind of gruesomed out by Queen Caroline's death. What was it?

1737, I think. And the kind of prolonged agony that she had to face and the the description of the matter I guess from her bowels that had that was making its way through a hole near her navel after a botched operation and it was soaking so heavily that it was destroying the sheets that she was laid in in the bed as she died and running onto the floor and there were people there keeping account of this and it's very intense but like think of the smell and and the kind of fright and the just the discomfort that she must have been in but also that the people that were there watching their mother their wife their friend die for me that sounds like one of the worst ways to go it's just

prolonged it's painful and it's you know maddie you pointed this out before but it's also witnessed you have an audience susie do you have a particular one that stands out what stands out there is that you're making a good case for lord dawson of penn to be going around oh no on their way oh no yeah no it's true it's true you did you just did have i got one that stands out i think right back at the beginning i talked about mary the second probably because her one always does stand out for me but also at the same period i guess the guess, the Stuarts, Charles II's death was quite interesting to me. I made a video a wee while ago. It was a long time ago, actually, now, when Donald Trump was president and he supposedly had Covid. He stood up and said, I've got the best medical men in the country around my bedside and I'm

having all of these new experimental drugs and I'm going to be absolutely fine. And I listened to that and I thought, oh, that's a worry. That's what Charles II said. He had all these medical men around him. They were all trying different things. They were all giving him experimental drugs. And he stood up at one point and apologised for taking so long to die. But it would have been the same scenario, you know, we talked about with Mary, that they tried everything in terms of trying to rebalance the humours. So they're bleeding him, they're purging him, they're making him sick, they're raising blisters on his skin, and all these things would have happened to him as well. And again, he would have been quite a sight as a corpse. I think that was that was quite interesting again that triggered a lot of upset people who were wondering if i was wanting

president trump to die can't win can you i thought that was just a really good segue into my story about charles ii guys but yeah i think for me it has to be some of those really public monarch deaths so thinking about marie antoinette king louis those executions that are so brutal and so finite and so against the hierarchy that allows those monarchs to exist in the first place. And I think all the way through our conversation, there's been so much about the question of dignity when it comes to the monarch's body. And when you think of, you know, Charles I ascending the scaffolding to have his head cut from his body, or Anne Boleyn, or any of these monarchs who were executed, the narrative that we tell ourselves is that there is a level of dignity and a level of bravery and resignation when they

go to their deaths. And that's in such stark contrast to, you know, these oozing, exploding bodies that we've talked about. And I think that question of dignity and the humanity of monarchs is, to me, that seems central to your work, Susie, and exploring the sort of boundaries of that and how different monarchs, either on purpose or by accident, you know, push those boundaries and how the stories we tell afterwards also do the same. Well, if you want to know more about the gruesome, horrid, entertaining ways that monarchs died over the years, find Susie's books, Mortal Monarchs, 1000 Years of Royal Deaths. But Susie has a new book called Vital Organs, a history of the world's most famous body parts. Susie, do you want to tell us a little bit about Vital Organs? And there's some monarchs in there too, right? Yeah, well, when I was writing Mortal Monarchs, I stuck within England and Scotland and other stories were coming out from across the waters. You know, we went to France and we had a poke around in Louis XIV's rear end and we talked about Marie Antoinette, as you mentioned earlier. And I went off, actually went off around the world and found some other characters

that weren't monarchs as well. So that was a lot of fun, finding body parts that have made history. It has been gruesome and certainly not the most glamorous conversation I've ever had, but it's been so good talking to you, Susie. Thank you very much for coming on.

I am going to give a special shout out to whoever it is in the History Hit team that has to edit this episode because Susie, Maddy and I have had a ghost in this machine for this episode. I'm so sorry. We have had a ghost in the machine and we have battled on because we really wanted to have this conversation with Susie today because Maddy and I were both really really excited the team at History Hit were really excited about it too so I'm so glad thank you for your patience susie thank you for bearing with us because we loved having you on and we loved listening to all your fascinating insights into the death of monarchs if you want to find out some

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