It wasn't just Barbara Villiers (or his wife, Catherine of Braganza) who was sharing Charles II's bed. This week, we go deep on the Merry Monarch's relationships with Winifred Wells, Frances Stewart, Mary Bagot, and actress Moll Davis. Winifred Wells came to the King's attention as a Maid of Honor to Queen Catherine, and unlike the mean-girl energy of Barbara Villiers, Winifred and Queen became close, and Winifred remained in her employ for years after the death of Charles II. Frances Stewart was a renowned beauty who famously refused to become Charles's mistress - until, it seems, she did. She was also the first model for the personification of Britania on an English coin. Mary Bagot was the wife of one of Charles's longtime supporters, who had served his court while in exile in Europe. Mary "Moll" Davis was a popular actress of her day who provided yet another illegitimate child to the monarch before retiring to a fancy home and living on a pension provided to her by Charles.

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It's been a huge day in our Trashy Universe, with what might be the start of real, criminal accountability for a Jeffrey Epstein friend. Finally, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office - what Americans would likely call "public corruption" - a charge that could land him in prison for life. Americans may still be fuming about elite impunity over here, but at least in the UK, someone powerful is entering the find-out phase.

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Welcome to the Restoration! Charles has officially made it to his King Era, coming on back to England to claim his crown, with his latest mistress at this side. Her name is Barbara Villiers Palmer, and the court is about to get very steamy indeed. Barbara, a married lady, will create quite a stir at court, and just continue to stir that noble pot. Intersecting into this time period is a newly acquired cuckquean wife, Catherine of Braganza. It is only just a couple of years we explore in this naughty ride, but these years are action-packed with so much trash at the court.

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In this special trashy crossover episode, Vulgar History’s Ann Foster joins Alicia to talk about her new book, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen Without a Crown. Caroline’s life was pretty incredible and she should be remembered much more in history. This one has everything – a plucky heroine and a trashy king, marital misadventure, affairs, fashion, riots, scandal and everything else there is to love about the Regency Period.

Learn more about Ann at her website!

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This week, we follow Charles II across Europe with 3 more ladies and 3 more babies - all before he finds himself back on the throne of his kingdom!

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In this wild Trashy Divorces crossover episode, Stacie takes us back to the court of King James I of England, where a young noblewoman, Frances Howard, was desperate to escape her arranged marriage to marry another - and found her paramour's best friend to be a highly problematic obstacle. What to do, what to do?

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As the English Civil War ground on and the tides began to turn against the Royalist forces, Charles II decamped to Europe for his own safety. His mother was in Paris, but he also spent a lot of time in The Hague, where his sister Mary was the wife of William II, Prince of Orange.

Charles, then still just the Prince of Wales, met a Welsh lass there named Lucy Walter. Lucy had skipped out on the UK to get away from her parents, whose ugly divorce had risen to high scandal, and was hoping to find her fortune - via a husband or lover - in the English Court-in-exile.

In May of 1648, Lucy met Charles, and a relatively brief romance transpired, but one that produced Prince Charles's first child. Happily, Charles eagerly acknowledged his son, who would go on to become the Duke of Monmouth. Less happily, agents of English dictator Oliver Cromwell kidnapped the boy for 10 days, and years later, long after the romance was over, his own father would successfully kidnap him to hide him from Cromwell and other dangers.

Sadly, Lucy died some time in 1658, and never saw her old flame on the English throne, or her son as a Duke.

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History includes a lot of highs and lows, but England's Interregnum period was a particularly low low. King Charles I had been defeated in the English Civil War and was tried and beheaded in January 1649. For the next eleven years, various flavors of religious extremists, mostly under the sway of Oliver Cromwell, governed the realm (badly).

Cromwell died in 1658 and his successor, his son Richard, proved a more miserable leader than even his predecessors, which led to the restoration of the monarchy and Charles II strolling into an eager London on his 30th birthday. By then, his reputation as a ladies' man was already well established, and for a grateful nation, it was time to let the good times roll once again.

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Stacie has the gobsmacking escape of Princess Haya of Jordan, whose decade and a half of marriage to Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, was heading south by the time he became embroiled in yet another scandal for kidnapping one of his 26 children. Again.

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The city-state of Carthage, on the coast of modern Tunisia, was the product of a flight from tyranny. Dissidents from Tyre fled by ship and ended up building something enduring - for seven centuries, anyway. Slightly older than the city of Rome, Carthage's wealth came from a broad trade network that encompassed the entire Mediterranean Sea.

But as the Roman Republic's fortunes rose, conflict with their southern neighbor seemed to become irresistible, setting off a series of wars that would end in the total destruction of Carthage, its culture, and its people. But Rome's victory, apparently, wasn't quite enough. It turns out that Rome's first emperor also wanted to capture and transform the story of Carthage's founder, Dido, an early act of propaganda intended to knit together the nascent Roman Empire.

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Between the years 235 and 280 AD, the Roman Empire was a basket case. Emperors were dropping like flies, succession fights were common, pretenders routinely declared themselves Emperor, and whole regions broke away. It was not the most prestigious period for Rome.

In Roman-controlled Syria, a fully Romanized city-state called Palmyra had become a wealthy and prosperous destination on various trade routes, as well as the last bulwark on the eastern frontier between Rome and the Persian Empire. As the Roman crack-up proceeded, the city appointed its first-ever king, Odaenathus, who ruled alongside his wife, Zenobia. When Odaenathus was assassinated in 267 - we don't know by whom - Zenobia took the reins of Palmyra and led it through an audacious territorial expansion, until Palmyra controlled basically all of the Eastern Empire, including Egypt.

And then, as more Emperors bumbled through the halls of power in distant Rome, Zenobia gave up on them entirely and declared herself Empress of Rome, and her domain, the Palmyrene Empire, the equal of Rome itself.

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