A century and a half before the “Golden Age of Piracy,” an Irish woman of noble birth was conquering the inland seas and coastlines on the western edge of the island. Gráinne Ó Máille, anglicized to Grace O’Malley, hailed from the Umhaill line, a seafaring clan of Connacht, and while the family did conduct legitimate forms of trade, they also ran protection rackets on boats that tried to fish their waters, and sometimes plundered merchant vessels in the area, as well as settlements belonging to neighboring clans.

Her life almost perfectly overlapped Queen Elizabeth I’s, and during Grace’s life, the English Crown was deeply invested in the conquest of Ireland, mostly by seducing its nobles into servitude with fancy English titles. Barons and Earls proliferated around Dublin for years, but English shenanigans finally reached the West of the country when Grace’s first husband was cut out from the line of succession to his family’s Chief of the Name. Then he was assassinated, leaving Grace ready and willing to enact violent revenge on his killers.

The Crown continued eroding the alliances she was building. Her second husband was demoted from his role as regional king of Connacht while Grace was jailed on a plundering trip. When the Crown-supported king died, Grace and her husband teamed up to raise an army of 2,000 men to insure his succession. He not only got the title, but was named a Baron as well, in exchange for his promise of fealty to English law.

But Crown agents had already set their sights on Grace O’Malley as the kind of noteworthy adversary whose arrest or death would send a message throughout the Emerald Isle, and Grace was eventually forced to sail to London to seek an audience with Queen Elizabeth herself, an effort in which she prevailed handily.

Grace’s story is full of courage, vengeance, and daring-do, but it’s also a story rooted in specific moment in time, when the longstanding society of Ireland was changing and being changed. Ireland’s Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley saw it all up close, and as a most unconventional woman, charted her own course through.

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Born into a noble French family in Brittany, Louise de Kérouaille's road to the English Court, and to Charles II's bed, passed through Charles's sister, Henrietta Anne Stuart, Duchess of Orleans. Her family, focusing on a well-worn path to prominence, originally tried to have Louise noticed by Louis XIV of France and become a royal mistress. Louis didn't bite, but the royal mistress thing worked out in the end - possibly as part of a spy plot to keep the French informed about the goings-on in England.

In 1670, Louise accompanied Henrietta on a diplomatic mission to Dover, where Charles was trying to bypass Parliament and secure some funding from the French. Henrietta, unfortunately, died unexpectedly around this time, leaving Louise in a bit of a predicament. No worries: Charles II appointed the attractive 21-year-old as a lady-in-waiting to his wife, ensuring her presence at Court. In 1672, Louise joined the Charles II Baby Mama Club, and the following year was given the titles Baroness Petersfield, Countess of Fareham, and Duchess of Portsmouth for life.

Whether Charles II knew or cared about the financial support and gifts that Louise was given by Louis XIV is not known, but the English people had a good sense of what was going on, and Louise was profoundly unpopular with the English public - a striking contrast to Nell Gwyn. 

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One of the big changes Charles II made upon his return to his kingdom was to reopen the theaters that Cromwell and his zealots had shuttered 18 years earlier, at the start of the English Civil War. He also encouraged theaters to hire women, creating England's first class of actresses.

And Charles being Charles, he also dated a few of those newly minted performers. Today, Alicia talks about Nell Gwyn, whose rags to riches story is an iconic part of Restoration England. Born to a (potentially unmarried) brothel owner with a serious alcohol addiction, she got her start in the theater not as an actress, but selling concessions. She was a beauty and a natural mimic, and soon enough, the manager of the King's Company, Thomas Killigrew, began training her for the stage.

By 1665, her star was on the rise, and by the time she and Charles II were becoming a long-term couple in early 1668, Pretty, Witty Nell Gwyn was one of London's most notable people, beloved especially as a comedian.

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It feels safe to say that when Russians recall a leader’s reign as a “dark era,” we’re into some deeply, deeply dark events. Empress Anna, a niece of Peter the (Not So) Great, had survived many humiliations before Russia’s Supreme Privy Council elevated her to Empress; they thought she would be easy to control, but instead, her decade-long reign was characterized by Anna’s cruelty and capriciousness. A career of personal vendettas was fueled by her limitless power and a secret police system she stood up to discover and end plots against her.

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You thought Henry the 8th was the worst. Welcome to his contemporary, Ivan The Terrible. Terrible might be too kind of a word. With eight wives and hundreds of thousands dead in his wake, Ivan was a master of cruelty and just might be the King of Trash for the 16th Century.

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If you worried that royal houses had gotten a little too genteel by the 19th century, the story of Ranavalona I of Madagascar will disabuse you of that pretty quickly. Seizing the throne in 1828 after the death of her husband, King Radama - despite not being the rightful heir to it - she immediately launched a campaign of murder against her political rivals and potential successors, and summarily ended friendly relations with European nations, including expelling missionaries who had established schools. She didn't merely promote the local customs and faith traditions of the Malagasy people; she eventually banned the practice of Christianity entirely and executed those who practiced it. In fact, she executed a lot of people, in a variety of creative ways, and historians believe that in her 33-year reign of terror, she depopulated Madagascar by about half. It's no wonder that she's considered Madagascar's Bloody Mary, and Madagascar's Caligula.

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The Court of Charles II wasn't merely a playhouse for the King's sexcapades. There was art, too! But as with everything Chuckie II related, the art was provocative as well. It all started with Anne, Duchess of York and Albany, wife of the future James II, whose standing at court was not immediately awesome upon the Restoration of the Monarchy. But she was good friends with the painter Sir Peter Lely, as well as fellow reputationally-challenged court lady Barbara Villiers. Anne connected the two, the portrait was painted, and then Anne engaged in a bit of a power play at court by choosing which women would sit for portraits.

The paintings were widely copied and distributed in taverns and such, a sort of early version of dirty magazines in perhaps the trashiest court in English history.

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Though their romance had cooled by the 1670s, Barbara Villiers and King Charles II remained close for the rest of his life. He gifted her Nonsuch Palace, originally built by Henry VIII and used often by Elizabeth I. Barbara, who fell on hard times after four years living in Paris, had Nonsuch Palace demolished so she could sell off the building materials to pay her gambling debts.

The King died in 1685, but Barbara still had decades to go. In 1705, after the death of her long-suffering husband, she married a second time. Unfortunately, her new husband, Robert Fielding, was a gigolo who had married a different woman, believing her to be an heiress, just two weeks earlier. This became its own scandal and legal odyssey, but also a sort of fitting bookend for the life of Barbara Villiers, one of history's most interesting women, who died in 1709.

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Hey friends - just a quick note to let you know that we're pausing production this week because of a death in the family. Trashy Royals will return next Thursday, March 12. Thanks for your understanding.

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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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