Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The Stuart period is marked by decadence and abortory.

Experience the Stuart Court in all its nuanced splendour in this series compiled from our archive.

In this talk, Historic Royal Palace's chief curator Lucy Worsley takes us on a tour of famous women from the 17th century.

Hello. Now, I know that many of you are regular and are very well aware of the fact that Hantam Court is a Palace of Tomb Har halves. There's Tudor Hart and the Stuart's heart.

And the genesis of this project really lies back in the year 2009.

If you remember, 2009 was the 500th anniversary of when Henry VIII came to the throne.

And we did a big project that year representing the Tudor Root, Fairhampton Court.

This is when all those wall hangings went up in the haunted gallery

and the tables appeared in the Great Hall.

And that year, some of you may well have visited a small and temporary

exhibition that we did that was called Henry's Women. It was really great this exhibition.

It was interesting and quirky because it included portraits of all six of Henry's wives.

And they were all left field or disputed images

because here at Hampton Court we don't have the airtight by security gallery conditions

to borrow major works by Holbein etc and this exhibition was curated by my colleague Brett Dolman.

And at the end of it, he said, what has really intrigued me about this exhibition are the comments of the visitors who've gone around it and they've looked at the portraits of Ennies' wives.

And to a man and a woman, they said, I thought that Anne Willin was supposed to be really beautiful.

Now none of them looked beautiful.

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