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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

In the glittering royal courts of the 17th and 18th century,

power did not always sit on the throne.

Sometimes it stood just behind it, whispering, advising, persuading, and at times provoking.

Over the past few weeks, I've been revisiting the lives of some of the most famous, even notorious favourites of the English court.

I started with Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I first Forbidden Love, followed by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the intimate favourite

of King James I and 6th. Do have a listen to those fascinating episodes if you haven't done so

already. At the heart of Queen Anne's reign was one such figure, Sarah Churchill, Duchess

of Morbara, a woman whose influence reached from the

royal bedchamber to the battlefields of Europe, and whose rise and fall would come to define an age

of political intrigue, war and shifting alliances. Born in 1660, Sarah rose from modest aristocratic

beginnings, if that's not an oxymoran, to become Anne's closest

...