Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Myelt from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

In her early 20s, Frances Howard dealt with two scandals.

The first was certainly the more significant, a scandal that occupied court legassups

for years.

The scandal was she was trying to get an annulment from her husband Robert Devaro.

The two had been married in their early teams and they had had barely any contact before

Devaro went on his grand tour around Europe for a few years.

When he came back, he had smallpox.

So he couldn't really blame Frances for not wanting to go to bed with him, even if she

hadn't fallen in love with another man at court while her husband was gone, which she

had.

Frances was a daughter of the powerful Howard family and the gossip surrounding the impending

annulment gave the court of James I plenty to talk about during the early 1600s.

But during the long process of these annulment negotiations, Frances Howard had to deal

with the second scandal, much smaller and much easier resolved.

Frances had a ring that went missing.

The ring was stolen, or so Frances claimed, by a local faith healer who went by the name

Cunning Mary.

When the authorities confronted Cunning Mary, who did indeed have the diamond ring in

her possession, Cunning Mary protested.

She said that the ring wasn't stolen, that Frances Howard had given the ring as a deposit

...