Trashy Royals

Good nobles, we have a real treat for you this week as we journey down into Africa - Kenya specifically - to begin the trashy tales of the Happy Valley Set. This group of self-absorbed, wealthy British expatriates is legendary in history for all of the sins that occurred in their heyday, from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Today’s episode serves as a great introduction to this heap of hedonism, as we explore the life, the loves, and the mysterious murder of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll. After a life of great debauchery, he is found dead at a lonely crossroads near Nairobi on January 24, 1941. There are no lack of suspects in this case, as mostly everyone would like Josslyn more dead than alive. The is an arrest and a trial though of a jealous husband, Sir Jock Delves Broughton. It doesn’t go how you think it might.

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Turns out that selfies aren't really a new phenomenon, and as cameras emerged as a new technology in the 19th century, there was a nearly perfect subject who made the form her own. Meet Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, spy, diplomat, model, courtesan, art director, and one-time mistress of Emperor Napoleon III. It's quite a resume and a heck of a story - a minor noble whose beauty was legendary but whose arrogance and self-importance certainly rubbed the Parisian upper crust the wrong way.

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As a young man, Stanislaw Poniatowski arrived at the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, a Polish noble in the service of an English diplomat. An affair commenced with the future Catherine the Great, whose affection (and malign influence in the politics of Russia's neighbor) resulted in Stanislaw being elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in in 1764.

It was a good news/bad news reign for Stanislaw, who saw his country partitioned not once, not twice, but three times, by the greater powers on his borders. His efforts to modernize and liberalize Poland - including the creation of an American-style constitution in 1791 - were all for naught, as his former lover finally annexed what remained of Poland in 1795. It would be more than a century before Poland re-emerged as a nation, and one which views Stanislaw II August in an understandably mixed way.

Thanks to listener Ray for contributing this banger of a tale.

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This week, Alicia invited Alicia King Anderson Ph.D. to talk all things Persephone and Hades, the Queen and King of the Underworld.

We unpack the myth of this royal couple down below. How does a young girl, Kore, complete the transformation into Persephone? Who is Hades and why is he messing with his niece, Kore? How does the whole snatching of the beautiful maiden go down, and what happens in the Underworld?

It's a story with complicated supernatural family ties, a kidnapping, a mother's grief, famine, a marriage, and - big headline - the introduction of seasons into the human world. And this myth was a foundational piece of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which helped initiates of the cult of Demeter and Persephone abandon their fear of death.

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Explore More with Alicia King Anderson

Alicia King Anderson Ph.D.'s website

Join Alicia's Patreon community, Myth and Fairy Tale Nerds Unite!

Sign up for Alicia's March 22 workshop, The Return of Persephone: Spring Equinox Workshop

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As we roar towards the Ides of March, it just makes sense to spend a little time with Rome's OG, Gaius Julius Caesar. But since it's also Women's History Month, we're taking stock of his life and times through his marriages, both the ones we're sure happened, the one we aren't sure happened - and of course, Cleopatra makes an appearance.

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The Gabor sisters were some of the most iconic cultural figures in the second half of the 20th century, having arrived on our shores from Nazi-occupied Hungary, where they experienced loss and engaged in heroic resistance. Along with their mother, Jolie, sisters Eva, Zsa Zsa, and Magda, stormed the mid-century zeitgeist and lived through extremely complicated family dynamics, as well as complicated romantic entanglements - including, between them all - 23 marriages, 18 divorces, two widowhoods, and two annulments. They were allies and rivals, poly-linguists, artisans, and entrepreneurs. But mostly, they were women possessed of a drive to succeed and an eternal willingness to bend their stories to suit the moment at hand.

This month, Trashy Divorces is proud to present the lives and loves of The Glamorous Gabors, an eight-episode arc bringing these four amazing women into focus in the 21st century. Listen online or wherever you get your podcasts!

The Glamorous Gabors was researched and written by Melanie Shawn, with our deep gratitude.

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Just in time for Women's History Month here in the US, Alicia has a story as old as time - an 8th century Queen of the central English kingdom of Mercia during the Anglo-Saxon period who maybe was the victim of a smear campaign centuries later. Obviously, contemporaneous records of the period are sparse, but what we do think we know is that Queen Cynethryth and her husband King Offa had a contentious relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury in that period. Mercia confiscated some of the Archbishop's lands, and the Archbishop supported an uprising that saw Kent liberate itself from King Offa's rule. Things went far enough south between them that Offa eventually created an entirely new Archdiocese in Lichfield that would presumably be a bit more compliant with his wishes.

And while Offa and Cynethryth would outlive that Archbishop of Canterbury, it seems that the Church would have the final say over Cynethryth's story. Coincidentally, that portrayal became extremely negative right around the time, centuries later, that Empress Matilda was attempting to exert her righteous claim to the English throne after the death of her father, King Henry I.

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We're on break this week, so we're delving into Trashy Royals history (see what we did there!) with an encore of one of our earliest episodes, Roman Emperor Nero. While things started out relatively well when he took the reins from Claudius at just age 16, his attention and priorities quickly spiraled to pointless things and private grievance. As one does.

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Back in 1959, a writer named Samson Rebaldi gave an autocrat and despot a real glow-up in the pages of Confidential, a gossip rag of the era. Yemen's second-to-last hereditary ruler, Ahmad bin Yahya - known as "Ahmad the devil" within Yemen - was in Rome at the time, receiving medical treatment for a variety of ailments, and Rebaldi delighted in the news that he had traveled with his multiple wives, dozens of concubines, and maintained a stable of "slave girls" back at home. In Rome, Rebaldi says that doctors limited the ailing dictator to six female visitors a day, though Yahya's age, health problems, and various drug addictions may have made these visits less exciting that Rebaldi believed.

Yahya died in his sleep three years after the piece was published, at the age of 71, and was briefly succeeded by his son, Muhammad al-Badr. The Badr reign came to an end after just a week, when disaffected soldiers launched a coup and declared Yemen a Republic. It is, very tragically, still working on that.

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Last summer, Alicia was finally able to catch SIX The Musical on Broadway, and last weekend, Stacie got to see the US Tour version. A pop spectacular featuring the wives of Henry VIII, the play's back story is every bit as cool and fun as the show itself is. In this episode, we talk SIX The Musical, and we pull a Patreon Royal-Tea Time episode from August where Alicia got into what it's all about.

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