When Cnut (r1016–35) first became king of England, he paid off thousands of unemployed Viking raiders so that they would leave England. The cost was enormous – Cnut raised 10,000 Troy lbs [a measurement used for gold and silver] of silver from London, and 72,500 Troy lbs from the rest of England to finance his policy. This was a mammoth sum at the time; while it is difficult to meaningfully convert into modern currency, it amounted to more than 30,000kg of silver. Cnut’s payment was greater than any previous Danegeld sum – the former highest was 48,000 pounds, paid in 1012 during the reign of Æthelred.

William the Conqueror was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert of Normandy, also called ‘Robert the Devil’, and of Herleve (also known as Arlette), whose father, Fulbert, was a tanner: a trade deemed disgusting and carried out by despised people.William famously conquered England in 1066 and made himself master of a kingdom with perhaps 1.5 million inhabitants. He passed the throne on to his sons and his more remote descendants, who hold it to this day. 

After Richard the Lionheart was ransomed by the German king and Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI for 150,000 marks, his return to England was rather brief. He headed straight back out to the battlefields of Normandy and Aquitaine. The king led successful campaigns there for a further five years before being mortally wounded by a crossbow bolt during a siege battle.

Henry VII has long had the reputation of a penny-pinching killjoy whose only pleasure in life was to scrutinise his accounts and swell the royal coffers. But there was a good deal more to the first Tudor king than that. True, he was careful with money to the point of parsimony, but he also knew how to spend it when the occasion demanded. One of his first acts upon becoming king  after defeating Richard III at Bosworth was to order a lavish new set of clothes. During the two years that followed, he spent a staggering £5,386 (equivalent to £3m today) on his wardrobe.

Mary I is remembered for attempting to reverse the Reformation and return England to Catholicism. She restored papal supremacy, abandoned the title of Supreme Head of the Church and reintroduced Roman Catholic bishops.Mary also famously revived old heresy laws to secure the religious conversion of the country – heresy being a treasonable offence. Over the next three-and-a-half years, hundreds of Protestants – most accounts say around 300 – were burned at the stake.

It was believed that monarchs could heal scrofula, also known as ‘the king’s evil’, through ‘the royal touch’ – merely placing their hands on an afflicted person. It’s estimated that Charles II touched around 100,000 people during his reign – meaning he touched more of his subjects than any monarch before. 

Queen Anne (r1702–1714) died on 1 August 1714, having come to the throne in 1702 and holding the title of the first monarch to rule over a united Great Britain. At the time of her death, Anne had grown so vast that she had to be placed in a square-shaped coffin, before being carried to Westminster Abbey and buried next to her faithful husband, Prince George of Denmark. The Stuart line ended with her, and afterwards George I became the first Hanoverian king.

Victoria and Albert got married during a lavish ceremony on 10 February 1840 in St James’s Palace chapel. Victoria’s journal entry the day after their wedding shows no regrets. “When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express!” However, to Albert’s dismay, the newlyweds’s honeymoon lasted a scant three days, as Victoria was anxious not to shirk her royal duties. 

The Queen has owned more than 30 corgis during her reign. Her first corgi companion, Susan, was given to her as an 18th-birthday present in 1944. It has been reported that Susan accompanied the Queen on her honeymoon – to Broadlands, Hampshire, and Birkhall on the Balmoral Estate – in 1947. Many of the corgis since owned by the Queen were direct descendants from Susan.Elizabeth’s love of is similar to that of her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, who owned a number of dogs. She was not besotted by a single breed, though, and kept King Charles spaniels, Skye terriers and St Bernards, to name a few. 

The most intimate positions in Henry VIII's court was the ‘groom of the stool’, the man who helped Henry go to the toilet. Henry so trusted and confided in this figure that he was called the ‘chief gentlemen of the chamber’. From the time of Henry VIIonwards, this man was also in charge of the ‘privy purse’ – he was the king’s personal treasurer. In fact, he practically directed England’s fiscal policy.