Five English crowns and the doctors who served them

False — almost certainly. The red-hot-poker story first appears in the Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, written around 1355, about thirty years after Edward's death at Berkeley Castle. Contemporary sources from 1327 say only that he died of natural causes; sources from the 1330s say he was suffocated. The poker detail was a later elaboration intended to fit a theological judgment about his sexuality. Modern historians regard it as invention.

False. The cricket-ball story appears in the memoirs of Lord Hervey (his political enemy, published posthumously in 1848) and was repeated by Victorian historians for over a century. The 1751 autopsy by royal physician Frank Nicholls actually found a pleural empyema — a chronic respiratory abscess, almost certainly from tuberculosis. There was no external chest injury at all. The cricket ball was invention.

At about 7 a.m. on 25 October 1760, George II rose, drank his usual chocolate, walked into the small adjoining closet, sat down on the close stool, and died of an aortic dissection. His German valet heard the fall. The pose has been a quiet English embarrassment ever since.

Isabella's nickname *the She-Wolf of France* (la louve de France) became fixed in English historiography through Thomas Gray's 1757 poem *The Bard*. The name reflects the Plantagenet aftermath of her 1326 invasion of England, the deposition of her husband Edward II, and the three-year regency she ran with her lover Roger Mortimer until her teenage son Edward III overthrew them in 1330.

Polidori — Lord Byron's personal physician and one of the five English visitors stuck indoors at the Villa Diodati during the Year Without a Summer in 1816 — wrote *The Vampyre* (published 1819), introducing the figure of Lord Ruthven and the trope of the aristocratic vampire. Le Fanu's *Carmilla* came in 1872; Stoker's *Dracula* in 1897. *Varney* was a 1840s penny serial.