Anne of Cleves wasn't really a minger & Marie Antoinette was misunderstood

World War evacuee and I had my little cardboard gas mask box.

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ueen Elizabeth I was “fuggers”, Henry VIII “clapped” and it’s debatable whether Anne of Cleves was, as has been suggested, a “minger”.

Katie Kennedy, better known as the History Gossip, uses colourful language to bring alive famous historical characters in her bawdy social media posts.

Katie, 25, whose posts have millions of likes on TikTok, became famous practically overnight.

One minute she was writing her 12,000-word dissertation on women in Pompeii in her final year at Durham University, the next she'd posted a few quirky history videos on TikTok and gone viral.

She says: “I was on TikTok all the time anyway, so I posted some stuff about the Tudors and I got a couple of thousand followers. Then I did a video with the caption - why were the Tudes clapped?”

Clapped, she translates, means really ugly. She continues: “That did really well. It got onto this really big meme page called Great British Memes and they've got loads of followers. People were screenshot-ting it and asking, ‘Is that you?”

Earthy and funny, Katie's history videos are the right side of sweary, with a sprinkling of Gen Z language.

“Some of the slang that I've picked up through the years was originally just to get around TikTok guidelines,” she explains.

Katie’s success has already landed her a book deal, for The History Gossip - Was Anne of Cleves a Minger?

And she will now be appearing on our screens on Sky TV's History Crush, in which she'll rummage through the underwear drawers of historical figures such as Lord Byron, Charles Dickens or Marie Antoinette - and asking the big questions like was Henry VIII clapped?

“Yes he was,” she says. And was Lord Byron a crush or a burn (not)? “Definitely a crush.”

The speed at which Katie - now studying for a master’s degree at Oxford - got a book deal will have many seasoned writers gnashing their teeth.