BBC History Magazine 2015-09

VILLAINS OF THE BLITZ MAGAZINE BRITAIN’S BESTSELLING HISTORY MAGAZINE September 2015

Henry VIII’s

most successful queen AFTER 1066

BUILDING ON THE NORMAN CONQUEST

French Terror How the killers became the victims after 1789

Glorious monarchs The secrets to a happy reign

Why the Crusaders went to war www.historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine

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SEPTEMBER 2015

ON THE COVER: ANNE OF CLEVES PORTRAIT BY HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER – BRIDGEMAN, ST PAUL’S DURING THE BLITZ – GETTY, MAXIMILIEN DE ROBESPIERRE – AKG-IMAGES. THIS PAGE: FRAN MONKS/JENI NOTT

WELCOME “I like her not! I like her not!” were Henry VIII’s words on first encountering his soon-to-be fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, on New Year’s Day 1540. History, it’s fair to say, hasn’t shown much regard for Anne either, dismissing her as the ‘ugly wife’ and frequently ignoring her in favour of some of the more glamorous Tudor queens. Yet, far from being a failure, Anne may have benefitted more from her relationship with Henry than any of his other five wives and remained good friends with the king long after their marriage had ended. On the 500th anniversary of Anne’s birth, Tracy Borman seeks to change our understanding of a much-maligned figure. You can read that article on page 34. Sticking with the royal theme, this month will see Elizabeth II eclipse Victoria as Britain’s longest reigning monarch. To mark this milestone, we asked Dan Jones to look back over the past 1,500 years and pick out the key attributes for a successful spell on the throne. Turn to page 55 to discover where Elizabeth I, George III and the present Queen went right and what the likes of Charles I, Richard III and Edward II got so badly wrong. It is not all about kings and queens this montt h though. Also, in another packed issue, you will find articles about revolutionary terror, the Norma an conquest, Blitz criminals, the crusades and ev ven the dogs of 19th-century Paris. I hope you enjo oy the read and, as always, please get in touch to let us know what you think. Rob Attar Editor

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VILL AINS OF THE

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MAGA ZINE BRITAI ’S BESTSE LLING £4 60 • Sep

2015

HISTORY MAGAZ INE

Henry VI

II’s most succes sful ST

Glori monar

r killers he ms after 1789

The secrets to o happy reigg

Why the Crus aders went to wa www historyext ra com/ bbchistorymagazine

Facebook and Twitter twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/historyextra

Collector’s Edition: Holy Land Discover 3,000 years of faith, war and conquest in the Middle East. Buy your copy for just £9.99, and subscribers get free UK P+P* Order at buysubscriptions.com/holy or on 0844 844 0250**

THIS ISSUE’S CONTRIBUTORS

CONTACT US Joshua Levine The Blitz is a more interesting period than the clichés normally allow. Fear and chaos led to shared purpose, extremes of behaviour – and the turning of ordinary people into criminals.

Christopher Tyerman One of the things that this book tries to do is to locate crusading in the widest context of western European society, and not see it as a phenomenon that’s somehow separate, or different, or peculiar.

Marisa Linton I’m looking behind the iconic myths of the French revolutionary Terror, bringing to light the passions and fears that drove its leaders. The guillotine was hanging over them too if they failed.

쎲 Joshua writes about Blitz criminals on page 50

쎲 We interview Christopher about his new book on the crusades on page 65

쎲 Marisa explores the French Terror on page 22

*Subscribers to BBC History Magazinee receive FREE UK P&P on this collector’s edition. Prices including postage are: £11.49 for all other UK residents, £12.99 for Europe and £13.49 for Rest of World (please note that unfortunately this special edition is not available to order in North America). All orders subject to availability. Please allow up to 21 days for delivery **Calls will cost 7p per minute plus your telephone company’s access charge. Lines are open 8am–8pm weekdays & 9am–1pm Saturday

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SEPTEMBER 2015

CONTENTS Features

Every month 6 ANNIVERSARIES

11 HISTORY NOW 11 The latest history news 14 Backgrounder: the North 16 Past notes: Britain’s roads

18 LETTERS

55 The kings and queens who knew how to keep hold of their crowns

21 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW 48 OUR FIRST WORLD WAR 62 EVENTS

65 BOOKS Man’s best friend or favourite dish? Find out the history of Paris’s dogs on page 41

The latest releases, plus Christopher Tyerman on the crusades

77 TV & RADIO Marisa Linton reveals how the architects of violence found themselves on the block in revolutionary France

30 Death camp Britons Gavin Mortimer tells the tale of three men who found themselves at the heart of the Nazi extermination system

34 Anne of Cleves Tracy Borman argues that Henry VIII’s fourth wife should be remembered as a Tudor success story

41 A dog’s-eye view of Paris Chris Pearson describes the history of the city’s canines, who have served in its police force and fed its inhabitants

44 Make Catholics pay! Ted Vallance relates the aftermath of a plot to kill George I, which led to the persecution of a whole religious group

50 Crime and the Blitz The bombing of British cities in the Second World War offered fresh opportunities for criminals, says Joshua Levine

55 Glorious monarchs Dan Jones offers his historical tips for enjoying a long and prosperous reign

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The pick of new history programmes

80 OUT & ABOUT 80 History Explorer: the Norman conquest 85 Five things to do in September 86 My favourite place: Lisbon

93 MISCELLANY 93 Q&A and quiz 94 Samantha’s recipe corner 95 Prize crossword

98 MY HISTORY HERO Midge Ure selects the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh

29 COMPETITION Calling all budding history writers

Get published in this magazine!

32 SUBSCRIBE Save when you subscribe today USPS Identification Statement BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177) September 2015 is published 13 times a year under licence from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK. Distributed in the US by Circulation Specialists, Inc., 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 945, Shelton CT 06484-6238. Periodicals postage paid at Shelton, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037-0495.

GETTY/TOPFOTO/BRIDGEMAN/WWW.BELGIUMWW2.INFO

22 French Terror

BBC History Magazine

44 When Catholics paid the price for a rebellion

30 How did three Britons find themselves in Nazi death camps?

22 Why French radicals turned on each other

34 “ON BALANCE, ANNE HAD FAR MORE REASON FOR COMPLAINT THAN HENRY” BBC History Magazine

50 The dark side to the Blitz spirit

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Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in September in history

ANNIVERSARIES 28 September 1975

19 September 1356

A Spaghetti House hostage crisis grips the nation

English forces triumph at Poitiers

ate on 28 September 1975, the nine staff members at the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge were counting up the week’s takings. The total came to around £13,000 – not a bad haul, by the standards of the time. It was then that the gunmen struck. Three armed men burst into the restaurant, jabbing guns into the faces of the terrified restaurant employees. As the invaders led their captives down towards the basement, one staff member managed to get away. But the others – all Italians – were shoved into a tiny storeroom, crammed with tins of food. There, for the next five days, most of them remained – hostages. At first, the police and the press assumed that the raid must be some sort of political stunt. The gunmen – a Nigerian student and two West Indian friends – claimed to be representing the

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Black Liberation Army, and demanded to be flown out of the country to Jamaica. In reality, however, it was simply an ordinary armed robbery, which had gone dangerously wrong. For the next five days, the Spaghetti House was the centre of national press attention, with the police camped outside like a besieging army. Careful not to do anything that would inflame the kidnappers, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Robert Mark, allowed them a radio, some coffee and cigarettes in return for two hostages. His approach paid off: at last, on 3 October, the kidnappers cracked. “The hostages are coming out,” their leader radioed the police just before four that morning, as the exhausted captives staggered out of the building. Needless to say, the would-be robbers were all sentenced to long stretches in prison.

Free at last: police lead restaurant worker Renato Nasta out of the Spaghetti House after he had been held at gunpoint by armed robbers for five days

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The French king is taken captive to London, where he develops a taste for English life he battle of Poitiers has gone down in history as one of England’s greatest victories over France, and the day when the English heir to the throne captured the French king. For weeks Edward III’s 26-year-old son – also Edward, and known as the Black Prince – had been conducting a scorched-earth terror campaign north of Aquitaine. By the time the Black Prince reached Tours, he had been cornered by a much larger army under the French king John II, and after peace talks broke down, battle was joined in earnest. For the French, what happened that day in September was a disaster. Their crossbowmen could not possibly compete with the English longbowmen, whose arrows rained down in a storm of death. Not only were large numbers of French nobles slaughtered, but in the chaos, John himself was surrounded and taken prisoner. The remarkable thing, though, is what happened next. That night, even as his men lay dying, John was taken to the Black Prince’s red silken tent, where he was treated with great honour. Conveyed to England, John was kept in the Tower of London, where he was permitted to keep pets and horses, as well as an astrologer and even his own musical troupe. Eventually, after his countrymen had paid a gigantic ransom of 3 million crowns, John was allowed to return home. But the French king had enjoyed his time in London so much that, eight years later, with France in virtual anarchy, he decided to pack in being a king, and retired to… England.

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BBC History Magazine

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The press and police descend on a London restaurant “like a besieging army” after an armed robbery goes wrong

BRIDGEMAN

Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and presenter. His next series, Let us Entertain You, is due to air soon on BBC Two

English longbowmen create havoc among enemy ranks in this 14th-century depiction of the battle of Poitiers. The clash would trigger an unlikely love affair between French king John II and England

BBC History Magazine

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Anniversaries 3 September 863 In Paphlagonia, in the north of present-day Turkey, the Byzantine emperor’s uncle Petronas smashes a raiding Arab army under the emir Umar al-Aqta.

30 September 1791 At the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, 35 year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (right) conducts the first performance of his new opera The Magic Flute.

15 September 1847 After a week of fierce fighting, Mexican troops surrender to their American besiegers at the National Palace in Mexico City.

14 September 1812

Napoleon’s grand entrance into Moscow turns to ash and ruins Victorious French troops find a city deserted and ablaze t should have been one of the greatest moments of Napoleon’s life. On 14 September 1812, a week after his crushing victory at the battle of Borodino, the French dictator rode towards the gates of Moscow, ready to take the city’s surrender. But there was nobody there: no dignitaries, no nobles, nobody. The first French troops to enter the city sent back strange reports. The place was empty, save for peasants and foreign residents. And then, on the first night of

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the French occupation, came the first reports of fire in the Kitay-gorod bazaar. Even as Napoleon rode into the Kremlin, the fire spread. Some French – and even Russian – officers suggested it had been started deliberately as part of a campaign of Russian resistance, by arsonists equipped with flammable materials. “The existence of inflammable fuses, all made in the same fashion and placed in different public and private buildings,

is a fact of which I, as well as many others, had personal evidence,” wrote one of Napoleon’s generals. “I saw these fuses on the spot and many were taken to the emperor.” By the 16th, with the city ablaze and smoke rising over the Kremlin, Napoleon was persuaded to move to the Petrovsky Palace, over the Moscow river. Thousands were killed. And with so many buildings being made of wood, the fire was simply unstoppable. Churches, shops, warehouses, offices – all went up in smoke. By the time Napoleon returned to the Kremlin, he was the master of a city in ruins. His dream had – quite literally – turned to ashes. A few weeks later, with no sign of a Russian surrender, he ordered his army to begin the long march west.

BBC History Magazine

GETTY

Flames engulf the Kremlin in Christian Johann Oldendorp’s 19th-century engraving of the burning of Moscow. Napoleon – who had come to claim the city’s surrender – could only watch in despair as it burned before him

25 September 480 BC

Greece defeats Persia, once and for all Xerxes seethes as his navy is crushed by vastly outnumbered Greek forces aylight on 25 September 480 BC. As the Persian fleet sailed into the straits of Salamis, they heard the sound of their Greek opponents singing their battle hymn: “O sons of the Greeks, go, / Liberate your country, liberate / Your children, your women, the seats of your fathers’ gods, / And the tombs of your forebears: now is the struggle for all things.” The battle of Salamis, fought between the invading fleet of the Persian ruler Xerxes and his allied Greek adversaries, has gone down as one of the most famous naval engagements in history. For Xerxes, this was the moment when he would crush Greek resistance and cement his control of the enemy mainland. But as the Persian ships sailed into the narrow straits, they were doing precisely what the Athenian general, Themistocles, wanted.

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Greek warships clash with their Persian foes in Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s 1868 depiction of the battle of Salamis, which has widely been hailed as a turning point in world history

What followed was chaos. At first the Greek ships appeared to retreat from the Persians, as if afraid. In reality, however, the Persians’ overwhelming numbers worked against them. As one Persian line crashed inevitably into the next, some of their captains began to panic, and eventually morale cracked completely. Watching from his throne on Mount Egaleo, Xerxes looked on in impotent fury as his fleet fell back in disarray, the Greeks surging forward and singing in triumph. As the historian Herodotus

recorded, many of the Persians could not swim, so the seas foamed with the bodies of drowning men. Salamis is commonly seen as the turning point in the Persian Wars. Indeed, for generations of writers, it was a decisive moment in world history: the moment when the free cities of the Greeks definitely escaped the Persian yoke. This is probably an exaggeration. But had events in September 480 turned out otherwise, it is tempting to wonder how different our world might be.

COMMENT / Professor Paul Cartledge

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“It was a battle not just for Greek independence, but for Greek civilisation” In late September 480 BC the ancient Greek world was on a razor’s edge: in the west the Greeks of Sicily were under threat from an imminent invasion by the Carthaginians of north Africa (modern Tunisia). In the Aegean heartland a small handful of Greeks, led by Sparta and Athens, were daring to defy an actual invasion by a huge Persian-led amphibious force. Thermopylae had been defended but lost. Salamis – a tiny islet in Athens’ possession, not far from Athens itself – was the scene of a life-and-death naval battle. It was a battle not just for Greek independence, but for Greek civilisation.

BBC History Magazine

This was a civilisation of democracy, theatre, philosophy, science and history – and of piety towards the many gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. It was a combination of Athenian-led Greek bravery and skill, together with Persian miscalculation, that saw the loyalist Greek side win its famous victory. Persian emperor Xerxes turned tail and fled. Athenian playwright Aeschylus later celebrated with his tragic drama, The Persians. But the war was not yet won: that happened the following year, thanks mainly to the massive land battle of Plataea, in

Boeotia, which saw an alliance of Greek city states – including Sparta and Athens – destroy the remnants of the Persian army.

Paul Cartledge is AG Leventis professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge. His books include Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011)

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A Little History of the United States James West Davidson As E. H. Gombrich brought the sweep of history alive in A Little History of the World, now James West Davidson explores the vast panorama of U.S. history to the delight of readers young, old and in-between. Fast-paced chapters make for exciting reading while inspiring deeper thinking about such fundamental American values as freedom, equality and unity. 11 maps + 40 b/w illus. Hardback £14.99

Eureka

The Maisky Diaries

How Invention Happens Gavin Weightman

Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky

Filled with stories of struggle, rivalry and ingenuity, this revelatory look at the surprisingly long history of five ‘modern’ inventions – the airplane, the television, the mobile phone, the bar code and the personal computer – redefines the romantic idea of the ‘eureka moment’. Gavin Weightman’s captivating new work offers a fresh take on the making of our modern world. 12 pages of b/w illus. Hardback £20.00

As Soviet ambassador to London from 1932–1943, Ivan Maisky witnessed Britain’s drift to war at close quarters. Acutely observed and intensely readable, his recently discovered diaries reflect the diplomat’s remarkable access to the leading political and intellectual figures of the time, and their fateful decisions. 72 b/w illus. Hardback £25.00

The Battle of Agincourt Edited by Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer Commemorating the 600th anniversary of England’s legendary victory at the Battle of Agincourt, this sumptuously illustrated volume provides a defining reassessment of arguably the most iconic military engagement of the medieval era, immortalised in William Shakespeare’s classic history Henry V. 120 colour + 80 b/w illus. Hardback £30.00

‘High-calibre, serious non-fiction.’ – Sam Leith, Guardian from Yale University Press

The Age of Catastrophe A History of the West 1914–1945 Heinrich August Winkler As Germany takes its place at the helm of a unified Europe, a leading German historian looks back at the years between 1914 and 1945, examining how and why that nation so radically broke with the normative project of the West and unleashed disaster around the world. Hardback £35.00

In Nelson’s Wake

Speer

The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars James Davey

Hitler’s Architect Martin Kitchen

A masterly account of the decisive role played by the British Navy in the pivotal struggle against Napoleon. Dramatically narrating famous events alongside less well-known actions, James Davey tells the story of the many individuals who followed in Nelson’s wake and helped shape British history. 42 colour illus. + maps Hardback £25.00

A fascinating new life of Albert Speer, Germany’s chief architect and Minister of Armaments during World War II, reveals Adolf Hitler’s trusted confidant to have been far more devoted to National Socialist regime ideologies and complicit in its crimes than previously believed. 16 pages of b/w illus. Hardback £20.00

www.yalebooks.co.uk

The Lost World of Byzantium Jonathan Harris A concise, accessible and actionpacked history of one of the medieval world’s greatest empires by a leading scholar who eschews the usual run-through of emperors and battles, illuminating the very heart of Byzantine civilisation and its remarkable influence on its neighbours and on the modern world. 16 pages of b/w illus. Hardback £25.00

The latest news, plus Backgrounder 14 Past notes 16

HISTORY NOW Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at [email protected]

Secrets and lies Junior defence minister John Profumo with his wife in Venice, 1963. INSET: Soviet spy Yevgeny Ivanov, who photographed top-secret plans for the defence of Berlin in Profumo’s study

EXCLUSIVE

The Profumo security breach was “more serious than thought”

EYELINE/GETTY

New research suggests that the Cold War political affair posed a significant intelligence risk to the UK. David Keys reports

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ne of Britain’s most famous political scandals, the Profumo affair, posed a much more serious security threat than has previously been believed, new research shows. The 1961 scandal was caused by the sexual relationship between junior British defence minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler. It subsequently emerged that Keeler, and later Profumo, were also friends with a Soviet embassy official Yevgeny Ivanov, leading to speculation that the relationships may have led to a security breach. Until now, historians thought that Profumo’s work focused on the end of army conscription, meaning that he

possessed no major defence secrets and had therefore not been responsible for a major security breach. Yet, according to new research by University of Cambridge historian Jonathan Haslam, Ivanov was able to photograph important top-secret documents in Profumo’s house. What’s more, the research also reveals that, for a crucial period at the time of his relationship with Keeler and friendship with Ivanov, Profumo had been helping to arrange the acquisition of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Polaris, from the United States. Haslam’s work shows, for the first time, that Profumo was privy to the highly secret and geopolitically sensitive negotiations to allow West Germany to share in

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History now / News WHAT WE’VE LEARNED THIS MONTH Millions of dogs were mummified in Egypt The remains of 8 million animals, the majority of which are dogs, have been found in catacombs in Egypt. The bodies, which date from between roughly 750 and 30 BC, were mummified and stacked in the caves at Saqqara, a vast burial site in the north of the country. It’s known that ancient Egyptians regarded animals as sacred – numerous cults centred on specific species – but a mass burial on this scale was unexpected.

any decision to use its territory to fire nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union. Russian material studied by Haslam – details of which are included in his book, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, soon to be published by Oxford University Press – also shows that Ivanov penetrated Profumo’s personal study and photographed US specifications for the topsecret X-15 experimental high altitude hypersonic American plane. In addition, he was able to photograph key allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin, as well as secret records about US tactical nuclear weapons. This extraordinary security breakdown appears to have occurred due to a lack of office organisation on Profumo’s part. The revelations show that he left secret documents on his desk in his house while he was out of his study, and that he failed to lock the room or instruct family members not to allow people to enter it unaccompanied. As a result, when Ivanov visited the minister’s home, Profumo’s wife merely asked him to wait unaccompanied in her husband’s study.

“The research shows that Profumo was privy to highly secret and geopolitically sensitive negotiations” 12

Even after the scandal broke, it appears that the British security services – and, presumably, Profumo himself – were completely unaware that the crucial photographs had been taken and that top military secrets were in the hands of the Kremlin. Indeed, historians have often defended Profumo, partly because the full extent of the security breaches had not been uncovered until now. The study also reveals that even the fact that Ivanov was a Soviet agent was kept from prime minister Harold Macmillan, either deliberately or due to government incompetence. Haslam’s research reveals that the police knew that Ivanov was a spy (because they had been told so by Keeler) and that they almost certainly told the home secretary – but that Macmillan was kept in the darkk for several months. When the PM was finally told, he realised that his junior defence minister’s knowledge of so many US and UK secrets made the situation more perilous than he had been led to believe. “Our new understanding of what actually happened during the Profumo affair shows that it was much more serious than has been thought until now,” Haslam told BBC History Magazine. “What’s more, the new evidence shows how the affair undermined US confidence in Britain’s security abilities at the very height of the Cold War. Washington was furious that what they perceived as British incompetence might be putting US security at risk.”

Big history names will gather at new festival Simon Schama, Tracy Borman and Melvyn Bragg are among the experts and broadcasters confirmed to be speaking at a major new festival launching in September. The Radio Times Festival, organised by Immediate Media, the company that publishes BBC History Magazine, will see leading names from the worlds of TV, radio and books gather at The Green at Hampton Court Palace from 24–27 September. For more details, see radiotimesfestival.com.

Medieval shoes have been found in Oxford An array of “rare and exciting” artefacts believed to be 700 years old have been uncovered in a site in Oxford. The medieval objects, which include the remains of 50 leather shoes, a wooden bowl and timber posts, have been well preserved because the area in which they were found is below the water level of the Thames floodplain.

These medieval shoes, found at a site in Oxford, may have been discarded as fashions changed

BBC History Magazine

GETTY/OXFORD ARCHAEOLOGY

Eye in the sky The X-15 experimental plane, mounted on a B-52 bomber and tailed by a jet, prior to a test flight above California, 1962. John Profumo’s friendship with Yevgeny Ivanov resulted in details of the aircraft falling into Soviet hands

A human commodity A Jamaican sugar plantation in an 18th-century illustration. From farmhands to sailors, a vast British workforce depended on the slave trade

“These letters show the human element of the opposition to abolition, and the daily concerns that they had”

SOCIAL HISTORY

Exposed: the shocking normality of the slave trade It’s easy to see the abolition of slavery as inevitable – yet, as newly rediscovered records show, the system was firmly entrenched in 18th-century society. Matt Elton investigates

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e may now see slavery as an unacceptable social evil – yet many 18th-century people regarded it as a positive force, a fact highlighted by a collection of documents newly acquired by a University of Cambridge college. The set of letters and business records relate to the running of the Jamaica sugar plantation of wealthy English landowner William Philip Perrin from the 1760s until the 1790s – the same period in which the abolitionist movement was being founded. The very fact that these documents are so unremarkable says much about how slavery was regarded, says Ryan Cronin from St John’s College, where the records are now held. “Perrin

BBC History Magazine

owned the plantation but lived in England, and hired managers to oversee the running of the estate,” he said. “They would correspond about profits, acquiring land, buying cattle and buying slaves to work on the land. Slaves would be described in the same terms as any other commodity: letters detail how a certain amount of sugar has been sold, that there’s been a property dispute, and by the way do you want me to buy 60 slaves? It’s quite shocking, to modern eyes, how commonplace transactions were that featured this human commodity.” One particularly striking entry sees Perrin’s estate manager advise him to buy 60 or 70 slaves to work the land for sugar –

because it would be cheaper than hiring cattle to do the same job. “These records are fairly typical, although a lot of similar documents don’t seem to have survived because they’re quite ephemeral: they are just correspondence, after all,” says Cronin. “But I think they are outstanding in that they’re not outstanding. They’re shocking in how commonplace and ordinary these things would have been.” Indeed, Cronin is eager to emphasise that it wasn’t just the wealthy who stood to lose out if slavery was abolished. “It’s easy to paint it as rich, influential figures campaigning to keep slavery for their own interest, but people such as Perrin didn’t run plantations alone: he had

estate managers, farmhands and sailors to work for him. This vast workforce was dependent on the trade. Workers could be earning a pittance – but without the slave trade they would be out of a job. That’s why there was a lot of popular opposition to abolition: it’s not as straightforward as thinking of it as the rich versus the abolitionists.” Given the ‘ordinary’ nature of the trade, the work of abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson – both of whom were students at St John’s College – appears even more remarkable. “Looking back centuries after the abolition bill, it’s easy to construct a triumphalist narrative: it’s obvious that the abolitionists were on the right side of history, and it seems almost inevitable they would succeed,” says Cronin. “That’s not a bad way of looking at it: the slave trade was an appalling moral evil, and a very dark chapter in British history, but it was more complex than that. “Letters such as these show the opposition’s human side, and their day-to-day concerns. They weren’t pantomime villains: they were making a living in an absolutely terrible way, but they were still just people making a living. Without sounding as if there’s any sympathy for the slave trade, these letters show the real-life issues of both sides.” The TV series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners is still available on BBC iPlayer: bbc.co.uk/iplayer

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History now / Backgrounder

The historians’ view…

Does a bright new dawn await the cities of the north? The government has appointed a minister for the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ in an attempt to attract investment into the region’s cities and towns. So could this spell the end of England’s infamous north-south divide? Two historians offer their perspective Interviews by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history

Press coverage has been dominated by tales of northern cities rising as cultural phoenixes out of the ashes of industry NATASHA VALL The most notable precedent for the government’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ initiative was a series of measures in the 1930s that designated Tyneside and Cumberland as ‘special areas’, and employed government funds to build Team Valley trading estate and encourage new industries. These have rarely been remembered for bequeathing positive legacies, but rather as marking the north as an area of industrial blight and high unemployment. This image has proved difficult to shake off, and was often misplaced, especially as the ‘north’ is a surprisingly diverse region. The Special Areas recommendations of 1934 excluded Middlesbrough and Darlington because they were bucking the regional unemployment trend thanks to industries ranging from electrical engineering to brewing and retailing. Many of these

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provided new work opportunities for women, a fact often overlooked in the familiar story of the north as a region of depression and unemployment. There is still a disproportionate focus on health, deprivation, poverty and poor life chances in the north. This reflects the legacy of relative economic backwardness and hardship. That said, the Nissan plant in Sunderland routinely outperforms Midland and southern-based motor manufacturers. Yet the press rarely picks up on northern success stories – it is far more seduced by the image of ‘Benefits Street’. Just as there is a new minister for the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ today, past initiatives often involved nominating someone to take a special interest in the region. In the early 1960s Harold Macmillan, former MP for Stockton (who retained an affection for the area) gave Lord Hailsham/Quintin Hogg responsibility for the North East. His famous arrival at Newcastle Central station wearing a flat cap became iconic, but in the region he was largely viewed as a Tory buffoon. Homegrown Labour figures were more successful, particularly T Dan Smith, head of the Northern Economic Planning Council. Yet he was jailed for corruption in 1974 and, since his downfall, many voters have been suspicious of individual leadership and local politicians. This resurfaced during the campaign for regional devolution in the early 2000s. In the North East there was, and

The Aeolus acoustic wind pavilion sculpture at Manchester’s Media City. “Manchester has been called ‘Cottonopolis’, the ‘shock city of the industrial revolution’, and now ‘Northern Powerhouse’,” says Christopher Godden

continues to be, hostility to the idea of powerful local mayors. There’s been a great deal of talk about a cultural revival in the wake of deindustrialisation. For example, Gateshead hosted the National Garden Festival in 1990, an event that is regarded as a pivotal moment in the culture-led regeneration of Baltic Quays. Since then, press coverage has been dominated by tales of northern cities rising as cultural phoenixes out of the ashes of industry, transformed by gleaming art galleries, post-modernist architecture and huge shopping malls. Has this worked? Jobs in art galleries haven’t compensated for the huge losses in manufacturing. Culture-led regeneration has often been superficial. But the North East has one of the UK’s fastestrising technology clusters. And local businesses and politicians are optimistic that the creative and digital sectors will help deliver the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.

Dr Natasha Vall is director of the Institute for Design, Culture and the Arts in the School of Arts and Media at Teesside University

BBC History Magazine

Eyre Crowe’s painting The Dinner Hour, Wigan shows women factory workers taking their lunch in the 1870s

The enterprise of Manchester’s self-made merchants in the 19th century forged the city’s links with the global economy

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CHRISTOPHER GODDEN What we have with the government’s Northern Powerhouse initiative is the idea of an economic hub to rival the power of the south, with science, technology, culture, tourism, finance and transport serving as foundations for the regional economy. While the idea of the Northern Powerhouse is clearly intended to encompass several northern cities, there is no question that Manchester dominates. The extent to which this is good for the wider region is open to debate. All that I can say is that, while Manchester’s pre-eminence here has not gone uncontested, we should not ignore the city’s historical position as a powerhouse of

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economic, social and political developments. Manchester is used to collecting titles, famously ‘Cottonopolis’ or the ‘shock city’ of the industrial revolution – and, with ‘Northern Powerhouse’, the city has another title to add to the list. How novel is this government scheme? The idea of a Northern Powerhouse is the culmination of a number of local initiatives developed in recent decades. Though deindustrialisation in the 20th century did inspire some state intervention, this isn’t an area in which central government has traditionally taken the lead. In Manchester, it is possible to trace these local initiatives back to tough decisions made over the past 30 years in response to the city’s post-industrial decline. We have here a story of a city council abandoning municipal socialism and replacing it with an entrepreneurial strategy designed to grasp opportunities for regenerating the city as a vibrant business and cultural centre. Such local strategies for investment, regeneration and growth – developed from the mid-1980s onwards – are important in understanding much of what has led to today’s situation. And this has even deeper roots. The story for Manchester since the 1980s has been one of economic self-determination and a

renewed appreciation of the relationship between the local and the global. The obvious historical examples here are the self-made Manchester merchants whose enterprise, ambitions and strength of governance forged the city’s links with the global economy through the movement for free trade and the development of the cotton industry during the 19th century. Yes, these merchants found it very difficult to respond to the loss of once-secure textile export markets following the First World War. As a consequence, the mid-20th century saw Manchester identified as the symbol of post-industrial decline. Yet the story today, for the city and the wider region, is clearly one of Manchester’s political and business elite finding new responses to opportunities as they present themselves. In doing so, they’ve shaped the city’s economic reinvention and her links within the global economy.

Dr Christopher Godden is a lecturer in economic history at the University of Manchester DISCOVER MORE BOOK 왘 The North-South Divide: The Origins of

Northern Consciousness in England by Helen M Jewell (Manchester, 1994)

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History now / Backgrounder PAST NOTES BRITAIN’S ROADS OLD NEWS

The slave who thought outside the box North Devon Journal / 14 November 1850 enry Box Brown arrived in Liverpool aboard the Constantine packet-ship from America. In his early thirties, and a fugitive slave from Richmond, Virginia, Brown had had to watch as his wife and children were sold by his master to a different slave owner. On 29 March 1849, Box Brown had managed to escape his captivity in a remarkable way, by packing himself into a box just 3 feet long, 2 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep. Once inside, the box had been sent, via railroad and steam ship, from Richmond to Philadelphia. This was a journey of 350 miles and took 27 hours to complete. Box Brown could only breathe through tiny holes in the side of the container, and was at great risk of discovery. Although ‘Keep This Side Up’ was written on the package, the box was often turned upside down. He arrived at his destination – the home of anti-slavery campaigner Passmore Williamson – and then toured the US speaking about the horrors of slavery. He was in constant danger of arrest, and so travelled to England where he remained for 25 years.

Motorists sit in traffic in London, May 1959. The number of cars on Britain’s roads has soared since the Second World War, now topping 35 million

As many of us prepare to spend long hours in jams on Britain’s motorways, Julian Humphrys sets off on a journey through the history of our road network What is Britain’s oldest road? Many argue that it’s the Ridgeway, an 85-mile route from Avebury to Buckinghamshire which may well have been in use for 5,000 years. What did the Romans do for us? The Romans built the first roads to be formed into anything like a national network. The roads they built, like the Fosse Way (from Devon to Lincoln) or Watling Street (from London to Shropshire), remained in use for centuries and the routes are still followed today.

News story sourced from britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and rediscovered by Fern Riddell. Fern regularly g y appears on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking

ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JONES

BENJON NESILLUSTRATION.COM/GETTY

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Were medieval roads really bad? By our standards, yes, with the result that waterborne transportation by river or coastal shipping was widely seen as the cheapest and easiest option for anything but the shortest journeys. By the 17th century, major roads were, in summer months at least, largely passable for wheeled transport, including coaches. However, Celia Fiennes, who famously travelled the country at that time, was often scathing about the state of the roads she encountered. What led to an improvement in the state of our roads? The development, mainly in the

18th century, of turnpikes, stretches of roads that were run by trustees and funded and maintained by tolls. By the 1830s over 20,000 miles of road had been turnpiked and many surfaces improved thanks to the work of engineers like John Macadam, whose roads were covered with layers of compacted stone. Where are we today? In something of a jam, with around 35 million licensed vehicles. For much of the 20th century, our roads were, by 2015 standards, largely empty but the rise in the use of cars and lorries after the Second World War still led to a concerted attempt to improve our road network. December 1958 saw the opening of Britain’s first motorway – an 8-mile stretch of the Preston bypass (now part of the M6) – and the first sections of the M1 opened in the following year. But these and future developments have always struggled to cope with an increase in demand that they themselves helped to create. In 1989, just three years after the completion of the M25 motorway, Middlesbrough-born singer-songwriter Chris Rea released his anthemic song ‘Road to Hell’.

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LETTERS

A great magazine to listen to What a refreshing innovation to have a magazine that combines the visual and audio in such an imaginative way. As someone who has a love of history and suffers from dyslexia it is such a boon to be able to hear the correct pronunciation while following the words in an article. Over the years I have had to overcome the pains of reading at a rate much slower than perhaps the average person, and as such, get frustrated that my reading speed restricts the amount of information I can cover. This innovation for BBC History Magazinee has not only given me a new experience, it has helped my reading and enabled me to explore more areas of history. Audio books can be very good, but to be able to follow the printed word, while also listening to those words, gives one

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the two sensations that, once combined, increase tremendously the experience of your magazine. For me, now in my 60s, it opens up an exciting new information source into the subject of history that I love. Rolson Davies, Surbiton Editor replies: Thank you for your feedback, Rolson. We’re continuing our trial of producing an audio version of the magazine this month. Readers can download it for free at historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/septemberaudio o or through our iPad and iPhone editions.

쎲 We reward the letter of the month writer with our ‘History Choice’ book of the month. This issue it is Fighters in the Shadows by Robert Gildea. Read the review on page 69

caused heavy civilian casualties in what would now be called ‘collateral damage’. There are accounts of these, often very harrowing, in the memoirs of individual firemen and in the histories of the Paris Fire Brigade, a unit of the French army that, interestingly, was left intact and in situ by the Germans throughout the occupation. The military traditions of the fire brigade led to many firemen being involved in the street battles of the August 1944 liberation, while their colleagues continued their ‘normal’ duties. These included saving large stocks of flour when the retreating Germans set the flour mills at Pantin on fire in an apparently deliberate attempt to create famine in the liberated city. Fire-fighting operations here could not begin until the firemen had negotiated with the German troops and Resistance forces waging a fierce battle in the area. Michael Smith, Essex

No need to drop the bomb In your social media section in the August issue (Letters), you posited the question: “Do we need a National Women’s History Museum?” I don’t ‘do’ social media for various reasons, so come to your question late. But personally I find it absolutely staggering that in the 21st century this country can have: a Dog Collar Museum; a Pram Museum; a Lawnmower Museum; a Lock and Key Museum; a Pencil Museum; and in Dundee there is the Verdant Works, which has a collection that explores the history of jute. And yet your question still needs to be asked! Of course we need a National Women’s

History Museum! The contribution of women to arts, science, engineering and humanities MUST be recognised in this way. For shame that it doesn’t yet exist! Or should they just settle for the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle? Austin Baird, Cramlington

Pouring scorn on corn I have no idea whether the drawing in your July issue shows Shakespeare (Newss). I should just like to point out that what he is holding is snake’s head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris. This is a wild flower, far more common then than it is now, and surely far more likely than corn on the cob! Monica Caldwell, Brighton

The flames of resistance Roger Moorhouse is quite correct in his suggestion (Miscellanyy, July) that more Parisians were killed by Allied air raids than in the bombing of the city by the Luftwaffe. The Allied attacks he refers to Is ‘Shakespeare’ holding Fritillaria meleagris here, or simply corn on the cob, as one historian suggested?

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The opinions expressed by our commentators are their own and may not represent the views of BBC History Magazine or the Immediate Media Company

I agree with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, when discussing the rights and wrongs of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan (Should America Have Dropped the Bomb? August), that one atrocity does not justify another, no matter how great and understandable the thirst for revenge. An atrocity is an atrocity and is by definition morally unacceptable. After 9/11 Bin Laden cited Hiroshima as an example of western double standards. It has made it more difficult for us to tell others never to use terror as a means to an end. The Americans could at least have tried dropping the bomb in an open space as a demonstration of the effects; they could have given assurances that the emperor and the imperial system would be untouched; they could have brought Stalin into the war against Japan a little earlier, which would almost certainly have resulted in surrender, etc. They “could have tried harder”, as my old teachers used to say. David Simmonds, Surrey

Truman’s dilemma Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can calmly analyse the pros and cons of dropping the atomic bombs. Inevitably,

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The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in 1945. Our readers disagree on the morality of the bomb

What you’ve been saying on Twitter and Facebook @HistoryExtra: Do you think Britain should pay reparations to India? Andrew Ellis We do pay, through the International Development Fund and other charity and aid. Should we demand payment for creating a unified Indian state and its railway? We gave them a governmental structure and a legal system

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Roger Stevenson Where does it stop? Will Normandy pay reparations to Yorkshire for the Scouring of the North?

the moral issues tend to be at the forefront of our deliberations. However, by August 1945 America and her allies were war weary. American losses during the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific had already been horrendous. The risk of adding tens of thousands more if Japan had been invaded was not an option any presidentt would have been willing to take. Hence Truman chose to end the war with one mighty blow. Of course, he and his advisors knew that thousands of civilians would die or be grievously hurt but, as Richard Overy says in the article, the strategic bombing offensive on Germany and Japan had already killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Modern weapons make civilian casualties inevitable. Historian Lawrence Freedman has written that the decision to use the bomb was inevitably linked in the minds of the policy-makers with the strategic bombing offensive. We should also remember that technical determinism tends to be a key feature of modern wars. Those who direct war can-not afford to be squeamish. Finally, we must not overlook an important economic reason for the decision to use these terrible weapons. The three-year Manhattan Project had cost $2bn. James Byrnes, Truman’s personal representative on the bomb committee, was adamant that if the bomb was not used, Congress would be up in arms. He also argued that the effects of the bomb would impress the Soviets and make them more amenable in postwar negotiations. From around June 1945, the only thing that could have saved Japan from the

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bomb was complete submission. Dr Barry Clayton, Lancashire

How old are the Spitfires? I would like to query the 1940 date on the caption of the photo on page 19 of August’s issue (Letters). The Spitfires seem to have four bladed propellers and bubble canopies. The propellers might be OK but the canopies were on much later marks, and not possibly issued in time for the Battle of Britain. JF Green (Aircraft Spotter Badge: Boy Scouts, 1939–1945), Rugby Editor replies: We’ve had several letters regarding this image and it certainly appears that our 1940 date was incorrect. If any readers happen to know the exact date, please do get in touch. These Spitfires, which appeared in last month’s magazine, did not date to 1940, as many readers have spotted

WRITE TO US We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them. We may publish your letters on our website. Please include a daytime phone number and, if emailing, a postal address (not for publication). Letters should be no longer than 250 words. email: [email protected] Post:

Dan Brown It’s true Britain drained India’s wealth, but it also gave them modern education, law, a parliamentary system and science and technology. Let’s be friends instead of counting and tallying this old stuff Sarah Rawlins As I come to understand it, this isn’t about money but reparations. I think it’s slight arrogance on the English part to think that anything we did to India was anything short of inhuman Farooq Ahmad Yes, Britain should, because the land and manpower of India was used to prosper the British Empire @HistoryExtra: Do you think that history can survive the digital age? Nathan McGrath People are more interested in history than ever. The digital age has made the skills and understanding more relevant rather than less, some academics just need to catch up Konrad von Taiser In the digital age fact-finding is easy, but we are suffering from an information overload. Therefore the most important task of 21st-century historians is teaching their students how to sort through an over-abundance of information responsibly and come away with something like the truth Jemma Bezant This is such a non-issue! In the UK at least, history and archaeology for example are driving forward innovative uses of technology in terms of engagement and dissemination

Letters, BBC History Magazine, Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN

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Michael Wood on… public service broadcasting

“It’s still the BBC’s job to convey beauty, meaning and knowledge”

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He is currently working on The Story of China, a series for BBC Two

the 1950s onwards, when TV became a mass medium, broadcasting the sciences, arts and humanities as part of ‘quality cultural programming’. The ‘golden age’ of public service television, which shaped my generation of viewers, came out of that – from The Great War and Seven Up (1964) through to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Bronowski’s Ascent of Man (1973) and Life on Earth (1979). We’ve had massive changes since then, of course: the invention of the world wide web, the growth of electronic and digital media, the coming of the multi-channel universe and the birth of catch-up TV, have altered terrestrial broadcasting forever, not least in the way we all watch television. During that time there have also been many changes in content, style, accent and ethnic and gender mix. But, in my experience, Reith’s educational and egalitarian agenda still guides the BBC. And now the BBC finds itself under attack. There’s even talk of the end of the old licence fee, and of partial privatisation. As always though, a sense of history gives us a little perspective. Back in the eighties, misplaced and short-sighted antipathy cut back the World Service’s potentially pre-eminent influence across the world as a British brand, and also passed up on the opportunity for a BBC World TV channel that would have taken CNN to the cleaners and exerted a huge influence in spreading British culture and ideas. Despite this, today the BBC is still one of the great British brand names abroad. It tells us who we are, and it tells other people too – and isn’t that a definition of soft power? And that’s because of the BBC’s founding ethos, developed in the 1920s. The idea, some say, is anachronistic now. But it works because it is so simple. Reith was a funny old buttoned-up Scots Calvinist, but his desire to “inform, educate and entertain” translates into any language and culture. The goal, we all agree, is still to convey “things of beauty, meaning and knowledge”, as it says on the foundation stone. So let’s try to take the long view: shortsightedness, after all, was not a fault we associate with Reith and Matheson.

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When work takes me to BBC Broadcasting House in London, sitting in the reassuring surroundings of the art deco foyer, I often find myself reflecting on the history of public service broadcasting. There, above the lifts, is what one might call the BBC’s foundation stone: “This Temple is dedicated to the Arts and Muses by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being director-general. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.” In our sceptical age, such idealism may sound a bit quaint. But coming after the First World War, it was not mere rhetoric. The date tells the story. Founded in 1922, with its unsteady first steps in the General Strike, the BBC was essentially shaped in the Depression. By 1931, Britain’s imperial mission had become deeply problematised. At home there was widespread hardship and unemployment. The loss of half of Britain’s world market in a few years had dealt a devastating blow to manufacturing and trading cities. But ecumenical ideas were in the air: “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” would be the BBC’s motto. Society was changing fast (women, after all, had only just got the vote!) It was the time to think about using new technology to further cultural – and moral – progress. The creation of the BBC was one of many social projects of the time, including the Central Library in my home town, Manchester. The library was a consciously pioneering educational project “for all classes in the community” and Reith thought like that too. It was then that the future role of public service broadcasting was defined. The key figure was not Reith but Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s first director of talks, who formulated the idea of ‘difficult’ and important subjects of public interest being discussed on the airwaves. This shaped the content of public service broadcasting from

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG

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French Terror

The circle of terror Marisa Linton reveals how the architects of the bloodletting that swept Paris after the French Revolution ended up among its victims Complements the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of A Place of Greater Safety

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How the mighty fell An engraving showing members of the Girondins in prison in 1793. This once powerful revolutionary faction had advocated removing deputies’ immunity from the death sentence, yet were themselves guillotined en masse six months later

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French Terror IN CONTEXT

The French Revolution turns sour By the spring of 1794, the French Revolution had been raging for nearly five years. The revolutionaries of 1789 had set up a constitutional monarchy with a National Assembly, and the king’s absolute powers were curbed by law. But many royalists refused to accept it; they fled France to become émigrés, and urged the foreign powers to make war on revolutionary France. In June 1791 French king Louis XVI attempted to become an émigré, fleeing with his family, but was intercepted at Varennes and returned to Paris. In 1792 war broke out with Austria and Prussia; it went badly from the start. On 10 August the Parisian street radicals, the sans-culottes, led a pitched battle to overthrow the monarchy. A new Assembly was set up, the National Convention, which declared France a republic. Britain, Spain and the Dutch Republic joined the conflict, and a civil war ignited in the Vendée, leaving the Republic beset on all sides. The Convention set up a Committee of Public Safety, along with a Committee of General Security, to take on executive responsibilities of government. Under pressure from the sans-culottes and their leaders, the Cordeliers, the Convention’s deputies voted for the Law of Suspects which formed the basis of a legalised terror. This law saw almost 3,000 so-called enemies of the revolution die under the guillotine in Paris in just 12 months. In October 1793 terror was used against revolutionary leaders themselves, when the Girondin faction was sent to the guillotine. Now the revolutionary leaders were faced with the dilemma of whether to maintain the Terror to ensure the Republic’s survival.

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n his prison cell, during the long hours before dawn, Camille Desmoulins, radical revolutionary and deputy to the National Convention, wrote a last letter to his wife, Lucile, in which he struggled to comprehend the sudden turn of events that had brought him to that terrible place. It was the spring of 1794, the height of the revolutionary terror, and the prisons were crowded with thousands of people who had fallen foul of the sinister Law of Suspects. But Desmoulins was in a different category to most prisoners – for he personally knew his accusers, the men who had signed his arrest. Several of them had been his friends, among them Maximilien Robespierre, known to Desmoulins since their schooldays. For five years Desmoulins himself had been at the forefront of the revolution, and now the revolution itself had turned on him. “My dear Lolotte,” he wrote, his tears staining the paper, “I, whom men who called themselves my friend, who call themselves republicans, have thrown into a cell, in solitary confinement, as though I were a conspirator!” The revolutionary government had its reasons for his arrest – complicated, unedifying, tortuously political reasons. The previous winter, Desmoulins, a talented but reckless journalist, had begun to write a new newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he put pressure on the already jittery government. Desmoulins not only called for a policy of clemency to wind down the Terror, but challenged the authority of the two commit-

tees that led the revolutionary government – the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The committees had already organised the arrest, trial and execution of a group of extreme radicals, the Cordeliers, self-appointed spokesmen for the militant working people of Paris, the sans-culottes.

Increase in terror Desmoulins, in Le Vieux Cordelier, r had repeatedly attacked Hébert, leader of the Cordeliers, who had called for an increase in terror and the violent suppression of the Catholic church. Now, the committees, in part as a trade off to show their evenhandedness and intolerance of any opposition, decided to crack down against Desmoulins’ moderate group too. It was at a midnight meeting of these two committees that the arrest of Desmoulins and several of his fellow deputies – including Georges Danton – had been agreed. Danton, like Desmoulins, was a member of the radical group, the Jacobins. He was also the former minister of justice and a one-time member of the Committee of Public Safety. If he could be arrested then no deputy was safe. When news broke in the Convention that Desmoulins, Danton and the rest had been arrested in the night, there were murmurings of anger and dismay, but in the end the deputies accepted the arrests – partly out of fear for themselves. The deputies listened as Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, the young, handsome and Tragic couple Camille and Lucile Desmoulins – shown with their son, Horace – went to the guillotine within a matter of days of each other

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Almost 3,000 ‘enemies of the revolution’ died under the guillotine in Paris in just 12 months

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Best of enemies Deputies of the National Convention are shown at the Tuileries Palace in May 1793 in a contemporary engraving. The Republic that they created was said to be ‘one and indivisible’ yet proved to be anything but

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alarmingly intense Saint-Just made the formal denunciation. He stood very still, only occasionally moving his right arm in a sweeping down gesture that reminded one eyewitness of the falling blade of a guillotine, as he disclosed a long list of vague allegations. Danton, Desmoulins and their friends, Saint-Just said, were part of a conspiracy, secretly in league with their apparent enemies, the extremist Cordeliers, together with the foreign powers at war with France, plotting to bring down the revolution from within. Three days later the accused faced their trial. Danton, a bull of a man and a prodigious orator, argued till his voice gave out, but to no avail. A further decree was obtained from the Convention to silence their protests and exclude them from their own trial. On 5 April they were condemned to death as traitors and conspirators against the Republic. As the tumbrels carried them towards the waiting guillotine, past the shuttered windows of the house where Robespierre lived, Danton cried out: “Within three months, you will follow me!”

Stalinist show trial This tragic episode, sometimes known as the Danton Affair, has long been seen as an iconic BBC History Magazine

“Politics was once the business of the king and his ministers. Now a new kind of man came into being: the professional politician” moment in the revolution. Playwrights, film makers and novelists, ranging from Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, have portrayed its enigmatic protagonists and the dark and claustrophobic world of revolutionary politics in which they lived. More than one commentator has compared it to a Stalinist show trial, as in Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton, with Robespierre playing a cold-blooded Stalinist figure, while Danton is portrayed as the humane and likeable – if venal – hero. But what is less understood is that the Danton Affair was part of a pattern. A surprising number of revolutionaries fell victim to the revolutionary terror, both before and after the affair. Of the 749 deputies in the National Convention, 86 died violent deaths during the life of the Convention (between September 1792 and October 1795). Most died under the guillotine, some by their own hand, and almost a third in total were

arrested – both before, during and after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794. It was a phenomenon that I refer to as the ‘politicians’ terror’. The second thing that is not well understood is that the trial of Danton and Desmoulins was not typical of how most trials were conducted. The revolutionaries used rough justice, and decisions were swift and not subject to appeal, but in most cases heard before the Revolutionary Tribunal there was some attempt to establish guilt or innocence. Overall nearly half the accused were found not guilty, and even after prosecutions in Paris intensified in June and July, nearly a quarter escaped death. The trials of revolutionary leaders, however, were particularly ruthless in the way they were conducted, precisely because the men who initiated them were afraid for themselves if they failed – fearful either that their intended victims would turn the tables and 25

French Terror

Leading revolutionaries whose methods were turned on them

Camille Desmoulins (1760–94) Desmoulins’ attempts to make a career as a lawyer suffered due to his stammer. In July 1789 he was in a cafe at the Palais Royal, where he urged people to storm the Bastille. He became a talented, volatile journalist and wrote Le Vieux Cordelier, the chief vehicle for the ‘Indulgent’ faction to attack the revolutionary committees and the Terror. He was arrested in March 1794, tried and executed.

Georges Danton (1759 –94) At the outbreak of revolution, Danton (left) was a lawyer. After the monarchy fell, he became minister of justice. He had undisclosed sources of wealth, and was probably corrupt. He called for a Revolutionary Tribunal, saying: “Let us be terrible to spare the people from being so.” He sat with the Jacobins in the Convention, and supported the use of terror. Yet there were rumours about his commitment. He was executed along with Desmoulins.

Maximilien Robespierre (1758– 94) Robespierre was a lawyer who became a radical revolutionary, a deputy in the first National Assembly, and a leader of the Jacobin Club. Popularly known as ‘the Incorruptible’, he only held power in the last year of his life, after joining the Committee of Public Safety. He is seen as an apologist for the Terror ror, though the extent to which he controllled it was exaggerated by the men who w overthrew and killed him in the 1794 T Thermidor coup.

Louis-Antoine Sa aint-Just (1767–94) The youngest member of tthe Convention, Saint-Just had a meteoric career as a revolutionary leader. In Parris he gained a chilling reputation for takin ng on the role of spokesman for the Committee of Public Safety in denouncing succ cessive political factions: the Girondins, the e Cordeliers, and the Indulgents. He trie ed to defend Robespierre in Thermidor, but ended by dying alongside him.

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seek revenge, or that they themselves might be denounced by the sans-culotte militants if they were seen to show weakness and favouritism to men who had been their friends. As one deputy later put it: “You had to be the first to attack, because whoever stayed on the defensive was lost.” It had not always been thus. Back in the early months of the revolution in 1789 when the Bastille fell, when the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was written, when the deputies of the National Assembly gave up their privileges and declared the French people to be equal under the law, people like Camille Desmoulins reacted with wonder, hope and boundless enthusiasm. Many wept tears of joy – though some of the nobles, ominously, seeing their privileged world collapse around them, wept tears of rage. Until the revolution, politics had been the exclusive business of the king and his ministers. Now a new kind of man came into being – the professional politician. The deputies were plunged into a new political world, one in which they tried to establish their credibility with the crowd as men of integrity, untainted by old-regime corruption.

Radical democrats Robespierre, Desmoulins and their friends were part of a radical democratic and egalitarian group. None of these men entered revolutionary politics intending to become killers. In 1791 Robespierre tried to get the death penalty abolished altogether as a barbaric, inhumane punishment. Shared ideals and the common cause brought them together. They became successful, men who counted in the new world of revolutionary politics. Profits from his political journalism had finally given Desmoulins the means to ask the girl he had long loved, Lucile Duplessis, to marry him. She was a small, graceful and elegant blonde from a wealthy family, and before the revolution she would have been out

of his social league. As he waited anxiously for her answer she astounded him by crying and laughing at the same time out of sheer happiness. Their wedding in December 1790 was attended by many of the brightest young revolutionaries, men whom Desmoulins was proud to call his friends. His witnesses included Robespierre, and another mutual friend, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The future seemed assured under a constitutional monarchy, but over the next two years the situation deteriorated. Successive events – the attempted flight of the king; the declaration of war on the foreign powers harbouring French royalists; a succession of unexpected military disasters and betrayals by high-profile leaders; the overthrow of the monarchy in a pitched battle in Paris – all spiralled into a dangerous destabilisation of politics. When, in September 1792, the Convention met and established a republic, the atmosphere was tense. The Republic was said to be ‘one and indivisible’, but behind this proclamation of unity, new factional divisions formed among the deputies, and in many cases former friends became bitter enemies. Most damaging of all was the general conviction – born largely of political inexperience – that opponents could not be legitimate in their views, but must have bad intentions. Mutual suspicion, calumny and fear intensified.

Secret enemies A new faction, the Girondins, dominated the Convention’s early months. Their leader was Brissot, who had become the enemy of Desmoulins, Robespierre and the Jacobin faction. Desmoulins wrote a pamphlet Brissot Unmasked, which claimed that Brissot was a secret enemy of the revolution. It was one of the Girondins who first proposed that the immunity preserving deputies from arrest for their opinions be removed but, ironically, it was the Girondins themselves who wh were the first faction to suffer ng of immunity. In October from the endin 1793, 21 of them, including Brissot, were

“The Danton Affair has been compared to a show trial, with Robespierre playing a cold-blooded Stalinist figure” A c1790 portrait of Maximilien Robespierre, one of the Terror’s chief architects BBC History Magazine

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Men of terror

“The executioners worked so vigorously that several of the heads flew through the air to land at the base of the scaffold”

BRIDGEMAN

The final moments A victim of the Terror prepares to meet his death at the Place de la Revolution. Once arrested, revolutionary leaders had virtually no chance of escaping the guillotine – some were even denied the opportunity to defend themselves in a trial

condemned to death amid dramatic scenes. One of the condemned stabbed himself. Seven of the guests at Desmoulins’ wedding were among those convicted. In the public gallery Desmoulins himself, stricken with remorse for his clever denunciations of his former friends, broke down and wept. The Girondins went to the guillotine defiantly singing the Marseillaise and crying “Long live the Republic!” The executioners worked so rapidly that the actual killings took only 36 minutes, and so vigorously that several of the heads flew through the air to land at the base of the scaffold. After the first few executions people in the crowd began to move away, horrified at what they were seeing – the reality of the guillotine in action. The next political faction to perish en masse was that of the Cordeliers. Their leader, Hébert, had used his newspaper Le Père Duchesne, in which he adopted the brutal persona of a sans-culotte to mock his enemies for their cowardice when their turn had come to face ‘the national razor’. Now the executioners entertained actual sans-culottes by stopping the descent of the blade inches above Hébert’s neck, a game they played four times, before the blade was allowed to slam home, and his screams at last were silenced. Just a few days later came the turn of Desmoulins, Danton and their friends. In his defence Desmoulins had made the painful admission: “I was always the first to denounce my own friends.” BBC History Magazine

But the most extensive wholesale slaughter of a political faction took place with the fall of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their supporters. Over the three days of 28, 29 and 30 July 1794, more than 100 people met their deaths under the guillotine in the Thermidor coup. Since these people had all been declared “outlaws” by the Convention for defying its decrees ordering their arrest, they were not given even the semblance of a trial, but appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal only to have their identities officially confirmed. Among them was René-François Dumas, who until the previous night had been president of the tribunal that now condemned him.

Heroes and villains In the 220 years since their deaths, there has been much mythologisation of the revolutionary leaders, a tendency either to whitewash or to blacken their reputations. This is particularly the case for Danton and Desmoulins – so often seen as heroes – and for Robespierre and Saint-Just – just as regularly stigmatised as villains. The truth is rather more complicated – as it often is. Many of the revolutionary leaders were perpetrators as well as ultimately victims of terror. The fact that many acted out of fear, or the conviction that they were defending the Republic, may help to explain their choices, but does not lessen the horror of what they did. For their womenfolk, however, the

moral case is more straightforward. They did not perpetrate terror themselves, but nevertheless suffered bereavement, public shame, and often the confiscation of their families’ goods and property, while a few of them literally became victims of the politicians’ terror. Camille Desmoulins’ last tear-stained letter to his wife still rests in the National Archives, but Lucile herself never saw it. By the time he wrote it she was already under arrest. It was claimed that she had tried to use bribery to stir up a prison revolt in a pitiful attempt to save her husband’s life. She was condemned only days after Camille. In the tumbrel taking her to her death she rode with the widow of Hébert. Their husbands had done so much to destroy one another, yet at the foot of the guillotine the two women embraced, in defiance of revolutionary politics, in defiance of death. Marisa Linton is reader in history at Kingston University. Her most recent book is Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) DISCOVER MORE RADIO 왘 The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation

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Second World War

The Nazis mistakenly believed the Welsh bombardier Alf Jones to be a spy and shot him in the back of the neck at Mauthausen concentration camp

DEATH CAMP BRITONS Gavin Mortimer tells the story of three men who found themselves in the Second World War’s equivalent of hell on Earth – a Nazi concentration camp

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BBC History Magazine

B

ombardier Alf Jones was one of the ‘old sweats’ of the 23rd Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. He’d enlisted in 1931, aged 17, and served three years in India before joining the reserve list in 1938. Returning to his native Port Talbot, Jones worked in the tin mines but he re-enlisted on the outbreak of war. A few weeks later, at the end of September 1939, Jones and his regiment sailed for France and were ordered to dig-in close to the Maginot Line. When the Nazi war machine rolled through the Low Countries into France in May 1940, Jones was one of scores of artillerymen captured. But not for long. The enterprising Welshman made his escape in Belgium while being transported to Germany. It was the start of a flight that would eventually end more than four years later with his execution in Mauthausen concentration camp. History has, for the most part, overlooked those unfortunate few Britons who were sent to the Nazi death camps. Most were members of Special Operations Executive (SOE), captured on missions to occupied Europe. But there was also a handful of soldiers and civilians transported to places whose names have become bywords for wickedness, for no other reason than the Germans found them too hard to handle in ordinary camps.

WWW.BELGIUMWW2.INFO, AKG IMAGES

German wrath Anthony Faramus didn’t look like a troublemaker. Charming, good-looking and a popular figure in Jersey, the 21-year-old was working in the island’s Miramar Hotel when the Germans invaded in July 1940. He didn’t take well to the occupation, incurring the wrath of the Germans to such an extent that in late 1941 he was deported to Fort de Romainville on the French mainland as ‘an undesirable’. Faramus spent the next two years incarcerated in Romainville prison. But by the winter of 1943/44 the Germans needed all the manpower they could muster to help in their war effort, so Faramus was sent to Buchenwald in central Germany. Gone was the relative comfort of Romainville. Instead, recalled Faramus, “we slept sardine-like, overwhelmed by the smell of human excreta and diseased bodies… throughout the long nights, voices cried out in hunger, in fear, in pain”. The days were a living hell. Inmates were set to work in the camp’s stone quarry or sent to the subsidiary camps to help in the manufacture of munitions. Many dropped dead from exhaustion; others killed themselves on the electrified fence, and those too weak to work BBC History Magazine

Mauthausen in September 1944. By now suffering the effects of malnutrition, the Welshman was not fit for slave labour, so on 9 November Jones was taken to the camp’s execution room and shot in the back of the neck.

“Le bandit Hopper”

Anthony Faramus pictured (far right) in April 1945 on his liberation from Buchenwald concentration camp

“‘We slept sardine-like, overwhelmed by the smell of human excreta and diseased bodies,’ recalled Anthony Faramus” further were garroted in the camp’s ‘strangling room’. In December 1944 Faramus was sent from Buchenwald to Mauthausen, situated in Upper Austria. By now he had learned that British inmates were often singled out by the guards, so on arriving, he passed himself as a Frenchman. It was a prudent move. Three months earlier Alf Jones had arrived at Mauthausen. No longer the fit and feisty Welshman, he had been in German hands since his capture in Brussels in 1941. Interned first in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Jones was classified as a ‘political prisoner’, the authorities believing him to be a British agent and not, as he presumably told them, an intrepid soldier who had passed himself off as a Belgian for more than a year. He was used as a human guinea pig, forced to march up to 15 miles a day testing the durability of prototype army boots. After a spell in Allach, one of Dachau’s sub-camps, Jones was transported to

At some point on his grisly journey through Nazi depravity, Jones might well have encountered Ian ‘Johnny’ Hopper, a 30-year-old Englishman who for two years had waged a guerrilla campaign against the Germans. Hopper’s family had moved to Normandy when he was a child, and he later married and went into business as a wireless repairman. When war came Hopper, assisted by his French wife, began attacking German targets, setting fire to oil depots or blowing up railway lines. In time he became bolder, assassinating enemy soldiers and French policemen. In its edition of 17 September 1941, the newspaper Le Journal de Normandie told its readers there was a reward of 10,000 francs leading to the capture of “le bandit Hopper”. He was caught in Paris the following year during a shoot-out with soldiers in which his wife, Paulette, lost her life. (Hopper fired the bullet that killed the already seriously wounded Paulette to prevent her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo). Sent to Neue Bremm torture camp, Hopper was beaten by the guards after every RAF bombing raid on Germany. Eventually he was taken to Mauthausen to work in the granite quarry. “It had 186 steps up which we used to carry those big rocks on our shoulders,” he recalled. “The rule was that anyone who fell down on the steps would be beaten till he got up or he died. If he died, they threw him back down into the quarry, and they had a horse and a cart that came every afternoon and… collected the bodies.” Hopper was lucky. Unlike Jones his health never broke and he survived Mauthausen, as did Faramus, who died in 1990, the same year as he published his memoirs. “Strangely, however, I was not embittered by my years in captivity,” Faramus concluded. “The isolation, the prejudice, the intimidation and the defiance at camps Buchenwald and Mauthausen proved to be an important education for me.” Gavin Mortimer is an author whose books include The Men Who Made the SAS: The History of the Long Range Desert Group (Constable, 2015) DISCOVER MORE BOOK 왘 A Journey into Darkness

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Crime and the Blitz

CRIMINALS OF THE

BLITZ

Men pick their way thro ough a street levelled du uring German bombin ng. A criminal later remarked that air raids were the bestt ally London’s crooks ever had

Joshua Levine reveals how the German bombing of British cities in the Second World War created new opportunities for lawlessness

W

ally Thompson was a hardworking thief who always looked to exploit a situation. During a heavy air raid in 1941, he drove a stolen lorry into a narrow street in London Bridge. An air raid precaution (ARP) member, Thompson was wearing his uniform; it allowed him to move around London freely and unsuspected. Alongside him in the lorry were the members of his gang – Batesy, Bob and ‘Spider’. The gang’s plan was to break into a warehouse, pick up a safe from the office and drive it away. As anti-aircraft fire raged and bombers droned, Batesy jumped out and opened the warehouse gates with a cloned key. Spider – an experienced burglar – ran forward and forced a window, before jemmying the main door open from the inside. Within moments, all four men were inside, manhandling the safe out to the lorry. But as they reached the door, a bomb landed outside. The ground pitched forwards, and Thompson was thrown through the air, landing on the stairs. The gates were destroyed, the lorry was turned upside down and fires started to burn. Everybody was shaken – but unharmed. Choking on dust, cursing his luck, Thompson urged his men to run. Spider had other ideas. Spotting a young girl trapped in a nearby building, he began

50

scaling a wall to reach her. Minutes later, a fire engine arrived and a ladder was sent up to the ledge where Spider was hanging with the girl in his arms. He climbed down, and handed her over to a police constable – who was deeply impressed. He asked for Spider’s name and address; such courage deserved recognition. However, Spider declined to give his details. Feigning humility, he and his colleagues slipped quietly into the night. Without the safe. According to Thompson, the Blitz was a golden period for criminals. “Air raids,” he remembered, “were the best ally London’s crooks ever had.” Billy Hill, who came to be known as the boss of Britain’s underworld after the war, agreed: “They were roaring days. Money was easy, the villains were well loaded with dough, and we were all busy.”

Capital crimewave The anecdotal evidence is backed up by the official figures. In 1941, the Metropolitan Police made 5,280 more arrests and recorded 4,681 more indictable offences than it had in 1939 – the primary reason being the increase in criminal opportunity. Yet as career criminals were exploiting the blackout and the absence of police, a much larger group was increasingly finding itself on the wrong side of the law: ordinary citizens. The Blitz lasted between Saturday 7 September 1940 and May 1941. It brought danger to towns and cities and chaos to the

country as a whole, causing people to behave in extreme and unaccustomed ways. One result of this was ‘Blitz spirit’, the instinctive realisation that life – and other people – mattered. But darker outcomes were also evident – and one tragic crime reveals much about the period. In late September 1940, Ida Rodway, a law-abiding woman in her late 60s, and her blind husband, Joseph, a retired carriage driver, were bombed out of their Hackney home. The devoted couple began sleeping on Ida’s sister’s floor. But as the days turned into weeks, Joseph’s mental state deteriorated and their money began running out. Without financial assistance or any apparent hope for the future, Ida did what she considered to be the kindest thing for Joseph. Instead of bringing him a cup of tea in the morning, she brought a knife and slit his throat before handing herself in to the police. Ida Rodway was charged with murder and brought to trial at the Old Bailey – where the court medical officer construed her insistence that she had done nothing wrong as evidence of insanity. He might equally have viewed it as evidence of crushed pragmatism. Nevertheless, his view saved Ida from the hangman. The jury was instructed to return a verdict of guilty but insane, and she was committed to Broadmoor where she died in April 1946. The Rodway case demonstrates that at the start of the Blitz, the authorities had little BBC History Magazine

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Anne of Cleves

BRIDGEMAN

False impression This portrait of Anne of Cleves, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1539, delighted Henry VIII. Unfortunately, the king was far less impressed with his new bride when he met her in the flesh

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BBC History Magazine

COVER STORY

For centuries, Anne of Cleves has been cast as a hapless figure who so repelled Henry VIII that he was unable to consummate their marriage. Yet in truth she was a popular, pragmatic woman who fought back from a very public humiliation to become Henry’s most successful queen By Tracy Borman

AKG-IMAGES

A

nne of Cleves has gone down in history as the ugly wife. Henry VIII was so revolted when he first clapped eyes on her that he immediately instructed his lawyers to get him out of the marriage. Thereafter, his poor, spurned fourth queen retreated quietly into obscurity to hide her face from the world, while Henry joyfully married the infinitely more desirable Catherine Howard. Anne, who was born 500 years ago this month, was Henry’s wife for just six months, making her the shortest reigning of all his queens. And so she has been dismissed as little more than a blip in the history of England’s most-married monarch. The true story of Henry VIII’s fourth wife is entirely different to this humiliating fiction. Anne may not have been to the king’s liking, but how she responded proves that she was far from being the hapless victim of legend. In fact, she can justifiably claim to have been the most successful of all Henry’s wives.

The charter annulling Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The king’s passion for lady-in-waiting Catherine Howard sounded the death knell for the couple’s p union

Anne, daughter of the late Duke of JuliersCleves, Johann III, and sister of his successor, Wilhelm, had first been mooted as a potential wife for the English king in the closing weeks of 1537, soon after the death of his beloved third wife, Jane Seymour. Anne was then 22 years of age, and had already been used as a pawn in the international marriage market when she had been betrothed to François, heir to the duchy of Lorraine, in 1527. This had come to nothing, leaving her free to marry elsewhere. John Hutton, ambassador to Mary of Hungary, who had originally made the suggestion, admitted he had heard no great praise of her beauty. Such a recommendation hardly motivated Henry to pursue the scheme any further, and it was not until early 1539 that the idea was resurrected. This time Henry gave it more credence because he desperately needed new allies. His two great rivals, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and French king Francis I, had forged a treaty, and to make matters worse, a short while later Pope Paul III had reissued 35

Anne of Cleves

“I like her not!” On New Year’s Eve, Anne arrived at a stormy, windswept Rochester Castle in Kent. The next day, in true chivalric tradition, Henry hastened to greet her in disguise. He was horrified with what he saw. “I like her not! I like her not!” he shouted at Cromwell when the meeting was over. It seemed that Anne had been rather flattered by her portrait. In contrast to the petite stature of Henry’s first three wives, she was tall, big-boned and strong-featured. Her face was dominated by a large nose that had been cleverly disguised by the angle of Holbein’s portrait, and her skin was pitted with the marks of smallpox. To be fair to Anne, however, until Henry expressed such a strong aversion towards her, there had been no other disparaging accounts of her appearance. The famous nickname of ‘Flanders Mare’ was only coined by Bishop Gilbert Burnet in the late 17th century. Most of the contemporary accounts before her marriage had been complimentary. Even Henry was forced to admit that she was “well and semelye [seemly]”. But the fact that she nevertheless repelled him ensured that Anne would henceforth be known as the ‘ugly wife’. History has thus served a great injustice on Anne, particularly as her betrothed could hardly have been described as an attractive prospect himself by the time of their marriage. Incapacitated by an ulcerated jousting wound in his leg, Henry’s girth had increased 36

Cornelis Massys’ less than flattering portrait of Henry VIII. For all Henry’s mutterings about Anne’s appearance, the queen may well have drawn the shortest straw

“Henry complained that Anne had ‘very evil smells about her’. The king also bemoaned ‘the looseness of her breasts’” at an alarming rate. When he became king he had been a trim 32 inches around the waist; by the time he met Anne of Cleves it was closer to 52 inches. A contemporary depiction (shown above) reveals the king as a grotesque figure. His beady eyes and tiny, pursed mouth are almost lost in the layers of flesh which surround them. He appears to have no neck, and his enormous frame extends beyond the reaches of the canvas. “The king was so stout that such a man has never been seen,” reported a visitor to court. “Three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet.” On balance, Anne had far more reason for complaint than her prospective husband. However abhorrent his new bride might be to Henry, there was no going back. It would have caused a major diplomatic incident if he had reneged on the treaty, and England could ill-afford to lose allies. The wedding duly took place on 6 January 1540, and the king now had to do his duty by consummating it. Thanks to the events that happened afterwards, a detailed account of the wedding night exists among the records of Henry’s

reign. The king had run his hands all over his new wife’s body, which had so repelled him that he had found himself incapable of doing any more. The following morning, he told Cromwell that he found Anne even more abhorrent than when he had first beheld her, bemoaning: “She is nothing fair, and have very evil smells about her.” He went on to claim that there had been certain “tokens” to suggest that she was no maid, not least “the looseness of her breasts”, which he had apparently examined closely. As a result, he confided to a manservant, his bride was “indisposed to excite and provoke any lust” in him and he “could never be stirred to know her carnally”. He had therefore “left her as good a maid as I found her”. For her part, Anne gave every appearance of joy in her new husband. But despite Henry’s claims, she was clearly a virgin and had no idea what was involved in consummation. When the marriage was but a few days old, she confided to her attendants that she believed she might be pregnant, telling them: “When he [Henry] comes to bed he kisses me, and taketh me by the hand, and biddeth me, Goodnight, sweetheart: and in the morning kisses me, and biddeth me, Farewell, darling. Is this not enough?” The Countess of Rutland retorted: “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York.” Henry’s inability to consummate the marriage has been traditionally assigned to his revulsion at his new bride. But it is at least equally possible that he was impotent. He was nearly twice his young bride’s age and had become increasingly immobile in recent years. There had been no talk of a mistress for hing that some time. This was not the sort of th he would have wished to be publicly kknown. n, prided Kings, even more than ordinary men themselves on their sexual potency: it was, after all, vital for the continuation of their dynasty. Henry was a little too eager to t boast ugh he to his physician, Dr Butts, that althou could not bring himself to have sex with w Anne, he had had “two wet dreams”.

The happy couple? To the outside world, everything was as it should be. Anne wrote to her family, assuring them that she was very happy with heer ure that husband. Meanwhile, Henry made su he appeared in public with his new qu ueen as often as could be expected. A few dayys after the wedding, a celebratory tournament was held in Greenwich. The contemporarry chronicler Edward Hall recorded the event and praised the new queen so effusively that nobody would guess there was anything amiss. “She was appareiled after the E English fashion, with a French hood, which so set BBC Histor y Mag

BRIDGEMAN

the bull of excommunication against the English king. Although the then Duke of Juliers-Cleves, Johann (Anne’s father) was no Protestant, he – like Henry – had expelled papal authority from his domain. An alliance with Cleves would therefore provide a major boost to the Reformation in England, and it was for this reason that Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, championed it so enthusiastically. In March 1539, Henry finally agreed that negotiations could begin. Cromwell was quick to relay reports of Anne’s beauty, assuring his sovereign: “Every man praiseth the beauty of the same lady as well for the face as for the whole body… she excelleth as far the duchess [of Milan] as the golden sun excelleth the silver moon.” But Henry was taking no chances. He dispatched the renowned portrait painter Hans Holbein to Cleves so that he could see what he was letting himself in for. The king was delighted with the result. Holbein’s portrait (see page 34) showed a pretty young woman with fair hair, a doll-like face, delicate eyes, mouth and chin, and a demure, maidenly expression. The match was confirmed and a treaty was signed on 4 October 1539. A few weeks later, Anne embarked upon her journey to England.

forth her beauty and good visage, that every creature rejoiced to behold her.” But Anne lacked the courtly refinements that her new husband was used to. The education of noble ladies in Cleves was very different to England. Being accomplished at music, dancing and languages was seen as trivial – “an occasion of lightness” – and ladies were instead taught the more useful skills of needlework and household management. The English ambassador to Cleves described Anne as being of “lowly and gentle conditions”, and noted that “she occupieth her time most with the needle”. No matter how affable and eager to please the new queen was, her awkwardness rendered her an embarrassment in the sophisticated world of the Tudor court. There was another reason why Henry was

desperate to be rid of his fourth wife. By the spring of 1540, he had fallen madly in love with Catherine Howard, a pretty young lady-in-waiting in his wife’s household. This spurred him into action. Pressure was brought to bear on Thomas Cromwell, who had been arrested for treason and was now obliged to give evidence from the Tower in support of the annulment. On 24 June Anne was ordered by the council to remove herself from court and go to Richmond Palace. A short while later, Anne learned that her marriage to the English king had been called into question because Henry was concerned about her prior betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine, and had therefore refrained from consummating the union. An ecclesiastical inquiry was duly commissioned, and a delegation of councillors arrived

at Richmond in early July to seek Anne’s co-operation. Shocked by this sudden turn of events, Anne fainted. When she had sufficiently recovered herself, she steadfastly refused to give her consent to the inquiry. Before long, though, perhaps fearing a similar fate to Catherine of Aragon or, worse still, Anne Boleyn, Anne resolved to take a pragmatic approach. The marriage was duly declared illegal on 9 July, and the annulment was confirmed by parliament three days later. Anne wrote a letter of submission to the king, referring to “your majesty’s clean and pure living with me”, and offering herself up as his “most humble servant”. Anne was to be richly rewarded for her compliance. She was given possession of Richmond Palace and Bletchingly Manor for life, together with a considerable annual

Elizabeth I

Friends and rivals Anne of Cleves won over three fellow Tudor queens, yet the failure of her marriage proved lethal for a king’s chief minister

Catherine Howard

Thomas Cromwell

Anne of Cleves was about the same age as her eldest stepdaughter, Mary, and the two struck up an apparently warm friendship. It is an indication of how likeable Anne was that Mary overcame her natural aversion to reformers and refused to listen to the rumours that Anne was conspiring against her when she became queen.

The skittish young Catherine was among the ladies appointed to serve Anne when she arrived in England in December 1539. Anne was fully aware that Catherine had caught her husband’s eye and although she complained to the Duke of Juliers-Cleves’s ambassador, she soon became reconciled to the situation, gracefully ceding victory to her rival. To show that there were no ven danced hard feelings, she ev with Catherine after the t latter had become queen.

Arranging the king’s disastrous fourth marriage was the beginning of the end for his chief minister. Cromwell had championed Anne enthusiastically, aware that the marriage would cement his religious reforms. After her first disastrous meeting with Henry, Cromwell urged Anne to “behave in a way which might please the king” – in short, she should ‘excite lust’ in her new husband. But it was all in vain and Henry had Cromwell executed a few days after the marriage was annulled.

BRIDGEMAN

Mary Tudor

Anne cherished an abiding affection for Henry’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth. She once claimed that “to have had [Elizabeth] for her daughter would have been [a] greater happiness to her than being queen”. Perhaps the two women were initially united by a shared sense of rejection at the hands of the king, but theirs was also a meeting of minds because both were of the reformist faith. The princess undoubtedly learned a great deal from her stepmother, particularly the art of pragmatism, which would become the keynote of her own queenship.

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Anne of Cleves

Just good friends Speculation began at once about who would be the king’s next wife. Among the potential candidates was Anne of Cleves. She had been careful to remain on good terms with Henry after their annulment, and had shown no signs of resentment at being so humiliatingly rejected. She had been a regular visitor to court and had also received several visits from her former husband, which by all accounts had been very convivial. The pair had exchanged New Year’s gifts in 1542. But the king made no indication of wishing to revive their union, and although Anne was rumoured to be bitterly disappointed when he married his sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr, this may have been just for show. By that time, Anne was comfortably ensconced at Hever with all the riches and honours of being a queen, but none of the disadvantages of being married to the ageing, bloated and increasingly tyrannical king. She remained there for the rest of her days, outliving her estranged husband, who died in 1547 and was succeeded by Edward, his nine-year-old son. Edward’s accession prompted a decline in Anne’s status. The new king’s council viewed her as an irrelevance, not to mention a drain on their resources, and confiscated two of the manors that Henry had given her. Forever the pragmatist, Anne resolved to make the most of the life that she had left. She established her house at Hever as a lively social centre – a kind of miniature court, where she could receive esteemed guests from across the kingdom, notably Princess Elizabeth, who doted upon her. Through these guests, she kept abreast of 38

Anne of Cleves was a committed reformer who might have fallen victim to Mary Tudor’s anti-Protestant crackdown – like bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, shown being burned at Oxford in 1555 – if it wasn’t for the fact that she was good friends with Mary

“Following Catherine Howard’s execution, among the potential candidates to be Henry VIII’s sixth wife was Anne of Cleves” events at court, and solicited invitations to visit it herself. The archetypal ‘merry widow’ (or divorcee), Anne also outlived Henry’s son, Edward, who died after just six years on the throne. He was succeeded by his elder half-sister Mary, with whom Anne was still on good terms. She and Elizabeth were accorded the place of honour at Mary’s lavish coronation. The two women shared an open chariot which was richly arrayed with crimson velvet and “cloth of silver”. Anne and her younger stepdaughter were also given new dresses made from a similarly rich silver material, and in the procession to Westminster Abbey they walked together directly behind the new queen. But neither Anne nor Elizabeth would long enjoy Mary’s favour. Their reformist religious views set them at odds with the new conservative Catholic regime, and there were soon rumours that the two women were conspiring against the queen. These were almost certainly untrue: Anne was far too sensible to take such a risk and had no grudge against

Mary. Fortunately, Mary retained enough of her former affection for Anne not to act against her. With characteristic discretion, Anne left court soon after Mary’s accession, resolved to live out her days quietly at Hever and Chelsea – another manor left to her by Henry. It was while staying at the latter that Anne died on 16 July 1557, after a short illness. Although she was only 41 years of age, she had outlived each of Henry VIII’s five other wives – and had had a happier ending than any of them. It is a testament to her sensible and cheerful nature that she had managed to stay in everybody’s good graces throughout those turbulent times. Even her dogmatic stepdaughter Mary, who sent hundreds of reformists to the flames, held Anne in such esteem that she ordered the full pomp and ceremony of a royal funeral at Westminster Abbey. It was a lesson that was not lost on her younger stepdaughter, Elizabeth: to succeed in the dangerous and volatile world of the Tudor court, one must be guided by pragmatism, not principle. Tracy Borman is a historian and bestselling author. She will be discussing the Tower of London and Thomas Cromwell at BBC History Magazine’s History Weekends – see historyweekend.com

DISCOVER MORE BOOKS 왘 Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII’s Discarded

Bride by Elizabeth Norton (Amberley, 2010) 왘 Elizabeth’s Women by Tracy Borman (Vintage, 2010) BBC History Magazine

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income. This was further boosted by her right to keep all of her royal jewels, plate and goods in order to furnish her new properties. Moreover, she was to be accorded an exalted status as the king’s ‘sister’, taking precedence over all of his subjects, with the exception of his children and any future wife that he might take. Henry later granted her some additional manors, including Hever Castle, the former home of Anne Boleyn. This was to become her principal residence, and she lived very comfortably there on the fringes of public life. It says much for Anne’s strength of character that she managed to accept and adapt to her new life with dignity. Henry and Catherine Howard were married at Oatlands Palace in Surrey on 28 July 1540. But the king’s joy was shortlived. Catherine was a flighty and flirtatious girl, some 32 years younger than her husband, and she soon began an illicit affair with Thomas Culpepper, a gentleman of the privy chamber. When her adultery was discovered, she went to the block in February 1542.

Dogs in Paris

Parisian dogs have hunted criminals, been eaten as a delicacy with peas, and filled the streets with poo. Chris Pearson, who has been researching the history of dogs in cities, traces their impact on the French capital over the past 200 years

TOPFOTO

An elegant Parisian with her pooch at the Bois de Boulogne in c1910–12. Walking dogs is a way of life in the French capital, yet strays have caused widespread fear and revulsion BBC History Magazine

Dogs in Paris

BITING

Mad dogs and paranoid Frenchmen Dog bites alarmed many Parisians, as fears of rabies stalked the 19th-century city. Rabies anxieties led some doctors, vets and other commentators to call for the eradication of dogs from French cities. Among them was army officer Alexandre Roger, writing in 1813, who lamented how rabies could strike anyone, rich or poor. To minimise the risk of rabid dog bites, the police prescribed the muzzling of dogs in public places and targeted unmuzzled dogs for destruction. But the muzzling orders were often ignored and poorly enforced, while some doctors and vets labelled them dangerous because ‘spontaneous rabies’ was more likely to develop in restrained and repressed dogs. Animal protectionists, for their part, portrayed muzzles as cruel and ineffectual. The French chemist Louis Pasteur’s development of a rabies treatment in the mid-1880s did not eradicate fears of dog bites: the press reaction to Paris’s newly minted police dog unit in the early 20th century dwelled on the possibility that police dogs might bite innocent Parisians, even if the dogs spent much of their time muzzled. More recent fears over dangerous dogs suggest that dog bites remain a source of concern and controversy.

Four-legged agents of the law At the dawn of the 20th century, fear of crime in Paris was soaring. Lurid newspaper articles routinely portrayed the city as a wild, dangerous place, where violent street-gangs (so-called ‘Apaches’) preyed on hapless citizens. The police needed to fight back – and fast – and so enlisted the services of Paris’s pooches. Drawing on the experience of police dog units in Belgium and Germany, French law-enforcers started to train dogs to identify criminals and defend themselves against Apaches. Scientists and philosophers had long posed the question: are dogs intelligent? For the police, the answer was a definitive ‘yes’, and they promoted their dogs’ mental dexterity and physical prowess at dog shows, and many newspapers enthusiastically reported on the exploits of the “four-legged agents of the law”. Such was these canines’ apparent success that Apache gangs reportedly trained their own dogs to attack the police’s hounds. But doubts soon began to emerge about dogs’ intelligence: could they really distinguish between criminals and innocent citizens? With such concerns rising, the attempt to turn dogs into canine crime-fighters floundered during the First World War and was only resurrected in earnest in 1965.

An attendant and his guard dog at the world’s first pet cemetery, Paris, c1900. The cemetery was evidence, says Chris Pearson, “that pet dogs were now treated as part of the family”

“The cutlets were over-marinated, he concluded, but the dog-liver brochettes were ‘tender and completely agreeable’”

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EATING

“Dog cutlets with petits pois” During the 1871 Prussian siege of Paris, hungry and wealthy Parisians famously devoured the contents of the city’s zoo, as well as cats, rats and dogs. Adolphe Michel, editor of the daily newspaper Le Siècle, attended a dinner where “dog cutlets with petits pois” and “brochettes of dog liver” appeared on the menu. The dog cutlets were over-marinated, he concluded, but the brochettes were “tender and completely agreeable”. We don’t know for sure exactly how much dog meat humans actually ate – and reports of their consumption have undoubtedly been exaggerated. In any case, modern Parisians have paid far more attention to what dogs eat, rather than what

they taste like. As far back as the 19th century, public hygienists were praising stray dogs’ proclivity for scavenging harmful debris from the streets – including infected carcasses covered in flies – so doing their bit to keep the city clean. Since then, countless owners have tried to give their dogs a more refined diet. Just like their British and American counterparts, French vets have long advised dog-owners to provide their pets with a balanced diet of bread, vegetables and meat. And, by the late 19th century, they were were being bombarded by adverts for Spratt’s dog biscuits, a mixture of processed flour, vegetables and meat powder. BBC History Magazine

AKG-IMAGES

CRIME-FIGHTING

WALKING

The curse of the canine vagabond Owners walking their dogs are a ubiquitous presence in Paris. Such is the importance accorded to ‘walkies’ that busy Parisians can now pay for someone to walk their dog in Fontainebleau Forest (40 miles south-east of the city) while they are at the office. Yet the authorities haven’t always been so relaxed about the movement of dogs across the city. In the 18th century, “merchants, artisans and others” were banned “from letting their dogs loose on the streets at day or night”. This legislation became even more stringent in the 19th century, when stray dogs were widely reviled for undermining the myth that dogs’ main role was to serve humans as loyal companions. Strays symbolised disorder – observers criticised their fondness for public fornication – in the supposedly modern city and, like human ‘vagabonds’, were treated as a threat to the rest of the population.

DYING

From pet cemeteries to industrial slaughter DEFECATION

The dirty war on dog poo The streets of Paris are infamous for being littered with dog mess. But canine excrement only emerged as a public health problem in the 20th century, after human and other animal wastes had been largely removed from the streets. In the 1920s doctors and city councillors became alarmed at the diverse range of dog excrement splattered across Parisian pavements, which harboured harmful microbes and tapeworms. But reluctant to confront dog owners, the city authorities did little to tackle the problem until the election of Jacques Chirac as mayor in the late 1970s. With the number of Parisian dogs seemingly reaching breaking point, Chirac’s adminis-

tration launched educational campaigns, constructed dog toilets and brought the infamous ‘moto-crottes’ onto the streets of Paris. Adapted to ‘scoop the poop’, these motorbikes and their riders scoured the streets to much press and public ridicule. But this technological fix was not enough to remove the estimated 20 tonnes of dog excrement deposited daily on the capital’s streets. It was not until the enforcement of fouling fines in 2002 that progress was made. Yet dog poo remains on Parisian streets and continues to spark public health concerns, attract the ridicule of foreign observers, and provide evidence, for some, of widespread incivility in the capital.

Attitudes towards dead dogs lay bare the contradictions in man’s relationship with canines in modern Paris. The pet dogs of wealthy Parisians could be buried as if they were human – in 1899 feminist writer Marguerite Durand and lawyer Georges Harmois opened the world’s first pet cemetery at Asnières-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Here, the headstones attest to the sense of loss that pet owners felt towards their departed canine companions. The cemetery was a shrine to middle-class sentimentality, and evidence that pet dogs were now treated as part of the family. But it was also an attempt to make the capital more hygienic and prevent owners from throwing their dead pets into the river Seine, from which thousands of canine corpses were fished out each year. At the same time, the municipal pound killed thousands of stray dogs in its lethal chamber, selling the bodies to renderers and glue makers. Dr Chris Pearson is a lecturer in 20th-century history at the University of Liverpool, specialising in environmental, animal and French history DISCOVER MORE WEBSITE 왘 Chris Pearson explores canine history in his

blog Sniffing the Past at https://sniffingthepast. wordpress.com/

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The Georgian war on Catholics

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BBC History Magazine

Make Catholics pay! When the British government discovered a plot to kill George I, it responded by demanding money from an entire religious community. Ted Vallance describes what happened next

I

n April 1722, Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole received news of a plot to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne. The conspirators, a horrified Walpole learned, hoped to seize power through a series of co-ordinated local risings in England. Meanwhile, leading Jacobites, such as the exiled Irish soldier the Duke of Ormond, would land invasion forces in BBC History Magazine

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

Scotland and south-west England. Walpole acted fast, ordering the opening of post to smoke out further evidence of the conspiracy. However, it was not until the summer that he discovered any substantial evidence of the plot, in the form of a series of letters penned by Christopher Layer, a Norfolk lawyer who acted as an agent for the Jacobite lord William North. These letters contained detailed plans for the rebellion and

the assassination of King George. The authorities arrested Layer and other leading plotters – including Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, after whom the plot would derive its name – and had the lawyer hanged, drawn and quartered for treason on 17 May 1723 (his severed head was reportedly later sold to the antiquary Richard Rawlinson). Yet Layer’s intransigence – he repeatedly 45

refused to implicate his co-conspirators, despite having the possibility of a reprieve repeatedly dangled before him – meant that there was not enough evidence to put Atterbury himself on trial. Instead, Walpole forced through parliament a special act designed to inflict severe punishments less than death on an individual deemed guilty of serious offences. As a result, Atterbury was stripped of his bishopric and sentenced to perpetual banishment. Walpole’s prosecution of the plot, however, did not end with the punishment of the leading Jacobites. Habeas Corpus – a writ that was often seen to offer protection from arbitrary imprisonment – probably pre-dated Magna Carta, and was enshrined in statute law in 1679. Walpole, however, successfully suspended this important legal safeguard on the grounds of national security. He also gave the military greater powers to guard against further invasion attempts and domestic insurrections. Most extraordinary of all was how Walpole decreed that these new powers should be paid for – through a £100,000 tax on Catholics’ estates. The legislation laid out fixed sums that each county was required to raise as part IN CONTEXT

The Atterbury Plot Though he had ruled Britain for seven years, in 1721 King George I’s grip on the throne remained far from secure. Ever since the Protestant William of Orange had ousted the Catholic Stuart James II as king in 1688, the so-called Jacobites had dreamed of returning a Stuart ruler to the throne – and had launched a series of failed uprisings to achieve that aim. In the early 1720s, they continued to cast a long shadow over the monarchy. The year 1721 was also a perilous one for Britain’s Whig government, which fiercely opposed the prospect of a Catholic king. Having just presided over the ‘South Sea Bubble’ financial crisis – when stocks in the South Sea Company crashed, ruining thousands of investors – it found itself deeply unpopular with the British public. In an attempt to capitalise on this disaffection, a group of conspirators – a combination of Jacobites and Tories (the Whigs’ opponents in parliament) – conceived the Atterbury plot to assassinate George I and replace him with James II’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart. Yet, before they could strike, the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, revealed to Lord Carteret, secretary of state for the south, that the Jacobites had asked him to send 3,000 men in support of a coup d’etat. As a result, the plot collapsed.

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“Most extraordinary of all was how the government decreed the military’s new powers should be paid for – through a £100,000 tax on Catholics’ estates” of their contribution to the levy – and any Catholics who refused the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration (denying the title of the Stuart Pretender to the throne) were deemed liable to pay.

Enemies of the state The tax was given royal assent in May 1723. Yet by then Catholics were already bearing the brunt of existing punitive legislation. Local officials were soon gathering lists of ‘disaffected persons’ (a description usually interpreted as being synonymous with Catholicism), and seizing and itemising Catholic holdings of horses and weapons. While the Catholic tax did become law, the bill faced significant opposition in parliament, passing by only 16 votes. Historian Eveline Cruickshanks has suggested that the government may have deliberately delayed reintroducing the bill – to a point when numbers in the house had thinned – as a way of overcoming parliamentary opposition. One Tory MP claimed that “had not many of our friends been gone into ye country… we had rejected it”. Opponents of the tax pointed out that it seemed unfair to penalise Catholics when those involved in Atterbury’s plot had largely been Anglican Tories (opponents

Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, was banished for his part in the plot that bears his name

of the ruling Whig administration in parliament). Others felt that the measure bore unflattering comparison with the system of ‘compounding’ and ‘sequestration’ used by the parliamentarian regime to exploit the estate of royalists. Some Whigs objected to the measure too as an assault on liberty of conscience, often seen as one of the key principles that the revolution of 1688 (when the Protestant William III and II had overthrown the Catholic James II and VII to become king of England, Scotland and Ireland) had sought to defend. Yet the government minister Lord Carteret was having none of it, arguing that the tax was perfectly compatible with religious liberty. In a series of letters to the British ambassador Lord Polwarth, Carteret declared that it was “known throughout Europe that there is nothing so alien to the spirit of this nation than persecution for the sake of religion.” But the tax and other penal legislation against Catholics had been made neither to “force their consciences or to persecute them”, but because Catholics had been involved in conspiracies and rebellions against the crown. Even when Catholics had not been implicated in plotting, they had still withheld recognising the government by swearing allegiance “which cannot be justified by any principle of religion”. Carteret’s letters defending the tax were intended to justify the measure to Britain’s European Catholic allies. However, while Catholics had been involved in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion (when James Francis Edward Stuart’s attempt to regain the throne for the House of Stuart ended in bloody failure), many Catholics were prepared to swear allegiance to George I. The problem was that they were not prepared to take the oath of supremacy or the declaration against transubstantion incorporated into the socalled ‘Test Acts’, which involved repudiating the authority of the pope and core elements of Catholic doctrine. The difficult situation Catholics found themselves in was explained clearly in a statement made by Henry Englefield of Shinfield, Berkshire in the wake of the 1715 rebellion when required to register his estate. Englefield stated that he would “willingly take an oath of fidelity to King George” but “the real presence of the body and blood of our saviour in the sacrament of the Eucharist was always believed by the holy Catholic church”. Catholics continued to protest their loyalty to the crown, among them Edward Elwall of Wolverhampton, who in 1724 declared: “God almighty bless King George and all his royal family… All good Christians love the king as does Edward Elwall.” As the research of Eamon Duffy and BBC History Magazine

ALAMY

The Georgian war on Catholics

Gabriel Glickman has shown, these individual declarations of loyalty fitted in with broader schemes by the Catholic leadership after 1715 to devise an oath of allegiance that would be acceptable both to the Catholic community and to the government. These proposals were given short shrift by Walpole, who told a deputation of Catholic lords that he “found fault with their religion which procured interest abroad, and it was fit they should suffer for it”. And they certainly did suffer: Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire recorded that the “Grand Tax”, as he called it, had cost him £14 17s 2d (about £2,000 in modern terms). Despite this, historians have usually

viewed the £100,000 tax as a failure, as did many of Walpole’s contemporaries. Sir Richard Coxe warned the prime minister that the “difficulties we are meeting with in laying the tax on papists are insuperable without directions from above”. The tax never raised the anticipated amount and counties were slow to return payments. The last to pay, Devon, only did so in 1743, two decades after the tax had first been imposed. Yet the intention of the tax, as Walpole revealed in his response to the Catholic peers, was not simply to milk a religious community for money. He wanted primarily to exert pressure on Catholics, especially the aristocracy and gentry, and deter foreign

Pope-burnings, land grabs and “half-citizens” Five ways in which Catholics were made to suffer in Georgian Britain A war on worship The 18th century began badly for England’s Catholic community. In 1700, ‘An Act for Further Preventing the Growth of Popery’ systematised existing anti-Catholic legislation, continuing Elizabethan and Jacobean restrictions on Catholic worship, and on educating children in the Catholic religion. The act was enforced via a system of payments to informers.

Prison awaits Even pieces of legislation that appeared to take the heat off Catholics were in fact intended to do the opposite. The translation of the death penalty to life imprisonment for Catholic priests was really designed to ensure its effectiveness: it was believed that

more judges would convict Catholic priests if a custodial rather than a capital sentence was imposed.

Paying double Post-revolutionary laws also targeted Catholics economically: the Land Tax first imposed in 1692 was levied at a double rate on Catholic estates. After the 1715 rebellion, Catholics were forced to register their property in land, and those judged popish ‘recusants’ could be subject to the confiscation of two-thirds of their estate.

Chapels under attack Although these penal laws were rarely enforced, their impact on Catholics was far from minimal. As historian Colin Haydon has argued, they left Catholics as “half-citizens”, while the state’s hostile attitude towards them gave anti-Catholic prejudice and violence (such as a series of attacks on Lancashire chapels in 1715) the stamp of official approval.

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Riots erupt

A mob sets fire to Newgate Prison during the Gordon Riots, 6–7 June 1780. Many Catholic houses and chapels were destroyed in the unrest

BBC History Magazine

Fed by the enduring literary tradition of Protestant ‘martyrology’ and by festivals such as the ‘pope-burnings’ held in English towns every 5 November, ‘anti-popery’ remained a powerful force in public life. This was starkly revealed in the wake of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which removed the penalties of the 1700 legislation for Catholics who were prepared to swear a modified oath of allegiance to the crown. In 1780, following a demonstration against the act, the Gordon Riots erupted in London, leaving nearly 300 dead and 200 wounded.

states from harbouring exiled Jacobites. The records of the tax made at a local level reveal that in this respect it was highly effective. Yet, returns of ‘papists’, such as those for the City of London held at the London Metropolitan Archives, reveal that it wasn’t just the wealthy who suffered. Charles Matison of Bishopsgate Ward, London was entered into the lists despite being of “peasable behavier and of little or noe substance suposed”. Women as well as men were included in these lists and, as the use of descriptions such as “lives very handsom[e]” or “in mean circumstances” implied, the state used the evidence of informers, as well as existing tax records, to identify Catholics and calculate their wealth. The pressure on the Catholic community was such that Bishop Bonaventura Giffard feared that his co-religionists would be reduced to an “extremity of want”. However, the £100,000 tax, as with other punitive laws against Catholics, operated, as the chief justice Lord Mansfield later put it, in terrorem, through the threat of implementation rather than via actual enforcement. The aim was to subdue the Catholic community and make it do the British government’s bidding, not to annihilate it. The readiness of many Catholics to pledge obedience to George I reveals the difficulty of viewing, as government ministers such as Carteret did, England’s small Catholic community as a dangerous ‘fifth column’. Rather, the refusal of Walpole’s government to countenance the loyalist overtures made by leading Catholics left the mostly peaceful Catholic community excluded from English public life for another 50 years. It is a historic reminder, perhaps, of the difficulties that can arise from equating the actions of a few individuals with an entire religious group. Ted Vallance is professor of early modern British political culture at the University of Roehampton. He will be discussing the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant at BBC History Magazine’s History Weekend – see historyweekend.com DISCOVER MORE WEBSITES 왘 The Devon Oath Rolls website contains

much useful information about the 1723 tax: foda.org.uk/oaths/ 왘 For information on the London Metropolitan Archives holdings, go to cityoflondon. gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitanarchives/Pages/default.aspx 왘 For information on other archival holdings relating to the Catholic Tax, go to: http://1723oaths.org

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WWI eyewitness accounts

OUR FIRST WORLD WAR

On the offensive In part 16 of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart takes us to September 1915, when the Allies launched “the greatest battle in the world’s history” at Loos in the north of France. Peter will be tracing the experiences of 20 people who lived through the First World War – via interviews, letters and diary entries – as its centenary progresses ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES ALBON

Joe Murray Joe grew up in a County Durham mining community. He arrived in Gallipoli with the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division in April 1915 and was soon moved to engineering duties as a sapper.

At Gallipoli, following the failure of the August offensive intended to break out from Anzac and the new Suvla landings, the fighting had settled into a grim stalemate. By this time Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray was attached to the VIII Corps Mining Company and engaged in an underground game of chess. Both sides were driving out tunnels under the trenches seeking to lay huge mines to blow up their enemies. Both were listening out for the tell-tale sounds of underground digging. When detected, a camouflet mine would be set and detonated to destroy the enemy mine workings. It was a race against death. Joe recalled one such incident.

We decided to make preparations for a blast. We had to make a recess in the

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side, a little bit to the left so that we didn’t blow our own mineshaft. We had to stop him without stopping ourselves. Lieutenant Dean gave permission. They came up with all their paraphernalia. There were three 10lb tins of ammonal. I put two detonators in one tin of ammonal, then I wrapped the cable round the tin and then round a sandbag so that when we pulled on the cable it wouldn’t displace the detonator. All the sandbags were already filled and we packed them up to a barrier of about 5 feet. You have to make the place of least resistance upwards – not along the tunnel – or it would blow out your own tunnel. The cable had to go right to the surface to the firing line. There the officer had a detonator box with batteries and a plunger. The moment he pulls that plunger up he warns the officer in the line: “I’m going to do a bit of blasting – mind your heads!” All the troops in the line stand-to on the firing step with rifles ready because we don’t know what’s going to happen. As soon as the plunger goes down, the lot goes up. I thought: “That’s fine, thank the Lord for that!” There was this terrific noise… and great big chunks of clay falling everywhere. With the Turkish mine blown in, the British mine could be reopened. And so it began again.

Sir Douglas Haig General Sir Douglas Haig was commander of the British 1st Army, making him one of Britain’s most senior soldiers. In September 1915, Douglas Haig was ordered by BEF commander, Field Marshal Sir John French, to prepare an attack on German trenches in the Loos area of northern France, to commence on the 25th. But every week the German lines got stronger. It was a daunting prospect. In desperation, Haig decided to release poisonous chlorine gas. The problem was that he needed winds of the right strength and direction to carry the gas across to the German lines. Assisting Haig in making his decision was Britain’s leading meteorologist, Ernest Gold. Haig spent much of the night before the battle monitoring the weather forecasts.

Mr Gold arrived. His weather charts were most interesting, but his forecast for a favourable wind was not very encouraging. Mr Gold at 6pm reported telegrams from

Finisterre and Norway were more favourable. At 9.20pm forecast midnight to midnight “wind southerly then changing to south-west or west, probably increasing to 20 miles per hour. Weather unsettled and showery at first, probably improving later.” On this I ordered the troops to be put into the trenches. About 10pm, I walked out and the wind seemed from south-west – but very light. With so much at stake, tension was high at 1st Army headquarters during the early hours of 25 September.

The greatest battle in the world’s history begins today – some 800,000 French and British troops will actually attack today. At 3am, I saw Mr Gold. Wind in places had fallen to 1 mile per hour. He could not say anything definitely beyond that the wind would probably be stronger just after sunrise. I went out at 5am – almost a calm. Alan Fletcher lit a cigarette and the smoke drifted in puffs towards the north-east. At one time owing to the calm I feared the gas would simply hang about our trenches! However, at 5.15, I said: “Carry on.” I went to top of our lookout tower. The wind came gently from south-west and by 5.40 had increased slightly. The leaves of the poplar gently rustled. The decision was taken.

BBC History Magazine

PART 16 SEPTEMBER 1915 John Palmer John Palmer joined the army as a regular in 1910, and in September 1915 was serving as a signaller with the Royal Field Artillery.

Bombardier John Palmer was serving in the Loos district, busy laying telephone lines between the batteries, ready for the battle to come. The German artillery was very active.

Fritz commenced a heavy fire on a point some 200 yards to our rear. The spot they had concentrated on was a well where the infantry got their water supplies and they had caught our poor lads in the act of drawing this precious liquid. It was a scene I shall never forget. One poor chap was caught in the act of drawing up the bucket. He lay there, his head almost severed, one hand on the bucket, which was rapidly filling with his blood. Others lay all around, a mass of mangled bodies, some

killed instantly, some in terrible agony. We were met with moans and curses, some begged for help, others just for a fag. On 25 September, laden down with signal paraphernalia, Palmer set off up into the front line where he was repairing telephone lines back to the battery. Here he saw the results of Haig’s decision to release the chlorine.

On our front there was terrible calamity. The wind had been hardly noticeable but was favourable for us to use the gas. This had been sent over on its terrible mission of death and destruction to pave the way for our advance. All appeared to be going well for a few minutes, then the wind

“A terrific roar accompanied by a blinding flash. I remembered no more until I found a medical chap bending over me and asking if I had been gassed”

suddenly dropped altogether, leaving the deadly gas between the trenches. This in itself was a disaster but worse was to follow. According to the time programme, our troops went over the top. They passed right through this belt of gas and soon were in possession of the German front line. But at what cost! The field of battle to our front presented a shambles. There appeared to be bodies everywhere. The masks were quite serviceable but during the charge, they were unable to get their breath. Some were unable to see and many in panic pulled the masks off. It presented a gruesome spectacle. Their faces and hands gradually assumed a blue and green colour. Death must have been awful to them as their eyes appeared to be starting out of their heads. As Palmer carried on his duties, suddenly a German shell crashed down.

A terrific roar accompanied by a blinding flash. I remembered no more until I found a medical chap bending over me and asking if I had been gassed. I eventually discovered I was in a large cellar and on each side of me were stretchers of British troops advance through gas on the first day of the battle of Loos, 25 September 1915

wounded. They told me I was picked up on the edge of the trench near dozens of dead and wounded infantry. A large shell had fallen in the trench. My forehead was very sore and on putting my hand up to my hair I found to my astonishment that most of it in the front was missing – apparently it had been scorched by the explosion. I then discovered that one of my arms was bandaged – a slight wound caused by a shell fragment. Things were so desperate that Palmer had to return to his duties that night.

The wire got mixed up with the bodies of those killed and I had to untangle it several times. Each time it was tangled round a body I had to carefully free it and the sight of those cold faces and sightless eyes upturned to the moon was enough to break the nerve of the strongest man. Lack of sleep, strain and the pain of the arm made me feel I had had more than enough. Add to that the sensation of my fingers touching those stiff hands of our dead lads, well it was something I hoped I would never experience again. Eventually, Palmer collapsed exhausted and was evacuated back to safety. Peter Hart is the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum. His books include The Great War: 1914–1918 (Profile Books, 2013) DISCOVER MORE WEBSITE 왘 You can read previous

instalments of “Our First World War” at historyextra.com/ ourfirstworldwar TV AND RADIO 왘 The BBC’s First World War ALAMY

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Crime and the Blitz

CRIMINALS OF THE

BLITZ Joshua Levine reveals how the German bombing of British cities in the Second World War created new opportunities for lawlessness Complements a new five-part series on BBC One, The Blitz

W

ally Thompson was a hardworking thief who always looked to exploit a situation. During a heavy air raid in 1941, he drove a stolen lorry into a narrow street in London Bridge. An air raid precaution (ARP) member, Thompson was wearing his uniform; it allowed him to move around London freely and unsuspected. Alongside him in the lorry were the members of his gang – Batesy, Bob and ‘Spider’. The gang’s plan was to break into a warehouse, pick up a safe from the office and drive it away. As anti-aircraft fire raged and bombers droned, Batesy jumped out and opened the warehouse gates with a cloned key. Spider – an experienced burglar – ran forward and forced a window, before jemmying the main door open from the inside. Within moments, all four men were inside, manhandling the safe out to the lorry. But as they reached the door, a bomb landed outside. The ground pitched forwards, and Thompson was thrown through the air, landing on the stairs. The gates were destroyed, the lorry was turned upside down and fires started to burn. Everybody was shaken – but unharmed. Choking on dust, cursing his luck, Thompson urged his men to run. Spider had other ideas. Spotting a young girl trapped in a nearby building, he began

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scaling a wall to reach her. Minutes later, a fire engine arrived and a ladder was sent up to the ledge where Spider was hanging with the girl in his arms. He climbed down, and handed her over to a police constable – who was deeply impressed. He asked for Spider’s name and address; such courage deserved recognition. However, Spider declined to give his details. Feigning humility, he and his colleagues slipped quietly into the night. Without the safe. According to Thompson, the Blitz was a golden period for criminals. “Air raids,” he remembered, “were the best ally London’s crooks ever had.” Billy Hill, who came to be known as the boss of Britain’s underworld after the war, agreed: “They were roaring days. Money was easy, the villains were well loaded with dough, and we were all busy.”

Capital crimewave The anecdotal evidence is backed up by the official figures. In 1941, the Metropolitan Police made 5,280 more arrests and recorded 4,681 more indictable offences than it had in 1939 – the primary reason being the increase in criminal opportunity. Yet as career criminals were exploiting the blackout and the absence of police, a much larger group was increasingly finding itself on the wrong side of the law: ordinary citizens. The Blitz lasted between Saturday 7 September 1940 and May 1941. It brought danger to towns and cities and chaos to the

country as a whole, causing people to behave in extreme and unaccustomed ways. One result of this was ‘Blitz spirit’, the instinctive realisation that life – and other people – mattered. But darker outcomes were also evident – and one tragic crime reveals much about the period. In late September 1940, Ida Rodway, a law-abiding woman in her late 60s, and her blind husband, Joseph, a retired carriage driver, were bombed out of their Hackney home. The devoted couple began sleeping on Ida’s sister’s floor. But as the days turned into weeks, Joseph’s mental state deteriorated and their money began running out. Without financial assistance or any apparent hope for the future, Ida did what she considered to be the kindest thing for Joseph. Instead of bringing him a cup of tea in the morning, she brought a knife and slit his throat before handing herself in to the police. Ida Rodway was charged with murder and brought to trial at the Old Bailey – where the court medical officer construed her insistence that she had done nothing wrong as evidence of insanity. He might equally have viewed it as evidence of crushed pragmatism. Nevertheless, his view saved Ida from the hangman. The jury was instructed to return a verdict of guilty but insane, and she was committed to Broadmoor where she died in April 1946. The Rodway case demonstrates that at the start of the Blitz, the authorities had little BBC History Magazine

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Men pick their way through a street levelled during German bombing. A criminal later remarked that air raids were the best ally London’s crooks ever had

BBC History Magazine

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Crime and the Blitz

understanding of how to deal with the effects of bombing. They were surprised by the relatively small loss of life in comparison with the huge amount of damage to buildings. The result was that large numbers were left homeless with nowhere to turn. It would take some weeks before the newly appointed special commissioner for the homeless, Henry Willink, could begin to overhaul the system. He quickly made homes available, introduced a workable system of benefits, and created a network of information centres. He also removed the poor law mentality that made claimants feel more like Dickensian beggars than victims of Nazi bombing. It would be fair to say that Willink – a Conservative MP – kick-started the welfare state. It was too late, however, to save Ida Rodway from her criminal destiny.

Breaking the law

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An exchange in Cutler Street – also known as ‘Loot Alley’ – in 1945. The Black Market criminalised many ordinary people

“The offences committed during the Blitz were often carried out by ordinary people reacting to opportunity”

Young serviceman James Burnham came home on leave to find his lover asleep in a shelter in the arms of another man. Turning his service rifle on the pair, one bullet missed while a second broke the man’s arm. A Canadian military policeman, meanwhile, desperately in need of money to marry his English girlfriend, held up the Coach and Horses pub in Covent Garden, London. He struggled with the barman, shooting him dead. Without access to firearms, these and other similar incidents may have ended very differently.

criminalising the ordinary. “Everyone had their crafty ways,” recalled Tottenham fireman Francis Goddard, “it was the only way you could survive.” One example is Goddard’s wife who worked in a restaurant, where she had access to steak, salmon and other delicacies. At the end of a hard night, she would wrap a few choice items up in tissue paper, and carry them home hidden in her knickers. “I hope you haven’t worked too hard!” her husband remembers laughing. “I hope you haven’t sweated too much...” The sudden availability of firearms played its part in the inadvertent crime wave.

Guilty of murder But of all the wrongdoing that took place during the Blitz, one act seems to stand apart as the archetypal crime of the period. Starting with the discovery of a body on a bomb site, there was little initial surprise. But when it was shown that the victim had been strangled, a murder enquiry was instituted. The body was ultimately identified using two new methods: the study of dental records and the superimposing of a photograph of the victim onto a photograph of the skull. As a result, Harry Dobkin was found guilty of the murder of his wife Rachel. He had tried – and failed – BBC History Magazine

GETTY

The introduction of defence regulations in 1939 created myriad new ways to break the law – from buying an un-weighed chicken, to painting a car light blue. Robert ColvinGraham, rector of Old Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire, discovered as much in the late summer of 1940, when he appeared before local magistrates charged with ringing his church bells – an act that had recently been made illegal except as a warning of airborne invasion. Colvin-Graham’s protests were ignored by the bench who sentenced him to a month in prison. At Oxford Police Court, meanwhile, Cecil Hughes was charged with making a statement likely to cause alarm or despondency. While reading an elderly lady’s electricity meter, he had attempted a series of jokes concerning the Nazis’ ability to invade Britain. He had chosen the wrong audience. “It was a queer way for a British subject to talk,” the lady told the magistrates, who found Hughes guilty (after a lengthy adjournment) and fined him £5. There were many new ways for an ordinary person to turn outlaw. While some of those responsible for looting in the aftermath of air raids were known criminals, the majority were opportunists reacting in the moment. Indeed, between September 1940 and May 1941, a staggering 48 per cent of the looters arrested after air raids were children. Although looting was punishable by death under Regulation 38A, it often amounted to little more than recycling. The head of a heavy rescue squad, for example, was sent to prison for picking up a near-empty bottle of gin from the ruins of a pub and handing it to his exhausted men, while an old-age pensioner received six months in prison for taking a bit of rope and an old jug from a ruined house. The Black Market was also responsible for

Five Blitz criminals 1 Killing spree In the summer of 1940, John Fulljames, a student at University College Oxford, opened fire with a rifle on fellow students. Tried for murder, Fulljames was described to the jury as having a “split-mind” in the fashion of Dr Jekyll. He was committed to Broadmoor where the authorities rejected the court’s finding of insanity.

2 Future gangster Victims left homeless by the Blitz, c1940. Beyond Blitz Spirit, misery and hardship drove some people to crime A police warning makes it clear what punishments await would-be thieves

Seventeen-year-old James Harvey was robbed and killed by a gang of youths in Elephant and Castle – a no-go area due to the blackout and the absence of police. The leader of the gang, 21-year-old Jimmy Essex, was initially charged with murder. But he was eventually sentenced to just three years in prison for manslaughter, leading to an outcry from furious local residents. Essex went on to become a notorious London gangster.

3 Shell shock In September 1940, Percy Clark was charged with attempting to murder his wife Irene in their family air raid shelter. Claiming that the bombs had driven him mad, he admitted punching her repeatedly in the head in front of their children. While Irene was recovering, her hospital ward was struck by a bomb and she was killed. Percy received permission to be released from custody to attend her funeral.

GETTY/ALAMY/TOPFOTO

Harry Dobkin murdered his wife, Rachel, and then tried to pass her off as a victim of the Blitz

to pass her off as a victim of the Blitz. One wonders how many other murder victims were more expertly disposed of as the bombs fell, and how many grudges and scores were settled as a result. The range of offences committed during the Blitz, from breaches of regulations to cold-blooded murder, was wide. And while some were committed by inveterate wrongdoers, many were carried out by ordinary people reacting to opportunity. But beyond opportunity was a world of uncertainty. Our grandparents and greatgrandparents feared that tomorrow would never come. They were open to risks and unfamiliar behaviour of all kinds. In the flash of a bomb, Spider went from stealing a safe to saving a life. And even when danger was not immediately present, the Blitz’s steady brutality sat in the background, raising the nation’s temperature. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of George Hobbs. Hobbs was a 43-year-old mortuary assistant found guilty of stealing items from the bodies of air raid victims. Sentencing him, the judge called his a “horrible and disgusting case”. But Hobbs’s plea in mitigation is revealing. He told the court that nobody BBC History Magazine

recovered from bombed premises. This, he said, combined with the dread that he might himself become a victim of an air raid, had an effect on his mind. He had been doing a job for many years; but it was a job that had suddenly become more extreme and overlaid with fear. His words should not be dismissed. They hold the key to much of the behaviour of the period. From this place of fear and confusion came both the good and the bad. Blitz spirit is often celebrated; Blitz criminality is rarely admitted. Yet they stand together as twin symptoms with a common cause.

4 Cowardly convicts Two brothers, Brian and Patrick Williams, were serving members of the armed forces, who walked into a police station to admit a burglary they had committed before the war. They believed that criminal convictions would secure their release from the army and navy respectively. Brian was successful: he was convicted, sent to borstal for three months and discharged. However, Patrick was merely bound over, and returned to the Royal Navy.

5 Impersonating a pilot Joshua Levine is an author and historian who has written several books on the Second World War, including his latest The Secret History of the Blitz (Simon & Schuster, 2015) DISCOVER MORE TELEVISION 왘 The five-part series The Blitz will

begin on BBC One in September. We’ll be previewing the series at historyextra .com/bbchistorymagazine/tv-radio

Twenty nine-year-old D’Arcy Wilson, a barman from Thornton Heath, was sentenced to two months’ hard labour for impersonating an RAF officer. Having deserted his wife and children, Wilson started wearing the officer’s uniform “to impress women”. He was apprehended after he gave a “sloppy salute” to a flight lieutenant. At the time, he was days away from bigamously marrying an 18-year-old girl who believed him to be a test pilot.

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Queen Elizabeth II pictured in 1953, near the beginning of what will soon be her record-breaking reign

HOW TO BE A

TOPFOTO

SUCCESSFUL MONARCH As Elizabeth II is set to overtake Victoria as Britain’s longest reigning monarch, Dan Jones looks back over the past 1,500 years to reveal the secrets to a happy and glorious period on the throne

BBC History Magazine

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Successful monarchs

1

Make an impact

It’s all very well living to a ripe old age, but you’ll ultimately be judged by your achievements, however long your reign Longevity is a great personal achievement for a monarch, although it is not a marker of success on its own. Queen Victoria’s 63 years and 216 days defined an age in British history; but in terms of relative accomplishment and reputation-building, Henry V’s nine years and 163 days – during which he won at Agincourt and conquered France – were pretty potent too. That being said, a long reign can be a good way to earn a lasting reputation. Elizabeth I (44 years) and Edward III (50 years) were both remarkably tenacious rulers, and although both eventually went rather stale, they were living legends by their old age. George III (59 years) followed much the same path. His reign ended, like Edward III’s, in the misery of personal decay and mental collapse, but before that came victories in the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars, and survival during the sorely testing American War of Independence. Queen Victoria in the c1880s. As the queen who presided over the glory days of the British empire, her position in the pantheon of great monarchs seems secure

HOW NOT TO DO IT Henry III lasted 56 years, but there was precious little to celebrate. Failure in his attempts to invade France and, risibly, Sicily, was followed by a dreadful war with the English barons that saw Henry virtually deposed by his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort.

Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh tie the knot in 1947

2

Marry well

Rocky relationships can often lead a to rocky reigns Behind – or beside – almost everyy successful monarch is a trusted c consort. Elizabeth II has Prince Philip. Victo oria had Albert. William III (and II) and Mary II had one another. Henry VIII began n his reign with one fine queen, Catherine of Aragon, g , and ended it with another, Katherine Parr – although he had to go through four other, rather less satisfactory, versions in between. One of the most intriguing partnerships in the history of the British monarchy was the marriage between Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. This ultimately brought Eleanor’s huge southern French duchy into union with the English crown and the links between England and Gascony would endure for 300 years. And since Eleanor had previously been married to Louis VII of France, her remarriage to Henry signalled a huge shift in continental power away from the Capetian dynasty toward the new Plantagenet crown. Henry and Eleanor fell out dramatically in 1173–74 when the queen encouraged her sons in a massive rebellion and was imprisoned for more than a decade. However, she endured and emerged in old age to hold together the reigns of Richard the Lionheart and, until her death in 1204, her youngest son, King John.

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GETTY

HOW NOT TO DO IT Mary, Queen of Scots never had the greatest judgment, and her decision to marry her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565 was among her worst. Darnley turned out to be a drunken, diseased murderer, who was eventually strangled before his house was blown up with gunpowder in 1567.

3

Have fertile loins

A golden rule of monarchy: you can never produce too many successors The most basic fact of British monarchy is that it is hereditary. Its future depends on maintaining a large royal family who can ensure that the bloodline survives, no matter what. Notable successes in this field include Henry II – whose children numbered three kings of England, and queens of Castile and Sicily. Edward III’s many children restocked the Plantagenet dynasty during a lean time at the end of the 14th century. Even Henry VIII, whose troubles with producing an heir had such a profound effect on English history, managed to father three more Tudor monarchs, carrying the dynasty to the end of the 16th century.

Perhaps the greatest success of all, however, was George III, who produced 15 children with his queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Two of his sons (George IV and William IV) ruled after him, and although neither produced a direct heir, Queen Victoria (George III’s granddaughter through his fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent) still inherited the crown in 1837. We should, however, remember Queen Anne, who gave birth to 17 children – only one of whom reached the age of two – and died at the age of 49 without a child to succeed her. No matter how many children you have, you can never have too many.

HOW NOT TO DO IT It’s all very well spreading the royal seed, but it needs to remain in the family. Henry I fathered more than 20 children, but only two were legitimate: William the Ætheling, who died in a shipwreck, and the Empress Matilda. When Henry died in 1135 his decision to name Matilda as his heir led to the 19-year civil war known as the Anarchy.

BRIDGEMAN

George III and Queen Charlotte shown with their six eldest children in 1770. The prolific pair would go on to produce 15 offspring, among them kings George IV and William IV

BBC History Magazine

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Successful monarchs

4

Build big

Architecture can be the saving of even the worst ruler’s legacy Monarchy is stamped into the landscape as much as it is written in the history books, and even otherwise useless rulers have obtained some redemption through their building works. To the otherwise inadequate Plantagenet rulers Henry III and Henry VI, for example, we owe Westminster Abbey, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. In the Middle Ages, kings built castles, and in that sense, all were following the lead of their ancestor William the Conqueror, whose campaigns in England in the 11th century were secured by building and garrisoning fortresses. In the 13th century, Edward I commissioned the stunning ring of fortresses around Snowdonia, including the castles at Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech. Later, Windsor Castle was extensively remodelled by several monarchs, most notably Edward III in the 14th century and George IV in the 1820s. During the Stuart restoration, the classical-baroque style flourished, under masters like Christopher Wren (whose masterpiece was the new St Paul’s Cathedral) and Nicholas Hawksmoor (who developed Wren’s work in Greenwich). The last great phase of royal building came under Queen Victoria – or, rather, Prince Albert. Balmoral was created as a royal holiday residence in Scotland, while in London the museums and cultural spaces around South Kensington were begun under Albert’s influence (and, later, in his memory).

HOW NOT TO DO IT Royal building is an exercise in controlling your own legacy. Elizabeth I refused to follow royal custom by designing her own tomb. Thus she rests in Westminster Abbey beneath a squat, ugly effigy ordered by James VI and I, which compares noticeably badly to the tomb of James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed.

Richard I – shown with his sister greeting Philip II of France – earned his stripes fighting overseas

5

Bash foreigners

You’re not a true royal superhero until you’ve thrown your weight around abroad The mythical king Arthur – once an archetype for great kingship – was famous for having extended his influence far beyond the shores of England. According to the original Arthurian pseudohistory, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century, Arthur travelled sword in hand to Ireland, Iceland, Norway and Gaul, and conquered a large swathe of northern Europe, much to the irritation of the Romans. “The fame of Arthur’s generosity and bravery spread to the very ends of the Earth,” wrote Geoffrey. Ever since, we have admired monarchs who advanced their influence in a similar fashion. During the Middle Ages, Richard the Lionheart and Edward I earned their military reputations fighting in the crusades; Edward III and Henry V expanded the territorial reach of the English crown to include great chunks of France. During the late Tudor and Stuart ages royal subjects populated the New World, and at the apogee of British imperialism under Queen Victoria, the crown’s influence really did extend to “the ends of the Earth”, as empire expanded to include India, Australia, Canada, southern Africa and south-east Asia. Today the house of Windsor exercises ‘soft’ power over the Commonwealth, but Elizabeth II is probably the most internationally travelled monarch in history, having been on state visits to scores of countries, from Ireland to Zimbabwe, China to the Vatican City.

Beaumaris Castle did more than cow the Welsh – it is also a conspicuous reminder of Edward I’s martial prowess

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HOW NOT TO DO IT George I, first of the Hanoverians, got things the wrong way around, being far more focused on life in his native Germany than on spreading his fame and renown in Britain, where he held his crown. An unpopular and largely unsuccessful king, he is ill-remembered today.

Winston Churchill and George VI celebrate victory in Europe from the balcony of Buckingham Palace, 8 May 1945. The two were thrown together by war but formed a formidable partnership

6

Learn how to delegate

Remember, you’re never too regal to rely on advice from lesser mortals Even a great king or queen cannot rule by themselves: the most successful find able servants on whom they can rely for advice, information and diligence in carrying out the royal wish. At its best, monarchy is the business of building partnerships with these sorts of counsellors and servants, and the list of effective pairings is long. Henry II had Thomas Becket. Henry V had Cardinal Beaufort. Henry VIII had Thomas Cromwell. Elizabeth I had Lord Burghley and, later, his son, Robert Cecil. George III had William Pitt the Younger. Of course, in the case of

7

Becket and Cromwell, things ended fatally for the counsellor. That was the hazard of the job. Even in the modern age, when ministers have been thrust upon monarchs by democratic election, rather than handpicked under royal prerogative, it has been possible for those born to power and those raised to it by the people to work in successful partnership. Circumstance threw together George VI and Winston Churchill, and despite their many differences, their relationship was an important part of Britain’s victory in the Second World War.

HOW NOT TO DO IT Edward II made perhaps the worst choice of advisors in history. His childhood friend Piers Gaveston was murdered by the king’s irate barons. His later favourites, the Despenser family, caused a rebellion and civil war following which Edward was forced to abdicate and was murdered in Berkeley Castle.

Treat life like a catwalk

BRIDGEMAN

You’re powerful, you’re chivalrous, you’re magnificent – so dress like it

Tights-wearing pomposity: the famously vain George IV cavorts in front of a mirror in a cartoon from 1820

BBC History Magazine

Monarchs are supposed to look different from their subjects, and the best of them understand this. During Edward III’s day, a cult of chivalrous and magnificent kingship was created around lavish outward display, huge tournaments and parties in which the king and his friends would wear elaborate costumes of exotic birds, or monks. Subsequently, Edward IV imported the latest Burgundian fashions to the English court, while Edward’s grandson and great-granddaughter, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, stepped things up another level, and made sure their splendid outward display was captured for posterity by the best court painters in Europe. Since then, kingliness (and queenliness) has regularly been equated with a form of

regal high fashion all of its own. This has included the dandyish decadence of Charles II’s court, the tights-wearing pomposity of George IV’s, and the medalchested military sobriety of George V’s and George VI’s. Today, Elizabeth II has made her own the bold, single-coloured hat-andcoat combinations created by her dresser Angela Kelly.

HOW NOT TO DO IT Henry VI never exuded regality, and though he could dress well, he was better remembered for wearing all black with clumpy farmer’s boots. Paraded through London by his enemies near the end of his life, he was mocked by the population for being dressed in a shabby old blue gown.

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Successful monarchs

8

Spin, spin, spin

Reality is overrated. In royal circles, it’s perception that matters One of the best ways to be remembered as a great ruler is to put the word out yourself. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both took great care to cultivate their own magnificent images. But one of the greatest masters of this art was Henry V. Although undoubtedly a great soldier and extremely talented ruler all round, Henry also understood the importance of influencing the way he was perceived. Between 1416 and early 1417 a cleric in Henry’s private chapel wrote the Gesta Henrici Quinti – a book portraying Henry as a man on a divinely approved mission to seek justice in France, and establishing much of the public image of Henry that has survived so successfully. Henry V, shown in a 15th-century manuscript, was a man on a divine mission – at least that’s what his powerful PR machine told his subjects

HOW NOT TO DO IT Richard III provides an object lesson in how not to be remembered. Despite his efforts to frame his usurpation in 1483 as legally and morally justified, he remains a highly controversial king. And, for all the efforts of his modern apologists, the Tudor image of a hunchbacked, murdering schemer persists to this day.

Elizabeth I, shown praying in 1569, was lucky enough to worship the same God as most of her subjects

9

Do God

Atheism isn’t an option in a role that gives you a direct line to the Almighty The permanent and irreversible mark of monarchy is conveyed by anointing the king or queen with holy oil at their coronation – a ritual that has existed since the Middle Ages, and which puts the king or queen in direct communion with God. So the sanctity of monarchy is and has always been a serious business. Medieval kings routinely ascribed their successes to the Almighty, and their successors have been expected to protect the church (which, since the Reformation, has been under their oversight). It is important, of course, to find the same God as the majority of your subjects. Elizabeth I succeeded where Mary failed in large part because she was a relatively moderate Protestant rather than a Roman Catholic; William III (and II) replaced James II (and VII) on the grounds that England would not tolerate another Catholic Stuart king. Even today, when monarchs can once again (in theory and in law) marry Catholics, Elizabeth II and her successors are and will be governors of the Church of England.

HOW NOT TO DO IT There is a fine line between belief in the awesome sanctity of monarchy and a belief that God has pre-approved everything you do. The insistence of James VI and I and Charles I on the divine right of kings played a significant part in the outbreak of the Civil War and the abolition of the monarchy between 1649 and 1660.

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monarchy, go to historyextra.com/bbchistorymagazine/ podcast/tudors/debating-british-monarchy

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Christopher Tyerman in his room at the University of Oxford. “Crusaders were real people motivated by very different impulses, even if those impulses are, to me at any rate, repulsive in many ways,” he says

Photography by Fran Monks

INTERVIEW / CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN

FRAN MONKS

“Religious war isn’t an irrational act, and we shouldn’t dismiss it as irrational” Christopher Tyerman talks to Matt Elton about his new book that considers the practical reality of going on crusade – and, by so doing, reveals the inherent rationality of the Middle Ages BBC History Magazine

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Books / Interview PROFILE CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN A graduate of New College, University of Oxford, Tyerman has been a lecturer in medieval history at Hertford College, Oxford since 1979 and a fellow at the college since 2006. He was recently appointed professor of the history of the crusades at the University of Oxford, and his previous books include God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Allen Lane, 2006).

IN CONTEXT

Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095 with the aim of securing Christian control of the area around Jerusalem, captured by Muslim armies centuries earlier. The resulting wars and conquests spanned hundreds of years and resulted in thousands of people leaving Europe to aid the war effort in the Holy Land. A military effort on such a huge scale required extensive organisation, including the provision of transport, food, equipment and medical care. The impact of the crusades remains contested, but they had a profound effect on everything from trade to culture.

What sort of people went on crusade? The social reach was very broad. There were the military elites, the urban elites and their entourages and military households, and the wider community who had been recruited to fight as infantry. Beyond that, there’s evidence of quite modest farmers, urban and rural artisans, and rich peasants, all of whom could hope to earn some money on crusades. And obviously poor peasants could have gone, but would have needed someone else’s funds. So it was socially quite embracing – not just knights and soldiers. Women went too: lists of crusaders from the late 12th century feature around 10 per cent women. Some were wives, but others went by themselves or in groups – in other words, they weren’t chaperoned. Some rich women even hired groups of soldiers to take with them, so they were very powerful. The involvement of society as a whole, women as well as men, both followed and is very revealing about wider social structures. What techniques were used to try to get people to go on crusade? It was a multimedia activity. Firstly, there was a written side: campaigns would start with papal letters being sent out, as well as newsletters and doctored eyewitness accounts of some atrocity that they wanted to advertise to stimulate attention. There was also a visual aspect: during the Third Crusade, preachers went around with big posters on canvases depicting Saladin and his horse crapping on the holy sepulchre, or pictures of Muhammad beating up Christ. There were also sermons, which were big theatrical performances. You assembled a crowd who knew what to expect, in the same

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way that you know what to expect when you go to a pop concert. The preacher would be on the stage, using props and an array of oratorical and theatrical tricks. Most of the sensory perceptions were involved, and the message was a universal one: salvation, duty, necessity. It was carefully constructed to generate the maximum effect. People signed up for various reasons. You could commit to go because you believed that it was the right thing to do, as people believed that fighting against the Nazis or Napoleon was the right thing to do. So it could be an ideological, emotional commitment. But it was also seen as a respectable thing to do. You were fulfilling your role in society, your cultural obligation. Your reputation would have been enhanced by going on crusade, with benefits for your material standing. So the pressures on lords were social and cultural as much as religious. If you were employed, of course, you went – you were an employee, your livelihood depended on your lord and you went with him. You may have believed in it, you may not. This idea that everything was spontaneous is something commentators projected d for religious reasons, but the reality of trying to organise an army was exactly the same as in any other period: you needed resources, leadership, social structures, and so on. The crusades took place over a huge area. What effect did this have on the way they were planned and managed? Co-ordination was extremely difficult – but it wass achieved. Deadlines were set for when people left, and muster points were set at particular times. There were rounds of diplomacy, with endless letters going to and fro preparing for markets and contracts with shippers. We know that the Third Crusade took Germany a year to prepare for and a year to get to the Holy Land. Interestingly, in 1190, Richard I prepaid his soldiers’ wages,

“These weren’t clods credulously following some bogus spiritual ideal – they thought it through rationally”

recorded on exchequer accounts, and took the money with him to pay them for the next year. And hey presto, they got to the Holy Land at the end of that year. So there was practical intelligence and planning, and people arrived in a fairly co-ordinated way. This was partly because there were only two seasons in which people could get to the Holy Land by sea, but it was not done by coincidence or chance. There was a pattern to these campaigns, based on networks of communication founded on lordship patterns, regional, monastic and trade links, and connections between towns. These communities came together because they already had contact. How did the crusaders find their way? Well, they knew where they were going. Not initially, perhaps, in the way that we would, by using maps, but through their version of satnav: people, veterans and locals who told them where to go. When you look at itineraries you see that they were organised in a linear way from town to town just like satnav. They were diagrammatic maps just like that of the London underground. The idea that they set off over the horizon not knowing where to go is a modern myth. By the end of the 13th century there’s plenty of evidence that they were using maps, and there are written accounts of journeys to the Holy Land that specify in which direction to go and how many days it would take. How did crusaders go about providing medical care? The idea that medieval medicine was a form of licence to assault and murder is untrue. Crusaders took doctors with them on the Fifth Crusade, for instance, and provisions were made for nursing. Not all wounds were fatal, and you needed to save people’s lives if they had injuries, look after your wounded, and bury your dead. This is true of any army, and true of the crusades. Obviously the treatment was hit and miss, but there was an understanding of how to treat wounds. You can tell this from surviving skeletons that wounds have healed and so couldn’t have been fatal. This reflects one of my book’s general themes: that these weren’t clods inspired by crude superstition, credulously following some bogus spiritual ideal. Well, to our eyes the ideal mayy have been bogus, but they thought it through

BBC History Magazine

“There’s no point in historians even considering whether the crusades were a good thing or a bad thing” same, but nonetheless led real lives. We can’t know all about them, or much about them in many ways, but we don’t owe them judgment – we owe them understanding.

A 15th-century depiction of fighting in the First Crusade. “The idea that crusaders set off over the horizon not knowing where to go is a modern myth,” says Christopher Tyerman

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rationally. It had to be explained to them: if the cause of a crusade wasn’t convincing, people didn’t join up. This was not an obedient society, but a questioning one. The medical care shows that we should take these people seriously: these were serious people, doing their best to confront serious problems. Are there any characters who have been particularly overlooked? I think that the unsung are the mass of the crusaders. The physical conditions of going on crusade weren’t pleasant. One shouldn’t get sentimental about this, but the common experience of the common person going on crusade was, shall we say, strenuous. There were things to compensate for this, such as the camaraderie, but it was often tough. My reaction – and you see this in a lot of historians who write about the crusades – is somewhat split. On the one hand, you have to acknowledge the crusaders’ intellectual and physical effort and psychological stamina. Yet I think that their actions are

BBC History Magazine

to some extent characteristic of a very different society from ours. There’s no point in historians even considering whether or not the crusades were a good thing or a bad thing. That seems to me to be sloppy selfindulgence, a condescending judgmentalism of the worst sort that doesn’t help us understand the historical reality. These were real people motivated by very different impulses, even if those impulses are, to me at any rate, repulsive in many ways: the violence, the intolerance, the assumption of religious, racial and moral superiority. Those things were all shared by the other side as well, of course. One can’t escape from the victims, and any attempt to see the crusades in terms of either moral superiority or moral inferiority of western Europe, or in simplistic debates about the ‘clash of civilisations’, seems to me to be entirely fruitless and historically incorrect. The excitement of history is to engage with people who were different, not the

How would you like this book to change people’s view of the crusades, and this period more generally? People put the wars of faith into a category of either admiration or lunacy, or they see them as being alien. These weren’t alien activities, so it’s important to set the crusades in a more explicable, believable context. The Middle Ages was a time of rationality. The condescension that somehow we’re above superstition now is just wrong: we have homeopathic medicine, for God’s sake! People did things for rational reasons, and worried about things as we do. Life was difficult, and they came up with rational solutions, whether it was building scaffolding or worrying, as King Amalric of Jerusalem did, if there was any evidence outside the Bible for Jesus’s resurrection. They were asking serious questions about their world as we do: yes, they were doing it with a different knowledge base, but they were still asking questions based on reason and rationality. We can then turn the lens back and look at ourselves and say that, if religious war is not an irrational act, we shouldn’t dismiss it as such in the 21st century. It iss rational, and we must therefore use reason to combat it. How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the Middle Ages by Christopher Tyerman (Allen Lane, 432 pages, £25) Hear more from this interview on our podcast at historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/ podcasts

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attention to their stories. Describing their personal trajectories and setting them in historical context offers us an insight into their actions, motivations and beliefs. He emphasises the scope of the contributions made by non-French nationals – so far under-represented in literature on the subject – and credits the huge number of anti-fascists engaged in the Resistance. It is hard not to be moved by the heroism of some of these lesser-known participants – especially veterans of the Spanish Civil War and Jews from outside France, all of whom were tough fighters with nothing to lose. Gildea’s account makes it clear that fear of communist insurrection, both in resistance circles and on the part of the British, led to missed opportunities. Yet they all played a crucial role in helping to secure the liberation of France. Rather than a consideration of ‘French Resistance’, Gildea calls for us to refer instead to ‘Resistance in France’. The important contribution of these foreign fighters is integrated into a wider discussion of the workings of the Resistance. Gildea shows how the movement changed over time as general French Resistance members study weapons parachuted into the south of the country, c1944. and statesman Charles de Gaulle came Robert Gildea’s book is “a must for all those interested in the period”, says Hanna Diamond to play a leading role in London and then Algiers. He explores rivalries between resistors, their clash of visions and often reluctant unification, with de Gaulle as figurehead. HANNA DIAMOND commends a thorough, well-told overview The inner tensions and workings of the Resistance are well dealt with. of the Second World War Resistance movement in France The book’s account of the manoeuvring between the various personalities in – men and women – who took action north Africa, as it became a centre of Fighters in the Shadows: A New MAGAZINE against the German occupiers. Using operations for Resistance activity, is History of the French Resistance CHOICE particularly clearly laid out. So too is oral and written testimony, Gildea Robert Gildea sweeps us into the traumatic patterns the wide range of Resistance activities, Faber & Faber, 608 pages, £20 of their existences and their daily from armed military action to rescue The complex and heroism. He recounts the power battles along escape lines, and Gildea describes contested story of the within the Resistance movement, or the groups that specialised in acts of French Resistance in Maquis, especially the rivalry between sabotage and intelligence. His account the Second World those in France and those in London charts the growth of the ‘secret army’ War has become and, later, north Africa. He takes us and the development of the organisacentral to the nation’s through key players’ lives, personalities, identity. Robert successes and setbacks. “This book sweeps us Gildea’s comprehenIn foregrounding the extent of sive, thoroughly the contribution made by dissident into the daily heroism researched book focuses on the life communists, and other resistors of of the Resistance” stories of a wide range of individuals foreign and Jewish origin, Gildea draws

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Freedom fighters

BBC History Magazine

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Books / Reviews COMING SOON… “With its centenary approaching, how should we now see the battle of the Somme? Historian Andrew Roberts tackles that subject in his new book Elegy, and I’ll be meeting him to find out more. And, of course, we’ll have the usual complement of reviews of the latest history titles.” Matt Elton, reviews editor

“Stories about the French Resistance have been framed and reframed throughout the postwar period” who had been involved in his Free French movements in London or Algeria. For foreign fighters, France’s liberation was often seen as a mere prelude to liberation in their own homeland. Yet their ambitions to continue fighting for democratic freedom were soon frustrated by the postwar geopolitical configuration that emerged with the arrival of the Cold War. In a final discussion, Gildea analyses how Resistance memory has been developed and manipulated. Stories about the movement have been told and retold, framed and reframed, throughout the postwar period to chime with contemporary French political need – especially since the death of de Gaulle. The recent emergence of a redeeming myth of the ‘good’ French person who helped save the Jews has allowed France to again feel proud of its wartime past. This rich and dramatic book is an absolute must for all those interested in the period. Hanna Diamond is professor of French at Cardiff University and the author of Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (OUP, 2007)

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Idiosyncrasy and idealism HALLIE RUBENHOLD enjoys a joint study of Mary Shelley and

Mary Wollstonecraft that says much about Georgian society Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon Hutchinson, 672 pages, £25

It may come as a surprise that two of the most outspoken women of the Georgian era, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and Mary Shelley (1797–1851), were mother and daughter. It’s equally surprising to discover that their lives have as yet never been examined together in a single work. Charlotte Gordon’s fascinating double biography remedies this omission while shedding new light on both lives. Gordon’s narrative history is a skilful interweaving of the two stories. Although Wollstonecraft’s relationship with her daughter was brief – she died of puerperal fever 10 days after her birth – her influence remained ever-present. By juxtaposing their experiences, Gordon presents a compelling comparison of their struggles, adventures, romantic entanglements and, ultimately, the uniquely personal philosophies that helped to shape the writings for which they are best remembered: Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). While Shelley is widely known, her mother is less famous, and Gordon makes good use of Wollstonecraft’s unusually passionate writings about herself to make her biography shine. As the daughter of an abusive father, she learned to live according to her conscience rather than society’s conventions. Gordon makes no apologies for her complex subject’s idiosyncrasies.

Wollstonecraft shunned the marriage market and the trappings of luxury, and was not ashamed to bear her first child out of wedlock or plead with the wife of her lover, Henry Fuseli, to permit her to live with them. Unwilling to compromise on her ideals, she was an advocate for women’s rights and remained a proponent of the French Revolution through its bloodiest phase. Yet when she became pregnant a second time by her lover, philosopher William Godwin, the couple saw the virtue in legitimising the child through marriage. Shelley remained acutely aware that she had been the cause of her mother’s death. While her father did his best to educate his daughter in the radical principles that he had shared with her mother, he was not especially forthcoming with the affection that Mary craved. Godwin described his daughter as “singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind”, but was surprised when, contrary to his wishes, she decided to throw her lot in with one of his political followers, the already married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite Godwin’s efforts to shield her from the social ostracism suffered by his wife, his daughter too was made to face controversy and ridicule. Romantic Outlaws offers something much richer than the literary criticism often found in biographies of Wollstonecraft and Shelley: it provides a study of the condition of women in the Georgian era and succeeds in presenting a picture of the difficulties faced by those determined to make use of their intellects and idealism. Hallie Rubenhold is author of Lady Worsley’s Whim (Vintage, 2009) Mary Shelley as depicted in a c1830 portrait. Charlotte Gordon explores her life and that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft

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tions that managed the secret fighters who hid out until D-Day when the order finally arrived that they should mobilise. The final chapters make compelling reading, as Gildea traces the lives of the Resistance fighters in the aftermath of the war. He explores their hopes, fears, triumphs and disappointments. Many struggled to adjust to the peace, and those who were haunted by the traumas of the camp experience found it difficult to return to normal life. For those who had imagined that their commitment to resistance would gain them access to the postwar political scene, there was an acute sense of betrayal. Many felt sidelined when de Gaulle’s provisional government pushed aside all but those

One of Moscow’s Stalinskie Vysotki, or ‘Stalinist skyscrapers’ – known in the west as the Seven Sisters. Owen Hatherley looks at how such buildings “symbolised socialist modernity”

Building blocs EVAN MAWDSLEY rates a tour of eastern European history through

its architecture – from workers’ clubs to glistening skyscrapers Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings by Owen Hatherley

CORBIS

Allen Lane, 624 pages, £25

This is an informative, thought-provoking book that, among other things, provides unique insights into the governments and people of half of Europe. In particular, it is an informal history of architecture and its patronage by state and party in the ‘Eastern bloc’ from the 1920s to the collapse of European communism in the 1980s. Owen Hatherley does not pretend to be comprehensive in his coverage of the history of architecture under socialism

BBC History Magazine

and communism (ideologies thoughtfully delineated here). Although broad in scope, this book is not a Pevsner Architectural Guide: it does not cover all regions of the former USSR, nor all parts of the bloc. Communist China appears only in a fascinating coda. The subject is broken down into thematic chapters. The scene is set by a discussion of the ‘magistrale’, or great showpiece avenue, such as the StalinAllee in East Berlin. At the other end of the socialist spectrum is the ubiquitous

“This is not a guidebook: Hatherley’s style is quirky, witty and highly personal”

residential neighbourhood or ‘mikroraion’. Related to both of these are public buildings, workers’ clubs and ‘palaces’ of culture that Soviet architect Moisei Ginzburg described effectively in the 1920s as “social condensers”; interestingly, some churches are included within this third theme. Tall structures are dealt with as a separate, highly visible topic: vertical where the magistrale is horizontal, but serving a similar purpose. Included are Stalin’s wedding-cake skyscrapers and the later TV towers that symbolised socialist modernity. Mass-transit buildings – the famous metros – are rightly appraised much more positively. The final chapters cover rather different themes: reconstruction and replication after wartime damage (most remarkably in Warsaw); small-scale building ‘from below’; and, finally – appropriately – monuments and mausoleums. This is neither a monograph nor a guidebook. Hatherley’s style is quirky and witty, and the approach highly personal. He explains his own background: memories of grandparents and parents who were active on the hard left; writing the book in a Warsaw mikroraion; touring Russia and eastern Europe on a budget with the writer Agata Pyzik (to whom the volume is dedicated). Many of the illustrations are from postcards, which adds to the immediacy. Nevertheless, this is a big book, and – although it would go against the text’s casual spirit – readers may have benefited from more guidance. Given the nature of the topic, maps and plans would have been a valuable addition. There are a large number of black and white photos, but colour would have been welcome. Those new to the topic would have been aided by a chronology and a glossary. I would, in any event, enthusiastically recommend this volume to travellers and tourists (Hatherley explains the difference), and also to those who want to understand the bewildering recent past of Russia and eastern Europe. It’s also an extremely entertaining read. Evan Mawdsleyy is a former professor of international history at the University of Glasgow and co-author of The Blue Guide to Moscow and Leningradd (A&C Black, 1990)

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Books / Reviews A 16th-century tapestry showing the arrival of explorer Vasco da Gama into Calicut. Francois Soyer praises Roger Crowley’s “fascinating account of the rise of an empire”

The first empire FRANCOIS SOYER considers an account of how the Portuguese

came to rule the world’s oceans in the 15th and 16th centuries

Faber and Faber, 432 pages, £20

The establishment of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean between 1497 and 1516 has been overshadowed by the contemporaneous rise of the Spanish empire in the Americas, yet its implications for world history are no less significant. Portugal’s kings financed voyages of exploration along the African coast, with mixed commercial and crusading goals. The first aim was to find a direct trade route between Europe and Asia that would bypass the Islamic world, and thus deprive it of revenue it gained from the spice trade. The second was to establish contact with a mythical Christian king in

Asia with whom, it was fondly hoped, an anti-Muslim alliance could be forged. Drawing from Portuguese and Arabic sources, Crowley’s fast-paced and vivid narrative relates how, in little more than two decades, the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope and gained naval military supremacy in the Indian Ocean in spite of resistance from both Muslims and Hindu powers. Unlike the vast territorial Spanish empire, the Portuguese empire was based on trading outposts and strategically situated fortresses. Yet, as Crowley makes clear, its establishment was no less bloody. While the names of Columbus, Cortes and Pizarro have become (in)famous,

“Crowley relates how, in little more than 20 years, the Portuguese gained supremacy”

Into the wild ROBERT J MAYHEW on a history of a South American colony

set up by a civil war rebel – and how trouble came to paradise Willoughbyland: England’s Lost Colony by Matthew Parker Hutchinson, 288 pages, £16.99

Readers will probably be more familiar with John Willoughby, the fictional rogue in Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility, y than with his real-life eponymous 17thcentury predecessor, Sir Francis Willoughby. It is Sir Francis who is at the heart of Matthew Parker’s

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book, and yet the lives of both share a complex interweaving of romantic designs, deceit and the drive for wealth. As Parker’s lively narrative relates, Willoughby was inspired by Sir Walter Ralegh’s late 16th-century account of the fabulous wealth to be found in El Dorado, a mythical city located somewhere in inland South America between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. A turncoat in the Civil War, Willoughby decided to flee to the continent and found a colony whose ultimate aim would be accessing this fabulous wealth. In its founding years, the colony was a cosmopolitan entrepôt,

less familiar to some are Vasco da Gama and the first two Portuguese viceroys in the East Indies, Francisco de Almeida and Afonso de Albuquerque. Crowley skilfully brings them to life, carefully avoiding quasi-heroic depictions. He highlights their remarkable leadership, military prowess and seemingly indomitable spirit in the face of huge challenges, and reveals their flaws and willingness to turn to violence. Crowley tends to somewhat overplay Portugal’s isolation in medieval Europe prior to the voyages of exploration. The nation was directly involved in the Hundred Years’ War and its royal house had close connections with the English crown. He also occasionally lets literary licence get the better of him: his extraor-

or trading post, home to French, Dutch and English alike. It also welcomed a Jewish community, boasting the first synagogue in the Americas. And yet there was always trouble in this tropical paradise: the rivalries among competing imperial powers led to a merry-go-round of rulers and rebels; relations with indigenous groups were strained at best and murderous more often than not; and the rigours of the environment led to frightening loss of life. In this environment of suspicion, the English government sent spies to assess the loyalty of the colony, the most famous being the pioneering female writer Aphra Behn, whose most famous work, Oroonoko (1688), was based on her experiences in Willoughby’s colony. In Parker’s account, these problems overwhelmed the utopian beginnings of the English colonial presence in South

BBC History Magazine

BRIDGEMAN

Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley

WANT MORE ? For reviews of hundreds of recent history books, go to our online archive historyextra.com/books

The man and the myth MICHAEL SCOTT praises a look at Xerxes, the fifth-century BC

king of Persia whose life and character has long been debated Xerxes: A Persian Life by Richard Stoneman Yale University Press, 288 pages, £25

dinary description of King Manuel I as a man possessing “disproportionately long arms, which hung down to his knees, giving him an apelike appearance” contrasts with the reality of a man who seems to have been physically unremarkable. Despite these criticisms, Crowley offers a fascinating account of the rise of an empire, one that heralded the rise of European states to a position of global military and commercial dominance that would endure until the 20th century. Francois Soyerr is an associate professor in history at the University of Southampton Roger Crowley picks his favourite historical holiday destination in our My Favourite Place feature on page 86

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America, with the 1660s seeing the emergence of a society predicated on slavery and oppression. Shortly after Willoughby’s death in the same decade, his colony was invaded by the Dutch, who would hold territorial rights to Willoughbyland in the form of what we now call Suriname until 1975. Willoughbyland d does not get us to the heart of the mystery of why the myth of El Dorado held such a strong hold on the imagination, despite the complete lack of evidence of its existence. It also overplays the beneficent elements of early English settlements overseas. It is, nevertheless, an enjoyable account of a neglected moment in the emergence of the British empire. Robert J Mayhew w is a professor in the school of geographical sciences at the University of Bristol

BBC History Magazine

This book opens with the claim that it is the “first attempt at a serious biography of Xerxes, or any Achaemenid [Persian] king since Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, written in the second century AD”. What follows is an erudite insight into the problems of writing about the ancient world when the surviving sources do not, or have chosen not to, speak to a particular topic. The sources relating to the life and character of the Achaemenid rulers, and particularly those of Darius and Xerxes – the two Persian kings who attempted and failed to conquer Greece in 490 BC at Marathon and 480–79 at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea – are a mix of heady victorious rhetoric and careful character assassination from the Greek side, and sparse, often laconic, survival from the Achaemenid side. This is coupled with the thoughts of generations of later writers in both the west and east, who have responded to these famous individuals as one might respond to an empty bottle to be filled with one’s preferred tipple. In this they are not alone. The game of turning ancient acchievers (or, in this case, supposed non nachievers) into standardbearers for heroic or devilish characteristics is a long-standing one. What makes Xerxees interesting is that he was the ruler of the largest empire the world had seen by the fifth century BC. As such, as our gazze on the ancient worrld slowly widens – do omi-

nated as it often is by Greece and Rome – understanding the life and character of a figure such as Xerxes is paramount. Richard Stoneman does this for us in an engaging and wide-ranging fashion. He nimbly tries to avoid the character assassination of Xerxes by Alexander the Great and his successors, combs through multiple Roman-era narratives for key ideas and insights, and, perhaps most deserving of admiration, tackles a wide selection of literature from the biblical book of Esther via the 10th-century Iranian national epic Shahnameh and Gore Vidal’s 1981 novel Creation. Stoneman masterfully weighs these difficult sources for what they can tell us, both about the individuals and societies that created them and Xerxes himself. The book covers Xerxes’ accession, his empire, image, religion, invasion of Greece, family, romances and – finally – his assassination by the commander of the royal bodyguard. What emerges, on the one hand, is the public persona of a man who slowly learnt to deal with the great challenges faced by the ruler of the largest empire of his time, a man driven by a need to carry out a ‘great deed’ worthy of his ancestors and position, and who always maintained a proper religious attitude towards the gods. On the other hand, from what we can know of his ‘inward qualities’, Xerxes seems to have been a lover of nature, prone to amorous infatuations (in his middle age he fell for a younger wo oman), and a man overshadowed by what Stoneman labels “th he Persian melancholy”. Michael Scottt is assocciate professor in classics and ancientt history at the University of Warwickk

A relief of Xerxes s in the Hall of a Hundred Columns, Persepolis. The king “was ruler of the largest empire the world ha ad ever seen”

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Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS The Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson

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Abacus, 877 pages, £14.99

This take on the last days of the Second World War in Europe is reminiscent of Cornelius Ryan’s books The Longest Dayy and A Bridge Too Far: fat page-turners packed with anecdote and human interest. Rick Atkinson is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and I was hooked from the first page. One of Atkinson’s strengths is his ability to paint vivid wordpictures. His description of the seizure of the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen in March 1945 by a US patrol under lieutenant Karl H Timmerman is almost cinematic in quality – another reminder of Cornelius Ryan. Atkinson is also a master of the telling quotation. He cites the view of supreme Allied commander-general Dwight D Eisenhower that field marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery was an “impossible” subordinate, but also quotes brigadier Bill Williams on Monty’s “sheer competence [and] decisiveness”. These quotations neatly capture two aspects of Montgomery’s complex character. Atkinson’s judgments are generally fair: he gives credit to Montgomery for the victory in Normandy, and sees Eisenhower as the campaign’s key figure. Unsurprisingly, the US army takes centre stage, although he does give space to the British; the Canadians get less than they deserve. He is reasonably up-to-date with campaign scholarship – although there are some glaring omissions in his bibliography – and makes

BBC History Magazine

good use of primary sources. The book isn’t ‘definitive’, as claimed in the blurb, but this is a gripping account of the climactic campaign in western Europe – the A Bridge Too Far for the 21st century. Gary Sheffield d is professor of war studies at the University of Wolverhampton

Everyday Life in Medieval London by Toni Mount Amberley, 336 pages, £9.99

William the Conqueror did not think much of London or its “evil inhabitants”, but he did acknowledge that it was “a most spacious city… and richer than anywhere else in the kingdom”, which is why he made a beeline for it as soon as he had defeated Harold at the battle of Hastings. Therein lay the essential dilemma of the capital: it was the most powerful city in England, and therefore the most prone to invasion. During the thousand years of Toni Mount’s fascinating study, London was at turns dominated by Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Tudors. Mount traces the impact that each subsequent ruling dynasty had on the capital’s architecture, religion, laws, health and social life. Told from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, it provides a vivid picture of the city in all its drama and glory. Although the narrative is punctuated by well-known events, these are secondary to the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants. It was for the most part a hard life, dogged by

poverty, plague and violence, but there were also feast days, football and shopping. Few would choose to swap modern comforts and convenience with the squalor and disease of medieval times but, as Mount skilfully conveys, some things have changed little. Medieval Londoners had the same preoccupations as we have today, from work and family to health and – above all – the vagaries of the English weather. Tracy Borman’s latest book is The Story of the Tower of London (Merrell, 2015)

Operation Sealion by Leo McKinstry John Murray, 496 pages, £9.99

In a revisionist, unashamedly patriotic history of the dangerous summer of 1940, Leo McKinstry argues that our image of Britain at bay before the threatened German invasion has been hopelessly distorted by the ancient TV series Dad’s Army. y Far from the classic comedy’s amateur bungling buffoons, he claims, Britain’s

response to Hitler’s menace was professional, resolute, ruthless and packed with purpose. Beginning with Churchill’s rise to power, McKinstry shows how the new PM’s will to resist the Nazis infused the nation with a quiet determination. As beaches were transformed into bristling barriers of barbed wire, and pillboxes sprouted across the country, Hitler had to abandon hopes of a bloodless surrender and plan for Operation Sealion: the invasion and occupation of the defiant island. Yet Hitler was always halfhearted about the prospects for a successful seaborne invasion, and his cautious navy and army chiefs reinforced his doubts. Both the young pilots of ‘the Few’ and the grim, grey navy warships stood in the path of a surprise Channel crossing. As summer turned to autumn, he abandoned Sealion and fatally turned his thoughts to the east. Before the summer of 1940 Hitler had an unbroken record of success. After it – as McKinstry’s masterly narrative clearly shows – Britain’s bulldog spirit showed the world that even the fearsome Nazi war machine was not invincible. Nigel Jones is the author of Peace and Warr (Head of Zeus, 2013)

Soldiers watch over the south coast of Britain, 1940. Leo McKinstry offers an “unashamedly patriotic history of that dangerous summer”, says Nigel Jones

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Books / Fiction THREE MORE GREAT ARTISTS IN FICTION Girl with a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier (1999)

FICTION The artist’s muse NICK RENNISON on a novel, based on real events, that

explores the romantic life of painter Rembrandt van Rijn Rembrandt’s Mirror by Kim Devereux Atlantic Books, 394 pages, £12.99

In 1647, Hendrickje Stoffels is a young woman living in the small town of Bredevoort in the Netherlands. When her widowed mother remarries, she is obliged to leave the family home and travel to Amsterdam in search of employment. The naive Hendrickje finds a job as a maid in the house of the famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn, and is thrust into a situation she finds difficult to understand. Rembrandt is still haunted by the death of his wife five years earlier. He castigates himself because, at the moment of her greatest need, he was too obsessed by his work, and too weak in spirit, to support her. He has taken a new lover in the substantial shape of his housekeeper Geertje, and Hendrickje becomes a horrified, unwilling witness to their earthy love-making. Yet the complexities of the emotional undercurrents between the two escape her.

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Tensions in the household increase as it becomes clear that the painter is attracted to his young maid. Hendrickje, in her turn, responds to Rembrandt’s interest, fascinated by his unique vision of the world and by the hidden, often dark, depths to his character that she senses but cannot fully construe. Geertje is cruelly sidelined. She is eventually banished from Rembrandt’s household to become a persistent thorn in his side until he ruthlessly conspires with her brother to have her committed to an asylum. Hendrickje becomes the painter’s last great love, and we see their life together through her eyes. She tells much of the story herself: the voice that Kim Devereux gives her is not always convincing, but for the most part Rembrandt’s Mirrorr provides a powerful portrait of a genius whose need to put his art first makes it difficult for him to love and be loved. As plague hits Amsterdam and mortality threatens their happiness, the novel becomes a moving affirmation of the love that Hendrickje, and particularly Rembrandt, struggle to express. Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s Questt (Corvus, 2013)

The Passion of Artemisia Susan Vreeland (2002) S Susan Vreeland’s novel vividly recreates n tthe turbulent life of the early baroque o painter Artemisia p Gentileschi. From G tthe high points of her career under h the patronage of the Medicis to the tragedies of her rape by a colleague and her torture by the Inquisition, this is the story of a woman who struggled bravely to assert her individuality. In this powerful work of invented autobiography, Vreeland creates a memorable portrait of a pioneering female artist.

The Painter of Souls Peter Kazan (2015) W When this rich and colourful novel opens, c Filippo Lippi is a street F urchin in Renaissance u Florence, possessed F of an untutored talent o ffor drawing. Taken in by a religiou religious order and trained to be a Carmelite friar, he cannot repress his desire for the beauties of the world and his urge to depict them. Apprenticed to the great 15th-century painter Masaccio, he must struggle to reconcile the conflicting demands of the godly and the artistic life.

BBC History Magazine

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A portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels by Rembrandt van Rijn. A fictional re-creation of their relationship is at the heart of Kim Devereux’s powerful new novel

In this reconstruction of the world reflected o in the golden age of Dutch painting, Tracy D Chevalier cleverly C ttakes a well-known painting by Vermeer p and provides a a story to explain the enigmatic woman who appears in it. Griet is 16 when she arrives in Vermeer’s household and is slowly drawn, despite the difference in age and social class, into an increasingly intimate relationship with her master, eventually coming to act as his muse and his model.

Mark Gatiss will be tracing his family history in a 12th series of Who Do You Think You Are?

Celebrity stories Who Do You Think You Are? TV BBC One, scheduled for Thursday 13 August

The genealogy series returns for a 12th series, with another stellar line-up researching their family histories. This year, those featured are model Jerry Hall, actors Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid, Frances de la Tour, Mark Gatiss and Jane Seymour, Bake Off ’s Paul Hollywood, choirmaster Gareth Malone, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and TV presenter Anita Rani. The first episode will feature Paul Hollywood, who traces the Second World War experiences of his grandfather, Norman Harman.

Jonathan Dimbleby documents 20 momentous years in the 20th century

Momentous events War and words RADIO BBC World Service,

BBC

scheduled for August

Having charted the history of Auntie through the Second World War for The BBC at War, Jonathan Dimbleby takes another journey into the archives for a three-part series that tells the story of 1936–56. From the Spanish Civil War via 1939–45 to the Suez Crisis, it’s a tale told primarily from the perspective of BBC radio reporters and correspondents, whose number famously included Jonathan’s father, Richard Dimbleby. It’s also a tale of how the BBC grew to be one of the most trusted news organisations in the world.

BBC History Magazine

Jonathan Wright previews the pick of upcoming programmes

TV&RADIO

A study in scarlet BBC History Magazine goes on location to hear the story behind a new historical drama The Scandalous Lady W TV BBC Two, scheduled for Thursday 20 August Even beneath forbidding grey skies, Wrotham Park is magnificent. A short train ride from central London, the stately home has long been a favourite destination for film-makers looking to recreate the past. Few, though, can have had quite such a remarkable story to relate as the makers of The Scandalous Lady W. The 90-minute drama explores what happened when, in 1781, Lady Seymour Worsley eloped with her lover, militia officer George M Bissett. In itself, this would have caused a scandal, but what followed was a sensational court case that pitted Bissett against Seymour’s husband, Sir Richard Worsley. “It’s a little like Nigella and Saatchi,” says Natalie Dormer, who plays Seymour and chats while resplendent in 18th-century costume. “The Georgian free press was a great problem for people in power.” For women, the Georgian legal system was a problem too. Worsley’s case was for ‘criminal conversation’, a concept that rested on the idea of a wife being one of

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her husband’s possessions. As a ‘possession’, Seymour didn’t even testify. The case ultimately damaged all concerned. While Worsley claimed £20,000, he had to settle for a shilling as, among other tidbits, lurid details of his own behaviour emerged. Meanwhile, Bissett and Seymour were hounded over the scandal. As to how we know so many of the details here, that’s down to historian Hallie Rubenhold, who wrote Lady Worsley’s Whim. She took inspiration from a famous Joshua Reynolds portrait, which shows Seymour dressed in a red riding habit, garb the painter may have chosen because of Seymour’s reputation. Perhaps the sad truth is that Worsley and Seymour should never have married. She was romantic and, to quote scriptwriter David Eldridge, “too modern for the time she was born in”. Worsley was rational, ambitious and may have been autistic. Which is not to say the story lacks wider resonance. Natalie Dormer: “There are women now in societies who don’t have legal autonomy of themselves, so it’s actually more of a relevant story than you might think it is.”

Dangerous liaison: Natalie Dormer and Aneurin Barnard play Lady Seymour Worsley and George Bissett in The Scandalous Lady W

“As a ‘possession’ of her husband, Seymour didn’t even testify in the court case”

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TV & Radio

WANT MORE ? We’ll send news of the best history shows direct to your inbox every Friday. Sign up now at historyextra.com/newsletter

A boat sails along the Bridgewater Canal in Lancashire, 1793

Canals: The Making of a Nation TV BBC One Regions, then BBC Four, scheduled for August and September

Today, Britain’s canals are largely used for leisure, but back in the late 18th century, these new routes represented, in the words of Liz McIvor, “a type of infrastructure that hadn’t been seen before”. As the industrial revolution gathered pace, these waterways were crucial for moving raw materials, goods and people. Canal mania gripped the nation. But how to build them? As McIvor, curator of social history and technology

Soviet ideals Man with a Movie Camera DVD (BFI Blu-ray, £19.99, cert: U) Voted last year by Sight & Sound d magazine as the greatest documentary ever made, director Dziga Vertov’s silent-era Man with a Movie Camera shows us life in the cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa during the Soviet era. The movie buffs’ enthusiasm is rooted in great part in the sheer range of different techniques Vertov employed. Even today, Vertov’s use of double exposures, jump cuts and extreme close-ups can seem dizzying, so think how these 67 minutes must have

with Bradford Museums and Galleries, relates in her series charting how the canals transformed the country, those who oversaw their construction essentially invented the discipline of civil engineering. They were men such as modestly born millwright James Brindley (1716–72), who received little formal education as a child. “It was because of those breakthrough characters that people began to professionalise in engineering,” says McIvor. Individual canal engineers were upwardly socially mobile too, although there were limits. “Their children and grandchildren were accepted by the higher echelons of society, once the taint of trade had worn off a bit,” adds McIvor. seemed back in 1929, when the language of cinema was still being invented. For those with a passion for history, of course, Man with a Movie Camera is fascinating for other reasons. In showing us people going about their lives, almost as cogs in the Soviet machine, we catch a glimpse – albeit an idealised one – of a lost society. Adding context to the BFI’s Blu-ray re-release, the disc features, among other highlights, an audio commentary by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian; and Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1935), a propaganda film based on three songs dedicated to the revolutionary leader. The main film features an acclaimed score by Michael Nyman.

Renowned director Ric Burns traces the history of New York

The BBC will be going pop art mad in late August, with a season of programmes. These include A Brief History of Graffiti (BBC Four, August), presented by Professor Richard Clay, who embarks on a journey that takes us from a 30,000-year-old drawing found in the Caves D’Arcy in central France through to the contemporary street art of Banksy. Clay’s overarching question is whether there’s a connection between messages daubed on walls in different eras. Radio highlights include an edition of Open Country (Radio 4, Thursday 13 August) that focuses on Jersey as a stronghold for Neanderthals in western Europe. More Neanderthal artefacts, we learn, have been found on the island than in the rest of the British Isles combined. On BBC Radio Wales, and also available via BBC iPlayer Radio, Jewels from Llandudno (Saturday 15 August) tells the story of Wartski jewellers, which was started 150 years ago in north Wales by a Russian-Jewish émigré. Expect tales of royal weddings and Fabergé eggs. For those with satellite TV, renowned director Ric Burns’s New York (PBS America, weekdays from Monday 17 August) tells the story of the city that never sleeps, beginning back in the days when the Big Apple was a Dutch trading post, Neu Amsterdam. Also on PBS America, Islam: Empire of Faith h (starts Wednesday 19 August) explores the rise of Islamic power and faith during the religion’s first 1,000 years.

Dziga Vertov’s film offers a glimpse of the Soviet machine

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BBC History Magazine

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Industrial superhighways

OUT&ABOUT HISTORY EXPLORER

The Norman conquest Professor David Bates and Spencer Mizen visit NorwichCastle to discover how the people of England adapted to life under their new masters

MIKE HARRINGTON

I

t’s hard to imagine the Norwich that dominates the skyline today. skyline without its great Norman The size and scale of the castle is evident keep. It’s there – staring imposfrom any number of vantage points around ingly down on you from atop its the city. But it’s perhaps not until you step lofty motte – when you step out inside the keep – which played host to into the city from its bus station. William I’s son Henry I over Christmas 1121 It’s there as you pick your way – that you get a true feel for what a huge through Norwich’s market place, the impact this building would have had on so-called French borough. It’s even there, in Norwich’s inhabitants. This cavernous space the middle distance, as you approach the is filled with any number of treasures: city’s other triumph of Norman architecamong them a 900-year-old spiral staircase ture, Norwich Cathedral. (which conveys you to the castle battleToday, the castle is a popular tourist ments, where you can take in magnificent destination, a fascinating symbol of views of the city), a Norman chapel, Norwich’s rich history. Yet, 900 or so years a well that’s twice the depth of the keep, and ago – as it was constructed, partly from a gloomy dungeon. massive Caen stones shipped across the Perhaps most impressive of all is the Bigod Channel on behalf of England’s new masters arch, the original entrance to the keep. Art – it would have had many meanings to a historian Sandy Heslop has described the local population reeling in the aftershock arch as “one of the finest surviving of regime change. entrances to a secular building in “From its foundations to the stones Norman architecture”. Yet, incorporatatop its battlements, Norwich Castle ing influences from Germany and the was about the projection of power,” Iberian Peninsula, and taking its chief says Professor David Bates, professorial architectural inspiration from models fellow at the University of East Anglia. on the river Loire, south of Normandy, “It’s the new Norman regime saying it can be suggested that it’s not to the people of Norwich: ‘We’re in culturally Norman at all. “It certainly charge now.’” offers us a clue to just what a multiculA fortification, probably a huge tural place early 12th-century England ring-work, had been constructed on was,” says David Bates. the site by at least 1075 – we know this In the aftermath of his victory at because it’s recorded that year as being Hastings, William and his followers the epicentre of a rebellion against built fortifications and installed William the Conqueror, headed by one garrisons in centres of strategic of his barons, Ralph de Gael, Earl of importance across his new kingdom – East Anglia. from Rochester in the south-east and By 1110, the original wooden Chepstow in the west to York in building within the giant the north. But it wasn’t until A stained-glass window from the earthwork had been replaced William’s death, and a second Norman chapel at by the imposing stone structure generation of Norman rulers, Norwich Castle

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BBC History Magazine

“The castle was the Normans saying to the people of Norwich: ‘We’re in charge now’” PROFESSOR DAVID BATES Norwich Castle dominates the city’s skyline, as it would have done 900 years ago. More than 100 houses were razed to make way for this massive symbol of Norman power

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that many of the great stone buildings that we can still see today began to appear – Norwich Castle among them. “Norwich was an obvious location for a stone keep because, not only was it one of the kingdom’s great towns, it was right on the frontline in terms of potential threats to the Normans,” says David Bates. “A fleet sent by the Danish king Sven Estrithsson tried to force a landing here in 1069 and an earlier Danish king, Swein Forkbeard, sacked the town in 1004 in the process that led to his son Cnut becoming king of England and ruler of a North Sea empire. In these political circumstances, if there was going to be an attack, it was as likely as anywhere to be right here in Norwich.” You can only imagine what the AngloSaxon residents of the town would have made of this massive new building project. Domesday Book mentions at least 100 houses being razed to make way for the castle. And if that wasn’t enough disruption, a French quarter, or ‘borough’, soon sprang up to the west of the keep, complete with 500 French settlers. Then, of course, there’s the contemporary Norwich Cathedral, just a few hundred metres to the north-east. Epic scale To say that Duke William of Normandy’s conquest of England was a traumatic event

in the country’s history is an understatement of huge proportions. Regime change took place on an epic scale – something that the historian John Gillingham has described as a takeover “unparalleled in European history”. “By the time of Domesday Book in 1086,” says David Bates, “almost all the major landowners hail from Normandy and northern France. There’s barely an English tenant-in-chief to be seen. “The transformation was also pretty brutal in the church. Within a few years of the invasion, the only English bishop still in his post was Wulfstan of Worcester but – and this is important to give us a broader perspective – bishops and abbots from regions of northern France were already being appointed in England beforee 1066. Indeed this interaction with the continent had been going on since the start of the conversion of the English to Christianity in the late sixth century.” So why were the English sidelined so comprehensively in the wake of the Norman conquest? Part of the reason, argues David Bates, lies in the enormous gamble that William took in crossing the Channel in the first place. “The invasion of England was a hugely risky undertaking – failure could have had catastrophic consequences for William and his followers.

So, like all successful medieval kings, William had to offer rewards and also guarantees of security. This entailed defeating rebellions, granting lands and installing newcomers in places of strategic importance, such as Norwich.” For Norwich’s new rulers, this meant assuming control of a prosperous city sat right in the pivot of the hugely lucrative North Sea trading network – somewhere that David Bates describes as a “crucible of opportunity”. “There would have been a huge amount of turmoil and upheaval across England during the final decades of the 11th century – and

“CONQUERED AND CONQUERORS WOULD HAVE LEARNED TO LIVE SIDE BY SIDE – AND MANY PROSPERED FROM THE ARRANGEMENT” 82

BBC History Magazine

MIKE HARRINGTON

Out & about / History Explorer

ON THE PODCAST historyextra. com/bbchistory magazine/ podcasts

THE NORMAN CONQUEST VISIT

Norwich Castle

FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE 1 The White Tower, London Where William asserted his authority The White Tower was William I’s ultimate power statement. Begun on the edge of the largest city in his new kingdom, it was built to awe Londoners and to demonstrate authority. The stone keep was probably completed by 1100 – it remains the centrepiece of the Tower of London, Britain’s most popular tourist attraction. hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon

The interior of Norwich Castle’s keep. Top left is the Bigod arch, “one of the finest surviving entrances to a secular building in Norman architecture”

ALAMY/AKG IMAGES

many people won’t have liked it,” says Bates. “In Norwich, this seems to have translated into resentment, probably hostility, but interestingly no outright resistance. In other areas, the story was, of course, different.” Social change One such place was York, where hostility to the Norman takeover erupted into armed rebellion. William’s response was swift, leading to the infamous campaign now known as the Harrying of the North. Across entire swathes of northern England, homes were torched, crops ruined and men, women

William I at the head of his troops. His campaign of destruction in the north of England was, says David Bates, “brutal, even by medieval standards”

BBC History Magazine

Castle Hill, Norwich NR1 3JU 쎲 museums.norfolk.gov.uk

and children were put to death in a campaign of destruction that David Bates describes as “exceptionally brutal – even by medieval standards”. Yet for all the savagery and bloodshed of the years immediately after 1066, the Norman conquest isn’t just a story of pain, subjugation and resentment. It is also one of human resilience. “From the beginning, conquered and conquerors would have been learning to live side by side – and many of them would have prospered from the arrangement,” says David Bates. “There are few better examples of this than Norwich, which was soon embarking on a period of prosperity and conspicuous consumption not yet seen in its history – and making some of its residents rich in the process.” Even the vast building projects to erect the city’s castle and cathedral brought opportunity as well as upheaval, operating as huge job creation schemes for Norwich’s residents. And it’s instructive, says David Bates, to think – when you gaze out across the city from the great keep’s battlements – that your 12th-century predecessors would have seen parish churches dedicated to Breton, Scandinavian and northern English saints. “Yes, the Norman conquest of England was a story of power and domination. But it’s also one of migration, multiculturalism and the mixing of peoples – phenomena that are at the heart of English identity.” Historical advisor: Professor David Bates (left), historian and author. David’s most recent book is The Normans and Empire (OUP, 2013). Words: Spencer Mizen

2 Winchester Cathedral Where Norman architecture hit its zenith Few Norman buildings can match Winchester Cathedral in terms of scale and beauty. In many ways, the building is typical of the Norman conquest: the old Anglo-Saxon minster was reduced to rubble and in its place, completed in 1093, appeared a building boasting the longest nave in Europe. But multiculturalism is present again – a major inspiration was the burial church of the Salian emperors, the cathedral of Speyer in Germany. winchester-cathedral.org.uk

3 The Bayeux Tapestry Where William’s victory is uniquely relived The Bayeux Tapestry brings arguably the most celebrated battle in English history to glorious – and sometimes gory – life via nearly 70 metres of embroidered cloth. Despite its name, this depiction of Duke William’s victory at Hastings was made in England in the 1070s, commissioned by William’s half-brother, Odo, but reflecting English influences. tapisserie-bayeux.fr/ la_tapisserie_de_bayeux.html

4 Chepstow Castle Where England met Wales Work on the site began a matter of months after the battle of Hastings – under the Conqueror’s close friend William fitz Osbern – a testament to how the Normans immediately began to demonstrate their presence and authority. cadw.gov.wales

5 Dunfermline Abbey Where Norman style is evident Founded by Edgar the Ætheling’s sister St Margaret, the wife of King Malcolm (Mael Coluim) III, and developed by their son King David I, this magnificent building shows the architectural influence of the Norman conquest beyond the English kingdom’s borders. dunfermlineabbey.co.uk/wwp

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Out & about

FIVE THINGS TO DO IN SEPTEMBER Visions of plague FESTIVAL

350th Anniversary of the Great Plague

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Various locations, London 4–6 September 쎲 talesofplague.co.uk/festival

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ANNA GORDON/THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

n September 1665, London saw its highest number of casualties to the bubonic plague that had broken out in the city. Up to 100,000 Londoners or more are thought to have died during the outbreak – the worst since the Black Death of 1348 – which peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in just one week. This month, Londoners will commemorate the 350th anniversary of the outbreak with a three-day festival of music, drama, talks, walks, exhibitions and workshops. The programme opens with a procession – complete with replica plague cart, used to ferry the dead – to the historic church of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, site of the Great Plague pit. Elsewhere, the Wellcome Collection will play host to a plague doctor – complete with fascinating medical artefacts from the museum’s collection – while guided walks will take festival-goers on a tour of the city’s ancient churches and plague pits. The church of St Olave Hart Street will see experts discuss the Great Plague and Samuel Pepys, whose diaries are regarded as one of the best eyewitness accounts of the outbreak. Pepys is entombed in the nave of the church. The festival rounds off with a Pepys Party at the Hung Drawn and Quartered pub, Tower Hill, while St Botolph’s will host a Great Plague exhibition. Visit the website for the full programme of events.

Visitors to London’s Great Plague festival will come face-to-face with the plague doctor, a common sight in 17th-century England

EXHIBITION

EVENT

EVENT

EVENT

Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns

The Radio Times Festival

BBC History Magazine’s York History Weekend

Hadrian’s Wall Live!

British Museum, London 10 September–6 December 콯 020 7323 8181 (booking line) 쎲 britishmuseum.org

Around 100 drawings created using the delicate technique of metalpoint go on display at the British Museum this month, tracing the development of the genre. Works on show date from the 14th century to the present day.

Hampton Court Palace, Surrey 24–27 September 콯 0871 2305 539 (booking line) 쎲 radiotimesfestival.com

Big name historians including Simon Schama and Tracy Borman are part of the first Radio Times Festival, organised by Immediate Media, the company that publishes this magazine. GALLERY For a full historyextra. programme, com/bbchistory magazine visit the /silver-gold website.

Merchant Adventurers’ Hall, York 25–27 September 콯 0871 620 4021 (booking line) 쎲 historyweekend.com/york

York’s Merchant Adventurers’ Hall will play host to 15 expert speakers as BBC History Magazine launches its first history weekend in the city. Tracy Borman, Michael Wood, Bettany Hughes, Dan Jones and Ian Kershaw are among those speaking at the event. For information, and to book tickets, turn to page 62 or visit the website.

Various locations along Hadrian’s Wall 3–6 September 콯 0370 333 1181 쎲 english-heritage.org.uk/ hadrianswalllive

The Roman forts of Housesteads, Birdoswald, Chesters, as well as Corbridge Roman Town, will be putting on talks, battle re-enactments, gladiatorial combats, theatrical performances and more over four days in September. Visitors to Housesteads Roman Fort will also be able to experience the site under the cover of darkness.

Rogier van der Weyden’s silverpoint Portrait of an Unknown Woman, c1435 BBC History Magazine

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Out & about

MY FAVOURITE PLACE

Lisbon, Portugal By Roger Crowley

F

rom the ramparts of the medieval castle of St George, perched high above the city, it’s possible to understand why Lisbon exists. I’ve been coming here to research Portugal’s voyages of exploration and have grown to love this surprising place, rich in history. With its line of hills and the river Tagus beyond, wide as the straits between continents, gleaming in the sunlight, Lisbon is a gateway to the Atlantic. The Tagus gifted Lisbon the finest harbour on Europe’s western seaboard. From the Phoenicians onwards everyone has stopped off here. The Arabs held it for four centuries; their original settlement, Alfama, a dense souk of steep lanes through which antique trams hurtle, bells clanging, is where I like to stay. You can get pleasurably lost in its evocative labyrinth, eat a tasty Goan fish curry or visit clubs o is sung where fado – the languorous urban blues of Portugal, an expression of love, loss and hard times.

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The Second Crusade of 1147 expelled the Muslims and built the city’s stern cathedral on the slopes below the castle. Many of the English knights got no further and settled down – the start of a long Anglo-Portuguese alliance. But it was Henry the so-called Navigator, in the 15th century, who really got Lisbon going, with the voyages of discovery that culminated in Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India in 1497. A short tram ride will take you to Belém (Portuguese for Bethlehem) downstream on the Tagus, Gama’s point of departure. Belém is an iconic place in Portuguese history. For centuries, ships sailed from here to India, China and Brazil, returning with spices, slaves and gold. Some of this wealth went to build the city’s great treasure, the 16th-century monastery of Jerónimos, a World Heritage site, 300 yards long, wreathed inside and out with exuberant carved symbols, like the Philippa of Lancaster married John I, king of Portugal, in 1387. Their many offspring became known as Portugal’s ‘Illustrious Generation’

ornamentation on a Hindu temple. Its church contains the tombs of Gama, Manuel I, the king who ordered his expedition, and Luís de Camões, Portugal’s greatest poet. Nearby is the romantic tower of Belém, standing offshore in the Tagus, similarly embellished with motifs and carved figures, including the head of the first rhino to be seen in Europe since the time of the Romans. (Manuel sent the live rhino to the pope but sadly it drowned en route.) The Portuguese come to Belém to revere their past, take the lift to the top of the modern Monument to the Discoveries (another wonderful view) and to eat a local speciality, pastéis de Belém, custard tarts sprinkled with cinnamon and washed down with hits of black coffee. Spices made Lisbon for a time the wealthiest and most exotic city in Europe. It was the silicon valley of exploration and attracted map makers, merchants and entrepreneurs from across the continent, but its urban fabric was dramatically ruptured by the great earthquake of 1755. It happened on All Saints’ Day. Many people were in church and thousands died. The aftershock was not just

physical – in the age of enlightenment it caused debate across Europe about the existence of God. Much of the low-lying city was wiped out in a single day. The grand centre, fronting the Tagus, was rebuilt in imperial style, like London after the Great Fire of 1666, but the stark skeleton of the Carmo Convent remains as a monument to the devastation. Much of this history can be glimpsed in a series of museums: the Museum of Ancient Arts, which contains treasures from the Orient; the Maritime

BBC History Magazine

ROBERT HARDING

Continuing our historical holidays series, Roger explores a city that was once the wealthiest and most exotic in Europe

The Portuguese come to Belém to revere their past

ADVICE FOR TRAVELLERS

BEST TIME TO GO A visit in mid-late spring means you avoid the heat of the Portuguese summer or the often unpredictable winter weather. Carnival season takes place in June, when Lisbon’s patron saints, Peter, John and Anthony, are widely celebrated.

GETTING THERE You can fly to Lisbon from most UK airports, including London, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester.

WHAT TO PACK Both an umbrella and sun cream if you’re going in spring. The weather can switch from Atlantic rain to summer heat very suddenly.

WHAT TO BRING BACK Your house name or number in azulejos – a form of glazed ceramic tilework.

READERS’ VIEWS

The 16th-century tower of Belém, overlooking the river Tagus, is a Unesco World Heritage Site and a favourite tourist attraction

Museum; the Gulbenkian; and, one of my favourites, the Tile Museum. Azulejos, glazed tiles, are a national art form – you can see examples everywhere throughout Lisbon, but this collection is splendid. If museums pall and it gets too hot, take a short train ride to the nearby town of Sintra, Lisbon’s

Been there… Have you been to Lisbon? Do you have a top tip for readers? Contact us via Twitter or Facebook

green hill station. Perched on an outcrop, it’s noticeably cooler in summer and contains the fascinating National Palace of Sintra – a wonderful mix of Moorish and medieval European architecture, closely connected with another figure of the Portuguese golden age. Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, came to Lisbon to marry King John I in 1387; she was a guiding influence on the Portuguese court and produced a succession of talented sons, including Henry the Navigator, who steered

Lisbon and Portugal on its remarkable voyage. Roger Crowleyy is a writer and historian. His new book, Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire, is published this month and reviewed on page 72

Go up into the hills & see beautiful town of Sintra – where Arthur Wellesley once signed a truce that almost ended his career @_GerryRoberts Take a tour with the old tram. So romantic and wonderful views of the town @EuropeRider See the amazing ceramic tiles everywhere. Don’t forget a trip up the tower! Roger Perris

Read more about Roger’s experiences in Lisbon at historyextra.com/ bbchistorymagazine/lisbon

Next month: Mark Stoyle visits Brittany in France

twitter.com/historyextra facebook.com/ historyextra

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Q&A

QUIZ BY JULIAN HUMPHRYS Try your hand at this month’s history quiz 1. What was set in 1846 at 4 ft 8½ins?

ONLINE QUIZZES historyextra.com /bbchistorymagazine/quiz

2. What medieval custom caused William Ashford to abandon his appeal in 1818 against the acquittal of Abraham Thornton of the murder of his sister? 3. Which organisation was first set up in 1909 by Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming? 4. Why was the Parliament of Bats, which was held in Leicester in 1426, so called? 5. In February 1864, a 16-year-old actress married a 46-year-old artist in St Barnabas Church in Kensington. Who were they? 5 ILLUSTRATION BY GLEN MCBETH

Q How were thousands of people killed

in medieval battles? Surely swords were far less efficient than guns

6. What originally stood on the roof of this building?

Steve Newman, via Twitter 6

The simple answer is that in absolute terms the numbers of casualties inflicted in medieval battles weree generally far lower than those suffered in the great battles of the industrial age. In addition, medieval armies were smaller and battles much shorter in duration. The figure of 28,000 dead is often quoted for the battle of Towton in 1461 – the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil – but most historians now accept that this is almost certainly a gross exaggeration. Having said that, as a percentage of those who actually took part, the casualties in such battles and in the pursuits that often followed them could be extremely high – and the weapons used could be horrifyingly efficient, causing considerable damage.

ALAMY

A

QUIZ ANSWER 1. The gauge (distance between the two rails) of a British railway line. 2. Thornton challenged him to trial by combat, an age-old right that had never been repealed. The case led parliament to abolish the right in the following year. 3. The Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. 4. Because the members, who had been forbidden to wear swords to the parliament, armed themselves instead with clubs or bats. 5. Ellen Terry and George Frederick Watts. 6. An enormous equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington. (It’s the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner and the statue is now at Aldershot.) BBC History Magazine

Whereas hand-to-hand combat is now the exception, in the Middle Ages it was very much the norm and weapons like the English bill with its stabbing spike, slicing blade and tearing hook were ideally suited for it. At the battle of Flodden in 1513, the bill accounted for the deaths of 5,000–7,000 Scots, perhaps 20 per cent of their entire army. Missile weapons like the longbow could also be effective at killing large numbers. At the battle of Stoke in 1487, for example, Henry VII’s archers took a heavy toll of the 4,000 unarmoured Irish troops who made up the bulk of the Earl of Lincoln’s rebel army. Julian Humphrys, development officer for the Battlefields Trust and author of Clash of Arms: Twelve English Battless (English Heritage, 2006)

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Miscellany

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Write to BBC History Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN. Email: [email protected] or submit via our website: historyextra.com

Every issue, picture editor Samantha Nott brings you a recipe from the past. This month it’s a chicken dish dreamt up for a special royal occasion

Coronation chicken

INGREDIENTS • 2 roasting chickens (I used 2¾ lbs chicken drums and thighs) • water and a little wine • 1 carrot • 1 bouquet garni • salt and 3–4 peppercorns For the sauce: • 2oz chopped onion • 2 tsp curry powder • 1 tsp tomato purée • 1 wine glass of red wine • ¾ wine glass of water • 1 bay leaf • salt, sugar, pepper • 1–2 slices of lemon • 1 squeeze of lemon juice • 1–2 tbsp apricot purée (or apricot jam) • ¾ pint mayonnaise (I used 28 tbsp) • 2–3 tbsp whipped cream, plus a little more • 1 tbsp oil

METHOD Poach the chicken with carrot, bouquet, salt and peppercorns in water and a little wine, for about 40 minutes or until tender. Allow to cool in the liquid and remove bones. Cream of curry sauce: Fry the onion in oil for 3-4 minutes, then add curry powder. Fry for a further 1–2 minutes. Add tomato purée, wine, water, and bay leaf. Bring to boil, add lemon slices and juice, pinch of salt, pepper and sugar. Simmer uncovered for 5–10 minutes. Strain and cool. Add mayonnaise and apricot purée in stages. Season, and add more lemon juice if necessary. Mix in the whipped cream. Coat the chicken in the sauce and mix in a little extra cream and seasoning. Serve with rice salad and a little extra sauce. Rice salad: The salad comprised rice, cooked peas, diced raw cucumber, finely chopped mixed herbs and French dressing. VERDICT The original version has many more subtle wine and herbinfused flavours than the bright yellow, sultana-laden, modern sandwich filler! Difficulty: 4/10 Time: 1½ hours Based on the original B 1953 recipe from: The Constance Spry Cookery C Book by Rosemary Hume B and Constance Spry a C Coronation chicken: a dish fit for a queen

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American neurologist Silas Weir-Mitchell advocated rest and isolation for those suffering from psychological impairment

Q Shell shock was a term coined during the First World War. But are there documented cases before this and how were those afflicted treated? @Sprint901, via Twitter

Yes, there are documented cases of related conditions prior to the First World War. British Army surgeons wrote reports on the after effects of shellfire following the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and Balkan War of 1912–13. These prefigure shell shock as described by the psychologist Charles Myers in 1915. Cases of what we would now recognise as the psychological wounds of war were also written about in relation to earlier conflicts. ‘Nostalgia’, for example, was viewed as a psychopathological disorder from the 17th–19th centuries, one commonly diagnosed in soldiers. Treatments for these conditions were extremely varied. They included removal from the source of symptoms through discharge from the

A

army, the incitement of ‘pain and terror’, as recommended by French doctor Jourdan Le Cointe, or through the public shaming of sufferers, as practised during the American Civil War. Military medicine focused on the short-term maintenance of manpower rather than the long-term rehabilitation of the individual. Thus most of the developments in treatment of psychological impairment in this period were being made in civil practice, with Jean-Martin Charcot’s experiments with hypnosis, Silas Weir-Mitchell’s rest cure, Freud’s talking therapy and explorations of the efficacy of electroshock therapy. Dr Jessica Meyer, academic fellow in legacies of war at the University of Leeds

BBC History Magazine

BRANCH COLLECTIVE/ROSEMARY SMITH

Coronation chicken was created in 1953, when renowned florist Constance Spry and cordon bleu chef Rosemary Hume catered for a banquet to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II. It is believed to be inspired by the ‘Jubilee Chicken’ created for George V’s silver jubilee in 1935. At the time the recipe was widely published so it could be enjoyed at street parties across Britain. But, with postwar rationing still in place, the ingredients would have been hard to come by.

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Lady Caroline, whose affair with Lord Byron caused great scandal (see 4 down)

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Across 5 Blaise, 17th-century French mathematician and religious philosopher (6) 7 Whitehall war memorial by Edward Lutyens, the stone version unveiled in 1920 (8) 100 Government-commissioned ship, whose task was to attack and plunder another nation’s vessels (9) 11 English gold coin worth six shillings and eight pence (5) 12 Organisation set up in 1949 to facilitate economic development of eastern countries of the Soviet bloc (and other socialist states) (7) 144 Viking descendants who, led by Rollo, established a duchy in northern France in the 10th century (7) 166 See 18 down 17 See 23 down 188 Historical area corresponding roughly to the Crimea, whose people produced exquisite ‘animal style’ artefacts (7) 20 The social orders of France (the common people, clergy, nobility) prior to the Revolution (7) 22/27 The main reception centre, located near New York, at the height of immigration into US (5,6) 244 Democrat leader twice defeated by Eisenhower for the US presidency (9) 266 Name given to English coastal defence towers built at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (8) 27 See 22 across

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Down 1 Great Meso-American civilisation, whose Classic period began around AD 250 (4) 2 Historic city of the West Bank, a major source of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (6) 3 19th-century politician, free trade campaigner and co-founder of Anti-Corn Law League (4,6) 4 Lady Caroline, who had a scandalous affair with Lord Byron (4) 5 That of Avignon lasted from 1309–77, when it was re-established at Rome (6) 6 Medieval tax: its revival by Charles I was one of the grievances leading to the Civil War (4,5) 8 Nazi soldier,

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Eagles at War By Ben Kane The first of three works of historical fiction, Eagles at Warr explores the bloody battle of Teutoburg Forest, in AD 9, which saw an alliance of Germanic tribes take on the might of three Roman legions – and win. Available in paperback from 27 August, published by Penguin Random House

tried by a Polish court in 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz, where he had been the commandant of the concentration camp (5) 9 Middle name of the 19th/20thcentury Glasgow artist, architect and designer, Charles Mackintosh (6) 13 City of southern England, named Noviomagus Reginorum by the Romans (in one version) (10) 15 In the years following her killing with other Romanov family members, ‘Anna Anderson’ was a famous claimant of her identity (9) 17 Local official, such as chief magistrate in Anglo-Saxon times (5) 18/166 Mechanical invention that contributed to the industrial revolution and the age of rail transport (5,6) 199 Former archbishop of Canterbury (d1109), whose ontological argument for God’s existence has been much debated (6) 21 Ecclesiastical gatherings such as that of Whitby (664) and of Dordt (1618/19) (6) 23/17 across Commander whose misinterpreted order resulted in the tragic charge of the Light Brigade in

October 1854 (4,6) 25 The Drury Lane theatre was the HQ of this Second World War entertainment organisation (4) Compiled by Eddie James

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‘Animal style’ artefacts, such as this belt buckle, were created where? (see 18 across)

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Emperors of Rome Tom Holland describes how the tyrannical house of Caesar remained in power despite the excesses of Nero and Caligula British faces Simon Schama selects some of the most fascinating portraits from the country’s history

Europe at war Ian Kershaw explains why the early 20th century was beset by conflict and how that period came to an end

The Somme Andrew Roberts opines on the bloody First World War battle

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My history hero “His work was incredibly radical for the time. He brought a whole new dynamic to every aspect of both Scottish architecture and interior design”

Singer-songwriter Midge Ure chooses

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

C

harles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, artist and designer – and a prominent member of the ‘Glasgow School’, a circle of influential modern artists and designers. He is best known for designing the Glasgow School of Art, which was badly damaged in a fire last year – but he also worked in interior design, furniture and textiles. In later life, he and his wife, Margaret, moved to France where he painted watercolours. He died in London. When did you first hear about Mackintosh?

Probably in my late teens – although I was aware of his work before I was really aware of him. The teachers never taught us about Mackintosh at school but, growing up, I just became aware of his architecture walking around my Glasgow hometown. I remember going up to the Glasgow School of Art one day to see if I could have a quick look round – but in those days they wouldn’t let you in if you weren’t a student! What kind of person was Mackintosh?

He was obviously a very creative person, but he also believed strongly in what he was doing. You have to remember that he started out as an architect during the Victorian era when a lot of buildings, both inside and out, were rather dark and foreboding. He didn’t want that. And he wasn’t afraid to use different colours and materials, going for a daring modernist look. Indeed, his work was incredibly radical for the time, as you can tell by his distinctive high-back chair designs. He brought a whole new dynamic to every aspect of both Scottish architecture and interior design. What made him a hero?

He had the courage of his convictions. A lot of people didn’t get his work because he so brazenly flouted Victorian convention, both in terms of architecture and interior design. His work was just too ‘out there’ for many of his contemporaries. But he stuck to his guns, and that shows a huge strength of character; in short, he had a lot of bottle. I also love the way that when he got a job to design a building, he did the lot. You didn’t just get the house with Mackintosh, but the furnishings and wallpaper too.

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“He had a lot of bottle,” says Midge Ure of the flamboyant Charles Rennie Mackintosh, pictured here

You wouldn’t have had to go to Ikea because he designed it all for you! What was Mackintosh’s finest hour?

Hill House, in Helensburgh, near Glasgow, overlooking the river Clyde. He built and designed absolutely everything in the property, which dates back to the 1900s and, to my mind, it’s his finest domestic creation. You can still see it now [it’s a National Trust for Scotland property] – and it’s just stunning. The interior design is a mix of art nouveau, arts and crafts and Scottish baronial with Japanese-style touches here and there. The colours are bold… and the house just so far ahead of its time. Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about him?

Not really. I’ve never really heard anyone say anything bad about him – although I think it was rather sad that in later life he turned his back on architecture and design, and devoted himself to his watercolours. I think he had so much more to give the world of architecture. Can you see any parallels between Mackintosh’s life and your own?

We’re both creative people, although I think my work has been fairly mainstream compared to what he produced. Being creative types, I suspect that we also both had to swim upstream much of the time, and stay true to our beliefs to realise our vision. If you could meet Mackintosh, what would you ask him?

It’s hard to know what to ask your hero. As a young man, I was once in the same room as Fred Astaire but was too nervous to go up to talk to him! I think I’d ask Mackintosh where he got his ideas, and why he gave up architecture. Most architects keep going until they drop. Midge Ure was talking to York Membery Midge Ure OBE E is best known as the frontman with the rock band Ultravox but he also co-wrote and produced the Band Aid chart-topper Do They Know it’s Christmas?? and co-organised Live Aid. For details on upcoming shows visit midgeure.co.uk

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