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How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today
The experiences that shaped Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot co-conspirators into violent extremists seem all too familiar today. Lucy Worsley tells a story of religious clashes, state-sanctioned torture and comrades-in-arms willing to die for the cause
Towards the end of 1605, a man was being interrogated in a smallish building deep within the fortress of the Tower of London. It was here, in the most secure place in Britain, that the state dealt with its enemies. This particular enemy of the state was named Guy Fawkes. The records of that interrogation are today among the treasures of the National Archives, and going there to film them for the new series of Lucy Worsley Investigates was an unbelievable thrill. It’s evident that a secretary recorded Fawkes’s words, and that the conspirator was asked to sign his name to verify that the record was accurate. On one page, his signature is clear and confident: Guido Fawkes. Two days later, though, his name is no more than the faintest of scrawls. Historians generally agree that this difference is because, in the time between scribbling the two signatures, he’d been tortured and had lost the use of his hands. A few weeks later, he would also lose his life. Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot conspirators It’s quite extraordinary to think that, 400 years later, this tale of violence has morphed into an annual occasion for family-friendly fun. The reason for lighting bonfires and fireworks on the fifth of November is now largely forgotten. Technically, we’re celebrating the foiling of a plot against King James VI & I, planned by Catholic extremists whom many would call terrorists. Read more | Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato If you step off a London Underground train at Charing Cross, you can admire an enormous tiled image of the gunpowder plotters that takes up the whole height of the platform wall. Seen by thousands of commuters, tourists and schoolkids on a London day out, the image of the conspirators – with their tall hats, flowing locks and furtive body language – makes them look like a rather stylish rock band. But with violence and religious extremism wreaking havoc round the globe today, it seems timely to revisit what might be mistaken for a cosy old story of plots and plotters. Because when we compare our knowledge of radicalisation in the modern world with what happened to Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, many similarities become clear. Perhaps because the name of Guy Fawkes is so well known today, many people don’t realise that he wasn’t the most significant of the conspirators. The plot’s mastermind was actually a Warwickshire gentleman called Robert Catesby, whose role has been rather overshadowed by the dramatic circumstances of Fawkes’s capture and subsequent torture. What the Charing Cross tube picture does do accurately is give the sense that the group felt a strong social connection – like a band of brothers, which some of them were, literally: among the conspirators were two sets of siblings, including Christopher and John Wright. Read more | Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament They were among Fawkes’s fellow plotters who had known each other during their childhoods in the city of York. There, the Catholic faith was alive and well – and subject to intense persecution – in the later years of the reign of the Protestant queen Elizabeth I. Guy was himself baptised a Protestant in 1570 but in his teens, it seems, he embraced Catholicism with all the fervour of a convert. His journey towards radicalisation could have begun as early as 1586, when he may have witnessed the appalling public execution of a York woman, Margaret Clitherow. Having been caught sheltering priests of the outlawed Catholic faith, she was crushed to death with heavy weights. In the eyes of her fellow Catholics, her death turned Margaret into a martyr. A brown and shrivelled hand, purportedly one of Margaret’s, is venerated today in the Bar Convent in York as a holy relic. It seems likely, then, that Fawkes and the Wrights would have realised early on that life would not be easy for them unless they gave up on Catholicism – or on the government. Guy Fawkes: an extremist abroad In his early twenties, Fawkes made a big life change. He sold his possessions near York and travelled to mainland Europe to fight as a paid soldier for the Catholic cause. Many modern-day extremists make similar life choices. Learning the trade of warfare abroad, surrounded by young men with the same beliefs and removed from the calming influence of family and community at home, the world view of a soldier fighting in the name of faith often narrows to black and white. Jason Burke, The Guardian’s international security correspondent, knows all about this process. An extremist fighter, he explains, is ‘best’ trained over several weeks in a special camp. It’s vital to prevent the wannabe soldier from going home each evening to see mum. Read more | Guy Fawkes “is like a modern-day jihadist,” says counter-terrorism expert In Europe, Fawkes was soon on the payroll of Catholic Spain, learning skills that would, in time, make him attractive to the plotters. In particularly, he became familiar with gunpowder and explosions. Meanwhile, another young man was also being radicalised – Robert Catesby, whose idea it later was to blow up the House of Lords in order to kill the king, some of his family, his members of parliament and the whole seat of power. Catesby had long been dissatisfied with the way England was governed. Under Elizabeth, his family had paid the fines exacted for refusing to attend Protestant church services. More dangerously, he got himself caught up in the Essex Rebellion of 1601. This wasn’t specifically a Catholic plot but, rather, involved a grouping of disaffected people of various stripes who aimed to change the power constellations at court. That uprising was unsuccessful, and Catesby was forced to pay a huge fine for his part in it. Then, in 1603, Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland inherited her crown. It seems that Catesby had high hopes of the new regime. England under James VI & I The new king knew that his succession as James I of England might well be challenged – so, being a clever politician, he tried to appeal to a wide base of potential supporters in England, hinting strongly that he’d be more sympathetic than Elizabeth to those of his future subjects who were Catholics. After all, he had a Catholic wife, Anne of Denmark. When James came to the English throne, though, those who knew him best perhaps weren’t surprised to find that the hinted-at new policy of tolerance never materialised – quite the opposite, in fact. Catesby and other Catholics were chagrined to find the new king proclaiming in parliament that he was never going to tolerate their religion. Another staging post on the journey towards direct action was passed. Catesby did not know Guy Fawkes at this stage, but they had one key thing in common: Fawkes’s new friends, the Spanish. Spanish archives contain correspondence from Fawkes, reporting from the European mainland on what he understood about the situation in England. The new king’s regime was not stable, Fawkes claimed, arguing that it was justifiable to use violence to promote the ‘right’ kind of religion. Fawkes was clearly ripe for recruitment as a Catholic conspirator. And so we come to vital documents for the history of the gunpowder plot: the records of the confessions made by the surviving conspirators after it was all over. I looked at one set, held at Hatfield House Archives, which take us right into the room during some of the plotters’ meetings, allowing us to overhear those dangerous conversations. Read more | Traitor or Faithful: British history's most notorious treason cases One of the conspirators, Thomas Wintour (sometimes spelled Winter), described the moment when Catesby told him that he’d thought of a way of restoring Catholicism to England. His idea was to blow up parliament on the day of its opening session, killing the king and all of the MPs who had passed unjust laws against Catholics. Chillingly, Catesby believed that those actions were reason enough for them to die. Catesby had a task for Wintour. He was to travel to Europe to find some “confident” gentleman – meaning one in whom they could have confidence – to act as the plot’s technician. He’d heard that a certain Guy Fawkes might be a suitable candidate – and one who also offered another important advantage. Having lived abroad for so many years, few people in England would remember Fawkes’s face. Catesby was already on the authorities’ radar, but Fawkes might walk down the street in Westminster without being recognised. To further obscure his identity, Fawkes also did something common in modern-day extremism: he adopted a war-name. He would now go by the moniker John Johnson. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot The plot was taking shape. After the planned explosion in Westminster, Catesby intended to take advantage of the chaos. With James’s regime in disarray, a great uprising would be launched in Catesby’s native Midlands, and Catesby would snatch James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to place her on the throne as a puppet queen. But time ticked on. There was a delay when the opening of parliament was postponed, and soon there were just too many people in on the secret. Then there was a leak. One plotter, anxious that Catholics present in parliament on the key day would also lose their lives, wrote an anonymous warning: the Catholic Lord Monteagle received a letter telling him not to attend. Read more | Alternate history: what if… the gunpowder plot had succeeded? This missive, known as the Monteagle Letter, made its way into the hands of the authorities, where it caused much concern. Was the threat real? Many questions remain about how much the authorities already knew at that point, but certainly an extra patrol was laid on in Westminster. As every schoolkid now knows, Fawkes was found hiding in a cellar with his dark lantern, his barrels of gunpowder and the fuse to ignite an explosion that would very likely have transformed Britain’s religion. Interrogation and torture of Guy Fawkes Captured and taken to the Tower, Fawkes next experienced something else still common worldwide: interrogation. I asked psychologist Laura Farrugia, assistant professor at Northumberland University, who helps to train police in carrying out ethical and effective interviews, to assess the techniques used on Fawkes. She noted that the initial questions posed by authorities at the Tower, who were accustomed to interrogating suspects, were concise, targeted, comprehensible. Whenever Fawkes knew or guessed that the authorities already knew the answers, he gave them freely. Read more | 9 places associated with Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot However, Fawkes didn’t name his fellow conspirators. So the king himself stepped in, drawing up a list of less-successful, more ‘clever’, complicated questions that would have been difficult and confusing for any suspect to answer. Unsurprisingly, this approach failed. Nevertheless, Fawkes did say something that provides perhaps the first and the last piece in the jigsaw of his radicalisation: he would not betray his friends. Extremists were, and are, social creatures. They rely on friendship and camaraderie. This, as well as their political and religious beliefs, keeps them going. The king ordered torture, and Fawkes did eventually crack. Ironically, though, the authorities didn’t need his information. They had followed other leads, tracking Catholics who had left London suddenly just before the attack, and eventually caught up with the key plotters in a safe house in the Midlands. Thomas Wintour’s confession recounts a scene, just before the authorities stormed in, that would have been romantic – if it were not acted out by men who’d been willing to take hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. They agreed to die together. And when the local sheriff entered, guns blazing, Catesby did just that, taking a bullet that killed him. Fawkes and a few other surviving conspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered in London. The plotters would perhaps have been mortified to know that their plot not only failed in its aims but even helped to secure James’s regime. It turned him into a survivor – someone with God on his side. He insisted that his personal achievement in defeating this plot be commemorated on its anniversary every year. Four centuries later, many Britons are still obeying him – even though most have forgotten exactly why. This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Queen Victoria's unhappy childhood: life under the 'Kensington System'
What was Queen Victoria like as a child? And did she have a normal childhood? Here, historian Lucy Worsley explores the monarch’s youth at Kensington Palace – where she lived under the rules of the 'Kensington System' – and finds that it might not have been as unhappy as Victoria herself would have had us believe
On 24 May 1819, a baby girl was born at Kensington Palace. It was then the least fashionable of the royal palaces, hidden away behind the lime trees of its wide green gardens to the west of London. The arrival of Alexandrina Victoria, as she was christened, did cause some excitement. A long line of carriages calling for news about the health of the mother, the Duchess of Kent, reached all the way to Hyde Park Corner. But at that point the new baby, King George III’s latest granddaughter, was fairly low down the royal pecking order. As the years of her childhood passed, however, and as her elder cousins failed to thrive and died, Alexandrina Victoria grew in importance. It gradually emerged that the little girl growing up quietly behind closed doors at Kensington Palace would one day reign over the whole of the British Isles, including Ireland. And, in due course, a quarter of the globe’s landmass. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/05/GettyImages-513688265-347013e-e1703672371102.jpg" width="621" height="406" alt="The young Victoria with her mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, in an 1821 portrait by William Beechey. "My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much," said Victoire. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)" title="The young Victoria with her mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, in an 1821 portrait by William Beechey. "My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much," said Victoire. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)" /> The death of Queen Victoria's father Just as Queen Victoria’s path to the throne was not obvious at the time of her birth, her education and training for the position seem at first sight to have been quite shockingly inadequate. One of the problems was the early loss of her father, the Duke of Kent. He had terrible debts, caused partly by an expensive refurbishment of his apartment at Kensington. In the winter of 1819–20, he tried to save money by taking his beloved wife and baby daughter to live cheaply in a rented holiday house, out-of-season, at Sidmouth in Devon. There he caught pneumonia and passed away. This left his widowed duchess, whose name was Victoire, in a difficult position. German, and only recently married to her duke, she spoke no English and felt ostracised by the rest of the royal family. She had few resources, either financial or intellectual, on which to fall back for the care of her daughter. View Green Video on the source website One person who knew Victoire, Duchess of Kent, described her as “very delightful, in spite of want of brains”. If she was scatty and disorganised, she was also warm and loving. Her late husband’s will now placed Victoire in an unusual situation. Normally, a child in the line of succession would be handed over to the reigning monarch for education and guardianship. But the Duke of Kent had loved and trusted his wife, and made her guardian of their daughter instead. This was a duty Victoire intended to carry through. The rest of the royal family would perhaps have preferred it if she’d slipped back off to her native Germany – but Victoire remained. The daunting implication was that, if her daughter came to the throne before she was 18, Victoire herself would become regent of Britain. She would effectively be reigning over a country of which she could not even speak the language. Unfortunately, Victoire lacked confidence in herself. “I am not fit for my place, no, I am not,” she would say. “I am just an old stupid goose.” No wonder that she now fell into the outstretched hands of a man on whom she would come greatly to rely: her late husband’s adjutant from his army days, John Conroy. Who was Sir John Conroy? Conroy was a 6ft, black-haired, good-looking chancer from an Irish background. It's easy to see how Victoire was forced by necessity, loneliness and incapacity to depend on the man who became her advisor and factotum (an employee who takes on several types of work). Her husband's death had left her both distraught and penniless. Her brother Leopold came down to Sidmouth to help out, but failed to bring her any ready money. "Gut, gut Leopold," as Victoire called him, in her German accent, was nevertheless "rather slow in the uptake and in making decisions". It was Conroy, with his "activity and capability", who arranged a loan for her at Coutts bank. And Conroy could see, as the duchess’s chief advisor, that he might one day become the power behind the throne. He encouraged Victoire and the little Victoria to go back to live at Kensington Palace, and there devised something called the ‘System’, a set of strict rules under which the princess would live. What was the Kensington System? It sounds rather sinister, and on some levels it was. At its most basic, the System (as Conroy himself called it, with capital S) was for the young Victoria’s personal safety. It demanded she be kept in semi-seclusion at Kensington Palace. Behind the garden walls, she’d be isolated from both disease and assassination attempts. Secondly, the fact that she was rarely seen at court distanced her, in people’s minds, from the unpopular regime of her uncles, Kings George and then William IV. As a possible future queen, she’d remain untainted by association with them. She would be a fresh start – or, as Conroy put it, “the Nation’s Hope”. But thirdly – and sinisterly – the System also seems to have been about breaking Victoria’s spirit, and getting her to submit. It contained an element of surveillance: she wasn’t allowed to sleep alone, play with other girls or even walk downstairs without having someone holding her hand. And each day she had to write in her ‘Behaviour Book’ how well – or badly – she’d behaved (see more rules below). On the podcast | Professor Jane Ridley reveal lesser-known aspects of Queen Victoria's life Accounts of Queen Victoria’s childhood usually take at face value her adult recollections of this period in her life, in which she complained of trauma and loneliness. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that she did have a natural tendency to make a drama out of her own life. And perhaps there were some elements of the System that helped to make her reign a success. There is no doubt that Conroy was indeed a manipulative bully, but there is also something more to his poor reputation among historians than just Victoria’s well-recorded dislike. The snobbish court establishment looked down on his lack of an aristocratic background. Born in Wales to Anglo-Irish parents – his father was a barrister – Conroy had reached his position of influence entirely by his own efforts, which contemporaries found troubling. Read more | ‘Dumpy’ dowager or vibrant beauty: what did Queen Victoria really look like, and how tall was she? Secondly, if the System Conroy had devised had three components, the first two were wildly successful. He did keep Victoria safe. And, through a carefully stage-managed series of public appearances in her teenage years, he did manage to create an enormous groundswell of warmth for her when, eventually, she became queen. The Kensington System that governed Queen Victoria's childhood Victoria was not allowed to spend time by herself and she always had to sleep in her mother’s room. Victoria could not walk downstairs without holding the hand of an adult in case she fell. (It sounds melodramatic, but Victoria did actually confirm in later life that this was a rule she had to abide by.) Victoria was not allowed to meet any strangers or third parties without her governess being present. The young Victoria had to write in a ‘Behaviour Book’ how well she’d behaved each day, so that her mother could assess her progress. Sometimes it was good, sometimes “VERY NAUGHTY”. Victoria could only appear in public on carefully stage-managed ‘publicity tours’. This was to distance her from the unpopular regime of her uncles, Kings George IV and William IV, and to present her as “the Nation’s Hope”. Victoria was not allowed to dance the scandalous and intimate new dance called the waltz, not even (as is often said) with other royal relations. She would never waltz until married to Prince Albert. Victoria had to build up her strength by exercising with her Indian clubs [a pair of bowling-pin shaped wooden clubs] and a machine with pulleys and weights, and was mandated to have plenty of fresh air. She would be a life-long devotee of open windows, to the extent that her courtiers would always be shivering. The young Victoria was not allowed to gorge on her food. She was allowed to eat bread with milk and plain roast mutton, and was restricted from eating her favourite things: sweetmeats and fruit. Young Victoria's publicity tours One of the items on display in an exhibition at Kensington Palace is the small wooden travelling bed that Victoria used for another strand of Conroy’s System: the country-wide ‘publicity tours’ that he organised for her. Taking her on closely choreographed visits to provincial towns and nobleman’s houses around Britain gave her future subjects an intriguing glimpse of their future monarch. It was a strategy that paid off entirely. When, in the early hours of 20 June 1837, the 18-year-old Victoria was woken up at Kensington Palace with news that her uncle had died in the night, she was able to emerge – as Conroy had planned – as a fresh start for the monarchy. Victoria's journey to the throne was a struggle. But once she was queen, she would not long remain at Kensington Palace. She removed herself as quickly as she could to the relative freedom of Buckingham Palace instead. There’s a well-known and compelling narrative that sees Victoria, on her accession day, cutting free of the System to the extent, even, of changing her name. Read more | Victoria’s great palaces: 5 of the queen’s grandest and most significant homes When called on to sign her name, the new queen put just plain “Victoria” – not the “Alexandrina Victoria” of her christening. It’s widely believed that she was called “Drina” in childhood, rather than Victoria, and that the change symbolised a break from the past. But her mother had some time earlier agreed that the “Alexandrina” should be dropped quietly, and her toys are marked with a “V”. The duchess had, in any case, also called her daughter by the pet name of “Vickelchen”. How did the Kensington System affect Victoria? So the System was not entirely a black-and-white affair. Even the most unpleasant aspect of it, that of surveillance, perhaps had an unintended benefit. It toughened Victoria up. She would have to face a lifetime of being watched and judged. The Behaviour Books were just the start. As her mother explained to her: “You cannot escape… from the situation you are born in.” Victoria might as well be given the chance to get used to living under watch and under pressure. This was far from normal for a 19th-century girl, who was expected by society to shrink away from attention. But even Victoria’s Uncle Leopold, an enemy of Conroy’s, likewise coached his niece about the element of performance that would be so central to her role as a constitutional monarch. “High personages are a little like stage actors,” he explained. “They must always make efforts to please their public.” Harsh judgement has sometimes been heaped upon the Duchess of Kent for not standing up to Conroy when he bullied her. But while Victoire lacked moral fibre, that did not make her a bad person, and this too is something that Victoria herself in later life came to appreciate. As Victoire explained, she’d simply done her best for her daughter. “My greatest of fears was that I loved her too much,” she said. And what Victoire did bequeath to her daughter was a huge capacity for love. Most royals of the early 19th century could not afford to look for love in their marriages, which were pragmatic affairs undertaken for blood or politics. Yet Victoire, creature of an age in which romantic novels were beginning to provide a new template for living, had sought and found a soulmate in her husband. She brought up her daughter to desire the same thing – and Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert was a love match. Read more | Love before Albert: Queen Victoria’s suitors Victoria came in later life to realise the love her mother had felt for her – despite the System – and she also spent her childhood watching her mother defer so much to the advice of a man. The result of this was that she herself, in due course, would cling all the more closely to her own family. And in doing so, Queen Victoria would model for the media and the nation a domestic life that was more than acceptable to the age in which she lived. The dutiful queen The industrial revolution had allowed a man, working in industry or business, to earn enough money to keep his wife at home, untroubled by the outside world. In her own family life, Victoria would become a kind of super-Victorian: submissive to her husband, Prince Albert, apparently devoted to her children – the perfect pin-up for a populace tired of the debauchery, the mistresses and the general excesses of previous kings. Read more | Who were Queen Victoria's children? Everything you need to know about her sons and daughters But while the young Victoria was loved to the extent of being spoilt, there were still terrible gaps in her more formal education. The System had given her nothing more than the standard education for a genteel young lady being prepared for marriage. The majority of her time was spent on music, drawing (at which she excelled), dancing, religion, French and German. Her tutors reported her as “indifferent” at spelling, but “good” at most other subjects. “The rest of her education,” one of Victoria’s prime ministers later noted, “she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness.” But there was also a curious advantage to having a queen who relied on her “natural shrewdness”. It made her an instinctive, populist politician in a way that her classically educated male court and cabinet could never really appreciate. When she did ultimately come to write a book, for example, it was far from a learned tome. She published an account of holidays she’d taken in Scotland, which became a huge success and a runaway bestseller. Its rather banal content appealed directly to the people among her subjects who mattered, the people who held the balance of political power in the 19th century: the middle class. Read more | Friends, family and rivals: Queen Victoria and the European empires While other monarchies across Europe were being threatened by revolution, the British monarchy survived the 19th century unscathed. This was not least because the middle classes thought that their undereducated, dutiful, home-loving queen simply wasn’t worth overthrowing. It was not the result that Conroy’s strange ‘System’ was intended to achieve. Victoria would look back on her Kensington childhood with horror and regret. But far from being the breaking of her, you could argue that Victoria’s unusual childhood was in fact the making of her reign. This article was first published in the June 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
The love-hate relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his creator: "Conan Doyle felt upstaged by Holmes"
Historian Lucy Worsley talks to Jonathan Wright about her new BBC Two series exploring the story of Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle
Look at a photograph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and you seem to be looking at a stolid gentleman. He was, after all, a physician whose peak years straddled the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But read his Sherlock Holmes stories and a different picture emerges, of a man with a vivid, ingenious and macabre imagination. Discussing her new series for BBC Two – Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley On The Case Of Conan Doyle – historian Lucy Worsley tells us about Conan Doyle’s contradictions – and about her affection for his most famous creation. “I hope that if people watch our show, they might be inspired to pick up a book of Sherlock Holmes stories, to turn the pages, and to be transported back to the foggy London of the 1890s with a new sense of its social context and what it all means,” she says. “Literature is a fabulous means of time travel!” When did you first encounter Sherlock Holmes? I have had a lifelong, huge and weird crush on Sherlock Holmes. I remember sneaking The Hound Of The Baskervilles into my school bag because I wanted to finish it illicitly. I’m drawn to him for various reasons that don’t reflect particularly well on me, I think – he’s a loner, he’s obsessed with his work and he’s quite selfish. But when he’s on a case he cares passionately, which redeems him. And also I think that if the lovely Dr Watson loves Mr Holmes, and he very clearly does, then Holmes must at heart be a loveable person. How did Arthur Conan Doyle come up with Sherlock Holmes? Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine, where all kinds of interesting scientific advances were being made in the later 19th century. In particular, Conan Doyle studied with the famous Dr Joseph Bell [1837–1911, a surgeon who lectured at the University of Edinburgh], who could work out what was wrong with people by minutely analysing every detail of their body and symptoms. You can see Holmes doing the same thing, with his clients and with suspects. He has an almost superhuman power of understanding the real truth, which turns out to be based on highly focused observation. Read more | Victorian medicine: why the 19th century was a time of seismic medical change Sherlock Holmes wasn’t an instant success until suddenly he was. What factors came together? Arthur Conan Doyle initially tried to publish Sherlock Holmes in the kind of highbrow magazines he longed to appear in, such as The Cornhill. But it turned out Holmes was much more suited to this fantastic new mid-market magazine, The Strand. This was very often read by commuters working in the throbbing, busy, foggy London of the late 19th century, which the fictional Holmes was keeping safe for people just like them. It’s no accident that a Sherlock Holmes story could be finished in the time it took your train to get home! Arthur Conan Doyle was at best ambivalent about Holmes. Why was this? Conan Doyle was an intellectual snob. He wanted prestige and respectability and to join all the poshest clubs. Yet, at the same time, he wanted money. So he was deeply ambivalent about his ambitions. He wanted to be highbrow and rich, but he couldn’t quite have both. So he chose being rich. Why did Conan Doyle kill off and then bring back Holmes? Conan Doyle felt upstaged by Holmes, so he had Holmes fall to his death over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Ten years on, though, Conan Doyle just couldn’t resist the enormous sums of money he was offered to bring Holmes back to life. Given his own life goal of being a highbrow writer, he must have felt a bit dirty about this. But I think it’s a shame he couldn’t take pride in his own creation! Why did Conan Doyle so crave respectability and security? Dark family secrets were endemic to the Doyles. Conan Doyle’s grand London friends had no idea that for many years his alcoholic father [artist Charles Altamont Doyle, 1832–93] was confined to an asylum, that his mother had taken up with a younger man, and that he himself had a wife and a relationship with a much younger opera singer as well. Add in the financial precarity of Doyle’s childhood, and you get a very powerful motivation for plugging away with his writing until it became a wild success. His energy and determination were as important as his talent. Was Conan Doyle in some sense in denial of a part of himself? There was always a suppressed longing in him for the unknown, for things that can’t be explained by the rational, scientific mind of Sherlock Holmes. Later in life, he became a fully paid-up member of the spiritualist movement: he believed in life after death, he consulted mediums in the hope of communicating again with his son, lost just before the end of the Great War. But if you think about Sherlock Holmes back in the 1880s, he seems on the surface to be this cold, calculating machine of a man, yet he also has the purpose of making people feel better. He consoles them, he solves their problems: he provides the kind of reassurance and authority that a medium does. The rational and the mystical were present in Conan Doyle in equal measure. Read more | The supernatural interests of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle How important is the case of George Edalji [1876–1953, a solicitor of Indian descent who was wrongly convicted on a charge of injuring a pony] in understanding Conan Doyle – and does it shed light on Holmes? The case of George Edalji shows Conan Doyle really embracing – for once – the fact that the wider public often confused him with the fictional character he’d created. He ‘investigated’ the case and published articles about it, and lobbied police and government, just as Holmes would have done. The campaign Conan Doyle led helped to get the Court of Appeal set up, to deal with miscarriages of justice. It was one of the great achievements of Conan Doyle’s life, I think. Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley On The Case Of Conan Doyle started on BBC Two on Sunday 10 December. Find out more about the series
Lucy Worsley on Agatha Christie: "She’s a genius, she’s an artist, she’s a creative"
Lucy Worsley speaks to Rhiannon Davies about her new biography of the doyen of detective novels, Agatha Christie, and what her life and work reveals about the 20th century
Rhiannon Davies: Why have you decided to write about Agatha Christie for your new book? Lucy Worsley: I have a bit of an obsession with detective fiction, and I’m also really interested in female writers, so I thought it would be fascinating to view Agatha Christie’s life through the eyes of a historian. And it was such a long life: she was born in 1890 and died in 1976. To me, her books aren’t just entertainment – they’re a record of the social history of the 20th century. So she’s a genius, she’s an artist, she’s a creative – but she’s also a representative woman of her time. A lot of the things that happened to other women in the 20th century happened to her. How did her background inform her life and writing? She was born into a family with money, and I think that’s so important in understanding a lot of the things that happened to her later. Her father was American – so that gave her an international perspective on life right from the start. One of the things people get wrong about Agatha Christie is thinking she’s quintessentially English; in reality, she was from a family of globetrotters. They lived in Torquay, on the south coast of Devon, and Agatha had a very comfortable life in a Victorian villa. They had lots of money and a beautiful garden where, she tells us, she used to play with her imaginary friends. So she was making up stories from an early age. What was expected of a woman of her social class at that time? Get married. She described the philosophy of the people she knew in her childhood as waiting for "the man" who was going to come along and change your life. She had an older sister, Madge, who was sent to boarding school and given some of the values of what was called the "New Woman". This was a middle-class view of femininity: you should be educated, and break barriers, and go out into the world. Clearly, though, her parents didn’t agree. They brought Madge home and put her on the marriage market. She got married – very successfully – to the heir to a Manchester business fortune, and ended up with a huge house. The idea was that Agatha herself would follow the same route – minus the inculcation with the values of the New Woman at boarding school. Throughout her whole life, Agatha never spoke in favour of emancipation or women’s capacity or anything like that. But, even though she didn’t say she held feminist values, I think we can detect some of those ideas in her actions. In what ways could she be seen as a feminist? Throughout her life, Agatha kept up a public image that she wasn’t a professional working writer – which, clearly, she was. She wrote roughly 80 books; 2 billion paper copies of her works have existed; she’s sold more copies than any other book or writer except the Bible and Shakespeare. What strikes me is that, unlike God or Shakespeare, she’s female. And that often gets weirdly glossed over. That’s partly her own doing. She never wanted to be taken seriously as a professional writer, partly because of the values of her childhood but also because of something very bad that happened to her in 1926. That year marked the great pivot point of Agatha’s life, when she went through a huge episode of what we’d today call public shaming, which we’ll return to later. At the time, lots of newspaper articles were written about her in which her professional success was definitely a bad thing. So, after 1926, she never spoke of herself in those terms again. You’d think that on her passport she’d state her profession as writer or author – but it actually said she was a housewife. You say that, in terms of her parents’ expectations for her life, getting married was the biggest priority. So did her first marriage conform to social norms of the time? She came on to the marriage market in trying circumstances: her father had died and the family had lost their money, so they were going downhill socially. Yet Agatha was still expected to try to marry up. She actually received nine proposals, sometimes dismissing them in the funniest ways. When one young man asked her to marry him, she said something like: “It’s an awfully silly thing to ask a girl to marry like this. We’ve only known each other for 10 days – don’t be such a fool.” But then along came the 10th man, Archibald Christie – Archie. He wasn’t quite what her mother would have wanted, being from a slightly lower social class. In his favour, though, he was incredibly hot, and a pilot, and Agatha was head over heels with him. It’s like the film Top Gun, except it happened in a country house in Devon in 1912. There was a lot of toing and froing over whether they would get married, because neither of the families was particularly happy about what they saw as this slightly ill-matched couple. Perhaps they wouldn’t have tied the knot had it not been for the First World War. Archie was sent off to France, and when he came home for Christmas after the first few months of the war, something had changed within him, and he said: “We’ve got to get married at once.” It was a very hasty wartime marriage, like many others. And, like many other hasty wartime marriages, it wasn’t going to last that long. What was Agatha’s own experience of the First World War? I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate just how important the First World War was in the creation of Agatha Christie as a person. With Archie away serving in France, she volunteered at the field hospital that had been set up in Torquay. She started at the bottom, washing the floors, and she later used this experience in her fiction; you find little snatches of her real life in so many of her novels. Then she progressed to actually treating patients, which was harrowing work. She describes having to take a man’s amputated leg down to the furnace in the hospital for it to be burned, and how one of her patients died after three days in her personal care. The trauma of war clearly affected men – everybody knows about shell-shock – but historians have realised recently that it affected women, too, in a way that nobody really wanted to talk about at the time. Even if the nurses weren’t at the front line, they still experienced things that no nice young ladies like Agatha ever expected to witness – the naked, dirty and wounded bodies of young men, for instance. Then they had to go home to their families, but they could not distress them by describing what they’d seen. They had to keep this horror within the hospital. This act of containment – having a secret, being not quite what you seem from the outside – was essential to all of the characters Agatha went on to produce as a detective novelist. Her time in the hospital was also particularly important because she trained as a pharmacist’s assistant, taking a job in the part of the hospital where the medicines were mixed – this involved handling really dangerous, strong drugs. So Agatha was handling poisons, and it was during her time working in the pharmacy that she picked up a pen and started to write. One of the things she wrote, beginning in 1916, was her very first published detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles [which originally appeared in 1920]. And guess what? It features a young lady who works in a hospital as a dispenser, and it features a death by poison. Read more | Arsenic: a brief history of Agatha Christie’s favourite murder weapon Let’s talk about 1926 and Agatha’s 11-day disappearance, an episode that captured the nation’s imagination. What was the background to her vanishing? This mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie, which led to a national search for her – she was eventually found staying under a false name in a hotel in Harrogate – seems to be the central injustice of Agatha Christie’s life. A lot of people would tell you that it happened because she wanted to frame her cheating husband for her murder. That’s what the newspapers said at the time, and it’s a narrative that’s been picked up in so many other books about her. When I started my research for this book, I was open to that suggestion. But it’s not at all consistent with what I found in her personal archive and in the evidence from the time. What I believe happened was as different from that as night from day. By 1926, Agatha was a successful novelist, and she was under a lot of pressure to keep producing books. But her mother died that year, and she went into an episode of what today would probably be described as depression. She reported forgetfulness, tearfulness, insomnia, an inability to cope with normal life. Unfortunately, it turned out that her husband, Archie, couldn’t cope with this – he wasn’t an emotionally literate man. And then he announced that he was leaving her for a woman called Nancy, who was nearly a decade younger than Agatha. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/agatha-christie-missing-5-e97a3be.jpg" width="801" height="530" alt="English crime writer Agatha Christie and her daughter, Rosalind, are featured in a newspaper article reporting the mysterious disappearance of the novelist, 1926. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="English crime writer Agatha Christie and her daughter, Rosalind, are featured in a newspaper article reporting the mysterious disappearance of the novelist, 1926. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Agatha became very low and, on 3 December, her mental state became so bad that she considered suicide. She then entered, I believe, into a fugue state. Now, this is a very rare condition, and it causes you to step right outside your normal self and adopt another persona, so that you don’t have to think about the trauma you’ve been experiencing in your current situation. She gave herself a new name and travelled to the town of Harrogate, which had a reputation for medical excellence. There she stayed at a health spa, where she tried to recover her lost health. That’s not framing your cheating husband for murder – that is living with a really serious mental-health condition. And yet the narrative is that she was somehow a bad person who was playing some sort of a trick on the world: perhaps she was doing it to frame the husband; perhaps she was doing it to get attention to sell novels. Agatha then married an archaeologist, with whom she travelled extensively. What role did she play in 20th-century archaeology? Agatha got a second chance at life and love when she met Max Mallowan. After they married in 1930, she spent part of each year on archaeological digs with him in Syria and Iraq. One of the ways in which she’s been underestimated is as a funder of 20th-century archaeology. She basically paid for Max’s digs – partly to please him, partly because she found archaeology personally interesting, and partly because she enjoyed the life she was able to live on a dig, where she was treated as just another member of the team. She was famous for being very good at cleaning the finds, particularly the delicate ivories discovered in Iraq at the site of Nimrud, also known by the ancient name Kalhu. She would clean them with a little brush and some face cream. Though that’s a very striking image, it completely downplays the fact that she was there in the first place only because she’d provided the money for the expedition to happen. It was socially unacceptable then that she was a female breadwinner who was basically bankrolling her husband’s career. During her travels she met people of several different nationalities, but her work often mirrors prejudices held by many others in 20th-century Britain. How did those attitudes evolve and reflect changing ideas? One of the reasons for reading Agatha Christie is to understand how the racial politics of middle-class white people of Britain played out throughout the 20th century. Her publishing history reflects that, too, because she was writing about the world of her first readers, who were in Britain and America – largely people who looked and sounded like her. Listen on the podcast | Agatha Christie disappears What you can see in her writing over the years is a gradual liberalising of views. Many people make the mistake of thinking that all of her stories are set in 1935 or thereabouts. That’s largely down to the TV adaptations that aired on Sunday nights, which maybe your grandparents used to watch. Actually, her books span a much wider chronological period. After the Second World War, for example, her books feature more Iraqi characters. In Agatha and Max’s archaeological life, you can see them gradually coming to terms with the fact that the attitudes of prewar archaeology were no longer acceptable. Ideas about where finds from digs should eventually be kept changed over time. The whole history of 20th-century archaeology is captured in the life of Agatha Christie. What happened at the end of her life? It’s amazing to think that Agatha Christie was still writing books into her eighties. Her publishers began to get a bit worried, because it was clear that the books weren’t as good as they used to be. Weirdly, though, she’d become such a powerful brand by that point that it didn’t matter. In the 1970s she published a book called Passenger to Frankfurt; I personally think it’s bonkers – as did her publishers. But it was a huge hit, staying on the bestseller list for six months, so they had to apologise to her for doubting it. The deterioration in the quality of the writing may have a sadder explanation – pretty heartbreaking, actually. If you analyse the language she’s using in her later books, it becomes repetitive and a lot simpler. Other sources also suggest that she was entering into the early stages of dementia. When Agatha did finally die, in 1976, it was possibly as easy as any death could be. She was being looked after by her (much younger) husband, Max; one day, after they’d eaten lunch together, she passed away very peacefully. The two of them are buried next to each other in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, Cholsey, near where they lived in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Why should historians be interested in her work and life? Agatha Christie is worth studying because she’s there in the back- ground of our lives today. Someone who’s such a cultural phenomenon is worth taking seriously and investigating. I also think it’s important because her life and her work provide a wonderful record of what white middle-class British people thought about things throughout the 20th century. It helps you understand where we are in the world today. That’s all on top of the fact that you can get huge pleasure and enjoyment from reading her books. Some of them are just works of art – they’re exquisitely crafted machines for giving you pleasure and entertainment. Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, and a broadcaster and bestselling author of books including Queen Victoria (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) and Jane Austen at Home (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017) This article will be published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine – out 29 September 2022
Author, adventurer, archaeologist: Agatha Christie’s action-packed life
Agatha Christie is known as the queen of detective fiction. But, as Lucy Worsley reveals, her life contained almost as much drama and mystery as her novels
Agatha Christie is known as the queen of crime fiction. But, as Lucy Worsley reveals, her life contained almost as much drama and mystery as her novels. Speaking to Rhiannon Davies, she reveals how Agatha Christie was a thoroughly modern woman for her time, and explains how her 80 books reflect the tumultuous transformations Britain went through during her lifetime. Lucy Worsley is the author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Read next | Lucy Worsley on Agatha Christie: "She’s a genius, she’s an artist, she’s a creative"
The survivor, the "incurable" and the scapegoat: Lucy Worsley on the extraordinary lives of three ordinary women
History is too often presented as tales of “great men” – yet the experiences of ordinary women speak eloquently about the reality of lives past. Lucy Worsley introduces three outwardly unremarkable people caught up in pivotal events...
Life after the Black Death: how plague opened up new horizons for a Suffolk widow “Why should people study the Black Death?” I asked historian John Hatcher. “Because,” he laughed, “it’ll make you feel better about coronavirus. ”When the bubonic plague swept through England in 1348–49, it wiped out something like half of the population. Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic account of plague symptoms describes how first “swellings in the groin or under the armpits, some egg-shaped, others the size of an apple” would appear. Victims then “began to find dark blotches on their arms and thighs. These were signs that someone would die.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/07/Black-Death-bed-a44ec68.jpg" width="680" height="452" alt="Miniature depicting a couple suffering from the Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept Europe in the Middle Ages. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Miniature depicting a couple suffering from the Black Death, the bubonic plague that swept Europe in the Middle Ages. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> The rich were more likely to survive, hiding away on country estates where the risk of infection was lower. Priests, however, had terrible survival rates because, as they heard the confessions of the dying, they were in the direct line of fire. Read more | How the years after the Black Death became a 'golden age' for medieval women Professor Hatcher has studied the Black Death’s rampage through one particular Suffolk village, Walsham le Willows, and led me to the story of one particular woman, Olivia Cranmer, which had rather a surprising ending. In the Suffolk Archives in Bury St Edmunds, the records of the court of Walsham le Willows survive in an astonishing state of preservation. They allow us to track the effects of the pandemic on Olivia’s family, whose name still survives in the part of the village called Cranmer Green. The Cranmers were serfs, with the right to cultivate assigned land. In return, they had to pay their lord for all sorts of basic things, such as getting married. Though luckier than many people who had no access to land at all, the Cranmers still lived on the edge. Life in England in 1348 was precarious because the agricultural techniques available couldn’t really support the population. And a history of hunger made a body less able to resist and survive the Black Death. The court records of Walsham, a village of around 1,200 souls, register an astonishing 119 men dying just between the court sessions of May and June 1349. But these deaths were recorded only because the customary death duty – often a cow – would now be payable to the lord of the manor. And the court rolls don’t mention the deaths of women or children, because they were economically irrelevant. That’s why it’s so surprising that Olivia Cranmer appears in the rolls enough times for us to track her life story. The Cranmer family were not infrequent law-breakers: they were fined for having more sheep than they were permitted to, for example. Olivia first pops up in the records when she had to pay a penalty for having an illegitimate child. When she did later marry, the absence of the usual payment due suggests that it might have been a forced marriage – a union seen to “put right” her position as an unmarried mother. Life then seems to have treated her well until 1349 when her grandfather William, her father and her two brothers died. Next, her husband, Robert, was taken. Shifting dynamics The deaths of so many men all over England completely changed social dynamics. Some labourers refused to work altogether, thinking that life was too short. Others demanded higher wages. And there were women, like Olivia, who became important in an unprecedented way. With so many of her closest relatives dead, Olivia was allowed to take over the family plot of land. Like some other widows and female plague survivors, she became a farmer and businesswoman in her own right. In later life, she even sublet her land so that she could live off a pension. The Black Death perhaps brought Olivia Cranmer a life she could never had dreamed of. Remarkably, she survived into her seventh decade as a relatively rich, independent woman. And I like to think it’s significant that she never remarried. A one-way ticket to Bedlam: the "madhouse" awaited a seamstress who tried to kill the king The 18th century’s most high-profile patient with a mental illness was, of course, George III. But intertwined with his life story is that of a woman whose experiences of mental ill health show how a person’s rank dramatically changed the treatment they received as a patient in Georgian England. There was always something a bit different about Margaret Nicholson, according to witnesses who spoke at the investigation into her actions. She couldn’t seem to hold down a job – she’d been a housemaid and a seamstress – and strange fits of laughter were heard at night ringing from the rented room in which Margaret lived alone. Margaret believed that the king, father of his people, had a responsibility to make her rickety life better. She wrote to him no fewer than 20 times, asking for money and other help. When he failed to answer, she arrived at St James’s Palace on 2 August 1786 – and tried to kill him. Margaret’s attempt on George’s life wasn’t particularly serious: she used a dessert knife, more useful for cutting up fruit than attacking people. And the king himself, perhaps recognising someone who was experiencing something akin to his own episodic illnesses, called out to his guards not to hurt her. But Margaret now presented Georgian society with a problem. She was ill, clearly, but she was also a criminal. In France she might well have been executed in a barbarous fashion, but the British prided themselves on doing things differently. Instead, she was committed to hospital. This hospital, though, was the dreaded “Bedlam”: the Bethlehem Hospital, where patients were sometimes chained to the walls. Its authorities decided that Margaret should be placed in the wing for “incurables” – people who they considered were never going to get well. And there poor Margaret remained, year after year. She was probably treated with leeches and emetics, just as George III had been, until the royal doctors panicked and brought in physicians with slightly more up-to-date tools for treating mental illness. The king’s doctors, operating at the forefront of medical practice, began to prescribe calm, quiet and fresh air, instead of the old methods: blood-letting and violent purging. After five years, the hospital authorities decided that Margaret no longer needed to be restrained with a chain, but no one was ever going to let this “dangerous” woman go free. Partly because of the king’s illness, treatment and temporary recovery, Georgian society grew gradually more interested in what was going on its “mad- houses”, and in 1815 parliament heard about the barbaric conditions in the Bethlehem Hospital. A new regime of reporting and inspecting was introduced, and the hospital’s record-keeping was vastly improved. These records reveal that Margaret was, by the late 1810s, a very elderly woman, quiet in her ways and in good health, albeit hard of hearing. They also tell us that she enjoyed tea, snuff and gingerbread. Margaret died in 1828, having spent 42 years in the system. The reforms came too late to bring about any major improvement in her life, but at least these records allow us to see her for herself at last: not as a criminal or a patient, but simply as an old lady. Burning injustice: the grim fate of a healer in the wrong job at the wrong time In the 1590s, one midwife and “wise wife” (or healer) gained a good reputation among the patients she helped from her home in the Scottish village of Keith, East Lothian. Yet Agnes Sampson also had the terrible misfortune to be in the wrong job at the wrong time. Scots of Agnes’s generation were fearful of witchcraft, and the majority of those accused of this crime were women. Witch scares frequently erupted at times when standards of living declined, as happened in the 1590s. Thanks to a prolonged spell of poor weather and increased pressure on the land, people were going hungry – and society needed someone to blame. “Witches” were thought to be people who’d made a terrible pact with the devil, promising to do his bidding in return for a long life. Europe’s “experts” on witchcraft proclaimed in scholarly books that, though men could be seduced into witchcraft, women were particularly vulnerable to the devil’s blandishments. On top of that, the religious changes of the 16th century – particularly the coming of the Reformation to Scotland – led people to take more extreme religious positions. This was true for both Protestants and Catholics, but was particularly true of King James VI of Scotland. Hoping to position himself as a good and godly heir to the Protestant throne of England, he thought his credentials would be improved by getting tough on witchcraft. Remarkable discovery It was in this climate that someone made an accusation against the local midwife in Keith, Agnes Sampson, who found herself investigated by the church. It’s quite remarkable to be able to discover anything at all about a woman living a quiet rural life at this level in society. But, through records of the investigation, we learn that Agnes was a widow, that she had children, and that she’d learned her craft as a healer from her father. We also know she had a lot of clients, both satisfied and dissatisfied, who now came forward with their opinions. It’s hard for us to understand that, even though it may sound cool today, there was simply no such thing as a “good” or “white” witch. Rather, Agnes was someone you might employ to protect you from the malign consequences of witchcraft: sickness in your family or your cattle. In Agnes’s case, the accusations mounted up, finally coming to the attention of the king himself. She was brought to his palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to be interrogated. Those questioning her used torture, causing her “pain most grievous”. Shaving all the hair off her naked body, they searched it for the “devil’s mark”: this involved pricking a suspect’s body with a pin until a spot was found which the devil had made insensate. Agnes was stabbed all over. On the podcast | Witch hunters: cynical persecutors or misguided zealots? The record of what Agnes said under these terrible conditions survives, but it’s a tricksy document. Today we understand that a person “confessing” under duress will say anything to make the pain stop, guessing at whatever it is that the questioners want to hear. So when Agnes tells us that she took part in a meeting of witches, or cooked up a storm at sea, she was probably saying more about the fantasies of her interrogators than telling anything remotely like the truth. But Agnes’s “confession” made her, under the law, into a witch. Her fate was then inevitable. And on 28 January 1591, she was strangled then burned on Edinburgh’s Castle Hill. Walking on that hill today, watching the tourists enjoying themselves, it’s chilling to think of the injustices carried out there on women such as Agnes Sampson. The only glimmer of good in this whole story is that, unlike so many others, in this case we know and can commemorate her name. Lucy Worsley is an author, broadcaster and chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She is the presenter of a new four-part series Lucy Worsley Investigates, airing on BBC Two an available on iPlayer
Lucy Worsley dons her best jewels and high-heeled shoes to give us a practical guide to etiquette in the snake pit that was the Georgian royal court
The Great drawing room, crammed full of courtiers, lies at the heart of the Georgian royal palace. Here the king mingles most evenings with his guests, signalling welcome with a nod, and displeasure with a turned back. The winners and losers of the Georgian era – which runs from 1714–1830 with the reigns of Kings George I, through George II and George III, to George IV – can calculate precisely how high they have climbed (or fallen) by the warmth of their reception at court. Although parliament’s power is rapidly growing, ambitious and talented people still flock to court in search of perks and prestige. High-heeled and elegant shoes crush into the palace floorboards the reputations of those who have fallen from favour, while those whose status is on the rise stand firmly in possession of their few square inches of space. Bridgerton: everything you need to know Step into the ballrooms of Regency England, and catch up on the real history that underpins seasons 1 and 2 of Bridgerton, from the real royals to the palaces and promenades | Read more <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/BRIDGERTON_204_Unit_04659R-57b98a4-e1683126162801.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="Bridgerton. Simone Ashley as Kate Sharma, Jonathan Bailey as Anthony Bridgerton" title="Bridgerton. Simone Ashley as Kate Sharma, Jonathan Bailey as Anthony Bridgerton in an episode of Bridgerton. The series draws many elements from real Regency-era history" /> So the elegant state apartments of a royal palace are also a battlefield. This is a world of politicking and skulduggery, wigs and beauty-spots, where fans whistle open like flick-knives. Intrigue hisses through the crowd, and court factions are also known as ‘fuctions’. Successful courtiers have level heads and cold hearts. They understand all the nuances of court etiquette, and know how to manipulate them to their advantage.It’s vital, therefore, to learn the rules of the game. What should you wear at court? Ladies have to wear the court uniform: the ‘mantua’. A coat-like dress spread out sideways over immensely wide hoops, this formal court dress has become trapped in a fashion time warp. Tightly-laced, uncomfortable, and immensely heavy because of the silver in the weave, its skirts will get wider and wider as the 18th century progresses. Your arms descend from a requisite three rows of frills. (“I am so incommoded with these nasty ruffles!” says novelist Fanny Burney.) You should wear your best jewels, and carry a fan. Gentlemen should wear a wig, an embroidered suit and a sword, and under their elbows they carry a flat, unwearable version of a hat. Because you have to bare your head in front of the king, no one wears real hats at court. However, you can gate-crash a court party quite easily if you borrow the right clothes and slip a shilling to the footman on the door. You can even hire a sword from a booth at the entrance. “Dress is a very foolish thing,” declares the arch-courtier Lord Chesterfield, and yet, all the same, “it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed”. Tip: you can’t be overdressed Read more | 7 weird and wonderful Georgian beauty treatments How do you walk in a dress like that? It’s quite hard to walk in a mantua, and only grand palace doorways have the width to accommodate the hooped skirts without the lady turning sideways. The whalebone hoops force you to take tiny steps, so court ladies are described as looking like they roll along on wheels. Ladies-in-waiting aren’t allowed to sit down, or to fold their arms. Before exiting the royal presence they have to curtsey three times, then back out of the room. But don’t worry: your dancing master will train you in how to do all this. Tip: take tiny, elegant steps, and practise beforehand How on earth does one relieve oneself in such a dress? It’s easier than it looks, as you won’t be wearing knickers (not invented yet). You may squat over a chamber pot, or else you use a ‘bourdaloue’. This is a little jug like a gravy boat that you clench between your thighs. Privacy is not essential, and the French ambassador’s wife annoys everyone with the “frequency and quantity of her pissing which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of witnesses”. However, if the queen doesn’t grant you permission to go, you just have to try to hold on. One of Queen Caroline’s ladies was once defeated by a bursting bladder. A humiliating pool of urine crept out from under her skirt and “threatened the shoes of bystanders”. Tip: take a ‘bourdaloue’ with you What messages can I signal with my fan? There are hints that the secret language of the fan – ‘beware, my husband approaches’, ‘you are cruel’, ‘don’t forget me’ – is already in place in the 1720s. According to these coded displays, the ladies painted by William Kent on the walls at Kensington Palace are all saying variations of the same thing: ‘I am married’, ‘I wish to get rid of you’ or just plain ‘no’. Either this is a very strange coincidence, or else William Kent is playing a joke in depicting all these ravishing ladies making such cruel denials! Tip: don’t wave your fan about without forethought! How do I get to meet the king? Once in the drawing room, you’ll need to push your way into the ring of people waiting to speak to the king. People “jostle and squeeze” by one another, reports Baron de Pöllnitz, shouting pardon over their shoulders, and it’s simply impossible to hold a conversation. Everyone laughs when Lord Onslow tumbles backward among the crowd and lies sprawling, while a gentleman, “drunk and saucy”, is ejected for throwing a punch. Beautiful dresses conceal poor hygiene: the courtiers will be “sweating and stinking in abundance as usual”, complains courtier John Hervey, while exchanging “lying smiles, forced compliments, careful brows, and made laughs”. If you’re lucky, one of the court officers will introduce you to the king. Remember to bow low and kiss his hand. Tip: grab a good place in the circle What’s the Rumpsteak Club, and how can I join? If King George II does not wish to acknowledge a courtier who is out of favour, he will turn his back or ‘rump’. Those who have been spurned console themselves by the thought that they’ve won membership of an exclusive group, the Rumpsteak Club. The existence of this disrespectful group really annoys the king: “What! Are they laughing at me?” he bellowed when he first found out about the joke. Tip: if you’re slighted, make a joke of it Who should I cultivate? The court is not really a meritocracy, and to acquire a post in the royal household you will need a powerful patron. You must wait for the right opportunity to press your case for a job, a promotion or a favour. “By the Grace of God”, an ambitious court equerry promises himself, “I am willing & ready to bustle thro’ this bad world”. If a man “can hold out five years”, counsels another courtier, “tis morally impossible he should not come into play”. But there is still a risk that you might end up penniless and jobless, having wasted “half of the very flower” of your life standing waiting outside a door. Tip: identify a patron as soon as you can How do I get home? Leaving the drawing room at last, you need to search among the jostling sea of servants in the courtyard for your own chairmen and sedan chair. Ladies travelling by chair flip up their whalebone hoops on each side so that they look like strange winged insects. They also tilt their heads back and remain motionless so the roof doesn’t squash their tall hairdos. Exhausted by the hours of standing in their weighty dresses, they will go straight home to bed. Gentlemen, however, might not go home at all, but continue their networking in the clubs and coffee houses of St James’s. Tip: prepare for an exhausting evening! This article was first published in the May 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine
Lucy Worsley on Blitz Spirit: the courageous stories of six Londoners
Lucy Worsley tells the stories of six people who endured the London Blitz, and finds that it was a time of courage and resilience, doubt and despair
Listen to this article: What does “Blitz Spirit” really mean? It’s a concept that’s frequently invoked in times of crisis: a curiously British commitment to keeping calm and carrying on. Eighty years on from the Blitz, though, it’s worth remembering that the eight months of intense bombing between September 1940 and May 1941 did not comprise just one single, homogeneous experience for the people living in London and the many other British cities affected. Those eight months were indeed a time of remarkable resilience, and of terrible suffering. Yet our clichéd images of the Blitz – jolly singalongs in the air raid shelters, milkmen continuing to deliver as usual to bombed-out houses – don’t tell the whole story. It seems timely, while we’re facing a national crisis of our own, to drill down deeper into the nature of the “Blitz Spirit” – and one way to do that is to look in detail at the personal recollections of Londoners who were there, living and dying beneath the bombs. The government issued propaganda declaring that “London Can Take it” – but would these ordinary people have agreed? The dangers of the Blitz spirit A closer look shows us that Londoners experienced a whole spectrum of doubt and despair as well as the courage and resilience about which we more often hear. And it’s hard to generalise: every person had their own unique experience of the Blitz, as the recollections of these six individuals reveal. NAME: Robert Barltrop AGE IN 1940: 17 JOB: Porter at Sainsbury's The day of 7 September 1940 had been a normal one for Robert, preparing chickens at the Sainsbury’s in east London where he worked. But that afternoon he took up his lookout post on the roof of the building to see the very first raid of the Blitz coming in from the east. The German planes “were flying across my line of vision”, he recalled. “I had a perfect view… they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it… I began to hear thumps, and those were bombs falling, and clouds of smoke were rising up… until you couldn’t see anything but a huge bank of smoke, and still they were coming.” The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? Robert, however, was determined that life should go on; he rushed home that very evening – to go on a date. “It sounds daft but perhaps we both thought it was a bit romantic meeting in an air raid,” he wrote. “We could smell the smoke and hear the raid.” He wasn’t alone in thinking that some things were too important to give up, despite the Blitz. “You also had your own living life,” he recalled. “Particularly if you were young, you felt a very strong need to make some kind of social life for yourself. You knew you were going to be called up before long and if you didn’t see your friends and have a bit of a good time, then you were never going to.” Robert and his family survived a hit to their home, sheltering under their dining room table. But despite his insistence on living as normal a life as possible, the Blitz changed him. “Opportunities were taken away and intentions cancelled. Circles of friends were broken up and pursuits left behind: a great many of us were put on paths we had never envisaged.” Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War Two and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis NAME: Ita Ekpenyon AGE IN 1940: 41 JOB: Student and air raid warden Ita was born in Nigeria, where he worked as a teacher before coming to London in 1928 to study law. When war broke out he was living at 146 Great Titchfield Street; he became an air raid warden, with Marylebone his local patch. Ita’s job was to make sure that people obeyed the blackout rules, to keep order in the shelters, and to help people to safety during raids. One of a small community of only 15,000 Londoners of African origin, Ita is among the most well-known of the black people who experienced the Blitz, largely because he wrote a memoir of his service. Some of the people on his patch considered it “lucky” to have a black warden. ”It amuses me,” he wrote, “that in the district where I work the people believe that because I am a man of colour, I am a lucky omen. I had heard of such child-like beliefs, but I am delighted that such beliefs exist.” But he also experienced the casual racism that was common in 1940s London. Once he had to intervene to prevent some foreigners from being ejected from a shelter, recalling that: “Some of the shelterers told the others to go back to their own countries.” Ita told them that he “would like to see a spirit of friendliness, cooperation and comradeship prevail at this very trying time in the history of the empire”. Calm and friendly, Ita noted that his very presence “seemed to cheer the people, for they felt the wardens were looking after them”. After the war he became a postman. He died in 1951. NAME: Frances Faviell AGE IN 1940: 34 JOB: Artist and nurse Well off, living in Chelsea, working as an artist: Frances seemed to have life sorted. But the Blitz turned her world completely upside down. She trained as a volunteer nurse, along with her housekeeper, and they took turns to pretend to be wounded. “It did seem ridiculous to have to lie flat on a piece of marked pavement pretending to be a casualty,” she recalled. But as Frances listened to wireless reports of the war’s progress, she began to feel a new seriousness. “I could listen in my beautiful room surrounded by comfort and with a good meal waiting downstairs,” she wrote, “but I could not eat.” As the Blitz continued, Frances became increasingly committed to her new vocation, taking on extraordinarily challenging duties – not least piecing together the broken bodies of the dead in preparation for burial. “It was a very difficult task,” she recalled. “There were so many pieces missing… the stench was the worst thing about it – that, and having to realise that these frightful pieces of flesh had once been living, breathing people. We went out to smoke cigarettes when we simply could not go on.” By the time of the penultimate big raid on London in April 1941, Frances was living with her second husband, Richard Parker, and was four months pregnant. Her house was hit, but she was able to crawl out of its smoking ruins – and her son, John Parker, is still alive today. NAME: Nina Masel AGE IN 1940: 18 JOB: Reporter for the Mass Observation project Nina was a working-class teenager living in Stepney in the East End of London, and a talented writer. She was working in her family’s local shop when she got a job recording her community’s attitudes to the Blitz for social research reports that were then used by the media and government. Nina was, perhaps more than most people, conscious of the gap between what the papers said about “Blitz Spirit” and the reality of the bombing in the East End. “Of course the press versions of life going on normally in the East End on Monday are grotesque,” she wrote. “There was no bread, no milk, no elec- tricity, no gas... The press version of people’s smiling jollity and fun are a gross exaggeration. On no previous investigation has so little humour, laugh- ter or whistling been recorded.” Nina is known particularly for her accounts of the enormous and notorious Tilbury air raid shelter in Stepney. “The first time I went in there, I had to come out,” she wrote. “I felt sick. You just couldn’t see anything, you could just smell the fug, the overwhelming stench... There were thousands and thousands of people lying head to toe... The place was a hell hole.” Nina’s report caught the eye of Winston Churchill, who insisted that conditions in the Tilbury Shelter be improved. But when the Ministry of Information twisted a Mass Observation report on the safety of shallow air raid shelters, which East Enders widely believed to be dangerous, Nina felt that she and the other researchers were being misrepre- sented, and she resigned. “I left soon afterwards,” she said, “in a blaze of indignation and fury.” NAME: Frank Hurd AGE IN 1940: 44 JOB: Fireman By September 1940, Islington-born Frank was more than ready for action, having prepared for months before the Blitz began. He and his colleagues in the Auxiliary Fire Service had “half-hoped for something to happen”, though they also “felt ashamed for letting the monotony get us down”. When the first bombs finally fell, though, Frank had more than enough excitement. On the first night of the Blitz he was called to Beckton Gas Works in east London, where he first experienced a bomb falling, describing “a weird whistling sound... then a vivid flash of flame, a column of earth and debris flying into the air, and the ground heaved”. How did WW2 affect schools in London? Night after night, Frank fought fires; his diary, now in the Imperial War Museum, tells a story of steady, unremitting, cheerful service. He never seemed to lose his nerve, nor his commitment to his work. “Perhaps I have made light of a serious situation,” he wrote, “but thank God we can laugh at this sort of thing.” If ever a Londoner kept calm and carried on, it was Frank. Tragically, though, on the night of 29 December 1940, during the so-called “Second Great Fire of London”, he was seriously injured fighting fires near Smithfield Market, and died in hospital the following day. NAME: Barbara Nixon AGE IN 1940: 33 JOB: Actor and air raid warden Until the war threw her career off course, Barbara had worked as an actor. In May 1940, though, she went to Finsbury Town Hall to sign up as one of the first female air raid wardens. A practical person and a socialist, Barbara joined up because, she explained, it seemed “the most active and obviously helpful Civil Defence occupation open to women... I wanted an active job; I particularly wanted to avoid the position of many women in the First World War – of urging other people to do work they wouldn’t think of doing themselves.” Barbara and her fellow wardens were given a tin hat and a whistle, but only a vague idea of their duties. The priority seemed to be to report where bombs had fallen, followed by providing reassurance to members of the public. “Our only asset,” she thought, “was our zeal to help.” On the late afternoon of 7 September, Barbara witnessed the first big raid on Lon- don – a devastating onslaught that set fire to the East End. Then, coming off duty, she went into Soho for dinner. Along with many others, Barbara hadn’t yet grasped that this first raid had been merely the overture: the intention of the initial attack had been to start fires to act as beacons, guiding in the many more bomb- ers that would follow that night. “That day, London had changed,” Barbara said, “like a drunk man suddenly sobering up when he receives tragic news.” The following morning’s newspapers were positive, declaring that London could “take it”, and that the damage had been surprisingly slight. But Barbara observed that, despite the censorship of the press, people suspected the truth: “The most common saying by men, as well as women, was that this wasn’t war, it was murder.” There was a sense of defeat. Once British artillery began to return fire, though, a more conventional glimpse of “Blitz Spirit” emerged in Barbara’s account. “On Wednesday they brought up the guns at last,” she wrote. “There had never been such an exhilarating uproar... it was a splendid and deafening cacophony. It was said that they fired 20,000 shells that night; it may have been extravagant, and not particularly effective, but it was worth it. It revived the spirit of the Londoners.” Lucy Worsley is a historian, broadcaster and author. Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley aired on BBC One in February 2021 and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer This article was first published in the February 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
Lucy Worsley on royal history's biggest fibs
How much of what we think we know about history’s big events are actually true? Ahead of a new series of Royal History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley on BBC Two, BBC History Revealed editor Charlotte Hodgman spoke to Lucy about historical misconceptions, the French Revolution and the battle of Waterloo...
Q: What drew you to investigating some of the misconceptions and inaccuracies of royal history? A: I’ve made some other programmes along the lines of ‘history’s biggest fibs’, and what I like about the subject is that it’s not just about what happened; it’s about the skills a historian needs to assess the evidence and establish the truth of what actually happened – if that is ever possible. So it’s not just about the past; but the practice of history as well. Revolutions against monarchies have historically provided some intense storytelling, fake news, and, well, just plain fibbing, and that’s because the way you win a revolution is to tell the best story. So revolutions seem to be the essence of this idea of royal history’s biggest fibs. Q: One event you reassess is the French Revolution, specifically the role of Marie Antoinette. What did you discover? A: Marie Antoinette is one of those people about whom British people feel a sense of sympathy, but who is still widely hated by the French, and that’s because they’ve been taught to do so by the French revolutionaries. Yet from our perspective, you can see that, as a female and a foreigner, Marie Antoinette was a fantastic scapegoat for all the troubles the French monarchy was going through. Did Marie Antoinette really say “let them eat cake”? Q: Why did the French people focus on Marie Antoinette rather than the king himself? A: It was partly because, in the 18th century, it was difficult to reconcile your belief in the divine authority of your king with the knowledge that actually he’s not that good at his job. And this is an issue that goes back centuries: you don’t blame your king, you blame his ‘evil councillors’. In the case of Marie Antoinette, she had to face the added negativity of being from Austria, an ancient enemy of France. But there was also someone missing from court during Marie Antoinette’s reign, and that was a royal mistress. Louis XVI didn’t have one. So a lot of the negativity that would usually have been directed at a hated mistress – for being frivolous, for wearing expensive jewels, or getting involved in politics – instead found an outlet in the queen, Marie Antoinette. Q: What about the role of America in the French Revolution? A: Well, the traditional story is that France’s huge debts were down to the Queen and her huge extravagance. But when I spoke to the curator of the Palace of Versailles, he explained that the debts of the French state were actually caused by the American War of Independence. France had been financially supporting the Americans against the British and racking up huge debts. That was the crunch that really created the circumstances in which revolution in France began to seem like a good idea. Your guide to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence Q: Did people question events and the reasons behind them at the time they were happening? A: This is really the kind of essence of politics – who’s on side and who isn’t – and how change spreads through groups of people. In the second episode, we look at why there wasn’t a revolution in Britain during the late Georgian period, when you really might have expected there to have been one given the chaos and financial catastrophes of the Napoleonic Wars. Even so, there were the seeds of discontent being sown that would later lead to revolutions. It just takes a few people in the moment to have a really strong view that something is wrong. And it might take a long time for their cause to be won – such as the fight for Catholic Emancipation during the early part of George IV’s reign – but it can win. Q: Most people have grown up with the idea that the battle of Waterloo was a British victory. Was this the case? A: It depends on your perspective. If you were the Duke of Wellington then yes, it was totally a British victory. But if you were the Duke of Wellington’s European allies, then you might get rather annoyed by that statement. The Duke of Wellington and his ‘Dearest Georgy’ The European allies referred to the battle as the Belle Alliance and saw it as a European collaboration, but from the earliest dispatch sent back to Britain after the battle, Wellington was calling it the battle of Waterloo after the place it was fought, playing down the collaborative nature of the victory. There’s an incredibly detailed model of the battlefield as it looked at 7.45pm on 18 June 1815 at the National Army Museum, London, built by Lieutenant William Siborne in the 1830s. When Siborne asked for funding for the work, he was effectively told by Wellington that he would get no money from Britain because he had placed too many Prussians on the battlefield. At a time when Britain had been shaken by revolutions in France and the Napoleonic Wars, it was extremely important for Wellington – and George IV, another character we look at in the series – to claim Waterloo as a British victory. Lucy Worsley is a historian and Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She was speaking to BBC History Revealed editor Charlotte Hodgman The new series of Royal History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley begins on 6 November on BBC Two This content was first published in the December 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
Lincoln and slavery: "If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would"
To generations of Americans, Abraham Lincoln is the Great Emancipator, the man who ended slavery. But, argues Lucy Worsley, scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find that the president’s motives weren’t as unblemished as many people believe
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is very familiar to British eyes – not least because American action movies often seem to show it and the other monuments of the capital’s National Mall under attack from terrorists, criminals or even aliens. A spectacular assault on the landmarks of Washington DC is Hollywood shorthand for expressing the idea that America and its values are under threat. But visit the memorial on any summer’s day, and you’ll find it a peaceful place, crowded with schoolchildren paying a first visit to their nation’s capital, and learning from their teachers the basic story of America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. He’s one of the towering figures in the story that Americans tell about themselves in order to explain – in the absence of a long shared history or natural borders – what holds their nation together. Read more: Q&A: Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln? Lincoln's funniest jokes What the schoolkids very often learn is that Abraham Lincoln is the ‘Great Emancipator’, the man who ended slavery, thereby ending the Civil War of 1861–65 between America’s north, and the breakaway states of its south. And he’s been hero-worshipped by many subsequent Americans for these achievements. “He moved a nation,” said America’s 44th president, Barack Obama, “and helped free a people.” Meanwhile, its 45th once promised to be “more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”, with just one exception: that of the “late, great Abraham Lincoln”. The Great Emancipator’s memorial is itself a sort of physical embodiment of the post-Civil War, reunited Union. Its builders were careful to use stone from both the southern states that had formed their own Confederacy, and the northern states who remained within the Union. Around the top are the names of individual states, including the Union states that had abolished slavery before the Civil War began, and the Confederate states in which slavery remained legal. But the memorial mixes up the names of all the states together, north and south alike, to show that the USA’s indissoluble nature is written in stone. The Lincoln Memorial makes it seem like the American Civil War is well and truly over. But it was only last year that a woman died in Charlottesville, Virginia during a dispute about how exactly the bloody conflict of 150 years ago should continue to be commemorated. There are many holes in the schoolbook success story of Lincoln emancipating the slaves and healing a divided nation. Read more: The 5 most notorious presidents in US history A brief history of impeachment and what it means for President Trump <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-772144-1e33bd1.jpg" width="800" height="530" alt="Richard Nixon resigns" title="Richard Nixon announces his resignation from the White House, 9 August 1974. Nixon resigned less than two years into his second term, before his near-certain impeachment following the Watergate scandal. (Photo by Dirck Halstead/Liaison via Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> For a start, Abe Lincoln is not quite the hero with modern sensibilities about slavery that people often assume. To him, the emancipation of up to 4 million African Americans who laboured on the plantations and industries of the South was not an end in itself. It was a means to an end, a tactic towards defeating the South by damaging its economy. The secession of the southern states had in any case happened not purely over the issue of slavery but, more accurately, over the issue of whether or not slavery was going to be permitted in the new states forming in the western part of the North American continent and wanting to join the Union. No place in America? For people who believe uncritically in the image of the Great Emancipator, Lincoln made some surprising statements about slavery. Here’s just one of them: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would.” He also believed in the rather barmy idea – or so it seems to modern eyes – that the formerly enslaved had no place in the United States, but instead ought to be sent back to their native Africa, or even to South or Central America. Lincoln certainly was no abolitionist along the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) did so much to persuade people that slavery was morally wrong. And his achievement was much more subtle than simply ordering emancipation to happen. Lincoln’s skill was to occupy a slowly changing succession of positions that lay well behind the cutting edge of radical thought on the evil of slavery. But, as he made the journey towards the idea that slavery is unacceptable, he was able to take the majority of Americans with him. In other words, he wasn’t a saint, but a human being. And a human being who happened to be a supremely gifted politician. Read more: American history myths: 7 things people get wrong Abraham Lincoln: 5 facts <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/Washington-a0f5b73.jpg" width="801" height="801" alt="A painting depicting George Washington with British soldiers at Yorktown. In the final battle of the war at the siege of Yorktown, writes Jem Duducu, there were nearlyas many French soldiers and sailors as American rebels fighting for colonial independence. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)" title="A painting depicting George Washington with British soldiers at Yorktown. In the final battle of the war at the siege of Yorktown, writes Jem Duducu, there were nearlyas many French soldiers and sailors as American rebels fighting for colonial independence. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)" /> It was well into the war that Lincoln decided to make his ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ (effective January 1863). Even then, the document did not promise freedom to all slaves. A number of slave-owning states remained loyal to the Union. Some of those with vulnerable, valuable positions on the border of the Confederacy were allowed to maintain slavery in order to keep them on Lincoln and the Union’s side. Trail of devastation Some of the behaviour of Lincoln’s Union troops towards the former slaves who’d escaped or been freed by their owners was horribly compromised. One such controversy marks the epic 1864 march by a Union army across the state of Georgia. Led by General William Sherman and marching under a flag of emancipation, the army left a wide trail of devastation in its wake. Those on the Union side of the story see it as a successful mercy mission to free the slaves. However, Sherman’s campaign can also be read as an unnecessarily brutal act of total war which saw the invaders fail to live up to their supposed ideals. That might even have become the opinion of the formerly enslaved African Americans who attached themselves to the train of a Union leader operating under Sherman, Brigadier General Jefferson C Davis. A large number – the exact figure is unknown – of escaped slaves joined Davis’s forces. They wanted the protection of Lincoln’s army. After all, troops in the service of the Great Emancipator would surely look after them. But Davis wanted to rid his baggage train of what he saw as an encumbrance of “useless negroes”, slowing him down and increasing risk. Read more: Lord Nelson and slavery: Nelson’s dark side History explorer: the British slave trade <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/Slave-trade-2-ac46069.jpg" width="1024" height="513" alt="Shackles that were used to tether slaves, on display at the International Slavery Museum. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)" title="Shackles that were used to tether slaves, on display at the International Slavery Museum. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)" /> Davis’s army used pontoon bridges to cross a swamp of deep-running black waters at Ebenezer Creek near Savannah. But in an act that stains the memory and motives of the Union side, he left his unwelcome recruits behind and in danger of falling into Confederate hands. One of Davis’s colleagues believed that this must result in “all these negroes being recaptured or perhaps brutally shot”. In the event, many of them died trying to cross the swamp on their own makeshift rafts, or even by swimming through its waters. Ebenezer Creek was just one shameful incident, but the further undermining of Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator began even as the mourning for his 1865 assassination, and his subsequent commemoration, were still in progress. Soon after his death, a former slave named Charlotte Scott gave five dollars from her pay to go towards another statue of Lincoln, not the stone memorial on the Mall, but the bronze Emancipation Memorial in a different part of Washington DC. At the unveiling of the statue, though, a black politician and reformer named Frederick Douglass made an important speech. He pointed out that, even if Lincoln ended slavery, he always chose the course of action that would most advantage white America. “I as much as any other man,” Lincoln once said, “am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Read more: A country at the crossroads: how Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War Harriet Tubman and the ‘Underground Railroad’ Frederick Douglass and others would watch with chagrin as the ending of slavery in a formal sense turned into less official forms of abuse of African Americans. Racial segregation became a fact of life in many formerly Confederate states, as did using the formerly enslaved as poorly paid labour. Indeed, ‘slavery’ was still possible – in all but name. The Chattahoochee Brick Company was a particularly heinous example of this. Operating at full steam to rebuild the city of Atlanta after the Civil War, it produced millions of bricks a year. To do so, it exploited a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which formalised emancipation. Slavery can no longer exist, this amendment says, “except as punishment for crime”. So, if you were convicted of a crime – a situation that applied disproportionately to black people – you could find yourself working for hardly any money under a scheme called ‘convict leasing’. If particularly unlucky, you might find yourself in the Chattahoochee Brick Company’s yard outside Atlanta, where thousands of convicts were worked to death, and whose bodies are thought still to lie beneath the remnants of the company’s works. Read more: Michael Wood on... slavery Britain: a nation of slave owners <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/05/GettyImages-463917157-8ac3a7f-d868842-e1634139068680.jpg" width="554" height="374" alt="An 1826 illustration from 'The Black Man's Lament" title="This 1826 illustration from 'The Black Man's Lament', an anti-slavery narrative poem by Amelia Opie, depicts a campaigner accompanied by a chained slave urging men to sign his petition for abolishing the slave trade. (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> A tacit rebuke It was all this and more that led Martin Luther King to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 to address a rally of more than 200,000 people marching for civil rights. It was no accident that King chose this spot to make a speech that included the words ‘I Have a Dream’. He was referring to the American Dream, and signalling that King and his fellow black Americans also, like white people, dreamed of living as full citizens within Lincoln’s Union. By standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King was saying tacitly that the president’s legacy had let him and his like down. Emancipation had promised more to black Americans than it had delivered. Of course, a lot has changed since 1963. But the Civil War and its memorials are still causing dismay and even violence in 2018. The nexus has been a small park in Charlottesville, Virginia, a quiet college town. When I visited it in June, I was driven by a taxi driver named Mario, whose marriage ceremony had taken place outdoors in the little park. He told me he’d been surprised when his father refused to pose for the wedding photos near the park’s central statue. Read more: The global legacy of Martin Luther King Martin Luther King: the big questions <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/11/MLK-2-2109014.jpg" width="800" height="800" alt="American civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Washington DC, where he delivered his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters in Washington DC in August 1963. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" title="American civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Washington DC, where he delivered his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech to a quarter of a million civil rights supporters in Washington DC in August 1963. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" /> Mario’s father had strong negative feelings about the statue because it’s a memorial to another Civil War general – a Confederate this time – named Robert E Lee. To Mario’s older relatives, the statue of General Lee is not ‘just’ an artwork – it’s the legacy of a white supremacist way of life that still restricts the opportunities of black people today. And Mario’s family certainly weren’t alone in holding the statue of General Lee in contempt. In 2017, Charlottesville city council voted to change the name of the area from ‘Lee Park’ to ‘Emancipation Park’, so as to counter the effect of the statue at its heart. Some went further still, and argued that the statue should come down altogether. Part of the offence lies in the fact that the statue of Lee isn’t a product of the Civil War or its aftermath. It was erected between 1917 and 1924, a period when confidence was returning to the South after the calamity of the 1860s – and when lynchings and other activities by the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise. However, the threat to remove the statue brought out an alliance of protestors in its defence, including members of an extremist group called ‘Unite the Right’. There were violent clashes and, as a consequence of the actions of one of ‘Unite the Right’s’ supporters, a woman – Heather Heyer – died. It may seem extraordinary to suggest that a person killed in 2017 was the most recent casualty of the American Civil War, a conflict that’s supposed to be long over. But there’s certainly something in the claim. “We’re still suffering, we have so much healing to do,” said Heather Heyer’s mother in August 2018, one year on from her daughter’s death. “We have a huge racial problem in our city and in our country.” That’s quite at odds with the message of unity implicit in the memorial to Lincoln that introduces the man and his meaning to so many Americans to this day. Britain has the advantage of several helpful tools for nation-building: centuries of history, a convenient natural border, even a powerful monarchy formerly unafraid to use force to keep its constituent parts together. America, on the other hand, lacking all those things, has had to write its own story. And, when it gets to the chapter about the Civil War, it’s clearly very far from having reached its final draft. This article was first published in the November 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine