HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2024-05-07T16:28:41.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries
items: “Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1
items: Royal sibling rivalry: Henry VIII, Richard III and other monarchs whose fate was determined by their brothers and sisters
items: Free-spirited drama or fake news? How The Crown morphed from ‘safe’ territory to controversy
items: Annus Horribilis: what happened in the Queen’s horrible year?
items: Why the real Beatrix Potter was more than her children’s tales
items: Elizabeth Woodville: Edward IV’s controversial queen consort
items: The Argyll divorce: the society scandal that rocked 1960s Britain
items: The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses
items: Diana: the rebel princess

Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries
type: item
date: 2024-05-07T16:28:41.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: From meditations on grief to musings on motherhood, diaries can reveal a great deal about women’s lives over the centuries as well as the momentous occasions they lived through. Sarah Gristwood turns the pages of some of history’s most fascinating – and overlooked – examples...
encoded: On the evening of 7 May 1945, Lancashire housewife Nella Last and her husband, Will, gathered around the radio with their neighbours. They agreed that if the announcer said the king was to speak, they knew that the big day had come at last. When, instead, the announcer, “said so unemotionally that tomorrow was to be VE Day, and that Churchill was to speak at three o’clock”, the group just gazed at each other. They felt, recalled Last in her diary, “no pulse quicken, no sense of thankfulness or uplift, of any kind”. But despite the sense of an anti-climax, Last still felt that she had to find a way to mark the occasion – no matter how small. “I rose placidly and put on the kettle and went through to prepare the salad. I looked on my shelf and said: ‘Well, dash it, we must celebrate somehow – I’ll open this tin of pears’, and I did.” The end of the Second World War in Europe, and the way it was celebrated, is widely documented. But Nella Last’s vivid description shows what a gift we have in women’s diaries: their immediacy, their sense of what it was like being there, and their insight into what the diarist was thinking, rather than what the weight of hindsight would tell them to do. Yet, despite their intrinsic value to historians, women’s diaries remain a largely untapped resource – something that motivated me to compile a new anthology, Secret Voices, bringing together more than 1,200 diary entries written by women all over the world. Diaries: a fresh perspective on history Indeed, diary entries written on the same day as major events can put what we’ve traditionally thought of as being ‘history’ into perspective. As Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, wrote in February 1942: “It is now half-past seven in the morning. I have clipped my toenails, drunk a mug of genuine Van Houtens cocoa, and had some bread and honey.” She described feeling, at that moment, “enormous faith and gratitude that life should be so beautiful”, despite the fact that she had t…

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“Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1
type: item
date: 2023-11-16T12:14:36.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: The Crown
subject: The royal family
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: Historian Sarah Gristwood reviews the first episodes of the royal drama’s final season. Centring on the final months of Diana, Princess of Wales, part one invokes an eerie blend of memory and invention, and plays with our knowledge of what lies ahead…
encoded: As actor Claire Foy said in the Netflix teaser for the sixth and final season of its flagship drama, the crown is a symbol of permanence. She, in her role as the young Elizabeth II, meant the crown she embodied, the one on her head – but you could say the same of The Crown too. A final sixth season, taking the narrative into the 21st century, was originally on – then off – then on again. It is now being shown in two separate chunks; and rightly so, because although the first four episodes are about the crown and its putative future, in personal terms they are all about Diana, Princess of Wales. Even the evocative poster image shows Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana – alone but always on view – perched on the end of the springboard aboard the Al Fayed yacht in the summer of 1997, seemingly contemplating a dive into an uncertain future. These first four episodes cover a little more than eight weeks, and with such a tight focus its central performance is all-important. Debicki does not disappoint. Her voice – that voice we all remember from the real Diana’s Panorama interview – is almost spookily right. Images we all recognise are recreated with astonishing accuracy (though the famous landmines walk has been transposed from her Angola visit to her Bosnia one in August 1997). But in those very memories lies the challenge – that we’re coming up to, as the New York Times put it, “one of the most analyzed periods in recent British history”. And as they watch this season, many viewers (in the UK at least) will have an alternative narrative running simultaneously in their head as they match up the drama with their own recollection. Read more | The Crown S6 part 1: the real history in the royal drama The Diana of Debicki and writer/creator Peter Morgan is a woman coping with the chaotic circumstances around her –though nods are made to reports which described, instead, a woman adrift, vibrating distractedly between her anti-landmine crusade and a life of luxury. Much in the first two…

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Royal sibling rivalry: Henry VIII, Richard III and other monarchs whose fate was determined by their brothers and sisters
type: item
date: 2023-01-05T14:00:54.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: General History
subject: Georgian
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Victorian
subject: Henry VIII's wives
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Royal children
subject: The royal family
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: Through history, the role of the second or third royal sibling has not always been easy. Here, historian Sarah Gristwood explores 10 of the most famous – and dysfunctional – royal sibling relationships...
encoded: In the bad old days of high infant mortality, any royal family needed an heir and several ‘spares’ – north of the border, James V and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, are just two of the many British monarchs with elder brothers who died in infancy. William the Conqueror left England to his second son, another William, while the eldest son, Robert, inherited Normandy. Since then, the history of these islands has been littered with famous second – or third, or fourth – royal siblings (or, more specifically, royal sons, since gender continued to trump age right into the 21st century), who for better or for worse have done much to shape the monarchy that we know today. Here are 10 of the most famous... Read more | 'Royal Family’: the fly-on-the-wall documentary the Palace doesn’t want you to see Richard I (1157–99) It wasn’t Richard the Lionheart, but his elder brother, Henry, who was crowned ‘the Young King’ of England, unusually during their father’s lifetime. In the event Henry predeceased his father, but perhaps the fact Richard hadn’t been raised for the job explains why the crusader showed so little real enthusiasm for hands-on rule of England, spending only a few months in the country during his 10-year reign. Richard was himself succeeded by his younger brother, John. Fairly or unfairly, King John has gone down in popular history as a disastrous monarch whose reign was epitomised by his losing the crown jewels in the Wash – but he did inadvertently help to give us Magna Carta. Read more | When and how did Richard the Lionheart die? John of Gaunt (1340–99) By contrast to John I, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – fourth son of the prolific Edward III – has traditionally been accorded a good measure of respect for the steering hand he kept on the country during the minority of his nephew, Richard II. His harsh fiscal policies, however, made him a particular target of the Peasants’ Revolt – while almost as soon as John himself died, Richard II was deposed by Jo…

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Free-spirited drama or fake news? How The Crown morphed from ‘safe’ territory to controversy
type: item
date: 2022-11-09T14:45:41.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 21st Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: The Crown
subject: The royal family
description: Drama, comedy, tragedy – even catharsis, the release of emotion. And that’s just from real-life footage of the actual royal family. Oh yes, and then there’s also the fifth season of The Crown. As the Netflix drama tackles new territory, in the 1990s and well within living memory, historian Sarah Gristwood considers the practical and ethical questions around on-screen portrayals of the recent royals…
encoded: As The Crown moves into the 1990s, it was always going to have a hard row to hoe. The events of those years are at once too shocking and too familiar. What seemed pleasurably entertaining when the events depicted were safely in the past seems tone deaf once they come within the collective living memory. And that was even before a sinkhole opened up right in front of the plough; the Queen’s death in September 2022, and the transformation of Prince Charles (previously broadly viewed as fair game) into His Majesty King Charles III. Read more about the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide Why are some people criticising The Crown’s new season? Everyone has joined in the chorus of disapproval. Former prime minister John Major proclaimed his outrage at scenes in the first episode which have him (played by an oddly-cast Jonny Lee Miller) listening, reluctantly, to Charles (Dominic West) suggesting his mother should abdicate in his favour. (Typically for The Crown’s use or misuse of factual detail, the Sunday Times poll prompting the suggestion was not invented – but the presentation of it was skewed.) In a rare moment of political unity, T…

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Annus Horribilis: what happened in the Queen’s horrible year?
type: item
date: 2022-11-03T17:06:50.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: The Crown
description: In a speech by the Queen on the 40th anniversary of her succession, she described the year 1992 as her "annus horribilis" – or horrible year. Historian Sarah Gristwood explains what happened in Elizabeth II's life in 1992
encoded: In the three decades since Elizabeth II’s famous speech, the phrase annus horribilis has passed into popular currency. Perhaps – at a time the monarchy’s popularity and relevance seemed at a low ebb – the fact that the phrase endured shows that the monarchy still retained its pulling power. Or perhaps the fact the Queen chose Latin, a dead language, to describe 1992 showed the very reason people were finding the monarchy less relevant. “One’s Bum Year” was how The Sun newspaper translated the words, with deliberate crudity. You couldn’t make up the saga of that year. Luckily for the media, they didn’t have to. For the British newspapers locked into a vicious circulation war, it was fortunate, and perhaps even now for the producers of season five of The Crown, due to debut shortly. But even a bald chronicle of events of 1992 shows how the blows kept coming, in a volley as relentless as the fusillade of gunfire on a Balmoral shooting day. Read more about the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana What happened to the royal family in 1992? January 1992 saw the Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and his Duchess Sarah, telling the Queen their marriage was effectively at an end; characteristically, she asked them to wait before mak…

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Why the real Beatrix Potter was more than her children’s tales
type: item
date: 2022-02-11T10:01:58.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 20th Century
subject: Edwardian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: As a new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London celebrates the life and inspirations of the beloved children’s author, Sarah Gristwood considers how the much-forgotten elements of Beatrix’s Potter’s work make her so extraordinary…
encoded: Everyone – surely – knows Beatrix Potter? The creator of characters such as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Tom Kitten and Pigling Bland? Her creations are familiar, but as is often the case the real person behind them is rather surprising. This month, a new exhibition at the V&A, ‘Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature’, is celebrating the beauty and accuracy of those countless, eponymous, drawings. But it also pays tribute to her whole, wider, legacy. Beatrix Potter’s life fell into three distinct phases, and the ‘little books’ that made her famous occupied only the shortest of them. Born in 1866, she spent more than 30 years in education, as a Victorian young lady dominated by her family. Perhaps unexpectedly, as she was later famous for her stories of the countryside, she was forced to spend much of her life in city streets. “My brother and I were born in London because my father was a lawyer there,” she wrote in her later life, “but our descent – our interest and our joy was in the north country.” Her salvation was the long summer holidays her family spent first in Scotland, then in the Lake District. A sheltered childhood She and her brother Bertram would travel north and back with a menagerie of pets – a jay and an owl, a hedgehog (called Mrs Tiggy), rats and bats, and a whole succession of rabbits, which Beatrix used to take out on a dog lead. “Even the usually idiotic hutch rabbit is capable of developing strong character, if taken in hand when quite young,” she wrote. But though devoted to her pets she was quite unsentimental, even boiling the skeleton when an animal died to study bone structure for her drawings. As a 15-year-old, she wrote in her journal: “The chestnut horse is disposed of at last. Papa sent Reynolds to the Zoological Gardens to enquire the price of cat’s meat: £2 for a very fat horse, 30/-[shillings] for a middling one, thin ones not taken as the lions are particular.” That coded diary, which Potter kept from her mid-teens until the ag…

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Elizabeth Woodville: Edward IV’s controversial queen consort
type: item
date: 2022-02-07T12:50:40.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Plantagenet
description: Could she have saved her sons from Richard III? Did she mastermind an uprising against Henry VII? How did she react to the death of the princes in the Tower? Sarah Gristwood unpicks the mysteries surrounding Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s controversial queen...
encoded: Why did Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV appal so many people? When, in the autumn of 1464, Edward IV informed his councillors that he had made a secret marriage, his choice of bride – Elizabeth Woodville – went against all the conventions of his day. Kings were supposed to marry in order to cement a foreign alliance – Elizabeth would be the first English queen since the Norman Conquest. Kings were also supposed to marry fellow royalty – Elizabeth was the daughter of a mere knight. The secrecy of the ceremony was another problem. In the years ahead, the first parliament of Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, would denounce this as an “ungracious pretensed marriage”, having taken place “secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private chamber, a profane place”. Worse still, in an age when many people believed a king’s bride should be a virgin, Elizabeth was a widow. If that wasn’t bad enough, her first husband had been killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the Lancastrians against Edward IV’s Yorkists. And she was even five years older than Edward – though, as the king pointed out, with two young sons by her first marriage, she had at least proved her fertility. More seriously, it was later alleged that Edward had no right to marry Elizabeth at all, having been earlier secretly precontracted to someone else. The charge was raised in 1483, after Edward’s death, when Richard of Gloucester signalled his intention to take the throne as Richard III on the grounds that Edward’s sons – Richard’s nephews – were illegitimate. One Bishop Stillington was said to have declared that he had earlier married Edward to Eleanor Butler (née Talbot), daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury. The evidence for Stillington’s accusation is, at best, circumstantial – Eleanor was dead by 1483, so no one could ask her, and the earlier marriage hadn’t been an issue in 1464. But for it to be raised at all shows that the marriage was, indeed, hugely controversial. Did she marry for love…

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The Argyll divorce: the society scandal that rocked 1960s Britain
type: item
date: 2021-12-26T08:05:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: New BBC drama A Very British Scandal will catapult viewers into a vicious society divorce battle that saw one woman’s reputation raked over in the 1960s tabloids. Biographer and historian Sarah Gristwood considers the real figures at the centre of the drama – including the so-called ‘headless man’ – and how the case reflects the changing attitudes of a nation…
encoded: Margaret Campbell, the famously beautiful Duchess of Argyll, had been a celebrity – and a source of scandal – from even before her debutante days. But she would be remembered for just one thing: the so-called ‘divorce of the century’, which ended her marriage to the Duke of Argyll in 1963. Polaroids, forcibly snatched by her husband and produced in evidence, showed her – naked except for her recognisable signature pearls – engaged in what the presiding judge called “a gross form of a sexual relationship” with an unidentified man. The divorce convulsed the Britain of the 1960s, reflecting a changing mood in the country. What has perhaps been lost along the way is a sense of the duchess, and indeed the duke, as a living, breathing human being. The new miniseries A Very British Scandal, with Claire Foy and Paul Bettany playing the Argylls, must hope to change that. But this is the story that gives meaning to the old cliche – this truth really is stranger than any fiction could be. The child of a Scottish self-made millionaire, raised largely in New York, the young Margaret Whigham had been reared in an atmosphere of privilege, but emotional insecurity. By the time she was 19 years old, she was already the veteran of four engagements – to the Prince Aly Khan; the Earl of Warwick; the son of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook; and the married millionaire sportsman Glen Kidston. She had also, as she told one would-be biographer, become pregnant by a young David Niven and undergone an illegal abortion. In 1933, at 20, she married the rich American-born socialite and businessman Charles Sweeny; there was such public excitement around her wedding dress that the event halted traffic in Knightsbridge for three hours. Such was her status that a lyric referencing ‘Mrs Sweeny’ would feature in one version of Cole Porter’s hit song ‘You’re The Top’. But after 13 years, two children, a stillbirth, and eight miscarriages, the couple divorced in 1947 – comparatively amicably, by …

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The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses
type: item
date: 2021-11-22T16:55:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Plantagenet
subject: Tudor
subject: Historical people
description: They masterminded coups, brokered peace deals and may even have led troops into battle. Sarah Gristwood unlocks the stories of the women who shaped one of the bloodiest dynastic clashes in English history
encoded: The events of the middle and late 15th century were, we have always been told, driven by men. It was a story of the battlefields on which kings, dukes and earls fought for control of the country during the Wars of the Roses; a great dynastic confrontation that saw the houses of York and Lancaster battle for control of the English crown from 1455–85. This assumption of male dominance is as automatic as the one that saw Margaret Beaufort ignore her own claim to the throne in favour of her son, Henry Tudor, or as the heiress Anne Neville being passed between Lancaster and York as though she were as insentient as any other piece of property. Yet the actions of the women forged during the Wars of the Roses would, ultimately, prove to matter as much as the battlefields. Referred to as that “great and strong-laboured woman” by Sir John Bocking in 1456, Margaret of Anjou, with her determination to hold onto the reins of power, played a vital part in pushing England into civil war. It was two other women, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, who brokered the marriage that sealed the peace deal. From Henry VI’s wife to Henry VII’s mother, it was women who acted as midwives to the Tudor dynasty. The women behind the so-called Wars of the Roses were playing a game of thrones. The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency. The passion and pain of the lives echo through William Shakespeare’s history plays – and yet, those plays apart, most of us know very little about their extraordinary stories. This is due, in part, to the patchy nature of the source material. The sources for this particular period are “notoriously intractable”, as JR Lander, an expert on the Wars of the Roses, put it – and more so for women who fought on no battlefields and passed no laws. The detailed records – and the aristocratic letters you find even from the days of Henry VIII less than 50 years later – are largely absent. What’s more, the years that saw the disappearan…

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Diana: the rebel princess
type: item
date: 2021-11-06T07:06:00.000Z
creator: Sarah Gristwood
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: The Crown
subject: The royal family
subject: TV interest
description: Initially presented as the heir to the throne's dutiful, innocent bride, Diana transformed herself into an outspoken and controversial figure. Sarah Gristwood considers a short life lived in the full glare of expectancy and speculation
encoded: It’s now nearly 40 years since Prince Charles began courting Lady Diana Spencer; more than 20 since her death following a car accident in a Paris underpass. It feels as if – slowly, cautiously – she is beginning to pass into history. To look back to the early days of her public life is to realise how far we have come. It was 1980 when the 32-year-old Charles encountered the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, youngest daughter of Earl Spencer, at a weekend house party. They had met before, since Charles had been involved with her elder sister, Sarah, but then Diana had been a mere 16 – and now, Charles was under pressure to find a bride. His beloved mentor Lord Mountbatten, recently assassinated by the paramilitary Provisional IRA, had urged Charles to “choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for”. It was Diana’s tragedy to be chosen for what she did not have – experience, any sign of independent opinions – rather than for any more positive qualities. Charles and Diana: a history of their marriage Not that Diana was reluctant; she actively sought the prince’s interest. Unhappy at home, thanks to her parents’ bitter divorce and her father’s remarriage to the daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, she was looking for her path in life. Without a qualification to her name (“thick”, she cheerfully called herself), marriage was the obvious option. That autumn the press spotted Diana sitting beside Charles as he fished the river Dee. Immediately they took up the tale of ‘Shy Di’, the aristocratic English rose, so modestly working as a kindergarten assistant. Her uncle Lord Fermoy assured the press she was a virgin; her biographer Andrew Morton would write that she knew she had to “keep myself tidy”. There have been few high-profile women in the modern western world who were chosen so exclusively for what was valued in their forebears: virginity, aristocracy and fertility. Read more “It doesn’t fall into th…

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