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What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother?
Throughout her long reign, the late Elizabeth II juggled being a mother and grandmother with royal duty. But with careful judgment, hard work and a mischievous sense of humour, she forged a dynasty and inspired a nation
They might not be the first monikers to spring to mind when thinking of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch who was renowned for her sense of duty and her dignified demeanour, but “Gary” and “Cabbage” are two of the nicknames bestowed upon her by her family. “Gary” was how Prince William knew his grandmother as a youngster, apparently confusing the word with “Granny”, while the Queen’s great-grandchildren Prince George and Princess Charlotte know the Queen affectionately as “Gan-Gan”. As for “Cabbage”, this was the fond nickname used by her husband Prince Philip – which might come from the French term of endearment, “mon petit chou”, translated to “my little cabbage”. Was Elizabeth II a mother when she came to the throne? As matriarch of “The Firm” (the insider name for the royal family) and the oldest monarch in British history, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952 at the age of just 25, the mother of two young children. Thrust into royal duties, she faced the immediate challenge of balancing the work of monarchy with the demands of motherhood, a battle which was present throughout her reign. Read more | A brief guide to the British royal family, by The Crown historian Robert Lacey Just 18 months after her accession in 1952, Elizabeth II was called upon to tour 13 countries, including Australia, over six months, without Charles, age five, and Anne, age three. The young children were famously greeted with handshakes upon the return of their parents, and though she dispensed with some of the more formal royal traditions – the children were not required to bow or curtsey to their mother – their childhoods were marked by absence. The prince and princess were largely raised in their younger years by governesses and other household staff, in the same way that Elizabeth and Margaret had been by “Crawfie”, in keeping with the manner of many upper-class families of the time. The children were required to understand that travel and time were part of the monarch’s commitment to rule. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1450650980-a8ef201-e1776646626706.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II holds baby Prince Edward on a balcony as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, stands beside her in military uniform, smiling." title="The Queen holds a very young Prince Edward in her arms as she stands on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with the Duke of Edinburgh, June 1964. Edward was the most recent child to be born to a reigning British monarch (Photo by Getty Images)" /> It was a decade after Anne that the Queen gave birth to her third child, Prince Andrew, in 1960. Prince Edward followed in 1964, making the two sons the first children to be born to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria. Ten years after her accession, many noted a difference in the Queen’s relationship with her two younger sons. Royal historian Robert Lacey suggests the Queen became “warmer and flexible”, able to step back a little from her duties. What were Queen Elizabeth’s relationships with her children like? Both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip agreed that their children should not be hampered, as they saw it, by the social and educational constraints of homeschooling, which had previously been the norm for royals. Yet Charles’s education was far from straightforward. Prince Philip wished Charles to be sent to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, hoping to make his son in his own image. The Queen Mother (who favoured Eton, close to Charles’s Windsor home) wrote to the Queen in 1961, saying, “it is miles and miles away, he might as well be at school abroad. He would be terribly cut off and lonely up in the far north.” The Queen Mother’s fears for her sensitive grandson were not unfounded. Two years after the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992 (which saw the marriages of three of her children break down amid tabloid scandal, as well as a fire at Windsor Castle) an authorised biography of Prince Charles dealt perhaps the harshest blow to the Queen’s reputation as a mother. Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now The 1994 account, written by Jonathan Dimbleby, described the bullying and “crushing loneliness” Charles experienced at school, and a childhood characterised by long periods of his mother’s absence. Charles was said to feel “emotionally estranged” from his parents and yearning for affection that, in his view, they were “unable or unwilling to offer”. The book declared Charles’s bonds of affection to be much stronger with his nanny Mabel Anderson and detailed how the Queen would spend short windows of allotted time with her son in the morning before his daily walk and before bedtime. Historian Piers Brendon has suggested that in contrast to the “tremendously affectionate, and very welcoming and warm” Queen Mother, with whom Charles had a close relationship, Elizabeth II was “a very distant mother”. Read more | A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth Yet in a 2002 BBC documentary, Princess Anne said: “We understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch, in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make. “But I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.” What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a grandmother? If the Queen’s reputation as a mother has been characterised as distant by some, there was a more palpable fondness for her eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. From the birth of her first grandchild – Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, born in 1977 – the Queen took on a new persona; the dutiful grandmother who inspired by example. “I’ve always been very close to my grandmother, and we speak often,” Peter Phillips told The Telegraph in 2016. “She has been an inspirational person throughout my life.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1241123935-47c9c5f-e1776646682863.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II, wearing a bright green coat and hat, smiles at her great-grandson Prince George during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations." title="The Queen shares a moment with Prince George of Cambridge during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022. George is now second in line to the throne following his great grandmother’s passing (Photo by Getty Images)" /> In 2018, Princess Beatrice told of how her grandmother “goes out into the community with a genuine curiosity as to how she can be a force for good in the world”. Though duty evidently came first, there was also an enduring sense of fun that she shared with those close to her. Many royal sources have recounted how the Queen was an excellent mimic, and particularly fond of impersonating former prime ministers and US presidents she had known through the years (some favourite impressions were reported to be René from TV show ’Allo ’Allo! and Labour politician Tony Benn). One royal aide, Angela Kelly, shared how the Queen has “a wicked [mischievous] of humour”. Read more | The 8 most famous royal weddings in British history The Queen proved herself an adept grandmother in the 21st-century online world too, no more evident than when she joined her grandson Prince Harry in 2016, recording a sassy comedy video message to US president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama in order to promote the Invictus Games. At Christmas, even as her descendants started their own families, the Queen remained at the centre of the royals’ festive celebrations, bringing together the whole family at her Sandringham residence. At 6pm sharp, the tradition was for adults to exchange cheap joke gifts and Prince Harry could clearly get away with a little extra cheekiness towards his grandmother. On one such occasion he gave the Queen a shower cap with the slogan: ‘Ain’t life a bitch’. Elizabeth II’s ancestor Queen Victoria was notoriously meddlesome in the marriages of her grandchildren – as ‘Grandmama Queen’ she felt uniquely placed to orchestrate the marriages of her 42 grandchildren, manoeuvring them into seats of European power. The Queen did hold the power to exercise control over her descendants’ marriages­ – though not all; since 2013, the Succession to the Crown Act has meant that only the first six royals in line to the throne require the monarch’s permission to validate their marriages. So in 2018, Princess Eugenie could marry without the Queen’s consent (though it’s unlikely that she wasn’t consulted), whereas Prince Harry still had to obtain the monarch’s permission. This the Queen duly bestowed, writing in her official capacity: “My lords, I declare My Consent to a Contract of Matrimony between My Most Dearly Beloved Grandson Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Rachel Meghan Markle.” It’s clear though that her grandchildren valued the Queen’s approval beyond an official seal. And it seems that a sure way to impress the monarch was by getting on with her beloved corgis. “For the last 33 years, I’ve been barked at,” Harry told the BBC ahead of his 2018 wedding. That apparently wasn’t the case for the Duchess of Sussex. “This one walks in,” the prince joked, indicating his bride-to-be, “Absolutely nothing. Just wagging tails.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-960056422-947df8c-e1776646732976.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Prince Harry and Meghan Markle smile during their wedding ceremony inside St George’s Chapel, Windsor, surrounded by guests." title="The Duchess of Sussex wore a tiara owned by Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother, Queen Mary, during her wedding in May 2018 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The Queen also publicly showed her support and welcome to her grandsons’ wives by lending them two significant family heirlooms for their weddings. The Duchess of Sussex wore the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary’s platinum and diamond bandeau tiara for her wedding in May 2018. The Duchess of Cambridge wore the Queen’s Cartier scroll tiara, purchased by the Queen’s father King George VI and given to Elizabeth on the princess’s 18th birthday. Long to reign over us More than seven decades after starting her own family, it’s clear that the late Queen imbued her dynasty with her own strong sense of duty and service. She served as the figurehead of the family, an inspiring example by which to measure their own public activities. Despite the familiarity, it’s also clear that the Queen was still able to keep her family on their toes. In 2018, Prince Harry gave the following advice to a group of visitors to Buckingham Palace: “If you suddenly bump into her in the hallway, don’t panic. I know you will. We all do.”
The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queen
At the time of her birth, Elizabeth II was a princess who was never expected to succeed the throne. So how did she become queen? From her unconventional childhood to the crisis that made her a monarch, Kate Williams charts Elizabeth II's life within the royal family before she was crowned...
In April 1926, Britain was on the brink of the General Strike called by the TUC. There had been an economic perfect storm: the postwar crash in coal prices, combined with the government putting Britain on the gold standard, had put mining under pressure. After a government commission recommended reducing miners’ wages, the stage was set for an all-out strike of miners and other workers covered by the TUC, including railway and transport workers. But despite being in a crisis, the home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks could not be excused from witnessing the legitimacy of a royal baby. The Duke and Duchess of York – George V’s second son, Bertie and his wife, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – were expecting their first child. Although the baby was not a direct heir to the throne, Sir William still had to travel to 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, a home owned by Bowes-Lyons, where the child was due to be born. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II: 50+ facts about her life and reign The little girl was born by caesarean section at 2.40am on 21 April. “We have long wanted a child to make our happiness complete,” wrote the duke. The child was “a little darling with a lovely complexion”, decreed Queen Mary. “I do hope that you and papa are as delighted as we are to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have had another grandson?” wrote the duke to his father, George V. The baby was officially third in line to the throne, but since she was the child of George V’s second son – and female – she was destined to be pushed down the succession by sons born to her uncle, the Prince of Wales, and her father. She was called Elizabeth Alexandra Mary after her mother, great-grandmother and grandmother – after consorts, not queens regnant. The princess was destined for a good marriage and little more. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1404441219-533f6bb-e1776639421178.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A baby Queen Elizabeth II is held by her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, while her father, the future King George VI, looks on in a black-and-white family portrait." title="The Duke and Duchess of York with the infant Princess Elizabeth, 1926. The Duke would later become George VI following the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII in 1936 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> On 3 May, the TUC called the General Strike. Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin called it the “road to anarchy”, but the government played hard, drafting in volunteers and calling forth the middle classes to step in. By 12 May it had been called off and the following year the government outlawed sympathetic strikes and strikes intended to coerce the government, making another general strike impossible and restoring the existing structures of power. Two weeks later, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was christened by the archbishop of York at Buckingham Palace. The young princess was a favourite with her grandparents and one of the few people in the family not afraid of the king, whom she called ‘Grandpa England’. In early 1927, her parents departed on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, leaving her with her nannies. When they returned, they took a new house, 145 Piccadilly, near Hyde Park. It had 25 bedrooms, a lift and a ballroom but, by royal standards, Elizabeth was growing up in a cosy, normal house and her playmates in the gardens were the daughters of businessmen and doctors, not fellow princesses. In 1930, Princess Margaret was born. This time the home secretary, John R Clynes, had to trek up to Glamis Castle, the ancestral home of the Duchess of York. “I am glad to say that she has large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment a lady needs!” the duchess wrote. As they grew up, it became evident that the two little girls had very different personalities. Elizabeth was conscientious, dutiful and orderly – she couldn’t go to sleep without unsaddling and feeding all her nursery horses and lining them up neatly. Margaret was playful, determined and fond of pranks – she blamed any mistakes or spillages on her imaginary friend, Cousin Halifax. In 1933, when Elizabeth was seven, she received a new governess, Miss Marion Crawford. She had been recommended to the Duchess of York as a “country girl who was a good teacher, except when it came to mathematics”. Fortunately, the duchess was not looking for a challenging academic schedule. Both she and her husband had hated school (the duke had been ridiculed as a dunce). What the royal couple wanted for their daughters was a “really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories”, which meant minimal lessons. The king had only one request: ‘‘Teach Margaret and Lilibet a decent hand.” Miss Crawford’s regimen was gentle. Elizabeth received lessons from 9.30 until 11 in the morning and the rest of the day was devoted to outdoor games, dancing and singing, with a rest period for an hour and a half. Unlike her parents, Elizabeth had an aptitude for learning and enjoyed history and literature but she had little opportunity for sustained study. Queen Mary criticised their education and recalled that she had busied herself with homework in the holidays – but to no avail. In her free time, Elizabeth was fondest of dogs and horses. She declared she wanted to marry a farmer so she could have lots of “cows, horses and dogs”. George V died in January 1936, and the Prince of Wales assumed the throne as Edward VIII. As king he was more dependent on his lover, Wallis Simpson, than ever. But although the foreign press discussed his relationship with the American divorcee at length, the British newspapers stayed quiet. In late October, Wallis filed for divorce from her second husband and it was clear that the king meant to marry her. The government was as determined to stop him, for it was thought the people would not accept a divorced consort. The empire governments mostly refused the idea outright. “It was plain to everyone that there was a great shadow over the house,” wrote Miss Crawford. Read more | The death of King George V – what happened? On 10 December, 10-year-old Elizabeth was about to write up her notes from her swimming lesson when she heard chants of “God Save the King” outside. She asked a footman what had happened and he told her that her uncle had abdicated and her father was king. She ran up to tell her sister the news. “Does that mean you will have to be the next queen?” asked Margaret. “Yes, some day,” replied Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret. In the face of crisis and change, Elizabeth adopted a technique she would use throughout her life: she stuck to her routine, attempting to appear unruffled. She wrote up her swimming notes, and at the top of the page she wrote: “Abdication Day.” Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now The jolly life of 145 Piccadilly was at an end. The family moved into Buckingham Palace and her father and mother – who had always been so present – became consumed by meetings, receptions and politics. The former king, now the Duke of Windsor, the Uncle David of whom the children had been so fond, was sent to Europe. Elizabeth attended her father’s coronation, accompanied by Queen Mary, writing that the abbey was covered in “a sort of haze of wonder as papa was crowned, at least I thought so”. Elizabeth was now heir to the throne. Queen Mary stepped up her campaign over education, and more history was introduced. In 1938, Elizabeth began receiving lessons from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, on constitutional history. Marten’s teachings were important to Elizabeth’s perception of her role: he told her that monarchy was strengthened by adaptability and talked of the importance of broadcasting directly to her subjects. The palace and the government were concerned that the princess did not seem too isolated. The First Buckingham Girl Guide Pack was instituted, with 20 girls invited to the palace on Wednesday afternoons. They learned trekking in the palace grounds and practised signalling in the corridors. On 15 March 1939, German tanks entered Prague. The ‘peace’ created through appeasement by prime minister Neville Chamberlain was shattered. “Who can hope to appease a boa constrictor,” declared The Telegraph. The country moved towards war. In the summer of 1939, Elizabeth and her parents paid a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where the king had studied. There she was introduced to Philip of Greece, 18 to her 13. The princess was fascinated by him. On 3 September 1939, Chamberlain announced on the BBC that Britain was now at war. The king broadcast later in the day, telling the people that this “grave hour” was “perhaps the most fateful in our history”. The princesses were staying at Birkhall, near Balmoral, on their annual summer holiday with Miss Crawford – and were soon joined by hundreds of evacuees from Glasgow. After Christmas at Sandringham, they went to Royal Lodge in Windsor, the pale pink walls painted green to fool enemy bombers. The queen refused to bow to pressure to send the children to Canada, out of the range of the enemy. Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? In spring 1940, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway. Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister, declaring to the Commons that Britain must “wage war, by sea, land and air with all our might”. The dispossessed royals of Norway and Denmark arrived seeking safety in London. The princesses were sent to Windsor Castle, where they would remain for the rest of the war – along with the crown jewels, bundled up in paper in the underground vaults. The princesses were key to the propaganda strategy – the nation was told that they were in a secret location in the countryside, where they carried around their gas masks and grew their own carrots and potatoes in a vegetable patch. But the princesses were not exempt from the terrors of war – 300 bombs were dropped on Windsor Great Park over the course of the conflict. Often they were woken at night and sent into the underground vaults of the castle. Like Churchill, they slept in ‘siren suits’, zip-up all-in-one jumpsuits designed for warmth and practicality in bombing raids. The palace had repeatedly rejected requests for Elizabeth to speak on the radio. In 1940, with the Luftwaffe razing British cities to the ground, the king and queen changed their minds. In a time when US support for the war effort was critical, they agreed to allow the princess to broadcast on the BBC to the children of North America. On 13 October she gave her speech, expressing how she and her sister sympathised with those who had been evacuated, since “we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all”. The speech was a hit. “Princess yesterday huge success here,” reported a north American representative of the BBC. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1018089778-f154721-e1776639568862.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white image of a young Queen Elizabeth II seated at a desk reading from a script into a microphone, with Princess Margaret watching beside her." title="Princess Elizabeth (right) and Princess Margaret broadcast a morale-boosting speech for the “children of North America” in October 1940. The address was warmly received across the pond (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “This time we are all in the front line,” said the king in his Christmas message at the end of 1940. The bombing of British cities continued until April. Britain entered a sustained period of hardship. In 1941 it was the first country in the world to introduce conscription for single women. When Elizabeth turned 16, she begged her father to allow her to join the Labour Exchange. She was interviewed, but not placed – much to the relief of the king, who wished to protect his daughters. At the end of 1943, when Elizabeth was 17, Philip came to spend Christmas with the family. He was charmed by her admiration and what he described as the “simple pleasure” of family life, so unlike his own unhappy childhood. He returned to war enthusiastic about the idea of marrying the princess, and his cousin, George of Greece, made a suggestion to the king that the pair might wed. It was a misstep; the king was shocked and told George that Elizabeth was too young and Philip “had better not think any more about it at present”. The king didn’t wish to lose his daughter and the courtiers thought Philip “rough, ill mannered” (in the words of one). Worst of all was his background. As one courtier put it, “it was all bound up in one word: German”. The princess turned 18 in 1944 and began to assume royal duties. Her father insisted she be made a counsellor of state (usually only open to those who had reached 21) and she stood in for him when he was briefly in Italy, signing a reprieve on a murder case. She made her first public speech at a children’s hospital and launched HMS Vanguard in the autumn. But she wanted more – she desired to serve in the forces. In early 1945, the king relented and allowed her to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a trainee ambulance driver. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1475851901-3f9d0ec-e1776639728760.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A young Queen Elizabeth II in Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform stands beside a military ambulance marked with a Red Cross." title="Princess Elizabeth served as a trainee ambulance driver and mechanic during the Second World War. Photographs of the young royal doing her bit for the country became a vital propaganda tool for the British government (Photo by Getty Images)" /> At the base in Aldershot, she was initially kept away from the other trainees and taken to eat in the officers’ mess, before the papers found out and the regime was quickly adjusted. The princess later said that it was the only time in her life that she had been able to test herself against people her own age. For the government, her training was a propaganda coup. Photos were taken of her wielding her spanner or standing by vehicles and she was on the front of every Allied newspaper. On 30 April, Allied forces occupied the Reichstag. Hitler took his own life in his bunker and the troops surrendered. On 7 May, the BBC interrupted a piano recital to announce that the following day would be known as Victory in Europe Day. The war was over. On VE Day, the princesses appeared with their parents and Winston Churchill on the balcony of the palace to wave at the crowds, Elizabeth in uniform. That evening, Margaret suggested that they go out to see the crowds. The king and queen relented and the girls set off, accompanied by Marion Crawford and various officers, wandering as far as Park Lane before returning back through Green Park to shout “we want the king!” with the crowds. “All of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief,” recalled Elizabeth. Read more | “We sang, we danced and we all held hands”: celebrating VE Day Once the euphoria had subsided, the aftermath of war seemed grey, miserable and full of privations. “Food, fuel and clothes are the main topics of conversation,” wrote the king. He was exhausted by the effort of war and found it hard to adjust to daily life. At the same time, the people were fascinated by the princess and increasingly preferred to see her opening hospitals, presenting prizes and giving speeches. She was overwhelmingly popular: dignified, a veteran of the war and full of the glamour of youth. Cambridge University suggested she might be the first woman ever to receive an honorary degree, but the palace refused the offer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-3354783-d77a9e1-e1776639818551.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip walk arm in arm outdoors, smiling at one another in a black-and-white photograph." title="Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip enjoy a walk during the first part of their honeymoon, which was spent at the Broadlands Estate, Hampshire, in November 1947. The couple would be married for 73 years (Photo by Getty Images)" /> In 1946, with the end of the war in Japan, Prince Philip returned to Britain and was sent to teach naval officers in Wales. He began to court Elizabeth in earnest, taking supper with her and Margaret in the nursery and taking the sisters out to restaurants or shows. Austerity Britain was delighted by the idea of a royal romance and the possibility of a wedding. The king and queen were dubious, but it was too late – Elizabeth was determined to marry Philip. In February 1947, the princess left the country for the first time for a tour to South Africa with her parents and sister. There, she celebrated her 21st birthday. She reviewed troops, attended a ball in her honour and gave her address to the empire. In it she pledged her future: “I declare before you that my whole life, whether it shall be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” She had spent a long time in the nursery but now she was 21, on the brink of marriage – and in less than five years, she would become queen. This article was first published in BBC History Magazine’s ‘Queen Elizabeth: 90 Glorious Years’ bookazine
At the end of the 19th century, the law-abiding citizens of Birmingham were terrorised by a new breed of gang member with two defining passions: natty streetwear and extreme violence. Andrew Davies reveals why so many young, working-class men were drawn to the brutal glamour of the peaky blinders
"Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham and assaults on police. No matter what part of the city one walks, gangs of 'peaky blinders' are to be seen, who ofttimes think nothing of grossly insulting passers by, be it a man, woman or child. I venture to say that 99 times out of 100, they are not even brought to justice." This anguished letter, signed "Workman", was published in the Birmingham Daily Mail on 21 July 1898. Who were Birmingham's real Peaky Blinders? ‘Peaky blinders’ were easily recognised. Contrary to the myth that grew in later decades – and the BBC drama series – they did not wear caps lined with razors. In fact, they wore ‘billycock’ or bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, with a rakish, curved rim, two-and-a-half inches wide. They moulded the brims of their hats into a point, worn tilted over one eye – hence their nickname. They did not belong to a single gang. Quite the reverse: opposing gangs, all sharing this outlandish style, sought each other out on the streets of Birmingham and in late-night confrontations outside the city’s music halls. The term peaky blinder, adopted in the 1890s, was distinctive to Birmingham. In Manchester and neighbouring Salford, gang members were known as ‘scuttlers’. In London, they became known by the more enduring label ‘hooligan’. How violent were real gangs like the Peaky Blinders? The frustration of ‘Workman’ was understandable. Three days earlier, Police Constable George Snipe had been fatally injured in a disturbance that shocked the city. PC Snipe and a fellow constable named Mead were patrolling a poor district to the north of the city centre between 9.30pm and 10pm when they ‘moved on’ a group of six or seven young ‘roughs’ who had gathered outside the Tram Stores pub in Hockley Hill. As one member of the group later admitted, the men had spent the day, a Sunday, on a spree, “drinking all the day, and fighting all the evening”. The constables followed the men to the junction of Bridge Street West, where PC Snipe arrested 23-year-old William Colerain for using vile language. When the two constables tried to take Colerain in, he kicked out and the prisoner’s friends attempted to rescue him. A crowd gathered. In the ensuing melee, someone hurled a brick at PC Snipe’s head with such force that it knocked his helmet off. The stricken constable was taken by cab to the city’s General Hospital, where he died in the early hours of the following morning. A post-mortem revealed that his skull had been fractured in two places. On the podcast | Historian Andrew Davies on the real Birmingham gangsters who inspired Peaky Blinders The death of PC Snipe caused an outcry. Editorial commentaries in the Birmingham press railed against the brutality, violence and degradation that confronted the city's magistrates on a daily basis. According to the Mail, "A large percentage of the rising generation are emerging from boyhood into manhood without acknowledging any authority whatever, and with all the instincts of the savage brute implanted in them." The Mail was not alone in demanding the introduction of flogging for crimes of violence. As it pointed out, a public meeting in St George's Ward, attended by a large number of working people – many of whom lived locally, close to the scene where PC Snipe had been assaulted – "enthusiastically applauded" calls for brutal street ruffians to be flogged. "Public feeling has reached a white heat," the Mail commented, "and very properly so." A local woman named Polly Mullins identified the brick-thrower as James Franklin. Aged 19, Franklin worked as a file-cutter. He stood trial at the Birmingham Assizes on 16 December 1897, but the case against him collapsed when defence witnesses testified that the brick had been thrown not by Franklin, but by 19-year-old George ‘Cloggy’ Williams. Franklin was found not guilty. Williams went on the run as soon as he heard that PC Snipe had died. He evaded arrest until 9 January 1898. When he made his first appearance before the city’s stipendiary magistrate, reporters noted that, “his hair, which is of a light colour, was dressed in the approved ‘peaky blinder’ style, short at the back, and pulled down in a fringe over his forehead”. His former employer testified that Williams had worked as a glass-beveller for four years before leaving abruptly, without drawing his wages, on the day of Snipe’s death. Contrary to the prevailing depiction of peaky blinders as workshy, the employer said Williams had been “very industrious”. Williams in turn stood trial at Birmingham Assizes on 17 March 1898. After just two days of hearings, he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to penal servitude for life. Passing sentence, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell, described the crime as "atrocious", noting that it was "thinly removed" from murder. The judge evidently thought the jury had been unduly lenient in finding Williams guilty only of manslaughter. The local newspapers applauded the sentence. As the Birmingham Daily Post put it: "We hope that every rowdy in Birmingham will take the lesson to heart." If the term peaky blinder was new in the 1890s, concern at violence among youths in Birmingham’s industrial districts was not. As historian Barbara Weinberger notes, clashes between rival youth gangs were first reported in the city during the early 1870s, their origins in territorial wars fought between English and Irish street gangs. Hostility towards Birmingham’s Irish-Catholic population had intensified during the previous decade. In June 1867, Park Street in the city’s Irish quarter had been largely demolished during the Murphy riots, provoked by an anti-Catholic tirade by the militant Protestant orator William Murphy. Anti-Irish feeling was subsequently inflamed by reports of ‘Fenian’ activity. During the 1870s, according to Weinberger, anti-Irish sentiment “offered a focus and a target for the frustrations of inner city youths which… became institutionalised in gang warfare”. Why did people join gangs like the Peaky Blinders? Weinberger offers two further explanations for a reported upsurge in street disturbances and gang warfare in Birmingham from around 1873–74. The recession that followed the boom of the early 1870s threw thousands of unemployed and disenfranchised youths onto the streets. At the same time, police clampdowns on drunkenness and street gambling were resented in working-class districts. Young men featured prominently in the disturbances that ensued. Weinberger contrasted the vigour of campaigns to reform “public manners” with the indifference shown by the civic authorities to the “welfare or rights of a section of the community who had no power or votes… and for whose behaviour they had nothing but disdain”. Youthful members of Birmingham’s street gangs described themselves as ‘sloggers’. According to historian Philip Gooderson, the ethnic hostility that sparked gang conflict in the 1870s was later eclipsed by narrower, territorial loyalties. Most of the feuds reported in the press during the 1880s and 1890s involved gangs from adjacent districts. Conflicts spread across the Birmingham conurbation, extending from the central ‘slums’ to Aston, Perry Barr and Balsall Heath, all of which lay outside the jurisdiction of the Birmingham police in 1890. Street gangs also confronted each other at music halls. On 23 December 1893, John Metcalfe, aged 20, was fatally stabbed in the neck during a fight between rival gangs from Park Street and Barford Street. The gangs clashed outside ‘the Mucker’, the concert hall in Digbeth, fighting with the buckle ends of their belts as well as knives. Thomas Cherry, a 19-year-old nailmaker, was subsequently convicted of manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. By the 1890s, Birmingham’s sloggers had adopted a distinctive uniform. One of the witnesses at Cherry’s trial, William Bond, sported a “cropped head and bell-bottomed trousers”. It was a style shared by the sloggers’ counterparts in Manchester and London, the scuttler and the hooligan. What did the real Peaky Blinders wear? The Birmingham paint and varnish manufacturer Arthur Matthison saw the city’s warring youths at close quarters when his family moved to Summer Lane, close to the spot where PC Snipe was fatally injured and notorious as a rendezvous of the ‘peakies’. In his memoirs, Matthison painted the peaky blinder as intensely style-conscious: “He took pride in his personal appearance and dressed the part with skill. Bell-bottomed trousers secured by a buckle belt, hob-nailed boots, a jacket of sorts, a gaudy scarf and a billy-cock hat with a long elongated brim. This hat was worn well over one eye, hence the name ‘peaky blinder’. His hair was prison cropped all over his head, except for a quiff in front which was grown long and plastered down obliquely on his forehead.” Read more | In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like? As Matthison pointed out, most peakies belonged to a slogging gang. He saw these youths as “the product of poverty, squalor and slum environment”. To Matthison, living in Summer Lane with “slums abounding all around”, it was all too apparent that youth violence was the by-product of harsh social and economic conditions. Historian Philip Gooderson qualifies this assessment, pointing out that gang conflicts not only extended beyond the city’s slums but also drew in many youths in full-time work. The occupations of the sloggers who appeared in droves before the magistrates, according to Gooderson, read like “a roll-call” of Birmingham’s industrial workforce: “brass caster, iron caster, fender maker, striker, hinge maker, filer, stamper, chandelier maker, gun polisher, coach builder, spectacle maker, glass blower”. Half of them worked in the iron or the brass industries, the dominant sectors of the local economy. None of them, however, could be described as middle-class. Slogging, like scuttling in Manchester and Salford, was a working-class pastime, reflecting the kudos attached to displays of fighting prowess and toughness in working-class neighbourhoods. Middle-class youths, with greater opportunities and better prospects, had no incentive to risk injury and imprisonment. The Mail dispatched a reporter to Summer Lane, where Matthison lived in the early 1890s, and the correspondent relayed an encounter with a peakie's 'moll'. She too was easily identified by her appearance, since it mirrored those of the peaky blinder himself: "There was the same lavish display of pearl buttons, the well-developed fringe obscuring the whole of the forehead and descending nearly to her eyes, and the characteristic gaudy-coloured silk neckerchief covering her throat. Her head was hidden beneath an elaborate hat of considerable dimensions and decorated with feathers and poppies." (Interestingly, by the late 1890s, the peaky blinder's uniform incorporated the pearl buttons typically associated with the London costermonger.) The reporter concluded, ruefully, that Summer Lane's molls were a "long-suffering lot". When did the real Peaky Blinders disappear? In the years before the First World War, Birmingham’s peaky blinders faded from view. Gooderson attributes the decline of slogging gangs and the concomitant disappearance of the peakies to a number of factors, ranging from the growth of football as an alternative source of excitement for working-class youths to a belated clampdown by the police and judiciary. Like all youth fashions, peaky blinder style had a limited shelf-life. In the early decades of the 20th century, young people in Birmingham, as elsewhere across Britain, began to look to Hollywood for a new sense of glamour. Had a youth dressed as a peaky blinder made an appearance in Birmingham in the 1920s he would have been greeted with astonishment, although middle-aged passers-by might have chuckled in recognition. In 1936, nearly 40 years after their demise, memories of the peaky blinders were stirred by a series of letters published in the "Notes and Queries" column of the Birmingham Weekly Post. One reader had seen "many a policeman" and civilians alike "laid out" by them. In reply, "Bred and Born Brum" insisted that the peaky blinder was "just an ordinary working man… He could always be found at work during the day in some brass foundry, doing his bit at the lathe or vice or perhaps as a polisher or in the casting shop." Read more | Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders S5? Another correspondent, F Atkins, was adamant that “a good many readers have a wrong conception” of peaky blinders: “Their actions were mostly restrained to rival gangs and the police. The general public was seldom interfered with unless they interfered.” Mr Atkins also revealed how the hat that gave the peakie his name was fashioned. It was a “Bowler hat with the brim made to fit the sides, the front of the brim came to a point almost like the spout of a jug. This was done by wetting the brim, warming it by the fire, them making it the shape required. This was worn on the side of the head to show the hair on the other side done in a ‘quiff’.” The peaky blinders had long ceased to stalk Birmingham’s toughest streets. But their fashion sense and penchant for violence had guaranteed their spot in the second city’s collective memory. Andrew Davies is the author of City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). He discussed the real peaky blinders on the HistoryExtra podcast This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Lonely hearts and holiday flings: a brief history of dating
From calling cards and corsets to 'the pill' and the sexual revolution, we have always found inventive ways to find and further love. Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, takes us on a whistle-stop tour of courtship through history
When I first began writing about the history of dating, what struck me most was how similar the problems of today are to the 1930s, the 1840s, and even the 1780s. From worrying about a partner’s financial standing, or whether someone was going to stick around long enough for you to have children with them, to persuading your parents they are indeed a good fit, the means by which we go about finding love may have changed, but not the hopes, dreams and anxieties we’ve had about discovering it. In the Georgian era, for example, the advice was clear: looks matter but value them at the peril of your long-term happiness: “She, who, intoxicated with flattery, protracts the triumphs of her beauty in youth, may live to lament the barren spoils of it in age.” Indeed, throughout history, grooming and dressing as well as you possibly can has always been a better strategy than ruminating on what you don’t have. Victorian women wore dresses cut just above the nipples, with pearl necklaces draped lasciviously in their décolletage, while some Edwardian men favoured wearing corsets and delighted in the sensation of tight lacing. When the mini skirt was invented in the early 1960s, some men even tried it out, including 16-year-old trainee brick layer Tony Liggard whom the Daily Mail reported was convinced it would catch on among men. It didn’t – but long hair, floral patterns, make-up and jewellery all eventually did. So much for the myth that male grooming is a recent phenomenon! <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/2GettyImages-559574483-24ee5fb-e1770990862524.jpg" width="1499" height="1000" alt="A Victorian advertisement showing black and white sketches of men wearing corsets. Across the top is an address and an advert for Madame Dowding" title="Some Victorian and Edwardian men experimented with wearing corsets, as this 1899 advertisement reveals (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once you were suitably styled, you needed to get a date’s attention. The Georgians were mad for ‘lonely hearts’ adverts, which they would write and post via newspapers including The Times, later in matrimonial gazettes, circulated around London’s coffee houses, while the Victorians settled on the idea of the marriage bureau, an agency designed to match the middle classes, via photos and details about their hobbies. In the 1930s, gay men and women would use the fan columns of movie magazines to drop hints about their sexuality by referencing Hollywood stars such as Bette Davis and Montgomery Clift. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Chaperones and calling cards In the flesh, of course, the best seduction tool has always been dancing. From Regency square dancing to secret Victorian drag balls, from the 1910s ‘turkey trot’ to the 1980s and 1990s acid house rave scene, the vertical expression of the horizontal desire has rarely failed a trier. As playwright and actor Steven Berkoff reminisces about the Tottenham Royal dance hall in his autobiography Free Association: “You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice.” But if you couldn’t dance, witty conversation and excellent manners have always served as a good substitute. Meeting a lady on the street in Victorian England was a fraught business. As the etiquette manual Manners for Men put it, you were never to introduce a lady to a gentleman, but always the gentleman to the lady, and must never offer an umbrella to a woman on the street on the basis that “No lady would accept the offer from a stranger, and the other sort of person might never return the umbrella.” WATCH | Fern Riddell's presents her groundbreaking research into one of the most tantalising royal rumours in British history View Green Video on the source website Middle-class Victorians embraced a complicated ritual of giving out calling cards, and of making home visits according to a strict etiquette. However, even if you succeeded getting an audience with your potential amour, you would never be left unattended. Chaperones were in full force until the First World War, when the exodus of Britain’s young men left women to parry and party on their own. Etiquette manuals were swapped for magazine problem pages, and by the 1930s, handbooks on sex were as easily purchased as those on hosting. When we think of the early 20th century, we may imagine courting couples meeting one another on realistic terms, their expectations untroubled by the imagery of dream homes and impossibly honed bodies that haunt contemporary media. However, we’ve always idealised glamour. From the birth of the celebrity-courted gossip column in the 1920s and the boom in cinema from the 1930s, our aspiration to marry the richest and most beautiful has long intruded upon our daily contentment. Today, with living standards so much higher, and the cost of clothes and cosmetics cheaper, it’s actually easier than ever before to replicate celebrity standards of grooming. And while we frequently flagellate ourselves for living in an increasingly narcissistic, selfie-obsessed culture, we aren’t the first generation to be so concerned with the vagaries of appearance. In fact, the Victorians even had their own version of Instagram, exchanging cartes-de-visite – small portrait prints which would be organised into albums also containing images of celebrities and royalty. These albums were exchanged in flirtation but also as a means of asserting one’s social standing. The trick was to guess whether someone showcasing a royal portrait had in fact met the royal in question. Sex before marriage Perhaps the biggest surprise about our dating history is that pre-marital sex has often been the norm for most people. Apart from the revival of a long-practised behaviour called ‘bundling’ – cuddling with clothes on – which was a response to the 1834 Poor Law penalising women who found themselves pregnant as single mothers, it seems our ancestors always found a way to “try the goods before you buy them,” as I remember my grandmother once joking to me. Condoms that could be washed out with carbolic soap were used from the mid-19th century, while contraception campaigner Annie Besant was tried for obscenity for publishing a pamphlet on the topic in 1877. Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys When Marie Stopes published her sex manual Married Love in 1918, it was just as widely read by single girls as married ladies. In her book, Stopes advocated the benefits of conjugal love, and physical pleasure within marriage. “I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance,” she says in the preface, “that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.” In the 1930s, Marjorie Hillis, the author of Live Alone and Like It, recommended that women stay away from affairs before the age of 30 while acknowledging that plenty of single ladies were inviting gentleman callers back to their homes at night, and that societal attitudes were changing: “A woman’s honour is no longer mentioned with bated breath and protected by her father, her brother and the community. It is now her own affair.” Meanwhile, in the 1960s, ‘the pill’ didn’t quite provide the immediate revolution it has been credited with. Originally it was only prescribed to married women, and even in the 1970s, doctors could refuse women a prescription on moral grounds – something my own mother remembers happening when she went, as an engaged woman, to seek it out. What’s more, the downside of women procuring the pill was that men, who had originally assumed responsibility for acquiring condoms, stopped taking as much responsibility for contraception. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/4BXPEMP-2d507fc-e1770991054847.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a young woman. She is sitting at a desk, looking at the camera, while bent over a microscope. In front of her is a large glass globe" title="Birth control pioneer Marie Stopes pictured in her laboratory, 1904. Stopes advocated the benefits of “conjugal love and physical pleasure within marriage” (Image by Alamy)" /> Long before apps like Tinder widened the dating pool, developments in travel and technology have been crucial to navigating the course of true love. When the stream train came into everyday use in the mid-19th century, rail travel reached the masses. Women now shared dimly lit, cramped carriages with men, and even if you were venturing to visit a maiden aunt, there was every chance you could enjoy a verbal dalliance or three along the way with people you wouldn’t necessarily ever clap eyes on again. “Surprise visits by moonlight” The bicycle, meanwhile, also improved romantic opportunities. Contrary to the tricycle, which saw women wearing full skirts and accompanied by a chaperone, the two-wheeler required women to get their leg over, and was effectively the first mode of transport that they could use entirely independently of men. Etiquette guides of the period recognised that people could now pay “surprise visits… by moonlight” and that seaside flirtations could be enhanced by romantic bike rides together. While there was fear about exactly what kind of excitations might be invoked by the bike riding, 1897’s Manners for Men advised that men encountering female cyclists “help ladies as much as possible by pushing their machines up the hills for them”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/5GettyImages-3292776-48250fa-e1770993875813.jpg" width="1500" height="1912" alt="A black and white photograph a woman in a long coat, wearing a hat. She is sitting on a bicycle with her arms crossed. Behind her, there are some trees and a road" title="A young woman enjoys a ride on a ‘scorcher’, a type of bicycle, c1897. Etiquette guides from the era suggested that courtship could be enhanced by romantic bike rides with your partner (Image by Getty Images)" /> Of course, when circumstances called for it, people have travelled to far-flung lands to find a mate. In the 1930s middle-class women that found themselves ‘left on the shelf’ still travelled to colonial India in search of husbands. Nicknamed ‘the fishing fleet’, these women travelled by boat to colonial outposts along with ambitious young men seeking work. In some cases, they’d often coupled up before the vessel had even docked, or used the voyage as an opportunity to scope out who would be available on dry land. This was encouraged by local Indian churches who did not approve of ‘loose’ women flitting about the provinces. Read more | A timeless love story? Abélard and Héloïse’s passionate affair There was even a tale of one 36-year-old woman named Kitty Irwin who was invited to stay with a married friend in Karachi. During her six months ‘on tour’, she met an exporter called Sam Raschen who became more or less besotted with her at first sight. When she arrived at the booking office to arrange her passage home, she was escorted to see Raschen in his office at the dock and he subsequently persuaded her to delay her return indefinitely and, instead, marry him. In the 1950s, the first package holidays opened up the possibility of a ‘holiday fling’ to the general populace. The 1970s, meanwhile, saw the invention of 18–30s holidays, which began with the same insalubrious reputation that they ended up with. A Sunday Times reporter from the end of the decade wrote: “I spent one night on the beach until 4am waiting for Chas to finish and let me get back to bed. But he did give me 1,000 pesetas to amuse myself with. As for my other room-mate, he was sick in the sink on the second day. Too much sangria. Despite that, he managed five girls in our seven nights there. And one girl, I found out, had tackled an equivalent number of blokes.” Later, the film Shirley Valentine would inspire a flock of similarly inclined women, including female sex tourists who were courted by young Caribbean men called ‘rastitudes’, and men who sought mail-order brides, on a ‘no-try-before-buy’ basis. Today, dating organisations like Inner Circle connect peripatetic singles at events in multiple capital cities. And with advances in digital messaging and virtual reality technology, it’s never been easier to start a relationship across a distance. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/62JRHC3E-8ac18b1-e1770994863561.jpg" width="1500" height="1003" alt="A photograph of a couple looking lovingly into each other's eyes. The woman has a pink top on and curly hair. The man is in a dark blue shirt and has a moustache. Behind them is a large beach" title="Pauline Collins and Tom Conti in Shirley Valentine (1989). The award-winning film, based on a Willy Russell play of the same name, inspired women to pursue their own holiday romances (Image by Alamy)" /> Nor has it ever been easier to date according to broader gender preferences, sexual orientation or erotic peccadilloes. Much of that is as a result of the relaxation of some of the laws discriminating against LGBTQI individuals and so-called ‘alternative’ relationships, but also a cultural shift in how we define gender, and who gets to decide what kinds of couplings and throuplings (or more) are permitted. But some of it is the dating industry’s desperate attempt to cast the net ever wider as dating app fatigue sets in and users become cynical of taglines such as ‘Designed to be Deleted’. The future of dating Finding an appealing alternative to dating apps is proving tough; experimental in-person dating events in places like bookshops just don’t yet have the same reach or appeal, and younger users are frequently finding apps such as Snapchat and TikTok a much better way to connect. And if AI is set to pose a bigger shift to how we live since the Industrial Revolution, that includes dating. That could be your AI bot talking to another AI bot to streamline the process of making a partner shortlist for you, but also AI’s increasingly sophisticated ability to dredge the internet for information about specific individuals, collated from a lifetime of social media posts. However, as we've seen throughout history, dating as simply yet another commodification has never stuck – and certainly never managed to fulfil the wild longings of the heart. And while marriage rates flounder, dating as not just entertainment but self-fulfilment has a rose-tinted future. Nichi Hodgson is a journalist and the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder (Little, Brown, 2017)
What happened to Shakespeare's daughters? A guide to the playwright's family life and descendants
The story of the Shakespeares was one of social advancement, says Stanley Wells, reflected in dwellings that rose from rural farmstead to manorial splendour. Along the way were some family upsets: pregnant brides, lawsuits and excommunication. As a film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet arrives on cinema screens, find out more about when William married Anne (Agnes) Hathaway, when their children were born, and what became of the Shakespeare family after the playwright's death…
He is one of the greatest writers of all time, and our longing to know as much as we can about him continues. We know that William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to John and Mary Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and that he was their first child to survive past infancy. During the Elizabethan period, infant mortality was very high, and his parents had already lost two daughters before young William was born. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but his baptismal record survives, showing that Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare (William, son of John Shakespeare) was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Holy Trinity Church on 26 April 1564. His birthday is now celebrated on 23 April, since it was common for baptisms to be held three days after a birth. As a film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's historical novel, Hamnet, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is released, find out more about the playwright's home life and how his family influences shaped him – plus what happened to his daughters after the story of Hamnet concludes. William Shakespeare's birth family: who were his parents? The story of Shakespeare’s family – one of upward social mobility – is reflected in their homes. Start in the small village of Wilmcote, three miles north of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the playwright’s mother, Mary Arden, grew up in a small farmhouse built around 1514 by her father, Robert. Mary was the youngest of eight daughters by his first wife; his second, Agnes Hill, brought with her two sons and two daughters. When Robert made his will in 1556, he named young Mary as one of his two executors and left her a substantial amount of land and money, which suggests that she was a woman of exceptional ability. Mary Arden married the up-and-coming glover (and later wool dealer and money-lender) John Shakespeare, probably in 1557. Before long they moved into his substantial double-house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, now known as Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Mary had eight children, but only six survived infancy. John gave the town loyal service, rising through the ranks from the relatively humble role of ale-taster to become alderman and, in 1568, bailiff (or mayor.) His application for a coat of arms was unsuccessful in 1576, but he was granted one 20 years later, when he was said to be worth £500 – a sum not to be sneezed at. He died in 1601. In 1594 John’s eldest son, William, had become a shareholder in the troupe of players called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, based in London. Three years later William demonstrated his commitment to his home town of Stratford by buying New Place, the largest house in the borough. Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway In 1582, at the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway (also known as Agnes), who was already around three months pregnant with their daughter Susanna. The Hathaways – tenant farmers with 90 acres of land in the nearby village of Shottery – were acquaintances of the Shakespeares, and William may have met Anne while helping with the local harvest. To ensure the pregnancy didn’t cause a scandal, Shakespeare had to apply to the Bishop’s Court in Worcester for permission to hold a wedding at short notice. Between 1570 and 1630 the records show that only three men in Stratford-upon-Avon were married below the age of 20 (the average age to marry was 26). Shakespeare was the only one of those whose wife was already pregnant. William and Anne also had three children, an elder daughter, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. Shakespeare's family at New Place New Place in Stratford was demolished in the 18th century but archaeological excavations carried out under the auspices of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust have added to our knowledge about the size and layout of the property. It had five gables, a courtyard, three floors, and between 20 and 30 rooms – more than enough to accommodate the entire extended family, if necessary. Indeed, Thomas Greene, Town Clerk from 1603 to 1617 and a member of the Middle Temple, who described himself as William’s cousin – the word could be flexibly used – lodged there with his family. There would also have been ample space for William’s unmarried brothers, Richard, Gilbert and Edmund, of whom little is known. We do know that Edmund, 16 years younger than William, became an actor in London like his brother, had a bastard child, and died when he was only 27. He was buried in what is now Southwark Cathedral on the last day of 1607 to the sound of the ‘great bell’ – the tolling of which cost someone, probably William, £1. Gilbert, who witnessed the deed of purchase for New Place in William’s absence, worked at one time as a haberdasher in London. Of Richard we know only that he was baptised in Stratford on 11 March 1574 and buried there on 4 February 1613. William’s sister Joan, born in 1569, married a hatter, William Hart, some time before 1600. They had four children: William, Mary, Thomas and Michael. Joan’s husband died in 1616 only a week before his famous brother-in-law, who left Joan life tenancy of part of the Henley Street house, along with £20 and “all his wearing apparel”. She lived there until her death in 1646 when the house, along with the adjoining dwelling, passed to her son Thomas, and then to his son, another Thomas, by the will of Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Barnard. The property, identified as the Birthplace on the earliest surviving map of the town (dated 1759), remained in the family till 1806. The line continued; John Shakespeare Hart, a chair-maker, was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey in 1800 with a memorial that mistakenly described him as “the sixth descendant from the poet Shakespeare”. Subsequent family members emigrated to Australia. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to his daughter, Susanna, who, with her husband John Hall, moved into New Place while Anne was still there. Anne lived at New Place for another seven years until her death in 1623. What happened to William Shakespeare's children? Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet – the name a variant of Hamlet – died in 1596, aged only 11. Presumably, like his father, he had been a pupil at the free grammar school, though its records from this period don’t survive. Susanna, born six months after her parents married, seems to have been an accomplished woman with a mind of her own. She was reported to the Ecclesiastical Court for refusing to take communion at Easter 1606 when, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, the authorities were especially anxious to round up possible Roman Catholic sympathisers. The case was dismissed. The following year she married the strongly Protestant physician John Hall, and her father gave her the substantial gift of 107 acres of land in Old Stratford as a marriage settlement, while apparently retaining a life interest. In 1613 her marriage was afflicted by scandal when one John Lane claimed that Susanna had caught a sexually transmitted infection from a married hatter and haberdasher named Ralph Smith. She successfully sued Lane for defamation of character in Worcester Consistory Court. Lane, who did not turn up to defend himself, was excommunicated. These events are dramatised in Peter Whelan’s successful play The Herbal Bed (1996). The Halls are believed to have lived in the large and handsome house on the outskirts of the town now known as Hall’s Croft, which dates from 1613 and may have been built for them; when Shakespeare died in 1616 they moved into New Place. Shakespeare left most of his property to Susanna and appointed the Halls as his executors. Susanna lived until 1649. Her epitaph reads “Witty” – that is, intelligent – “beyond her sex, but that’s not all, / Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.” In this period, education for girls lagged far behind that for boys, but there were petty schools in the town where both boys and girls could learn to read, write and do their sums. Susanna’s signature survives in the records of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, seems to have been a bit of a handful. At the age of 31, less than two months before her father died, she married Thomas Quiney, son of a prominent townsman, in Holy Trinity Church – but was excommunicated because they had not obtained the special licence required for marriage in Lent. There was reason to marry in a hurry: soon afterwards Quiney was accused of “incontinence” with Margaret Wheeler, who had been buried with their illegitimate child. He pleaded guilty. Shakespeare made changes to his will seemingly designed to protect Judith’s interests. She and Thomas went on to have three sons, all of whom died young; they called the eldest, born soon after his grandfather died, Shakespeare. Judith lived until 1662. Shakespeare’s last direct descendant was Elizabeth, born to Susanna and John Hall in 1608. He left her most of his silver plate (easily convertible into cash if she wished). She married Thomas Nash and they lived in New Place. After he died she married John Barnard, a prosperous widower with several children, in 1649. When her mother died soon afterwards the couple moved into New Place. A staunch Royalist, Barnard was made a baronet in 1661. Later they moved back into his ancestral home, Abington Manor in Northamptonshire, an even more splendid house than New Place, where Elizabeth died childless in 1670. So a family story that began in a modest farmhouse ended with Shakespeare’s granddaughter in a great manor house. What would Mary Arden have made of that? Does Shakespeare have any living descendants? Shakespeare has no direct living descendants, but there are still descendants of his sister Joan and her husband William Hart. His childhood home on Henley Street in Stratford remains in the care of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Stanley Wells is a leading authority on Shakespeare. He is honorary president of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham
Forty years ago, the UK found itself in the grip of a virus that killed thousands of people and sparked fear, confusion and prejudice – HIV. Janet Weston explores the Aids crisis as it unfolded throughout the 1980s, and how it transformed attitudes about everything from sexuality to healthcare
In the early 1980s, reports of a strange new disease began emerging from the United States. It was picked up in the British gay press – Gay News ran a story in November 1981 under the headline “Gay cancer or mass media scare?” – but relatively few people noticed. Even among those who did, confusion and doubt reigned: weren’t these tales of a “gay cancer” just fear-mongering, a backlash against the gains of the fight for gay liberation in the 1970s? How could a disease target gay men, anyway? Such suspicions were not without good reason. The medical profession had a difficult history with people who didn’t conform to heterosexual norms: less than 10 years earlier, homosexuality had still been categorised by the internationally influential American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder. And when it came to Aids, the lack of knowledge about its cause or mode of transmission led to wild speculation. One theory linked Aids to the use of “poppers”, a recreational drug popular on the gay scene; another proposed that Aids was the end point of too many sexually transmitted infections. The picture grew still more complex as the symptoms associated with this new illness were also identified both among injecting drug users and people with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia, including women and children. By July 1983, there had been 14 reported cases of Aids in Britain, all among men. Most were gay, including one man who also injected drugs, but the group included another who had been receiving treatment for haemophilia in the form of blood products. Just two months later, the number had risen to 24, and included a woman and a second man with haemophilia. As numbers of diagnoses in the United Kingdom started to rise sharply, the deaths began. Many people died very soon after diagnosis, as an array of opportunistic infections took advantage of their weakened immune systems. Terrence Higgins died in July 1982, one of the first deaths in the UK attributed to Aids. His partner, Rupert Whitaker, recalled asking the doctors whether Higgins’ death could have been caused by the strange “American disease”, but was dismissed out of hand: he was not family, so they couldn’t tell him anything. It wasn’t until a few years later that he found out they expected him to die soon, too. In the aftermath of Higgins’ death, his friends joined with Whitaker to set up a trust in his name to provide information and education in this information vacuum – and to provide support and services for people affected by Aids. In those frightening early years, charities such as the Terrence Higgins Trust led the charge. Men and women who had begun to see the impact of this disease first-hand devoted themselves to taking action. As well as fundraising, they gathered and shared the latest information, often looking abroad for insights from countries with more advanced epidemics. Volunteers and activists also campaigned for accurate media coverage and government attention, and ran phone lines and community centres to provide counselling and advice. Dread of infection Given the uncertain and rapidly changing state of knowledge about Aids, it was often difficult to know what advice to offer. If this really was a sexually transmitted disease, then perhaps abstinence was the answer – but with a newly self-confident gay community and a flourishing scene in many of Britain’s cities, this hardly seemed realistic. There was an idea that condoms might reduce the risks, but it was far from certain, and there were fears that condoms might give a false sense of security. Campaigners and volunteers struggled to decide on the best line to take. Even so, given the paucity of medical knowledge, many of these volunteers were better informed than the average doctor or nurse. In fact, many people with Aids in the 1980s knew more about their condition than their own clinicians, and some clinicians were willing to listen and learn. The idea of patients as participants in or even consumers of healthcare, whose experiences and views should be valued by biomedicine, had been building since the 1950s and was given a huge boost by patient expertise and advocacy during the first decades of HIV and Aids. With no known cause, no certainty over the mode of transmission, and all early signs indicating that Aids was invariably quickly fatal, the dread of infection was overwhelming. Nurses recalled being scared of their patients, caring for them in isolation while wearing two sets of gloves and gowns, using disposable cutlery and plates and burning bedsheets after use. “Nurses didn’t even touch a patient’s notes (which had ‘Infectious’ written at the top) without gloves,” one recalled. “It was just horrendous.” Life and death on the margins The virus causing Aids, now known as HIV, was identified in 1984. Soon thereafter a test for HIV antibodies – indicating exposure to the virus – was approved for use in the UK. The ability to test individuals, including those showing no symptoms, was transformative in terms of gathering data about the epidemic, but the results were alarming. Initial testing revealed that perhaps as many as three-quarters of people with haemophilia already had HIV, as did some of their sexual partners. Haemophilia was commonly treated with products generated from blood donations from large numbers of people, and around 1,200 people in the UK with haemophilia were infected with HIV in the 1980s. For the press, they were the “innocent victims” of the virus. That label naturally also served as a reminder that there were supposedly “guilty” ones, too, and fear quickly turned into hostility and discrimination. Those affected by Aids were mostly gay men, with drug users the second-largest group. These were already marginalised communities who could easily be blamed for their own misfortune, and Aids soon became deeply stigmatised: a marker of deviant living. Some of those with Aids were glad to be informed that their condition had finally led to a form of cancer, because at least cancer was something that you could tell people about without shame. In Edinburgh, heroin use had become particularly prevalent in the early 1980s; testing carried out by one doctor, Roy Robertson, revealed that more than half of his patients were HIV positive. The scarcity of needles and syringes, which were often seized by police, meant that drug users shared and repeatedly reused their injecting equipment, and infection had been spreading rapidly. Public health policy regarding drugs in Scotland underwent a dramatic shift in response, with attention turning to ways of minimising the harms of drug use instead of insisting on abstinence. It became a priority to reduce injecting drug use as much as possible, for example by prescribing methadone to those addicted to heroin, and for those who continued to inject, to provide sterile equipment. The anxiety surrounding HIV/Aids and its high profile made such radical policy changes possible. The availability of a test for HIV brought its own problems, though. Many people were tested without their knowledge and permission, misinformed of the meaning of their test result, or not told at all. Eighteen-year-old John Campbell, who would later set up the Coalition of People Living with HIV and Aids and advise the government on HIV in prisons, had been arrested in 1986 for “male importuning” and was tested on arrival into prison. But the charges were dropped, he was released, and he had no idea that he had tested positive for another 10 months. Fear and loathing The profile of HIV/Aids increased in the second half of the 1980s. Many people in the UK had remained entirely or mostly oblivious to the unfolding disaster, but this soon changed. Although emerging research indicated that HIV could not be transmitted by casual contact, such as a handshake or a shared cup, a lot of the media coverage became increasingly hyperbolic. “I’d shoot my son if he had Aids, says vicar” ran one lurid headline in The Sun in October 1985. Such coverage often quoted the extreme views of people from all walks of life, from publicans seeking to ban people with Aids from their establishments, to the chief constable of Greater Manchester who said that people with Aids were “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”. The fact that people with HIV or Aids might hold down jobs seemed particularly horrifying. Newspapers anxiously reported that people with HIV or Aids might work as airline cabin crews, bus drivers, teachers – or most worryingly of all, as doctors and dentists. Many people with, or suspected of having, HIV or Aids were fired: the Terrence Higgins Trust dealt with about 100 cases of employment discrimination each year. This period has been characterised as one of “wartime emergency”, with mounting panic finally leading to government action. The Conservative government appointed a cabinet committee to tackle Aids in autumn 1986, and on 21 November there was an emergency debate in the House of Commons. Opinions diverged dramatically, between those favouring regulatory measures such as quarantines and compulsory testing, to those who preferred a more liberal approach, including the promotion or provision of condoms and guarantees of confidentiality for those testing positive. Perhaps most memorable, in terms of government response to the crisis, was the nationwide health education campaign launched in January 1987. In the face of a significant lack of enthusiasm from then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, this included television spots, billboards and a leaflet for every household. Actor John Hurt lent his voice to the now-notorious television advert. Over footage of the word “Aids” being chiselled into a tombstone, he intoned: “If you ignore Aids, it could be the death of you. Don’t die of ignorance.” This campaign has often been remembered as a success. It was a clear sign of action, and expensive too, costing around £20m. Polls afterwards suggested that viewers felt more confident of their understanding of Aids, and ultimately, the worst predictions for the epidemic in the UK did not materialise. However, the campaign also relied heavily upon generalised impressions of death, disaster and doom, doing little to dispel rumours or to educate and help those already affected or most at risk. Artist and activist Leigh Neal received her diagnosis just as these adverts aired; she remembered their clear message that Aids meant death, and the environment of fear and hostility that this created towards her – including bricks thrown through her window. For those who were not white gay men, this lack of information and support could be particularly acute. The later 1980s saw the creation of more specialist advocacy and support groups to fill these gaps. One of the founders of Positively Women, a group set up in 1987 by and for women with HIV, remembered feeling “doubly isolated” in most HIV/Aids support groups, as a woman and a former drug user. Mainliners, a support group run by and for HIV-positive drug users, was founded in the same year. So, too, was the Broderip Ward at Middlesex Hospital in London: a specialist ward for those with HIV and Aids. It was opened by Princess Diana, who took pains to shake hands multiple times with patients at the ward before the cameras, without wearing gloves. Garnering huge press coverage, many recalled this as a vital moment, helping to dispel some of the myths swirling around Aids at the time. This ward and others like it represented greater resources and medical expertise dedicated to HIV and Aids, but also many more people suffering and dying. Specialist wards could provide a sense of community and even fun, in dark times. HIV nurse Barbara von Barsewich described one patient, “a tall, Italian, glamorous man who came out of a side room [in the ward] at night-time in a blue ball gown and six-inch heels... he swung around and just looked so gorgeous. And then he started coughing up bits of his lung... It was just so hard. It was so painful. You knew exactly what was happening.” Love and loss For the most severely affected communities, the extent of the loss in the late 1980s and early 1990s was overwhelming. Julian Hows recalled the deaths of four lovers over these years. One was passionate about cars and was eventually driven to hospital by Hows and friends in a Mercedes-Benz, borrowed for the occasion. As they arrived at the hospital and opened the car door, Hows remembered: “A really nice nurse said, ‘You realise your friend has gone.’” He had died on the journey. Gay men and their friends experienced years of countless funerals, with social circles of young people all but obliterated. At many of these funerals, it remained taboo to mention Aids. Many families felt, as writer and activist Simon Watney put it, “condemned to silence, to euphemism”. In the mass media and popular discourse, Aids stubbornly remained something that happened to “other people”. Generalised fears became more deeply racialised, as news emerged of the epidemic’s disastrous spread and possible origins in Africa. Continuing the tradition of self-help and community organising among those affected by HIV and Aids, volunteers set up the Black HIV/Aids Network in 1989 and began to deliver literature, films and services specifically addressing black and Asian people in the UK. Towards the end of the 1980s, activism surrounding Aids reached a high point. Members of the newly formed London branch of ACT-UP – the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power – organised a series of eye-catching protests designed to attract headlines. Targets included Australia House, in response to new laws requiring immigrants to take an HIV test, and Pentonville Prison, where helium-filled condoms were released to carry leaflets about Aids over prison walls. Read more: From Sappho to It’s a Sin: 9 LGBT+ histories, chosen by experts The London branch of ACT-UP soon disbanded, though, and in the 1990s Aids gradually disappeared from the headlines. The arrival of much more effective drug treatments from the mid-1990s onwards transformed HIV into a chronic but manageable condition. And, although there had previously been a great deal of interest in deploying insights from history to understand and contextualise responses to Aids, historical attention to the epidemic also waned. HIV/Aids had transformed attitudes, practices and policies around sex and sexuality, drug addiction, activism and community-building, as well as hospital hygiene, clinical research and doctor-patient relationships. As the sense of urgency and, later, the memory of the epidemic began to fade, not all of these changes were sustained. Roy Robertson, still working in addiction studies in Scotland, reported that HIV had reappeared in a vulnerable population of injecting drug users in Glasgow in 2015, in a political and policy context that bore striking similarities to that of the early 1980s. Four decades on from the first diagnoses and deaths, there is now a resurgence of interest. Oral history projects are springing up, and new research is beginning to investigate less well-known experiences. There is a campaign for a public memorial to the lives lost to Aids, and a clear desire to ensure that all the losses and gains of those years are not forgotten. After all, a generation of people diagnosed in the 1980s are now the first people with HIV to reach retirement age. The history of HIV/Aids in the 1980s is still unfolding. A global concern: 7 key moments in the world’s battle with HIV/Aids in the 1980s United States 1981 Clinical reports began to describe clusters of a rare type of pneumonia and other unusual infections among gay men and then injecting drug users, in California and New York. News of this novel disease was picked up by the gay press. Different names and possible explanations were floated and the term “Aids” was coined in 1982, but the original idea of a “gay plague” proved difficult to dislodge. Cuba 1983 The government set up a National Aids Commission and ordered the destruction of all blood products imported from overseas. Law 41 was passed, giving the Ministry of Public Health power to enforce the quarantining and mandatory treatment of anyone affected by diseases deemed to pose significant community risk. The first case of HIV was diagnosed three years later, and the quarantining in sanatoria of anyone diagnosed with HIV or Aids began. This remained in place until 1993. Zaire 1984 Research in Kinshasa provided strong evidence of the transmission of HIV between heterosexual couples. Here, there were just as many women with HIV or Aids as men. These findings were not easily accepted by the scientific community but were finally published in The Lancet. The prospect of a global epidemic affecting not only gay men, drug users and haemophiliacs, but also heterosexual couples, began to stir more governments to action. Netherlands 1984 A drug users’ “union”, known as a junkibonden and active since 1980, began to provide sterile needles and syringes to injecting drug users in Amsterdam. Initially introduced to tackle the spread of hepatitis B through shared needles, the scale of needle provision was stepped up considerably in light of HIV and Aids and eventually received government funding. The union published literature by and for drug users, and offered peer support and advice on safer injecting. Senegal 1986 The first cases of Aids were reported. This was a different and less virulent strand of the virus, first identified in West Africa by Senegalese researchers the year before. It brought international recognition and encouraged national political attention to HIV and Aids. Rates of infection remained consistently low, thanks not only to the different viral strand, but also factors including the legalisation and regulation of sex work and high safety standards concerning blood products, both of which pre-dated the epidemic. USSR 1987 The first Aids-related death was recorded, a few years after Russia’s health minister declared that it was a “western disease” that would have no impact on a country without drug addicts or prostitution. There were more than 500 known cases by 1990, but the Soviet authorities emphasised that most of these were foreign nationals. A few years after the collapse of the USSR, reports of rapid HIV spread emerged: by the mid-1990s Russia was said to be on the brink of a vast epidemic. Japan 1989 Haemophiliacs infected with HIV filed lawsuits in Tokyo and Osaka, demanding compensation from the government and pharmaceutical companies. Contaminated blood products imported from the US meant that around 40 per cent of Japanese people with haemophilia were infected with HIV. This “tainted blood” scandal dominated headlines and perceptions of HIV and Aids in Japan: plaintiffs and their families finally received a formal apology and compensation in 1996. Janet Weston is assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. An episode of the BBC Two series Saved by a Stranger covered the HIV/Aids crisis. You can catch up with that on the BBC iPlayer This article was first published in the June 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
Your history guide to Frogmore Cottage: who has lived there before?
How much do you know about the history of Frogmore Cottage, previously home to Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex? Who has lived there before, and why was it built?
Where is Frogmore Cottage? Frogmore Cottage, set in the grounds of Frogmore House, is part of the Frogmore estate in Windsor, Berkshire. Frogmore is situated around half a mile south of Windsor Castle, within Home Park (the private estate of the castle). It’s close to the river Thames and built upon historically wet marsh ground, which led to the estate’s name; the low-lying plot attracts a high number of frogs from the nearby riverbank. Today the cottage, nestled in a quiet corner of the estate grounds, is a private residence, and served as the British home of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, from 2019 when it was gifted to them by the late Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Harry and Meghan were requested to vacate their British base in March 2023, as they took an official step back from participation in royal duties. It is owned by the Crown Estate, though there are no current residents based at the house, royal or otherwise. It was reported in October 2025 that Prince Andrew, younger brother to King Charles III, is considering Frogmore as his residence after leaving Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Read more | Why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived? Can people visit Frogmore Cottage? The cottage is not open to the public, though Frogmore House and estate can be visited on a number of charity days held each year. When and why was Frogmore Cottage built? The cottage has served as a royal refuge since it was built in 1801. It was commissioned by Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who bought the Frogmore estate as a country retreat for herself and her unmarried daughters in 1792. Her husband, often referred as ‘Mad King George’, ruled Great Britain and Ireland from 1760–1820 and suffered from an illness (sometimes attributed as porphyria, a rare hereditary disease) that prompted episodes of eccentric behaviour. Historian Sean Lang explains how the king once ordered his carriage to stop in Windsor Great Park while he popped out to have a chat with an oak tree, apparently under the impression it was the King of Prussia. The royal couple had 15 children over the course of their marriage, and historian Helen Rappaport has suggested that Frogmore Cottage was designed to provide respite for the king’s family. “The king had episodes of frenzy. He was most likely very hard to live with and [Queen Charlotte] presumably utilised Frogmore Cottage as a retreat.” Who else has lived in Frogmore Cottage? Another famous resident of the cottage on the estate was Abdul Karim, an Indian Muslim clerk who became a close confidant and teacher to Queen Victoria. Karim was sent to England to wait at the queen’s table during the 1887 golden jubilee celebrations when the 68-year-old monarch wanted servants who reminded her of her status as Empress of India. She was taken by the handsome young man and Karim quickly rose within Victoria’s affections, as well as in status to the title of ‘Munshi’ (teacher or clerk), teaching the queen Hindustani and advising on all matters concerning India. The relationship between queen and clerk, recently explored in a book by historian Shrabani Basu and dramatised in the film Victoria and Abdul, is just one story of a steady stream of Indian migrants coming to Britain during the 19th century. As Basu told History Extra, “[it’s] fascinating that a young Indian Muslim man was at the centre of the royal court at a time when the British empire was at its height. It is a part of history that the royal family tried to destroy after Queen Victoria’s death.” Karim lived in Frogmore cottage with his family, and refurbished the property in 1893. The queen visited him at the house “each second day”, explains Basu. Yet following the queen’s death in 1901, Karim was forced to return to India by Victoria’s son and successor, Edward VII, who had “abhorred” his mother’s companion. Read more | Queen Victoria's Indian confidant: an interview with Shrabani Basu A home to royal refugees? In the early 20th century, the cottage also hosted royal refugees from Russia. Following the killing of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918, who were shot by their Bolshevik guards, some relatives of the tsar fled the country. One such royal group was offered sanctuary in Frogmore Cottage by King George V, and included the king's cousin Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna. The royal refugees' financial situation meant the cottage soon fell into disrepair, and when King Edward VIII offered Xenia and her family Wilderness House (in the grounds of Hampton Court to the south-west of London), the family left Frogmore. What else can be found on the Frogmore estate? Frogmore House itself dates from 1680–84, built by an architect of Charles II for the king’s nephew. It was later the home of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, for more than 20 years from 1840, and artworks by both the duchess and Queen Victoria are on display in the house. A teahouse built for Queen Victoria also remains on the estate, alongside a 18th-century summerhouse in the form of a Gothic ruin designed by English architect James Wyatt. The estate has long been a bolthole for the royal family. King George VI and his wife Elizabeth spent part of their honeymoon at Frogmore in 1923, and it’s reportedly where the late Queen Elizabeth II walked her beloved corgis. The house hosted the wedding reception of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018, as well as that of the Queen’s eldest grandchild, Peter Phillips, and Autumn Kelly in 2008. Read more | Retiring royals: 9 rulers and royals who stepped down through history The Frogmore estate is also the site of the Frogmore Mausoleum, the burial place of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. The mausoleum, not open to the public during tours of the estate, is currently undergoing restoration works to protect against ongoing damp problems due to its riverside location. The site on the west side of the gardens at Frogmore House was chosen by the queen just four days after Albert’s death at the age of 42 in 1861, and construction began three months later. Following her death at Osborne on the Isle of Wight and a state funeral, Queen Victoria was buried at Frogmore on 4 February 1901. King Edward VII and his grandson, the six-year-old future Edward VIII, knelt as the queen was slowly lowered in to the crypt to be laid to rest beside her beloved husband. View Green Video on the source website
The rise of Æthelstan was as important a moment in English history as 1066 and Magna Carta. On the 1,100th anniversary of his coronation, David Woodman salutes a king who forged a nation
It’s there beside the guildhall. A large grey stone surrounded by Victorian railings. Over the years, countless visitors to Kingston-upon-Thames have strolled past it, many barely registering its existence. Yet here, nestled at the heart of the London borough, is one of the most significant landmarks in the story of early England. For it was in Kingston, 1,100 years ago, that Æthelstan was presented with a ring, a sword, a sceptre and a rod – and proclaimed king. The early medieval leader was the first of, perhaps, seven rulers to be crowned in Kingston over the next five decades. Yet none would leave a legacy quite like his. Æthelstan’s investiture on 4 September 925 acted as the springboard for a reign that would redefine the parameters of early medieval kingship. The new king triggered a cultural and governmental revolution. He became the most feared and respected leader across the British Isles. He made waves across north-west Europe. Above all, he presided over the establishment of ‘England’. To tell his story is also to tell the story of the emergence of a nation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/dreamstime122053861webready-a294964.jpg" width="1500" height="2250" alt="A large stone sitting on a stone base with inscriptions on it. Behind it, there is a blue fence and two stone turrets, and some green hedges" title="The Kingston-upon-Thames coronation stone where Æthelstan was proclaimed ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ in September 925 (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Whirlpools of cataclysms Although Æthelstan was formally invested in the autumn of 925, he had actually become king in the previous year, following the death of his father, Edward the Elder. That delay tells its own story. Æthelstan may now be remembered as one of the great early medieval kings. But his rise to power was anything but straightforward – and far from uncontested. There is evidence that one of his half-brothers, a man called Ælfweard, had also been recognised as king in 924. Power may, therefore, have initially been divided between the two men, with Æthelstan ruling over the kingdom of Mercia (roughly corresponding to the area we now know as the Midlands) and Ælfweard taking control of Wessex (in the south and west). Read more | If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater? Ælfweard’s death soon after brought this division of power to an end, and Æthelstan now found himself sole king across both Wessex and Mercia, a polity known as the ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’. But even then his position was far from secure: there were those in Æthelstan’s capital, Winchester – chief among them its bishop, Frithestan – who opposed his position as king. Twelfth-century sources also tell us that there was a plot to end Æthelstan’s ambitions by having him blinded – only for the person involved (a certain “Alfred”) to be dispatched to Rome to be judged by the pope for his treachery. Æthelstan may have been safe for the time being, but that didn’t stop one contemporary royal document referring to the “whirlpools of cataclysms” that swirled around him. The list of potential cataclysms extended far beyond Frithestan and Alfred. For decades, successive early medieval rulers had lived in the shadow of Viking aggression – and Æthelstan was no different. In the ninth century, there had been significant Viking settlement in the eastern parts of Mercia – not to mention the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria, particularly the city of York. Many of the Viking kings based in York were the descendants of Ívarr, who had risen to power in Dublin and landed in English territory in the mid-860s, causing ruin and destruction. By the early 10th century, these same Viking rulers in York maintained their links to Dublin, which meant that Æthelstan found himself confronted by potential enemies on multiple fronts. The largest threat was, perhaps, presented by Sihtric Cáech (the ‘one-eyed’), Viking king in York at the beginning of Æthelstan’s reign. Sihtric had coins minted in his name in Lincoln – a sure sign that he was attempting to increase the bounds of his authority beyond the traditional confines of Northumbria and into the east Midlands. Many of these coins give him the title of ‘rex’ (king) below an image of a sword on one side, while the reverse carries a hammer. Such objects convey obvious messages about the martial and pagan character of his rule. Fire in the skies Æthelstan and Sihtric’s relationship could, so it seems, have easily been defined by rancour and warfare. But diplomacy and then the fickle hand of fate intervened. On 30 January 926, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how the two kings “met together at Tamworth… and Æthelstan gave him his sister in marriage”. Although the Chronicle’s account is brief, the event referred to was clearly of great significance. No details of what was agreed in Tamworth have survived, but we can assume that Æthelstan and Sihtric would have recognised each other’s authority and the need to keep the peace between both parties. Yet Sihtric’s pledge would soon be rendered redundant for, by 927, he was dead. As the Chronicle reports it, there “appeared fiery lights in the northern quarter of the sky, and Sihtric died, and King Æthelstan succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians”. With this short account, the Chronicle captures what is arguably one of the most important episodes in English history. Æthelstan’s absorption of Northumbria represents the moment when an ‘England’ of a recognisable geographical and political shape was formed for the very first time. The Chronicle provides no more detail about the way in which Æthelstan had acceded to Northumbria, the challenges that he faced in extending his authority, or the importance of what had happened. Some light is perhaps shed on this episode by a 12th-century source that describes Æthelstan razing a Viking fortress at York in order to gain the city’s full submission. Whatever truly happened in the first half of 927, Æthelstan was clearly aware of the significance of this moment. After gaining Northumbria, the king held a ceremony on 12 July 927 at Eamont Bridge, a small town just to the south of Penrith, where he received the submission of various British kings, and a further Northumbrian ruler. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, here “they established peace with pledge and oaths… and renounced all idolatry and afterwards departed in peace”. Read more | 1066: who was the rightful king? It’s a shame that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not give more detail about this momentous year. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on the Chronicle alone for our understanding of what the occasion meant to contemporaries. The retinue of people that accompanied Æthelstan north in 927 included a poet who drafted verses celebrating the fact that “Saxonia”, by which the poet means ‘England’, was now “made whole”. “King Æthelstan lives,” he declares, “Glorious through his deeds!” That there was a poet present with Æthelstan at this crucial juncture in 927 sent a strong message about the type of king he aspired to be: not just militarily dominant, but intellectually superior, too. This idea of a king who cherished learning is supported by the earliest surviving manuscript portrait of any English monarch (shown left), preserved today at the front of a manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Here Æthelstan is shown wearing a distinctive crown, book in hand, head bowed in front of St Cuthbert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-1354472098webready-086d217.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of a king wearing a blue robe holding a book. Beside him, a saint holding a Bible and wearing a red robe stands in front of a church" title="This early 10th-century manuscript portrait projected Æthelstan’s commitment to learning, says David Woodman. It shows the king (left) holding a book, with head bowed in front of the Northumbrian saint, Cuthbert (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obsessed with theft Æthelstan now commanded more territory than any early medieval king before him.But, with his realm stretching from the English Channel in the south to the northern limits of Northumbria – and the Viking threat far from extinguished – how did he go about maintaining control? And what policies did Æthelstan enact? Thanks to surviving coins, diplomas (grants of land to favoured subjects) and a large corpus of laws that survives in the king’s name, these are questions that we can answer in some detail. Careful scrutiny of Æthelstan’s laws, for example, reveals a king who was deeply concerned by the issue of theft, a crime that he and his advisers return to again and again. We also know that Æthelstan’s legal system depended to a striking degree on the written word: on laws being sent to different parts of the kingdom to be implemented by royal officials. The king clearly sought to set up a single administrative system that worked across the entire kingdom. One of his law-codes hints at this aspiration when it calls for there to be only one coinage in use. Those coins that survive from Æthelstan’s reign are never entirely homogeneous in design, but they do all carry the king’s name. Where Æthelstan’s laws and coinage travelled, the king himself would sometimes follow. Royal diplomas – issued in the period 928–35 by an anonymous royal scribe known as ‘Æthelstan A’ – reveal that Æthelstan moved regularly around the kingdom himself, making grants of land. Most of these assemblies were convened in the heartlands of Wessex, but the diplomas tell us that they also travelled further north – convening, for example, in Nottingham in early June 934. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL3964061webready-b06c79e.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large document with a paragraph of writing with lists of things below it" title="In this diploma from 931, Æthelstan grants land to a man called Wulfgar in Ham, Wiltshire. Such documents reveal the depth of the king’s interest in the administration of his kingdom plus the influence he wielded over Scottish, Welsh and Strathclyde/Cumbrian rulers (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> The royal diplomas conventionally contain lists of the important ecclesiastical and lay officials who attended the assemblies – and these make for interesting reading. Not only do they contain English names of people from Wessex and Mercia, but also Old Norse names (presumably from the north and east of Æthelstan’s realm), and those of British kings hailing from the Welsh and Scottish kingdoms. It seems, then, that these assemblies (known by the contemporary Old English word witan, literally ‘wise men’) drew powerful figures from across the British Isles, reflecting just how widely Æthelstan had managed to extend his authority. Read more | The battle of Brunanburh: the forgotten fight that changed British history Æthelstan’s status is even reflected in the sheer complexity of the language used on his royal diplomas (all written in Latin, with a deft use of rhythm and alliteration, and with a clause in Old English, too) and repeated proclamations of the king’s undoubted power. In one diploma, ‘Æthelstan A’ tells his audience that the king has been “elevated by the right hand of the Almighty to the throne of the whole kingdom of Britain”. Amazingly, two 10th-century ‘Æthelstan A’ originals survive today in the British Library in London. Large, highly professional in their script and layout – with long columns of witnesses at their conclusion – they were evidently designed to make it clear that this was a king who wielded new levels of power. Those coming from the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom could not fail to have been impressed by what they saw and heard. Power couples But what about those beyond the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom, in continental Europe? Here, too, it seems that Æthelstan was able to exert a degree of influence – courtesy of a series of strategic marriage alliances involving his half-sisters. Eadgifu married Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks; Eadhild wed Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks; Eadgyth was matched with Otto the Great, king of the East Franks and later emperor; Ælfgifu (or Eadgifu) married into the Burgundian royal line. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL167523webready-a65a7f6.jpg" width="1500" height="1429" alt="Eadgifu of Wessex (second right) in a 14th-century manuscript. Æthelstan’s half-sister was married to Charles the Simple and bore him a son: the future Louis IV of France (second left) (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="Eadgifu of Wessex (second right) in a 14th-century manuscript. Æthelstan’s half-sister was married to Charles the Simple and bore him a son: the future Louis IV of France (second left) (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> While his half-sisters were dispatched to Europe, scholars increasingly moved in the opposite direction to exchange the latest prose and verse texts at an English court that was becoming a hub of bookish activity. We think it is in Æthelstan’s court that some of the earliest English interactions with the Indian game of chess can be evidenced – yet more proof of 10th-century England’s growing cultural pulling power. A hostile coalition The tentacles of Æthelstan’s power now stretched far and wide. But such power could provoke intense resentment. And so it proved in 937 when a coalition of hostile forces – led by Óláf Guthfrithson, Viking king of Dublin; Constantine II, ruler of the Scottish kingdom of ‘Alba’; and Owain, king of ‘Strathclyde/Cumbria’ – clashed with English armies at a place called Brunanburh. Modern discussion of Brunanburh has focused on the enduring mystery of its location. But it’s important not to lose sight of the significance of the battle itself: nothing less than Æthelstan’s newly forged ‘England’ was at stake that day. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL3299765webready-cd67542.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A bishop sprinkles holy water over Æthelstan’s corpse in a 14th-century manuscript. The king’s death in 939 brought to an end one of the most successful reigns in all of medieval English history (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="A bishop sprinkles holy water over Æthelstan’s corpse in a 14th-century manuscript. The king’s death in 939 brought to an end one of the most successful reigns in all of medieval English history (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It was certainly a large and bloody clash. A famous poem, written in the immediate aftermath to commemorate Æthelstan’s deeds, tells us that: “Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword.” Like its location, precise details of how the battle unfolded have been lost to history. But what is certain is that the English prevailed. As the Brunanburh poet tells us: “Edward’s sons [Æthelstan and his brother Edmund] clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords, for it was natural to men of their lineage to defend their land, their treasure and their homes, in frequent battle against every foe. Their enemies perished; the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed.” So important was the outcome of Brunanburh that, unusually, sources from outside the English kingdom – from Wales, Scotland and Ireland – all register its result. Æthelstan had confronted the greatest threat to the authority of his reign and he’d faced it down. Yet his triumph was to be short-lived. Two years later, the king lay dead. And within a few short months of his burial in Malmesbury Abbey, the kingdom he had forged over the past decade began to fall apart. Vikings came to power once more. Óláf Guthfrithson, who had failed to unseat Æthelstan at Brunanburh, finally realised his ambition of seizing control in York. The political fragmentation that followed Æthelstan’s death has left some modern historians to question just how successful he had been in creating ‘England’ in the first place. We should certainly not think of his kingdom as any kind of homogeneous whole. What ‘England’ meant to the people of Winchester would have been very different to someone living in St Germans (Cornwall), or to a resident of Durham (Northumbria). But, at a time when English territories had for generations been riven by divisions, the very fact that Æthelstan was able to bring all of these areas together for the first time, and to be formally recognised as their king, shows how precociously successful he had been. It’s for these achievements that 927, the date of England’s formation, should be as well known as those other landmarks of the medieval era: 1066 (the Norman Conquest), 1215 (the issuing of Magna Carta), 1348 (the arrival of the Black Death) and 1455 (the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses). Æthelstan had presided over a transformative moment in English history. In his 15 or so extraordinary years on the throne, a new nation had been born. David Woodman is professor of history at Robinson College, Cambridge. His new biography of Æthelstan, The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, is published by Princeton University Press This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
9 things you might not know about Sherlock Holmes
The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, has for more than 130 years been a star of stage and screen, played by actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Ian McKellen and serialised in countless books. But how much do you know about this famous crime-buster, who made his first appearance in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual? Here, author Martin Davies shares 11 lesser-known facts about Sherlock Holmes...
1. The first actor to play Sherlock Holmes was American… The first actor to take on the role of Sherlock Holmes in any official capacity was the American William Gillette. His 1899 stage play was adapted from a script by Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Opening six years after the author had attempted to kill off his creation at the Reichenbach Falls, the play was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic: between 1899 and 1932, Gillette performed the role more than 1,000 times. Gillette is also credited with introducing the curved briar pipe that was to become synonymous with the great detective – possibly because a straight pipe obscured the actor’s face when he delivered his lines. On the podcast | Sherlock Holmes: the real history that inspired the detective stories On first meeting Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Gillette is said to have appeared in character, complete with deerstalker, and after examining Conan Doyle most minutely, to have opined: “Unquestionably an author!” 2. … who introduced a love interest Gillette was also one of the first to annoy the purists by introducing a love interest for Holmes. When he telegraphed Conan Doyle with the question “May I marry him?” the author is said to have replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him!” It’s impossible to count the number of writers who, since then, have taken Doyle at his word. Read more | Real-life Sherlocks: the detectives of Scotland Yard and their curious cases 3. He defied death Holmes, having survived the Reichenbach Falls, refused to die with his creator. By the time of Conan Doyle’s death on 7 July 1930, Holmes was already a star of stage and screen. His film debut, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, came as early as 1900. Just a few seconds long, the film used stop-motion camerawork to show Holmes attempting to grapple with a burglar who repeatedly disappears, then reappears in a different part of the room. 4. A 1940s duo cemented Holmes and Watson's on screen personas One of the oldest surviving film adaptations of Conan Doyle’s work dates to 1916 (William Gillette again) but it was the English duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s who for many years became identified in the public imagination as the Holmes and Watson. Rathbone and Bruce made 14 Sherlock Holmes films between 1939 and 1946 (and starred in more than 200 dramatisations for American radio), yet only the first two films were set in the Victorian period. The others had a contemporary setting, allowing Sherlock Holmes to pursue Nazi spies and to urge the purchase of war bonds. Bruce’s dim, bumbling Watson tends to infuriate Holmes purists. 5. He inspired hundreds of parodies The Adventures of ChubbLock Homes, an early comic strip, appeared in Comic Cuts magazine as early as 1893, and the urge to parody the great detective has never gone away. In 1901, while William Gillette’s official Holmes play was running in London, audiences at Terry’s Theatre were enjoying performances of the rather more frivolous Sheerluck Jones. The comic strip Sherlocko & Watso was hugely popular in the USA in the early 20th century, and silent film parodies abounded. Later in the century, Peter Cook and John Cleese both played comedy Sherlocks on film (Cleese's character was Arthur Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock’s grandson). Less well remembered, perhaps, is the 1976 TV film The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, in which a youthful Larry Hagman (before his JR Ewing days) played a deluded motorcycle cop, Sherman Holmes. Read more | Women detectives: meet the Victorian female super sleuths 6. Tobacco, cereal and… mouthwash? Holmes has sold it all Even in his early days, Sherlock Holmes was helping manufacturers to sell their products. In the 1890s, the makers of Beecham’s Pills ran advertisements suggesting that the great detective was a devoted user. And as a smoker, Holmes was popular with the tobacco companies. Early cigarette advertisements using Holmes’ image included brands such as Lambert and Butler’s ‘Varsity’ mixture, Chesterfield, Ogden’s, Gallaher’s and Players. Since then, products as diverse as furniture cream, mouthwash, breakfast cereal and photocopiers have all benefited from association with the great man. 6. He debuted on TV to mixed reviews With the growth of television after the Second World War, the Baker Street detective was quick to adapt to the new medium. Alan Wheatley was the first actor to portray Holmes on British television – his 1951 series was broadcast live. But it seems Wheatley was not a fan of Holmes. When asked about Holmes’ character, he is said to have replied: “In my opinion he just seemed to be an insufferable prig”. 7. One actor played Holmes twice… and his brother Peter Cushing appeared as Holmes on the BBC in the 1960s. He had already played the detective in the 1959 Hammer film The Hound of the Baskervilles, alongside Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Lee was to play Holmes himself in a 1962 film; then, nearly 30 years later, he took up the pipe again, playing an ageing Sherlock in two TV films known together as Sherlock Holmes the Golden Years. Throw in an appearance as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Christopher almost bagged the complete set. Alas, he never appeared on screen as Doctor Watson. 8. The most prolific Holmes For many people, the definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes was by Jeremy Brett, for Granada Television, in the 1980s and 1990s. Brett appeared in 41 episodes, including five feature-length productions. However, even that impressive achievement doesn’t make Brett the most prolific Holmes. That title must go to the British actor Clive Merrison, who played the detective on BBC Radio between 1989 and 1998, and who completed the full canon – dramatisations of all 60 of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and novels. 9. Holmes, The Avengers and Britain's most famous secret agent are forever linked on screen And so to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, in which Andrew Scott rose to prominence playing Moriarty. Scott has also appeared in the new James Bond film, Spectre, joining an illustrious club of actors who have performed alongside Britain’s most famous spy and Britain’s most famous detective. But only Sir Roger Moore has played both leading roles on film. Sadly his one appearance as Holmes – in the 1976 TV-film Sherlock Holmes in New York – is not, perhaps, his most memorable work. Sean Connery never played Holmes, but he did play the ultra-astute friar William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, so you might say that he came close. The actor playing Dr Watson to Roger Moore’s Holmes was Patrick Macnee, most famous as John Steed in The Avengers. Macnee played Watson again, 15 years later, alongside Christopher Lee’s Holmes. Then, in 1993, he donned the deerstalker himself in The Hound of London, thus becoming that very rare thing – an actor who has starred in films as both Holmes and Watson. But all these efforts to breathe new life into Sherlock Holmes might well have been greeted with bemusement by Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote in a letter in 1892: “Holmes is as inhuman as Babbage’s Calculating Machine.” Martin Davies is the author of Mrs Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse (Canelo, 2015)
Emma of Normandy: not just a two-time queen consort of England
Emma of Normandy was queen consort to two of England’s best known pre-Conquest kings, Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great. But she was also a savvy political player who came into her own as queen mother, writes Dr Cat Jarman
Emma of Normandy is best-known as being queen consort to two kings – Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great – and the mother of two more, Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor. She was the daughter of Richard I (the Fearless) of Normandy and the Danish-descended Gunnor. She is also a pivotal character in King and Conqueror, the BBC's Norman Conquest drama, which paints Emma as a dominating force over her son King Edward – which leads to a very ahistorical demise – and in Netflix's Vikings: Valhalla, where she is portrayed as a politically-savvy queen wielding quiet power in the English court, often working to subvert the machinations of the ever-grasping Earl Godwin. Who was Emma of Normandy? Emma was one of nine children and most likely born in the AD 980s. A daughter of the Norman dukes, she was the great-granddaughter of the Viking warrior Rollo, the founder of Normandy who hailed from either Norway or Denmark. This made her of Scandinavian ancestry on both sides of the family. She was also the great-aunt of William the Conqueror. In the words of Godfrey, prior of Winchester’s cathedral monastery, writing in the 11th century: “She had kings as sons and kings as husbands; she shone forth in the glory of her progeny of kings; she excelled in virtue even the ranks of her glorious ancestors.” Emma of Normandy's first marriage: Æthelred the Unready In 1002, probably aged in her late teens or early 20s, Emma was sent to England to marry King Æthelred, as his second wife. The marriage was clearly a strategic one, aiming to strengthen an alliance between England and Normandy in light of harrowing attacks on both English and Norman shores by Scandinavian raiders. Æthelred had apparently accused Emma’s brother, Duke Richard II, of harbouring the Vikings and enabling their attacks, and the marriage was designed to ensure his allegiance. Read more | Aethelflaed: who was the warrior queen who crushed the Vikings? Their union was an unusual one, as although several English princesses had been married off to French and German rulers historically, no English king had married a foreign wife for almost 150 years. Upon her arrival in England, Emma was given the name ‘Ælfgifu’. The marriage resulted in three children: two sons, Edward (later known as Edward the Confessor) and Alfred, and a daughter, Godgifu. Few sources say much about Emma’s political activity in these years, and it seems her role was mainly one of being a wife and a mother: the most common description of her at the time was as the conlaterana regis: “she who is at the King’s side”. This first decade of her career was the one in which she was the least powerful, and one source, William of Malmesbury, suggests that she and her husband were never on good terms. The England that Emma found herself at the beginning of the 11th century was one marked by ongoing trouble and threats of Scandinavian attacks. In 1013, this came to a head when the Dane Swein Forkbeard successfully invaded England. Emma and her children were sent into exile in Normandy, later followed by her husband. Swein’s rule of England was to be short as he died the following year, and a messy two years of political disputes ensued even after Æthelred was restored to the throne. Emma of Normandy's second marriage: Cnut the Great In 1016, Æthelred died. More turbulence was to follow, and later that year England fell to Swein Forkbeard’s son, the Danish King Cnut. The following year, he is reported to have asked for Emma to be fetched to be his wife. Emma became queen of England, once again, but this time also of Denmark and Norway. As with her first marriage, this was a strategic one as it cemented Cnut’s role as king of England. Taking the widow of one of his predecessors as his own wife no doubt helped mark his superiority. At the same time, the union might be seen as symbolising friendship and alliance. While it is unclear what Emma herself really thought of it at the beginning, she later stressed that not only did the marriage bring peace but it was an equal union that she entered into with her own consent. Read more | Cnut’s invasion of England: setting the scene for the Norman conquest Her ancestry may well have affected her feelings. After all, her mother was the daughter of recent Danish settlers in Normandy, and northern origins were a key part of Norman self-identity. Emma likely spoke Danish from childhood and apart from her family connections, she was clearly important to Cnut – not least because of her knowledge of English politics. It seems likely that the partnership between the two grew over time, helped by the fact that they were more or less of the same age. In a document from the New Minster in Winchester, illustrating the monastery’s loyal benefactors, the two are depicted either side of an altar as a double act. This depiction – one of several – emphasises Emma’s political importance. Their marriage lasted until Cnut’s death in 1035. Emma of Normandy's children As well as the two sons and one daughter Emma had with Æthelred, she went on to have two more children with Cnut: Harthacnut and Gunnhild. Cnut also had two sons by his first wife, Ælfgifu (confusingly, the same name that was given to Emma), Swein and Harold Harefoot. At the time of Cnut’s death, Swein had been sent to rule in Norway along with his mother, while Harthacnut was ruling in Denmark. That left Harold as the only of Cnut’s sons still in England. Emma remained at Winchester, where Cnut’s military household was based, and was left in charge of the Royal Treasury and in a position of power. Read more | Norman women: the power behind the thrones Harthacnut was the legitimate heir and should have ascended the English throne, but he could not return from Denmark to claim the crown so Harold ruled in his stead as either regent or co-ruler. Competition for the throne was to continue. Emma’s sons with Æthelred – Edward and Alfred – had been in exile in Normandy and returned to England in 1036. Alfred was soon killed, after being captured and blinded under suspicious circumstances, and Edward may have briefly joined his mother in Winchester before returning again to Normandy. Eventually, Harold was recognised as sole king in 1037. Emma was exiled to Flanders, where she stayed with a distant relative, Count Baldwin and his wife Adela. But her ambitions for herself and her sons remained. Read more | Are women at the heart of the action in the Norman Conquest? Emma of Normandy as England’s queen mother Emma’s career in England can be divided into three distinct parts: the first two relating to her marriages, and the third to this period after Cnut’s death. Now, Emma worked to manoeuvre her sons into kingship, taking an active part in the political sphere as queen mother. When Harold died in 1040, Emma returned from Flanders and Harthacnut finally took the throne. The role as queen mother was clearly an important one, and she was recognised as an authority: she is listed as mater regis in witness lists during these years. Emma may have learnt about queenship from her mother, Gunnor, who was later hailed as the matriarch of the Norman aristocracy, dubbed the ‘mother of the dynasty’ in the 12th century. Harthacnut ruled for only two years, with Emma by his side, until his death in 1042. He was succeeded by his half-brother Edward. But the new king appears to have turned against his mother, arriving in Winchester a few months after his coronation and taking away her treasures of silver and gold, as well as most of the land she owned. Emma was allowed to stay in Winchester and eventually regained her position at court, though without her former status. The precise reasons for this are unclear: Emma was later accused of having been too harsh on Edward; of offering aid to Magnus of Norway for an invasion of England; and even of having had an affair with Ælfwine, the bishop of Winchester. It seems none were true. Edward most likely wanted to reduce her political involvement back to a simple status as the widow of the former kings, leaving him to rule independently. As far as we know, she lived the rest of her life in Winchester. What was Emma of Normandy’s legacy? Our actual information about Emma’s life is sparse, Much of what we know comes from the Encomium Emmae reginae, the Praise of Queen Emma. This narrative was written down in 1041/2 by a monk from St Bertin, in what is now France, and was commissioned by Emma herself. The Encomium, however, is not a straightforward biography, but an account – modified in several later versions – of the role she played in English politics during the reign of Cnut and his successors. A famous illustration shows her seated on a throne, a kneeling character handing the book to her, with her sons Harthacnut and Edward watching from the wings. The Encomium conjures the position she was in at the height of her power, aimed at her sons and written to influence the future. Despite her remarkable political career, her best known legacy is no doubt her Norman link to William the Conqueror, enabling the events of 1066 to run their course. In the words of 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, describing her marriage: “From this union… the Normans were justified according to the law of peoples, in both claiming and gaining possession of England.” How and when did Emma of Normandy die? Emma died of an unknown cause on 6 March 1052. She was buried next to Cnut and Harthacnut in Winchester Cathedral. In 2019, a team from the University of Bristol announced that among the 1,300 bones mixed up in six mortuary chests from Winchester Cathedral were the remains of a woman who matched both the date and age of death of Emma. There are no records of other women of similar status buried there at the time and DNA work is in progress in an attempt to identify the remains more definitively. 1066: The battle for England Member exclusive | The year 1066 is the most famous in English history, but there's a lot more to the story than one bloody battle at Hastings. In this four-part series, medievalist Marc Morris talks David Musgrove through the full story of the Norman Conquest. Watch all episodes now Dr Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, broadcaster and author of River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (HarperCollins, 2021) King and Conqueror is streaming on BBC iPlayer now. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week