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Historian John Cooper explains how the Gunpowder Plot was exposed – and how the men behind it were hunted down and subjected to brutal punishment
In the autumn of 1605, Catholic conspirators believed they were about to strike a blow to the heart of the English state – but then a mysterious letter exposed their plan. In this second episode of our four-part series on the plot, Danny Bird speaks to historian John Cooper about the Gunpowder Plot’s dramatic collapse. They examine Fawkes’s arrest and forced confession, the grisly public trials and executions that followed, and how James VI & I turned the plot's failure into political dynamite – consolidating power and turning treason into an abiding warning to posterity. Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast. John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
Who laid the fuse for the Gunpowder Plot?
Historian John Cooper introduces us to the conspirators behind the infamous plot to blow up king and parliament
In the autumn of 1605, Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes led a desperate band of Catholic gentlemen in one of history's most daring conspiracies. Having smuggled 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the Palace of Westminster, their plan was to blow up James VI & I, along with the majority of England’s Protestant elite, paving the way for the restoration of Catholicism. In this first episode of our four-part series on the plot, Danny Bird speaks to historian John Cooper to uncover a world of persecution, espionage and faith-driven extremism. They unfurl the conspirators’ bold plan and interrogate the powerful spy networks of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England that set the scene for an explosive act of treason. Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast. John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
Want to delve further into the world of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot? HistoryExtra's Danny Bird rounds up some essential reading to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason
"Remember, remember the 5th of November…’ The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 ranks among the most audacious acts of treason in British history – a dramatic attempt by a small group of disaffected Catholics to blow up King James I and parliament, not long after the new Stuart regime took the throne. In a new HistoryExtra podcast series, available weekly from Sunday 19 October 2025, I join Professor John Cooper for a four-part series that brings this fraught, combustible moment into sharp relief, exploring the motives, betrayals and what-could-have-been consequences of this explosive act of treason. Below I've selected some essential further reading from the BBC History Magazine and HistoryExtra archives that is intended to deepen your understanding of the religious tensions, political intrigue, and continuing legacy surrounding the plot. Whether you want to trace the conspirators’ inner motivations, follow how the scheme unraveled, or explore its echoes in later British culture, these articles will guide you further into one of early modern England’s most fascinating stories.
Bandits & blasphemers: crime in 17th century Scotland
Allan Kennedy unpacks what looking at crime and punishment can reveal about Scottish values in the 17th century
Which crimes were most common in Scotland in the 17th century – and what can those crimes reveal about society at the time? In today's episode, we're delving into a world of violence, vengeance, bandits and blasphemers, as historian Allan Kennedy speaks to Emily Briffett about his recent book Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland. He explores what constituted a crime, who committed them, and how justice was pursued in a society shaped by intense religiosity and complex legal systems. Allan Kennedy is the author of Serious Crime in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Buy it now from Amazon
His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence
Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era. But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-660416773webready-b8ec9d0.jpg" width="3680" height="2453" alt="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" title="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" /> Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance. His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-526930024webready-ba9bbfe.jpg" width="1500" height="1977" alt="A black and white image of a young woman with curly hair tied back. She is wearing a low cut dress and has her arm across her lap, holding a plant stalk" title="Elizabeth Pepys, depicted in an engraving of a contemporary portrait. She died aged just 29, after nearly 14 years of marriage (Image by Getty Images)" /> The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious. Ignoring infidelities Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825. Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.) Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/6-volumes-of-diarywebready-07b7f70.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Five dark brown books with gold insignia on the front, with one open book, covered in writing" title="Pepys wrote his diaries (above) in a form of shorthand called Tachygraphy, incorporating words from other languages to further obscure his meaning (Image by Pepys Library, Magdalene College)" /> Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades. By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted. That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is. Out of kilter When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned. Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings. In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’. Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him. As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them. Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down. Read more | Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened? Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer. On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell. On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].” The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back. Controlling behaviour These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye. Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/gr0099194webreadyH-2-1ea86dd.jpg" width="3109" height="2073" alt="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" title="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" /> He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children. Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669. By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants. One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering. Read more | Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.” Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto. Lost voices The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details. These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/AKG7770684webready-e35e02b.jpg" width="1500" height="1837" alt="A painting of a man in a brown shirt with white scarf and cuffs. He is looking directly at the viewer and is holding a piece of music in his left hand" title="John Hayls’ 1666 portrait of Pepys. The diarist’s “graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions”, writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by AKG)" /> It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants. Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries. Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth. Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”
Jonathan Healey tells Ellie Cawthorne about the dramatic moments that sparked the breakdown of Charles I’s relationship with parliament and the outbreak of the Civil War
Ellie Cawthorne: Why was the winter of 1641–42 such a pivotal time in British and Irish history? Jonathan Healey: In the heart of that winter came one of the most iconic moments in English political history. On 4 January 1642, angry at dissent from parliament, King Charles I marched down to the House of Commons and tried to arrest five MPs. I wanted to tell the backstory of that dramatic, divisive moment. The lead-up had been a really intense period of political strife, popular protest and gradually growing disorder, all of which fed into a very frightening political crisis. Afterwards, the country descended into civil war. Often when we read books about great revolutions or political events, we look at the deep, long-term causes. However, though that’s important, we also need to recognise trigger moments. Day-by-day or minute-by-minute, it’s often incredibly difficult to see which way things will go – but, as a historian, it’s important to immerse yourself in those turning points. Can you give us a sense of how parliament functioned at the time? In the early 17th century, parliament didn’t sit regularly – it was called only when the king needed it. Its role was essentially twofold: to grant taxes, particularly for war, and to propose legislation. That legislation would then get signed off by the king, which was how new laws were made. But increasingly, in the 17th century, parliament started discussing issues of high politics such as foreign policy. In the view of the king, this went beyond its remit – monarchs in this period believed that they alone had the right to decide on foreign policy. However, because they represented the taxpayers who had to pay for the wars, members of parliament felt that they should have a say. That created a flashpoint. In the 1620s, a series of conflicts had erupted between parliament and the monarchy over issues such as tax, religion and the crown’s right to imprison people without charge. The relationship between king and parliament had broken down. Understandably peeved at this situation, Charles decided that, as far as possible, he would rule without parliament. However, over that period of personal rule, a series of serious grievances and difficulties emerged. Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? When Charles was forced to call parliament again in 1640 because of a rebellion in Scotland, all of these issues came back to the fore, and there was a sudden ferment against royal rule among MPs. By November 1640, the beginning of the so-called ‘Long Parliament’ saw a broad consensus for reform and an intention to get rid of some of the perceived abuses of the previous 11 years but, over the next 12 months, the reformists pushed things too far. They argued for reform of the bishops, and began to engage with a much broader political constituency – both of which were controversial moves. By the beginning of winter 1641, a backlash against these reformists had started. Would these tensions have emerged regardless of the monarch, or was there something about Charles in particular that antagonised parliament? There were lots of things about Charles that antagonised people. He had a preference for a High Anglican form of worship, which many people in England didn’t like very much. Above all, though, he was someone who really liked order, traditional social hierarchies and the aristocracy. He didn’t like bottom-up political engagement when it came to the church, and he definitely didn’t like it when it came to the state. That view was not unusual at the time: lots of people were worried about popular protest and the perceived dangers of the mob – that was one of the factors that led them to rally around the king. But Charles took this view to quite an extreme level. The other thing that proved difficult about Charles’s personality was his innate sense that, as king, he was right. He thought that the choice of methods he employed to get his way didn’t matter as much as the end result – and that created a sense of fear about what he might be willing to do next. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/MNXB20cmyk-4ed0c59.jpg" width="1158" height="772" alt="A man in black clothing stands against a dark background. He has shoulder-length grey hair and a goatee and wears a black hat" title="Sir Edward Nicholas asked Queen Henrietta Maria to identify key players who might join a royalist party supporting the king – ultimately, to no avail (Image by Alamy)" /> Who were the other key figures at the time, and how did they swing the pendulum? Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was a really important operator behind the scenes. By the end of 1641, one of Charles’ administrators called Sir Edward Nicholas (imagine a Thomas Cromwell-type figure but with a bigger diet) was trying to pull together a royalist party, but he didn’t know the key aristocrats. So who did he go to? The queen, because she knew everyone. On the parliamentarian side, there was John Pym. He was an incredibly sophisticated operator – a real political magus – but some of the tactics he used in parliament were incredibly devious and cynical. On 1 December 1641, a great list of grievances and demands called the Grand Remonstrance was presented to Charles. It was passed by parliament, albeit by the skin of its teeth, but Pym and his reformists failed to secure agreement to get it printed. So, in the Commons a few weeks later, proponents of the Grand Remonstrance waited until late, after a lot of the royalists had gone home. With the members struggling to see by candlelight, they suddenly introduced a motion to overturn the earlier vote and have the Grand Remonstrance printed. And the strategy worked – it was devious, but clever. We’re all familiar with that kind of political tactic today, but that was the first instance when we can really see it in action. It feels like something out of a 21st-century political drama... Yes, or The Thick of It [Armando Iannucci’s acclaimed 2005–12 spin-doctor television sitcom]. After all these years of tension, what was the spark for the events of 4 January 1642? Up until that point, Charles had been regaining the initiative. He was building up a royalist party, and there was a real possibility that he would be able to command a majority in both houses. He’d given a proclamation summoning back to Westminster all of the MPs who’d gradually drifted home because they were fed up of sitting in parliament. The theory was that these were moderates and royalists, and that their return would stifle the simmering trouble. However, street protests prevented the bishops (who were all royal appointments) from attending the House of Lords, and the balance tipped. By around 28 December 1641, Charles had lost the majority in both houses. He felt he had to do something to slow things down – to disrupt things. For a long time, Charles had wanted revenge against certain key players he thought had stabbed him in the back at the time of the Scottish rebellion. So he had his attorney general draw up prosecutions against five particularly troublesome MPs and one member of the House of Lords. Read more | The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won How did things unfold on that fateful day? News of these intended prosecutions had emerged on 3 January 1642, so parliament was incredibly tense the following morning. Everyone was very worried, and a lot of shops in London were shut. But lunchtime came and went with no developments, so parliament started sitting again for the afternoon. Meanwhile, after pacing about the whole morning, in the mid-afternoon the king suddenly appeared from Whitehall Palace and commanded a group of soldiers to follow him. After requisitioning a coach in a ‘follow that taxi’ moment, Charles arrived at Westminster with around 500 armed men. A group of about 80–100 of those men climbed the stairs and banged on the door of the House of Commons. The debate stopped, and the king entered; the MPs all stood and removed their hats. Charles then told the speaker, William Lenthall, that he had arrived to arrest the five members, asking where they were. There was silence. The missing MPs had been warned about what was going to happen by Lucy Carlisle, a courtier close to the queen – and it became clear to Charles that they weren’t there. Then followed a key moment: Lenthall declared that he couldn’t help Charles, because he was just the voice of the Commons. Essentially, he was expressing the point that, despite having been appointed by the crown, he was there to represent the people, not the king. Extremely angry, Charles stormed off, followed by the soldiers. It was a really dramatic moment that could so easily have ended in a massacre. Was this a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment in the lead-up to civil war? A lot of people said so at the time, and I do think that Charles took things too far. His action was quite clearly an armed threat against parliament. But the crucial thing about this incident is that it destroyed a huge amount of trust in the king. The parliamentarians saw Charles gathering soldiers around himself, and concluded that they couldn’t trust him – they needed to be able to protect themselves. So they decided to take control of the county militia. They passed a bill to make this happen, but it wouldn’t become law unless it was signed off by the king – and of course the king was never going to sign this bill. Parliament was then forced to argue that their bill had legal force anyway. That led to a constitutional fissure: in a state of emergency, could parliament legislate without the king? This became the dividing issue. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/0088128-Topfoto-e6c9fae.jpg" width="1041" height="694" alt="A painting shows Charles I standing under a large arched doorway. He is dressed all in black with a white collar. Standing around him is a large group of people, including a priest dressed in red robes. In the background, there are several large buildings" title="Charles I leads armed followers into the Commons on 4 January 1642 on a fruitless mission to arrest five MPs – the moment that arguably sparked the Civil War (Image by TopFoto)" /> How much was the wider public aware of what was going on in parliament at the time? Increasingly quite well aware, because this was an era when the politics of Westminster were becoming more accessible to those on the street. England was very well connected, people knew who their MPs were, and letters were flying back and forth across the country. Scurrilous pamphlets were published in long-running battles between reformists and royalists, and the first proper political English newspaper was also launched around this time [Head of Several Proceedings, first published by John Thomas in November 1641] – a kind of weekly digest of events in parliament. After his attempt to arrest the five MPs on 4 January 1642, Charles was passing through St Paul’s when a radical parliamentarian journalist called Henry Walker ran up and threw one of these pamphlets into his coach. Called To Your Tents, O Israel, it implored the English people to resist tyrants – so you can imagine Charles’s response when he read it. In that moment, a great connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street. And it was that incident, more than anything else, that encouraged Charles to flee London. How was this all connected with events in Ireland? In late 1641, there was a massive uprising in Ireland, which was predominantly Catholic. A lot of Irish people were fed up with rule by English Protestants, but in particular they didn’t want to be ruled by English parliamentarian Protestants, who were especially anti-Catholic. It was a very violent rebellion, with atrocities committed in Ulster. However, reports of the violence were wildly exaggerated, creating a panic in England that there would be an Irish invasion, and that English Catholics would rise up. One of the immediate consequences of this intense paranoia was that someone in England had to raise an army to put down the rebellion – and neither parliament nor the king could trust the other side to do so. Eventually, an army was raised, but not before months of wrangling between king and parliament – and by the time it left, relations between the two were already descending into hostility. Did people sense that war was coming by this point? By the spring of 1642, I think there was a real sense that war was on its way. Records reveal that some ordinary people saw this as an opportunity to settle local scores. For example, one man in Salisbury basically said: “I’m going to support the king, and I’ve decided that my neighbour is for the parliament so, when the war comes, he’s the first person I’m going to bash on the head.” Read more | 8 reasons why the Civil War broke out Was there any way that the king and parliament could have found a compromise and avoided war? I don’t know if compromise is the right word. By early 1642, there was a group of very serious reformists who didn’t trust the king, and a king who hated them in return. It’s very hard to see how those two sides could have been reconciled. But what could have happened quite easily is that the day-to-day workings of politics could have gone the king’s way. Those reformist politicians could have been isolated, and found themselves in a sticky situation. Those people really did go through this political crisis on an absolute knife edge, with a real sense of dread that they could be prosecuted and beheaded. I think that dynamic of fear helped push things towards civil war. So I don’t think there could have been a compromise as such, but there might have been a different outcome. There were lots of moments when things could have gone in another direction. One potential counterfactual could ask: what might have happened if, when Charles got to parliament, the five MPs were still there and decided not to go quietly? You would have seen a gang of about 100 angry cavaliers, all with pistols, trying to drag people out of parliament. Would that have ended peacefully? Probably not. Did this era determine how the relationship between parliament and royal rule played out in the longer term? When the Restoration of the monarchy happened in 1660, interestingly it was the settlement of late 1641 that was restored. What happened in 1642 was a parting of the waves, with the radicals on the parliamentarian side headed in a much more constitutionally extremist direction. That was jettisoned after the Restoration, and parliament instead returned to a reformed position. But there were also lots of long-term consequences of this period. It emphasised the importance of the crown working with parliament, rather than being antagonistic to it. In the later 17th century, there were very few periods where parliaments weren’t held – parliament had become an accepted part of the constitution in a way that it hadn’t been before. So that turbulent era is part of the reason why the UK became the constitutional monarchy it is today. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford. His previous book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Breeze Barrington explores the extraordinary story of Maria of Modena – the Italian-born queen consort to James VII and II – and considers how her controversial childbirth in 1688 paved the way for the Glorious Revolution
Born into Italian nobility and raised with quiet ambitions of becoming a nun, Maria (or Mary) of Modena was thrust on to the European political stage as a teenage bride to James, Duke of York, who was later crowned as James VII of Scotland and II of England. Talking to Elinor Evans, cultural historian Breeze Barrington shares how Maria navigated a foreign court, vicious anti-Catholic sentiment, and personal loss, to emerge as a resilient and principled queen. Breeze Barrington is the author of The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, 2025) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-288187&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-graces%2Fbreeze-barrington%2F9781526663788%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%2520Graces%253A%2520The%2520Extraordinary%2520Untold%2Cat%2520the%2520Restoration%2520Court%2520%28Hardback%29%26text%3DA%2520spellbinding%2520work%2520of%2520history%2Cmisogyny%2520of%2520the%2520Restoration%2520court.#:~:text=The%20Graces%3A%20The%20Extraordinary%20Untold,at%20the%20Restoration%20Court%20(Hardback)&text=A%20spellbinding%20work%20of%20history,misogyny%20of%20the%20Restoration%20court." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy now on Waterstones
Maria of Modena: The queen who started a revolution
She was an Italian Catholic in a ferociously anti-papist English court. An aspiring nun in a hotbed of hedonism. Breeze Barrington follows the extraordinary trials and tribulations of James II & VII’s second wife, Maria of Modena
Shortly after the queen rose on 10 June 1688, she felt a familiar swell of pain. “Send for the king!” she called, while her ladies helped her back into bed. Maria (Mary) of Modena was in labour. Soon the room in St James’s Palace began to fill: some 70 people crowded in to watch the queen give birth. There was no screen to shield her, and the bedcurtains were kept open as she screamed in pain: “I die! Oh! You kill me! You kill me!” Her cries were so terrible that many said they could hardly bear to listen. Yet the king – James II & VII – exhorted the members of his council to come nearer, to look more closely. He had heard the rumours that the pregnancy was fake, and was determined to ensure that no one could say this child was not born of the queen. The sight of so many faces so close to Maria was overwhelming; she could not give birth with so many men looking on her, she said. But while James stooped to cover her face with his periwig, the rest of her body remained on full display – and everyone present witnessed that crucial moment. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/BAL405188-640310b.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A painting shows a queen dressed in an orange gown and blue robe sitting on a throne. To her right stands a small boy in blue tights and a red cloak. To her left, a young girl in a blue dress sits on a table. On the far right, a king, also in a blue robe and with a large wig on sits on another throne." title="A 1694 portrait of James II and Maria of Modena, with their two children, Louisa Maria Teresa (right) and James Francis Edward. After the Glorious Revolution, the family fled England for France (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> That evening, the London Gazette reported the news to the citizens of the capital: “This day between 9 and 10 in the morning the Queen was safely delivered of a PRINCE.” Protestant England now had a Catholic heir – and a constitutional crisis. It did not take long for the crisis to unfold. To keep the queen warm as her labour began, a serving woman had placed a bedpan full of hot coals under the blankets. That simple act prompted whispers that a child had been smuggled in – and, whether or not anyone believed the rumour, it provided sufficient pretext for seven politicians and nobles to invite William of Orange to invade England, launching the episode now widely known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. If Queen Maria of Modena is known today, it is for these events of 1688. But behind the story of political upheavals lies another tale – of an Italian Catholic princess who, at just 15 years old, was sent to a Protestant country that feared ‘popery’ more than anything else. There she would marry a man 25 years her senior, heir to the English throne. It is the story of a young woman whose purpose in life was seen as the breeder of heirs, but who deserves to be viewed as far more than merely a Catholic womb. Dynasty in decline Maria Beatrice d’Este was born on 5 October 1658 in Modena, around 23 miles north-west of Bologna in northern Italy. Though once a great ruling dynasty, by the mid-17th century the Estensi family was much in decline. Maria’s father died when she was not yet four years old, leaving her two-year-old brother, Francesco, to take his place as Duke of Modena, with their mother, Laura, acting as regent. A formidable and highly educated woman, Laura kept her children at what Maria later called an “awful distance” from her, and was determined that both of them would be scholars. Much of Maria’s education took place in the convent attached to the palace, and she felt at home in that life of devotion to God, in a place of education, community and friendship. While still a child, she determined that she would become a nun. Unbeknown to her, events unfolding in England would soon change the course of her life. Anne Hyde, the first wife of James, Duke of York – younger brother of King Charles II – died in 1671. Her body was hardly cold before talk turned to James’s remarriage. Charles’s nine-year marriage to Catherine of Braganza had produced no children, so James was the heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, and would have to make a dynastic match with one of the princesses of Europe. James sent his trusted friend the Earl of Peterborough as ambassador extraordinary, to find him a wife and future queen. After many months of searching, Peterborough encountered a portrait of a beautiful young girl, and wrote to James and Charles that he had “found his mistress and the Fortune of England”. Read more | Alternate history: what if James II and VII had kept his throne? The fact that Maria wanted to become a nun mattered little to these powerful men. When she told Peterborough that she would rather throw herself in the fire than marry James, he replied that he “could not believe… that she was made for any other end than to give Princes to the World”. Tellingly, another powerful man had taken an interest in the match: Pope Clement X. He informed Maria by letter that, in marrying James, she would open herself “to a vaster field of merit than that of the virginal cloister”: by bearing Catholic heirs, she could bring England back to the true faith. After reading this letter, she cried for three days – to the extent that she was held down by force. Peterborough merely wrote that: “The princess at last gave herself up to the will of her friends.” Over in England, James sent a note to his daughters, Mary and Anne, explaining that he had “found a new playfellow”. They were 11 and 8 years old, respectively; Maria was 14. Controversial match Maria arrived at the hedonistic court of the ‘Merrie Monarch’ in 1673, completely unprepared for what she encountered there. “I cannot yet adapt myself to this state – a state to which, as you know, I have been opposed,” she wrote to her former mother superior. “Many nights I weep and grieve and cannot get rid of this melancholy.” The match caused controversy. Cruel and scurrilous pamphlets circulated, in which it was hoped that she would “be envenom’d with the pox” and to “die before 20, rot before 16”. But though young in years, Maria was resourceful. She learned English quickly, and began to navigate court politics by using the kind of soft power for which the Estensi family was so celebrated – notably, through patronage of the arts. The poet John Dryden wrote verse in her honour, Dutch artist Peter Lely painted her portrait, and the court was filled with the sounds of Italian opera – “the first that had been in England of this kind”, according to renowned diarist John Evelyn. As her friendship with her stepdaughters burgeoned, Maria encouraged their talents for singing and dancing by commissioning The Masque of Calisto. This was a lavish spectacle even by the standards of the Restoration court, and the princesses – along with Maria’s favoured maid of honour, Sarah Jennings (later Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne’s ‘favourite’) – took the starring roles. Shortly before the masque’s first performance, Maria gave birth to her first child. It was not the hoped-for boy, but the infant’s parents were overjoyed, and named her Catherine Laura – Catherine after the queen, Laura after Maria’s mother. Soon after, Maria had her daughter baptised in her rooms – as a Catholic. When her brother-in-law, King Charles II, learned what she’d done, he smiled and patted her hand. That was all very well, Charles said, but the child would be raised in the English church, so she would have to be baptised again, as a Protestant. This experience gave Maria a concrete understanding of her position at court for the first time. Her children were not just her own, but children of the crown; though she gave birth to them, she had no say over their upbringing. (Tragically, Catherine Laura did not live long; though Maria was pregnant a total of 12 times, only two of her children survived to adulthood and one outlived her). Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution? Maria’s own life as Duchess of York was one of constant uncertainty, as anti-Catholic feeling intensified. Parliament was increasingly divided into two factions, Tories and Whigs; the former supported hereditary monarchy, while the latter was implacably opposed to James ever becoming king. Meanwhile, tensions were rising more broadly in London. The years after Maria’s arrival in England were marked by two plots. The first, the so-called ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678, was a series of accusations by the fantasist Titus Oates, who claimed to have unearthed treasonous Catholic plans to kill the king. Despite being a complete fabrication, it resulted in imprisonments and the execution of some of Maria’s close friends, and she and James were sent into exile – first in Brussels, then in Scotland. The second plot was real, and came shortly after James and Maria’s return to court in 1682. Had it been successful, the ‘Rye House Plot’ of 1683 would have seen Charles and James assassinated, with James, Duke of Monmouth – Charles’s favourite illegitimate son – made king. It was over the years following the Rye House Plot that Maria was finally able to recreate something of the life of female friendship and intellectual endeavour that she had enjoyed in the convent in Modena. Two of her maids of honour, Anne Kingsmill (later Finch) and Anne Killigrew, were prodigiously talented: both were poets, and Killigrew was also a painter. Among her maids more generally, Maria encouraged a culture of learning and intellectual endeavour, and both Annes produced work in her honour. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/2WF05B1-63d8096.jpg" width="1181" height="788" alt="A young woman in a bright pink gown sits for a painting with one arm resting in her lap and the other leant on a step to her left side" title="Anne Killigrew was one of Maria’s maids of honour and a talented poet and painter. Killigrew died at 25 and a volume of her poems was published posthumously (Image by Alamy)" /> Two pieces in particular provide a snapshot of this shared creative life, both depicting Maria as the goddess Venus. The first, a collaboration between Kingsmill and Killigrew, was a masque entitled Venus and Adonis – a proto-feminist retelling of the classical myth. The second was Killigrew’s painting Venus Attired by the Graces, featuring both Annes among the Graces. A new dawn of women’s art and poetry seemed on the horizon. A Catholic queen On 6 February 1685, Charles II died suddenly, aged 54. Maria mourned him deeply – though was wary of displaying her grief in public. “I was so greatly afflicted by the death of King Charles that I dared not show how much,” she wrote, “lest I be suspected of hypocrisy.” Despite their worries about the reception they might encounter, James and Maria were welcomed as the king and queen. This gave her an opportunity for greater patronage: the writer Aphra Behn wrote a celebratory coronation ode, and Anne Killigrew painted coronation portraits. Then tragedy struck again in April when Killigrew died of smallpox, aged just 25. The new king, James II & VII, had learned all the wrong lessons from the execution of his father, Charles I; he thought that anyone who disagreed with him was against him, and believed that all of parliament were his enemies. His longstanding mistress, Catherine Sedley, was made a countess, and seemed to hold more influence over him than anyone, including his wife. It was said that Maria “loves her husband in all sincerity” but that “she is an Italian, and very proud”. She decided that, unlike queens who had come before, she would not tolerate this situation, and told James to choose: his mistress or his wife. If he continued his affair, she would leave England. “Give her my dower,” she told him. “Make her Queen of England, but let me see her no more!” If James was surprised by this outburst, he would soon be even more astonished when he encountered Maria’s priests, all on their knees, begging him to send away his mistress and save his soul. Overwhelmed, he agreed. These growing tensions were heightened by the absence of a male heir. Maria had not been pregnant in three years so, at the end of August 1687, went to Bath to take the waters in search of fertility. Her treatment became a form of popular entertainment: members of the public flocked to the galleries to watch her bathe as an Italian orchestra performed. Almost immediately afterwards Maria became pregnant but, no sooner had she found out, rumours began – fuelled (perhaps even started) by King James’s daughter Anne, whose own anti-Catholicism had turned her against her father and stepmother. Hot coals in a bedpan After the keenly observed birth of Prince James Francis Edward in June 1688, the rumours only intensified. Some said that the pregnancy had been a hoax; others claimed that Maria had miscarried, or that the child had been a girl and replaced with a boy. All agreed that the child, who was given the title of Prince of Wales, had been smuggled into the room in a bedpan, even though at least two Protestant witnesses saw the bedpan full of hot coals at the beginning of the labour. The seven men who wrote to encourage the invasion by James’s nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, exploited these rumours, including in their letter the claim that the child was an imposter. William ensured that his fleet landed on 5 November – a day on which effigies of the pope were ritually burned in bonfires. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/2WREX7C-41eff94.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="An engraving from 1690 shows King Louis XIV of France greeting James II at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, where the exiled English king and queen lived for the rest of their lives (Image by Alamy)" title="An engraving from 1690 shows King Louis XIV of France greeting James II at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, where the exiled English king and queen lived for the rest of their lives (Image by Alamy)" /> Fearing for their safety, James and Maria took their baby and fled into exile at the court of Louis XIV in France. They never stopped believing they might be able to get back the throne. But it wasn’t to be, and they remained at Saint-Germain-en-Laye for the rest of their lives. Here, freed from the obligations of queenship, Maria could once again devote herself to patronage of the arts and of women’s education. In some ways, her life had come full circle: she became the patron of a convent of the Visitation – the same order that she had wanted to join as a child. Maria outlived her husband by 17 years, bearing him another child in exile. She “has been overwhelmed with calumnies,” James said of Maria on his deathbed. “But time, the mother of Truth, will I hope, at last make her virtues shine as bright as the sun.” MARIA'S MOMENTS The times and travails of a Catholic queen 1658: Maria is born on 5 October at the Ducal Palace (right) in Modena to Duke Alfonso IV d’Este and Laura Martinozzi 1662: Maria’s father dies and her two-year-old brother, Francesco, becomes Duke of Modena. Laura is appointed regent until he comes of age 1673: On her 15th birthday, Maria begins the journey to England to take her place as Duchess of York, escorted by her mother 1675: Maria’s first child, Catherine Laura, is born in January but dies in October. Racked with grief, Maria suffers the first of multiple miscarriages 1678: Titus Oates comes forward with tales of a Catholic conspiracy against Charles II, and in 1679 Maria and James are sent into exile. While she is away, Maria’s four-year-old daughter, Isabella, dies in London 1682: The court of James and Maria returns to England. Maria’s new maids of honour include the poet Anne Kingsmill and the poet/painter Anne Killigrew 1685: Charles II dies on 6 February. James and Maria’s coronation is on 23 April 1688: Maria gives birth to James Francis Edward Stuart on 10 June, an event dubbed the “baby in the bedpan myth”. It is the catalyst for the so-called Glorious Revolution – the invasion of Britain by William of Orange 1689: With Maria and James in exile in France, William and his wife, Mary (James II’s daughter), are crowned as joint monarchs of England, Scotland and Ireland on 11 April 1718: Maria dies in Paris on 7 May. She is buried at the convent in Chaillot, of which she has been a patron while in exile Breeze Barrington is a cultural historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the 17th century. Her new book is The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, July) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Are your neighbours spying on you? In the 17th century they had the power to destroy your life
In early modern Britain, neighbourly gossip was the backbone of a court system that turned moments of privacy into public spectacle and shame
Everyone loves to gossip – hiding secrets, swapping stories, passing quiet judgement. But what if your neighbour’s whispers could land you in court? In the early modern period, as the Stuart dynasty rose and fell, people lived in close-knit communities where privacy was a rare and precious commodity. It was also something that often aroused deep suspicion. It was in this context that bawdy courts, a Kafkaesque phenomenon unique to the era, thrived. Fuelled by neighbours who watched your every move, these tribunals could be triggered simply because you’d spent too much time alone, with potentially devastating social consequences. What were bawdy courts? These were ecclesiastical tribunals that thrived in the early 17th century, tasked with enforcing Christian moral conduct and turning ordinary people into judges. They earned the name ‘bawdy courts’ because they were often concerned with salacious cases, with jurisdiction over everything from adultery and fornication to seemingly minor violations like dancing on the Sabbath or failing to attend church. A strange blend of justice and spectacle, they institutionalised the human impulse to observe, judge and meddle. Read more | Stuart Britain: what was life like for ordinary people? At one tribunal held in Easter 1618 for instance, a man appeared for keeping his alehouse open during church services, accused of doing so to tempt the congregation to his establishment instead of places of worship. There are also examples of more violent crimes, like that of Roger Lodes, a curate, who drew his dagger in the churchyard against a man named Thomas Atkinson. Witness or voyeur? Perhaps the most remarkable element of this system wasn’t the crimes themselves but rather how they were discovered. Far from relying on confession or official investigation, these courts were powered by community surveillance. As sociologist and author Tiffany Jenkins describes on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, neighbours essentially spied on each other: “There are a number of cases where people are taken to court where they have to explain why they were in private for 15 minutes or so,” she says, “and the witnesses who are called are very forthcoming about what they've seen. “The witnesses will talk about, ‘Well, I could see through the keyhole or the crack in the door or the gap in the window that they were having relations.’” Sometimes, they would fetch their friends to join the spying and corroborate the story. Jenkins recalls one instance where the witness said “I went to find Joan, the shoemaker, and she came and had a look and could also see that this couple were having intimate relations.” It might sound almost comical, but those testimonies could become the basis of real legal action. “The community really were responsible for bringing this to people's attention,” Jenkins explains. “If you didn't, you could be accused of bawdy, which is effectively encouraging lavishness and poor behaviour." Read more | Why was the first Stuart king obsessed with witch hunts? Although everyone was subject to this moral scrutiny, women seem to have borne the brunt of it. Their reproductive potential placed them at the centre of communal anxiety and accusations could prompt bodily inspections in attempt to uncover the truth; some women, Jenkins notes, would even have their breasts felt to see whether they were pregnant or not. She explains that in an era without formal welfare systems, an illegitimate child posed a burden not just to the mother but to the whole community. “Say a woman had a child out of wedlock, the community would have to take care of them,” says Jenkins. “They wouldn't move away, go to the big city. The woman wouldn't be able to do that. You lived and died together, and so you were much more responsible for each other.” Yet, while this might sound restrictive, such surveillance sometimes offered protection. Domestic abuse for instance – largely unregulated by formal law at the time – was much more visible in these tightly monitored environments. Suspicion of solitude In this world where moral failure was assumed to thrive in private spaces, the act of being alone became highly suspicious. “Privacy was frowned upon, it was for adulterers and murderers,” says Jenkins. “Even the attempt to acquire privacy was seen as suspicious [..] you could be plotting as well as fornicating, and both these things were frowned upon. We see this same sentiment from Martin Luther himself – theologian and architect of the Protestant Reformation – who warned a friend, as Jenkins puts it, “don't be alone because that's when the devil comes”. This led to a kind of internalised surveillance, where people didn’t just distrust their neighbours; they even didn’t trust themselves to behave properly behind closed doors. “[Privacy] only becomes something that is celebrated in the Victorian period,” says Jenkins. “It takes a couple of centuries before privacy is seen as a kind of national value in England and in America.” The spectacle of shame So what happened if you were found guilty of getting up to no good? Punishments from the bawdy courts were rarely violent, but this didn’t prevent them being effective. A typical sentence was public penance, in the form of standing before the congregation in a white robe and confessing your sins aloud. Read more | 10 of Britain’s most infamous witch trials It sounds like a light punishment, but in small communities where how you were perceived meant everything, this spectacle could have devastating consequences. “Public shame was effective,” says Jenkins. “It could ruin people's reputations. And so, people would fall over themselves to find ways not to be publicly shamed.” Some managed to buy their way out. Jenkins recounts one man from Banbury who paid £3 to avoid the humiliation of a public confession after being accused of fornication. This was a significant sum at the time, and demonstrates the lengths people would go to avoid disgrace. Tiffany Jenkins was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
In 16th and 17th-century Scotland, many hundreds of ‘witches’ were put to death – 10 times the proportion executed in England. Martha McGill asks what drove the killings
In November 1590, a servant named Geillis Duncan from East Lothian was interrogated by her employer, David Seton. According to Newes from Scotland, a 1591 pamphlet that included a report of the case, Geillis used to sneak out of her master’s house at night. She also “took in hand to help all such as were troubled or grieved with any kind of sickness or infirmity” and performed “many matters most miraculous”. Suspicions aroused, Seton questioned Duncan about how she worked her cures. When she gave no answer, he tortured her with thumbscrews and by “binding or wrenching her head with a cord or rope”. Still she remained silent. Finally, Seton and others searched her for a ‘devil’s mark’ – a blemish or insensitive spot created by Satan – and found one on her throat. She broke down and confessed “that all her doings were done by the wicked allurements and enticements of the devil, and that she did them by witchcraft”. Witchcraft had been criminalised in 1563, and there had been a handful of prosecutions since. But Duncan’s confession kicked off something new – Scotland’s first large-scale witch-hunt. What’s striking about this panic over supposed black magic is just how much more intense and lethal it was than witch-hunting in other European countries – perhaps most notably England. Read more | Why was King James VI and I obsessed with witch hunts? Following her interrogation (involving torture), Geillis Duncan claimed to have participated in a night-time witches’ gathering, also known as a sabbat, at North Berwick kirk. She alleged that other locals were present, and as many as 70 people were ultimately accused. Their confessions detailed bizarre and alarming practices. Supposedly they had sailed across the sea in sieves, meeting at the kirk to dance and sing. The devil had preached from the pulpit, and they had kissed his buttocks. Some of the accused also claimed to have attacked King James VI, casting spells to harm him or raising storms to sink his ships. Newes from Scotland reported that the devil considered James VI “the greatest enemy he hath in the world” – a statement designed to flatter a monarch who believed himself divinely appointed. But James was also fearful of the devil’s designs on him, and involved himself directly in the interrogation of the accused witches. Blame began to make its way up the social scale, and the king’s own cousin, the Earl of Bothwell, was accused of heading a conspiracy against the monarch. Although he was eventually acquitted, Bothwell’s political career was ruined, and he was forced into exile. The last executions resulting from the North Berwick trials were in 1592, but the fallout from the witch-hunt endured far longer. The idea of the threat of witchcraft had been promulgated from the highest social echelons, and was further publicised in 1597 when James VI published Daemonologie, a book about the devil’s wiles. Mass witch-hunts swept Scotland again in 1628–30, 1649 and 1661–62. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a database recording known prosecutions, has identified 3,837 accused. Execution rates are difficult to establish but may have been in the region of two-thirds. By these metrics, Scotland’s execution rate per head of population may have been about five times the European average, and 10 times that in England. Who were the ‘witches’? Those accused of witchcraft were usually of middle age or older. Though rarely wealthy, they were not typically destitute. People from society’s middling ranks had the strongest economic ties to their neighbours, and were most likely to become embroiled in quarrels. Sometimes local healers or cunning folk were targeted, but most of the accused were not magical practitioners of any kind. Men were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft. One of the victims of the North Berwick trials was a Haddington schoolmaster called John Fian. According to Newes from Scotland – the primary focus of which was Fian’s case – he confessed under torture to having served as the devil’s clerk at witches’ meetings. Other crimes ascribed to him by Newes from Scotland and the trial transcript included throwing cats into the sea to raise storms and magically lighting up a horse’s ears while travelling by night. Perhaps the oddest story told how Fian became obsessed with the sister of one of his pupils. When she rejected his attentions, he asked the boy to bring him three of the girl’s pubic hairs, promising in return to refrain from beating him in the classroom. The boy’s attempt to take the hairs awoke his sister, who complained to their mother. After a sound beating, the boy confessed the scheme. His crafty mother substituted the desired pubic hairs with three strands from a cow. When Fian eagerly brewed up a love spell, the cow reportedly came barging in, “leaping and dancing upon him, and following him forth… to what place so ever he went”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/G37Y28cmyk-9a5a776.jpg" width="3074" height="2048" alt="An illustration of man on a horse. A man bewitching a cow can be seen in the background. Gallows and a church are also visible." title="A woodcut in Newes from Scotland (1591), a pamphlet reporting the North Berwick witch trials, depicts John Fian enchanting a cow and adding torches to his horse’s ears." /> Fian was something of an outlier: about 85 per cent of those convicted of witchcraft in Scotland were female. Women were more likely to work in domestic spaces and to be blamed for domestic misfortunes. Misogyny was another factor. In the late 17th century, lecturers at Aberdeen University taught that women were more susceptible to demons because they “believe more easily, discern less, and are more driven by desires for revenge and pleasure”. Men who became witches, the lecturers added, were “often effeminate, timid, credulous, fickle, and disturbed in judgment like women”. The Scottish kirk was also a patriarchal institution. The Calvinist leader John Knox, who was probably involved in drafting the 1563 act that made witchcraft a capital offence, did have circles of female confidants. Yet he is better remembered for The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in which he asserted that women were “weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish”. But Scotland was not any more misogynistic than other parts of Europe; indeed, women actually made up a higher proportion of those accused in England. Misogyny can’t explain the relative severity of witch-hunting north of the border. Capital punishment Legal frameworks provide a crucial starting point for understanding the differences between witch-hunting in England and Scotland. England’s 1563 and 1604 witchcraft acts prescribed different penalties according to the severity of the offence. By the terms of the Scottish act, any use of “witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy” was punishable by death. So, too, was consulting witches, though this was not enforced. Some convicted witches were given other sentences, such as banishment, but Scottish punishments remained harsher than those typically meted out south of the border. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/BAL234052cmyk-543dd44.jpg" width="3570" height="2378" alt="The devil speaks to witches in another woodcut from Newes from Scotland. By the time the North Berwick witch-hunt was over, some 70 people had been accused. (Photo by Bridgeman)" title="The devil speaks to witches in another woodcut from Newes from Scotland. By the time the North Berwick witch-hunt was over, some 70 people had been accused. (Photo by Bridgeman)" /> In addition, Scottish interrogators made more use of torture to extract confessions. This practice was illegal unless authorised by a warrant from the privy council, the main executive governmental body, but zealous ministers and lairds sometimes overlooked that prohibition. Physical torture of the kind used against Geillis Duncan seems to have been relatively uncommon, but sleep deprivation was probably widely employed. Another coercive interrogation method was witch-pricking, by which the accused was searched and pricked with pins to find a ‘devil’s mark’. Martha Semple (or Sempell), a “well-favoured and genteel” girl of 17 or 18 from Renfrewshire, was investigated for witchcraft in 1697. According to one record, she was twice searched for the devil’s mark, and “the pricker missed not to search the very soles of her feet and other more secret places, for when there was any difficulty to find the mark they did quite unclothe them”. In a society that prized women’s modesty, this ritual would have been deeply humiliating. Read more | The Pendle Witches: what happened in the infamous Lancashire witch trial? Trials also differed between England and Scotland. English judicial processes were largely centralised, and witch trials were typically held in county assize courts presided over by judges appointed by the crown. Before 1662, most accused witches in Scotland were tried in haphazard local courts overseen by commissioners who might have little or no legal training. Though the central court was relatively lenient, execution rates in local trials may have been higher than 90 per cent. Mary Cunningham was tried in Culross in 1644. Her advocate “gave in such defences as could not be answered by the procurator fiscal, who had no skill of law”. The commissioners admitted defeat, and petitioned the privy council to have her tried at the central court in Edinburgh instead. Mary was lucky. Most accused witches did not have the resources to hire a lawyer, and they were not permitted to speak in their own defence. Creating a godly state Particular political and religious contexts underpinned Scottish witch-hunts, which sometimes erupted during periods of economic hardship or political unrest when community tensions ran higher and the authorities were keen to appease God’s wrath. More broadly, they reflected a drive on the part of both church and state to transform Scotland into a godly nation. Following the 1560 Reformation, kirk sessions were established to enforce religious conformity and tackle sins such as blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness, profaning the Sabbath and illicit fornication. Ministers did not believe every accusation. In Ayr in 1633, Margaret McCall accused Agnes Dunschit of being “a rank witch who should be burnt quick”. McCall claimed that Dunschit had come to her house on a thundery night and told her to renounce her baptism. Yet the accuser could offer no proof, and the kirk – bearing in mind that McCall was “a drunkard and keeps a bad house” – ordered her to declare publicly that she had lied. Sometimes, however, ministers or local lairds did take accusations seriously. This was particularly likely if accusations covered a long period and were voiced by multiple people, or during periods of mass witch-hunting. Arrest and interrogation typically followed, at which point the nature of the accusations might evolve. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-918908272cmyk-22ae600.jpg" width="4994" height="3327" alt="A ship is wrecked in the sea, with people left stranded in the water. People watch from the shore and one has her arms raised." title="A ship is wrecked in a storm raised by a witch in a coloured woodcut of 1562. Women were far more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men" /> Neighbours commonly accused each other of acts of maleficium, or magical harm. In Kirkcaldy in 1633, Janet Allan testified that she had refused to give Alison Dick some sour bakes, after which the latter had declared that Allan’s children would beg and that tadpoles would nest in her husband’s hair. The husband was later lost at sea and their children were left destitute, leading Allan to suspect that Dick had cursed the family. The accused woman was executed a month later. In the eyes of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, witches targeted not just individuals but entire communities. Accused witches had entered into covenants with Satan, with the ultimate aim of dismantling godly society. As James VI explained it, witches used a variety of methods, but all worked towards “the enlarging of Satan’s tyranny”. Interrogators were often less concerned with investigating specific acts of maleficium and more with posing leading questions about diabolic pacts. Thus Janet Barker, tried in Edinburgh in 1643, confessed that the devil promised her a red petticoat and gown, so that “she should be as trimly clad as the best servant in Edinburgh”. She thereupon “condescended to be his servant for half a year”. Others detailed sexual encounters with Satan, who might take the form of a man or a beast. In 1662, Jonet Braidheid from Nairn described how the devil sucked the blood out of her mark and spat it out over her head to rebaptise her, then had sex with her. He was “as cold as spring well water” inside her. He paid her afterwards, but the money turned red. English scepticism The Scottish privy council wielded significant power over witch-hunts, being able to grant or refuse commissions for local trials. There was no comparable state authorisation in England. Even James VI lost much of his fervour for witch-hunting after he inherited the English throne and moved to London in 1603. English elites had been known to mock the barbaric, superstitious ways of the Scots, and James was perhaps cautious of appearing credulous to his English courtiers. Moreover, it seems that he became genuinely more sceptical. In the years following his move south, he personally investigated a handful of cases of demonic possession and, in deeming them fraudulent, saved the lives of several women accused of summoning the offending demons. Nor was the English church involved in witch-hunting to the same degree as the kirk in Scotland. The English Reformation was instigated by Henry VIII, whose motives were more political than ideological. The church remained highly centralised, and, though parish churches were important hubs, they did not develop the same powers of social control as kirk sessions. In Scotland, the Reformation was a relatively radical grassroots movement dedicated to refashioning the nation into a place of unrivalled godliness. It introduced a Presbyterian structure that placed significant power in the hands of local elders. The relatively limited role of English clergymen in witch-hunting, as well as the more effective prohibition of torture, meant that English witchcraft trials remained largely focused on maleficium – the act of causing harm – rather than the more explicitly religious crime of diabolism. Demonological ideas were explored in popular pamphlets but were rarely voiced in courtrooms. An exception came during the 1640s in the chaos of the Civil War, when the infamous ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins spearheaded England’s bloodiest witch-hunt. In general, though, accused witches in Scotland were blamed for more dramatic and far-reaching crimes against Christendom than their English counterparts. The phenomenon fades By the late 17th century, witchcraft prosecutions were declining across Europe, and elite attitudes in Britain reflected that trend. Consider the large-scale Scottish witch-hunt in 1661–62, which involved at least 600 accusations and likely hundreds of executions. The privy council granted commissions for waves of trials, but officials soon began to worry that matters were getting out of hand. In April 1662, the council issued a proclamation declaring that “a great many persons… have been apprehended and hurried to prisons, pricked, tortured and abused… by such persons as have no warrant or authority so to do.” The council was taking aim at ministers and other local elites who had overstepped their commissions or neglected to secure them. The privy council subsequently became more reluctant to grant commissions for local trials. A growing proportion of those accused of witchcraft were tried centrally or by trained judges from Edinburgh operating in circuit courts, and defence lawyers increasingly challenged the evidential basis for witchcraft, resulting in far higher acquittal rates. The council also made efforts to clamp down on the illicit use of torture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/0882400-2cmyk-57d7ce4.jpg" width="1644" height="1096" alt="A black and white sketch of various instruments of torture, including a sword, some shackles and a pyre" title="Instruments of torture used in 16th-century European witch-trials. Though illegal without a warrant from the privy council, torture was sometimes used in Scotland to obtain confessions" /> The lawyer George Mackenzie, lord advocate 1677–86, exemplifies the growing scepticism of legal professionals. He wrote in 1678 that he did not doubt the reality of witches, but believed that many “poor ignorant creatures” had been unfairly prosecuted in Scotland. He attributed confessions to the use of torture, and recounted speaking with an impoverished woman who avowed that she had confessed because she expected to starve otherwise; having been accused of witchcraft, she imagined that “all men would beat her, and hound Dogs at her, and… therefore she desired to be out of the World”. Prosecutions petered out in the early 18th century; the last is usually considered to be that of Janet Horne in 1727. She was reputedly accused of riding her daughter, who took the form of a pony, to pay homage to the devil; both were reportedly tried by the local sheriff and found guilty. The daughter escaped, but Horne was burned to death in a barrel of pitch. However, the evidence is uncertain. If this episode did take place, it may have been a lynching rather than a formal trial, without authorisation from the central authorities. Witchcraft was decriminalised in 1736, bringing an end to what Walter Scott called a “dark chapter in human nature”. However, the witch-hunts remain a culturally relevant and emotive subject. As recently as 2022, the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland made formal apologies for their historical roles in witch-hunting. And the attitudes and concerns that drove these persecutions are still germane today. Witch-hunting grew out of specific religious, political and cultural contexts – but reflected an enduring human tendency to turn largely powerless victims into enemies of state and society. Martha McGill is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. She helped develop two games exploring historical perceptions of witchcraft. You can download them here This article is from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine