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Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain
The author's books depict an evocative slice of early 19th-century life, but many aspects of the Regency era are only hinted at in her novels, as Lizzie Rogers reveals
Ever felt like you could be Elizabeth Bennet? You’re not alone. Entering Jane Austen’s world can feel like an immersive experience. Reading her books (or watching television or film adaptations, or the many spin-offs and lookalikes), it’s easy to believe that somehow we’ve really got to know her England – and, by extension, the people who lived in it. That feeling is encapsulated in the 2008 ITV series Lost in Austen, which follows the adventures of 21st-century heroine Amanda Price. Stepping through a portal into the world of Pride and Prejudice, Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds herself in the bosom of the Bennet family, messing up episodes in the novel, trying – with varying degrees of success – to fix them and, inevitably, falling in love with Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Her opening voiceover declares that “I’ve read [Pride and Prejudice] so many times now the words just say themselves in my head and it’s like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there – it’s become a place I know so intimately… I can see that world, I can touch it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/shutterstockeditorial912719bewebready-5e6f127-e1765974181648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a modern-day adaptation of a Regency ball. A couple dance in the middle, with the man spinning the woman around. Around them, several other couples dance" title="A scene from ITV’s Lost in Austen, where 21st-century heroine Amanda Price steps into Pride and Prejudice, which she describes as “a place I know so intimately” (Image by Shutterstock)" /> This is far from a new sentiment. In March 1826, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal that Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment... What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.” Her undeniable talent for character study is one of the key reasons why Austen’s work resonates so loudly across the world. Creative retellings of her novels show how the themes, characters and plotlines easily transcend their bounds of Regency England and fit well in other countries, other cultures and other times, with new representations amending the ages, social class and genders of characters. In the 250 years since Austen’s birth, her work has morphed into a behemoth that we simultaneously modernise and have made emblematic of life in late 18th and early 19th-century England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-113633139webready-0bd035d.jpg" width="2083" height="1388" alt="An image showing an old man with a straight face, wearing a suit and coat" title="A 19th-century engraving of author Sir Walter Scott, who wrote glowingly of Austen’s writing after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obscuring obsession Thanks to her gift for evoking that era, its environment and inhabitants, it’s easy to envision ourselves inside her world. We feel able to enter it through the plots of her novels and their adaptations for stage and screen, as well as the extension of her unfinished novel Sanditon, fleshed out vividly in the ITV series running from 2019. But there is a danger that we conflate her writing too fully with the history of the time, obscuring swathes of this period through our obsession. The picture we receive is one that’s been enhanced by layers of interpretation, adaptation and the historical distance between us and the source material. The effect of them all together is “to make us read novels that aren’t actually there”, argued Helena Kelly in her 2016 book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, echoing the views of other Austen scholars. Because Austen’s work feels so modern and accessible, we miss wider perspectives that are alluded to through her clever study of the world around her – but also, importantly, many that she simply could not give us and did not have to. One person cannot capture every aspect of life in their era, nor act as the singular voice of a generation. No matter how brilliant or important the writer in question is, they cannot speak to the experience of everybody. Yes, Jane Austen was a genius, through whose pen the novel was changed forever. She defied her circumstances in life – being a woman with very little money – to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, thanks solely to her immense talent. And she does open a window into this period of history from which we can learn so much – but her work, and the questions it raises, invites us to widen our gaze. Our knowledge of both her and the time in which she lived is only enriched by expanding our understanding by exploring the work of other writers and figures that populated her world, opening our eyes to that diverse, fast-changing and momentous era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-173344128webready-9d2cff4-e1765974152772.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white pictures showing large groups of people in states of undress, fighting and drinking in the street" title="William Hogarth’s Gin Lane provides a stark portrayal of a teeming urban environment in which drunkenness and debauchery were rife (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fascinated by the intelligent satire of Austen’s novels, we might look at the art of William Hogarth. Though he died in 1764, more than a decade before the author’s birth, many of his images of 18th-century London highlight the blight of corruption and the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor well into the 19th century. His famous prints Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) could be seen as demonising the drinking habits of the working class. But his work does at least feature ordinary folk as more than just background elements. A portrait of his own servants from the early 1750s, for instance, presents distinct faces and personalities. Hogarth’s father spent time in debtors’ prison, a place more often associated with the Victorian work of Charles Dickens, and many other figures from the Georgian period also found themselves inmates. The actress and writer Mary Robinson (c1757–1800), who later became famous for her portrayal of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (and for her brief affair with the Prince of Wales), lived with her profligate husband in debtors’ prison for several months from 1775; while there, she became the family breadwinner by publishing her poetry. Read more | Beyond the podcast: Jane Austen Robinson’s memoirs, prepared from 1798 and published the year after her death, charted a life beset with immense ups and downs. They give us an insight into her youth and first marriage (“I considered chastity as the brightest ornament that could embellish the female mind,” she writes) and trace the struggles that continued to beset her into her later years. In fact, much of the preparations for those memoirs was done on envelopes because she couldn’t afford to buy fresh paper. Crime and poverty To continue our trip into the murkier corners of London during this period, consider the business dealings, crime and poverty prevalent in lower-class areas of the city. One publication that illustrates this side of urban life was Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious bestseller published annually from 1757 to 1794 that detailed names and talents of dozens of sex workers. It was interrogated by Hallie Rubenhold in her 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies, which itself inspired the television series Harlots (2017–19). These aspects of London are hinted at in Pride and Prejudice, in the form of the poverty and depravity that Mrs Bennet fears will be the fate of her daughter Lydia after she runs away to the capital with George Wickham. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2E4A0NWwebready-e008451.jpg" width="1639" height="1093" alt="A drawing of a black man with one leg, dressed in a blue jacket, checked shirt and a feathered hat, playing the violin" title="An early 19th-century illustration of sailor-turned-street performer Billy Waters, whose life “highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period” (Image by Alamy)" /> Strength in diversity Sanditon introduces Austen’s only black character: Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies. During the 18th century, it is estimated there were more than 20,000 black Britons – a significant number, in a British population that had exceeded 10 million by 1801. To explore the lives of some of these people, read Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (2022) and Mary L Shannon’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing (2024). The latter gives a voice to a black sailor in Regency Britain whose presence as a street performer was so famed across London that his name became legendary, his life shaped by those who aimed to profit from his talent. Living from around the 1770s until 1823, Waters’ life maps closely onto Austen’s, and highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England Mansfield Park, Austen’s third and perhaps most divisive novel, makes clear the links between slavery, the country house and aristocratic wealth. The titular house is built on a fortune sustained by plantations worked by enslaved people in Antigua, and its name may come from Lord Mansfield, whose judicial decisions enabled the advancement towards the abolition of slavery. Austen’s favourite poet was William Cowper, whose work fervently supported antislavery campaigns. But there were also first-person accounts of the experiences of black people in Britain in that period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2H492WTwebready-9bef977-e1765974356801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An open book with a portrait of a black man in a suit on the left page, and a title page on the right" title="First-person accounts written by the formerly enslaved – such as the letters of Ignatius Sancho (above) – helped rally Britons to the cause of abolition (Image by Alamy)" /> The letters of Ignatius Sancho, born into slavery on an Atlantic ship in 1729 and brought to England at two years old, were published in 1782, after his death. One of them – written to John Wingrave, a London bookseller, in 1778 – contains a stinging rebuke of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes – prayers – and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.” Olaudah Equiano was another high profile supporter of the British abolitionist movement whose writings shone a light on the iniquities of the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative autobiography – telling the story of his enslavement in Africa, arrival in Britain as a young man and life after purchasing his freedom in 1766 – was hugely popular when it was published in 1789. The enslaved female poet Phillis Wheatley revealed in verse her desire for intellectual fulfilment. Travelling to London from Boston with her enslavers, she was able to publish Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 – believed to be the first set of poems published by an African American. Such writings enable us to understand experiences of black people during the era, reminding us of the often-forgotten diversity of England at this time. In this vein, the second season of Bridgerton (2022) highlighted – albeit through a fictionalised lens – the experiences of south Asian people in Britain. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the British empire was in rapid ascendency, fuelled by commerce, trade and the ruthless actions of the East India Company. The author’s own cousin, Eliza Hancock – who later married Jane’s brother Henry – grew up in India as the daughter of a British surgeon to the East India Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90779123webready-cbf67a0-e1765974523630.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of three workers working in a factory, turning large wheels with cloth hanging over them into buckets" title="An 18th-century illustration of workers dyeing cloth. Jane Austen lived through a boom in industry, but others would document the struggles of the labouring poor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Long-lost sister William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, which was set during the Regency period though published in 1848, highlights through the character of Jos Sedley the wealth that could be accumulated by young people capitalising on travelling to India. Historian Durba Ghosh has noted that Thackeray had a long-lost (and possibly mixed-heritage) sister, Amelia – also known as Sarah Redfield – in India, and explored the stories of many south Asian women, demonstrating the strong connections between Britain and India at the time. Read more | Strange and surprising pastimes of the Regency Ton Thackeray’s dramatic novel is more specifically set during the Napoleonic Wars, hinted at in Austen’s work through the regular presence of a militia or naval characters, though this inclusion is often overlooked as a reflection of the lived experience of constant war and unrest. Two of Austen’s brothers were in the navy and one was in a militia regiment, while her cousin Eliza lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine. The absence of peace and a sense of perpetual uncertainty were harrowing facts of life. This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and parliamentary representation. Through the late 18th and early 19th century, villages, towns and cities grew rapidly while at the same time the voices of ordinary people were not heard. Burgeoning industry created a new class of wealthy people, while also fostering extremely testing working conditions for the labouring poor. We tend to think of these subjects as uniquely endemic to the Victorian period, taking centre stage in the writing of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, but the boom in industry was firmly rooted in Austen’s lifetime. For instance, Lancashire’s cotton industry was in full swing by the late 18th century, with some 20,000 apprentices working in cotton mills in 1800. Textile magnate Robert Peel (1750–1830), long-term MP for Tamworth and father of the future prime minister of the same name, began campaigning and introducing legislation on child labour in the early years of the 19th century. Spending time in London, Bath and Southampton, Jane Austen would have been offered significant insights into the growth of industry and urban overcrowding. We celebrate Austen’s novels for the questions she raises about the position of women in society, a subject that preoccupied many of her contemporaries. Early feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures who deserved rights accordingly in a world that granted them few, if any. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects she wrote: “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.” Wollstonecraft’s words caused a sensation – and when, after her premature death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin published her biography, so did the story of her life. She lived frequently outside the bounds of accepted social propriety – a point that enables us to delve deeper into the world of reputation, of making spaces to safely subvert societal expectations and legal doctrine, and of understanding how relationships, freedom and restriction truly worked in practice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1441698253webready-9c87b29-e1765974624755.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" title="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" /> The third season of Sanditon (2023) presented a slow-burn romance between two gay men, Arthur Parker and Lord Harry Montrose – the storyline breathing a small piece of fictional life into the rich LGBTQ+ history of this period. A visible real-life example can be found in the cottage named Plas Newydd in Llangollen, Wales where from 1780 the couple Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler created a sanctuary for queer happiness. They became famous within their own lifetimes, visited by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal pension by George III upon the intercession of Queen Charlotte. We cannot – and should not expect to – learn everything about the history of the Regency period from the pages of Jane Austen’s novels. But as fans, readers and historians, we are indebted to her for providing a gateway into this tumultuous period, into which new research is being undertaken all the time, shining light on previously unheard voices and hidden faces. It is all these lived experiences that weave a rich tapestry, helping us to better know the period in which Jane Austen lived – one that indelibly shaped her and the masterpieces she left behind.
George Washington is an American hero – so why was he the pride of Victorian England?
He may be a symbol of US independence, but George Washington’s family tree is firmly rooted on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Sam Edwards visits the English towns and villages that the president’s ancestors once called home
In 1886 a remarkable discovery in Lancashire, England, shed important new light on what one newspaper called the “vexed question of the ancestry of George Washington”. The discovery came during restoration work at St Oswald’s Church in Warton, a small village in the north of the county overlooked by a rocky crag and an Iron Age hill fort. As workmen chipped away at some of the old plaster on the church tower’s exterior, they were amazed to uncover “the coat of arms and name of the Washington family”. The news was received in Lancashire and beyond with delight. Indeed, despite his central role in leading the American Revolution, George Washington had long been a popular figure in Britain. He was often praised by the British press for his citizen virtue and skills as a military leader, and his death in December 1799 was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic. On learning of his passing, some of the ships of the Royal Navy’s fleet even lowered their flags to half-mast as a mark of respect. Little wonder that the discovery of Washington’s family crest at Warton was greeted with such enthusiasm. Here at last, after many years of detailed genealogical research, was something definitive, something literally carved in stone. The coat of arms at St Oswald’s provided clear proof that the Washington family tree had roots in the Lancashire loam. The timing could not have been more perfect. The relationship between the US and UK governments was just then becoming increasingly friendly – a development the historian Bradford Perkins later termed the ‘Great Rapprochement’. This was a good time, in short, to discover (and proclaim) Washington’s ‘Englishness’, particularly because his stock in the United States was riding especially high. Only a couple of years earlier, a huge obelisk in his memory had been dedicated in the nation’s capital, which still dominates the city skyline even now. British enthusiasm for Washington persisted over the subsequent decades. In the early 20th century, correspondents to The Times could still be found regularly (and excitedly) debating the first president’s English lineage, and by the 1920s there was a veritable ‘cult’ of Washington on this side of the pond. Today, five places in England can claim a close tie to Washington, as we reveal below… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/1C5FTDE-8166170-e1766161751458.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a white village pub with a red and gold sign saying George Washington. To the left, there is a large church tower" title="The George Washington pub in Warton is only a short distance from the church where the first president’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas Washington, are buried (Image by Alamy)" /> 1. Warton, Lancashire Where you can sup a pint in a pub named for George It’s fair to say that although George Washington was aware of a family connection to “one of the northern counties of England” he knew very little beyond that. The discovery of the family crest on the church tower in Warton therefore revealed that Washington’s instincts were correct. His family was indeed from a northern county – Lancashire – and it was quickly apparent that the ties to Warton went very deep. By 1888, one local historian, Henry Whitman, had even documented these ties in a special volume titled The Washingtons and their Connection with Warton. Among the local details Whitman recounted were a Washington grave (of Elizabeth, died in 1751, and of Thomas Washington, died in 1823) and a Washington House (dated 1612, and located on the village’s main street). Both the grave site and the house duly became key destinations for Washington pilgrims. In 1932, a large group of Americans visited the village to mark the bicentennial of Washington’s birth and, before departing, took time to lay a wreath at the grave of Elizabeth and Thomas. They were followed a decade later by groups of Lancashire-based American troops who left behind a Stars and Stripes flag that was subsequently flown from the tower of St Oswald’s every 4th July. Read more | George Washington: your guide to the war hero, founding father, first US president and slave owner And then, in 1976, the bicentennial of the American Revolution was celebrated in Warton with 10 days of festivities. The carefully planned events unfolded during a now-legendary summer heatwave and the partygoers became so parched that they literally drank the local bar dry! In 1998, the pub in question – The Black Bull – changed its name to The George Washington. Today, you can sup a pint under an American flag and just a short walk from where Washington’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas, are buried. 2. Whitehaven, Cumbria The burial place of George’s grandmother – and the only place in England invaded by the US Navy Lancashire isn’t the only northern county to claim a connection to the first president. In Whitehaven in Cumbria (historic Cumberland) there’s a Washington link that is even closer. The town, once heavily involved in the trade with the American colonies, is the final resting place of Mildred Gale, George Washington’s paternal grandmother, who died here in 1701. Born and raised in Virginia, Mildred was married to a Lawrence Washington (one of many in the Washington clan – see below for more details) and it was one of their children – Augustine – who became the father of George. Following Lawrence’s untimely death (in 1698), Mildred married George Gale of Whitehaven, hence why she was in town in 1701. The exact cause of her own death is unclear, though it was most probably some sort of disease as her infant child and maid also perished. The latter, a young woman by the name of ‘Jane’, was likely enslaved, though she was referred to in the parish burial register as a “negro servant”. Notably, Jane seems to have been buried in the same grave as Mildred. It was many years later, in 1876 – the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution – that the town’s Washington link was properly rediscovered. The link drew still more attention in the 20th century and a plaque commemorating the connection was unveiled in the church in 1955. Sadly, the church was severely damaged by fire in 1971, but a new memorial tablet was erected in 2006. Interestingly, this is not the town’s only link to the events of the American Revolution. In April 1778 a contemporary of George Washington – John Paul Jones – led a naval raid on Whitehaven. Jones’s plan was to disable the town’s guns and then set the ships in the harbour alight. The attack was only a partial success, however, because soon after their landing several of Jones’s men proceeded to the first pub they could find where they duly got drunk! Today, Whitehaven is proud of its connection to John Paul Jones. In 1999, the town even issued a declaration allowing one US Navy man o’ war per year to enter the harbour without charge. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/32JTB0N8-6fc0297-e1766162039230.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" title="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. Washington Old Hall, Tyne and Wear Visited in 1977 by another president with local roots The Washington family seems to have first arrived in the Warton area as far back as the late 13th century, when a Robert Washington married into the Strickland family at nearby Sizergh Castle. Robert’s name – Washington – was derived from the village in County Durham where he lived, and he took it with him when he headed west. However, a branch of the family remained in County Durham until the end of the 14th century, and their impressive home still stands today: Washington Old Hall. Parts of the building likely go back to the age of the very first Washington – William (great-great grandfather of Robert) – and in the centuries that followed it had a remarkable life, going from a medieval manor house to a Victorian tenement. By the 1930s the house had fallen into disrepair and so an organisation was formed to purchase and restore it. In 1956, the National Trust assumed responsibility for its care and maintenance. The hall’s moment in the limelight came in May 1977 when huge crowds gathered there to welcome President Jimmy Carter. Carter was on an official tour of the northeast, and the hall was his second stop. The first was at Newcastle Civic Centre where he gave a speech which began with the now-famous words (delivered in almost passable Geordie) “Howay the lads”! 4. Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire A ‘shrine’ to George, deep in the English countryside If the Old Hall in Washington has the earliest English connection to the first president, it’s nonetheless another rural country seat that claims the title of being his ancestral home: Sulgrave Manor in deepest Northamptonshire. Tudor in origin, the house was built by Lawrence Washington (the first of several ‘Lawrences’ in the Washington genealogy) and it remained in the family until the mid-17th century. After the Washingtons’ departure it was occupied by various tenant farmers, and by the 20th century it had fallen into disrepair. The manor was subsequently saved thanks to the intervention of several high-profile figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1901–09. ‘Teddy’, as he was known, was keen to mark the centennial of the Treaty of Ghent, the agreement that had ended the War of 1812 (which had seen British troops march on Washington and burn down the White House). Read more | Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir? The real story of the maligned Founding Father and 'villain' of Hamilton By 1914, fundraising in both countries had enabled the purchase of the house, but the outbreak of the First World War then delayed the plans for its repair and reconstruction. The restored manor was finally unveiled as a ‘shrine’ to the Anglo-American relationship in June 1921. Interestingly, this was not the only celebration of George Washington’s English connections that summer. Just a week after the events at Sulgrave, a statue of the first president was unveiled in London overlooking Trafalgar Square. The two projects were in fact closely connected and so the statue’s dedication similarly involved various influential figures. One of these was Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, whose unveiling speech went so far as to claim Washington as a “Great Englishman”. In the years afterwards a popular myth developed around the statue: to honour Washington’s vow never to set foot on English soil, it was said that the statue was purposefully placed on earth imported from his home state of Virginia. Unfortunately, nothing in the archival record suggests that this is true. But the myth has been so powerful that following the recent re-dedication of the statue, in June 2025, some soil from Washington’s Mount Vernon home was indeed placed beneath the pedestal. 5. Purleigh and Maldon, Essex The key link to the very first Washingtons of Virginia By the time the Washingtons sold Sulgrave in the mid-17th century, one branch of the family had settled at Purleigh in Essex, 10 miles to the east of Chelmsford. This was where clergyman Reverend Lawrence Washington – the great-grandson of the Lawrence who had built the manor at Sulgrave – had been given the wealthy parish of All Saints. However, the good reverend’s commitment to the Crown during the Civil War led him to fall out of favour with the Puritan authorities and he later died in poverty in 1652. Perhaps this was why his son John opted to find a future in the North American colonies, landing in Virginia in 1657. John’s son – yet another Lawrence – was born in the colony in 1659, and it was he who married Mildred (later buried at Whitehaven). Of their three surviving children, one – Augustine – was to be the father of George Washington. Read more | Is this the secret to understanding US foreign policy? How a powerful doctrine from 1823 reshaped America When Reverend Lawrence Washington died, he was buried not in his old parish at Purleigh, but in nearby Maldon, and in 1928 a memorial window was dedicated there to commemorate this fact. The window was a gift from the citizens of the similarly named Malden in Massachusetts and was unveiled, very deliberately, on 5th July (just a day after Independence Day). The keen-eyed will see that towards the top of the window’s central panel is an image of the Washington coat of arms: three stars in red, above four bars in red and white. This is the very same heraldic sign that had been uncovered by workmen in Warton all those years before, and a long-running (though unproven) myth holds that it was in fact the inspiration for the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. Dr Sam Edwards is a reader in modern political history at Loughborough University
We often refer to countries as 'female' – so why has history excluded women from nation-building?
Janina Ramirez speaks to Danny Bird about how women and their stories have been co-opted and curated by men attempting to forge nations across Europe
Danny Bird: What was the genesis of Legenda? Was there a moment when you knew you had to write this book? Janina Ramirez: From the start of my academic career, I learned from [Palestinian-American literary critic and activist] Edward Said and others the value of acknowledging one’s perspective: being transparent about who you are, rather than claiming some sense of neutral empirical truth. For me, identity rests on three pillars. First, I am a woman. Second, class: I come from an immigrant, working-class background. Third, heritage: Polish-Irish, born in Dubai, raised in the UK, married to a Spanish-Scot, with a distinctly European sense of self. With all that, I wasn’t going to get away without a Catholic upbringing: convent school, just very Roman Catholic foundations. I’m not practising now, but it gave me empathy for faith and an understanding of belief. These roots inevitably shape my work. When I published The Private Lives of the Saints [in 2015], my aunt, a Franciscan missionary, told me how proud she was. I had to laugh because the book dismantled saintly myths rather than celebrating them. Yet she was right: I was still that Catholic schoolgirl, writing about religious figures, even as I reframed them. Questions of nationality also ran through my research. My first book required careful choices of terms: ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Scottish’, ‘British Isles’ – each politically charged. By Femina [2022], the pattern was striking: nations everywhere reclaiming heritage, from Scandinavia’s Vikings to France’s Cathars. The focus of my latest book crystallised while writing about [queen and saint] Jadwiga of Poland. My grandmother, who owned a bronze of Pope John Paul II, reminded me how faith and identity intertwine. In my lifetime, that pope canonised women I now study, using them to shape national narratives. So the direction of this new book was clear even as I finished the last one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/ali053543-2webready-72fca02-e1765540085950.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Isabella of Castile, pictured in a 15th-century illumination. Five centuries after her death, the Spanish monarch is still used as an icon to shape national identity as essentially Castilian (Image by Topfoto)" title="Queen Isabella of Castile, pictured in a 15th-century illumination. Five centuries after her death, the Spanish monarch is still used as an icon to shape national identity as essentially Castilian (Image by Topfoto)" /> You explore how women such as Joan of Arc and Isabella of Castile became symbols of national identity. Do you think their stories continue to shape how nations see themselves today? I open the book with one of [French far-right nationalist politician] Jean-Marie Le Pen’s impassioned rallies at the statue of Joan of Arc on the Place des Pyramides in Paris. So yes, her story remains relevant – mocked or taken seriously, but still shaping France’s political landscape. After being expelled from the [far-right anti-immigrant] National Front, Le Pen founded an even harder-right party, naming it after Joan of Arc and making her its emblem. That’s how potent her image remains to French nationalists. Similarly, Isabella of Castile’s influence endures. When I speak with Spanish friends, they describe how the Castilian dialect is still seen as the benchmark [rather than regional dialects such as Catalan or Galician] – much like in Britain, where London can feel like a ‘brain drain’ and doesn’t reflect life in the north, Cornwall or Kent. That sense of central dominance ties directly back to Isabella and the way she imposed her vision of Spain. And that’s the heart of it: attempts to impose a single collective identity on diverse peoples – peoples with different regions, traditions and faiths – inevitably crack. Even in Isabella’s lifetime, that imposed single national identity fractured and was repeatedly reinforced, layer upon layer. We see the same dynamics now in places such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. These identities don’t simply vanish; they resist, reassert themselves and continue to challenge imposed unity. Read more | Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win” I’d love to explore how nations so often personify themselves as women – from Britannia to Marianne – embodying a strange mix of maternal or nurturing spirit, virginal purity, even martial strength. What do you think is going on there? Brilliant question! I’m very fortunate to be a colleague in Oxford of Marina Warner, the doyenne of this subject. She has written on Joan of Arc, but also a wonderful book called Monuments and Maidens, which speaks directly to this point. She shows how nations embody themselves in female form: the Statue of Liberty, Marianne in the Panthéon, Britannia looming in St Paul’s Cathedral. And you’re absolutely right: there’s a deep frustration here. The nation is imagined as a woman, yet women themselves had little to no role in building nations. It’s a profound injustice: in virtually every revolutionary moment, women were excluded from shaping national identity. In France, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ – that emphasis on brotherhood – was about raising up men, not women. Think of how the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [1789] prompted the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen [1791] in response; the author of that second declaration, Olympe de Gouges, was executed for it. Revolutions don’t work for women; they offer no place for us. Yet the most powerful symbol to unite people is often ‘the mother’. That universal image, both compelling and emotionally resonant, becomes propaganda: to serve king and country is to serve one’s motherland. Men are called to die for their ‘mother’, while real women are denied participation in politics, philosophy, architecture or law. That’s the deep irony you’ve identified: women are entirely excluded from nation-building, yet the ultimate emblem of the nation is a woman. Several of the women you write about pushed back against the expectations of their time. Why do you think some have become celebrated as heroines whereas others have been condemned? We are still enthralled by the charismatic, the extreme, the outspoken. I don’t understand why certain celebrities and influencers command such attention while thoughtful, rational voices struggle to be heard. We must be cautious about whom we choose to celebrate as heroes, both today and in the past. The figures who endure often do so because their stories are condensed into simple, powerful images that can be reproduced and instantly recognised. Take Agustina of Aragón, for example. Many women fought in Zaragoza [against invading French forces] during the Peninsular War from 1808, yet she became iconic because painters such as Goya fixed her image: a small figure on a pile of bodies, lighting a cannon’s fuse. That lodged itself in the public imagination – this is how legend works. When I began the book, I also considered including men such as Robin Hood or Alfred the Great, whose myths have likewise been reshaped into soundbites. People prefer statues, posters and slogans to complex truths. They want heroes they can identify at a glance without grappling with the full picture. That’s why I wrote the book: to question the stories we take as fact. Consider the Lady Godiva legend [in which the 11th-century noblewoman of Mercia rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to win respite for its people from oppressive taxation by her husband, the earl]. The only factual link between the historical Godgifu and the tale we know is Coventry itself. Everything else is invention. I love stories, and I open each chapter with one, but my aim is to dig beneath them – to be forensic about who these figures really were. In doing so, they become more complex, more fascinating and ultimately more thrilling than the legends that have simplified them. Read more | “In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history Were there any unexpected objects or sources that illuminated the roles of women featured in your book? Yes – particularly while researching the chapter on Greece, one of the hardest to write. The 1821 Greek revolt is often downplayed in accounts of nationhood. Because it was a rebellion against the Ottoman empire – against ‘the east’, rather than against monarchies in western Europe – it can feel like a different story from the Belgian, German or French struggles for democracy, and tends to be pushed to the margins. I wanted to foreground it. What struck me most was how this perspective connects to broader debates about Eurocentrism. Recently, at the Gloucester History Festival, I listened to Peter Frankopan, 10 years on from the publication of his book The Silk Roads, urging us not to be so western-focused, and Vince Cable, who echoed the same point in relation to China, India and Japan today. I wanted to shift the narrative away from the familiar classical thread linking Europe to Rome and ancient Greece, and instead emphasise that, for much of medieval history, Constantinople (now Istanbul) was the true hub of civilisation and power. London and the north of Europe were seen as barbaric backwaters. Greek identity in the 19th century was not just a Byronesque, romantic appeal to ancient culture. For Greeks, it was about reclaiming the legacy of Constantinople, which had fallen to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Researching the role of women in Constantinople, I was struck by the extraordinary survival of coins, enamels, jewelled crosses – objects that in most revolutions would have been melted down, yet remained intact because the Ottomans largely ignored them. Among them are coins depicting the 11th-century sisters Zoe and Theodora (left) ruling with the male title ‘emperor’ of Byzantium, rather than ‘empress’. Their images, along with artefacts carried to places such as Georgia when it was ruled by Queen Tamar (reigned 1184–1213), are stark reminders that women could and did rule empires. Indeed, at the same time as Charlemagne was trying to construct a Holy Roman Empire [at the turn of the ninth century], Empress Irene was ruling in Constantinople, viewing the Franks as peasants on the fringes of civilisation. That chapter forced me to question western national narratives and to reflect on the cycles of rise and fall in world history. It also highlighted the need for humility in how we see our place in a global story that has always been in flux, and the importance of asking where women feature in that. You also discuss the intersection where religious devotion and politics meet, through women such as Catherine of Siena. Today, would their faith make them seem radical or reactionary? Catherine of Siena [14th-century mystic and letter-writer] is a fascinating and difficult figure to grasp. I suspect that she would now be seen as a radical extremist. Her influence grew rapidly from local notoriety to involvement in politics, family disputes and the affairs of the nobility. Rejecting the cloistered life of a nun, which she deemed too modest and hidden, she instead exploited the opportunities of the Dominican Third Order, which allowed women to live partly within the rhythms of monastic life while remaining active in the world – able to marry, raise families and pursue public roles. Even this was too restrictive for Catherine. She craved visibility and seized every chance to place herself centre stage. Behind her was a group that recognised her potential and promoted her as a kind of spiritual influencer. With their support, she was propelled onto ever larger platforms, becoming more reactionary and extreme as her fame grew. Eventually, she had the ear of the pope and played a part in global politics. It was a meteoric but tragic rise. Catherine’s regime of intense self-mortification, involving starvation and other severe practices, destroyed her health and she died young [aged just 33, in 1380]. Ironically, in the medieval world, some of the very behaviours officially condemned – such as fasting and self-harm – often brought fame and were celebrated as marks of sanctity. Extreme acts, such as plunging into frozen rivers or enduring brutal beatings, drew attention, enhanced reputations and opened the way to influence. For women, especially, punishing the body was often the only route to power and legacy. This pattern was not confined to women; men pursued similar paths. Nor is it a relic of the past. Even today, religious devotion expressed through extreme bodily endurance persists – in India, for example, ascetics hold an arm aloft until it withers. We may think ourselves too rational, too secular, to be drawn into such practices, but self-punishment in the name of belief remains very much alive. The temptation is to label such figures simply as fanatics, yet the reality is more complex. Were they extremists, or merely individuals desperately trying to stand out and make a difference? Religion, identity, politics, economics – all can be forces for good but, in the wrong hands and when driven by personal ambition, they become extreme. What emerges, in Catherine’s case and beyond, is the interplay between individual striving and wider social structures – why one person rises to prominence while others remain unheard. Read more | Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena In the end, you argue that reconnecting with these stories can help us resist division and manipulation. What do you think these women have to teach us about resilience and identity today? In my conclusion, I write that Agustina lit the cannon, while Joan picked up the sword. What unites these women is their courage. In times of threat and change, they were brave – and my argument is that we must be brave, too. We need clarity of mind and sharpened intellects to face today’s challenges. We are not fighting on streets with swords, but against misinformation, propaganda and manipulation at the highest levels. We must be equipped to understand our place in the world and our communities. The book begins and ends with women who had no concept of nations as we know them, yet shared the same land as us, walked the same paths and looked upon the same mountains. Their lives offer inspiration because they survived, thrived and achieved remarkable things in difficult circumstances. By connecting with their environments, we become part of their legacy. I deeply believe in the power of local history and connecting with our surroundings – exploring archives, visiting museums, walking through graveyards. Engaging with objects and places allows us to connect with people of the past in a meaningful way. It reminds us that humans have always been complex and brilliant. We are not the pinnacle of progress, and the people of the past were not mere peasants living short, brutish lives. Their experiences are fascinating, and learning about them teaches us to be better citizens today. In our modern world, we cannot control distant geopolitical events manipulated by the powerful. What we can control is our daily interactions with those around us, with the landscape and with our communities. Humanity has always found ways to coexist, collaborate and learn from one another across cultures and generations. That shared, everyday life that I see in my medieval figures still exists. We’ve just lost sight of it. We need to reconnect with each other, with the land and with the tangible realities of life, rather than the digitised, ethereal existence of screens and texts. Humans have always lived alongside one another, and understanding those relationships is essential. This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Porpoise for breakfast and late night sex visits: Henry VIII's life in a day
Ever wondered what Tudor England’s most famous monarch ate for breakfast? (Or whether breakfast was even a thing?) Tracy Borman examines Henry VIII’s daily routine – and sexual proclivities – during the year that he married Anne Boleyn
The year 1533 was a big one for Henry VIII. It began with his secret marriage to Anne Boleyn, followed a few months later by the annulment of his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The new queen was crowned in June, then in September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, rather than the hoped-for male heir. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Reformation parliament passed radical religious legislation that would separate the country from Rome and make Henry supreme head of the new Church of England. Amidst these seismic events, however, Henry’s daily life continued much as it had done during the previous 24 years of his reign. The Tudor court ran according to a strict routine, and nothing – not even the pope in Rome – could disrupt it. In the early years of his reign, when Henry was at the peak of his youthful vigour, he would rise at the crack of dawn and go hunting for several hours – sometimes until dusk. The courtier and diplomat Richard Pace reported to Cardinal Wolsey that, during the summer, the “King rises daily, except on holy days, at 4 or 5 o’clock and hunts till 9 or 10 at night”. Henry would get up later in the colder months, typically at around eight o’clock. But those carefree days had diminished by 1533. The king was paying much closer attention to affairs of state and was no longer living “in continuous festival”, as his first wife had put it in the early days of their marriage. Nevertheless, Henry still spent a decent amount of each day indulging in physical pursuits. Now in his early forties, he was almost as full of energy as he had been in his youth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/13AAW7T4-d152d6f-e1764861462989.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch of a man holding a large bow and arrow, with arrows across his body too. A man stands behind him and another kneels down on the ground next to him" title="A Victorian image depicts a youthful Henry VIII enjoying a spot of archery at the Field of the Cloth of Gold – the extravagant summit he hosted with Francis I of France in 1520. While the king no longer enjoyed a life of “continuous festival”, he was still physically active in his early forties (Image by Alamy)" /> An “improbably large codpiece” To get Henry ready for whatever the day held, his privy chamber staff had to rise even earlier than he did. Having cleaned the king’s chambers, the grooms would wake the esquires of the body, who slept in the ‘pallet chamber’ next door to the royal bedchamber. The esquires would enter their royal master’s bedchamber to “array him and dress him in his [under]clothes”, which were strewn with fresh herbs to keep them sweet-smelling. Having been “loosely dressed” by his esquires, Henry would step into the privy chamber so that his six gentlemen could complete the ceremony of robing with whichever garments he had chosen for that day. Henry loved to show off his physique – as well as his riches – in the quality and quantity of the cloth from which his garments were fashioned. His broad shoulders were emphasised by padded and embroidered sleeves, the curve of his calf muscles was shown off to best effect by white silk hose, and his improbably large codpiece symbolised his masculinity and power. Clearly, he pulled it off. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Guistinian, described Henry as “the best dressed sovereign in the world”. Hair, ear wax and urine When the king was dressed for the day, his barber would begin shaving his royal master and dressing his hair. He had to be a man of infinite trustworthiness: after all, he would be holding sharp blades to the king’s throat! During the early years of his reign, Henry was clean-shaven, as Catherine of Aragon preferred. But what she liked mattered less by 1533, when he sported a fine beard, which the barber would ensure was neatly trimmed. Read more | The swordplay’s the thing: Henry VIII's Masters of Defence and the thrilling world of 16th-century fencing Luxury pervaded the business of hairdressing and shaving, as it did every other element of Henry’s daily routine. Inventories of his possessions list silver basins for shaving and facecloths trimmed with black silk, as well as a comb of “gold garnished with… stones and pearl”, a toothpick case of gold, and an “ear pick of silver”. Among the many gifts that the king had showered Anne Boleyn with during their courtship was a gold ear wax scoop. Who says romance is dead? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2GettyImages-544278466-a6f7064-e1764861641975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing Henry VIII, bearded with a large hat on, wearing maroon robes and a large gold chain" title="A copy of Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous 1536–37 portrait of Henry VIII. The king’s neatly trimmed beard and “improbably large codpiece” are very much present in this depiction (Image by Getty Images)" /> Next up, Henry would be examined by one of his team of physicians. They came armed with bladder-shaped flasks for inspecting the king’s urine and would also examine his stools. In submitting himself to the frequent attentions of his medics, the king was following royal protocol – after all, a sovereign’s health was of the utmost importance to the state. But Henry had always been prone to hypochondria and would be thrown into a panic at any sign of illness at court. The French ambassador described him as “the most timid person in such matters you could meet”. Mrs Cornwallis’s sweet treats Having been washed, groomed, dressed and examined, the king was at last ready to go out into the court. The first meal of the day was generally served at around 10.30 or 11 o’clock, although sometimes it was as late as midday (breakfast was not a thing until the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth). This was known as ‘dinner’ and was substantial enough to maintain the king and his courtiers until late afternoon. It comprised an array of different meats, such as boar, pork, lamb and venison, as well as game birds like pheasant and rabbit, swan and more unusual fare like conger eel and porpoise. The king had a sweet tooth, too, and regularly gorged on custards, fritters, tarts, jelly, cream of almonds and quince marmalade. His favourite confectioner was a woman named Mrs Cornwallis, whom he rewarded with a fine house close to the Tower of London. In contrast to the popular image of Henry seated at the top table of a great feast, devouring endless chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulder, he was a very fastidious eater and preferred to take his meals in private. He didn’t like to linger over his meals, either, because he was impatient to get on with his day. WATCH | Kate Williams discusses the origins of Henry VIII's vast leisure complex, Hampton Court Palace View Green Video on the source website Hunting, archery, bowling and tennis took up several hours. Sir William Kingston, who was a regular at Henry’s court (and was later Anne Boleyn’s gaoler at the Tower), observed that even after more than 20 years on the throne: “The king hawks every day with goshawks and others… both before noon and after.” Having practised these sporting pursuits from childhood, Henry was highly skilled, particularly at tennis. The Venetian ambassador enthused: “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play.” “Tedious and painful” The distinction between work and play was blurred during Henry’s reign. He would discuss politics with ambassadors and ministers while enjoying a game of bowls or practising archery, and would hold more private audiences with his advisors while being dressed or undressed, taking his meals or bathing. The privy council was the beating heart of Henry’s government and would meet almost every day at around noon. By 1533, Henry was attending those meetings much more frequently than during the carefree early years of his reign. They would discuss all the most pressing matters of the day – of which there was no shortage in the year that the king rid himself of one wife, took another and separated England from Roman Catholic Europe. Thomas Cromwell was the most influential member of the privy council and worked closely with Henry, often holding private meetings with the king. Read more | The lie of succession: did James I steal Elizabeth I's crown? Supper was served between three and four o’clock each afternoon and would typically comprise soups, pottage, roasted meats, tarts, custards, fruits, nuts and cheeses. If Henry was peckish in the evening, his cooks would prepare a snack known as a ‘rear night’ or ‘all night’, which was usually served between eight and nine o’clock. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/3GettyImages-2198973715-a81c1a0-e1764861900600.jpg" width="1500" height="972" alt="A lavish display of fruit, vegetables, nuts, poultry and meat depicted by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, c1560–65. Henry would have been treated to similarly sumptuous spreads, although he preferred to eat his meals in private (Image by Getty Images)" title="A lavish display of fruit, vegetables, nuts, poultry and meat depicted by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, c1560–65. Henry would have been treated to similarly sumptuous spreads, although he preferred to eat his meals in private (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry was renowned for his piety and spent a significant part of every day in worship. One ambassador reported: “He hears three masses daily when he hunts and sometimes five on other days.” This had been encouraged by his first wife, a devout Roman Catholic. By contrast, Anne Boleyn was a reformer and introduced Henry to radical religious texts that encouraged him to break from obedience to Rome. Although he admitted to finding writing “tedious and painful”, the king was a voracious reader, and his private library was filled with classical and theological texts from across the world. Long trips to the loo Every so often, the king would take a bath in his private apartments. But the leading physicians of the age cautioned against regular bathing in hot water because it opened the pores and allowed deadly diseases such as the plague, sweating sickness and smallpox to enter the body. Instead, cold water was used for washing the king’s hands and face first thing in the morning and before and after every meal. Even if Henry’s baths were infrequent, they were predictably luxurious. At the palaces of Richmond and Whitehall, Henry had steam baths installed, fragments of which are still preserved at Hampton Court. Henry had his own private close stool (a type of portable toilet) in each palace. His ‘stool chambers’ at Greenwich and Hampton Court were kitted out with pictures and bookshelves to keep the king amused during the long hours that he spent there. His close stools were covered in embroidered velvet, stuffed with swan’s-down and studded with gilt nails. To emphasise his magnificence, Henry staged lavish evening entertainments at court. His Master of the Revels devised plays, pageants and musical interludes to be performed in front of the king and his guests. Some of the more ambitious set-pieces involved mock battles and the famous ‘Château Vert’ pageant of 1522, when a certain young lady called Anne Boleyn made her first appearance at Henry’s court. As well as being an accomplished musician, Henry loved to show off on the dance floor. He “exercised himself daily in dancing” and “does wonders and leaps like a stag”, reported an astonished onlooker. Most evenings, the king and his courtiers would indulge in gambling. Huge sums would be won and lost at cards, dice and board games. Between the years 1529 and 1532, Henry squandered a staggering £3,243 (equivalent to £2.36 million today). But there was always a jester or ‘fool’ on hand to cheer the king after his losses. Henry’s favourite fool was Will Somer, who entered his service in 1525 and kept the king entertained for the next 20 years. It was said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than was this fool”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/5GettyImages-463967531-c9338ca-e1764862158221.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A scene of revelry and merriment published in the 1902 book Henry VIII by AF Pollard. According to Tracy Borman, Henry “loved to show off” on the dance floor (Image by Getty Images)" title="A scene of revelry and merriment published in the 1902 book Henry VIII by AF Pollard. According to Tracy Borman, Henry “loved to show off” on the dance floor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Henry’s bedroom antics The king rarely retired before midnight, “which is our accustomed hour at court to go to bed”. An elaborate ceremony of disrobing began as soon as he stepped into the bedchamber. His gentlemen and esquires of the body would carefully untie, unbuckle and remove every item of clothing and then put on his nightgown. Another attendant would bring a basin of water and a cloth so that he could wash his face and clean his teeth. The king’s body servants would then comb his hair and cover it with a ‘night-bonnet’ of scarlet or black embroidered velvet before helping him into bed and lighting a candle next to it. Their work complete, all but one of the privy chamber attendants bowed low and backed out of the room, leaving their royal master to his rest. Every detail of this protracted routine would be observed each night without fail. It only differed when Henry chose to visit his wife. On such occasions, he would summon his grooms of the chamber, who would dress him in his nightrobe and escort him with lighted torches to the door of the queen’s bedchamber. The king would rarely spend the night there, though, and would return to his own bedchamber once his, erm, ‘business’ there had been concluded. But given that Anne Boleyn was almost certainly pregnant at the time she married Henry in January 1533, these conjugal visits would have been rare or non-existent until she gave birth in September. The wisdom of the day dictated that sex during pregnancy was harmful to the unborn child, so instead Henry found comfort with other women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/6GettyImages-533506999-960aef2-e1764862263626.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large man standing in gold regal clothing and a large cloak, being served a goblet on a tray by a man kneeling on the floor. Other people stand around and watch" title="An 1835 painting imagines Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s first meeting. Despite his early obsession with Anne, the king’s affection for his second wife waned only a few months into their marriage (Image by Getty Images)" /> This caused the first serious rift between the newlyweds in August 1533, when Anne was about to enter her ‘confinement’ – the month-long period when a royal wife would live in complete seclusion to await the birth of her child. “The king’s affection for her [Anne] is less than it was”, reported the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. “He now shows himself in love with another lady, and many nobles are assisting him in the affair.” When she heard of this, Anne was “very jealous” and confronted her royal husband. To her dismay, rather than offering placatory assurances, he spat back that she must “shut her eyes and endure” as more “worthy” persons had done. Henry’s affection for his new wife took another nose-dive when she gave birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) on 7 September, rather than the hoped-for son. Read more | Inside the six wives' bedchamber: the stories of Tudor ladies-in-waiting Adultery, treason and execution As the year 1533 drew to a close, the court moved to Greenwich for the Christmas celebrations. “The King’s Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”, one guest observed. There was a good reason for Henry to be cheerful: Anne Boleyn was pregnant once more. Her New Year gift to the king was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds and pearls. Designed by Hans Holbein, it featured three naked women standing at the foot of a fountain, water issuing forth from their nipples – a clear allusion to her impending motherhood. WATCH | HistoryExtra's Kev Lochun explores the story of the wife of Henry VIII who had a lucky escape View Green Video on the source website Sadly, the queen lost the child a few months later and miscarried twice more in the two years that followed. The king, who in the early days of their courtship had been so enraptured that he had overturned his entire kingdom in order to marry Anne, now “shrank from her”. In May 1536, Anne was condemned on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and treason and executed. Earlier that year, Henry had suffered a serious accident whilst jousting, which brought the physical activities that had filled so many of his days at court to an abrupt end. Plagued by pain and humiliated by his expanding girth, this most famous of kings became the bloated tyrant of legend.
Julius Caesar's hellraising youth: did he really defy tyrants and crucify pirates?
Ancient accounts of Julius Caesar’s early life depict an all-action hero who outwitted tyrants and terrorised bandits. But can they be trusted? David S Potter investigates
The most celebrated of all ancient Romans almost met a watery end before he’d made his big splash in the vast ocean of history. In 75 BC, Julius Caesar – then in his mid-20s and yet to establish himself as the most powerful man in Rome – sailed to Rhodes to study with a famous Greek rhetorician. But on his journey east, he was kidnapped by Cilician pirates from southern Anatolia. There was nothing so unusual about this stroke of misfortune – the waters of the eastern Mediterranean were plagued by bandits all too willing to prey on Roman travellers. But there was certainly something unusual about what happened next. Seemingly oblivious to the danger in which he now found himself, Caesar decisively took control of the situation. According to his biographer, Plutarch, “when the pirates demanded 20 talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them 50”. While his agents set out to raise the ransom money, Caesar made the pirates listen to his speeches and poetry, assuring them that he would come after them as soon as he was freed. He was as good as his word. Having paid the ransom, Caesar raised a fleet from the cities of the Roman province of Asia (western Anatolia) and captured the pirates. Then, when he discovered that the corrupt governor of Asia was looking to make a profit from the captives, he “took the robbers out of prison and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking”. It was a brutal act of revenge – softened only slightly by the fact that he slit the pirates’ throats to spare them the agony that would have been their fate on the crosses. Origin stories Caesar’s pirate-slaying escapades represent a truly extraordinary tale. But what are we to make of it? We know a great deal about Julius Caesar in the ‘colossus’ phase of his career – that period stretching from his mid-thirties to his assassination in his mid-fifties when he was an established political and military powerhouse. But for the earlier part of his life – before his every act was performed in the full glare of the ancient world’s attention – it’s a different story. Caesar’s youth and young manhood is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. The tales of his formative years are subject to exaggeration, even outright invention. Yet that doesn’t make examining that early life any less worthwhile. Doing so gives us rich insights into not only the rise of one of the ancient world’s towering figures but also of the political motivations of those who wrote that history in the chaos that followed his death. Much of what we know about Caesar’s early life has come to us through his two biographers, Suetonius and the aforementioned Plutarch, both writing towards the beginning of the second century AD, around 150 years after his death. Their accounts of those early years are quite similar, which suggests that they drew on a common source. Based on quotations in Suetonius’s writings, that source can be identified as Gaius Oppius, one of Caesar’s most powerful lieutenants. When it came to setting the record straight, Oppius was more interested in a good story than the truth. The same was true of his colleague Aulus Hirtius, who was at work in the same months editing and updating notes that Caesar himself had left behind. Both men were working under the overall guidance of Cornelius Balbus, who had been Caesar’s chief of staff. Read more | Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise Oppius got to work soon after Caesar’s murder on the Ides of March 44 BC. He needed to set the record straight at a time when Caesar’s legacy was being challenged by two very different forces. First, and most predictably, there were the assassins, who presented the slain leader as a tyrant whose character was shaped by uncontrolled arrogance and ambition. The second was aspiring ruler Mark Antony – leading general and one of Caesar’s most powerful supporters – who was also shaping the dead dictator’s legacy to suppress the interests of his chosen heir, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. So what do Oppius’s writings, communicated to us via Suetonius and Plutarch, tell us about Caesar’s earlier years? And do they contain any clues about how this product of a moderately successful patrician family rose to such dizzying heights of power? Classical education Caesar certainly seems to have benefited from a good eduction. His mother, Aurelia – whom Plutarch describes as “a woman of discretion” – saw to that. She found him an excellent tutor for his early teens, Marcus Antonius Gnipho, who went on to run his own well-regarded school. Gnipho had strong views on the Latin language, arguing that a word should only have a single meaning. This made quite an impression on his pupil: Caesar later wrote a book about this very subject, endorsing his tutor’s opinions. Another influence was an uncle, Caesar Strabo Vopiscus, who was famous for his wry sense of humour, which perhaps inspired the wit in Caesar’s writings. One person missing from any story of Caesar’s youth is his father, Gaius Julius Caesar. The biographies emphasise Caesar junior’s devotion to his mother, Aurelia, and make a great deal of his link to another uncle, Gaius Marius, who was renowned as the saviour of Rome from a barbarian invasion around the time of Caesar’s birth. His father, however, is nowhere to be seen. Was Caesar senior an absent dad? Or did he just not care? The marriages arranged for his offspring – to people who, while socially acceptable, lacked the drive to support the young Caesar – suggests the latter. The young Caesar’s first marriage, in his early teens, was to a girl named Cossutia, whose family hailed from well outside the political elite. Young Caesar’s status changed after his uncle Marius had himself installed as consul of Rome – the highest elected public official in the Republic – alongside Cornelius Cinna, following a civil war in 87 BC. To bolster this alliance, Marius had Caesar’s marriage to Cossutia dissolved so that the teenager could marry Cinna’s daughter, Cornelia. Caesar, we’re told, loved Cornelia deeply. If his father had any influence on the new match, the sources don’t mention it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/J0A9PJwebready-7d9568a-e1764601866245.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large crowd surrounding soldiers, with people bowing down and others reaching out to the crowd" title="This 1789 painting, Marius Returning to Rome, imagines the homecoming of Caesar’s uncle, who rose to become consul – then became embroiled in a bitter civil war with a rival, Sulla (Image by Alamy)" /> Thanks to his family connections, the young Caesar was increasingly pulled into the orbit of political power. For his later biographers, though, that wasn’t enough: what was needed at this stage in his life were adventures providing context for the great events that came later. If these episodes included triumph over loss and oppression, all the better. And in Caesar’s interactions with the Roman general and dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, that’s exactly what they got. Sulla’s dramatic arrival on the scene – seizing Rome, establishing a dictatorship and ruthlessly hunting down his enemies – shaped the politics of a generation. It also shaped the politics of Caesar himself. Sulla had become a major figure on the political stage when he was elected to one of Rome’s two consulships, in 88 BC. He was then awarded a campaign against Mithridates, ruler of the kingdom of Pontus, who had invaded Rome’s provinces in western Anatolia and encouraged the slaughter of Roman citizens. But then the command against Mithridates was taken from Sulla and awarded to Caesar’s uncle Marius. That’s when things turned ugly. Outraged, Sulla marched on Rome, stormed the city and declared that he had restored the rightful constitution. Marius was forced into hiding, but then returned with Cinna a year later, in 87 BC, winning the civil war mentioned earlier. Sulla then turned the tables on his enemies once again, launching a huge invasion of Italy in 83 BC. His military victory was complete by the end of the following year, at which point he posted up the names of his enemies – his notorious ‘proscription lists’ – around Rome. Read more | Caesar's funeral drama: anger and revenge after death Where did this leave Caesar? We can’t know for sure. Yet, as the nephew of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, he may well have been at the top of those lists. Sulla certainly seems to have made life pretty uncomfortable for him. The sources claim that the dictator deprived Caesar of the post of flamen dialis (high priest of Jupiter) to which he had been – or was about to be – appointed. They also tell us of Sulla’s demand that Caesar divorce Cornelia – and that, when the young man refused, he was forced to flee. Marked man For Caesar’s biographers, there was no lack of drama in this period of their subject’s life. He was, they tell us, pursued into hiding by one of Sulla’s assassins, who soon caught up with the fugitive – and spared him only after he agreed to pay a large bribe. When Caesar did eventually appear before Sulla, accompanied by his mother’s brothers and the Vestal Virgins, Sulla reluctantly granted him a pardon. “Have your way and take him,” he reportedly declared, “only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.” At this point we must proceed with caution. Did Sulla really utter these portentous words? To many historians, they bear all the hallmarks of a dramatic device, injected into the story to add an extra layer of jeopardy. As for the claim that Sulla denied Caesar the priesthood, that appears to be even more unlikely – because the latter never would have held the position. Cornelius Tacitus, Rome’s greatest historian, states that the post of flamen dialis remained unoccupied for 75 years after the death of a priest called Merula in 87 BC. What’s more, a requirement for the post was that both of the priest’s parents be patricians – members of Rome’s archaic aristocracy. Aurelia was from a wealthy family, but she was no patrician. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-150338287webready-c05f822-e1764602100354.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large stone relief shows a line of people doing different activities, including holding a child and riding on a horse-drawn carriage" title="depict events in a child’s life. Caesar’s youth was shaped by his mother, while his father seems to have been largely absent – or disinterested – during the boy’s early years (Image by Getty Images)" /> Some historians have also speculated that Sulla’s antipathy towards Caesar has been overstated. Light is shed on this point by Caesar’s first post, an appointment to the Roman province of Asia, where he served under one of Sulla’s most trusted lieutenants. Would this man really have taken on a youth whom his boss hated? It seems unlikely. Caesar’s service in Asia was notable for two events. One was the award he won for valour, having saved the life of a fellow soldier in combat. The other was his dispatch to the kingdom of Bithynia in the north-west corner of Anatolia, where he convinced the ruler, Nicomedes IV, to lend Rome naval reinforcements. A story that has swirled for 2,000 years – that Caesar had a sexual relationship with Nicomedes (Suetonius writes that “he dawdled so long at the court of Nicomedes that he was suspected of improper relations with the king”) – appears to be baseless. What does seem certain is that Caesar’s experience of persecution by Sulla – deprived of office and property, pursued by homicidal thugs – moulded his later career. After his rise to power in the 60s BC, Caesar repeatedly drew contrasts between the mercy he showed his defeated foes and Sulla’s mass murder of political rivals. And though he came from a noble family – descended, so the story goes, from Rome’s founder, Aeneas – he took the ‘popular’ path to the political summit in a bid to undo Sulla’s conservative constitution, which was designed to keep wealth in the hands of Sulla’s friends and prevent ambitious people from challenging the status quo. Sulla died in 78 BC, and Caesar returned to Rome soon afterwards. A year later he embarked on a career in law, prosecuting two of Sulla’s most prominent lieutenants for corruption in provincial offices. That wasn’t an act of anti-regime revenge: young men routinely drew attention to themselves by serving as prosecutors. Caesar’s speech in one of these cases, prosecuting a man named Antonius, was so effective that the officials in charge of maintaining the citizen roll quoted it when they banished the convicted man. Caesar’s eloquence was soon attracting more attention among the ranks of Rome’s elite. In the words of Plutarch: “It is said that Caesar had the greatest natural talent for political oratory, and cultivated his talent most ambitiously.” Even Cicero, who opposed Caesar, later stated that the latter could have become the greatest orator of his generation. But that wasn’t good enough for Oppius. He needed to burnish Caesar’s story with one more escapade showcasing his subject’s courage, resilience and resourcefulness. The tale of his capture by pirates did just that. Read more | The shockingly simple question historian Tom Holland would ask Julius Caesar Unlikely anecdotes So, to return to an earlier question, what are we to make of this tale? Caesar may well have been captured by pirates, but details in the story ring alarm bells. A ransom of 50 talents appears extremely high in a region that was largely bankrupt. And at the time, Caesar held no public office and, therefore, no authority to kill anyone, even a pirate. Perhaps, then, we should reassess this episode by considering what Oppius was trying to say about his former boss. The story was, perhaps, an attempt to contrast the ‘mercy’ of Caesar with the brutality of Crassus, who crucified thousands of Spartacus’s followers a few years later – and didn’t cut their throats to spare them protracted suffering. It also establishes Caesar as a foe of piracy years before Pompey – his one-time ally, later bitter enemy – took on a command to purge pirates from the seas. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-122316356webready-1ab06c2-e1764602006327.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large mosaic depicting two ships with groups of men on them, fighting each other" title="A Roman mosaic depicts the god Bacchus fighting pirates. Julius Caesar’s encounter with sea-going bandits may have been embellished to emphasise his courage and resilience, writes David S Potter (Image by Getty Images)" /> No matter how extravagantly the stories of Caesar’s dealings with Sulla and his capture by pirates were embellished, it’s not hard to join the dots between the young Caesar and the icon. He was a brilliant student of literature, shaped by excellent role models. His relationship with Aurelia, a strong character in her own right, may have influenced his own attraction to smart, powerful women, including his long-term mistress Servilia and later, Cleopatra. And he was courageous. The man who stood in the front line during crises in Gaul and the civil war against Pompey was the same person who had saved a fellow soldier’s life in Asia. Caesar the politician, however, was more the product of the dysfunctional Rome of his adulthood than of any event in his youth. When all’s said and done, it was his meticulous attention to detail and supreme ability to think on his feet that powered his incredible rise. And it seems that these were talents with which he was born, rather than ones honed through the adventures of youth. David S Potter is a professor of Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar (OUP, 2025) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Married three times by the age of 15: Margaret Beaufort, the woman who birthed the Tudor Dynasty
The mother of Henry VII is often characterised as a domineering woman who plotted her son’s rise to the throne. But how true is that depiction? Lauren Johnson explores the life of the founding matriarch of the Tudor dynasty
In March 1457, a short, slight widow left Pembroke Castle to embark on a 100-mile journey across territories stalked by civil war and pestilence. Her husband had died only four months earlier, carried off by plague contracted during imprisonment at another Welsh castle during the spurts of Yorkist resistance that marked the early Wars of the Roses. It was just weeks since she had given birth – a traumatic labour, endured without her family or support network. But she set out now to Newport with a firm sense of purpose. She would protect herself in one of the only ways a woman could at that time: by finding another husband. This widow and mother was Margaret Beaufort. She was 13 years old. The newborn she left at Pembroke would, in 1485, become King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Reading history backwards, it has become fashionable to portray Margaret as an obsessive, Machiavellian mother so consumed by the idea of her son’s divine right to the throne that she would commit child murder to bring it about. She, it is insinuated, was the true assassin of the princes in the Tower who threatened the claim of her “good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son”. But this interpretation is entirely fictional, and mired in misogynist oversimplification. Margaret did not aspire to a crown, either for her son or herself, until the unprecedented events of the Wars of the Roses made it essential for their survival. Child bride The notion that Margaret’s child might inherit the throne would have been laughable in 1457. The king then was Henry VI (a Lancastrian), who had a healthy son and myriad cousins sharing his royal blood. In contrast, the Beauforts were products of an illicit liaison generations back between a Lancastrian prince and his children’s governess. And, though in later life Margaret and her son were close both personally and politically, for much of Henry’s youth her maternal style can best be described as ‘hands off’ – arguably, emotionally neglectful. Little wonder, given the circumstances of Henry’s birth. Today we would consider Margaret a victim of child abuse. Her marriage to Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took place when she was about 12 – the age of consent for medieval girls (for boys it was 14.) This was her second marriage, her first having been dissolved in 1453, during a period of political turmoil. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2D4WH0N-2webready-b450274-e1764244782566.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting of a woman in a black dress and grey hood, holding a small maroon Bible in her hands" title="A painting of Margaret Beaufort. Despite being separated from her son, Henry Tudor, for many years, she battled to secure his inheritance as Earl of Richmond – and, ultimately, king of England (Image by Alamy)" /> Even in the 15th century, when marriages were arranged for cradle-bound babies, it was highly unusual for unions to be consummated before a bride was 16, and 20 was the average age of first pregnancy for most noblewomen. For good reason: medieval women’s bodies were still developing until then, and early childbirth was far likelier to end in stillbirth, maternal death or physically damaging complications. In later life, Margaret’s confessor, John Fisher, alluded to how underdeveloped Margaret had been when she gave birth, writing: “She is… a woman not of a great stature, but at that time it is said she was much smaller still, to such a degree that it almost seemed a miracle at her age that so little a body could bring forth a child at all.” Margaret was forced into motherhood so that her husband could claim her considerable inheritance. Her father had died before her first birthday, leaving her an heiress worth, in modern terms, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year – and with a distant royal claim that had seen her welcomed to court as the king’s “right well-beloved cousin”. Ironically, Edmund Tudor died before his child was born, leaving Margaret to face childbirth alone, half a kingdom away from her family, whose main seat was in Lincolnshire. Read more | The rise of Henry VII: how a life of cheating death prepared him for the throne as the first Tudor king Given the trauma of this experience, it is understandable that Margaret left her baby as soon as was physically possible and set out to regain control of her life. Barely three months after leaving Pembroke Castle, she was betrothed again; before her son’s first birthday, Margaret remarried and moved back to Lincolnshire. Henry’s wardship was granted to his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and later to the Yorkist William Herbert. Henry would remain in the care of these Welsh lords, 300 miles from his mother, until he was 14. Meanwhile, Margaret – still not yet 15 – was on her third marriage. She had reasserted the security torn from her by the marriage to Edmund Tudor. Her new husband, Sir Harry Stafford, was at least a decade older than her, but respectful and affectionate. Their household accounts show the couple working and travelling together, with thoughtful exchanges of anniversary and New Year gifts. In his will, Harry called Margaret his “best beloved wife”. Margaret was welcomed with open arms by the Stafford clan, especially Harry’s politically astute mother, Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, who took “my daughter Richmond” under her wing and protected her interests at court. Most happily of all for Margaret, the Stafford marriage brought her back to her own adored mother and half-siblings, close to the estates where she had grown up. It must almost have felt to Margaret as if the last few terrible years – encompassing marriage, widowhood and childbirth – had never happened. Distant mother It was not unusual for medieval children to grow up apart from their parents, but it is noteworthy – given that both Margaret and Henry grew up without fathers – that, whereas she lived with her mother until adolescence, she left her son shortly after birth. And though there is little surviving evidence for the first decade of Henry’s life, it is unclear if mother and son were in contact. Margaret did not return to Wales for almost a decade. Perhaps she rationalised that she was acting in her son’s interests; he was a boy, in need of male role models. Given the violent turbulence of this period, though, it is significant that Margaret kept her distance. She had chosen her alliance with the Staffords because, with civil war looming, they represented a dominant, stabilising force. But even they could not keep the incompetent Henry VI on his throne. In March 1461, he was deposed in favour of his charismatic young kinsman, Edward of York. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/Cardiffcastle-Eingangshalle1bErkerfensterwebready-00a5c3f-e1764244858208.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Jasper Tudor, depicted in stained glass in Cardiff Castle, accompanied Henry into exile for more than a decade (Image by Wikipedia/Public domain)" title="Jasper Tudor, depicted in stained glass in Cardiff Castle, accompanied Henry into exile for more than a decade (Image by Wikipedia/Public domain)" /> Margaret and her relatives quickly came to terms with the new king, Edward IV, but her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, was a diehard Lancastrian whose rebellions incited Yorkist reprisals. Pembroke Castle was besieged, with Margaret’s son, Henry, inside. Fortunately, as titular Earl of Richmond, Henry was a valuable commodity. His life was spared and his wardship granted to a leading Welsh Yorkist, William Herbert. There is no sign that Margaret protested; perhaps she could not cope emotionally with the responsibility of mothering a child after enduring so much at such a young age. Mother and son would not meet again until Henry was 10. The causes of their parting and ultimate reunion probably stemmed from the same root: Margaret hoped that she and Harry Stafford would have children of their own. But Henry’s birth had scarred her physically and psychologically, and as years passed it became clear that he would be her only child. Only when confronted with this realisation did Margaret belatedly seek to re-establish a relationship with her son. In September 1467, she returned to Wales for the first time since her remarriage, spending a week with Henry at Raglan Castle. He had grown tall and serious, with her capacity for quick learning. Perhaps she saw in his appearance and character glimpses of herself or her half-siblings – and perhaps, less comfortably, of Edmund Tudor. The visit to Raglan marked the beginning of Margaret’s self-identity as Henry’s mother, but she was no closer to taking physical possession of her child. Two years later, after another outbreak of civil war, she attempted to regain legal control of her son. When William Herbert was executed after the battle of Edgecote in 1469, Margaret struggled to assemble lost legal documents; to reassert her guardianship of Henry, she convened assignations in the manor houses of aristocrats, and with lawyers in alehouses. Mother and son were reunited briefly in 1470, touring London and Surrey together, indulging their shared love of hunting. Presumably they discussed Margaret’s hope of regaining Henry’s birthright, which had been stripped from him and parcelled out to leading Yorkists – not the crown, which was still entirely outside her aspirations, but the earldom of Richmond. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL3309180webready-c464ebd-e1764245134726.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a large stone castle, with trees in front of it and a large path leading up to it" title="An early 19th-century coloured engraving of Raglan Castle, seat of William Herbert, who was granted wardship of young Henry Tudor after 1461. Following a long separation, Margaret visited her son here in 1467 (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Dangerous blood The same forces that reunited Margaret and Henry also drove them apart. The internecine chaos unleashed on England in 1469 was finally resolved in 1471, when Edward IV conclusively vanquished his rivals in battle. Henry VI and his teenage son were killed. So, too, were several of Margaret’s Beaufort cousins and, within a few years, even Edward’s Lancastrian former brother-in-law, the Duke of Exeter. Suddenly, the possession of Lancastrian blood, no matter how thin, was dangerous. According to the Tudor poet Bernard André, Margaret advised Henry to flee into exile with his uncle Jasper: “Unless my imagination or maternal instinct deceives me… [Henry’s] life will be safer on the ocean’s waves than in this tempest on land.” In September 1471, Henry and Jasper sought asylum in Brittany, where they remained until 1483. Meanwhile, Margaret was left in limbo. Alive to the dangers inherent in Henry’s distant royal claim and traditional family loyalties, she warned him not to return to England until she had assurances for his safety. Mother and son could communicate only through intermediaries, trusted servants who braved the Channel crossing. Margaret demonstrated a profound sense of responsibility to Henry. The rightful Earl of Richmond was heir to a proud inheritance and, as any medieval aristocrat would, she fervently believed that her son should claim it. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors But it wasn’t until 1482, when Henry was 25, that making such a claim seemed possible. The death of her mother, and the ensuing business of settling her estate, enabled Margaret to cut a deal with Edward IV to bring Henry home safely. On 3 June 1482, Edward and Margaret publicly agreed that, if Henry returned “in the grace and favour of the king’s highness”, he could claim his grandmother’s substantial West Country estates. An undated pardon now in the archives of Westminster Abbey suggests that this may have been a precursor to the restoration of Henry’s earldom. More privately – though loud enough that several leading courtiers later reported it – Margaret and Edward discussed how they were “related in the fourth… degrees of kindred”. This was almost certainly the first step in arranging a marriage between Henry and one of Edward’s daughters which, because of their relation, would demand a papal dispensation. Margaret, always less risk-averse than the men in her life, was willing to gamble her son’s life for this bright future. Unfortunately, 11 years of political exile had left Henry paranoid, and even these substantial guarantees did not convince him that he would be safe. He refused to return. Then political upheaval simultaneously dashed Margaret’s careful plans and enabled her to contemplate a future for her son that would have previously been inconceivable. Maternal kingmaker Margaret’s hopes of regaining Henry’s Richmond inheritance were thwarted when, in April 1483, Edward IV died unexpectedly. With two adolescent sons, Edward’s dynasty should have been assured. Instead, his brother Richard detained those young princes and claimed the throne himself. A contemporary eyewitness reported that the princes “were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, until at length they ceased to appear altogether”. It was rumoured that Richard had murdered them. For Margaret, like much of the English nobility, Richard’s accession was an unanticipated complication. Her hoped-for marriage between Henry and a Yorkist princess was dead in the water, and the princesses had fled into sanctuary. Moreover, after Harry Stafford’s death in 1471, Margaret had remarried the northern lord Thomas Stanley, whose family were stalwarts of the regimes of Edward IV and his son. Over the years, the Stanleys had had several ugly confrontations with Richard. Indeed, Stanley was briefly arrested during Richard’s coup. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/hip2705239webready-894c19a-e1764245293950.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a pan with a long, narrow build and a hat on his head" title="Northern magnate Thomas Stanley, who married Margaret Beaufort in 1472, shown in an engraving of a Holbein portrait. Having opposed Richard III, he and his family played a key role in bringing Henry to the throne (Image by Topfoto)" /> A pragmatist above all else, Stanley soon came to terms with Richard and so, apparently, did Margaret. But the circumstances of Richard’s accession had entirely changed the political landscape. Disaffected opponents plotted rebellion, and Margaret – whose territories stretched from Flintshire to Lincolnshire, Surrey to Devon – had myriad connections through whom she gained intelligence about these nascent conspiracies. The anti-Ricardians were a disparate band. There were servants of Edward IV who hated his queen’s Woodville relatives; the Woodvilles themselves, fearing reprisals; attendants of the lost princes, jealous of missed opportunities or genuinely concerned for their charges; even Lancastrian stalwarts who wanted rid of the Yorkists altogether. Read more | Inside the six wives' bedchamber: the stories of Tudor ladies-in-waiting Their very heterogeneity was a boon to Margaret. If the princes were dead – and by August it seemed they must be – then the rebellion needed a new figurehead. It needed to be an adult with royal blood and no loyalty to Richard – and, because they would have to fight for the crown, a male. Most of all, it needed to be someone impartial enough to unify these factions. In short: Henry Tudor. The exceptional circumstances of summer 1483 made it possible for the first time for Margaret to hope not merely for her son’s return but for his accession as king. A lifetime of political and economic activity had readied her for this moment. Even the collapse of their first rebellion in autumn 1483, which left Margaret under house arrest and deprived of her fortune, could not cow her. She was linked by blood, marriage and loyalty not only to most of the nobility of the realm but also to the working men and women who served them. Her vast network of connections can be read in her memberships of religious guilds, gifts and letters exchanged with neighbours, favours recorded in her household accounts, payments to merchants and craftsmen who provided for her husbands and family, and in many more ways – scarcely tangible then and almost entirely lost now. The loyalty of these associates to Margaret was longer-standing, and more immediately beneficial, than their allegiance to Richard III. When Margaret mobilised her network, she was able to gather considerable sums of money – and money meant weapons and manpower for Henry, which he used to invade and then defeat Richard in battle at Bosworth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/gr0036018Hwebready-068df39-e1764245479790.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a battlefield, with one man on a black horse, being handed a crown by a man in armour on the left" title="Henry receives Richard III’s crown from his stepfather following the 1485 battle of Bosworth, in a 19th-century engraving. Funds for Henry’s military campaign were raised by Margaret (Image by Topfoto)" /> Thus the mother who had been absent from her son’s life for so long was essential to the success of the campaign that won him the throne. Margaret enabled Henry to be crowned Henry VII in 1485 – and so to re-enter her life and build a close, lasting relationship. In an undated letter as king, son told mother: “I am as much bound [to you] as any creature living, for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it hath pleased you at all times to bear towards me.” Perhaps Margaret had not shown that affection “at all times” – mother and son both had a habit of rewriting their pasts to better suit their present circumstances. But, after a long, difficult journey, they ultimately built a relationship that proved unbreakable. Mother-in-law from hell? After claiming the crown at Bosworth, Henry wed Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, helping to heal dynastic rifts. The myth goes that Margaret was the ideal mother but a nightmare mother-in-law, so power-crazed that she even directed how her daughter-in-law must give birth. This idea is founded on a book of ordinances (rules for the royal household) attributed to Margaret by an 18th-century antiquarian, but there is no evidence that she wrote them. Other contemporary writings have also been misunderstood. In 1498, three Spanish ambassadors reported that “the Queen [Elizabeth] is a very noble woman, and much beloved [but] she is kept in subjection by the mother of the King.” However, it is not certain that those writers actually met either woman. Stopping only briefly in London, the ambassadors probably padded their reports with rumours, and their claims were tainted by jealousy. They sought to undermine their rival Rodrigo De Puebla, then pre-eminent in English affairs, who was close to Elizabeth. By insinuating that the queen was powerless, De Puebla’s enemies made his carefully fostered relationship appear self-serving and futile. De Puebla himself, who observed the two royal women first-hand, never represented their dynamic as problematic, and nor did other European agents in England. There is a powerful strand of misogyny to such claims – an interpretation of female relationships that persists today: that powerful women cannot coexist. But the (albeit sparse) evidence testifies to mutual respect and affection between Margaret and Elizabeth. Official documents and private letters refer, virtually in one breath, to “the queen and king’s mother”. They jointly founded a chantry chapel, and intervened to protect the royal children. After Elizabeth endured a difficult childbirth in 1496, Margaret wrote that the queen’s health was not “so good as I would [wish], but I trust heartily it shall [be soon] with God’s grace”. We do Elizabeth an injustice when we interpret her conservative queenship as a passive infliction rather than a pragmatic choice. She had lost many relatives in the Wars of the Roses, and saw the danger of promoting political agendas. Such shared trauma was a further connection between her and Margaret – another chain in a strong bond between two royal women who backed and shaped Henry’s reign. Lauren Johnson is a historian specialising in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Her new book is Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (Apollo, 2025) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or sixth century AD. 3. Goat eyelids Texts from ancient China describe penis rings made from a rather unusual material: goat eyelids, often with the eyelashes left intact. These were reportedly used between the third and fifth centuries AD to enhance sexual pleasure and performance by trapping blood within the penis. The elasticity of the goat eyelid was presumably the major selling point, but leaving the eyelashes on suggested they played a part too, potentially providing extra stimulation for both parties. By the 1600s, some Chinese men had upgraded their penis ring technology. These more modern devices were made from materials like jade and ivory, and were ornately carved, often depicting dragons. The dragons’ tongues usually extended to form a protruding nub, which could be placed against the woman’s clitoris to enhance her pleasure during intercourse – a forerunner to today’s clitoral stimulators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1052933946-4c20b47-e1764240604387.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" title="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. Apadravya (‘apparatus’) Even if you’re not remotely interested in the history of sex and sexuality, you’ll have likely heard of Vātsyāyana’s third-century AD tome, the Kama Sutra. As well as guidance about living a healthy sex life, the Sanskrit text also extols the virtues of using apadravya (‘apparatus’) to enhance one’s pleasure, describing the use of dildos, penis extenders and other sex aids made of wood, rubber, gold, silver, copper and ivory. Some of the devices are particularly unusual: one is shaped like a flower bud, while another resembles an elephant’s trunk. If that wasn’t enough, the Kama Sutra also contains instructions for creating artificial vaginas made of “hollowed-out pumpkins” and bamboo moistened with oil or ointment. Sounds a bit more effective than bread… 5. The Science Museum’s luxury ivory dildo One of the best-documented early modern sex toys is currently in the care of London’s Science Museum. Labelled “ivory dildo with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation”, the 18th-century device takes the form of an erect penis and includes a small pump and reservoir, seemingly intended to cause fluid to shoot out at an opportune moment. Curiously, the catalogue entry also states that the item was “found in the stuffed seat of a Louis XV armchair, which was in a convent on the banks of the Seine, near Paris”, but how it got there is a mystery sadly lost to the mists of time. 6. George Taylor’s steam-powered ‘Manipulator’ he ivory dildo might have been very novel in many ways, but one crucial thing that it didn’t do was vibrate. So where did the concept of the vibrator come from? The answer, it appears, lies in a steam-powered device from 1869 known as the ‘Manipulator’. Invented by American physician George Taylor, the Manipulator was not a theme park ride as its name suggests, but a large, padded table connected to vibrating ball, which would be positioned against the patient’s pelvic area as they lay on the device. The ball – which was powered by a coal-fired steam engine – provided continuous mechanical stimulation and was described as a “medical vibrating and kneading machine”. The Manipulator was an adaptation of a similar machine created by Swedish physical therapist Gustaf Zander; Taylor merely improved on Zander’s ideas by attaching his ‘Medical Rubbing Apparatus’ to what was, in effect, a stationary steam engine. However, Taylor warned physicians who bought the device that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the Manipulator should be supervised to prevent “overindulgence”. 7. ‘Rubber women’ Rubber, in its natural form, has been known and used for thousands of years, but modern rubber as we know it today was developed much later. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation, a process that made rubber strong, elastic and weather-resistant, paving the way for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications – some of which were later exploited for erotic purposes. Selected accounts suggest that, by the 1850s, manufacturers were producing rubber items that could be interpreted as early forms of sex dolls. These items have been described as ‘rubber women’ or femmes en caoutchouc in French, though they were not explicitly advertised as sex toys. The first mention of manufactured sex dolls in academic literature appears in Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), where he claims they were marketed primarily to sailors. However, modern scholarship suggests that Bloch relied heavily on fictional sources and exaggerated advertising, calling into question the book’s accuracy. Given the modern popularity of sex dolls, however, it seems plausible that variations on the theme may have existed in the early 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7.Femme-en-Caoutchouc-c16ea73-e1764241535367.png" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows a man holding a rubber woman in his arms" title="A 19th-century French song, La Femme en Caoutchouc (‘The Rubber Woman’), tells the story of a sailor’s ‘relationship’ with a sex doll. The affair does not end well, as indicated by the illustrations adorning this edition of the sheet music" /> Read more | Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans 8. Granville’s ‘Percuteur’ Large, steam-powered vibrators like George Taylor’s ‘Manipulator’ were far too bulky and costly for most physicians, so British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville decided to invent a smaller, spring-driven electromechanical vibrator known as the ‘Percuteur’. After patenting his device in the early 1880s, Granville was adamant that it should only be intended for therapeutic use on men, stating: “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion… simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked… by the vagaries of the hysterical state.” It’s not clear whether fellow doctors heeded Granville’s advice, but it’s important to note that vibrators at the time were viewed primarily as medical instruments rather than sexual devices. Indeed, Dr Carol Queen – curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco – has cautioned against calling these early vibrators ‘sex toys’, saying: “The vibrators were not marketed and sold for this purpose. They were healthcare devices that just happened to cause orgasm if you knew where to apply the vibration… there is no evidence that people who owned or used them knew this… though there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.” 9. Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators Modern butt plugs did not originate as sex toys, but as treatments for a range of ‘rectal ailments’, including constipation and ‘nervousness’. They were first patented in 1892 and marketed as ‘Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators’ from 1893 to 1940. They were sold in sets of four, in increasing sizes, and advertisements and surviving sets show that each dilator had an olive or bullet-shaped tip and a flanged base to prevent full insertion – a shape strikingly similar to today’s butt plugs. The devices were made of rubber, and the instructions suggested they be used with either Dr Young’s Piloment lubricant or Vaseline. Like early vibrators, they were marketed as ‘healthcare devices’, but back then – as now – the human anus contained a great deal of nerve endings, meaning inserting the dilators into the rectum will have caused many ‘patients’ to experience sexual pleasure. To paraphrase Dr Carol Queen, there’s no evidence to suggest that people did use these dilators during sex – but, equally, there’s nothing to say they didn’t. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Credit-CreepyCuteTreasuresEtsyDr-Youngs-Rectal-Dilators-7f08bac-e1764241593117.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" title="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" /> 10. Louis B Hawley’s Patented Penis Stiffener In 1907, US inventor Louis B Hawley sprang into action to quite literally support men with erection problems. Hawley’s patented ‘surgical appliance’ took the form of an external splint to keep the penis erect, with a covering to help hold it in place. Unfortunately, there are no first-hand accounts of how comfortable the device would have been for both parties, though given later patent writers’ critiques about its design being bulky and awkward, it’s probably fair to speculate that the answer may well have been “not very”. However, this early prototype did pave the way for more modern penis ‘stiffeners’, most notably Dr F Brantley Scott’s inflatable device, which was first sold in the 1970s and made up of two inflatable silicone cylinders with a reservoir and pump. That, in turn, led to the advent of surgically implanted and inflatable prostheses, which are still helping people enjoy robust and vigorous sex lives today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10GettyImages-837400890-547dfa0-e1764241628703.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" title="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex 11. Hand-cranked ‘massagers’ The earlier question of “but did people really use these things to masturbate?” raises its head again as we look at hand-cranked vibrators like Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator, which was sold throughout the early 1900s and could deliver 6,000 vibrations per minute. At this time, masturbation was widely viewed as shameful, and ‘obscene’ content was illegal in the US under the 1873 Comstock Act. This meant that vibrators could not be openly advertised as sexual products. However, according to sex toy historian Hallie Lieberman, “it’s impossible to deny that sexual uses for vibrators weren’t known”. The makers of the Bebout Vibrator, for example, made their target market very clear in a 1908 advert, describing their device as “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing [and] invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs”. Interestingly, many of these hand-cranked devices came with dildo-like attachments – though these were ‘officially’ intended to treat uterine complaints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11-2RX45AW-0c62c65-e1764241663308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" title="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" /> 12. The Oster Stim-U-Lax This scalp massage device, marketed to barbers, promised to deliver “several thousand rotating-patting Swedish-type massage movements per minute” via the operator’s fingers. But it wasn’t only used on scalps. A frank first-hand account by US sex educator Betty Dodgson (1929–2020) describes using an Oster Stim-U-Lax with her lover in 1966, explaining: “One day he was getting a haircut when his barber ended with a scalp massage using a vibrating machine that was strapped onto the back of his hand. Grant got the bright idea that it would be great for sex. On our next date, Grant brought out his new toy for us to try. Although I wasn't all that crazy about getting off on a mechanical device, my motto is to always try everything at least once.” It was, according to Dodgson’s account, extremely effective, and led her to become a keen advocate for vibrators from that point onwards. Dodgson is even credited with helping to bring such sex toys into the mainstream, promoting devices such as the now-ubiquitous Hitachi Magic Wand, first marketed in 1968.
I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting
Earlier this year, Keith Lowe was granted access to the home of one of the Nazi regime’s most notorious war criminals. Here, he reveals what he discovered within the chateau’s crumbling walls – and the challenges of separating a building from its disturbing past
It’s the summer of 2025 and I find myself standing at the entrance of an old, abandoned mansion just outside Prague. It looks like a stereotypical haunted house. On either side of the wrought-iron gates is a Gothic statue of a wild boar, glowering towards the road as if to deter all visitors. Beyond lies an overgrown garden and an austere-looking building with crumbling walls and dark windows. Just looking at this place sends a shiver down my spine – not because of the Scooby Doo atmosphere, but because I know its history. It was once the home of a Jewish industrialist, who used to hold lavish parties here for the cream of Czech society. But at the beginning of the Second World War it was requisitioned by the Nazis, who made it the official residence of one of their most notorious war criminals: Reinhard Heydrich. It has taken months to gain access. I first came here in September 2024 with a small group of historians from the US National World War II Museum in New Orleans. We had been tasked with scouting out sites related to Heydrich, but the Czech tourist office told us that this particular place would be impossible to visit because it was private property. Undeterred, my colleagues did a little detective work and managed to locate the owner, and after months of negotiation he finally agreed to give us exclusive access. And so here we are again – only this time the chateau’s gates are open, and we are allowed to go in. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/HeydrichGettyImages-107425114-31d8c6f-e1764247394375.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in full military uniform. He has right hand on his hip" title="Reinhard Heydrich pictured in 1942. The top-ranking Nazi was one of the chief architects of the ‘Final Solution’ (Image by Getty Images)" /> Portrait of a killer The historical significance of this site cannot be overstated. Its owner, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the most important men in the Nazi hierarchy. He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared intelligence service of the Nazi party. Between 1934 and 1936 he was also head of the Gestapo. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was promoted to head up the Reich Security Main Office, the umbrella organisation that oversaw all police and security operations throughout Hitler’s empire. As such, he was one of the most feared men in the whole of Europe. Tall, blond and athletic, Heydrich was the very picture of the Nazi ideal. He was also utterly ruthless: Hitler himself described him as “the man with the iron heart”. In the first three years of the war, he organised mass killings calmly, efficiently and without compunction. For example, after the invasion of Poland in 1939 he planned the arrest and murder of more than 60,000 intellectuals and community leaders, for no other reason than that they might one day pose a threat to Nazi rule. Later, under the cover of Hitler’s ‘Night and Fog’ decree, he masterminded the ‘disappearance’ of thousands of suspected Resistance members in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Families were deliberately kept in the dark about the fate of their loved ones. The purpose was to spread uncertainty and terror amongst the general population. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery But it was Heydrich’s actions against the Jews that made him most notorious. In 1938 he helped to organise Kristallnacht. The following year he supervised the creation of the Einsatzgruppen, who followed in the wake of the German Army in eastern Europe, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews by firing squad as they went. It was Heydrich who organised the Wannsee Conference. WATCH | Laurence Rees gives an expert overview of the Holocaust View Green Video on the source website From atrocity to assassination Heydrich spent the last nine months of his life in Prague. By this time, he had been made the de facto ruler of Bohemia and Moravia, and was living a life of luxury at the expense of the Czech people. His offices were in Prague Castle and the nearby Czernin Palace, but his official residence was in the village of Panenské Břežany, just a few miles outside the city. In those days his chateau was far more glamorous than it is today: it had 50 rooms, including offices, servants’ quarters and at least a dozen bedrooms. The double staircase leading to the upper floor had red marble walls, and all the hallways were paved with elaborate mosaic tiles. At the top of the stairs was a sumptuous ballroom with views over the extensive grounds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11Ballroom-20250512144741-Ballroom-03-69e4d34-e1764243055312.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large room with several windows on the right hand side, with billowing white curtains. On the floor are two large blue carpets and there is a long wooden table with maroon chairs" title="The former ballroom at Panenské Břežany, photographed by the author. The chateau once boasted 50 rooms, including offices, servants’ quarters and at least a dozen bedrooms (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> As soon as he arrived in Bohemia, Heydrich began treating the Czechs in the same way that he had already treated the Poles and the French. One of the first things he did was to declare martial law, and within just a few months he had already executed more than 400 suspected dissidents. His sentiments were quite clear: in comments to his aides, he announced his intention to “Germanise the Czech vermin”. Heydrich worked closely with his secretary of state, a Sudeten German called Karl Hermann Frank, who lived in the same village as Heydrich. The two men were well suited to one another. Frank, like Heydrich, was a vicious antisemite and seemingly addicted to brutality. During the day, this pair would plan repressive police actions against the Czech population, but in the evening they both would return to Panenské Břežany, to one or other of their luxurious mansions, where they would socialise with other senior Nazis and SS officers. All of this came to a dramatic end on the morning of 27 May 1942. That day, Heydrich set out from his chateau on his daily commute into Prague around 10am, just as he always did. He rode in an open top car, driven by an SS driver named Johannes Klein. He had no escort – he was arrogant enough to believe that he did not need one – and he followed the same route that he always took on the way to Prague Castle. It was this complacency that led to his downfall. Over the previous months, British and Czech intelligence had been observing Heydrich’s movements and had formulated an assassination plan, codenamed Operation Anthropoid. Having worked out his daily routine, they knew exactly where and when to ambush him. This particular morning, as his car slowed down at a bend in the road on the outskirts of Prague, a pair of Czech Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents were waiting for him. One of them, a man named Josef Gabčik, tried to fire a Sten gun at him, but it jammed. His partner, Jan Kubiš, then threw a specially prepared grenade at Heydrich’s car. Read more | The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings Rather than speed away from the ambush, Heydrich ordered his driver to stop, drew his pistol and stood up in the car to confront his attackers. It was thanks to his arrogance that shrapnel from the exploding grenade tore into his body, mortally wounding him. He died several days later, in hospital, of sepsis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/8-AssasinationGettyImages-104419725-be43add-e1764243103902.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white image of an open top car with a flat back tyre and extensive damage to the side facing the camera" title="Heydrich’s heavily damaged Mercedes-Benz following the grenade attack of 27 May 1942. Although Heydrich survived the initial blast, he succumbed to his injuries eight days later (Image by Getty Images)" /> Grim reprisals Heydrich’s assassination took the whole of the Nazi hierarchy by surprise, but when they finally gathered themselves, their reaction was typically brutal. Hitler called for the murder of 10,000 Czechs in reprisal and was only dissuaded from this by the need to keep Czech workers producing for the German war effort. Meanwhile, Heydrich’s subordinate, Karl Hermann Frank, was determined to track down and punish anyone even remotely linked to the assassination. He arrested and tortured hundreds of civilians in an attempt to find someone who could reveal where the assassins were hiding. On 10 June, he went a step further. Frank’s security forces surrounded the village of Lidice and executed all 173 men and boys they found there. More than 300 women and children were then rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where around half of them also died. As a final act of viciousness, the village itself was burned down and levelled, as if it had never existed at all. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/LidiceFFRH60-afccb73-e1764247521981.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white image of a burning village, with large clouds of smoke covering it" title="Smoke rises from the village of Lidice during its destruction by Nazi forces, June 1942. Hundreds of residents were murdered as ‘punishment’ for Heydrich’s assassination (Image by Alamy)" /> Lidice was chosen because several known Czech army officers happened to come from here, and it was assumed that they must have had something to do with the assassination – but in actual fact, the people of Lidice were entirely innocent in this respect. Two weeks later, a second village, Ležáky, suffered a similar fate. There was no attempt to hide these crimes. In fact, the Nazis openly publicised every stage of the massacres. This was designed to be a message to all potential resisters about the fate that awaited them and their communities if they ever attempted to defy the Nazis in future. Unfortunately, Frank’s brutality paid off. Appalled by the massacre, one of the special forces team voluntarily gave himself up to the Gestapo. In return for one million Reichsmarks and the promise of a new identity, he revealed the whereabouts of some of the other operatives in the Czech resistance network. After more arrests, and more torture, Heydrich’s assassins were finally tracked down, hiding in the crypt of Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Prague. The church was surrounded and a massive firefight ensured, but eventually, to avoid capture, the surviving Czech resistance fighters took their own lives. Abandoned to time After Heydrich’s assassination, his widow, Lina, continued to live in the chateau at Panenské Břežany. For the next three years she ran the house and its estate like a mini concentration camp. She was given a workforce of 150 or so slave labourers from the Theresienstadt ghetto and from Flossenbürg concentration camp. It turned out that this woman had many of the same psychopathic tendencies as her husband: those of her prisoners who survived the war later testified that she had personally subjected them to physical abuse. At the end of the war, Lina and her family finally fled the chateau to escape the advancing Red Army. They returned to Germany where she lived out her years on a generous army pension. Despite being found guilty of complicity in war crimes by a Czech court, she was never extradited. Meanwhile, her glamorous home and its lands were taken over by the Czech state. Over the next 50 years, a series of workshops were built in its grounds, and it became a kind of minor industrial estate. The chateau itself was used by the Metal Research Institute, before eventually being abandoned. As I walk around the building today, all these different layers of history are on display. Some of the rooms have ornate plasterwork ceilings that betray the house’s lavish past, while others are lined with functional tiles and electric cables left over from its time as a technical institute. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/13-Ruins-20250512141953-61f32b5-e1764243186292.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The chateau has fallen into a severe state of disrepair, with few of its lavish interiors still intact (Image by Keith Lowe)" title="The chateau has fallen into a severe state of disrepair, with few of its lavish interiors still intact (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Some of the original features are still there. In the huge, vaulted entrance hall there is an ornate stone fireplace where Heydrich’s guests would have warmed themselves before proceeding up the staircase to the ballroom on the first floor. The marble walls and mosaic floors are intact, but the artworks and 19th-century furniture are gone. The walls are deeply cracked, with peeling paint, and exposed pipes and beams where some of the ceilings have collapsed. Everything is in a state of disrepair. An uncertain future It is difficult to know what is to be done with this place today. The current owner wants to restore the building but is struggling to find the time or the money to do it justice. When we met him, he expressed a desire to preserve the place as an important cultural site and a place of Czech memory. But he is also a businessman, and needs to find a way to make it pay for itself. Read more | "We need to understand the Nazis as human beings": Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler's followers One idea is to make the house into a museum. This is what happened to Karl Hermann Frank’s villa nearby, which was originally part of the same estate. That building now houses a permanent exhibition devoted to the history of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the atrocities that were committed by Frank after Heydrich’s assassination. The owner is keen to do something similar with this place, but is not sure if a small village like Panenské Břežany can sustain a second museum devoted to a very similar subject. Alternatively, he could make it into some kind of exhibition space, or even a hotel. This would bring other concerns: it is not clear what kind of guests would want to take weekend breaks in the former home of a Nazi mass-killer. The last thing he wants to do is to create a pilgrimage site for Holocaust deniers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2-Main-Entrance20240918122145-Main-entrance-9512b18-e1764243226544.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Plans to turn the site into a museum or hotel are complicated by fears that it could become a tourist destination for Nazi sympathisers (Image by Keith Lowe)" title="Plans to turn the site into a museum or hotel are complicated by fears that it could become a tourist destination for Nazi sympathisers (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Until he has made up his mind, the building is likely to remain in a state of serious disrepair. As I walk around its dilapidated rooms and echoing corridors, I can’t help feeling that perhaps this is no bad thing. We are so used to having our thoughts and emotions curated for us that it is actually quite refreshing to visit a memorial site where you are free to imagine the past for yourself. I also wonder if there is something quite apt about how derelict this building has become. When they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazis made this place the centre of their power and authority over the Czech people; the fact that it is now a virtual ruin feels satisfyingly appropriate. I can think of no better epitaph for the evil man who lived here and the hollow ideology that created him. Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
"Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, James stares coolly out of the picture, straight at the viewer, as if to say: “Our time has come.” And it had. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The Mughal artist Abu al-Hasan, who painted that magnificent picture of Jahangir and Abbas, cannot have imagined that his world – the world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, created by the great Asiatic civilisations – was about to be shaken to its core by the violent energies, the inventiveness and the sheer ambition of the Europeans. Jahangir never got his summit with Shah Abbas. Nor did he meet the ailing Wanli Emperor, who was destined to die a couple of years later in Beijing. Since then, the turning of the wheel of history has been astounding: empires, world wars, the colonisation of entire continents, the triumph of capitalism – changes so huge that it is hardly possible to take them all in. The world has been remade in our likeness. And now, in 2025, President Xi hosts a summit calling for an alternative world order – “a more just and equitable global governance system”. We may not like President Xi’s choice of friends, but such is the realpolitik of our age. And to be sure, some would say that the American empire has accumulated enough misdeeds of its own to merit a reaction. Xi, in particular – an avid reader of history books (the Chinese translation of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads reportedly among them) believes in the destiny of China. He thinks that China’s time has come, after the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of western powers. Eighty years on from the Second World War, Xi now says that China’s rise to global leadership is “unstoppable”. So back to these images of empire: Jahangir and Abbas, Modi and Xi. Some would say that they represent wish fulfilment: a rebuke to what President Xi’s baleful friend Putin calls “outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models”. But behind the hugs and the photo ops, behind that amazing piece of diplomatic grandstanding in the giant military parade in Beijing celebrating China’s role in the Second World War, perhaps there is more than that: a vision of the future, uncomfortable though it may be to us in the west. As for Jahangir’s globe, the painting was a dream. But there are few images from the past that more powerfully distil what might have been. And now, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. This column was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Who won the crusades? The causes, death toll, and number of medieval holy wars explained
Who won the crusades, how many were there, and what caused them? Medieval expert Rebecca Rist answers these major questions, exploring how centuries of religious conflict reshaped the medieval world
The crusades were a centuries-long sequence of era-defining medieval holy wars that transformed dynamics of power and religious ideas across Europe and the Middle East. But who won the crusades, and just how many crusades were there? Those are two of the questions answered by professor Rebecca Rist, an expert on the crusades and their broader medieval context. Speaking about the topic on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Rist steps into the dust of medieval roads and the heat of besieged cities to explain why these campaigns erupted, what the major expeditions set out to accomplish, how those ambitions played out on the ground, and how the long arc of conflict finally came to an end. Who won the crusades? Overall, the Muslim forces won the crusades, and the Christians lost. However, as Rist explains, while that was the final state of play, the granular details were far from that simple. "The final bastions of the crusader states were lost in 1291 (having been founded originally in 1099) to Muslim forces. In that sense, obviously the Muslims won the crusades and the Christians were defeated. "However, the crusades span a very long period of time, starting with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the loss of Acre in 1291. There were many individual crusades within that period, some of which were won by the Christians – by the Western Franks, like the First Crusade – and others by Muslims. For example, the Muslim forces were successful in the Fifth Crusade in capturing Damietta." In other instances, Rist says there were greater degrees of complexity. "In some crusades, we have partial victories. If we take the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart was partially successful, in the sense that he was able to take and maintain Acre. But, of course, he didn't win back Jerusalem with a military victory." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1186332544-4f0a3d8-e1764009254971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration depicts Richard the Lionheart paying homage to King Philip Augustus of France during the Third Crusade. Although allies in their campaign to the Holy Land, the two monarchs maintained a tense partnership" title="Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus" /> How many crusades were there? "There were eight crusades during the period from 1095 to 1291 in the Near East," says Rist. However, Rist is careful to caveat this: it's a number that's subject to debate, as what precisely counts as a full-scale crusade is difficult to define. Still, according to Rist, the eight major crusades were broadly as follows: "The First Crusade (1095–99), is where the crusaders take Jerusalem and set up the crusader states. The Second Crusade (1147–50), is a subsequent response to the fall of the first crusader kingdom of Edessa (the crusader kingdom in the north). The Third Crusade (1189–92) is launched to try to win back Jerusalem and is perhaps the most famous because it involved Richard the Lionheart. The Fourth Crusade (1202–04) doesn't end up in the Holy Land at all, but the crusaders instead sack the town of Zara and then Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) is an attack that the crusaders make on Egypt, on the town of Damietta in particular (and this ends in failure). The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) is very interesting because it's not authorised by the papacy, but it’s a crusade where emperor Frederick II, goes out under excommunication. He has a lot of success and makes a truce with the sultan and gets Jerusalem back for 10 years. Finally, I like to think of the Seventh (1248–54) and Eighth (1270) Crusades, which are the two crusades of Louis IX, launched respectively at Egypt and at Tunis." Read more | Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? In addition to these eight core crusades, there were other conflicts that need to be recognised. "There were also many more minor expeditions [with] small groups of fighters between these major crusades as well. So we can think of the Barons’ crusade of 1236, for example, or the crusade by Edward, prince of England, sometimes called the Ninth Crusade (1271–72). These little ventures are going on between these major responses [when] great papal calls are put out, and very large armies take up that call." How many people died in the crusades? The crusades' death toll likely came in at around 5-6 million, possibly reaching as high as 9 million, according to Rist. But, once again, there are serious caveats to consider. "It's very difficult to estimate [the crusades' death toll] because of the source material. We're dealing with very unreliable sources: medieval chroniclers are notoriously unreliable when they give figures of battles and losses." Despite the problems with the sources, it's still possible to come to a very broad conclusion. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Crusades "There are figures ranging from 1 million to 9 million over the whole period from 1095 to 1291. John Robertson famously, in his Short History of Christianity – a very old but seminal book first published in the early 20th century – had that really huge figure of 9 million. But I've seen other historians estimate much lower numbers. When I'm giving these figures, I'm including Christians, Muslims and all those who followed the armies, not just the combatants. "Historians generally prefer to try to give estimates for individual battles rather than for the crusades overall, and I think that gives us a better sense of the carnage and the losses. Regarding the overall estimates between 1 million and 9 million, certainly one million seems far too few to me." She concludes, "I would go for a much higher figure: 5 or 6 million." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-1435556881-76ecf57-e1764009379800.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 14th-century illustration by the Maître de Fauvel depicts the Battle of Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097, one of the First Crusade’s major engagements. It shows crusader forces rallying after a surprise Turkish attack, capturing the drama and brutality of a battle that helped secure the crusaders’ advance into Anatolia." title="The Battle Of Dorylaeum On 1 July 1097" /> What caused the crusades between 1095­–1204? The motivations behind the crusades were a mixture of: "religious, political, social, and economic," says Rist. "To highlight a few definite motivating factors: I think the papacy granting a ‘remission of sins’ in the 12th century is a driving force. People want to be free from their sins, to try to wipe the slate clean, and they know that crusading will assure them that spiritual privilege. There is another religious motivation: to help fellow Christians. The pope had called for the First Crusade to help the Byzantines in the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had asked for help from the west because the Byzantines were struggling against the Seljuk Turks at this time." But it was far from just religion that motivated the conflicts, as Rist explains. Read more | Did the crusaders fight for God or gold? "There are many other non-religious motivations, such as the charismatic preaching that we see happening with these crusades. Take a figure like Bernard of Clairvaux on the Second Crusade. He preaches all over Europe drawing large crowds, and influences kings to ‘take the cross’. "I think crusaders were also spurred on by the idea of the glory that can pertain to their families if they take part in these great expeditions. Certainly, kings and emperors think it will do their ‘PR’ no harm. They take the cross often when they become kings. Often, it's a way of showing that there is a new reign and that they’re different from their fathers. "There's no doubt that there were also ideas of adventure. At the time of the First Crusade, there had been very bad harvests; there was famine in Europe, so people wanted something different and new. Of course, when they get out there, they didn't necessarily like it. But there were all kinds of romantic and adventurous ideas associated with the crusades." Ultimately however, Rist stresses that the motivation behind crusades was neither singular, nor homogenous. "An individual crusader doesn't just have to have one motivation. He can be conventionally very pious. He can also be hoping to be in favour with his lord. He can be hoping that there might be some land parcelled out to him. He can be inspired by charismatic preaching." How did the crusades end? The crusades ended in 1291 "when the Mamluks captured Acre," says Rist. She concludes, "For decades, Acre had been the centre of what remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem – and so it was the most important city that was still left of the crusader states. It fell to the Mamluk Sultan Khalil in 1291. In the days that followed, the rest of the remaining crusader towns – Beirut, Haifa, Tyre, Tortosa – all fell in a domino effect." The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now