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Is The Six Triple Eight a true story? The real WW2 history, as told by the movie’s historical consultant
Netflix’s historical film The Six Triple Eight tells the story of the all-woman, predominately-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in the Second World War. Molly Sampson, one of the film’s historical consultants, describes the true history seen on screen
How did one battalion almost-entirely staffed by Black women solve a crisis that affected the morale of millions of US servicemen during WW2? Netflix’s The Six Triple Eight is the story of a WW2 group, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the first and only Women’s Army Corps (WAC) unit of colour to serve overseas in the Second World War. Written and directed by Tyler Perry, the film stars Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams, the commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Despite facing racism and sexism – and gruelling working conditions – they were committed to serving their country with honour and distinction. Molly Sampson, a historical consultant on the film, spoke to HistoryExtra about these unsung heroes who were united in their determination, and in doing so they delivered hope and shattered barriers. Is The Six Triple Eight, based on a true story? Yes, though some details have been adapted for the screen, The Six Triple Eight is based on a true story. It tells the tale of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a ground-breaking unit of 855 women who volunteered to serve their country during the Second World War. The movie highlights their extraordinary mission: clearing a staggering backlog of undelivered mail for US troops stationed in Europe. It also addresses the systemic racism and sexism they faced, as well as their resilience and unity in overcoming these challenges. During the Second World War, US military policies and societal norms enforced rigid racial classifications, shaping the experiences of service members. Women of Latinx heritage serving in the WAC were often required to choose between identifying as Black – thereby being placed in segregated units – or White. Lydia Thornton, a member of the Six Triple Eight and of Afro-Mexican descent, faced this decision during her enlistment. She chose to serve under the strict rules of segregation, a testament to the complex interplay of race, identity, and military policy during the era. While the film dramatises certain events for storytelling purposes, its foundation is a true account of these unsung heroes’ service and dedication. Why was the Six Triple Eight formed? The Six Triple Eight was created to solve a US Army crisis: the backlog of over 3.7 million undelivered letters and packages for troops in Europe. It might not sound like one of the most pressing problems in a time of war, but mail sent during the conflict provided soldiers with a vital connection to home, and was a major morale booster. The situation demanded urgent attention, and so the War Department responded by forming the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black, all-female unit led by Black officers. Their mission: clear the backlog, restore the mail system, and boost soldier morale. The Six Triple Eight’s creation marked not only a solution to a logistical problem but also a significant step forward in racial and gender integration within the military. Read more | An army of women: adventures in the Auxiliary Territorial Service The Six Triple Eight was part of the US Army’s Women’s Army Corps. This branch had been created in May 1942 as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) – an emergency reserve without full military status enlisted women to serve in support roles and fix a growing manpower crisis. In July 1943, additional legislation was passed, eliminating the auxiliary status and creating the Women’s Army Corps. By late 1944, nearly 14,000 Wacs were serving overseas. However, due to the US Army’s segregation policy, Black Wacs were excluded from these deployments, confined to stateside roles despite their training and qualifications. This exclusion was challenged by civil rights leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, whose advocacy with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt highlighted the capabilities of Black Wacs and pressured the War Department to act. The Six Triple Eight’s creation answered Bethune’s campaign that there should be “a role for black women in the war overseas,” and in February 1945, they set sail for Europe. Who was the real Major Charity Adams? In The Six Triple Eight, Kerry Washington portrays Major Charity Adams, the trailblazing commander of the 6888th. Born in North Carolina and raised in South Carolina, Adams was a teacher and graduate student in Ohio before joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. She was part of the first WAAC officer training class, where she graduated as a Second Lieutenant and quickly distinguished herself as a training officer at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. While at the training centre, Adams experienced the realities of discrimination. Following her first visit to the Officer’s Club, she was berated by an unnamed white male Colonel for socialising in a desegregated space. Her experience would be echoed in the Officer’s Club at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where the Six Triple Eight were stationed while training for overseas service. Adams later recalled how these instances, handled with necessary grace, fuelled her motivation for her remarkable career. Her leadership and exceptional service led to rapid promotions, and by the time she took command of the Six Triple Eight, she had risen to the rank of Major. By the time she left the army in 1946, she was a Lieutenant Colonel, the second-highest rank available to women in the Corps. Known for her professionalism and unwavering dedication, Adams not only ensured the success of the Six Triple Eight’s mission but also served as a role model for the women under her command, navigating the dual challenges of racism and sexism with her reputation for dignity and determination. How was the Six Triple Eight received overseas? The Six Triple Eight’s arrival in Europe was both celebratory and fraught with challenges. Disembarking in Glasgow in February 1945, the women were greeted by the sound of bagpipes and the presence of Brigadier General Davis, who conducted an onboard inspection. Their journey continued to Birmingham, England, where they were welcomed warmly by US troops and British citizens. The women were billeted at King Edward’s School, where American troops had prepared their accommodations. A parade reviewed by US Lieutenant General John CH Lee drew large crowds, reflecting both the curiosity and respect of the British public. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/GettyImages-1438109388-f984198-e1734711473347.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Captain Mary Kearney and Major Charity Adams inspect the first arrivals to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at a temporary post in Birmingham, England" title="Captain Mary Kearney and Major Charity Adams inspect the first arrivals to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at a temporary post in Birmingham, England" /> What did the Six Triple Eight do in the Second World War? The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion took on the enormous task of clearing a massive backlog of mail for US troops in the European theatre of operations. Upon their arrival at the First Base Post Office in Birmingham, England, they faced 3.7 million pieces of undelivered mail. These ranged from letters from home, to care packages filled with food and gifts – some dating back to Christmas 1943. Using a sophisticated system of locator cards and Central Directories, the women worked in three eight-hour shifts around the clock, cross-referencing and updating outdated locator information to ensure accurate delivery. When addresses could not be verified, undeliverable mail was returned to the sender. What discrimination did the women of the Six Triple Eight face? Within the military, the women faced ongoing discrimination. While the segregation that existed stateside – such as the water fountains labelled “colored” at Fort Oglethorpe – were resolved, in the UK new issues existed. Beauty parlours were readily available in the US, even at smaller installations without one on base. However, no hair salon or shop was stocked with the necessary hair treatments and cosmetics in Birmingham. Instead, Adams and her Special Services officer, Captain Mildred Carter, had to acquire all the materials and equipment necessary to create their own beauty parlour. This facility would also be used by members of the Army Nurse Corps, who sometimes used leave passes to make an appointment. Read more | Wrens at war: life in the Women's Royal Naval Service in WW2 The unit also faced other challenges. While in Birmingham, the American Red Cross tried to prevent the Six Triple Eight members from using service clubs. In one instance of discrimination, a member of the unit was not allowed to stay overnight, instead having to stay with a local English family (who in turn welcomed her warmly). The Red Cross’s response was to eventually offer another facility to the unit – one that was wholly separate and segregated – which was promptly boycotted by the Six Triple Eight. Tensions escalated further when an unnamed general demanded a review of the battalion. Because of their duty schedule – three eight-hour shifts – only one-third of women were available for the parade. The general demanded the rest of the women quit either working or sleeping. When told this was impossible, he threatened to replace Major Adams with a lower-ranking white officer. Her defiant response – “Over my dead body” – has come to represent the unit’s wartime reputation for resilience and resolve in the face of systemic bias. Adams was warned she would be facing a court-martial for insubordination. Her defence came down to a counter-court-martial based on directives that banned the use of racially charged language. The general dropped his charge, and Adams continued her command. What difference did the Six Triple Eight make? In just three months, the Six Triple Eight had cleared the backlog of letters and packages in Birmingham. That is half the time that they had been allotted. Their success led to their reassignment to Rouen, France, where they continued their work under similar conditions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/6888Day04202301121817r-970a896-e1734712138890.jpg" width="620" height="423" alt="Milauna Jackson as Lt. Campbell, Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams and Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King in The Six Triple Eight" title="Milauna Jackson as Lt. Campbell, Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams and Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King in The Six Triple Eight. The unit cleared a huge backlog of delayed post destined for US soldiers during WW2" /> Despite the gruelling schedule, the women participated in community events (including a parade celebrating French saint Joan of Arc) and hosted an open house to showcase their facilities. Members of the unit also participated in several sports events; the basketball team made it to the championship tournament but faced difficulties securing transportation due to segregation. In the end they won – but only after Lieutenant General John CH Lee was informed and provided his private train car for their use. Tragedy struck the battalion in Rouen when three members – Mary Bankston, Mary Barlow, and Dolores Browne – were killed in a vehicle accident. A testament of the esprit de corps of the Six Triple Eight was the fact the women were not given a typical military burial. Instead, the unit collected money to purchase caskets, women with prior experience handled the preparation of the bodies, and Protestant and Catholic funeral services were held. Today, these three are among only four women buried at the Normandy American Cemetery. In October 1945, the unit moved to Paris. By the time the Six Triple Eight was disbanded in March 1946, they had processed an estimated 17 million pieces of mail, ensuring soldiers remained connected to their loved ones. What happened to the Six Triple Eight after the Second World War? After the war, the Six Triple Eight returned to the United States, and the unit was formally disbanded at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in March 1946. Major Charity Adams received a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel upon her return, making her one of the highest-ranking women in the Corps. For many of the women, military service was a temporary chapter. While some stayed in the armed forces, most returned to civilian life. Despite their extraordinary contributions, the Six Triple Eight’s story faded into obscurity for decades, overshadowed by larger narratives of the war. What is the legacy of the Six Triple Eight today? In recent years, the Six Triple Eight has gained greater recognition. A monument dedicated to the battalion was unveiled at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 2018, sparking renewed interest in their story. In 2019, the unit was awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation for its exceptional service in the Second World War. This recognition highlighted their impact on the morale and welfare of US troops and their professionalism in the face of adversity. Through the efforts of advocates including retired Army Colonel Edna Cummings, the Six Triple Eight was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022, the highest civilian honour given by Congress. These commemorations ensure that the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion – their service, sacrifices, and triumphs – continue to inspire future generations. The Six Triple Eight is available on Netflix. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week Molly Sampson is the Executive Director of the Maritime Museum of Sandusky. She is also a historian focusing on the Women’s Army Corps during the Second World War and served as historical consultant for The Six Triple Eight
Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
Runes – those instantly recognisable characters inscribed on stone, wood and bone – are filled with mystery, but can reveal little-known aspects of everyday Viking life. Eleanor Barraclough deciphers runes that recount tales of love, lust, travel and tragedy from a millennium ago
The Vikings are best known for their bloody raids, bawdy gods and buried ships. But they are also famous for the runes – the Nordic branch of the spiky north Germanic alphabet still so familiar today. Though Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, runes were the chief exception, lying at the intersection between text and object. In the same way that the word ‘alphabet’ is derived by combining the Greek letters ⍺ (alpha) and β (beta), the Nordic equivalent, ‘futhark’, is derived from the first six letters of the writing system: ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u), ᚦ (th), ᚬ (a), ᚱ (r), ᚴ (k). Surprisingly, because they represent such a recognisable and well-known form of ancient writing, no one knows for certain where runes came from. It’s probably no coincidence that many of the oldest interpretable runic inscriptions discovered – dating from the second century AD – were found in a context that shows evidence of contact with the Roman empire. The shape of runic characters are similar to many letters of the Latin alphabet, but with an angular shape more suited for carving into hard materials such as wood, bone and stone. It’s likely that knowledge of the Roman writing system travelled north with people who had spent time on both sides of the imperial frontier along the Rhine, whether as mercenaries, traders or craftspeople. Want to know more about the Vikings? Professor Ryan Lavelle leads our four-week HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course, available to HistoryExtra subscribers This might also explain one possible meaning of the word ‘rune’ itself: something secret or hidden, originally reserved for a particular segment of society – an elite group. As the centuries passed, though, knowledge and use of runes spanned an ever-broader proportion of society. The Viking Age is typically considered to encompass roughly the years 750–1100 AD – the period during which people of Scandinavian origins and heritage took part in overseas raiding, trading and settlement. At its height, the Norse diaspora they created stretched from Arctic Greenland in the west to the Eurasian waterways of the east. Listen | Neil Price takes us inside the Viking mind to explain how the Norse raiders viewed the world and what drove them to expand across the seas Designating dates for a ‘Viking Age’ is a useful way to situate ourselves in time. But runes remind us that any historical age rarely has neat edges to mark its beginning and end. Runes were used in the Norse world several centuries before the infamous international raids started, and their use continued for centuries afterwards. From the intimacies of daily life to the grand sweep of history, runes were used to record lives and deaths, preserving people’s names, their emotions, their humanity. Through them we come within touching distance of the people of the past, with their kaleidoscope of voices, experiences, emotions, relationships and beliefs. Here, we will see how deciphering runes allows us to catch glimpses of five key aspects of Norse culture, spanning the commemoration of death, love and lust, drinking, word games, and the realities of travel in the Viking Age world. Remembering a life Many runestones were carved to mark the passing of beloved individuals, recording details of their lives and travels The Norse inscriptions most familiar to us today are probably official runestones, typically commissioned to commemorate departed loved ones. If you’ve passed through Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, you might have walked straight past one such monument. Looming above the bustle of modern-day travellers, this incongruous lump of stone features the fading outline of two carved snakes arching round the edge and looping back on themselves. The bodies of the snakes are adorned with runes that translate as: Gunnar and Bjorn and Thorgrim raised this stone in memory of their brother Thorstein, who died in the east with Yngvar, and made this bridge. Read more | Test your knowledge of the Vikings with our ultimate quiz This runestone was originally erected in the mid-11th century alongside a road and the bridge mentioned in the inscription, where it could be admired by travellers passing along the busy route. Commissioning such a stone was an expensive act that not only commemorated Thorstein’s life but also immortalised his three brothers. The runestone mentions that Thorstein “died in the east with Yngvar”. In the region around Lake Mälaren, near Stockholm, are many other runestones that commemorate husbands, fathers, sons and brothers who, like Thorstein, went on that same eastern expedition – possibly in the direction of the Caspian Sea – and never returned. Some of these runestones still stand where they were erected. Others have been built into the walls of churches and cathedrals. In all, some 20 names survive on various stones: Thorstein, Gunnleif, Harald, Saebjorn, Baggi, Gunnvid, Ulf, Gauti, Belgir, Hrodgeir, Tosti, Hugi, Thorbjorn, Skarf, Skardi, Bjorstein, Osnikin, Orm, Onun and, of course, Yngvar himself. Each runestone is a public testament to private family loss, grief and pride. Love letters Norse people recorded romantic passions and secret desires in runes Many runic inscriptions from the Norse world were not meant for public consumption. Rather, they were the equivalent of the scrappy sticky notes, every day text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time. Written on wood, metal, bone and stone, a number of the surviving messages record strong emotions: loves, lusts, rejections. Some express fluffy sentiments of the sort that might appear in a packet of Love Hearts or on Valentine’s Day cards: “Think of me, I think of you! Love me, I love you!” Read more | How to write a love letter: 6 tips from the historical figures who did it best Others provide the names of the ones doing the loving and the lusting. Runes on a piece of cow bone from Oslo read: “Asa loves St____”, with the latter word broken off after the first two characters. Asa is a woman’s name, and St____ is likely the fractured remains of a man’s name: Stein or Stefan, perhaps. In this case, Asa’s feelings don’t seem to be much of a secret, because the final runes on the bone spell out the word ek uæit – “I know.” Other runic inscriptions hint at the sort of messy gossip that goes hand in hand with the human condition but which rarely survives for posterity: hints of same-sex acts, affairs, indiscretions and one-night stands. One carver tells us: “The clever woman lets loose for her lover, but folk still think she’s a virgin.” Another remembers the good times: “Ingibjorg loved me when I was in Stavanger.” Another spills the beans: “Clumsy-Kari and Vilhjalm’s wife are shacked up together.” Some tell of people who have been unhappily friend-zoned: “I love another man’s wife so much that fire seems cold to me, and I am a friend of this woman.” Others hint at rejection or love affairs gone sour. One such, a 10th-century square weaving tablet made from bone, found in Lund (then in Denmark, now in Sweden), provides two out of three names in what appears to be a love triangle: Sigvor (female) and Ingimarr (male). The unnamed carver of the runes is most likely female, and the runes appear to form a curse, directed particularly at Ingimarr: the translatable part reads “Sigvor’s Ingimarr will have my weeping!” There are examples of runic messages that were hidden in Norwegian stave churches, which tell us that private passions burned in these holy houses. A wooden runestick found in Urnes stave church at Sogn og Fjordane in south central Norway declares: “Arni the priest wants to have Inga.” Whether this was a confession by Arni himself or a scurrilous rumour started by a member of the congregation, we can’t know. Another stick, found in Lom stave church in the same part of Norway, was inscribed by a man called Havard to woman identified only by the first letters of her name, possibly Gudny or Gunnhild. He is proposing marriage – but it seems that he’s not her only option, because “it is my full desire to ask for you” is followed by “…if you don’t want to be with Kolbein”. Someone has attempted to conceal the identities of the people involved by scratching out the three names in this potential love triangle and dropping the wooden runestick surreptitiously between the church’s floorboards. Gudny/Gunnhild herself is a possible culprit – the wooden stick was found in the area of the church where women sat for mass – but we can only guess at the emotions that were going through their head at the time. Booze-fuelled banter Runes were used to summon errant husbands and make crude jokes The biggest haul of everyday runic inscriptions was found at the medieval harbourside of Bryggen in Bergen, Norway. There were nearly 700 at latest count, most inscribed on little sticks discovered by archaeologists after some of the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in the 1950s. One, etched by a woman named Gyda around AD 1200, reads ᚵᛦᛆ:ᛍᛅᚼᛁᚱ:ᛆᛐᚦᚢ:ᚴᛆᚴᚼᛅᛁᛘ – transliterated into Roman letters as gya : sæhir : at þu : kak hæim. In English, that roughly translates as: “Gyda says that you should go home.”. Judging from where the stick was found, it seems likely that Gyda sent the message to her husband down at the tavern, telling him to finish up his drink and come home. On the other side of the stick are a flurry of indecipherable runes – perhaps a reply to Gyda carved by a husband too drunk to hold his knife steady. Other runic inscriptions found in Bergen also bear the hallmarks of inebriation. One carved into a wooden handle reads: “If only I might come nearer to the mead-house much more often.” Elsewhere, a cow bone was scored with runes that proclaim: “Now there’s going to be a fight,” followed by an undecipherable reply in another hand – perhaps scratched by a couple of drinkers about to witness a noisy punch-up, one of them too inebriated to carve a coherent sentence. Such inscriptions tell us that medieval Scandinavians could be as immature as the rest of us. We can almost hear sniggering across the centuries as someone takes up their knife to carve: “Sit down and interpret the runes, stand up and fart.” And from toilet-based humour it’s only ever a hop, skip and jump to genital-based jokes. One line of alliterative poetry carved onto a length of wood might be translated as: “The vagina is lovely, may the penis serve it a drink.” Like all groundbreaking forms of technology, humans found a way to make it about bums and boobs. Playing with words Norse people enjoyed composing poetry and inventing linguistic games to help pass the time Wordplay, poems and brain teasers were beloved by people across all strata of Norse society. It’s relatively rare to find evidence of these preserved in runes because such verbal games were predominantly oral rather than written. But some surviving runes reveal the diverse ways those living across the Norse world amused themselves. One runestick dating from c985–1025 AD in the earliest decades of the settlement in Greenland tells us something about the sort of wordplay enjoyed by those who lived in the farthest-flung Norse communities. The stick involved is a four-sided piece of pinewood around 43cm long, with a natural knot at one end that resembles a birdlike creature. Read more | Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world It was discovered in 1953 by someone from the town of Narsaq who, while foraging for good-quality mud and soil for gardening, found themselves digging in what had been the living room of one of the earliest Norse farms. Runes are inscribed on four sides of the stick. On one side, transliterated into the Roman alphabet, the runes read: o : sa : sa : sa : is : o sa : sat. Several interpretations of these runes have been suggested, with variations along the lines of “On a tub saw the person, who sat on a tub,” or “On the sea that seemed to be, which you did not see on the sea.” Whatever the correct interpretation – and perhaps there was never meant to be just one – this is a fascinating example of word play using homonyms: words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings. There are many examples of this in modern Nordic languages, one being the Icelandic sentence Afi á Á á á á á: “Grandpa from Á [a place] has a sheep by a river.” Travel diaries Items carved with runes provide evidence of the travels of Norse folk during the Viking Age The previous example of runic wordplay from Norse Greenland, with its allusions to the sea, reminds us that this was a culture predicated on travel, both on land and on water. Other little scraps of runic inscriptions occasionally provide the names of ordinary individuals who travelled extraordinary distances, sometimes under extraordinary circumstances. One of these inscriptions was found in a wooden coffin in the Norse graveyard of Herjolfsnes, close to the southernmost tip of Greenland. The coffin contained no body, only a wooden stick carved with runes that read: “This woman, who was called Gudveig, was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.” She died on the voyage west, it seems, so this was as close to a burial as she could be given. Read more | Global Vikings: how the impact of the raiders and traders went far beyond Britain Another example was discovered near the high pass of Lendbreen, in the mountains of south central Norway. This pass lay on an ancient highway – a track along which farming families moved up to and down from their summer pastures, as well as a route used by traders and long-distance travellers bound for other parts of the country and even across the sea. As climate change bites, glacial archaeologists are racing to recover ephemera that were preserved here in ice for the past millennium. An extraordinary range of artefacts has been discovered, including farming equipment, a woollen mitten, a lot of frozen horse poo – and a relic revealing the name of at least one of the travellers who used this route during the Viking Age. Carved onto a wooden walking stick around AD 1000 are runes that read: “Ivar owns this.” Wherever Ivar was heading, he had to reach his destination unaided by his stick – which lay frozen in ice for the next thousand years. Eleanor Barraclough is a broadcaster, writer and historian based at Bath Spa University, and author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile, 2024) This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Oliver Cromwell’s postal spies: intercepting letters and codebreaking in the General Post Office
Oliver Cromwell was England's Lord Protector, but his enemies were out there and plotting through clandestine or coded letters. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman tell the story of the intelligence-gathering unit Cromwell created, the first in England, which deployed an array of cunning tricks to intercept and decode enemy communications
A month before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Government Code and Cypher School moved into Bletchley Park, a stately home and estate in Buckinghamshire. There, it established a centre dedicated to intercepting and decoding enemy communications, playing a pivotal role in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But this was not the first time an operation dedicated to the interception and decoding of messages had been set up in England. Indeed, in 1655 – nearly three centuries earlier – a smaller, but remarkably similar operation had been established on the orders of England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. It was christened the General Post Office. Early intelligence gathering Until the 1640s, intelligence gathering in the British Isles was a matter of individual spies reporting to their own spy chiefs – men such as Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Essex, and William Cecil and his son Robert. As rivals competing for the favour of their monarch, cooperation was not their first instinct. Operations tended to be limited to the infiltration of groups that might harbour potential enemies, but also the occasional interception of letters exchanged between known or suspected conspirators. And that was often a tricky task. Before any agent could attempt to read a message contained within a letter – which might be protected through ciphers, codes or invisible inks – they had to open it, preferably without damaging it. Long before the invention of gummed envelopes, letters were as intricate as origami birds. The paper on which the message was written was folded into its own letter-packet. Security devices included wax seals and ‘locks’ – pieces of paper threaded through the letter-packet that would rip upon opening, betraying the fact that the letter had been compromised. Great skill was required to deal with these anti-tamper devices; that might mean mending the damage caused by opening a letter or, when that was impossible, counterfeiting all or part of it. Breaking through the wax seal The first security measure encountered was typically the seal – a blob of molten wax into which a design was pressed, simultaneously identifying the sender and preventing the letter from being easily opened. Such seals could be removed invisibly if treated with care. In the second century AD, the writer Lucian recommended using a hot needle to prise off a wax seal. By the 16th century, though, the pliable beeswax-and-turpentine mixture used for seals in Lucian’s time had been replaced by a more secure wax. This brittle substance, prone to shattering, contained hardening substances such as gum arabic – obtained from the sap of acacia trees – or shellac, a resinous substance secreted by a species of Asian bug. The 16th-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano suggested warming the wax before using a horse-tail hair to slice under the seal and detach it in one piece. This was, of course, a very delicate operation, and Cardano recommended that less dexterous operators counterfeit the seal instead. To do so, a new seal might be created from scratch, copying the original design and casting a facsimile in brass. This took time and no little skill, though, and would be done only for suspects responsible for high levels of correspondence. For seals newly or only occasionally encountered, a fragile plaster-like cast could be used to directly mould a new wax seal. This process required a sample of the seal that was clear enough to be duplicated. In 1596, counter-espionage agent Arthur Gregory complained to Robert Cecil that “among so many seals… there is no choice of one perfect print”. Gregory would be best able to copy a ‘bare-seal’, formed by pressing a seal-stamp into molten wax on the outside of the letter-packet. The other type, a ‘covered’ or ‘papered’ seal – created by dripping molten wax between the two pieces of paper to be joined – was next to impossible to counterfeit. A counterfeiter’s craft – and curse Once a suitable seal had been identified, a cast could be made – which also required quite some preparation and skill. In his 1558 book of secrets, Magiae Naturalis (Natural Magick), polymath Giambattista della Porta suggested that, before attempting to make a cast, the counterfeiter should first “compass the seal about with wax, that the matter [the casting material] run not about”. This would prevent it from staining the surrounding paper, revealing the counterfeiter’s work. He also advised that the original seal be “anointed with oil” to prevent the casting material from sticking to it. The cast, once made, carried a negative image of the seal, which could then be used to cast a new seal from wax. When time was of the essence, a counterfeiter’s choice of casting material was all-important. Nothing was so likely to put the wind up conspirators as a letter taking 12 days to reach its recipients when it ought to have been there in four. Excessive delay in delivery of a letter was a tell-tale indicator of possible interception. To avoid such revealing delays, Arthur Gregory aimed to formulate a casting compound that dried at speed and to a metallic hardness – with unfortunate consequences. In February 1586, while working to perfect his ‘sealing metal’, he wrote to Walsingham: “I prepared a singular piece of the usual metal to show the same to your Lordship, but a sudden swelling in one of my eyes did prevent me.” A decade later, he connected his activities with recent afflictions: “With the making of metal this last night I have gotten an unsteadiness in my hand which will not leave me for a few days.” Though it’s impossible to be sure – Gregory failed to leave behind a recipe book for posterity – it seems likely that the formula he worked to perfect was inspired by della Porta, who used toxic ingredients such as ceruse (white lead), verdigris (copper carbonate) and quicksilver (mercury), any one of which might have caused Gregory’s symptoms. The General Post Office opens for business As well as counterfeiting seals, intelligence agents like Gregory also sought to master the imitation of handwriting and particular letterlocking styles, translation, cryptanalysis and myriad other tasks. During the time of Walsingham and the Cecils, intelligence operatives worked on an ad-hoc basis – and often alone. Their efforts sometimes delivered tangible results – for example, foiling the Babington Plot of 1586, a scheme to assassinate Elizabeth I and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. Read more | Alternate history: what if the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I had succeeded? But the lack of a centralised and resourced surveillance system could allow conspiracies to blossom unchecked. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, the nature of intelligence gathering changed. Oliver Cromwell, ruling as Lord Protector from 1653, was aware that the British Isles was shot through with supporters of Charles Stuart, son of the executed king. So he created a system of surveillance with the aim of controlling the primary method of communicating information over distance: the letter. In 1655, Cromwell installed his secretary of state and head of intelligence, John Thurloe, as postmaster general of a new institution, the General Post Office. His reasoning became clear in 1657, when An Act for Setling the Postage of England, Scotland and Ireland stated that the founding of “one general Post Office” would allow the Commonwealth to “discover and prevent many dangerous, and wicked designs… the intelligence whereof cannot well be communicated, but by letter”. Cromwell’s Post Office, then, was created not only to deliver letters but to intercept them. Precursor to the Post Office The idea of using a postal monopoly for the comprehensive surveillance of communication was nothing new. In the 1630s, Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis, was described as “a troublesome busy Woeman, [who] will open letters, [and] hath counterfait seales of publicque Ministers”. Alexandrine’s family held the monopoly on postal services throughout the Holy Roman Empire – in other words, most of western Europe. Between 1628 and 1646, while she minded the family business until her young son came of age, she developed a system by which letters were methodically opened and inspected for valuable information before being resealed and sent on their way, their recipients (generally) none the wiser. The information was then sold to the highest bidder. Alexandrine’s operatives worked in a back room of what we would now call a post office. Similarly secreted offices known as cabinets noir (‘black chambers’) later popped up in Paris and Vienna. The interception of letters was not uncontroversial. When Stuart diplomat and art broker Balthazar Gerbier realised that someone in Alexandrine’s office was opening and reading his letters, he complained of the “violation of his sacred letter-packets”. And in 1642, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Charles I’s secretary of state, argued that the opening of private mail was “a violation of the law of nature that no qualification by office could justify a single person in the trespass”. Inside the Black Chamber For Cromwell, however, the needs of the state justified riding roughshod over private delicacy. His postmaster general, John Thurloe, set up his Black Chamber in the ‘Queen’s Closet’ of the palace of Whitehall, London. In this room, decorated with gold leaf, his men processed all of the official mail sent into and out of the capital, as well as that between England and the continent. The Black Chamber aimed to provide continuous surveillance, and employed several operatives on what was effectively a production line that sought to systematically interrogate suspect letters. The work was conceptually simple but in practice complex, demanding and time-consuming. Read more | The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell The volume of post was too large for everything to be opened, so operatives concentrated efforts on letters for which addressees, recipients, handwriting or seals were already on their watch list. Once identified, these were opened and read, and any suspect contents copied, translated, deciphered or decoded. They were then resealed and sent on to their recipients to avoid spooking any conspirators before enough evidence had been gathered to catch them all. How to elude prying eyes in the Black Chamber Many of the intercepted missives were protected by clever alphabet and word-substitution systems If you needed to send a secret message in a letter that might well be intercepted and read by others, how might you protect that message? One way was by using ciphers or codes. At its simplest, a cipher is a system in which the individual letters are replaced by other letters, numerals or symbols, producing what is known as a substitution alphabet: ‘a’ might, for instance, be written as /, ‘b’ as 7, and so on. Such ciphers are relatively easy to crack using frequency analysis – that is, by counting characters. Because ‘e’ is the most frequently used letter in English, for example, whichever letter, numeral or symbol appears most often in the cipher text is very likely to represent this vowel. Simple substitution ciphers quickly reveal their secrets when interrogated using frequency analysis and a little pattern recognition. Several techniques could be employed to make cracking substitution ciphers more difficult and, most importantly, more time-consuming. But another approach was also used: codes. In a code, each word is replaced by a letter, numeral or symbol. A list of these, known as a ‘nomenclator’, might include names, titles, objects, syllables and common words. So King might be represented by 1, Queen = 2, Paris = 12, ship = 25, therefore = 42. Sender and recipient would work from the same plan, known as a ‘key’, which would contain one or more substitution alphabets, and a nomenclator with anything from 10 to 1,000 entries. These nomenclators were created to frustrate cryptanalytical techniques such as frequency analysis. This sparked a neverending battle for supremacy between cryptographers and cryptanalysts. The best ciphers and codes were easy to decrypt if you had the cipher key, but very difficult to crack if you did not. Getting the balance right could be tricky. While imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight in 1648, Charles I bemoaned the problems created by overdoing things. “Ther is so much in Cypher from K: [aka Lady d’Aubigny] that I doe not thinke fitt to stay this Packet upon the decyphering of them,” he wrote, “because it will cost more then a dayes worke.” By the time of the Restoration, Thurloe had, understandably, made his exit, but the Black Chamber itself remained as part of the fabric of government. By then, its operatives were virtually civil servants. The regime may have changed, but two of the more skilled employees, Isaac Dorislaus and Samuel Morland, remained in office to serve the new monarch, Charles II. (This is perhaps all the more surprising when you consider that Dorislaus’s father had been listed as one of the regicides, accused of involvement in the sentencing and execution of Charles I, and had been murdered by royalists in May 1649.) Lost secrets of Charles II's counter-espionage Morland, a natural entrepreneur in the ‘dangerous trade’, was more than happy to boast of his own victories – presumably safe in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be contradicted – especially when lobbying for cash from the restored king. He claimed that he had saved Charles’s life through the “dexterous opening and Sealing up of one letter Sealed carefully with a Wafer”, and that “by this Art of opening letters & Seals, and copying out dispatches in a moments time &c. were very great services done to King Charles 2”. Morland was something of a polymath. A keen inventor, he not-so-quietly took over the role of early modern Q earlier filled by Arthur Gregory. In 1664, he was granted an audience with Charles II, during which he demonstrated a series of “models in little of several engines and utensils” he had designed to help automate the counterfeiting skills on which the Black Chamber relied. Finding it impossible to distinguish counterfeits from the original letters, the king ordered that Morland’s methods be put into practice. Like Bletchley Park, the 17th-century Black Chamber drew together an array of talented counter-espionage experts and supported them with cutting-edge technologies. Unlike Bletchley, however, neither the Black Chamber nor any of its devices survived to be investigated further. When writing his memoirs in 1689, Morland recounted how another of his innovations, a machine that could copy entire documents in mere minutes, was used “at the General Post Office until at the Fire of London the apparatus was destroyed and was not set up again”. Perhaps it’s apt that this covert unit, and the tools it used to such effect in counterespionage, effectively vanished – virtually without trace. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University. Pete Langman is a writer and academic. They are the authors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press, 2024)
How to write a love letter: 6 tips from the historical figures who did it best
From Zelda Fitzgerald’s poetic professions to Prince Albert’s “promises of unchanging love and devotion”, find inspiration for a love letter that will warrant its own place in the history books…
When it comes to professing the heart’s most secret desires, there are few more traditional ways of expressing passion than the love letter. Much like the nature of love itself, the love letter's origins are murky indeed. There are references to amorous missives stretching back through the centuries, from the 5,000-year-old Bhagavatha Purana of Indian literature, through to an 8th-century BC Babylonian inscription and a poem on a c3,500 BC Sumerian tablet. One of the best known is arguably the Song of Solomon, regarded as the most romantic book in the Bible with its soft, sensual language. Read more | In their own words: 6 of history’s most fascinating letters What we can say for certain, is that from these early examples sprang a written art which has been treasured for centuries since. In a world transformed by the digital age, writing a letter to a loved one has never been quite so romantic. With that in mind, here is some inspiration to help you from figures in history, so you can craft a love letter that will warrant its own place in the history books… How to begin a love letter How do I love thee? Let me… Wait, what if I can’t count the ways? Struggling to begin your love letter? The predicament of loving someone so much that you can’t describe it is summarised no better than in Jane Austen’s Emma. “If I loved you less,” Mr Knightley professes to the eponymous character, “I might be able to talk about it more.” On the podcast | Historical literature podcast episodes This issue transcends fiction. It’s even been experienced by a US President – George Herbert Walker Bush. Whilst stationed overseas as a Navy pilot during the Second World War, he wrote many letters to his wife-to-be, Barbara. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/02/GettyImages-949564632-468c1c9-e1675869011813.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="US President George HW Bush and Lady Barbara Bush on the South Lawn of the White House, Washington DC, October 23, 1992." title="US President George HW Bush and Lady Barbara Bush on the South Lawn of the White House, Washington DC, October 23, 1992." /> Most of these were lost, but one of the few letters that did survive which shows that when words fail you, it can be better to simply say so: “This should be a very easy letter to write – words should come easily and in short it should be simple for me to tell you how desperately happy I was to open the paper and see the announcement of our engagement, but somehow I can’t possibly say all in a letter I should like to. I love you, precious, with all my heart and to know that you love me means my life. How often I have thought about the immeasurable joy that will be ours some day. How lucky our children will be to have a mother like you…” Confront a long-distance relationship Are you far away from a loved one? You’re not the only one to have experienced the woes that come with long distance. Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda is often remembered for its turbulent nature, though it wasn’t always so. Their earlier days together were filled with adoration, and they struggled greatly when apart. This happiness sadly ended when Zelda was admitted to the Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Switzerland for serious mental ill health. At this time, Fitzgerald was contending with alcohol addiction, and the pair’s afflictions made their written exchanges far more scornful. However, in viewing their earlier letters, we catch a glimpse of a relationship that was joyful: “Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and nowhere else in the world?” Fitzgerald pens. “Your photograph is all I have,” Zelda replies, “it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.” Read more | A history of Valentine's Day celebrations – from fertility festivals to the first cards Zelda wrote other missives, which provide warm details of her feelings towards Fitzgerald: “I look down the tracks and see you coming – and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me – Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It’s like begging for mercy of a storm or killing Beauty or growing old, without you. I want to kiss you so – and in the back where your dear hair starts and your chest – I love you – and I can’t tell you how much – To think that I’ll die without your knowing – Goofo, you’ve got to try to feel how much I do – how inanimate I am when you’re gone – I can’t even hate these damnable people – Nobodys got any right to live but us – and they’re dirtying up our world and I can’t hate them because I want you so – Come Quick – Come Quick to me – I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper – if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me – I still would want you I know – Lover, Lover, Darling – Your Wife.” And it wasn’t only creatives who recorded the anguish of missing loved ones on paper. Napoleon Bonaparte, whilst claiming his place in history as a ruthless military leader, appears to have been far more tender in his personal life. In a letter he wrote to his first wife, Joséphine, translated from French by Henry Foljambe Hall in 1901, he says: “Ever since I left you, I have been sad. I am only happy when by your side. Ceaselessly I recall your kisses, your tears, your enchanting jealousy; and the charms of the incomparable Joséphine keep constantly alight a bright and burning flame in my heart and senses. When, free from every worry, from all business, shall I spend all my moments by your side, to have nothing to do but to love you, and to prove it to you? I shall send your horse, but I am hoping that you will soon be able to rejoin me. I thought I loved you some days ago; but, since I saw you, I feel that I love you even a thousand times more.” Unearth your poetic side British writer Oscar Wilde fell hard for Oxford undergraduate Lord Alfred Douglas in June 1891, who he was introduced to by a friend, Lionel Johnson. Wilde and ‘Bosie’, as he referred to him, were very different, though. Whilst Wilde was non-confrontational, Douglas was fierier. But with fire came passion, a presence made clear by the writers in their letters: “My Own Boy “Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first. “Always, with undying love, “Yours, Oscar” In HM Prison Reading, following his sentence, Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Douglas, which became known as De Profundis (From the Depths). In the first half of the letter, he discusses the two’s relationship and, in the second, a spiritual awakening he experienced during his imprisonment. Read more | Oscar Wilde's tragic end His exchanges with Douglas prove that there are no limitations when writing a letter to a loved one, especially for the more poetic amongst us. Reflect on the past Musicians Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash were married for over 30 years. The two met when still married to other people, a difficult situation that inspired June’s cowriting of the song Ring of Fire with Merle Kilgore. During their marriage, the couple overcame the turbulence fame, and life, can often bring – including Johnny’s addictions to drugs and alcohol. Their letters show the devotion that allowed them to survive the difficulties they faced. In a letter, Johnny reflects on their past: “Happy Birthday Princess, “We get old and get used to each other. We think alike. “We read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted. “But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me.” Make promises for the future King Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn might have been severed, quite literally, but his written professions prior to their union were not short of promises. Anne was not satisfied with being a mistress of the Tudor king; she wanted to be his wife. Read more | 5 British castles with romantic histories And, for the woman he dissolved the Catholic church for, it might come as a surprise to discover that Henry was willing to do plenty more: “But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only. I beseech you to give an entire answer to this my rude letter, that I may know on what and how far I may depend. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart. No more, for fear of tiring you.” How to end a love letter Look no further than Prince Albert’s sign off… The marriage between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert has been reinvented over and over on the screen. The couple’s relationship is said to have been bursting with passion, and Victoria delivered nine children during their time together. Before this union was cut tragically short by Albert’s death, plunging Victoria into life-long mourning, their letters demonstrate the love they shared for each other: “Dearest deeply loved Victoria, I need not tell you that since we left, all my thoughts have been with you at Windsor, and that your image fills my whole soul. Even in my dreams I never imagined that I should find so much love on earth. How that moment shines for me still when I was close to you, with your hand in mine. Those days flew by so quickly, but our separation will fly equally so. Ernest wishes me to say a thousand nice things to you. With promises of unchanging love and devotion, your ever true Albert.”
In their own words: 6 of history’s most fascinating letters
From a scribbled warning about the Gunpowder Plot to a typed letter condemning the lack of lifeboats on the Titanic, the National Archives holds many of the most significant letters ever written. Here, we share extracts from six such letters, to shine a spotlight on history's key events…
Containing more than 80 letters, postcards and telegraphs written by historical figures including Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine Howard, Karl Marx and Winston Churchill, In Their Own Words: Letters From History (first published in 2016) recaptures a lost world in which correspondence was king. Drawing on more than 200 kilometres of records from the National Archives, the collection reflects on major historical events and developments, including the declaration of the Second World War, the death of Antarctic explorer Captain Oates, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the trial of Nelson Mandela. Here we bring you extracts from the book highlighting six of its most intriguing letters… Discovering Tutankhamun’s Tomb, 1924 ‘Would it not be a gracious, a kindly thing and a very diplomatic thing to do for the British Government and the Egyptian Government,’ American citizen G W Chance wrote to the Foreign Office on 7 January 1924, ‘to salute with Military honors, the remains and tomb of one of Egypt’s Rulers just discovered’. The Eastern Department of the Foreign Office dismissed the suggestion with a casual ‘external evidence would point out to his being the possessor of a weak mind,’ but the American’s idea was actually quite in line with the spirit of his time. Tutankhamun: who’s afraid of the pharaoh’s curse? What killed Tutankhamun? A brief history of the afterlife It all started in the Valley of the Kings, on the West Bank of the Nile in the south of Egypt. The Valley, which pharaohs chose as their place of eternity from the 16th century BC, is a fascinating place; among the most desolate, scorching hot spots on the planet, it is also one of the most truly magical. British archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, were given permission to dig in the Valley of the Kings in 1915. They went from one frustrating, fruitless season to the other until, on 4 November 1922, they discovered the entrance of a tomb with intact seals – that of 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Listen | Simon Sebag Montefiore describes some of history’s most fascinating letters, from Mark Antony’s thoughts on Cleopatra to a message Gandhi sent to Hitler It would take Howard Carter and his team about 10 years to excavate the tomb properly, partly because after the discovery of the first virtually intact tomb of the Valley, a wave of Tutmania swept the entire planet, firing the imagination of the world. Heaps of gold, a boy king, mysterious deaths... The story of King Tut (which became his affectionate nickname) was perfect to put the grim years of the First World War behind for the general public. It was also perfect to become the focus of esoteric theories and very strange suggestions such as the one made by Chance. ‘The reverence that all people of the world have for the abiding places of the dead, may be sneered at by some, but this sentiment is not to be brushed lightly aside,’ Chance wrote, adding: ‘Shakespeare felt its possible lack, when he protected his last resting place by a curse on him who moved his bones.’ Indeed, many of the numerous visitors the archaeologists had to contend with were animated by a decidedly morbid curiosity fuelled by the increasingly strong rumours of an ancient curse leading to the death of anyone getting too close to the young pharaoh. Now, as disappointing as it may sound, curses were, at best, infrequent in Ancient Egypt; Lord Carnarvon did die on 5 April 1923 in Cairo (the story says that the lights flickered, and that his hound in Highclere Castle howled at the precise moment of his death), but the medical report attested his unfortunate demise was due to septicaemia following an insect bite rather than to an ancient spell cast by a long-dead king. Besides, one cannot help but notice that Carter died in 1939, 17 years after disturbing Tut’s rest. Everyone, however, is sensitive to the fantastic, and Chance, who thought it was vital to ‘think a little seriously of these things, instead of considering the discoveries recently made in Egypt only as a source of cheap jokes and shallow witticisms,’ shouldn’t be blamed too much. ‘While some may say that it is a far cry from that generation to that of Ancient Egypt,’ as he put it, Tutankhamun is still one of the most widely known pharaohs in the world; his famous solid gold death mask adorns many cheap T-shirts, pens and snow globes. He has truly achieved eternity – albeit a tacky one. Braveheart: A letter from the King of France regarding William Wallace, 1300 The name William Wallace conjures up an image of a swaggering Scottish hero, ready for battle. But Wallace was also a diplomat. In the letter, just three lines long, the King of France, Philip IV, tells his agents at the court of the Pope in Rome to assist ‘William le Walois of Scotland, knight’, in the business that he has to carry out. This raises the tantalising possibility that this tiny letter was in Wallace’s personal possession more than 700 years ago. William Wallace was born into a noble Scottish family in the later 13th century. During his childhood, the Scottish kingdom was ruled, largely peacefully, by Alexander III. But at his death in 1286 the sole heir was his infant granddaughter, Margaret, daughter of the King of Norway. Known as the ‘Maid of Norway’ she died on her journey from Norway to Scotland in 1290, leaving no clear candidate for the succession. The future of Scotland was thrown into confusion as several men from elite families laid claim to the kingship. Edward I of England took advantage of the Scottish situation to assert ever-greater claims to overlordship in the kingdom until, in 1296, he finally invaded. The early stages of the campaign were a great success, and the Scottish coronation stone, the symbol of its independent kingship, was removed from Scone and taken to Westminster Abbey. William Wallace: who was the Scottish rebel who defied Edward I? Edward I: man of principle or grasping opportunist? 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history Edward I then turned his attention to France. But all was not over in Scotland. Unrest spread in early 1297 and William Wallace emerged from the shadows of history. In May, he killed William Heselrig, the English sheriff of Lanark, and the symbol of English authority in the region. The killing galvanised the Scots – many more joined the fight against the English, and Wallace became the leader of a full-scale rebellion. He joined forces with another rebel, Andrew Murray, and together they led a Scottish force against the English army at Stirling Bridge in September 1297. The English resistance was superior in numbers and led by an experienced warrior, John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey and Edward I’s lieutenant in Scotland. The two armies faced each other from opposite sides of the Forth, separated by a narrow bridge. The Scottish army waited, holding its nerve, until the English forces began to cross the bridge. When enough of the army had crossed, the Scottish charged down, surrounded this vanguard, and took control of the end of the bridge, preventing reinforcements from arriving. The English troops who had crossed the bridge were slaughtered or drowned in the Forth; those who had not beat a hasty retreat, led by de Warenne. Wallace’s triumph at Stirling Bridge cemented his reputation, and the Scottish rebels under his leadership went from strength to strength, driving the English out of Scotland. He led a large-scale raiding party into England in late 1297, plundering and laying waste to tracts of the northern counties. Documents of the time referred to him as the ‘guardian of Scotland’. To counter the rebels, in the summer of 1298 Edward I led an army into Scotland. Wallace was keen to avoid pitched battle, but Edward was determined to take the fight to the Scots and in July tracked the Scottish army to Falkirk where the strength and tactics of Edward’s forces won the day and Wallace left the field defeated.Perhaps because of this defeat, Wallace resigned the guardianship of Scotland, but continued to argue for his country’s independence from England, pursuing his aims through diplomacy. By the end of 1299, Wallace was in France, trying to persuade Philip IV to support the Scots against Edward. France and Scotland were old allies, and in November 1300 the French king wrote this letter. It is likely that it was carried by Wallace who perhaps travelled with it to Rome to present the Scottish case against the claims of Edward I. In early 1301 a Scottish delegation was in Rome doing just that, although we cannot say for certain that Wallace was among this group. By 1303 Wallace was back in Scotland taking a leading role in the military campaign against Edward I. The English King was determined to capture this symbol of Scottish independence, and Wallace was finally taken prisoner in Glasgow in August 1305. He was taken to London and tried at Westminster for treason. Found guilty, he was hanged, disembowelled and cut into quarters. His head was displayed on London Bridge, and four parts of his body were distributed to four different towns in Scotland. Payments to the men who conveyed these quarters were coolly noted in the records of Edward I’s Exchequer. "Philip by the grace of God King of the French to our loved and faithful our agents appointed to the Roman Court, greetings and love. We command/ you to request the Supreme Pontiff to consider with favour our beloved William le Walois [Wallace] of Scotland, knight/ in those things which he has to transact with him. Given at Pierrefonds on Monday after the feast of All Saints. 7 November 1300. Fourth letter of the King of France" Class antagonism onboard the Titanic, 1912 When Titanic sank in the early hours of Monday 15 April 1912, many questions were raised. It was one of the largest, most luxurious ships in the world, boasting better facilities than any other liner, and yet it sank on its maiden voyage when it collided with an iceberg. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Why had so few passengers been saved? And why did first-class passengers have a better chance of survival than those travelling in second and third class? More than 1,500 passengers and crew had died in the freezing ocean, and relatives, friends and onlookers alike were looking for answers in the wake of the tragedy. Among those concerned was Benn Tillett, the author of this letter. A famous trade union leader, he was hugely critical of the allegedly ‘vicious class antagonism’ that had led to the disproportionate loss of life among third-class passengers. Had the officers loading the life rafts deemed richer passengers more important than poorer ones? Benn Tillett clearly believed this to be the case. And the survival figures do show that the more a passenger had paid for his ticket, the greater his chance of survival. Indeed, fewer than 25 per cent of all third class passengers survived. Whether these figures can be attributed solely to ‘class antagonism’ and a ‘callous disregard of human life’ is debatable, however. Practical factors were at play too. In designing the ship, the architects had ensured that passengers of different classes would not mix, and to this end certain stairways were barred off with metal gateways. In theory, these gateways could be unlocked by a key-holding crew member. In practice, on the night disaster struck, there were no staff available to open the gateways, and as a result, hundreds of passengers were trapped below deck and drowned as water gushed in. Since the third class accommodation was furthest from the boat deck, in many ways this group had the least chance of survival even before class differences were considered. Tillett’s letter outlines some of the key reasons why more lives weren’t saved, and petitions the Marine Department to introduce more rigorous safety regulations in future. He complained that higher-class passengers were given priority in the lifeboats, which is definitely true, but more indicative that the loading of the lifeboats in general was completely mismanaged. The first raft launched, for example, took just 28 people, even though it had the capacity for 65. The crux of the issue, however, as Tillett explains, was simply the lack of sufficient lifeboats. Though it had been recommended to the designers that the Titanic should have 64 such vessels, the number was reduced to just 20 in order to keep the decks clear and to give the ship a more streamlined appearance. As a result, the Titanic ended up with lifeboats that could take only a third of the ship’s capacity. Not only this, but ships passing through iceberg-infested waters normally slowed down or stopped entirely when travelling at night. The Titanic’s crew had received warnings about icebergs from other nearby ships but, in spite of this, carried on at full tilt – partly to show what a marvellously fast vessel she was. Consequently, the impact on collision with the iceberg was much more severe than it might have been. Mere weeks after the supposedly ‘unsinkable’ Titanic had been launched, people like Tillett understandably emphasised the need for safety over speed, and the importance of sufficient lifeboats over aesthetic considerations. By the end of April 1912, the draw of being the first ship to have a heated swimming pool and the luxury of 11-course dinners in first class seemed somewhat less appealing if the ship’s crew could not safeguard the lives of its passengers. A warning about the Gunpowder Plot, 1605 This letter was sent to the Catholic Lord Monteagle, on 26 October 1605. The writer warned him to avoid the state opening of Parliament due in a few days’ time and remain at his estate for the purposes of safety. Despite being instructed not to ignore the warning contained in the letter and to burn the evidence, Lord Monteagle gave the letter directly to the Privy Council and King James I in Whitehall. His actions did not prevent the plotters from going ahead with their plan. What if the gunpowder plot had succeeded? Why the gunpowder plot went up in smoke During the reign of Elizabeth I, it was extremely difficult for Catholics to practise their religion owing to harsh fines and the risk of imprisonment. Catholic priests were banned and arrested by government spies. When James I of England and James IV of Scotland ascended the throne they hoped for greater freedom to practise their faith, but unfortunately this did not happen. In 1605, a group of discontented Catholic noblemen led by Robert Catesby – including John Wright, Thomas Wintour, Thomas Percy, Guy Fawkes, Robert Keyes, Thomas Bates, Robert Wintour, Christopher Wright, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham – decided to blow up the King and Parliament. After the explosion, the group planned to lead an uprising in the Midlands. They would kidnap Princess Elizabeth, James’s young daughter, at Coombe Abbey with the intention of using her as a figurehead through whom they could rule the country and restore the rights of Catholics. However, their explosives expert, a mercenary called ‘John Johnson’ (also known as Guy Fawkes) was disturbed in the cellar below the Houses of Parliament with a large quantity of gunpowder. Listen | Hannah Greig and John Cooper explore the story of the Gunpowder Plot The plotters escaped from London. Robert Catesby was killed after a shoot-out at Holbeach House in Staffordshire, where they had gone into hiding. The remaining members of the group were captured and tried at Westminster Hall; eight of them were found guilty and executed by January 1606. The plot increased the popularity of James I, and it became even more difficult for Catholics to practise their religion or participate in civil society. Today it remains a myth that Guy Fawkes was the main plotter, an idea perpetuated by the celebrations which take place every year for Bonfire Night on 5 November. "My lord, out of the love I beare to some of youere frends, I have a care of youre preservacion, therefore I would aduyse you as you tender your life to devise some excuse to shift youer attendance at this parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punishe the wickedness of this tyme, and thinke not slightly of this advertisement, but retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety, for though there be no apparance of anni stir, yet I saye they shall receive a terrible blow this parliament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them this cowncel is not to be contemned because it may do yowe good and can do yowe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt the letter and i hope God will give yowe the grace to mak good use of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe." Letters to the police from ‘Jack the Ripper’, 1888 On 31 August 1888, a woman named Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found dead in London’s East End; her throat was slashed and her body disembowelled. This was the first murder by so-called ‘Jack the Ripper’. Eight days later Jack struck again, and Annie Chapman was discovered in a backyard in Spitalfields. Like Polly, she had had her throat cut and her guts had been removed. Nearly a month after Polly’s death, on 29 September, a letter arrived at the Central News Agency, claiming to be from the killer. The writer taunted the police with an early theory that the killer was another wanted man who went by the name of ‘the Leather Apron’. The author went on, boasting how he had evaded capture and ending with a taunt that he was ready to it again and detailing one of the mutilations he would perform. Shortly after this letter came to the police, the murderer claimed two further victims. The body of Elizabeth Stride, a tall woman known as ‘Long Liz’, was found in Berner Street. Just 45 minutes later, a second body was found close by in Mitre Square. The body of Catherine Eddowes had been severely maimed and part of her innards had again been removed. Your guide to Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story” The very next day, the police received another ‘Ripper note’. This time it was smeared with blood: ‘I was not [kidding] dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky work tomorrow double event this time number 1 squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off had not time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again. Jack the Ripper.’ Believing that both the letters were written by the serial killer, the police decided to publish them, in the hope that someone might come forward and identify the handwriting. To this end, the letters were printed in the press. However, instead of producing any helpful information, the publication of these letters led to a huge stream of letters from would-be Jack the Rippers, containing crude, threatening messages, stating their intention to murder again. Listen | Hallie Rubenhold discusses the little-known life stories of Jack the Ripper’s five victims Most of the copycat letters were signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ and they borrowed the language of the original two – repeating the use of ‘Boss’, and ‘ha ha’, as well as the threats to mutilate the bodies of their future victims. The quality of the writing in the letters varies hugely: some pay heed to grammatical rules and the spelling is accurate, others are littered with spelling mistakes; some are legible, others are not. One further murder, of Mary Jane Kelly, five weeks later on 9 November, inspired a new spate of letters from copycat Jack the Rippers, but this stream of correspondence eventually slowed to a trickle. It is mystifying to consider why so many people wrote to the police pretending to be the notorious mass murderer. What motivated them to pen these appalling letters? Perhaps surprisingly, given Jack the Ripper’s purported hatred of prostitutes, the only two copycats who were caught were both women: one from Bradford, the other from South Wales. Obviously it’s possible that the first two letters were written by the murderer himself, but they also might have been written by a well-informed journalist in the hope of attracting attention to the story. This latter scenario seemed more plausible to the police, and they believed that a journalist called Tom Billing was the author. The huge volume of Ripper letters, as well as their evidently varied styles and levels of literacy, suggests that a good number of people were assuming the Jack the Ripper persona on paper. But what made them want to be associated with such brutal and violent crimes remains a mystery. "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and " [sic] quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last one was I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little game. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope. Ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladies ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work and give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly, Jack the Ripper. Don’t mind me giving the trade name." The return of Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains to France, 1840 Napoleon Bonaparte. The name alone was enough to send a shiver down the spine of any true born Englishman. One of the greatest military commanders in history, he almost single-handedly brought Europe under French hegemony and represented one of the most dangerous enemies Britain ever had to face. This letter, written nearly 20 years after Bonaparte’s death, records a little-known postscript to these momentous events and helps to signify a burying of the hatchet between Europe’s two greatest powers. For almost two decades Napoleon Bonaparte was a central figure in one of the most turbulent periods of European history. He was hugely influential in providing the military success that prevented the French Revolution from being crushed and exported the revolutionary ideals to the rest of Europe. In time Napoleon became increasingly powerful, taking the position of First Consul and eventually Emperor of the French. There were a series of European coalitions put together in opposition to the aggressive policies of France, and although Napoleon was able to defeat these he was never able to attack his most persistent enemy, Britain. In the end it was attempts to enforce economic warfare against Britain that led to Napoleon’s downfall through his ill-fated invasion of Russia. He was initially exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, but after his return and eventual defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo he was sent to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena. Napoleon Bonaparte: the rise and fall of a dictator What killed Napoleon Bonaparte? Lord Palmerston: the people’s champion Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821 and had recorded in his will that he wished his remains to be returned to Paris. For a number of years the French government resisted calls for this to take place because they were worried about the impact of the mass outpouring of public support which would naturally accompany any such move. By 1840 the French government felt that the nationalist fervour which would be unleashed by the return of Napoleon’s remains would be beneficial to them politically, and so in May they sent a request to the British government. This letter is a draft, preserved in the records of the British Foreign Office, of the response of Lord Palmerston to the French desire to ‘remove from St Helena to France the Remains of Napoleon Buonaparte’. He wrote that ‘H. M. Gov[enmen]t will with great pleasure accede to this request.’ As a result of this, the French government, with much fanfare, sent a warship to St Helena to collect Napoleon’s remains. These were then returned to Paris where, in front of a vast Parisian crowd, they were reinterred at Les Invalides on 15 December 1840. Draft Lord Granville Foreign Office 9 May 1840 My Lord, HM. Govt having taken into consideration the Request made by the Govt of France for permission to remove from St Helena to France the Remains of Napoleon Buonaparte, your Exly is instructed to assure Monsr Thiers that HM Govt will with great pleasure accede to this Request. HM. Govt hope that the readiness with which this answer is given, will be looked up in France as a Proof of the Desire of HM Govt to extinguish every Remnant of those national animosities which during the life of the Emperor arrayed the French and English People in arms against each other; and HM. Govt trust that if any such Feelings still continue anywhere to exist, they may be buried in the Grave to which these Remains are about to be consigned. HM. Govt will concert with that of France the arrangements necessary for carrying this Removal into effect. I am Sir. (signed) Palmerston These extracts were first published by HistoryExtra in 2016, and taken from In Their Own Words: Letters From History. The book, published by Bloomsbury, is authored by a team of 24 archivists, each with a particular area of specialism. You can find out more about the National Archives here
The letters that reveal Horatio Nelson’s secrets
He was Britain's greatest naval hero, famed for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars – most famously the battle of Trafalgar, at which he was killed. Now, a BBC Two series explores Nelson’s letters, which reveal how he skilfully used PR to advance his career, and how his passionate love affair with Emma Hamilton changed his life forever This article was first published in March 2015
Here, writing for History Extra, the director of Nelson: In His Own Words, explores some of Nelson’s most revealing writings… “Sir, The ever to be lamented Death of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, who, in the late conflict with the enemy, fell in the hour of victory… I have not only to lament in common with the British Navy, and the British Nation, in the fall of the commander-in-chief, the loss of a Hero whose name will be immortal and his memory ever dear to his country; but my heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend…” Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood Cuthbert Collingwood, Horatio Nelson’s second-in-command at Trafalgar, could not have caught the mood better in his despatch on the death of his boss: solemn mortification mixed with lip-quivering idealisation. A few weeks later, London expressed those same sentiments as Nelson’s coffin made its stately way to St Paul’s. It was said that huge crowds turned out to watch; the silence broken only by plaintive wails of grief. We wouldn’t witness that again until the funeral cortege of Diana, Princess of Wales made its way to Westminster Abbey, nearly 200 years later. Some have argued this was the end that Nelson had always envisioned for himself: the navy’s most successful commander, adored by his men, struck down in his finest hour defending his country from her most hated foe, buried in the church that symbolised Britain’s mercantilist power. From his early days in the navy, Nelson had always been ambitious. “I wish to be an Admiral and in command of the English fleet. I should very soon either do much or be ruined,” he wrote to his new wife, Fanny, when he was serving as a young lieutenant in Italy. It was entirely in keeping that Nelson would exhibit such barefaced ambition in a letter; writing to his superiors, his friends, brother officers and family was not just a means of communicating with the outside world (imagine, for a moment, Nelson’s blockade of the French fleet: holed up in his cabin on HMS Victory, with only his junior officers for company and not setting foot on dry land for nearly two years), it was his way of expressing his private and innermost feelings. And hidden in all his correspondence is a far more complex man than the dash-and-glory hero that Collingwood and so many Victorians were so keen to immortalise. In the ‘rough and tumble’ politics of Britain’s 18th-century navy, opportunities for promotion did not come easily. Years could go by without seeing battle action –the best means for a young officer to show off his tactical nous. Glory in battle, Nelson understood, led to promotion: “If it be a sin to covet glory,” he wrote to Fanny [and to Emma, Lady Hamilton in 1800], quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V, “I am the most offending soul alive.” But even though his early career was punctuated by seamanship that showed his extraordinary ability to lead men as well as display intense physical bravery – acts he was never slow to report to the Admiralty – by 1797 Nelson was frustrated that his talents were not being properly recognized by his peers. At the victorious battle of Cape St Vincent, Nelson had successfully boarded and captured two vastly superior Spanish men-of-war, but was flabbergasted to read there was no mention of his bravery in the report sent to the Admiralty by Admiral John Jervis. So he wrote his own report, colourfully bringing to life his own exploits, and sent it to William Locker in Britain, who in turn sent it to The Sun newspaper. His actions reveal Nelson’s profoundly discontented nature: happiness, for the young officer, was only defined by approval and recognition from others. Nelson’s own report sealed his public reputation as a hero, but he continued to use his letters to ‘spin’ his career. His defeat at Tenerife, which saw the loss of many of his men and his own right arm, could have been career-ending. After telling Admiral Jervis of his failure, he goes on to describe what he imagines the professional consequences will be: “When I leave your command, I become dead to the World.” The letter ends with: “You will excuse my scrawl, considering it is my first attempt...”– the effort of trying to write with his left hand for the first time seemingly too great to continue. Nelson could quite easily have dictated the letter to a secretary, but his painfully clumsy handwriting sends a clear message to Jervis: how can you possibly terminate the career of a man who writes with such candour and bravery? His marriage to Fanny had left Nelson emotionally stunted, but his scandalous affair with Emma Hamilton would change him. Nelson, relatively late in life, discovered emotional intimacy and great sex. His letters to Emma were thick with pulsing eroticism: “Last night I did nothing but dream of you altho’ I woke 20 times in the night. In one of my dreams I thought I was at a large table. You was not present, sitting between a Princess who I detest and another, they both tried to seduce me and the first wanted to take those liberties with me which no woman in this world but yourself ever did, the consequence was I knocked her down and in the moment of bustle you came in and taking me in your embrace wispered I love nothing but you my Nelson. I kissed you fervently and we enjoy’d the height of love.” And the product of their affair – a daughter named Horatia – would change Nelson profoundly. His letters to Emma from HMS Victory are suffused with yearning to be home, pottering around the garden, fixing the guttering of their house in Merton. Nelson, the warrior and single-minded scourge of the French, had become Suburban Man, fussing over the bills, nagging Emma to look after Horatia. “My dearest Emma, I would not have you lay out more than is necessary at Merton. The rooms and the new entrance will take a good deal of money. I also beg, as my dear Horatia is to be at Merton, that a strong netting, about three feet high, may be placed around the river that the little thing may not tumble in and then you may have ducks again in it. I shall be very anxious until I know this is done.” As I read deeper into his letters and longer into his life, I found his writings profoundly moving. For the first time, Nelson was reaching for contentedness that wasn’t defined by military achievements. Happiness, he had begun to understand, could lie elsewhere: among his family and, more than he imagined was possible, with his daughter. As his fleet rounded Cape Trafalgar, Nelson wrote to Horatia: “My dearest angel, I was made happy by the receiving of your letter of September 19th and I rejoice to hear that you are so very good a Girl. I shall be sure of your prayers for my safety, conquest and speedy return to Dear Merton and our Dear good Lady Hamilton. Be a good girl… receive my dearest Horatia the affectionate parental blessing of your father.” Nelson knew his duty was to defeat the French. After that, he could do what he really wanted: go home. David Belton is the director of Nelson: In His Own Words, which aired on BBC Two in March 2015. To find out more, click here.
Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in their own words: 5 fascinating letters from Tudor monarchs
When Henry VII and his successors put quill to paper, they left us a priceless insight into their desires, fears and motivations. Andrea Clarke tells the story of the five Tudor monarchs via their letters and diaries...
Henry VII’s dynastic ambitions The first Tudor king pens a gushing welcome to his son’s wife-to-be, 1501 This missive to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon is one of the only known examples of a letter written in the hand of Henry VII. It appears that the king took great pleasure in writing it, for it presaged an event that, Henry believed, would help secure his grip on the throne – Catherine’s marriage to his son Arthur Tudor. Henry wrote the letter in October 1501 – 16 years after seizing the English crown from the Yorkist king Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Henry’s own Lancastrian claim to the throne was tenuous, and even though he quickly married Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, to unite the rival dynasties of York and Lancaster, a succession of Yorkist plots to unseat him followed. Henry VIII: the boy who would be king Did Henry VIII acknowledge any of his illegitimate children? Catherine of Aragon: Spain’s Virgin queen? In response, the king shrewdly arranged strategic marriages for his children to bolster the new Tudor dynasty by linking it into a network of European royalty. In March 1488, Henry initiated talks with the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, to negotiate an alliance with Spain and the marriage of his eldest son and heir, Prince Arthur, to their youngest daughter, Catherine. The following year, the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Medina del Campo was concluded and Arthur and Catherine, aged two and three, were pledged to be married. Catherine’s departure from Spain was repeatedly delayed by disputes over the payment of her dowry but she eventually set sail for England in September 1501. Henry’s excitement at the news is palpable in his letter. “Madam, [your late arrival] here in our realm is to us so very agreeable that we cannot adequately say or express the great pleasure, joy [and] relief which we feel,” the king gushes. The arrival of a princess from one of the greatest royal houses in Europe to marry his eldest son and heir was a triumphant endorsement of the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. Catherine and Arthur were married on 14 November 1501, but the union was short-lived. Arthur succumbed to the sweating sickness and died in April 1502, leaving Catherine to face an uncertain future in England. Extract: “We cannot adequately express our joy” “Madam, [your late arrival] here in our realm is to us so very agreeable that we cannot adequately say or express the great pleasure, joy, [and] relief which we feel, nor the anticipation of seeing your noble presence, which we have often desired, both for the great graces and virtues which we hear it has pleased [God] to give to your person, and also [for the] mutual amity, confederation, and good alliance between our good cousins the King and Queen of Spain [your] parents and us, which [your presence] will now greatly augment. ” The wedding planner Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII seek news on their marriage negotiations, 1528 This remarkable letter, jointly written by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, provides a fascinating window into the couple’s relationship. In August 1528, Anne and Henry were desperate to be married, and the realisation of this goal depended very much on Wolsey. Henry had become infatuated with Anne some time in 1526 – 17 years into his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon – but Anne had resolutely refused to become his mistress. Tormented by the fact that his marriage to Catherine had yet to produce him a male heir, Henry decided to seek a papal annulment so that he could marry Anne. 11 things you (probably) didn’t know about Anne Boleyn The final days of Anne Boleyn In May 1527, Catherine’s nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII, thus preventing him from granting Henry the annulment that he craved. So the English king turned to Wolsey, his trusted minister and senior churchman. Wolsey persuaded the pope to allow the final decision on the validity of the king’s marriage to be made in England, and to send papal legate Cardinal Campeggio to preside over a legatine court alongside Wolsey. In this letter – requesting news about the progress of Cardinal Campeggio’s journey to England – Anne put pen to paper first, expressing her gratitude to Wolsey and reminding him that she longed to receive good news about the cardinal. “My Lord I do assure y[ou I do long to hear] from you some news of the Legate,” she writes. Anne then managed to persuade Henry, an unenthusiastic letter writer, to add some words of his own – and, no doubt, exert some extra pressure on the hard-pressed Wolsey. Extract: “I pray for good news” “My lord, in my most humblest wise that my heart can think, [I desire you to pardon] me that I am so bold to trouble you with my simple and [rude writing]… My Lord I do assure y[ou I do long to hear] from you some news of the Legate, for I do hope and [pray they] shall be very good, and I am sure that you desire [it as much as I,] and more if it were possible as I know it is not, [and thus remaining] in a steadfast hope I make an end of my letter [written in the hand] of her that is most bound to be. ” Extract: “We trust in your vigilance” “The writer of this letter would not cease till she had [caused me likewise] to set to my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to t[ake it in good part.] … The not hearing of the Legate’s arrival in [France causeth] us somewhat to muse, notwithstanding we trust by your dilig[ence and vigilancy] (with the assistance of Almighty God) shortly to be eased out [of that trouble]. … By your loving so[vereign and] friend. Henr[y R]. ” A death in the family Edward VI records his father’s demise with cool detachment, 1547 The rather scruffy handwriting you see here belongs to Edward VI, documenting in his diary (or ‘chronicle’) the fall-out from his father Henry VIII’s death in 1547. The first page of the young king’s chronicle explains that his uncle, Edward Seymour, rode to the medieval palace of Hertford to take him to his sister Elizabeth’s residence at the palace of Enfield. It was here, writes Edward – referring to himself in the third person – “the death of his father was first showed him, and the same day the death of his father was showed in London”. Edward and Elizabeth are said to have wept in each other’s arms when they were told of their father’s death, but Edward recorded nothing of his personal feelings. What we are left with is his rather detached observation that Henry’s death caused “great lamentation and weeping” in England’s capital city. The rest of Edward’s Chronicle focuses on the political and military events of his reign, revealing that he took a keen interest in the business of government and policy-making. This, and other papers he wrote on finance, trade, state and diplomacy, indicate that – though he became king at nine years old – Edward possessed the talent to become a great ruler. But his reign was one of unfulfilled potential, for Edward contracted tuberculosis and died in 1553, aged 15. Extract: “A great lamentation” “After the death of King Henry the Eighth, his son Edward, Prince of Wales, was come to at Hertford by the Earl of Hertford and Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the Horse, for whom before was made great preparation that he might [be] created Prince of Wales, and afterward was brought to Enfield, where the death of his father was first showed him, and the same day the death of his father was showed in London, where [there] was great lamentation and weeping; and suddenly he [was] proclaimed king. ” Extract: “The people said ‘Yea’” “Afterward, all things being prepared for the coronation, the king, being then but nine years old, passed through the City of London as heretofore hath been used, and came to the palace of Westminster, and the next day came into Westminster Hall, and it was asked [of] the people whether they would have him to be their king, who answered ‘Yea, yea’. ” Siblings at war Princess Mary rails against her brother’s Protestant agenda, c1551 Unlike Henry VIII, whose break with Rome and flirtations with Protestantism had been politically motivated, his son Edward held strong evangelical beliefs and advocated a full-scale Protestant Reformation in England. The evangelical establishment around Edward VI, led by his Uncle Edward Seymour, now Lord Protector Somerset, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, initiated a series of religious reforms aimed at framing the evangelical agenda in law. In doing so they enraged Edward’s devoutly Catholic sister, Mary, who refused to accept the legality of the reformist religious legislation, and provoked her into writing this letter to the lords of the Privy Council. Showing the same spirit and steely resolve as her late mother, Catherine of Aragon, Mary remonstrated with them for breaking the oaths they had sworn to her late father, Henry VIII, and for ignoring his wishes. “It grieveth me I say,” she wrote, “for the love I bear to them, to see both how they break his will, and what usurped power they take upon them.” Mary persisted in having Latin mass celebrated in her household but, in doing so, she misjudged her brother, who by 1551 would no longer tolerate her disobedience. On 28 January, the 13-year-old king informed his sister: “It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty.” Two months later, they had an emotional confrontation at Westminster, but neither Mary’s tears nor her declaration that she was prepared to die for her faith persuaded Edward to relent. For the next two years, the king maintained the ban on the mass in Mary’s private chapels. Extract: “It is against the law of God” “It is no small grief to me to perceive that they whom the king’s majesty, my father (whose soul God pardon) made in this world of nothing in respect of that they be come to now, and at his last end put in trust to see his will performed, whereunto they were all sworn upon a book. It grieveth me I say, for the love I bear to them, to see both how they break his will, and what usurped power they take upon them, in making (as they call it) laws both clean contrary to his proceedings and will, and also against the custom of all Christendom, and (in my conscience) against the law of God and his church, which passeth all the rest. ” Elizabeth I’s words of wisdom The queen offers James VI of Scotland some hard-headed advice, 1603 Following the death of Mary I in 1558, her sister, Elizabeth, ascended the English throne as the last direct heir of the Tudor dynasty. Concerned that the future of the Tudor monarchy depended on the survival of one woman, Elizabeth’s councillors regularly urged her to either marry or to name her successor. But Elizabeth steadfastly refused, famously declaring that choosing a successor would be tantamount to setting “my winding-sheet [shroud] before my eyes”. Despite this, towards the end of her reign, Elizabeth came round to the idea that James VI of Scotland should succeed her. In this letter to James, written just 11 weeks before her death, the queen expresses her pleasure at the king’s willingness to seek advice from her: “It pleaseth me not a little that my true intents, without glosses or guiles, are by you so gratefully taken.” She also provides her thoughts on Scotland’s diplomatic relations with Spain, France and the Vatican. Tellingly, she advises him against opening diplomatic relations with Spain. Elizabeth’s flourished signature is instantly recognisable but the elegant italic hand of her youth has been replaced with her virtually illegible “skrating” hand, for which she apologises. For all that, the letter reveals that Elizabeth remained as sharp-minded and politically acute in the final year of her reign as she had the previous 44. James and Elizabeth never met, but they corresponded regularly from the early 1580s, with Elizabeth frequently providing the Scottish king with outspoken advice on the craft of monarchy. Elizabeth’s death in 1603 brought to a close the rule of the Tudors. The crown did indeed pass to James VI of Scotland, who – as James I of England – became the first Stuart monarch and ‘King of Great Britain and Ireland’. Extract: “Your loving sister” “Thus you see how to fulfil your trust reposed in me, which to infringe I never mind, I have sincerely made patent my sincerity; yet stuffed with great good will. I hope you will bear with my molesting you too long with my skrating hand, as proceeding from a heart that shall ever be filled with the sure affection of your loving and friendly sister, Elizabeth R. ” Andrea Clarke is curator of early modern historical manuscripts at the British Library. She is author of Tudor Monarchs: Lives in Letters (British Library Publishing, 2017). This article was first published in the June 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
"If I don't come home": letters from a D-Day captain
The heartfelt diary of a captain written during the 1944 Normandy invasion has just been published. Captain Alastair Bannerman, who features in tonight's ITV documentary If I Don't Come Home - Letters from D-Day, recorded his thoughts and emotions before, during and after the invasion. His diary, which is from tomorrow available to read as an ebook, charts the building suspense in the run-up to D-Day, as well as the unforgettable "colours" and "sounds" of the day itself.
A 30-year-old father-of-two, Bannerman's diary reads like an extended love letter to his wife. In it he describes his longing for "your understanding, your quiet love and your gentleness", and his frustration that "duty and barbed wire, destiny and man’s madness have put thousands of miles between us". Bannerman's notebook was confiscated when he was taken prisoner by the Germans on 7 June 1944. Having narrowly escaped death, and survived the ordeal of a prisoner of war camp, Bannerman returned home to his wife and sons in April 1945. Extraordinarily, some years later a German translation of his diary was returned to him, and is now available to read. The book accompanies the ITV documentary If I Don't Come Home - Letters from D-Day, in which Bannerman features. Here, we have selected five highlights from the book (reproduced courtesy of ITV Studios Global Entertainment): 1st June To-day we have come into a new camp from where we shall embark and so there is only a last bastion between us and the fight in front of us. I have to admit I am not a hero and I have never wished for a free bath in the Channel! Nor have I been impatient because of the long delay. Now it seems that the day approaches us with the speed of lightning and just now I met Rowland who admitted to me that he was really afraid! He doesn’t know where we go but when we looked at a map of France we have – independently of each other – come to the conclusion that it could be Calais... James Henderson, gunner major, is asleep; he saw his wife to-day, the lucky man; his name is on a special list and he can go wherever he wishes to. My darling, how very much I long for you, to put my arms around you and to be embraced by you. It is torture not to get any letters and to feel that very likely you do not get mine either with this 100% censorship. At least I can imagine how you are sleeping now in our familiar and dear nursery, and this is a true blessing. 2nd June To-day we learn that tomorrow we will march to be allo-cated to landing craft. So the play is on. To-day I had rather a hectic time. I have been running about testing the sights of my guns, obtaining replacement parts, arranging everything in the sequence of loading, distributing rations for 24 hours, tinned meat, cookers, pills against sea-sickness, paper bags, chocolate, cigarettes, tablets to disinfect the water... This little book becomes rather fragmentary as I have to write it often at the end of the days, which have been crammed with work, and, being tired, I cannot write my best. I expect I often repeat myself. But it is only a notebook and may at least tell the outlines of things. It is now cool evening, the mess has closed, and the time is late when the camp is preparing for its rest, and probably this will be the last night on English soil for ages. Tomorrow I have to get up early, so I have to shave tonight. I feel rather like Father Christmas with all the parcels I have to carry with me... Tomorrow we shall have to go into our different boats and will not meet each other again for some time, not before we have reached our destination for action. I have already spoken to all of them and bade them good night and now I have to read them three orders of the day, one from the C.O., one from Monty and one from Eisenhower. Much depends on our gun but I cannot do any more. God be with them and all of us and may it be His Will that we end this horrible thing soon. 5th June There is still a sharp wind blowing but soon after breakfast we raised anchor and sailed out of the harbour entrance. The chalk cliffs gleamed in the sunshine and hung like white curtains along the flat green coast. The white fleet of armoured landing craft and supporting boats with their silver balloons, and the motor torpedo boats which stirred up white foam, made a lovely picture in blue, white and silver. A part of England’s armada; and it looked like a regatta. A signal was given: “Open envelope 007!” We opened it, the enterprise had begun. Operation Overlord begins tomorrow or the following day provided nothing unforeseen happens. Another message from an M.T.B:10 “Departure is 12.30”. So tomorrow must be D-Day. If that is so, H-hour11 is 7.25 and we land at 11.35. D.V. James is mad with joy. We have made up a list of the things which we now have to pack. I am not allowed to open anything yet, not before we are actually sailing. We have to arrange measures dealing with fire, the use of life-saving apparatus, the arrangement of air-raid precau-tions and for sleeping and eating for tonight... The sea is still terribly rough but there it is, my darling, it seems now that we’re off. 6th June. D-Day It is now 03.00 hours in the morning and I have just been up to the bridge. It is rather light because the moon is shining, though heavy clouds cover her. One can see the row of small ships and of darker balloons silhouetted in front and behind us against the grey sea. We are still rolling a little but the wind has subsided somewhat, thank Heaven. The captain and his first officer are on the bridge. They make sure where we are and look for the coloured lights which should guide us through one of our own minefields. You, my angel, sleep gently in the nursery, I hope. Your thoughts have helped me so much. They have given me real strength. I can imagine how you listen to the news at 9 o’clock and think of me with love. I hope that Andrew’s golden head rests gently and quietly upon his small pillow and that Richard is nice and comfortable lying in his narrow little carry-cot... With me sleep three officers: James, Raf and a special navy officer who is really only a travelling observer. How childlike and natural we all look when we are asleep. I slept almost from 10–2 o’clock and must now go back to the bridge if I am not going to fall asleep again in this stifling and sticky atmosphere... James relieves me at 4 o’clock and then I have a few hours to myself before dawn breaks. I have wakened James. A long line of flares hangs over Cherbourg, or I suppose it is Cherbourg, and a few anti-aircraft tracer shots go up in the air above the immediate front line. Funny to imagine that there Germans run around their guns. I would like to know what they are thinking. The whole Channel between us and Cherbourg is filled with little ships which all quietly and efficiently sail towards France. The British, Canadian and American fighting forces on the war-path... I heard that our C.O. has also landed, therefore our infantry must be there by now. God bless them and good luck to them. I do not believe that I can now write for very long. We can now see the French coast and very soon we will have to play our part. I must go now and look for the landing markings with my binoculars to ascertain our landing points. So, my darling, on we go! I know that you are with me. Come on the Bannermans! Let us be gay. Au revoir, God bless, I love you! 7th June D-Day is over. It was a day which I can never forget. What pictures, what sounds! An accumulation of extraordinary emotions when one fantastic adventure followed the other. When we came in close we could see that the beach was completely choc-a-bloc with vehicles. We had to steer over to the east and to look round for a bit. There was very little beach because it was high tide. Occasionally, a mortar exploded in the sea but otherwise there was little going on. We at last touched ground in France! Down with the landing ramp and when, after long last, the S.P. gun was off I got my two guns out. The waves were running high, but our waterproofed carriers made it safely. There were no ready-made beach exits anywhere but finally I got hold of a bulldozer which brought our gun and carrier up a dune and then we had to wait and actually queue up to move inland. The houses along the coast were only shells and it was a terrible experience when I saw for the first time dead bodies, first a German soldier and afterwards quite a few of our own soldiers. I can never forget all this or somehow forgive. If I Don’t Come Home: Letters from D-Day is now available to buy for £1.49 from a number of ebook retailers. Extracts courtesy of ITV Studios Global Entertainment. The dramatised ITV documentary If I Don't Come Home - Letters from D-Day, which follows four Allied soldiers as they pen what could be their last letters to the people they love, airs tonight at 10:35pm. 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Books interview with Michael Broers: "You don't have to make up myths about Napoleon's youth – just look at his letters to see evidence that he was a great leader"
Michael Broers talks to Matt Elton about the first part of his new biography of Napoleon, which covers the years from 1769 to 1805 and draws upon a newly published set of his correspondence
You’ve written about Napoleon before. What inspired this new book? The main thing was the publication of a new edition of his correspondence by the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, which offers us a completely new source for the man’s life. The first edition of Napoleon’s correspondence was produced in the 1850s and 1860s by his nephew, Napoleon III. So that was an official version, a bit as if Teddy Kennedy had edited the memoirs of John Kennedy: the word ‘Monroe’ wouldn’t crop up once. There’s a real irony here: Napoleon was master of the universe, emperor of the western world, and so obviously had scribes and secretaries working for him around the clock. He was also a prodigious correspondent himself. And yet, because of the ‘official’ nature of the material we’ve had access to, we have had to treat it with great circumspection – so historians have often used memoirs instead. This correspondence seemed to offer the first chance to write a proper, conventional life of this great statesman, using both memoirs and his own words. In your book, you consider Napoleon’s life in light of these letters. What impression do we get of his early life? I think that coming from a certain kind of Corsican family, had a permanent influence on him – but not in the way the stereotypical vision would have it. Corsica’s a complicated place in the sense that it’s actually two places. There’s the Corsica of the mountains, of the interior, that was very much a poor land of isolated villages, shepherds, and a vendetta culture. Too readily Napoleon and his family are associated with that world when they were nothing to do with it: they came from Ajaccio, which is one of four middle-sized towns that cling to the coast of Corsica and were founded mostly by the Genoese in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. They were civilised town dwellers, proud of having a Renaissance, humanist education. Napoleon had a happy childhood. He loved his parents very much: one of the great myths is that he hated his father because his father collaborated with the French. The correspondence shows no trace of that. What forces were particularly influential on the young Napoleon? One influence – because he was a remarkably intelligent man – was the material that he read. He was very widely read in the culture of his times, and up to date with scientific discoveries and technology. If Napoleon was alive today he’d be he saying “you want to move on from the iPhone, you want to get the Samsung. Josephine and I both have it”. But the largest single influence was the French army. He started military academy very young and, almost in spite of himself, took to military discipline and the collective barracks life. Nobody had to beat it into him: it was the most natural thing in the world. How did other people regard Napoleon early on in his career? It was a bit of a rollercoaster. His first big posting was at the siege of Toulon during the French Revolution. Toulon was, at the time, held by the British navy and a collection of French rebels. Napoleon was given charge of the artillery batteries and deeply impressed everyone. But then he refused a posting to put down a peasant rebellion in the west of France. He didn’t want to do it: he was in the artillery, which was the elite arm. They were the intelligentsia of the army – the bright boys, the geeks – and he didn’t want to be taken away from that. So his career went into the doldrums. He didn’t really come out of it until 1796 when – still in his late twenties – he was given command of the army of Italy. At that point many people were saying, “who on earth is this skinny, scruffy kid with the funny accent, and where did you get him from?” Napoleon was a political appointment and he knew it. He had to impress many of the older generals – and he did. But he also had a great publicity machine. He built up his victories in Italy, which were spectacular – he basically defeated the Austrians in the north of the country and kicked them out – but he almost lost some of his battles. So although he had a huge reputation within France, inside the Austrian high command there was a sense they had lost their nerve: they didn’t go away thinking that Napoleon was this military genius they had to be afraid of. And, again, his 1798–99 campaign in Egypt and Syria was played up in France as a great success, but the French government, Napoleon, and the men who served with him knew that it was a complete disaster. In my opinion, in many ways it was a less excusable defeat than Russia in 1812. So there are three perceptions of Napoleon. Firstly, that he’s the military genius who conquered Italy. Secondly, from his major opponents – the Russians and the Austrians – that he’s the chap who got lucky in Italy, made a mess of Egypt and who can be beaten. And, thirdly and most importantly, there’s the impression of him among his colleagues, his subordinate commanders, and most of all his men, that he is a good general. What new impression do we get from these letters that you hope readers will take away from the book? That he was very good at delegating. He wasn’t a micromanager, like the Duke of Wellington; he had the ability of saying very clearly: “These are my orders, and I trust you to carry them out.” What also emerges, which I think is rather new, is an ability to apologise. Overall, we get a sense of a highly intelligent man, who balanced very strong emotions with iron self-discipline and prudence. He was, particularly in the period that we’re dealing with, a man with no delusions of grandeur. He knew that he was living on the edge and behaved accordingly, steering a course through very dangerous waters and doing it very well. The last thing I would like readers to take away is something that the new correspondence has given us. When he was a teenager his father died, and Napoleon took the family’s affairs in hand. He wrote to the controller general of France, asking about his father’s pension, and then went to Paris to demand an audience with him. You don’t have to make up the mythological tales that have been told about Napoleon’s youth – about him organising schoolyard snowball fights and so on, which are hokum. You only have to read these letters to see that he was a great leader. Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny by Michael Broers (Faber and Faber, 608 pages, £30). This article was first published in the March 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine