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After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
The nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s surely counts as one of modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. On the 50th anniversary of General Franco’s death, Paul Preston explores how pluralism arose from the ashes of tyranny
When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise. And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen? Blurring the past To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required. And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would govern as regent until prevented by death or incapacity – and he had the right to nominate his own royal successor. The dictator didn’t name that successor immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until July 1969 that Franco announced to the world the identity of the man who would become head of state following his death. That man was Juan Carlos – grandson of Alfonso XIII, king of Spain from 1886 to 1931. This would not be a restoration of the legitimate royal family but the installation of a monarchy created by the Falangists – the far-right nationalist political group fronted by Franco. Juan Carlos would be compelled to uphold the fundamental laws of the regime, and could be removed if he strayed from them. As such, he was very much at the regime’s mercy. And yet, though no one knew it at the time, he would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515401714webready-f4ef08c.jpg" width="3891" height="2594" alt="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" title="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" /> In the late 1960s, that future lay some way off. Franco was still very much alive. By now, the dictator had delegated day-to-day administration of the regime to Carrero Blanco, an appointment that, rather than consolidate the regime, merely accelerated its disintegration. Facing an inexorable rise in working-class and student dissent and the armed opposition of the Basque separatist terrorist organisation, ETA, Carrero intensified repression, employing neo-Nazi organisations, off-duty policemen and civil guards to do his dirty work. It was a strategy that poisoned relations with the Basques, the clergy and workers, and fomented disquiet among the most perceptive elements of the regime. Read more | "If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator It also made him a target for assassination. On 20 December 1973, Carrero was blown up in Madrid by a bomb planted by four ETA operatives. Things got little better under his successor, Carlos Arias Navarro. In fact, an early trickle of defections under Carrero turned into a flood from 1974. With their country blighted by military interventionism, the virulence of the extreme right, violence in the Basque Country, obsolete industries and uneven development, moderates among the ranks of both the regime and the opposition were rapidly reaching the conclusion that only negotiation could prevent a bloodbath. Franco’s invading army Yet those seeking compromise in the wake of Franco’s death in November 1975 were confronted with seemingly insuperable obstacles – chief among them that, under Franco, Spain was governed as if it were a territory conquered by an invading army. The civil war had been provoked and fought by a coalition of rightwing forces to defend their sectoral interests against the reforming ambitions of the democratic Second Republic. Landowners, industrialists and bankers wanted to safeguard their economic privileges; the army to defend the centralised organisation of the Spanish state; and the church to retain its cultural hegemony. Each contributed to Franco’s war effort, financially, militarily or ideologically. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-463210205webready-2e54d5b.jpg" width="2772" height="1848" alt="A black and white photograph showing men in suits sitting around a long table. In front of each man is a folder of papers" title="Juan Carlos presides at the first cabinet meeting after Franco’s death, December 1975. His inbox would soon include terrorism, industrial unrest, and an army that simmered with discontent (Image by Getty Images)" /> The regime’s long-term survival was facilitated by total control of the media and of what passed for an education system to implement a national brainwashing that fomented fear of the return of the ‘reds’. After the civil war, these diverse forces of Francoism remained united by fear and by networks of corruption. Hardline Francoism was entrenched in the army, the police and the Civil Guard. However, for those such as Juan Carlos seeking an alternative future for Spain, there were glimmers of opportunity. Mass demonstrations revealed an overwhelming popular urge for democracy. Juan Carlos knew that important sectors of Spanish capitalism saw the political apparatus of Francoism as an obstacle to growth. In opting boldly for progress, he would be following the advice of British, European and American leaders. Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism While Juan Carlos may have been the most high-profile figure in Spain’s post-Franco reform project, he was far from the only politician seeking to transform the nation. In fact, the brains behind the operation can be said to be Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, an expert in Francoist constitutional law. As president of the Cortes (Spain’s parliament, which would have to ratify any reform scheme) and of the Council of the Kingdom (which had to endorse prime ministers), Fernández-Miranda would facilitate the ‘legal’ reform that was to be the real basis of the transition. Fernández-Miranda also played a key role in the elevation, in the summer of 1976, to prime minister of the young liberal Falangist Adolfo Suárez. Albeit impelled down the road to democratisation by popular pressure (1976 saw violence, enormous demonstrations and industrial strikes sweep the country) Suárez would be the perfect man for the historic task of steering democratic reform through the Francoist institutions. It was he, more than any other figure, who convinced other politicians that the reform project was serious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2TCY57Wwebready-04bbc53.jpg" width="5751" height="3834" alt="A black and white photograph showing two men with slicked back hair standing on either side of a microphone" title="Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (right, in 1969), introduced the legal reforms that facilitated Spain’s move to democracy (Image by Alamy)" /> As for Juan Carlos, his contribution lay firstly in persuading major figures to join Suárez’s cabinet. Secondly, by dint of constant journeys throughout Spain he generated support for reform and rode out the storm of opprobrium provoked by his nomination of Falangists like Suárez. Above all, by appearing in the uniform of commander-in-chief, and through his private meetings with officers, he neutralised the high command of the army and restrained military hostility to the democratic process. In the autumn of 1976, with great skill, Suárez managed to steer Fernández-Miranda’s astute reform project through the Francoist institutions. In mid-November, it was approved in the Cortes by a huge majority of its members, the largely unelected procuradores. Suárez later called it a collective suicide by the “procuradores del harakiri”. Juan Carlos made a considerable effort to make contact with members of the opposition to convince them of the need for moderation. This was rewarded on 15 December when the referendum on political reform saw the project approved by a majority of more than 90 per cent. The opposition’s calls for abstention were ignored by the leftwing rank-and-file – a telling manifestation of popular readiness to make sacrifices to secure the basic framework of democracy. The referendum was a victory for Suárez but also for the mass pressure throughout 1976 that had pushed the government towards democratisation. A SYMBOL OF RECONCILIATION How an amnesty helped Spain confront its past, and its future On 15 June 1977 something remarkable occurred across Spain: people went to the polls in free elections for the first time since 1936. With Adolfo Suárez’s UCD party securing victory, the complex process of building a democracy could now begin. Yet how was this to be achieved without plunging Spain back into dictatorship or the horrors of another civil war? The widespread consensus was that sacrifices would have to be made – and that meant an amnesty. On 14 October, that amnesty passed through Spain’s parliament, the Cortes, into law. This hugely consequential piece of legislation effectively stated that acts of terrorism in opposition to the Franco dictatorship – which meant the sporadic guerrilla warfare of the 1940s and ETA terrorism – and the crimes against human rights in its defence, could not be subject to judicial proceedings. As such, it wiped the slate clean and rested on a tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts with Franco’s regime. The public pressure for such an amnesty had been building for months – the previous year, 80,000 people had taken to the streets of Barcelona on successive Sundays to call for one. Yet the passing of the legislation was not without controversy. In early October, Suárez had met with representatives of all parties and warned them that the army, the banks and, to a lesser extent, the church had voiced their objections to an amnesty for political prisoners. That’s why the law that passed through parliament excluded both army officers who had fought for the Republic during the civil war and those involved in the Unión Militar Democrática, a pressure group of liberal officers punished for trying to ensure that the army would not block democratic transformation. Given the numerical discrepancy between the relatively few people involved in acts of violence against the regime and the many involved in its brutal imposition, the law required democratic forces to make a major sacrifice. It was also accompanied by the systematic destruction of the archives of the Franco regime’s repressive apparatus. Yet despite these issues, the amnesty – backed by a near-unanimous vote – seemed to symbolise reconciliation in a country that had been plagued by violence, bitterness and bloodshed for decades. As the basis of the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido) instituted across the political spectrum following Franco’s death, it would be one of the pillars of the transition to democracy. The trump card With elections scheduled for June, Suárez needed to create a party. Convinced that his best chance of success lay with a centre party, Suárez cobbled together the Unión de Centro Democrático by exploiting the need of many small centre right parties for alliances. His trump card was government control of Radio-Television Española and of local administrative machinery. UCD fused five main groups, each in turn composed of several others, all desperate to be part of an electorally viable movement. Ideological and ethical considerations took a back seat. Suárez’s skilful use of the media was rewarded with victory. UCD won 165 seats in the new Cortes, followed by the Socialist PSOE (who enjoyed considerable international support) with 118. The Communist Party of Spain and rightwing Alianza Popular trailed way behind with 20 and 16 seats respectively. But an essential part of the progress towards the elections also posed the greatest obstacle to the long-term consolidation of democracy. The legalisation of the Communist Party on 9 April confirmed the military’s conviction that its job was less to defend Spain from external enemies and more to safeguard Franco’s civil war victory. This wasn’t the only threat to the nascent democracy. From 1977 until 1982, on a monthly basis, Juan Carlos had to impose his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces on officers outraged because Suárez’s minister of defence, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, manoeuvred liberal officers into, and reactionaries out of, key positions. The situation was worsened by the relentless provocation of ETA’s attacks on officers. The response of the ultras within the army was golpismo – conspiracy to restore the dictatorship. At frequent receptions for senior officers at his Zarzuela Palace and on tense visits to garrisons, Juan Carlos argued powerfully for unity and discipline. Nevertheless, the crisis intensified and in late 1980 a plot was hatched to launch a military coup. The ex-secretary general of the royal household, General Alfonso Armada, persuaded other generals, most notably the Captain-General of Valencia, the ultra Jaime Milans del Bosch, that he had royal approval to instigate regime change. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515557430webready-e05d150.jpg" width="3356" height="2237" alt="A black and white photograph showing a man in military uniform standing at a pulpit in parliament, holding one arm in the air and a gun in the other hand" title="Antonio Tejero draws his pistol inside the Spanish parliament. The attempted coup of February 1981 constituted the greatest threat to Spain’s nascent democracy (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the end of January 1981, facing a revolt from within his own party as his popularity crumbled, Suárez resigned as prime minister. This left the king as the most visible guarantor of democracy but his meetings with Armada enabled the latter to give the impression of royal collusion in what was being plotted – and on 23 February, the plotters struck. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized the entire Spanish political elite as they attended the Cortes investiture of a new cabinet under Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, while Milans del Bosch ordered tanks into the streets of Valencia. Read more | The bombing of Guernica: who was responsible? Alone with his immediate staff, the king courageously headed the operation to dismantle the coup. In the course of a tense night, he appeared on television insisting that he would uphold the constitution. He telephoned Milans, effectively informing him that he would have to kill him in order to succeed: “I swear to you that I will neither abdicate nor leave Spain.” His intervention effectively ended the putsch. By the end of the month, the conspirators were in prison. Plots to kill a king In October 1982, the Socialists won a substantial victory in a new round of elections. From this moment forward, Juan Carlos no longer had to be called out as a ‘fireman’, and could act more as a constitutional head of state. The twin problems of Basque terrorism and military subversion remained, and there were ETA plots to assassinate Juan Carlos in 1985, 1986, 1995 and 1997. What’s more, the king still had to walk the tightrope of keeping both left and right onside – persuading the opposition that he would play a role in democratisation, while maintaining the support of Francoists by seeming to respect the constitutional laws on which, until 1977, his ‘legitimacy’ rested. In this, it certainly helped that the king was a naturally affable type. A telling example derives from the period in 1978 when the new democratic constitution was being elaborated by a parliamentary commission, or Ponencia. There was a reception for the haughty French president Giscard d’Estaing, who was visiting Madrid. At one point, Juan Carlos sidled over to Miquel Roca i Junyent, a member of the Ponencia, and whispered: “Don’t you think he looks more like a king than I do?” Looks can be deceptive, of course. And from the nightmare that threatened to envelop Spain following Franco’s death, the self-deprecating monarch and his colleagues had achieved something remarkable: they had successfully harnessed a people’s collective determination never to face civil war and dictatorship again. SURVIVING FRANCO A timeline of the 40-year battle for the soul of Spain 1936–39 Nationalist forces headed by General Franco overthrow the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Franco establishes a dictatorship that will endure until the 1970s. 26 July 1947 The Law of Succession establishes Spain as a kingdom with Franco as head of state. Franco has the right to nominate his successor. July 1969 Franco announces the identity of his successor: Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfonso XIII. 20 December 1973 Franco’s prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco is assassinated by ETA. 20 November 1975 Franco dies. Juan Carlos becomes king and head of state. 5 July 1976 Adolfo Suárez becomes prime minister. Later that year, the Spanish parliament overwhelmingly approves his reform project. 15 June 1977 Suárez’s UCD party secures victory in Spain’s first free elections since 1936. 14 October 1977 An amnesty passes into law effectively stating that crimes committed in support of, or opposition to, Franco’s regime could not be subject to judicial proceedings. 23 February 1981 Rightwing army officers attempt a coup. After Juan Carlos tells them that he will neither abdicate nor leave Spain, the perpetrators are placed behind bars. Paul Preston is a historian of the Spanish Civil War. His most recent book is Perfidious Albion: Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Clapton, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”
Jonathan Healey tells Ellie Cawthorne about the dramatic moments that sparked the breakdown of Charles I’s relationship with parliament and the outbreak of the Civil War
Ellie Cawthorne: Why was the winter of 1641–42 such a pivotal time in British and Irish history? Jonathan Healey: In the heart of that winter came one of the most iconic moments in English political history. On 4 January 1642, angry at dissent from parliament, King Charles I marched down to the House of Commons and tried to arrest five MPs. I wanted to tell the backstory of that dramatic, divisive moment. The lead-up had been a really intense period of political strife, popular protest and gradually growing disorder, all of which fed into a very frightening political crisis. Afterwards, the country descended into civil war. Often when we read books about great revolutions or political events, we look at the deep, long-term causes. However, though that’s important, we also need to recognise trigger moments. Day-by-day or minute-by-minute, it’s often incredibly difficult to see which way things will go – but, as a historian, it’s important to immerse yourself in those turning points. Can you give us a sense of how parliament functioned at the time? In the early 17th century, parliament didn’t sit regularly – it was called only when the king needed it. Its role was essentially twofold: to grant taxes, particularly for war, and to propose legislation. That legislation would then get signed off by the king, which was how new laws were made. But increasingly, in the 17th century, parliament started discussing issues of high politics such as foreign policy. In the view of the king, this went beyond its remit – monarchs in this period believed that they alone had the right to decide on foreign policy. However, because they represented the taxpayers who had to pay for the wars, members of parliament felt that they should have a say. That created a flashpoint. In the 1620s, a series of conflicts had erupted between parliament and the monarchy over issues such as tax, religion and the crown’s right to imprison people without charge. The relationship between king and parliament had broken down. Understandably peeved at this situation, Charles decided that, as far as possible, he would rule without parliament. However, over that period of personal rule, a series of serious grievances and difficulties emerged. Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? When Charles was forced to call parliament again in 1640 because of a rebellion in Scotland, all of these issues came back to the fore, and there was a sudden ferment against royal rule among MPs. By November 1640, the beginning of the so-called ‘Long Parliament’ saw a broad consensus for reform and an intention to get rid of some of the perceived abuses of the previous 11 years but, over the next 12 months, the reformists pushed things too far. They argued for reform of the bishops, and began to engage with a much broader political constituency – both of which were controversial moves. By the beginning of winter 1641, a backlash against these reformists had started. Would these tensions have emerged regardless of the monarch, or was there something about Charles in particular that antagonised parliament? There were lots of things about Charles that antagonised people. He had a preference for a High Anglican form of worship, which many people in England didn’t like very much. Above all, though, he was someone who really liked order, traditional social hierarchies and the aristocracy. He didn’t like bottom-up political engagement when it came to the church, and he definitely didn’t like it when it came to the state. That view was not unusual at the time: lots of people were worried about popular protest and the perceived dangers of the mob – that was one of the factors that led them to rally around the king. But Charles took this view to quite an extreme level. The other thing that proved difficult about Charles’s personality was his innate sense that, as king, he was right. He thought that the choice of methods he employed to get his way didn’t matter as much as the end result – and that created a sense of fear about what he might be willing to do next. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/MNXB20cmyk-4ed0c59.jpg" width="1158" height="772" alt="A man in black clothing stands against a dark background. He has shoulder-length grey hair and a goatee and wears a black hat" title="Sir Edward Nicholas asked Queen Henrietta Maria to identify key players who might join a royalist party supporting the king – ultimately, to no avail (Image by Alamy)" /> Who were the other key figures at the time, and how did they swing the pendulum? Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was a really important operator behind the scenes. By the end of 1641, one of Charles’ administrators called Sir Edward Nicholas (imagine a Thomas Cromwell-type figure but with a bigger diet) was trying to pull together a royalist party, but he didn’t know the key aristocrats. So who did he go to? The queen, because she knew everyone. On the parliamentarian side, there was John Pym. He was an incredibly sophisticated operator – a real political magus – but some of the tactics he used in parliament were incredibly devious and cynical. On 1 December 1641, a great list of grievances and demands called the Grand Remonstrance was presented to Charles. It was passed by parliament, albeit by the skin of its teeth, but Pym and his reformists failed to secure agreement to get it printed. So, in the Commons a few weeks later, proponents of the Grand Remonstrance waited until late, after a lot of the royalists had gone home. With the members struggling to see by candlelight, they suddenly introduced a motion to overturn the earlier vote and have the Grand Remonstrance printed. And the strategy worked – it was devious, but clever. We’re all familiar with that kind of political tactic today, but that was the first instance when we can really see it in action. It feels like something out of a 21st-century political drama... Yes, or The Thick of It [Armando Iannucci’s acclaimed 2005–12 spin-doctor television sitcom]. After all these years of tension, what was the spark for the events of 4 January 1642? Up until that point, Charles had been regaining the initiative. He was building up a royalist party, and there was a real possibility that he would be able to command a majority in both houses. He’d given a proclamation summoning back to Westminster all of the MPs who’d gradually drifted home because they were fed up of sitting in parliament. The theory was that these were moderates and royalists, and that their return would stifle the simmering trouble. However, street protests prevented the bishops (who were all royal appointments) from attending the House of Lords, and the balance tipped. By around 28 December 1641, Charles had lost the majority in both houses. He felt he had to do something to slow things down – to disrupt things. For a long time, Charles had wanted revenge against certain key players he thought had stabbed him in the back at the time of the Scottish rebellion. So he had his attorney general draw up prosecutions against five particularly troublesome MPs and one member of the House of Lords. Read more | The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won How did things unfold on that fateful day? News of these intended prosecutions had emerged on 3 January 1642, so parliament was incredibly tense the following morning. Everyone was very worried, and a lot of shops in London were shut. But lunchtime came and went with no developments, so parliament started sitting again for the afternoon. Meanwhile, after pacing about the whole morning, in the mid-afternoon the king suddenly appeared from Whitehall Palace and commanded a group of soldiers to follow him. After requisitioning a coach in a ‘follow that taxi’ moment, Charles arrived at Westminster with around 500 armed men. A group of about 80–100 of those men climbed the stairs and banged on the door of the House of Commons. The debate stopped, and the king entered; the MPs all stood and removed their hats. Charles then told the speaker, William Lenthall, that he had arrived to arrest the five members, asking where they were. There was silence. The missing MPs had been warned about what was going to happen by Lucy Carlisle, a courtier close to the queen – and it became clear to Charles that they weren’t there. Then followed a key moment: Lenthall declared that he couldn’t help Charles, because he was just the voice of the Commons. Essentially, he was expressing the point that, despite having been appointed by the crown, he was there to represent the people, not the king. Extremely angry, Charles stormed off, followed by the soldiers. It was a really dramatic moment that could so easily have ended in a massacre. Was this a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment in the lead-up to civil war? A lot of people said so at the time, and I do think that Charles took things too far. His action was quite clearly an armed threat against parliament. But the crucial thing about this incident is that it destroyed a huge amount of trust in the king. The parliamentarians saw Charles gathering soldiers around himself, and concluded that they couldn’t trust him – they needed to be able to protect themselves. So they decided to take control of the county militia. They passed a bill to make this happen, but it wouldn’t become law unless it was signed off by the king – and of course the king was never going to sign this bill. Parliament was then forced to argue that their bill had legal force anyway. That led to a constitutional fissure: in a state of emergency, could parliament legislate without the king? This became the dividing issue. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/0088128-Topfoto-e6c9fae.jpg" width="1041" height="694" alt="A painting shows Charles I standing under a large arched doorway. He is dressed all in black with a white collar. Standing around him is a large group of people, including a priest dressed in red robes. In the background, there are several large buildings" title="Charles I leads armed followers into the Commons on 4 January 1642 on a fruitless mission to arrest five MPs – the moment that arguably sparked the Civil War (Image by TopFoto)" /> How much was the wider public aware of what was going on in parliament at the time? Increasingly quite well aware, because this was an era when the politics of Westminster were becoming more accessible to those on the street. England was very well connected, people knew who their MPs were, and letters were flying back and forth across the country. Scurrilous pamphlets were published in long-running battles between reformists and royalists, and the first proper political English newspaper was also launched around this time [Head of Several Proceedings, first published by John Thomas in November 1641] – a kind of weekly digest of events in parliament. After his attempt to arrest the five MPs on 4 January 1642, Charles was passing through St Paul’s when a radical parliamentarian journalist called Henry Walker ran up and threw one of these pamphlets into his coach. Called To Your Tents, O Israel, it implored the English people to resist tyrants – so you can imagine Charles’s response when he read it. In that moment, a great connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street. And it was that incident, more than anything else, that encouraged Charles to flee London. How was this all connected with events in Ireland? In late 1641, there was a massive uprising in Ireland, which was predominantly Catholic. A lot of Irish people were fed up with rule by English Protestants, but in particular they didn’t want to be ruled by English parliamentarian Protestants, who were especially anti-Catholic. It was a very violent rebellion, with atrocities committed in Ulster. However, reports of the violence were wildly exaggerated, creating a panic in England that there would be an Irish invasion, and that English Catholics would rise up. One of the immediate consequences of this intense paranoia was that someone in England had to raise an army to put down the rebellion – and neither parliament nor the king could trust the other side to do so. Eventually, an army was raised, but not before months of wrangling between king and parliament – and by the time it left, relations between the two were already descending into hostility. Did people sense that war was coming by this point? By the spring of 1642, I think there was a real sense that war was on its way. Records reveal that some ordinary people saw this as an opportunity to settle local scores. For example, one man in Salisbury basically said: “I’m going to support the king, and I’ve decided that my neighbour is for the parliament so, when the war comes, he’s the first person I’m going to bash on the head.” Read more | 8 reasons why the Civil War broke out Was there any way that the king and parliament could have found a compromise and avoided war? I don’t know if compromise is the right word. By early 1642, there was a group of very serious reformists who didn’t trust the king, and a king who hated them in return. It’s very hard to see how those two sides could have been reconciled. But what could have happened quite easily is that the day-to-day workings of politics could have gone the king’s way. Those reformist politicians could have been isolated, and found themselves in a sticky situation. Those people really did go through this political crisis on an absolute knife edge, with a real sense of dread that they could be prosecuted and beheaded. I think that dynamic of fear helped push things towards civil war. So I don’t think there could have been a compromise as such, but there might have been a different outcome. There were lots of moments when things could have gone in another direction. One potential counterfactual could ask: what might have happened if, when Charles got to parliament, the five MPs were still there and decided not to go quietly? You would have seen a gang of about 100 angry cavaliers, all with pistols, trying to drag people out of parliament. Would that have ended peacefully? Probably not. Did this era determine how the relationship between parliament and royal rule played out in the longer term? When the Restoration of the monarchy happened in 1660, interestingly it was the settlement of late 1641 that was restored. What happened in 1642 was a parting of the waves, with the radicals on the parliamentarian side headed in a much more constitutionally extremist direction. That was jettisoned after the Restoration, and parliament instead returned to a reformed position. But there were also lots of long-term consequences of this period. It emphasised the importance of the crown working with parliament, rather than being antagonistic to it. In the later 17th century, there were very few periods where parliaments weren’t held – parliament had become an accepted part of the constitution in a way that it hadn’t been before. So that turbulent era is part of the reason why the UK became the constitutional monarchy it is today. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford. His previous book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?
The reviled king was condemned to death as a “Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy”. But on the 400th anniversary of his accession, how fair does that judgment seem today?
On 9 July 1637, King Charles I chaired a meeting of his Privy Council at Greenwich Palace. Among the business was the case of two draymen, William Willis and John Collins, who had been involved in a road-traffic collision. They had allowed their cart to crash into that of the Earl of Exeter, a member of the powerful Cecil family. A local jury had cleared Willis and Collins of any wrongdoing, but the king was not happy with that outcome. Charles and his council overturned the verdict, ordering that the two men be “whipped publicly through the town” as a fearsome example to others. After this, the draymen would be sent to prison, and there kept at work until further notice. Charles I was a man who liked order. He organised his political thought around certain maxims, one of them being: “It is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.” Willis and Collins certainly suffered: they were flogged and locked up. After all, one couldn’t have lowly draymen crashing into nobles’ coaches and then being acquitted: it was indecorous and subversive. Charles was a fussy man. His government regulated everything from the lengths of taxi journeys to the wearing of fake jewellery. He once even tried to ban swearing. Bookish, thoughtful and sensitive, Charles was possessed of a heightened sense of his own honour and dignity. By the time he ascended the throne in 1625, he was also politically active, well read and fully capable of forming his own opinions – a bit too much so, perhaps, for a king. When Charles came to power in 1625, it was a highly unusual event. He was the first adult to ascend the Scottish throne since 1390, and only the second adult male to take the English throne since Henry VIII in 1509. Read more | When was the last battle between England and Scotland? He left his thrones in a strange way, too. In 1649, he was put on trial for treason against his own people, and executed publicly. His statue in London’s Royal Exchange was defaced with the Latin words Exit Tyrannus, Regum Ultimus – ‘Exit the Tyrant, the Last of the Kings’. The trial itself had been justified on the grounds that it was legal – indeed required – for the representatives of the people to resist a tyrannical king. To its instigators, this was a moment of emergency: the killing of a king was a necessity, albeit a cruel one. Read more | Why Charles I had to die Charles certainly had a case to answer. After his defeat in 1646 at the end of the first phase of the Civil War, he only negotiated in bad faith – and when the opportunity to start a fresh conflict presented itself in 1648, he took it. His actions sparked renewed violence and bloodshed, and led to radical of his enemies to push for his trial, based on a well-established philosophical position, salus populi suprema lex: the safety of the people is the supreme law. Charles claimed that his trial was illegal, and many have agreed with that assessment – yet it's far from black and white. Listen | Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles I’s trial on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time Was Charles truly a tyrant? From a modern perspective – in an age that has given us men such as Hitler and Stalin – surely swotty, art-loving Charles hardly registers. True, he had a cruel streak. After a riot in Lambeth in 1640, he had one young lad tortured – making out the order for that punishment in his own hand – and another hanged, drawn and quartered. Twice in the winter of 1641–42, he gave the order for soldiers to shoot protesters in the streets if they refused to go home. But he was probably no nastier than other leaders among his contemporaries – including even his son, Charles II, under whom great cruelties were committed in Scotland, and during whose reign many hundreds of English Dissenters died in horrific prisons. Charles I was authoritarian. He liked to be obeyed, and sometimes took it personally when he wasn’t. One infamous scandal involved a fairly unlikeable man called William Prynne, who wrote a book perceived to be insulting to the queen. In 1634, Prynne was sentenced to be imprisoned, and to have his ears cut off. Come 1637, when the same man again got into trouble, it transpired that his ears had been only partially sliced the first time around. Furious, Charles personally directed the Privy Council to find out who had been at fault for that half-done job. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/HIP1627908cmyk-3115749.jpg" width="4633" height="3086" alt="Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, painted c1630–32." title="Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, painted c1630–32. Not unreasonably, the king feared for the safety of his wife, a French Catholic whose father, King Henry IV of France, had been assassinated some years before they married. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> Charles also believed in personal sacrifice for the greater good: he applied this principle to himself, but inevitably it was his people who usually had to bear the brunt. England was then a place riven by discord. The government was short of money – ironic, given the great wealth of the country at large – and, thanks to rising literacy and a thirst for news, growing numbers of people in England were keen to discuss politics and religion. London was expanding, too, bringing more people close to the geographic centres of politics at Whitehall and Westminster. Throughout Charles’s life, he carried with him a grave distrust of his subjects and their desire to involve themselves in politics. During his childhood, one of his tutors had written that the people were a “many-headed monster, which hath neither head for brains, nor brains for government”. It was a sentiment Charles remembered. He never shied from controversy, either, and it was when dealing with controversial topics that his authoritarian side dominated. In religion, Charles favoured a new, ornate and ritualised form of worship. He disliked those who disagreed, especially the so-called ‘Puritans’ who preferred church practice to be much plainer. Charles believed that their form of worship – which emphasised reading, careful listening and participation – was populist and anarchic. His government used the bishops to harass dissident clergymen and writers. Read more | Did Oliver Cromwell really ban Christmas? The Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s Another of Charle's most persistent problems was money. He knew that the English state was "press beyond her strength" and, in the 1620s, desperately needed to increase military spending. A furious war was raging on the continent, and Charles found himself fighting both Spain and France. Many argued that there was only one legitimate way of raising tax: ask parliament. The English parliament, though, was reluctant to provide the necessary finance without first airing “grievances”. So in 1626, Charles started to contemplate ruling without them. He levied a ‘Forced Loan’ – in effect, a direct tax that didn’t require parliamentary sanction. He argued that this was an emergency and that, in such cases, it fell to the king to levy funds – even if he hadn’t first obtained permission from the people. Worse, in order to ensure that the Forced Loan was collected, Charles imprisoned those who didn’t pay. It was here that a key technique he used to rule came to the fore. Charles allowed the issue to come to the law courts – but made sure that he won. In 1627, five imprisoned knights had sued for habeas corpus – demanding that they be allowed to challenge before a court the justification for what they claimed to be their unlawful detention. Before the case was heard, though, Charles personally interviewed the 12 judges to make sure that they were on his side. Unsurprisingly, they ruled in his favour – that he could imprison people without demonstrating a cause. A showdown followed. Parliament pushed for a ‘Petition of Right’ stating certain key freedoms. Taxation without parliamentary grant was declared illegal, as was imprisonment without cause being shown. Charles reluctantly allowed the petition – but then prorogued parliament and recalled all print copies of the petition, ordering that they “be made waste paper”. It was then reissued but qualified with a series of his objections. In the summer of 1628, Charles’s fears about his people were dramatically confirmed. His unpopular favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed to death in Portsmouth. Buckingham’s killing was widely celebrated – indeed, his funeral was held at night to prevent the attendance of jeering crowds. And Charles had other reasons for fearing his subjects. Within months of ascending the throne, he had married the young and vivacious French princess Henrietta Maria. The queen’s father, Henry IV of France, had been assassinated years earlier; in addition, she was a Catholic – and anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. No wonder she and her husband worried for her safety. More discord followed in 1629. When parliament returned that January, MPs started arguing again about tax and religion. Exasperated, Charles decided to send away the quarrelling politicians – but when his order arrived, a small group of MPs restrained the Speaker in his chair and passed a series of inflammatory motions. Charles was furious, and vowed to rule without parliament for as long as he could. Dissident MPs were imprisoned; after their leader, Sir John Eliot, died in the Tower of London, Charles refused to let his wife bury him at home in Cornwall. What followed was a period of ‘Personal Rule’ sometimes seen as a manifestation of Charles’s alleged tyranny. Clearly, he wanted to rule without parliament; he believed that parliaments were “of the nature of cats, that ever grow cursed with age”. But was royal rule so bad? The country was at peace, and some later looked back on these as halcyon days. Charles raised enough money to run a functioning government. It was how he did so that became the problem, and one issue in particular sparked controversy. There is no doubt that the navy needed serious investment. The obligation to pay for ships had traditionally fallen on the coastal counties and towns; now Charles – not unreasonably – extended this inland. By doing so, though, he was effectively creating a new tax – without parliament. Once more, Charles turned to his judges. He would allow Ship Money to be tested in the courts, and he would win. The king’s lawyers argued that this was an emergency situation, so it was the monarch’s duty to raise money for necessary defence. This he could do without parliament because, his attorneys argued, as “the King of England... He is an absolute Monarch”. The judges – men who had been picked by the crown – agreed, though remarkably by only the tightest of margins. Ship Money seems obscure today, but at the time people worried that it gave the king an unlimited right to seize property simply by declaring an ‘emergency’. Whether or not Charles was a tyrant, he was building an absolutist monarchy. As the politician John Culpepper observed: “If the laws give the king power in any danger of the kingdom, whereof he is Judge, to impose what and when he please, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king, not to the law." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-520833115cmyk-09e859a.jpg" width="5100" height="3397" alt="A contemporary illustration depicts Thomas Wentworth’s execution on 12 May 1641. He was one of Charles’s “most capable ministers”, but his style of rule generated huge resentment." title="A contemporary illustration depicts Thomas Wentworth’s execution on 12 May 1641. He was one of Charles’s “most capable ministers”, but his style of rule generated huge resentment. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> We cannot, of course, judge Charles only on his rule in England. He was king of Scotland and Ireland, too – and in both he faced huge rebellions. He sent one of his most capable ministers to govern Ireland in 1633. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Stratford, was busy and bright, but was also possessed of a dangerous ideology. He believed that “reason of state” trumped law. This was similar to Charles’s belief in suppressing private interests for the public good, but it was sharper in focus and backed by a fearsome personal energy. In Ireland, Wentworth successfully played off factions against each other, and built up a military to enforce his will. His aim was to make Charles – in Ireland, at least – “as absolute a monarch as Christendom can set forth”. This generated huge resentment, which in 1641 exploded into a massive uprising against English and Scottish settlers. By that point, Charles’s rule had already started crumbling elsewhere. Desperate to bring his kingdoms into some sort of religious unity, he had tried to impose English church practice in Scotland. This was met with fierce resistance, beginning in July 1637 with a riot in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. And when Charles failed to put down the Scottish rebellion, he was forced to turn once more to his English parliament for money. By now, the three kingdoms were cascading into Civil War. Thomas Wentworth – dubbed ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ – was put on trial and beheaded. Charles changed his approach to religion, and cultivated some he had once thought of as puritans, in the hope of winning the political game of chess. “I have somewhat altered from my former thoughts,” he noted slyly, “to satisfy the times.” Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War He disavowed Ship Money, and agreed to call parliament at least once every three years. By the end of 1641, parliament was trying to remove his power to appoint his own government ministers; in 1642, they tried to strip him of his military authority, too. Much of the blame for the problems that beset his kingdoms has been laid at Charles’s feet – and with good reason. He could be difficult to trust. From 1637, he tried to use his military power to threaten those who opposed his policies. He twice raised an army against Scotland rather than engage in serious negotiations. In November 1640 and in May 1641, he plotted to use the guns and garrison at the Tower of London to overawe London and parliament. In autumn 1641, he facilitated a violent plot in Edinburgh against the Scottish leaders, including his kinsman the Marquess of Hamilton. Late in 1641, he gathered ‘Cavaliers’ at Whitehall Palace, ostensibly to protect his family but also to threaten parliament. Then, in the early days of 1642, he took several hundred of these men to Westminster with the aim of arresting five dissident MPs. That was an error from which Charles never recovered. The astrologer William Lilly thought that “This rash action of the king’s lost him his crown”, as it “left scarce any possibility of reconcilement; he not being willing to trust them, nor they to trust him.” As Charles’s Cavaliers stood outside the Commons, some of them cocked their pistols and threatened to shoot MPs. Charles did not allow this to happen, but parliament feared a massacre. The day after his attempted arrest of MPs, Charles travelled to London's Guildhall and issued reassurances that he wished to rule “like a king, not a tyrant”. Yet many were not so sure. That winter, he fled for the countryside, “so fleeting and so friendless”, as one observer put it. There had been disorderly protests even under the palace windows, and a parliamentarian polemicist at one point managed to throw into the king’s coach a pamphlet that likened Charles to Rehoboam, a tyrannical biblical king. For someone who had always feared the “many-headed monster”, it was terrifying that his subjects could get so close to his person. So was Charles I a tyrant? Historians have deployed the term ‘legal tyranny’, referring to his making controversial policies certain that the judges – who depended on the king for promotion – would support him in the courts. Small wonder that disgruntled subjects turned to parliament as a higher authority. Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I? By 1642, though, Charles’s enemies had gone much further. They believed that parliament needed to control the government as well as the law: to wield the power to appoint ministers and control the militia. Their partisans had even started arguing that ‘reason of state’ allowed them to act beyond what was ordinarily legal. No longer could parliamentarians claim to be upholding the law; now they had to say they were protecting the people. It was a revolutionary idea – and there was no way that Charles would concede it without a fight. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at Kellogg College, Oxford. His latest book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
John Milton was an English radical polemicist and poet, whose magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has influenced artistic endeavours since its publication. On the 350th anniversary of his death, Islam Issa explores the story of the man who lived in revolutionary times, and who lost two wives, his liberty and his sight – but never his hope
John Milton was an early riser. He woke each morning with poetry in his head, itching for it to be recorded. The verses came to him during the night, he said – a special delivery from his very own lyrical muse. By 1652, he had completely lost his sight, so the disgruntled Milton had to wait patiently for a scribe to arrive. In the popular imagination, one of them was his daughter, Deborah, who has been depicted putting pen to paper as her father dictates his intricate poetry. Milton’s biographer wrote that on some days, when it took longer than usual for someone to begin transcribing, the poet “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked”. That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete. It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost. Tumultuous times John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics. The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy. In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an interest payment from a landowner to whom his father had lent money years earlier. By the time he returned to London, he had tied the knot with the debtor’s daughter. This marriage to Mary Powell – at 17, half his age – lasted just a few weeks. It’s long been assumed that Milton must have been difficult to live with. A more obvious cause of the rift was politics: the first rumblings of the Civil War were growing, and the Powell family’s strong royalist views were incompatible with Milton’s staunch republicanism. In any case, when Mary abandoned him and returned to her family, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to addressing the topic of divorce. The law of the time offered a separation agreement “from bed and board” that didn’t go as far as terminating the marriage. Dissolution “from the bond of marriage” was valid only on grounds of adultery. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published as an anonymous and unlicensed pamphlet, made the radical argument that a breakdown due to “indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind” should be sufficient grounds. Milton was well ahead of his time. It was another three centuries before parliament passed the Divorce Reform Act 1969, legalising no-fault divorce on the grounds of an “irretrievable breakdown”. To his contemporaries, however, Milton’s justifications for divorce were likely the most controversial of all his opinions. They led to open attacks that reached parliament (by now his name was associated publicly with the book), where he was condemned and where members pushed for state control over unregistered books, including Milton’s contentious tract. Under the Licensing Order of 1643, every book produced had to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton penned a strong and impassioned case opposing the policy. In Areopagitica, which became his most famous polemic, he defended freedom of expression and compared suppressing books to killing humans – in fact, he wrote, it might be even more deplorable, because it “slays an immortality rather than a life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL348130-5dfa773-e1731929244146.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" title="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" /> Republican ideals Milton was most prolific when expounding his diehard republican beliefs. During the 1640s, he spent much of his time writing poetry and prose that supported the militant anti-monarchical movement. When the republican army’s commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, besieged Colchester in 1648, Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”. That poem also suggested that the job of opposing the tyranny of inherited power remained unfinished: “O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; / For what can war, but endless war still breed, / Till truth, and right from violence be freed.” Early the next year, parliament indicted Charles I. Fairfax, meanwhile, was overshadowed by a subordinate commander, Oliver Cromwell, who became the island’s most influential statesman – and in whom Milton placed high hopes. Listen | Browse the HistoryExtra archive of podcasts on the Civil War, from female spies to Charles I's killers Charles I’s trial lasted eight days in January 1649. During that time, Milton quickly put together the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, its title page boasting “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death”. On 30 January, the king was decapitated by a single axe blow and his head held up, blood dripping from the neck, to the cheering crowd. The monarchy and the House of Lords were swiftly abolished. Some years later, Cromwell became head of state, taking the (unmistakably regal) title of lord protector. Speaking in tongues Within six weeks of Charles I’s execution, Milton was called upon to serve the republican government in the role of secretary for foreign tongues. Tasked with translating official communications, largely from the period’s international language of Latin, Milton received a handsome annual salary of £288, 13 shillings and 6½d (around £45,000 today). Foreign governments were still wary of the new regime in Britain, so Milton’s talents were mainly channelled into writings in defence of the revolution. His Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), published in October 1649, attempted to justify the regicide. It was written in response to Eikon Basilike (The Royal Image), subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published shortly after the execution and purportedly written by the king himself before he died. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1288501833-86a56ff-e1731928903323.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Held in high regard by royalists, the title page of Eikon Basilike featured an allegorical image depicting Charles as a saintly martyr, engraved by William Marshall. That artist had earlier drawn Milton for his 1645 poetry collection – a depiction that the author hated. In retribution, Milton instructed Marshall to engrave a caption in Greek, describing the latter as “a rank beginner” and “a good-for-nothing artist” – barbs which, not speaking that language, he would have been unable to understand. Milton and Mary Powell had reconciled in 1645, but different problems soon arose. For one thing, the writer’s eyesight was weakening: by 1648, he’d lost all vision in one eye, and in 1652 he became permanently blind. In that same devastating year, Mary died from complications during the birth of their third daughter, Deborah. Milton’s second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock in 1656, appears to have been more amicable. Like his first wife, though, Katherine died in 1658 following childbirth. In one of his most emotive pieces, Milton writes about encountering his late beloved, whom he met only after losing his sight, during his vivid sleep: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” Perhaps tellingly, it was around this time that Milton – a blind man left to raise his three daughters alone – began to work on Paradise Lost. Despite the overthrow of the monarchy, on Oliver’s death in September 1658 the Cromwellian government reverted to dynastic succession. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as lord protector, but lacked the qualities that had prompted Milton to describe his father as “chief of men… Guided by faith and matchless fortitude”. Parliament soon retook control, much to Milton’s delight. Within a few months, however, the army had dissolved parliament – something that Milton condemned in no uncertain terms. As the royalists regained power, and with the restoration of the monarchy looking inevitable, Milton remained outspoken in opposition. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth proposed the formation of a permanent republican federation, or at the very least an elected sovereign. Yet such a scheme was, by 1660, hopelessly utopian. Writer on the run The monarchy was restored that May, when Charles II returned from exile and succeeded his father. Like his fellow republicans, Milton had to either run or hide. With an arrest warrant issued, and in real danger of assassination, he went into hiding. A proclamation was issued ordering that all of his books should be collected for burning, and Milton’s writings were consigned to the flames at the Old Bailey. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period Execution loomed, and many of his friends were put to death. A general pardon issued later in the summer of 1660 exempted Milton from suffering the same fate, but it didn’t mean that he was safe. By autumn, Milton had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. It’s not known why he was pardoned, around three months later; it may have been because of his visual impairment, or thanks to support from his friend Andrew Marvell, a poet who was also an influential MP. Still, Milton emerged from prison having lost many of his acquaintances, and in financial difficulty; he’d paid £150 – a large sum – to be released, and £2,000 of his savings had been seized. More detrimentally still, his dream of a republic – one in which he had believed, that he’d promoted and that had, for a short while, lived – had all but vanished. The Restoration complete, plague arrived to ravage England, driving Milton to take refuge in Buckinghamshire in July 1665. When that epidemic abated, he made his way back to London early the following year – only to be met by another disaster: the Great Fire of London. Though his house survived, the majority of his city was razed. Milton had spent the first half of the 1660s focusing on Paradise Lost, with an inevitably different outlook on life. “I now must change / Those notes to tragic,” laments the poem’s narrator. Milton was by then blind, lonely and essentially under house arrest, the powers he had challenged now restored: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.” Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London The well-read Milton alluded to the scriptures, poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace. The result is a dramatic, imaginative take on Satan’s rebellion against God, and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve. Set at the beginning of human history, it boasts an expansive setting, with Heaven at the top and Earth dangling from it, Hell at the bottom and a dark Chaos in between. Its story is one of ambition and rebellion, questioning the extent of free will and divine justice. Its characters – even God the Father and Son – are complicated and imperfect. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-463907993-5e42463-e1731929089161.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> And no Miltonic character is more famous than the deeply intense Satan, who rallies the fallen angels with populist rhetoric but also contemplates his condition with psychological rigour: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” It’s difficult not to read Milton’s politics into his great epic. In the preface, entitled ‘The Verse’, he explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers, he thought. By opposing rhyme and writing freely, Milton’s style was inherently nonconformist. Even more surprising is Satan’s often justified, if overambitious, opposition to the omnipotent but stubborn and out-of-touch God. It’s no surprise that this has long been interpreted as a metaphor for brave opposition against the seemingly immovable monarchy. In 1667, publisher Samuel Simmons paid Milton £5 for the rights to Paradise Lost; according to his contract, he received a further £5 once sales reached an agreed figure. In 1674, he republished the most authoritative version of Paradise Lost, in 12 books – like the classic epics with which he may have felt it was on a par. A few weeks later, Milton prepared his will, in which he mentioned the money still owed by his first wife’s father. He died in November that year. All is not lost It’s both intriguing and telling that Milton didn’t venture to North America. As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation. In an alternative universe, he might have been America’s greatest poet. Yet though Milton was a radical, he was also an idealist who stayed put, believing that he could change the system. Read more | "They decided that God must be leading them to North America": the Puritan journey to the Mayflower He had seen some of the world beyond England, travelling to Italy, Geneva and France in 1638. He appears to have had no trouble mastering Italian, claiming that it’s “easily learned at any odd hour”. It’s even said that Milton rolled his letter R when he spoke in Europe, in an effort to differentiate himself from other embarrassing compatriots on the continent. That trip had a formative effect on Milton, evident in Paradise Lost. When Satan ventures from Hell to Eden with the intention of taking down Adam and Eve, his shield, “massy, large and round… Hung on his shoulders like the moon”. Satan is essentially carrying his shield like a big backpack: it looks like the moon only if “through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” it. That artist was the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who’d championed the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. This view was officially deemed “foolish and absurd… formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of holy scripture”. By the time Milton met him, the Italian was elderly and blind. He had challenged authority but been forced to retract his beliefs, and was under house arrest – just as Milton was when writing Paradise Lost. No wonder Milton also challenged authority. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-600041375-c1a0392-e1731928957762.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Never to yield Yet there is much to suggest that a spark of idealism lived on. Adam, Eve and Satan seemingly all lose in Paradise Lost. But its ending sees the human couple locking hands as they step into a new world, free from Eden’s baggage – a world in which they can explore themselves and engage their free will. Even Satan, “in dubious battle… shook his (God’s) throne”. Here, Milton holds on to the thought that, for a short while, he played a part in shaking the establishment. “What though the field be lost?” Satan asks himself, before continuing to declare that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.” Milton’s influence on the English language is as profound as his views on politics and religion were radical. It’s claimed that he invented almost three times as many words as William Shakespeare did. Throughout his career, too, he conceived phrases, many of which speak to the enduring necessity of optimism. In his masque Comus, the character of the Lady spots a “cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”. And in the elegy Lycidas, Milton ends by confirming the temporary nature of grieving – that life must go on: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” John Milton’s artistic legacy In the 350 years since its creator’s death, Paradise Lost has inspired generations of painters, musicians and writers Painting and poetry Poet and painter William Blake quipped that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. The protagonist of Blake’s illustrated Milton: A Poem is that author, whose soul is re-embodied from Heaven. Describing blindness, the narrator of Paradise Lost mentions that a “cloud” of “ever-during dark Surrounds me”; in the first picture of his illustrated epic, Blake drew a naked Milton surrounded by darkness and clouds. In the 1800s, Blake also created a series of striking watercolour plates illustrating Paradise Lost. Sculpture Milton’s Satan is a complicated character with altered perceptions over the centuries. Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer is a towering and unsettling bronze statue completed during the Second World War. The figure’s asymmetry, suggestive stance and possible androgyny reflect Satan’s sexual tensions in Paradise Lost and the poem’s description of how “spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both”. Several decades earlier, Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver’s Fallen Angel portrayed Satan’s agonising fall from heaven – a move away from the stern and hypermasculine pre-Miltonic devil. Literature In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the creature discovers a book inside an abandoned bag: Paradise Lost. He assumes that it’s a true story, and compares himself to lonely Adam and mistreated Satan. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,” he reflects, “I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” More recently, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy drew heavily on the plot and themes of Paradise Lost. Its very title borrows the epic’s description of the mysterious elements that God employs during the act of creation. Landscape art A footpath in San Diego, California, takes the form of a beguiling serpent that turns Paradise Lost into a physical journey. Since 1992, artist Alexis Smith’s 170-metre-long Snake Path has invited individuals to walk through temptation, passing a small Edenic garden of fruit trees and a granite statue of an oversized book. It is carved with words from the finale of Paradise Lost, in which the angel Michael reminds Adam – and, in turn, readers – about the path to true bliss: “Then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far.” Stained glass During the 19th-century Gothic revival, Paradise Lost appeared in stained glass – a form that Milton described as “storied windows richly dight [ie adorned]”. The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888, includes portraits of Milton at various stages of his life: at school, visiting Galileo, dictating to his daughters. Its Paradise Lost scenes show Satan rousing the fallen angels in one panel and spying on Adam and Eve in another. Music Themes and images from Paradise Lost have influenced countless musicians over the decades, from a metal band of the same name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eminem. Lana Del Rey reimagined the epic story in her short film Tropico, with songs Body Electric, Gods and Monsters and Bel Air exploring the states of bliss, fall and redemption. It takes cues from Milton’s epic poem: there’s a “muttering thunder” when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, while at the end the first couple depart “hand in hand”. “It’s innocence lost,” sings Del Rey, “like Paradise, Paradise Lost.” This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won
When some 6,000 parliamentarians tried to prise a few hundred royalists out of Basing House in 1643, they began a brutal siege that would drag on for years and see thousands slaughtered. Jessie Childs tells the story of a desperate struggle that became a defining episode of the Civil War
On a plant-finding expedition to Kent in 1633, the apothecary Thomas Johnson looked out from the tower of Canterbury Cathedral and despaired at the inadequacy of the town’s defences. “Our people,” he lamented, “like the Spartans of old, set more store upon arms than upon walls for protection.” A decade later, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was shoring up the defences of Basing House in Hampshire, ahead of an imminent parliamentarian attack – and presumably wishing that someone had listened to him earlier. We have always preferred the glamour of the battle to the dog-work of a siege. We hear the rumble of the cavalry charge and the first dry rattle of new-drawn steel more keenly than the sound of digging and guard duty. We imagine the king’s battle standard rescued at Edgehill and the royalist horse reduced to “stubble” by Cromwell’s troops at the battle of Marston Moor, but a half-starved garrison negotiating terms of surrender is rarely part of the picture. Yet the Civil War was not only won on Marston Moor, nor even at the battle Naseby when Charles I lost his artillery and a large part of his officer corps in June 1645. It was won three months later, at Bristol, when his nephew Prince Rupert yielded England’s second city and, with it, his command of the royalist army. It was won when further strongholds were taken and destroyed, securing parliament’s supply lines and, ultimately, giving the king nowhere to hide. Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War From Hull, where arguably the war began in July 1642, to Harlech, where the last royalist garrison surrendered in March 1647, the first Civil War was predominantly fought around walled towns, medieval castles and fortified manor houses. Each side had areas of dominance, but this was not a regional conflict in the sense, say, of the American Civil War, with a geographically defined North and South. Once it became clear that the war between king and parliament would not be decided by one big battle, it mushroomed into hundreds of local contests for resources, supply lines and communications. In Ireland, too, the fighting was characterised by batteries and blockades, skirmishes and storms. “We make war more like foxes than like lions,” wrote Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, “and you will have 20 sieges for one battle.” Civil War: neighbourhoods become frontlines This all matters because the nature of the Civil War helps to explain the pity of it, the scope of it, and its consequences – not least for the king. The causes of the war were by no means clear-cut, but the execution of Charles I was the result of enough people in power believing that only a ruthless tyrant could renew hostilities, as Charles had done in 1648 (again suffering defeat), after so much slaughter. Charles, the army leaders decided, was a “man of blood” against whom the Lord had witnessed and by whom an account must be made “for that blood he had shed and mischief he had done”. Read more | Why Charles I had to die We hardly have to look back to the 17th century to know that when neighbourhoods become frontlines, civilians pay the price. Sieges terrorised local communities, spread disease and sucked the produce from the land. Houses were destroyed to provide field of fire, “contribution money” was collected by both sides, and farms were stripped bare. The almsfolk at the hospital of St Mary Magdalen near Winchester lost 36 sheep to the royalists over Christmas 1643. They didn’t complain at the time, but the following March they were forced to petition General Ralph Hopton after royalists broke in and took all their seed barley and every bit of wood – the gates, doors, wainscot, tables, cupboards, even the pews in their chapel. “Your poor petitioners,” they wrote, “being very aged and impotent persons [are] thereby made destitute of the means of having either temporal or spiritual food.” Hopton signed a protection order, but by then there wasn’t even a stable door left to close. Timeline: key moments in the Civil War 22 August 1642 Following years of escalating tensions between Charles I and his opponents – fanned by his dismissal of parliament, imposition of taxes and attempts to impose religious uniformity – the king raises his standard at Nottingham. This signals the official start of the Civil War between royalist and parliamentary forces. 23 October 1642 The war’s first big battle at Edgehill (Warwickshire) produces no decisive winner and consigns the country to a long conflict fought locally around fortified strongholds. 10 August 1643 King Charles besieges Gloucester but withdraws the following month upon the approach of the Earl of Essex, chief commander of the parliamentarian army. The armies clash at Newbury on 20 September; the result is inconclusive. 1 July 1644 Charles’s nephew Prince Rupert relieves York for the royalists, but is defeated the following day by a joint Scottish and parliamentary force on Marston Moor. 31 May 1645 Rupert sacks Leicester in the presence of the king. The royalists march south and meet the New Model Army at Naseby on 14 June, where Charles loses his artillery and many of his officers. 10 September 1645 Bristol, England’s second city, falls to the New Model Army. “Doubtless God is with them,” one Puritan preacher declares. 5 May 1646 Charles surrenders to the Scots at Southwell, Nottinghamshire (hoping they will be more sympathetic captors than parliament), and orders his garrisons to surrender. Handed on to parliament in 1647, the king is eventually executed on 30 January 1649. 11 September 1649 Oliver Cromwell’s forces storm Drogheda and slaughter its royalist defenders in what was the most notorious episode in his bloody, siege based campaign in Ireland. 3 September 1651 Cromwell storms Worcester. Charles II goes on the run and eventually escapes to France. He will not return for nine years. On 16 December 1653, Cromwell is appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Why was Basing House important? A series of sieges at Basing House, 20 miles north-east of Winchester, illustrates the hard lessons parliament had to learn before it could win the war. Basing House was the mist-shrouded mansion of John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester. Said to be “the greatest of any subject’s house in England”, it was encircled by a deep ditch and thick, earth lined walls. Situated 40 miles south of the king’s headquarters in Oxford, and 50 miles south-west of parliamentarian London, it disrupted military and commercial traffic between the capital and the west and channelled resources and intelligence up to Oxford. Symbolically, too, Basing House – a refuge for prominent royalist families and their treasure chests – was vital. It came to be viewed from London as a microcosm of Stuart degeneracy. The marquess was Catholic – a “papist” to use the contemporary slur – while his wife, Honora, was half-Irish. Their beleaguered guests included actors, artists, writers and the architect Inigo Jones who helped with the fortifications. To Puritans, Basing House was “a limb of Babylon”, “a nest of the vilest vermin in all the kingdom”. It was here, announced one preacher, that “religion and laws and liberties and the very being of our English nation lie at stake”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/09/2HJW0J3webready-a9581a7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="King Charles I holds a a council of war before the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, the first major battle of the Civil War (Photo by CBW/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="King Charles I holds a a council of war before the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, the first major battle of the Civil War (Photo by CBW/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The first assault on Basing House It took parliament more than two years to figure out how to take it. The first major assault on Basing House – after a failed local attack in July – was commanded by William “the Conqueror” Waller, a Puritan general who detested “this war without an enemy”, but was nevertheless certain that God would help him win it. He set down before Basing House on 6 November 1643 with around 6,000 men. The garrison comprised 400 defenders. It was, Waller was told, “but a slight piece”. The marquess refused Waller’s summons to surrender and presented stiff resistance the following day. A sortie led by the apothecary Thomas Johnson resulted in the farm outhouses being set alight and Waller’s men either burned to death or in flight. The following week, Waller decided to have “another fling at Basing”. Again, his ratio was good, but almost half his force was made up of Londoners who were not keen on service beyond the capital. Everything that could go wrong for Waller went wrong on 12 November 1643. Listen | Jonathan Healey delves into the turbulent 17th century, which witnessed regicide, civil war and the political awakening of society The Londoners’ lack of morale and discipline was exposed when they were blasted with case shot (canisters filled with musket balls) and refused to drive on. Another unit forgot their musket drills, so that the second ranks fired before the first had time to turn away and the “third ranks fired upon them, and so, consequently, the rear fired upon their own front and slew and wounded many of their own men”. Waller fared better on the house’s east front, but his scaling ladders were too short, his petard (a bell-shaped bomb) was clamped to the wrong place and, again, the resistance was epic. A sniper inside the house picked off charging assailants, while women threw down bricks and stones from the roof. “Come up Roundheads if ye dare!” they screamed. At four in the afternoon, darkness and driving rain forced Waller to withdraw. One soldier, left behind with a shattered leg, cried out for help. What, shouted the defenders of the house, had the king ever done to him to make him rebel? At which question, one royalist newsbook reported, “this desperate wretch pulled out his knife and cut his own throat”. The following morning, Waller wanted to resume the assault. But, having slept out in the cold and sodden fields, and hearing that a royalist relief force was on its way, the Londoners chanted “Home! Home!” and Waller was forced to relent. His report made clear that, although God had chastised them with this beating, parliament should have supplied better men. The second assault on Basing House The second attempt on Basing House was a summer blockade imposed by the local Roundhead, Richard “Idle Dick” Norton. It lasted for 24 weeks and was hell for both sides. Smallpox, starvation, heavy shelling and internal tensions brought the royalists to the brink of collapse, but the garrison commander, a gnarly merchant called Marmaduke Rawdon, promised the marquess that his men would never surrender for as long as there was “a horse in the house, dog, cat or rat, or anything that is eatable”. He asked only for some wine and good tobacco from the marquess’s stores. By autumn, the defenders looked more like “prisoners of the grave than the keepers of a castle”. But marshland in front of the house ensured that it was never fully surrounded and, sometime over the summer, the Marchioness of Winchester slipped out to Oxford where she implored her fellow Catholic, Henry Gage, to save them. Read more | From the home front to the front line: what were the roles of women in the Civil War? Anyone who thinks that 17th-century soldiering was primitive work should study this exceptional operation. At 10pm on 9 September 1644, Gage led a royalist relief force on two night-marches through enemy-held territory. Each man was disguised with an orange-tawny scarf – parliament’s colours – and the troopers shared their horses with the footsore infantry. Gage was the first to do this, inspiring the rest. On the outskirts of Basing House, having swapped their orange scarves for white ribbons, they fought a skirmish with the besiegers – as fierce as any battle for those involved – and managed to cut through the lines and into the house. After raiding Basingstoke on market day, Gage provisioned the garrison, stayed for the night and then, having conducted a disinformation campaign to make the parliamentarians think he would be sticking around for longer, quietly slipped away. He took a different route back to Oxford, swimming the horses over the river Kennet (the troopers took the musketeers up on their saddles) and evading every high-alert patrol. It was, thought one royalist, “the most soldier-like piece these wars have ever yet afforded”. Five leading players in the battle for Basing House ROYALIST: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Johnson A valiant soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Johnson was an apothecary from Yorkshire, and the first person known to have sold bananas in London. A keen plant-hunter, he planned to write a catalogue of the plants of England and Wales. He was one of the most brave and popular officers at Basing House, as valued “for his valour and conduct as a soldier” as “his excellency as a herbalist and physician”. Shot in the shoulder in September 1644, he died two weeks later. ROYALIST: Honora, Marchioness of Winchester The chatelaine of Basing House, Honora was the grand daughter of Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, and the half-sister of Robert Devereux, the 3rd Earl of Essex and lord general of the parliamentarian army. She defended Basing House during the first attack, tearing lead off the roof to cast bullets, and held her broken family together after the Civil War. ROYALIST: Colonel Marmaduke Rawdon Marmaduke Rawdon was the military governor of Basing House. He was a leading London merchant and one of the first colonisers of Barbados. A staunch royalist, he wore a medallion of Charles I around his neck – but his Protestant beliefs made him clash with the Catholic Marquess of Winchester. Rawdon was expelled from the garrison before its last stand. ROYALIST: Inigo Jones The great designer and architect Inigo Jones was later described as having been “a very aged, infirm man” at the time he came to Basing House. According to one newsbook, he was brought in to help design the house’s fortifications. At the final storm, he was stripped of his clothes by a parliamentarian soldier (an accepted privilege of plunder) and carried out of the house wrapped in a blanket. He died seven years later, just before his 79th birthday. PARLIAMENTARIAN: Hugh Peter Hugh Peter was a Puritan preacher and a chaplain in the New Model Army. His graphic report of the fall of Basing House depicted the royalist stronghold as a nest of idolatry. The captured women were “entertained by the common soldiers somewhat coarsely”, he said, “yet not uncivilly; they left them with some clothes upon them”. A vigorous promoter of the regicide (though not a signatory of Charles I’s death warrant), he was executed on 16 October 1660. The road to victory at Basing House A month later, parliament’s southern armies converged around Basing House. They totalled 19,000 men and comprised Waller’s force, Lord General Essex’s main field army and the formidable Eastern Association commanded by the Earl of Manchester and his cavalry officer, Oliver Cromwell. Their scouts told them to expect the king on 21 October, and they drew up in battle array. The following day, though, upon hearing that Charles had wheeled about towards Newbury, they took the road after him. There was no trust between the parliamentarian generals at this point and the resulting second battle of Newbury on 27 October failed to deliver a killer blow to the royalist cause. After a hard reckoning and the introduction of a Self-Denying Ordinance (passed later, in April 1645) that required all peers and MPs to resign their military offices, parliament formed the New Model Army. It had a new commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas “Black Tom” Fairfax, and stricter discipline. Fairfax ensured that the men were paid centrally and regularly. Fornicators were whipped, and plunderers were shot. In its first year of campaigning, the New Model Army fought two major battles and a dozen sieges and storms. The siege of Basing House Cromwell, now lieutenant general of the cavalry, took a detachment to Basing House on 8 October 1645. Heavy bombardment produced two effective breaches in the house’s walls. On the 14th they stormed the house and took it in the better part of an hour. Whereas the garrison had been divided by religion and had lost its Protestant regiments, the New Model Army was united by an intense religious fervour. Cromwell prayed the night before the storm to the drumbeat of Psalm 115, reflecting on the lines decrying idols: “They that make them are like unto them, so is every one that trusteth them.” Listen | Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector Confidence stemmed, too, from numerical advantage (about 6,000 besiegers to 300 defenders), heavy artillery and the knowledge that no outside force could now save Basing House. The local royalist garrisons had fallen, and New Model discipline won local support. The fighting was savage and about half the defenders were slain. Some Jesuit priests were executed in cold blood and one woman, the daughter of a clergyman, was killed trying to save her father. However, the attackers showed restraint in some quarters. More than 100 prisoners were taken, including 15 “Irish rebels”. The New Model Army’s combination of numbers, guns, motivation, morale and controlled ruthlessness proved a winning formula. “God exceedingly abounds in His goodness to us,” wrote Cromwell that night as a fire took hold of the house. He recommended that it be demolished, “utterly slighted” – a policy that helped ensure strongholds could not be retaken. Acts of courage and atrocity The news of the fall of Basing House was received in Oxford with a cry of anguish “as if they had lost their gods”. In London, the bells rang out in celebration. Babylon had fallen. It was not the end of the war, but it helps explain how it was won. There is another reason why we should set more store upon walls than weapons. The length and intensity of a siege brings the face of war into sharp relief. Wonderful things happened at Basing House: acts of courage, creation, love, even a wedding. But it also witnessed desertions, betrayals and atrocities including a rudimentary form of chemical warfare: the parliamentarians set fire to hay bales saturated in sulphur and arsenic, and directed the fumes towards the house. For the royalist clergyman Humfrey Peake, a siege was mental as well as physical torture. He was tormented by the “sad spectacle” of death, the “intolerable stench” of it and the “hideous shapes” of death’s soldiers mustering against him. His nerves were shredded by the “panic terrors” of others, their “shrieks and cries and noise and tumult”, and the “sad unrest” that shows people “what they are”. Of the many ways in which men try to ruin one another, Peake concluded, “this of a siege is the sharpest and the saddest”. More than a flash of courage or cowardice on the battlefield, a siege drills deep down into the human condition and draws out the best and worst of humanity. This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett: the man who killed Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth
Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett ended the 12-day manhunt for John Wilkes Booth, as dramatised in an Apple TV+ series, by shooting and fatally wounding President Lincoln’s killer. But there’s much more to the true story of Corbett’s life…
Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett is a vital figure in the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent hunt for John Wilkes Booth – events depicted in the Apple TV+ series, Manhunt, which follows the gripping 12-day search for Lincoln’s Confederate killer. Corbett killed Booth, against orders, and this was an event that would define his life. However, both before and after this infamous act, Corbett was an individual shrouded in tragedy and intrigue. Who was Boston Corbett? Corbett hailed from Britain. Born in London in 1832, Corbett emigrated to the US around 1839 with his family, settling in New York City. He initially worked as a hat maker – notably, a trade known for its prominent use of mercury. The element’s use would be the subject of much speculation in later years, as the inhalation of mercury vapour came to be known to cause symptoms including psychosis, and excitability (the symptoms became so common in hatters that the phrase “mad as a hatter” was born). Corbett’s life would go on to be shaped by his immense devotion to the Christian faith. After the loss of his wife, who died during childbirth, Corbett found purpose in religion after becoming a regular attendee of street preaching congregations. Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln? In the late 1850s, his evangelism led him to change his first name from Thomas (or Tom), to ‘Boston’, as it was in Boston, Massachusetts, that he devoted himself to religion. Such was the fervour of his faith, Corbett became a street preacher and, in order to address his sexual impulses, he’s recorded as having castrated himself with scissors. Boston Corbett’s role in the Civil War Upon the outbreak of the American Civil War, Corbett enlisted in the Union Army in 1861, and he fought with the 16th New York Cavalry after re-enlisting in 1863. He military record is largely unremarkable, though there are some tales of him demonstrating particular courage and conviction. During the height of the war, Corbett was confined as a prisoner of war at the notorious Andersonville Prison where he was subject to appalling conditions and contracted a handful of illnesses and diseases. However, he ultimately survived the ordeal, and was released in late 1864, when he would then recover in hospital. A few months after his release, the war effectively ended when Confederate general Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces. Boston Corbett’s part in the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth On the evening of 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. Twelve days later, on 26 April 1865, amid the chaos following the assassination, Corbett was a member of the Union Army detachment pursuing Booth as part of a large-scale manhunt organised by high-level Washington figures including US secretary of war Edwin Stanton. Corbett was among those who helped to encircle Booth within a barn in Garrett Farm, Virginia, while their leader, Lieutenant Edward P Doherty, engaged in a back-and-forth conversation with Booth, trying to lure him out. Hours later, patience had run dry. Read more | The real history of Mary Surratt's controversial role in the Lincoln conspiracy Booth was cornered in the now-burning barn when Corbett shot and fatally wounded him through a gap in the barn exterior, despite receiving no order to do so. The instructions issued to Corbett and his detachment had been the opposite – to capture Booth alive as senior figures in Washington wanted to extract more information about the conspiracy and its motivations. Was there a conscious motivation behind his decision, or was it simply an unconsidered calculation made in the context of immense stress and pressure? Either way, Corbett’s actions meant that it was he, not Booth, who was sent to Washington for questioning. However, backed by Edwin Stanton himself, Corbett was not court martialled for his actions and, for a short time, was hailed as a hero. After providing his testimony about the events that led to the killing of Booth, Corbett left the Union Army and returned to his career as a hatter and a preacher. What happened to Boston Corbett after he killed John Wilkes Booth? Over the course of the next 20 years, Corbett’s mental state dramatically deteriorated. Paranoid that Confederate assassins would attempt to target him as revenge for killing Booth, and dogged by hate mail, Corbett isolated himself and built up a reputation as being erratic and unpredictable, and he would brandish his weapons while in public. Historians have since noted that the decline in his mental condition may have been hastened by his career as a hatter, with the mercury vapours produced in the hat-making process being known to contribute to serious neurological damage. On 1 October 1887, after a string of violent and threatening displays, Corbett was declared insane and was confined to an asylum in Topeka, Kansas. However, his story continued. Corbett escaped the asylum in 1888 and told Richard Thatcher, a fellow former Andersonville inmate, that he was heading for Mexico. However, there is no verified evidence of where Corbett went, or what he did, after his escape. From this point onwards, the fate of Corbett remains steeped in mystery. How and when did Boston Corbett die? There are no official records of how or when Boston Corbett died. But there are, of course, rumours about how Corbett met his end, including the suggestion that he died in Minnesota in 1894, in the Great Hinckley Fire. However (and whenever) he died, Corbett’s life was marked by chaos resulting from a combination of tragedy, faith, short-lived fame, and mental illness. His legend remains just as complex as that of the man he famously killed, and is arguably even more ambiguous. 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Alternate history: what if Oliver Cromwell’s son had never been named Lord Protector?
Professor Peter Gaunt tells Nige Tassell why a more capable leader than Richard Cromwell might have secured the long-term future of England’s republic – but not necessarily forever
In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, lay on his deathbed. He had served less than five years in his role as both head of state and head of government, following the earlier execution of Charles I in 1649, but he was now required to name his successor. Cromwell is understood to have done so verbally; certainly, no written records survive of him revealing the name of the new Lord Protector. He chose Richard, his eldest surviving son. He may have been his son, but Richard was no Oliver. His power base within the army was minimal and he had little clout within Parliament. By the following May, Richard’s weakness had brought about his departure, which in turn led to the end of the Protectorate and to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. So why had Cromwell believed his unqualified son to be the best man for the job? In context: the rule of Oliver Cromwell After the execution of Charles I in 1649, England was ruled by the Rump Parliament in conjunction with the English Council of State. Oliver Cromwell staged a coup in April 1653, dissolving the Rump Parliament and replacing it with a body called the Nominated Assembly. When this too was dissolved in December 1653, Cromwell created a Protectorate, with himself as Lord Protector. It was a role he fulfilled for less than half a decade. Suffering with complications from malaria, he named his son Richard as his successor. However, so weak was Richard as head of state that he resigned within months. In the struggle for power that ensued, an influential military figure, George Monck, restored the Long Parliament, the legislature that the Rump Parliament had superseded. Charles II returned from exile and the monarchy was restored in 1660. Why did Oliver Cromwell think his son was the best successor? “This is a key question and is very hard to answer,” explains Peter Gaunt, professor of history at the University of Chester and an expert on Cromwell’s Protectorate. “Oliver was surely sufficiently experienced and sufficiently intelligent to foresee problems in nominating someone who had no real military background or pedigree. I suspect a large part of the answer lies in Oliver’s traditional social outlook – he was never radical in social terms and respected the established social hierarchy, as well as the value of family and kinship ties. Thus, once given the right and obligation to name his successor, he felt bound to name his elder surviving son and legal heir.” The right of the Lord Protector to unilaterally determine his successor had only recently been agreed. Cromwell had been offered a hereditary monarchy, which he declined. Under a new written constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice of 1657, the role wouldn’t have been as all-powerful as that enjoyed by Charles I, as Gaunt makes clear. “It would have constrained quite tightly the actions of a king and what, as king, Oliver could do alone and without wider conciliar or parliamentary consent.” Instead, Cromwell was now permitted to name his successor. Either way, whether as monarch or Lord Protector, Richard stepped into his father’s shoes. Read more | Elizabeth Cromwell: the life of Oliver Cromwell’s shadowy queen Who were the other candidates? It wasn’t that there weren’t other, stronger candidates to become the second Lord Protector. There was Cromwell’s son-in-law, for starters, the militarily well-connected Charles Fleetwood. A more likely candidate might have been Major-General John Lambert, Cromwell’s right-hand man and chief author of the Instrument of Government (the constitution by which the post-monarchical government was run before the Humble Petition and Advice was drafted), had his fierce opposition to kingship in the spring of 1657 not led to a dramatic fall-out with Cromwell and his dismissal. There was an even more suitable replacement within Cromwell’s own bloodline: his younger son, Henry. “Henry might have made a better Lord Protector,” says Gaunt. “He had a stronger military background and pedigree than his elder brother and, as chief administrator of Ireland since 1655, he had shown himself to be a good political operator in handling government and civilian issues. Henry died quite young in 1674. If he had become Lord Protector in 1658, been successful in the role and lived on as long as his elder brother Richard, who did not die until 1712, things may have been very different.” More from our alternate history series What if... Alexander the Great hadn't died so young? What if... Boudica had defeated the Romans? What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England? What if... Magna Carta hadn’t been written? What if... Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s first son had lived? What if... Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated? What if... Napoleon had defeated Russia? It certainly wasn’t inevitable that Cromwell’s successor, following such a strong figure, would fail. Richard, without the connections or experience, was wholly unsuitable, but a sharper operator could have prospered. “Had the successor been able to repeat Oliver’s trick of keeping the army sweet, loyal and supportive of the ostensibly civilian Protectoral regime, I see no reason why the Protectoral system could not and would not have continued much longer-term. I see nothing fundamentally unsound in the system which meant that it was doomed to failure or would have collapsed in the foreseeable future. I am not convinced that a Stuart restoration was inevitable.” But nor does Professor Gaunt believe a republican government would have ensued for centuries. “I am guessing, given the traditional and conservative outlook of the political elite and wider population, that the Protectoral system, had it survived long-term, would have evolved closer to a constitutional monarchical system, perhaps complete with the return of the title of king.” Had a stronger Lord Protector succeeded Cromwell, one who lasted more than a handful of months, might other European states have considered divesting themselves of their own monarchies? “While there are some examples of politico-constitutional developments in one state influencing or being followed or copied by another state, it is not that common. It is much more usual for each state to follow its own path, with its own individual peculiarities and unique systems. It would not have served as a blueprint.” This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
The battle of Worcester: Cromwell’s last battle
The Parliamentarians’ crushing defeat of Charles II’s army at Worcester finally brought to an end more than a decade of civil war in Britain. Battle historian Julian Humphrys explains…
Climb the 235 steps to the top of the tower of Worcester Cathedral and, once you’ve recovered your breath, you’ll be rewarded with a remarkable bird’s-eye view of the city below you. You’ll also be standing on the very spot where, on 3 September 1651, Charles II watched his tired and outnumbered army prepare to do battle with the forces of Oliver Cromwell. It would be the final battle of the Civil War. After his father’s execution in 1649, the throne had passed, in theory at least, to Charles II. Charles was supported by the Scots, who disapproved of Charles I’s beheading (he had been their king as well) and had fallen out with their former English parliamentarian allies, particularly over religion. Parliament reacted by sending an army north which, led by Oliver Cromwell, defeated the Scots at Dunbar on 3 September 1650. Hostilities dragged on but on 1 January 1651, Charles was crowned king by the Scots at Scone. That July, the English crossed the Forth and, after defeating the Scots at Inverkeithing, cut their army off from its chief source of supplies. Hoping to tempt Charles and his Scottish army into hostile English territory, Cromwell left the border unguarded. Charles took the bait. At the beginning of August, he led his army into England. Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War The battle of Worcester: in context Who fought? Royalists (Charles II): 10,000 Scots, 2,000 English Commonwealth (Cromwell): 28,000 English Losses Royalists: 2,000 killed, 10,000 captured Commonwealth: 300 killed and wounded Who won? The result was complete destruction of Charles’s army If the young king had hoped that hordes of supporters would rally to his cause, he was to be disappointed. The English may have disliked the Republic, but they hated the Scots even more, and, after nine years’ intermittent fighting, they were thoroughly tired of war. Not only did the hoped-for reinforcements fail to materialise in any great numbers, but Charles’s army began to shrink as Scottish stragglers were mopped up by the English forces that were shadowing his army in ever-increasing numbers. On 23 August, having been forced to ditch his plan to advance on London by the sheer weight of numbers that were now facing him, Charles entered Worcester. Morale among his forces was low. His troops were tired, hungry and miles from home and, while most would have fought hard to defend their homeland, this adventure down south was a different proposition altogether. David Leslie, the commander of Charles’s Scottish cavalry, had fallen into a deep depression after being defeated at Dunbar, and expressed doubts that his troops would fight at all. Meanwhile, the forces of parliament were closing in. Realising that they were likely to be attacked, Charles’s men began strengthening the city’s defences. Earth was piled up against the medieval stone city walls to dampen the impact of cannon balls, and a large earth fort, dubbed Fort Royal, was thrown up outside the city’s Sidbury Gate to defend the eastern approach to Worcester. Much of this work was done by forced labourers from surrounding villages. Six months later, they would be set to work again, this time to demolish the defences they had been made to dig. By now, Charles probably had about 12,000 men under his command in Worcester. About 10,000 were Scottish, the rest English. By 17th-century standards at least, this was a substantial force, but it was dwarfed by the massive army that the English parliament was preparing to deploy against it. Commanded by Cromwell, it was a mixture of regular troops and soldiers from various local militias and, at 28,000 strong, it was one of the largest armies ever to take the field in England. Charles II on the run. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images) Crushing defeat On 2 September, Charles’s forces suffered a further blow to their morale when the Earl of Derby, the leader of the one English rebellion in support of the would-be monarch, turned up at Worcester with the news that his little army had been crushed at Wigan in Lancashire. On the same day, in a bid to at least improve the clothing of his tattered army, Charles ordered £453 worth of cloth from a local draper. But there would be no time to make this into uniforms for, on 3 September, Cromwell’s mighty war machine rolled into action. The significance of the date wouldn’t have been lost on Cromwell’s men. It was the first anniversary of his great victory at Dunbar and, to underline the point, the English used the same rallying cry – ‘The Lord of Hosts’ – as they had at that battle. For anyone who knew their Bible (and many did), the message was clear. ‘The Lord of Hosts’ was taken from a rather ominous passage in the Book of Jeremiah which read, “This is the day of the Lord God of Hosts, a day of vengeance, his sword shall devour his enemies. It will be drenched with their blood.” Seeking to make the most of his huge advantage in numbers, Cromwell planned to envelop Worcester from the south, east and west. The main drawback to this plan was a liquid one: running south to north past Worcester, the River Severn effectively cut his army in two, while troops advancing to the west faced an additional obstacle in the form of the River Teme, which joined the Severn just south of the city. But the English had found a solution to this problem in the form of a number of wooden boats, which they planned to lash together to form improvised pontoon bridges. While Cromwell remained with the bulk of his army on the eastern side of the Severn, his future son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, led 12,000 red-coated soldiers in an attack in the west. The Scots fought hard, progress was slow and there was some bitter fighting in and around the village of Powick just south of the Teme. (Ironically, this was the site of one of the earliest actions of the Civil War in England, when Royalist cavalry routed their Roundhead counterparts in 1642). A bridge too far Seeing what was happening and anxious to maintain momentum, Cromwell personally led three brigades of his army across the first pontoon bridge, which had been built across the Severn. Faced with this threat to their flank, the Scots fell back across Powick Bridge and took up new defensive positions north of the Teme. Once again, Fleetwood’s troops were faced with stiff resistance, but the Scots simply didn’t have enough men to defend everywhere. A new pontoon bridge was set up across the Teme, and using this, the bridge at Powick and another crossing further west, the English eventually broke through. Initially, the Scots fell back in good order, but as more and more Parliamentarians arrived on the scene, the retreat turned into a rout and they rushed for the town bridge across the Severn and the apparent safety of the city itself. Watching these events from the tower of Worcester Cathedral, Charles believed that he still had an outside chance of victory. He reasoned that, in crossing the Severn to help Fleetwood, Cromwell had seriously weakened his forces to the east. Rushing down the tower’s steep spiral staircase, he gathered together what forces he could and led them in a desperate sortie out of Worcester’s eastern Sidbury gate. Three hours’ desperate fighting ensued as the Scots initially drove the Parliamentarians back from their positions around Perry Wood and Red Hill and even captured two cannon. Sensing an opportunity, Charles called on David Leslie, who had assembled his cavalry outside the city, to come forward and support him. But with no confidence in his men, Leslie never moved. All is lost For Charles, the game was up. His outnumbered troops could advance no further, and by now, Cromwell was transferring troops back across the Severn to join the fray. The Scots battled on, using the butt-ends of their muskets when they ran out of ammunition, but eventually they were driven back into the city. Cromwell’s men stormed into Fort Royal and fired its cannon into the mob of retreating Scots who, according to one onlooker, were now so desperate to escape that they were “readier to cut each other’s throats than defend themselves against the enemy”. The Parliamentarians charged into Worcester, hot on the heels of the fleeing Scots, but royalist resistance lasted just long enough for Charles to escape out of St Martin’s gate. Tradition has it that he left by the back door of his New Street headquarters just as some Parliamentarian dragoons were coming in the front. Around 2,000 of Charles's men were killed in the battle, which Cromwell called “his Crowning Mercy”. Most of the rest were captured. The Parliamentarians lost 300 men. Although Charles eventually escaped, Worcester shattered the Stuart cause for a decade. It also confirmed the political dominance of England, and Westminster in particular, over the rest of Britain, the effects of which continue to resonate today. In 1660, Charles II was invited to return as monarch (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images) What happened next? Oliver Cromwell was now the most powerful man in the Republic, but Britain remained deeply divided and there was little agreement over how the country should be governed. In 1653, Cromwell became head of state as Lord Protector, but was never able to secure widespread support for his regime and, ultimately, his power rested on the fact that he had the army to back him. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, his son and successor, Richard, proved incapable of holding the country together and, in 1660, Charles II was invited to return as monarch. Read more about the Restoration What happened to Charles II after the battle? Charles would spend the six weeks after Worcester as a wanted man – a fugitive in his own country. Thanks to the loyalty of some of his subjects, his own resourcefulness and quick-thinking, and some large slices of luck, he eventually made it to safety on the Continent. Charles’s time on the run gave him something no other monarch of the time had – an insight into the everyday lives of the ordinary people in his realm. The Republic’s failure to find a political settlement led to Charles’s restoration as king in 1660. During his 25-year reign, he often proved callous and cynical, and was quite prepared to throw his advisors to the wolves. But he never forgot the loyalty of those who stood by him in those dark days of defeat. This article was first published in the April 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed
Roundheads and Cavaliers: where did the Civil War nicknames come from?
Professor Mark Stoyle explains the history behind two nicknames that came to represent the royalists (Cavaliers) and the Parliamentarians (Roundheads) during the Civil War…
The terms aren’t modern and actually first spring up – in the context of the Civil War – in London, in late 1642/early 1643. Certainly, in the propaganda of the time, you can see images of long-haired, foppish Cavaliers pitted against sober-looking, shorthaired parliamentarians. The word ‘Cavalier’ actually comes from the Spanish word ‘caballero’ (gentleman) and it had connotations of foreignness, of being a trooper or an armed horseman. And it was also tied up with images of gentility. So it became a very handy propagandist tool for the parliamentarians, because once you start to call people Cavaliers, you invoke the idea of snobbish aristocrats who are looking down on ordinary people. Browse | Expert articles, podcasts and video on the Civil War The word Cavalier also conjures up images of violent foreigners, particularly those associated with Spain, which was a country hated by Protestant men and women at the time and which was viewed as the heartland of European Catholicism. And, of course, there’s also the other meaning of the word cavalier: of being reckless, high-handed, swaggering, drinking and so on – the antithesis, if you like, of the stout Protestant English man or woman. The origin of the word ‘Roundhead’ is a little harder to trace and doesn’t have any obvious roots in other words. The classic explanation is that it reflected the short hair of the London apprentices who were very prominent in their support of Parliament at the beginning of the Civil War. Another possible explanation, which I’ve always been interested in, is that, before the Civil War, if you were seditious and opposed the government, particularly in religious terms, you could have your ears lopped off as a form of punishment. There is one rather gruesome example of a man who had already had his ears cut down once to the stumps, but then had the remaining stumps cut off for the same crime! Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War I do sometimes wonder if the term Roundhead was almost created as a nasty joke – to invoke the image of seditious, Puritanical individuals who had had their ears cropped as a result of their hostility to the established church. You can listen to the full interview with Mark Stoyle on our Everything You Wanted To Know About podcast episode Did Roundheads and Cavaliers really dress so differently? In a word, no. The idea of gaily dressed Cavaliers in plumed hats doing battle with helmeted Roundheads is a Victorian misconception. Armies in the Civil War of 1642–51 were dressed in exactly the same way and any cavalryman, Roundhead or Cavalier, offered the opportunity of wearing a helmet, breastplate and thick leather coat would have jumped at the chance. Until the establishment of Parliament’s New Model Army whose soldiers were uniformly clothed in red, infantry regiments were clothed in whatever colour uniform their colonels chose for them. As a result there were regiments on both sides wearing the same colour coats – red, blue, green and white- and this could lead to considerable confusion on the battlefield. The armies tried to get round this in a variety of ways. Cavalrymen were given coloured scarves or sashes to wear. These were normally red for the Royalists, tawny orange for the Parliamentarians. An army might adopt a ‘field sign’ to distinguish its soldiers – maybe a bit of greenery stuck in the hat – and was usually given a ‘field word’ – a simple phrase to shout out as a kind of password. Obviously field words were hardly secret, field signs could be swiftly removed (the Parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Fairfax avoided capture by doing this at the battle of Marston Moor) and at the battle of Cheriton in 1644 both sides took to the field with something white in their hats as a field sign and shouting out ‘God with us’ as a field word!