HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-11-20T09:01:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
items: Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”
items: "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?
items: Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
items: The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won
items: Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett: the man who killed Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth
items: How much do you know about the Civil War?
items: Alternate history: what if Oliver Cromwell’s son had never been named Lord Protector?
items: The battle of Worcester: Cromwell’s last battle
items: Roundheads and Cavaliers: where did the Civil War nicknames come from?

After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
type: item
date: 2025-11-20T09:00:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Fascism
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
description: 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
encoded: 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 gov…

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Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”
type: item
date: 2025-08-25T08:00:36.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
subject: Stuart kings and queens
description: 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
encoded: 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…

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"Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?
type: item
date: 2025-04-15T16:43:19.000Z
creator: Dr Jonathan Healey
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: 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?
encoded: 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 wo…

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Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:52.000Z
creator: Professor Islam Issa
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
description: 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
encoded: 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 intere…

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The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won
type: item
date: 2024-09-26T10:00:21.000Z
creator: Jessie Childs
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Castles
description: 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
encoded: 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…

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Thomas ‘Boston’ Corbett: the man who killed Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth
type: item
date: 2024-04-15T14:32:22.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: 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…
encoded: 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…

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How much do you know about the Civil War?
type: item
date: 2023-06-19T15:39:24.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Test your knowledge on the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles in the mid-17th century…
encoded: View Riddle on the source website

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Alternate history: what if Oliver Cromwell’s son had never been named Lord Protector?
type: item
date: 2023-06-19T14:50:41.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: 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
encoded: 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 Protecto…

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The battle of Worcester: Cromwell’s last battle
type: item
date: 2023-06-17T07:11:16.000Z
creator: Julian Humphrys
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: 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…
encoded: 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 st…

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Roundheads and Cavaliers: where did the Civil War nicknames come from?
type: item
date: 2023-06-15T10:37:38.000Z
creator: Professor Mark Stoyle
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Video shorts
description: Professor Mark Stoyle explains the history behind two nicknames that came to represent the royalists (Cavaliers) and the Parliamentarians (Roundheads) during the Civil War…
encoded: 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…

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