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"Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat"
Michael Wood on the evolution and erosion of universal human rights
I’ve just returned from a trip to Versailles. On a bitterly cold, end-of-winter afternoon, the great symbol of French monarchy, gilded anew for the 2024 Olympics, gleamed against a steel-blue sky. The crowds were huge: it’s one of the biggest tourist draws in France after Disneyland – which is somehow fitting, for Versailles is a fairytale palace, too. I walked the gardens, browsed the bookshop (stacked with books on Marie Antoinette, of course) and then strolled back through the town to the station. On the way, there was a surprise. In a side street, display boards along an old wall told the story of the National Assembly of the summer of 1789 – the very moment of revolution. Down a lane, a faded wooden sign over a crumbling gateway marked the site of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, where the scenery, costumes, instruments and props used in royal entertainments were stored; it’s now a centre of baroque music. Inside was a tree-lined courtyard and a rain-filled hollow marking the oval outline of the temporary auditorium where the National Assembly met. Here, affronted by the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and powerful, the representatives of the people voted to “abolish privilege” and create a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution The Rights of Man! Such were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the great 18th-century movement towards rational thought, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, human autonomy, secularism and democracy. That declaration in 1789 came hot on the heels of the American Revolution, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. That, in turn, was inspired by English precedent: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. These ideals have been upheld by western thinkers ever since, despite the horrendous deeds of imperialists across the world in the intervening time, colonising and enslaving other cultures, and fighting catastrophic internecine wars. It was the horrors of the Second World War that inspired the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, signed by all except Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Bloc. Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat. Liberal humanism, we are told, has had its day. In international affairs the rules-based order is gone. From Greenland to Iran there are no constraints on state action save self-interest. The same goes for internal governance. In the US, we’re seeing the tearing-up of the assumptions of American democracy, cherished since 1776. Hillary Clinton has said of President Trump: “He has betrayed the west, he’s betrayed human values… [and] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Read more | Your guide to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence Universal? Given the deeds of western colonialism over the past couple of centuries, it is not surprising that some have denied that they are. China, for example, now rejects Enlightenment ideas as non-Chinese. Yet many European observers in the 18th century saw the Qing state as a kind of Enlightenment society, with an (admittedly harsh) legal code, charitable institutions, scientific and literary clubs, poetry circles and even a measure of public opinion. Common human values in the Confucian and European traditions are evident in, for example, the beginnings of a human rights discourse in 17th and 18th-century China, and even discussion of the principle of the rule of law. As Huang Zongxi wrote in 1661, “You cannot have the rule of man without the rule of law.” Those 18th-century French intellectuals would have agreed. (China, incidentally, was one of the original signatories to the UN Declaration, and its constitution guarantees human rights, including of speech and religion – but only so far as they do not endanger the state. In China, the state has always come first.) But the ideals of the Enlightenment were European. Of course, they weren’t all created in the 18th century. Some go back to classical Greece and Rome, and some to the early medieval world of the great Carolingian thinkers; all three European renaissances played their part. The debate on universal human rights began in earnest in Europe in the mid-16th century. So these ideas are part of the European way of seeing the world – but they are surely also universal. On the train back into Paris, thinking on our troubled times, I was struck by the contrasts of Versailles. We walk the gilded halls of the king-emperor, but in the rain-filled hollow on the way to the station, history is still readable – the struggles of real people to make the real world a better place. This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
From ancient China to modern America: an astonishing history of censorship
A mistrust of ‘experts’ and ‘intellectuals’ has recently crystallised into US government interventions targeting academic institutions. Emily Knox and Joan Scott share their thoughts with Danny Bird about the troubling history of anti-intellectualism
Danny Bird: Anti-intellectualism can feel like quite a contemporary concern – but when did this phenomenon emerge? Joan Scott: It goes back a long way. In the case of the United States, a key reference is Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1963 in the wake of the McCarthy anti-communist hearings. I return to it often. Hofstadter traces anti-intellectualism almost to the nation’s beginnings, particularly in debates over education. Attempts to centralise schooling repeatedly provoked hostile reactions from local communities determined to control what their children were taught. Hofstadter locates this strain chiefly among non-elite, less formally educated groups who are suspicious of expertise and claims to superior competence, and wary of those in elite positions. The US therefore has a long history of anti-intellectualism, though it also appears in different forms elsewhere. France may be something of an exception – as a historian, I have seen philosophical disputes conducted at every level of French society in a way quite unlike anything in the US. In any case, though the tradition of anti-intellectualism is long-standing, we may now be experiencing it at its most acute. Emily Knox: When I think about anti-intellectualism, I see a rift. There is a fear that, if someone becomes more educated or begins to listen to experts, a break opens within their community. This is especially visible with first-generation university students, who can feel pulled away from their families and local ties. In many cases, anti-intellectualism grows from that sense of separation. It is rooted less in abstract questions of trust than in fear of loss, distance and change. Viewing it in those terms helps us to understand it more clearly. Has it commonly been during times of upheaval – such as religious conflicts, revolutions and the rise of authoritarian and populist regimes – when academic freedom has been attacked? EK: Yes. One of the earliest and most well-known recorded instances of book burning occurred in 213 BC under China’s first imperial dynasty, when the emperor, Qin Shi Huang, suppressed dissent by executing scholars and destroying their texts. Scholars are often targeted during periods of unrest or reactionary upheaval. In moments of crisis, people look for someone to blame: where did these ideas come from? Suspicion frequently falls on education and on those who produce and transmit knowledge. Across history, intellectual life repeatedly becomes suspect when societies fracture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/PA49MG-c6ca6cc-e1777451862538.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A traditional Chinese painting depicting figures in red and white robes burning books in the foreground while others in blue‑green robes are pushed into a pit beside an ornate building." title="An 18th-century illustration shows books burned and scholars buried on the orders of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 213 BC – an early example of the suppression of intellectual activity (Image by Alamy)" /> JS: I think it stems from the association between scholarship and criticism. From the outset, the scholar’s role has been to reflect on and critique the conditions in which people live. To pursue truth, however defined, is to question authority, and that questioning has long been linked to education. It is this critical function that makes scholars targets. As Immanuel Kant argued in The Conflict of the Faculties at the end of the 18th century, philosophers are uniquely placed to tell rulers what is wrong and what ought to be done. That task does not belong to theology or to the more practical disciplines. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-600033141-5864189-e1777451781506.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An oval-framed painted portrait of an older individual with white curled hair, dressed in a brown coat with decorative buttons and a white cravat, set against a dark background." title="German philosopher Immanuel Kant, pictured in 1765, stated that philosophers are uniquely placed to tell rulers what is wrong, says Joan Scott (Image by Getty Images)" /> This year marks 250 years since the American Revolution, which was led by a group of individuals strongly influenced by Enlightenment ideals. But did any anti-intellectual responses emerge from that upheaval? EK: The American context is particularly difficult because the revolution was incomplete in many ways. The promises of the founding documents are continually invoked, yet often fall short. For black Americans, the original revolution did not apply; another, still ongoing struggle was necessary. The more approximate parallel is the Reconstruction era (1865–77) after the Civil War, when American society attempted to redefine the rights of black people – a process still unfinished today. Read more | Women in the American Revolution: what were their lives like? We are now a generation beyond the civil rights movement, which itself was incomplete. Today, we see reactionary efforts to undo its achievements: attacks on the Voting Rights Act, resistance to feminist advances, and hostility toward LGBTQIA+ rights. Understanding this requires grappling with history, which Americans often struggle to do. The controversy over the 1619 Project illustrates this: presenting American history from a non-triumphalist perspective, centring it beyond the founding fathers, provoked deep resistance. Nikole Hannah-Jones originally created it as a New York Times Magazine special, marking the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia as the starting point of American history. She produced a series of essays centring the experiences of enslaved people and their descendants across time. It represents Hannah-Jones’s effort to reframe American history through a new, often contested lens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2RXWT0B-faa6c5a-e1777451938667.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical photograph shows children and adults gathered in front of a log building with a sign reading “Freedmen’s School,” surrounded by trees." title="A freedmen’s school in the US, c1868. “After the Civil War, American society attempted to redefine the rights of black people – a process still unfinished today,” says Emily Knox (Image by Alamy)" /> The project later expanded into a full book and a children’s edition, and quickly became a lightning rod, particularly among critics of what is called ‘critical race theory’. Similarly, images from the civil rights movement can unsettle people because they expose their own families’ histories, which remain raw for those who lived through it. Coming to terms with these histories is a profoundly difficult, ongoing challenge in the US. JS: Many of the critics of the 1619 Project who saw themselves as progressive or left-leaning attacked it not for ideological reasons but by accusing it of factual errors. In doing so, I believe some of them may have been denying the underlying biases they bring to the study of history themselves: a commitment to a triumphalist, progressivist vision of America. It illustrates how historians can obscure the assumptions that shape their own work while critiquing others. Why have books so often been targeted during waves of anti-intellectualism? EK: I am fascinated by the book as a technology: it collapses time and space, allowing us to access what people thought centuries ago. Books are particularly powerful in the Global North, shaped by the influence of Christianity, especially Protestantism. In my work on the Reformation, I emphasise two doctrines: sola scriptura, the idea that one can save one’s soul through reading [scripture]; and the ‘priesthood of all believers’ – the principle that no intermediary is required between God and people, reader and text. Books occupy a unique place in our lives. I often ask students if they break the bindings of their books; some are horrified by the idea while others are indifferent. Unlike other objects, the way we engage with texts shapes how we understand ourselves. That is why books are frequently banned: they are among the most powerful tools for shaping thought and identity. Control over knowledge has always been exercised through text, because this is how ideas are communicated, shared and contested. Censorship is another method often deployed to actively police the public understanding of reality. Where does this practice originate? EK: The origin of the term stretches back to the ancient Roman censor – the magistrate responsible for overseeing public morality. Authorised knowledge has always been central not only to authoritarian control but even to self-identifying democratic governments when they define what information is sanctioned and what is forbidden. Historically, this is seen in the ‘king’s imprimatur’ – the official seal approving a text. Today, the same principle appears in cases such the Epstein files: redactions signal what the government deems authorised for public access versus knowledge it withholds. Often, authorised knowledge focuses on victims, while information about perpetrators is restricted. This illustrates how governments generally manage and control knowledge. JS: Historically, almost every authoritarian regime has relied on censorship to impose its will. This illustrates how law can both censor knowledge and impose a singular view of human identity. Similar patterns appear throughout history: during the French Revolution, the Jacobins dictated what could be taught about society, politics and relationships; Maoist China imposed its ideological framework on education. Censorship has consistently been a key tool of authoritarian regimes for controlling thought, knowledge and social norms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-2232572087-2c6c79f-e1777452592240.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marcher holds a large orange sign that says “Why We March: Freedom Fairness Security,” while others behind them carry signs that read “Fighting for a Better Future.”" title="A participant in the 28 August 2025 March on Wall Street, a rally protesting against US government policies towards Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes (Image by Getty Images)" /> The study of history itself has often been at the forefront of anti-intellectual crusades. How can our comprehension of the past be sanitised or distorted by political pressures – and what are the consequences? JS: This raises a complex question, because I don’t believe in a single, objective truth of history. The history we write always reflects the ethical positions and values we bring to it. For example, the 1619 Project cannot be told without addressing both the history of slavery and its ongoing legacy of racism. My choices in research and teaching are guided by these values. There is no history without values – not in the sense of imposing an ‘official’ version but in recognising that the questions we ask about the past are shaped by the present. This is why it is crucial that the stories we teach, whether to children or the wider public, acknowledge the contemporary concerns that motivate them. Criticisms framed as objections to ‘presentism’ misunderstand this: the past exists only as we interpret it. So, in response to critics of undertakings such as the 1619 Project, the debate should centre not on alleged factual errors but on the values and principles that inform one’s approach to history. That is the lens through which I, as a professional historian, understand the importance of my work. Read more | "Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence EK: My work focuses on very recent history. For example, I’m interested in how the Covid-19 pandemic will be presented to children today. The youngest kids who truly remember it are now around eight to 10 years old. For many in school, the pre-pandemic world is already history. Recent events, such as the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol [by supporters of Donald Trump who believed the 2020 presidential election was ‘stolen’], illustrate how contested history can be. Even when reported widely, narratives vary: should words such as ‘insurrection’ be used to describe that episode? How do we interpret the actions of those involved, and the political consequences? These debates will eventually filter down into schoolbooks and children’s literature, and that is where history becomes contested at the community level, not just among scholars. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1230460050-19b9753-e1777452378158.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A dense crowd at an outdoor political rally holds numerous flags and banners while a row of helmeted police officers in high‑visibility jackets forms a barrier in front of them." title="Supporters of Donald Trump storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, aiming to overturn Joe Biden’s election win. Such events demonstrate just how contested even recent history can be, says Emily Knox (Image by Getty Images)" /> Many students note that history covered in formal lessons in the US often stops at 9/11, leaving everything since then largely unexamined. My work explores how recent events are already history, how their presentation is debated, and how these debates shape what children and the public understand about our shared past. JS: Statues are often used to memorialise figures as heroes of the nation, state or community. For example, Donald Trump has proposed marking the country’s 250th anniversary with a National Garden of American Heroes featuring 250 statues of people he considers important in US history. Meanwhile, statues depicting historical figures such as Christopher Columbus are being restored, alongside some of Confederate generals that had been removed or relocated to museums. In my view, plaques in such institutions explaining those people’s actions are far more appropriate than central heroic displays. The controversy over Columbus illustrates how historical narratives shift: he was once taught as the discoverer of America, but recognition of Native American perspectives has reshaped that story. President Trump’s recognition of Columbus Day, while not acknowledging Indigenous Peoples’ Day, reflects the politics of history. Television documentaries such as Ken Burns’ The American Revolution (2025) show how historical scholarship can reshape public understanding. Burns highlights slavery, Native American displacement and figures including Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the revolution, who happened to be of African and Native American heritage – a critical intervention that revises the traditional triumphalist narrative. Why and when do anti-intellectual movements demonise scholars and experts as ‘out-of-touch’ elites? Is it specifically during times of economic or other social crises? EK: You can’t discuss anti-intellectualism without considering class. The intellectual class is rarely working class; it is defined less by economics and more by markers of middle or upper-middle-class life. Intellectuals work with their minds rather than their hands, spend years in study – a luxury that many cannot afford – and are often associated with habits such as publishing, reading and other cultural signifiers. These markers set them apart. My father, for example, was the first in our family to earn a PhD in mathematics, and for years he was told he was ‘wasting his time’ instead of getting a job. Anti-intellectualism is often rooted in the perception of these class-based privileges, yet that dimension is not always acknowledged in discussions of the phenomenon. JS: Anti-intellectualism can emerge during times of crisis, but not always. Sometimes it is used opportunistically to advance a political agenda. Take the McCarthy era: the Cold War generated anxieties about communism, but it was Joseph McCarthy who manufactured a crisis, investigating and summoning individuals, ruining careers and dominating public attention for a decade. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-515468158-20125d2-e1777452445708.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two individuals sit at a table with microphones in a formal indoor setting; the person in the foreground holds up several sheets of paper while speaking." title="Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade was, says Emily Knox, driven as much by personal opportunism as genuine political crisis (Image by Getty Images)" /> A similar pattern exists in higher education today. The sector has long faced structural challenges, including reduced state and federal funding, a shift to student debt, and widespread financial insecurity. However the Trump administration’s higher education interventions have transformed these ongoing difficulties into what I believe is a full-blown crisis. Political opportunism, layered onto long-term structural pressures, plays a crucial role in the rise of anti-intellectualism. The internet was once hailed as a means of democratising access to information. However, in recent years it has gained a reputation for transmitting disinformation and conspiracy theories. How has this enabled anti-intellectualism to amplify distrust of expertise? EK: A good example comes from Reddit, where the AskHistorians subreddit is highly regulated: answers require citations and are usually provided by professional historians. It allows people to ask complex questions and ensures careful, informed responses. Yet Reddit also hosts substantial misinformation, especially on health topics, making it a fascinating place to observe how knowledge and misunderstanding can coexist. Read more | "Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent" Subreddits that encourage questions – for example, NoStupidQuestions and explainlikeimfive [years old] – provide spaces for people to seek understanding in a non-judgmental way. These forums highlight the importance of proactive, clear communication, rather than leaving people to rely solely on news or social media snippets. Is there a consistent thread that unites all of the anti-intellectual movements throughout history? EK: It’s largely about control. Take the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) compiled by the Catholic church, for example. It was created in response to Protestantism, to assert authority over ideas that the Catholic church could no longer directly control. The logic was simple: if people couldn’t read certain texts, they wouldn’t question doctrine, and the church’s authority would remain intact. In practice, this often backfired. Listing a book could make it more appealing. Even in the medieval period, putting a book on the Index often simply drew attention to it, making people want to read it. Attempts to control thought through banning texts rarely work as intended. Emily JM Knox is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The second edition of Book Banning in 21st-century America was published by Bloomsbury in January 2026 Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Her books include Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2019) This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Pageantry and politics: a history of British royal visits to the US
As transatlantic tensions swirled about King Charles III’s visit to Washington DC in 2026, Sam Edwards reveals how past royal tours have steadied the ‘special relationship’ in times of crisis
The April 2026 royal visit to the United States came at a particularly challenging moment for the US-UK ‘special relationship’. In the preceding months, President Donald Trump had repeatedly singled out prime minister Keir Starmer for blunt criticism, even going so far as to declare that Starmer as “no Churchill”. Meanwhile, the royal family similarly found itself caught up in transatlantic controversy: the Epstein scandal. If all that wasn’t challenging enough, King Charles’s visit to America also came at a time when the US-UK relationship was drawing even more scrutiny than usual. 2026 is year is the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, which popularised the phrase ‘special relationship’, and it’s also the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The latter was of course the event that severed the connection between the American colonies and the British Crown and thereby put the transatlantic relationship onto a very different trajectory. In short, the visit came at a time of significant turbulence in the US-UK relationship. King Charles, however, might have been able to take some reassurance from the fact that several of his predecessors had similarly travelled to the United States during moments of challenge, change and upheaval... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2GettyImages-1320405043big-566d798-e1777245347971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large group of men and women in formal 19th-century dress gather outside a red-brick tomb set within a leafy landscape, their attention focused on a central meeting of figures. Women wear layered gowns with bonnets, while men in dark suits and top hats stand in lines, with trees and a distant sky framing the scene." title="A painting by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter captures the Prince of Wales’s historic visit to George Washington’s tomb in 1860. The young prince, who later ruled as Edward VII, can be seen standing with President James Buchanan to the right of the tomb’s entrance (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1860: The first royal visit The very first visit to the United States by a British royal came in 1860 and involved Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. Its origins lay in an invitation received by Queen Victoria from Canadian leaders keen that she see for herself “the progress and prosperity of this distant part of your dominions”. Citing duty, the queen declined. But she despatched her eldest son in her place. When President James Buchanan got wind of the situation, he then saw an opportunity and so extended an invitation for the prince to journey south of the border. The royal household happily accepted, and the man destined to become Edward VII thereby became the first British royal to visit the United States. Conscious of diplomatic protocol, his visit to the US was billed as ‘private’, and so he travelled under one of his many other titles, Lord Baron Renfrew. The prince landed in Canada in July 1860 and spent two months touring, during which he was frequently greeted by cheering crowds. No one was quite sure, though, how he would be received when he crossed the border into the United States. After all, it was only just over 40 years prior that British soldiers had marched on Washington and burned down the White House. Still more recently, in the 1840s, the relationship between Britain and its former colonies had again been fraught, this time due to American designs on the Pacific Northwest. Read more | When was the White House built – and why is it white? There was no need to worry, however, as just like in Canada the prince received a rapturous welcome. Travelling unofficially as ‘Renfrew’, he was met in Washington by President Buchanan and spent some time touring the capital. But the most celebrated moment came a few miles away, at Mount Vernon in Virginia. Here, Lord Renfrew laid a wreath at the tomb of George Washington, the man who had of course defeated his great grandfather, George III, all those years ago. It was a powerful gesture, and it has been something of a royal rite of passage ever since. In 1970, for instance, the Prince of Wales – now King Charles III – laid his own wreath at Mount Vernon. Perhaps this month we will see his son, Prince William, do likewise. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/3EU058443-a21ccb9-e1777245457912.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="George VI leans forward to place a wreath against a white stone tomb, his figure slightly bowed in a solemn gesture. Rows of uniformed servicemen stand rigidly at attention on either side, while a small group of onlookers watches from the foreground." title="King George VI lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, 1939. The king’s five-day visit to the US, in which he met with President Franklin D Roosevelt, was the first such trip by a reigning British monarch (Photo by Topfoto)" /> 1939: The storm clouds of war The 1860 visit of ‘Lord Baron Renfrew’ occurred just as internal tensions in the United States were threatening to tear the country asunder. Within a couple of weeks of the prince’s departure, a new president – Abraham Lincoln – had been elected, while just a few months later war had broken out between North and South. The fighting would rage for the next four years, only ending in 1865. Almost 80 years later, in the summer of 1939, another American tour by British royalty likewise unfolded amidst the gathering storm clouds of war, albeit this time in Europe rather than in the United States. The 1939 visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth was a real landmark occasion: the first ever by a reigning British monarch. It came, moreover, at a particularly challenging moment for the royal family. Just three years earlier, in December 1936, Edward VIII abdicated the British throne. His decision provoked a constitutional crisis, but it also had ramifications for the US-UK relationship because it was at root a consequence of the king’s desire to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. The 1939 visit was thus a chance for the British royal family to shift the narrative. Equally important, it also provided an invaluable opportunity to strengthen transatlantic ties just as the Nazi threat in Europe intensified. The visit unfolded in June and was keenly supported by the US president, Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR). Like Lord Baron Renfrew’s visit in 1860, the royal tour took in a number of famous American landmarks, including Mount Vernon, where the British monarch followed the example set by his grandfather and laid a wreath at the tomb of George Washington. Read more | Why was George Washington the pride of Victorian England? Other significant episodes included a visit to the New York World’s Fair, a tour of the Capitol, and another wreath-laying, this time at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Perhaps most famous of all, however, was the king and queen’s meeting with FDR at his Hyde Park home. To the delight of the American press, the king was seen enjoying typical American picnic fare: hot dogs! By all accounts, the 1939 royal visit was a success. One American observer later wrote that “Their Majesties’ hundred hours in the United States had given rise to an enthusiasm without parallel in American history”. Later, one US newspaper even declared that because of the King’s visit “the old bond between the democracies has taken on higher, warmer, yes friendlier qualities than it ever had before”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/4GettyImages-79655098-fcd4ee0-e1777245704830.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A long line of cars moves down a wide, tree-lined avenue beneath a large triangular banner reading “Welcome Queen Elizabeth II”. Dense crowds line both sides of the road, with flags, uniforms and police escorts creating a sense of ceremony and scale." title="A motorcade marks Elizabeth II’s state visit to the United States in 1957. The young monarch faced the task of mending the so-called ‘special relationship’, which had been strained by the Suez Crisis (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1957: The new Elizabethan era Despite the success of the 1939 visit, the Americans did not immediately commit themselves to the British cause when war broke out in Europe later that year. But once the United States had entered the war (in December 1941) an alliance of unprecedented closeness was indeed forged. For the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, this was the beginning of what he would call the “special relationship”, a transatlantic partnership built on shared history, culture, values, and sacrifice. Nonetheless, for all its undoubted closeness the special relationship was frequently tested during the Cold War, most famously during the Suez Crisis of late 1956. The crisis was precipitated by the decision of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to seize the Suez Canal zone, a vital trade route. In response, the British and French (with Israeli support) launched a military operation to regain control, but they did so without first securing American approval. Their actions quickly met with vigorous criticism from Washington, with President Eisenhower demanding an immediate Anglo-French withdrawal on pain of severe economic sanctions. Chastened, the British withdrew their forces, and with his credibility damaged beyond repair, prime minister Anthony Eden duly resigned, albeit citing ill health. Read more | How significant was the Suez Crisis? Among the first key tasks of the new government of prime minister Harold Macmillan was therefore to restore trust with Washington. Fortunately ‘Super Mac’, as he was known, was very well-placed to do so – he knew President Eisenhower from their service together during the Second World War, while his ties to ‘Ike’s’ successor, President John F Kennedy, were even closer: he was uncle-in-law to JFK’s younger sister Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy (tragically killed in a plane crash in 1948). These close ties would certainly pay dividends, but when it came to rebuilding the special relationship Macmillan also had a trump card to play – royalty. The chance to play it finally came a year after the Suez crisis, in October 1957. Crowned in 1953 in a televised ceremony watched on both sides of the Atlantic, Queen Elizabeth II was eminently suited for the job of mending the special relationship, so recently strained by Suez. After all, she and the president were well-acquainted from the war years, and she was also already familiar with America. She had first visited – while still a princess – in 1951, during which visit she met with Eisenhower’s predecessor, President Harry Truman. The Queen was also very aware of the diplomatic impact of her parents’ visit in 1939. In short, this was one monarch ready and able to meet the challenge of the moment. The extent to which the 1957 state visit represented a clear attempt to restore the special relationship is quickly apparent in the itinerary. This was full of evocative symbolism and included a visit to Jamestown – to mark the 350th anniversary of English settlement – as well as a state dinner at the White House and a ticker-tape parade in New York City. It was a resounding success and was followed during her reign by no less than three more state visits to the United States. The second, in 1976, occurred during another testing moment in the transatlantic relationship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/5GettyImages-57078933mod-0179412-e1777245939916.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Elizabeth II, wearing a sparkling tiara and sash, raises a glass as she smiles towards a suited President Gerald Ford returning the toast. A long table covered in bright flowers fills the foreground, with other formally dressed guests standing nearby." title="President Gerald Ford toasts Elizabeth II during the monarch’s 1976 state visit to the United States. The trip coincided with celebrations marking 200 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 1976: The bicentennial The Queen’s 1976 state visit to the United States was purposefully timed so as to coincide with a major anniversary celebration – the bicentennial of the American Revolution. But like the visit of 1957 it also unfolded in the aftermath of significant transatlantic tensions, this time connected to the Vietnam War. The conflict in southeast Asia had dominated US foreign policy in the 1960s and early 1970s, and it also caused disagreements with European allies, including Britain. At the crux of the matter was the persistent refusal of the British government to send troops to fight alongside their American ally, a decision which drew pointed criticism from Washington. For both governments, the Queen’s 1976 state visit – which came at the invitation of President Gerald Ford – was thus an opportunity to reset the relationship after the recent disagreements. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II’s relationships with US presidents Like her 1957 visit, the details were worked out with an eye on the symbolism. The itinerary saw the Queen attend various bicentennial-focused ceremonies, and she also hosted her own reception at the British embassy in Washington. One of those in attendance declared that this was “the best diplomatic reception since King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited in 1939”. But the highlight was a speech the Queen gave on her arrival at Philadelphia during which she expressed her “sincere gratitude” to “the Founding Fathers of this great republic for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson”. The Americans were delighted, with all differences – historic and recent – now happily forgotten. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/6GettyImages-117937786-1d6273a-e1777246001564.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Elizabeth II wears a pale green coat and wide-brimmed hat with a pink accent, leaning on a railing and looking ahead. Beside her, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and other spectators in formal attire watch the event, some holding binoculars." title="Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh watch the Kentucky Derby during the monarch’s fourth and final state visit to the United States, May 2007. Although the monarch was able to indulge her passion for horse racing, the trip came amid heightened tensions stemming from the War on Terror (Photo by Getty Images)" /> 2007: A fond farewell The Queen’s fourth and final state visit to the US was in 2007, and like all its predecessors it occurred amidst geopolitical turmoil (it was the same with the third, in 1991, which came amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union and shortly after the Gulf War). This time the turmoil was tied to the ongoing War on Terror, which had seen British forces again fight side by side with the American ally. But although this suggested that the special relationship was back on a sure footing elsewhere the picture was rather more complicated. American unilateralism had in fact strained the transatlantic relationship, producing significant anti-war sentiment in Britain as well as vocal criticism of Washington from other European allies (especially the French). Frustrated by what they felt to be his slavish devotion to the Americans, some in the British press had even characterised the prime minister, Tony Blair, as President Bush’s ‘lapdog’. Just as after both Suez and Vietnam, therefore, the 2007 state visit offered a chance to use pageantry and ceremony to repair some of the damage. This objective was again very apparent in the itinerary, which, in homage to the 1957 visit, included a trip to Jamestown, then marking the 400th anniversary of English settlement. Other stopovers, all of which were well-reported in the US press, included attendance at the Kentucky Derby (the Queen was well-known for her love of horse racing) as well as a formal state banquet at the White House. It was the latter which also produced one of the trip’s most memorable moments: while giving a toast, President George W Bush had thanked the Queen for her role in the bicentennial celebrations, erroneously suggesting while doing so that this had occurred in 1776 (rather than 1976). The Queen raised her eyebrows in response, which in turn led the president to quip that she had given him “a look that only a mother could give a child”.
Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back
It’s a tale of slavery, racism and naked imperial power. Barnaby Phillips traces the fate of the exquisite golden treasures looted by British forces from the kingdom of Asante 150 years ago
In a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London. What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi. Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Thomas Bowdich, wrote that Kumasi was a wealthy city with elegant architecture and sophisticated public hygiene. The Asantehene and his courtiers, he wrote, wore “massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction”. Bowdich’s descriptions caused incredulity and excitement in Britain. But his delegation failed to build a lasting friendship with Asante. By the early 19th century, Britain, hitherto an enthusiastic slave trading nation, had embraced abolitionism. The Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, worried about this threat to his wealth, and asked Bowdich whether the British king could “renew the slave trade, which will be good for me”. Over the following 50 years, as Britain tightened its control of the Gold Coast at the expense of European rivals, and as Asante maintained supremacy of the interior, there were sporadic tensions – notably in 1824 when a British invasion of Asante ended in defeat and the death and decapitation of the commanding officer, Sir Charles MacCarthy – but also decades of uneasy Anglo-Asante coexistence. This all changed in 1871, when Britain purchased Elmina, the largest trading castle on the coast, from the Dutch, despite Asante insistence it belonged to them. In January 1873, an Asante army swept south and invaded the British coastal protectorate, to the surprise of William Gladstone’s government in London. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2XKCKN2webready-5e7ae12-e1776944134163.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical battle illustration showing red‑coated soldiers with muskets and bayonets clashing with fighters armed with spears and varied weapons. Smoke fills the background." title="A lithograph shows British troops clashing with Asante fighters during the first Anglo-Asante War (1823–31). As Britain expanded its presence in the Gold Coast, tensions between the two powers escalated (Image by Alamy)" /> In May 1873, Earl Kimberley, the colonial secretary, said that any attempt to conquer Asante would be “mad”. But the ambitious officer appointed to lead the British response, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had other ideas. Wolseley, just 40 but already a veteran of wars in Burma, Crimea, India, China and Canada, was determined the British would march to Kumasi. If the Asantehene, Kofi Karikari, would not make peace, he would “destroy his palaces, burn his capital, and lay waste his country as well as I could”. While politicians prevaricated, Wolseley shaped events on the ground. By January 1874, he was leading three battalions of British soldiers, plus many African allies and carriers, into the Asante forest. Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum The Asante army – armed with muskets – fought bravely, but was outgunned by the British, equipped with new Snider rifles. At the battle of Amoafo, many hundreds or even thousands of Asante soldiers, but only four British, were killed. One British sailor wrote that it was “murder, not a fair fight”. On 4 February, the British entered Kumasi, only to find that Karikari had fled. Wolseley, concerned about disease and encroaching rains, decided not to linger. Instead, he would leave the Asante with “a wholesome fear of the British power”. He ordered his soldiers to take treasure from the unguarded palace, and then blow it up, and to set fire to Kumasi to ensure “its total destruction”. Then he abandoned the burning city. Wolseley wrote that Karikari was “a brutal and deceitful monarch”. The British sense of racial superiority – Wolseley wrote that black people were suited only for slavery – had been reinforced by the apparent discovery in Kumasi of evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1501979475webready-c12bcea-e1776944602447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A central figure dressed in richly patterned regalia sits surrounded by attendants in traditional clothing. Large decorative umbrellas shade the group, with crowds and palm trees visible in the background." title="On the centenary of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s expedition, the then Asantehene, Opoku Ware II (seen here in 1977), requested the return of the Asante regalia, but it would take 50 more years for just 32 objects to come back to Ghana (Image by Getty Images)" /> Gold is always pretty On 13 February, the Asantehene’s envoys caught up with Wolseley on his march back to the coast, and agreed to a humiliating surrender. They handed over 1,000 ounces of gold objects, a tiny fraction of the 50,000-ounce “indemnity” demanded by Wolseley, but which included a significant part of the Asantehene’s regalia, essential to his political and spiritual authority. A history of Asante, written by one of Karikari’s successors, laments that the British were so impatient “that it was not even possible to call any of the provincial chiefs into Kumasi to contribute what they could. So King Kofi Karikari was obliged to bear the brunt of this payment alone.” Wolseley, who had already witnessed notorious plunders by British soldiers of palaces in India and China, drew a distinction between disorganised looting, which undermined military discipline and was therefore undesirable, and the acceptable collection of ‘prize’, to be auctioned off with the income shared among the troops. In accordance with this philosophy, when the British reached their headquarters at Cape Coast they held an auction of treasure from the Asantehene’s palace. The Daily Telegraph wrote: “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold. The prize agent… had shown considerable taste in the arrangements of their stores… and gold is always pretty.” The auction was enthusiastically attended by many of the Cape Coast elite, delighted by the defeat of the feared Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/531631001webready-71902b9-e1776944785361.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A gold sheath decorated with embossed concentric circles, leaf‑like motifs, and dotted borders" title="The British Museum houses some 550 Asante objects taken during the Anglo-Asante Wars, including the golden knife-sheath above (Image by The British Museum)" /> Many of the most valuable items, however, were sold in London in the spring of 1874 at Garrard, the crown jewellers in the West End, which had paid £11,000 (about £1.4m today) for the collection. Wolseley returned to Britain a hero – cheered by crowds, feted by Queen Victoria and the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, parodied on stage as ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ – and so the sale of “the golden spoil from Ashantee” attracted considerable excitement. Queen Victoria took some pieces of treasure – presented to her by the soldiers – and this added to its prestige. For most of the aristocrats and others who crowded Garrard’s rooms, Asante objects were exotic souvenirs of a British victory, “treasured… as memorials of the recent struggle”, as The Times put it. William Cecil, the Marquess of Exeter, for example, bought two gold badges and mounted them on gilt-silver trays with his family crest and an inscription. In this way, what had been sacred objects in Asante – the badges, known as akrafokonmu, were worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul – became trophies. (One of Cecil’s mounted badges was bought by the British Museum in the 1970s, after passing through various wealthy owners). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/1010657001webready-ce6a8d3-e1776943998684.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A round gold ornament featuring a central raised dome, concentric beaded circles, and four smaller domes set within decorative motifs." title="This 19th-century gold akrafokonmu is now in the British Museum. In Asante, such items were sacred objects worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul (Image by The British Museum)" /> Hints of humility Amid the general triumphalism, there were some doubts. The Welsh nonconformist MP Henry Richard observed that “scarcely any Englishman could look back with pride” on what happened in Asante and other recent campaigns in Asia and Africa. “Those were not triumphs of Christian civilisation but of barbarism and brute force.” Newspaper reviews of the Garrard sale also contain hints of humility. Asante, and Africa more generally, was perceived in Britain as a place without culture. And yet, The Times wrote, the gold badges were “wonderful… it would be difficult for any skilled goldsmith in western Europe not so much to surpass, but even to equal them”. Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation Inevitably, Britain’s museums took an interest. It was the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) that reacted first. The keeper of its Art Library, Robert Soden Smith, recognised Asante goldwork as “the most striking illustration… of the art of an ancient race hitherto imperfectly known to us”, and bought an elegant gold pipe, several badges and pieces of decorated sheet gold. The British Museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks, bought 10 objects initially, but grumbled that “some of the more dramatic specimens have been secured by private individuals”. He was probably thinking of Richard Wallace, who bought not only the gold head but also 15 other Asante objects, including swords and a pair of cast eagles, for a total of £1,256 (about £155,000 today), making him the largest purchaser. His biographer Suzanne Higgott says that Wallace craved recognition, and the Asante objects, “exceptional, high status and intriguingly ‘Oriental’”, therefore had obvious appeal. All of Wallace’s Asante purchases are still in the Wallace Collection today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BMImages01077757001SuperReswebready-408fd12-e1776944349408.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A curved sword with a dark blade featuring triangular and circular cutouts. The gold‑coloured handle is engraved and covered with two rounded pieces of spotted animal fur." title="This Asante ceremonial sword was one of 32 pieces returned to Ghana – on a long-term loan – in 2024 (Image by The British Museum)" /> The British Museum was able to enlarge its collection of Asante gold regalia over subsequent decades. This was in part because the British government gradually released more pieces which had been taken by Wolseley’s soldiers, but also because in 1896 another British army ransacked the rebuilt palace in Kumasi, and again carried off as much treasure as it could find. Today the British Museum has about 550 objects taken in the Anglo-Asante wars, of which some 220 are made of gold. Some of the most important pieces of Asante loot, however, remain in private hands or are otherwise hidden from public view. The Royal Artillery officer’s mess, in Larkhill near Salisbury, has an exquisite golden ram’s-head mask – 19cm in width and weighing 1.2kg – which William Fagg described as “a marvel of ethereal eggshell thin-lightness…among the most striking examples of west African metallurgy”. It was taken from the Asantehene’s palace by officers who were close to Sir Garnet Wolseley. Rather than being auctioned off, he allowed them to buy it directly for £135 (about £17,000 today). When the officers returned to England, newspapers reported they had “the best trophy… very valuable”. In 1875, the Royal Artillery sealed the ram’s head in a glass dome and mounted it on a stand which is carried on the backs of three bowed African figures, dressed in loincloths. Once again, Asante regalia was transformed into a British military souvenir. Today the ram’s head is only accessible to officers and their invited guests. The Royal Artillery declined my requests to see it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/7770417-2webready-ea8e369-e1776944451359.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people dressed in brightly patterned kente cloth stand outdoors, some holding ornate staffs and one playing a drum. Large colourful umbrellas shade several members of the group." title="People celebrate the Gold Coast becoming the independent nation of Ghana, Accra, 6 March 1957. Nearly seven decades after the formation of this new nation, says Barnaby Phillips,“the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions” (Image by Topfoto)" /> Decades of campaigning The Asante people still refer to the 1874 war as ‘the Sagrenti War’, from the local pronunciation of ‘Sir Garnet’. It was a seminal moment in their kingdom’s decline. By the 1880s, according to their own histories, “Kumasi was losing its power and… falling into a ruinous state”. In 1901 the British formally annexed Asante territory. They sent the then Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh, into exile on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than two decades. Read more | Who should decide the stories museums tell? In 1957 the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, but the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions. They have campaigned for decades for the return of the regalia. In 1974 the Asantehene, Opoku Ware II, wrote that the centenary of Wolseley’s expedition marked an “auspicious occasion on which to press for the return of objects of the deepest significance” to the Asante. This set off a flurry of diplomacy. Some British diplomats argued in favour of returning regalia, and the British Museum’s director, John Pope-Hennessey, told his trustees “there is widely conceded to be some moral weight behind the Asantehene’s request”. But the negotiations floundered, in part because even British officials who favoured flexibility could see no way round the 1963 British Museum Act, which makes it almost impossible for that institution to permanently return, or ‘deaccession’, items in its collection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1252637177webready-448d938-e1776943890314.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people pose in an ornate room with gold columns and decorative furnishings. The person in the centre wears a blue suit, while the two on either side wear brightly coloured kente cloth garments." title="In 2023, the Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, and his wife Julia met with King Charles III as they continued to press for the return of the Asante regalia (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 2023 the current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, raised the matter again, when he visited London to attend the coronation of his friend, Charles III. This time, his appeal fell on fertile ground. Museums in the west were under pressure to address the legacies of the colonial period and, in particular, to return objects taken by force. In 2024 the British Museum and the V&A (also constrained by national legislation from making permanent returns) announced they would return on long-term loan (for probably six or nine years) 32 pieces of Asante regalia. The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles announced that it was permanently returning seven objects looted by Wolseley’s army. In response to these developments, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the director of the Asantehene’s museum in Kumasi, said: “We want to get back as many objects as is humanly possible… We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.” How many treasures the Asante people do get back – and for how long they get to keep them – is bound to remain the subject of intense debate for years. “What we have here embodies the soul of Asante” The return of 32 pieces of gold regalia in 2024 sparked joy – and anger – among the Asante people, writes Barnaby Phillips On 1 May 2024, I waited in the sweltering heat outside the Manhyia Palace Museum, in Kumasi, Ghana, alongside local chiefs, foreign diplomats and museum officials. The banners on the museum’s walls proclaimed: “Homecoming; Adversity and Commemoration”. This was the ceremony to mark the return of 32 pieces of Asante gold regalia – among them, sacred badges, a helmet, a ceremonial sword and bracelets – that had been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896. The Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, dressed in green robes and a golden headdress, arrived to the shouts of praise singers and the beating of drums, protected from the sun by a huge tasselled umbrella carried by his entourage. The director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, bowed low before the Asantehene and addressed the crowd: “We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.” It would have been difficult to imagine the director of a major British museum using these words anywhere, let alone in this context, just a few years ago. The Asantehene, for his part, said the British had returned a small part of what they had taken. “But what we have here embodies the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent.” People cheered and filed excitedly into the museum, where they admired the glittering gold treasure, beautifully displayed on green cloth in glass display cases. Not everybody in Ghana felt so positive. Many were upset that the British were only returning objects on loan. Nii Kwate Owoo, a Ghanaian filmmaker who attended the ‘Homecoming’ ceremony, told me: “It turns my stomach, to be quite frank. An armed robber comes into your house, mows down your family and grabs your valuables, and comes back later and says: ‘Okay, you’re making noises, I’ll give this back as a loan!’” Inside the museum, I encountered more nuanced reactions. A museum guide, Sammy Amoah, said the return of the regalia was “important because it confirms history. That what we’ve been taught in books about our own past is true.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1988198434webready-1a0a230-e1776945236127.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people stand closely together as a person in a leopard‑print headdress and ceremonial staff receives a white box from someone leaning forward. Others in traditional attire look on." title="Osei Tutu II receives artefacts returned by the Fowler Museum in February 2024. Three months later, the British Museum and the V&A returned 32 objects, on loan (Image by Getty Images)" /> Barnaby Phillips is a historian and conservationist. His new book, The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure, was published by Oneworld in March This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Long to reign over us: how did Queen Elizabeth II survive seven decades of dizzying change?
When Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952, she could barely have conceived the currents – imperial retreat, multiculturalism, de-industrialiation – that would transform the nation during her reign. On the centenary of the Queen’s birth, David Cannadine explores how she navigated seven decades of dizzying change
When I was born in September 1950, King George VI had just over a year to live. I have no memory of him or his reign, and my first royal recollection was of the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth – or, more precisely, of images of her state coach and horses, which I cut out of a souvenir magazine. My parents did not own a television set, and did not know anyone who did, so it was only in 2012, the year of Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, that I watched the remastered version of the original coronation broadcast from Westminster Abbey. Richard Dimbleby’s reverential commentary, suffused with ardour and optimism, did indeed belong to that earlier time. When the Queen celebrated her platinum jubilee in 2022, few people in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth could remember when she had not been on the throne. Like Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II had become part of what Victoria’s biographer Lytton Strachey called the “indissoluble” scheme of things, which made it impossible for many people to imagine the world without her. Apart from just over a year at the beginning, and (thus far) four years at the end, my own life has coincided exactly with the 70 years of her reign. I was no part of her life, and never met her, but she was certainly a part of mine, as she was of millions of people in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and far beyond. Joining Shakespeare I never imagined it would one day fall to me to tell Queen Elizabeth’s life story, but in 2014 I was appointed editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it seemed likely that the Queen would die on my watch. The convention established for the ODNB’s predecessor, the original Dictionary of National Biography, was that when the monarch died, the editor would contribute the entry on him or her, and it duly fell to me to write the life of Elizabeth II. I did so in two forms: as a short book of 50,000 words, published late in 2025 by Oxford University Press; and as her entry in the ODNB, available online from April this year, which was cut to 35,000 words, putting the late Queen in the company of her namesake Queen Elizabeth I, along with Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. The ODNB entry is a tightly written biography, while the longer book historicises the Queen by setting her more fully in the context of her times. Read more | Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it? Producing these two different versions reminded me how biographers and historians take different approaches when writing individual lives. Some of the most outstanding recent biographies have been by historians – among them Ian Kershaw on Hitler, Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck and Diarmaid MacCulloch on Thomas Cromwell – but it is a genre about which many scholars remain sceptical. The political and constitutional historian Geoffrey Elton spent his life determined not to produce a biography of Thomas Cromwell, even though he greatly admired him; and in writing his life of Hitler, Ian Kershaw noted that biography ran the risk of “over-emphasising the role of the individual in shaping and determining events”, and “ignoring or playing down the social and political context in which those actions took place”. These risks most certainly apply to biographies of monarchs, though they are less acute when dealing with kings and queens who proactively make history. But sovereigns who reign reactively, rather than rule proactively, create serious expositional challenges, anticipated by Karl Marx, when he observed that “men [and women] make their own histories, but they do not do so under circumstances of their own choosing”. Elizabeth II was just such a circumscribed monarch, living out her life against trends and trajectories in many ways far from friendly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-120520595webready-f7c08c2-e1776683608167.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a person seated at a table with a BBC microphone in front of them, wearing a light blouse and a pearl necklace while holding a sheet of paper." title="In a speech broadcast to mark her 21st birthday – while she was touring South Africa – Princess Elizabeth pledged herself to a life of duty (Image by Getty Images)" /> Decline and fall One indication of this hostile 20th-century environment is that many monarchies were history’s victims rather than its victors. By the end of the First World War, the great-power thrones of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany had disappeared. The Second World War led to a further royal conflagration, as the Yugoslavian, Italian, Bulgarian and Romanian crowns were subsequently abolished, while the survival of the Japanese emperor was the exception that proved the rule. Thereafter the king of Egypt was driven out, the king of Iraq was murdered; Libya, Afghanistan, Greece, Abyssinia and Iran dispensed with their sovereigns, and only the return of a Spanish monarch in 1975 bucked that trend. This widespread royal retreat was accompanied by imperial dissolution, as the maritime empires of Portugal, Belgium the Netherlands and France disappeared during the second half of the 20th century. And so did the British empire, which had been the biggest of them all. Kipling had anticipated this retreat at Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, when his poem Recessional stressed the ephemerality of empire and the transience of global dominion. Between the partition of India and the return of Hong Kong to China 50 years later, the British empire went into full recessional mode. Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was the last British monarch to be Emperor of India, and she ‘gave away’ even more territory than George III. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613457692webready-3319b3d-e1776682784658.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows six people in formal ceremonial dress. At the centre stand a man in a decorated military uniform and a woman in a gown with a long train and veil. Two seated figures and two standing figures wear military uniforms with medals or elegant gowns and jewellery. Draped curtains and a carpeted floor form the backdrop." title="A family portrait from the wedding day of Elizabeth II’s parents, 26 April 1923. (From l to r): the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, the Duchess and Duke of York (the future Queen Mother and George VI) and Queen Mary and George V (Image by Getty Images)" /> A royal rebranding Such was the broader, confining global context against which Princess Elizabeth, born in 1926 as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, lived out her life. One further indication of these changing and challenging times was that only one of her parents was royal. Before the First World War, Europe’s ruling houses constituted an international, inter-connected elite, as exemplified by Queen Victoria’s children, most of whom wed their continental (especially German) relatives. But the First World War, which ranged the British and German royal dynasties against each other, put an end to that, and in 1917 George V rebranded the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as the House of Windsor, and decreed that his descendants might select marriage partners from among British families, by which he meant members of the aristocracy. Read more | The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queen The Duke of York duly wed Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Scottish grandee the Earl of Strathmore, which meant Princess Elizabeth was only ‘semi-royal’, whereas both the parents of Prince Philip of Denmark and Greece, whom she would later marry, were royalty. Philip may have belonged to the rootless and impoverished interwar diaspora of minor princelings, but his lineage was grander than Princess Elizabeth’s. At the time of her birth, there was no realistic likelihood Elizabeth would become the queen regnant of the United Kingdom. Like all Europe’s remaining royal houses, the British monarchy was patriarchal and patrilineal, which meant that if the Duke and Duchess of York produced a son, he would immediately leapfrog his elder sister and become first in the line of succession. And Princess Elizabeth’s uncle, the Prince of Wales, who would accede to the throne on the death of his father, George V, might yet marry and father a boy who would eventually follow him as king. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514080420webready-b1c182a-e1776682680633.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows two people standing together: one wearing a light dress with a brooch and a fur‑trimmed hat, the other in a dark suit with a patterned tie, light vest, and a flower pinned to the lapel. A stone wall with a metal window grille is behind them." title="The former Edward VIII marries Wallis Simpson in June 1937 after abdicating the throne. In doing so, says David Cannadine, he put “self and love before service and duty” (Image by Getty Images)" /> This meant there was every initial expectation that Princess Elizabeth would live out her life as a minor member of the royal family, marrying a British aristocratic landowner, doing good works in the local community, and enjoying the company of her horses and dogs. But she would not be the first member of the British royal family in modern times to inherit the throne unexpectedly. The same had been true of Victoria, of George V, and of her father, George VI. All three, like Elizabeth, were unanticipated monarchs who became successful sovereigns – as she would do to an even greater extent. This unexpected turn in Elizabeth’s life took place in 1936, when she was 10 years old. Her uncle, who had succeeded George V as Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, putting self and love before service and duty. But this obliged Elizabeth’s father to put service and duty before self and love, by becoming the sovereign, as George VI, he had never wanted to be. Having sired no son, this meant his elder daughter became heiress presumptive, and she fully assimilated her parents’ ethos of duty and service. In 1947, on her 21st birthday, when she was accompanying her parents on a tour of South Africa, Princess Elizabeth delivered a broadcast, pledging her life, “whether it be long or short”, to the service of the empire and Commonwealth, and it was a pledge she honoured and kept all her life. But that was not the only reason why 1947 was so important a year. India became independent, and was partitioned, portending the end of the British empire and its evolution into the voluntary community of association known as the Commonwealth. That same year, Elizabeth wed Prince Philip, beginning a more than 70-year union that would be perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613465636webready-d118ece-e1776682342956.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a bride in a lace wedding gown, tiara, and pearl jewellery holding a bouquet, smiling at a man in a formal military uniform with medals. Dark curtains form the background." title="Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten on their wedding day, 20 November 1947. Their 73-year union was, writes David Cannadine, “perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history” (Image by Getty Images)" /> British revolution Thereafter there were many milestones in Elizabeth’s long life and reign, extending across an astonishing 70 years. Here are just a few of them. 1952: the death of her father, her accession as the second Queen Elizabeth, and the widespread belief that a ‘new Elizabethan age’ had dawned. (Due to Britain’s diminishing status in the world, that belief would prove to be mistaken.) 1960: Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change speech’ delivered in South Africa, portending the end of what remained of the British empire. 1964: the advent of the Queen’s first Labour government, led by Harold Wilson. 1965: Winston Churchill’s state funeral, both the last rites of the great man and a requiem for Britain as a great power. 1979: Margaret Thatcher took office, as the Queen’s first female prime minister. 1997: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, delivered a jolt to the monarchy and the nation. 1999: the Queen opened devolved legislatures in Wales and Scotland. 2011: she visited Ireland and expressed sympathy for “those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past”. 2016: 43 years after Britain joined the EEC, an EU Referendum ended in Brexit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1450414706webready-b13781c-e1776682235671.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a group of formally dressed people standing on steps outside a building. Some wear military uniforms, others fur coats or ceremonial robes. One naval officer salutes while others hold programs." title="The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill" /> Significantly, none of these events were initiated by Elizabeth II, but she had to adapt to all of them. That is what monarchs who reign but not rule must do. At the same time, there were many milestones in her own life, as she celebrated a unique grand slam of four jubilees. 1977: her silver jubilee (25 years) – not yet even halfway through the Queen’s long reign, taking place during James Callaghan’s premiership, nearing the end of a difficult decade. 2002: her golden jubilee (50 years) – initially anxious, following the dismal 1990s and the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, but turning out to be an unexpectedly successful amalgam of royal tradition and Blairite ‘cool Britannia’. 2012: her diamond jubilee (60 years) – perhaps the happiest of them all, following the marriage of William and Kate Middleton, preceding the successful opening of the London Olympics, and instantiating the Queen’s own hard-won apotheosis. 2022: her platinum jubilee (70 years) – inescapably elegiac, as the Queen was largely absent from the celebrations, and her last years had been hard, with Covid, the death of Prince Philip and the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the US. But she made a final appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where she had first been glimpsed as a baby in her mother’s arms 95 years before. The Queen’s long reign meant her closest relatives were obliged to adapt in unprecedented ways. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother became a dowager queen for half a century. Prince Philip gave up a promising naval career and subordinated his life to supporting hers. Prince Charles had to wait until his early 70s before he became king. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, found neither personal happiness nor a fulfilling public role. In different ways, this must have been difficult for all four of them. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3335882webready-e52ecc4-e1776682455805.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a woman in a light outfit, hat, gloves, and pearls holding a bouquet as she interacts with a crowd of adults and children waving flags." title="The Queen meets children during her silver jubilee celebrations, 1977. Despite the smiles, Britain was suffering a crisis of confidence at this point in her reign (Image by Getty Images)" /> Unlike their parents, but like their Aunt Margaret, three of the Queen’s children – the Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew – divorced, which meant the (dysfunctional) royal family increasingly became a scandal-ridden soap opera. Prince Andrew’s excessive sense of entitlement, and his close friendship with the convicted American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were deplorable displays of bad behaviour and demonstrated still more deplorable and damaging lapses of judgment. The Duke of Sussex denounced his father in public for being cold and aloof, while his wife branded members of the royal family as uncaring, unsympathetic and racist. “Recollections may vary,” was the Queen’s response. As someone who belonged to the generation that had gone through the Second World War, she was ill at ease with the emotional incontinence that had become widespread during the closing decades of her reign. Total transformation During her 70 years on the throne, Britain changed significantly. In the early 1950s, the traditional aristocracy still counted in the corridors of power, the middle classes were closely linked to the empire, the military and the civil service, and working-class men were overwhelmingly employed in such heavy industries as coal mining, steel making and ship building. Except for the Queen, women knew their (subordinate) place, social mobility was limited, higher education was restricted to a minority, Britain was, to a large extent, ethnically homogeneous, the Church of England was a significant force, and the Victorian moral code still prevailed. Read more | The royal family and their right to privacy: who should have access to the records? But by the end of the Queen’s reign, the aristocracy was no longer the power elite, the middle class sought alternative employment, and the de-industrialisation of Britain meant most men no longer undertook hard manual labour. Rising standards of living and the expansion of universities made the country a more mobile and less deferential society, women occupied prominent positions in public and professional life, the influence of the Church of England had declined, the Victorian moral code had been dismantled, and the influx of immigrants from the dissolving empire meant Britain became an increasingly multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multicultural society. To all this the Queen adapted, slowly and not always enthusiastically, but overall, wisely and well. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-530137388webready-eab239c-e1776682946240.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people at a formal event: one in a sequined gown with a tiara and jewellery, one in a patterned dress with gloves and pearls, and one in a light traditional outfit. They appear to be conversing in an ornate indoor setting." title="With Margaret Thatcher at a Commonwealth meeting in Zambia, 1979. The Queen placed great store on Britain’s membership of this association of more than 2.7 billion people (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the United Kingdom diversified, the British empire diminished, until by the end of her reign it had almost completely disappeared. However much she cared about it, and however hard she worked at it, being Head of the Commonwealth was scarcely the same as being Empress of India. In 1952 Britain was still – just – a great global power; 70 years later, it was a middle-sized nation that had sought to compensate for the loss of empire by joining the European Economic Community, a venture that was abandoned following the referendum of 2016. It thus fell to Elizabeth to preside, not only over domestic devolution, diversification and de-industrialisation, but also over imperial retreat and international withdrawal. This meant that although in later life she became, like Victoria before her, a justly venerated matriarch, the uplifting, expansive narrative widely proclaimed in 1887 and 1897 found no echoes in 2002, 2012 and 2022. Queen Elizabeth II’s greatest achievement was, perhaps, to make recessional majestic. These were not circumstances of her own choosing, but she made history, all the same. Sir David Cannadine is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His latest book is Queen Elizabeth II: A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign (OUP, 2025) This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Power, pomp and the Peacock Throne: the Mughal empire at 500
Five centuries ago, the birth of the Mughal empire heralded a new era of social and religious tolerance, international trade, and artistic and intellectual flourishing. Jagjeet Lally traces the fortunes and legacy of the dynasty that transformed India
Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall deeply in love. Boy’s disapproving father forbids their union. The pair strive to be together, against the odds – but, in a tragic denouement, their young love is thwarted forever. It’s a timeless trope that’s long been stock in trade of Bollywood cinema. But when the girl is a courtesan and dancer, and her suitor is an imperial prince whose father – the Mughal emperor Akbar – holds the power to sentence her to death by immurement (being bricked up in a wall), the result is a sensational, lavish box-office hit. Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal), a 1960 blockbuster that smashed records for Indian cinema, is now an established classic. That film, based on a legend about the prince who later ruled as the emperor Jahangir, is rooted in the popular consciousness of the Mughal empire. That mighty, influential and long-lasting power was, according to one definition, founded 500 years ago this month, and ruled much of India for som e three centuries. The film touches on themes of romance, power, conflict, control and more, all linked in many minds with that dynasty. But who were the real Mughals, how are they remembered today – and is that legacy accurate? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/DXN48Awebready-d474b24-e1776688295226.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two individuals in elaborate historical attire stand in an ornate interior with carved pillars and arches. One wears a purple‑and‑pink outfit with gold embroidery and a jeweled headpiece; the other wears a light green garment with maroon and gold detailing and a pearl necklace." title="Dancer Anarkali is courted by Salim, son of the Mughal emperor Akbar, in the 1960 Bollywood blockbuster Mughal-e-Azam, based on a legend about the future ruler Jahangir (Image by Alamy)" /> The dynasty originated in 15th-century central Asia with a prince named Babur, whose ancestors included Genghis (or Chinggis) Khan. Babur was an even more direct descendant of Timur (Tamerlane), who died in 1405. Having created an empire stretching from the Black Sea to the borders of Ming China, Timur’s life later served as inspiration for the playwright Christopher Marlowe and composer George Frideric Handel. By the time of Babur’s birth in 1483, however, Timur’s empire had shattered into numerous smaller emirates, with various pretenders hungry for power. Sucked into this maelstrom after being crowned Emir of Fergana (now in eastern Uzbekistan) in 1494, Babur was ousted from that throne at the turn of the 16th century. Timeline: rise and fall of the Mughals 1504: Ousted as emir from the Fergana Valley (now eastern Uzbekistan), Babur and his followers head south and capture Kabul 1526: Babur defeats the Delhi sultan and establishes the foundations of the Mughal empire 1540: Babur’s son and successor, Humayun, is defeated by rival sultan Sher Shah Suri and exiled in Iran, retaking Mughal lands in 1555 1560–70s: Following a regency government, Humayun’s son Akbar comes of age and begins administrative reform and fresh expansion. He is succeeded in 1605 by his son Jahangir 1632: Construction of the Taj Mahal begins in Agra on the orders of Shah Jahan, who succeeded Jahangir in 1628 1638: Shah Jahan commissions a monumental walled city to serve as the new imperial capital, today known as ‘Old Delhi’ 1681: Aurangzeb, who took the throne from his father Shah Jahan in 1658, shifts his court to Aurangabad to manage territorial expansion 1707: Aurangzeb dies, and lengthy tussles among would-be successors follow, with seven more emperors taking the throne in less than 13 years 1717: Emperor Farrukhsiyar signs important trading rights over to the British East India Company, which proves pivotal to its expansion 1739: Nadir Shah of Iran defeats Mughal forces, seizing the Peacock Throne and other booty. His rivals also make bids for power, weakening the empire further 1757: Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah defeats the Mughals. The East India Company bests the Mughal governor of Bengal and begins its process of conquest 1857: Bahadur Shah Zafar backs the Indian Rebellion against Company rule in India. He is then deposed and exiled, ending centuries of Mughal monarchy With a band of followers, he headed south and captured Kabul in 1504, proclaiming himself padshah (emperor) in 1508. His new kingdom lay on the long-distance trade routes connecting the Indian subcontinent with the ancient Silk Roads. Though Vasco da Gama had discovered a direct sea route from Europe to Asia a few years earlier in 1498, and the Portuguese were starting to embark on imperial enterprise in the Indian Ocean world, it would be several decades before ships replaced caravans in the east–west trade. So Babur was able to command tax revenues from the passing commercial traffic. The real prize, though, was Al-Hind, or Hindustan, as north India was known by contemporaries in the region. (Ironically, Babur later lamented in his autobiography that India was “a place of little charm”, the lack of good horses and his beloved musk-melons chief among its many perceived defects.) So Babur and his followers launched raiding expeditions to the south. Soon they were invited by disgruntled north Indian elites to challenge the last of the so-called Delhi sultans who ruled over Hindustan from their capital in that city. On 21 April 1526, in a battle at Panipat some 50 miles north of Delhi, Babur’s forces proved victorious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-918984520webready-1ff64c7-e1776688172526.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A ruler sits on a golden throne under an ornate canopy, surrounded by attendants in colourful robes." title="Timur, who conquered swathes of Asia in the 14th century, pictured in a Mughal manuscript of c1600–01. Babur was his direct descendant (Image by Getty Images)" /> Delhi had been the capital of successive royal dynasties for centuries, attracting learned and wise men from far and wide to become a spiritual centre of great repute. These points were not lost on the Mughal empire’s founder, who was quick to pay homage at the gardens, tombs, mosques and monuments of Delhi’s important kings and saints. Timur had done the same in 1398 after his conquest of the city. Babur was effectively retracing his famous ancestor’s footsteps, linking himself to royal power and establishing his legitimacy as an emperor. Read more | Genghis Khan: the Mongol warlord who almost conquered the world Turbulent decades The first decades of Mughal rule were turbulent, the empire remaining fragile and far from consolidated. Besides the last vestiges of the old regime and numerous Indian rajas or kings resistant to Mughal power, challengers emerged from within Babur’s family itself. In keeping with Timurid political culture, Babur was seen as the first among equals by his relatives who considered themselves to possess as much legitimacy as him, and an equal claim to the throne. Some, such as Muhammad Zaman Mirza, chose to try their luck; his rebellion was quashed in the 1530s. Others – including Babur’s cousin Mirza Haydar Dughlat, who governed Kashmir – established toeholds of their own farther afield. Babur died in 1530, having ruled the new empire for less than five years, and was succeeded by his son, Humayun. That emperor’s early reign was marked by near-constant threats to his authority, and in 1540 Humayun was toppled from the throne and exiled by Sher Shah Suri, a sultan with a base in northern India. In 1555, though, Humayun returned with the military support of the Safavid shah. His triumph was short-lived: he was dead within a year of his reconquest, following an accident. So the task of securing the Mughal imperium fell to his son, Akbar ‘the Great’ (reigned 1556–1605). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1326248022webready-3c716d3-e1776688384638.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical painting depicts a crowded battle scene with warriors in armour wielding swords, shields, spears, and bows. Some fight on horseback, others on foot, all wearing colourful patterned clothing and helmets." title="A late 16th-century miniature depicts the triumph of Babur’s forces at the battle of Panipat in 1526. This victory secured Delhi, and marked the moment when the Mughal empire really took root in India (Image by Getty Images)" /> Awareness of Akbar’s greatness did not originate in posthumous tributes but was carefully established by the emperor’s own courtiers, not least the Mughal grand vizier and polymath Abul Fazl. In biographical, genealogical and historical works that emphasised Akbar’s excellent pedigree and portrayed his birth as nothing short of a miracle, the padshah was presented as a supernatural figure, preternaturally well-tempered, wise and just. Artists represented him larger than life; thanks to the steady stream of pictures brought by Jesuit missionaries and ambassadors from European courts, Mughal painters appropriated iconographic elements including the solar nimbus or halo to distinguish the emperor as a saintly, otherworldly being. Akbar’s greatness became a pillar of Mughal ideology, and was perpetuated by his heirs and most loyal nobles. All this would have rung hollow, however, had it not been accompanied by tangible achievements. It was from Akbar’s reign that the empire was consolidated, thanks to the standardisation of weights and measures, the wholesale re-surveying of the imperial lands to ascertain reliable figures of annual yields ahead of setting (reasonable) tax rates, and the transformation of the system of government. In a move aimed at reducing the tendency towards waywardness or rebellion, the institution of the imperial nobility was transformed into a graded and much more hierarchical system, with a steady rise in rank offered in return for loyalty to the emperor. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/KNDD3Bwebready-9d2e697-e1776688468204.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detailed painting shows a figure in ornate clothing standing on a grassy mound with a lion and a white cow beside them, set against a landscape with trees and distant buildings." title="Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, portrayed with a solar nimbus or halo in a 17th-century painting. His courtiers strove to cultivate his image as an almost supernatural figure (Image by Alamy)" /> For commoners, what mattered most was that the kingdom was peaceful, society harmonious, and trade flourishing. Their point of view is reflected in the incredibly rich autobiography penned by a Jain merchant named Banarasidas. He was 19 at the end of Akbar’s reign, and lived to see the reigns of two further emperors. Overcome by the rumours of Akbar’s death (from dysentery), he swooned and split open his head in the courtyard of his home. Meanwhile, his fellow townsmen were also beset with grief at the loss of an emperor whose rule they linked to their personal security and wellbeing. This outpouring of genuine affection was also connected with the interest in a broad range of religious teachings espoused by Akbar and, later, by his son Jahangir. The Mughals were Sunni Muslims, but the fruits of the emperors’ dialogues with other faith leaders was a short-lived syncretic religion or ethical system, Din-i Ilahi, and the much more enduring policy and practice of sulh-i-kul, universal civility or peace. Both pre-dated Enlightenment codes of tolerance by more than a century. Mughal toleration certainly aroused admiration among Europeans, and not only those who were religious minorities in their homelands. Indeed, Sir Thomas Roe – who left a widely cited account of the early 17th-century Mughal empire – noted the dramatic contrast with sectarian persecution and violence in England. Inclusive empire The Mughal empire was highly cosmopolitan, integrating people of different backgrounds and religions. It was also central to the success of the trading system that spanned the Indian Ocean. Indian cotton textiles were bartered for spices in south-east Asia. From the late 16th century, too, demand for spices and other Indian goods was swelling, fuelled by both Asian merchants and European trading organisations – first the Portuguese crown, then the English and Dutch private trading companies – with knock-on effects for the Mughals. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The decision to expand the empire’s frontiers to Gujarat and Bengal did more than bring Mughal rule all the way to the Indian subcontinent’s western and eastern seaboards. It also resulted in the incorporation of two of the most prosperous provinces and their entrepôts, chief among them Surat, the Bandar-i Mubarak or ‘Auspicious Port’. Akbar’s successors continued the process of imperial expansion, though it was his great-grandson Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor, who extended imperial rule over much of the peninsula, enlarging the imperial domain to its greatest extent. As tax revenues from the growing empire poured into the imperial coffers, the Mughal court became more magnificent, impressing ambassadors from all over Europe and Asia. Akbar, Jahangir (reigned 1605–27), and Shah Jahan (r1628–58) are often called the ‘Great Mughals’, reflecting the flourishing of the arts, architecture and culture during their reigns. This was a time of innovation, when Indian, Islamic and European motifs, forms and techniques were blended into a new tradition – the Mughal style. The emperor was, of course, key to this development. Jahangir’s interest in flora and fauna sat well alongside the naturalistic current in imperial painting prompted, in part, by the influx of Netherlandish art and he is said to have instructed court artists to make studies from life. Shah Jahan was more interested in buildings, and the complex of gardens and structures known as the Taj Mahal– its centrepiece an iconic, breathtaking white marble mausoleum – is a pinnacle of Mughal architecture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-612573174webready-94241d6-e1776688550478.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A view of the Taj Mahal shows its white marble dome, four minarets, and surrounding buildings beside a river, with reflections in the water and a hazy sky." title="The Taj Mahal, a mausoleum commissioned in 1631 by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, was the apogee of that emperor’s architectural ambitions (Image by Getty Images)" /> Projects commissioned by Rajput ruler and general Man Singh and other important nobles were also pivotal to the formation of the Mughal style. So, too, was the cultural patronage of imperial and royal women. Take Shah Jahan’s daughter, Princess Jahanara, who was the most senior figure in the imperial harem, and the richest woman in the empire. She was the driving force behind several large-scale architectural projects – Chandni Chowk, the tree-lined boulevard of shops and squares bisected by a canal in what’s now Old Delhi, is among her most famous and enduring legacies. Sahifa Banu, meanwhile, was one of at least two women known to have been trained by Mughal masters such as Persian miniaturist Aqa Reza. Her portrait of an Iranian monarch (shown on the previous page) is in the V&A Museum’s collection in London. Shah Jahan’s son and successor, Aurangzeb (r1658–1707), is seldom called a ‘Great Mughal’. Instead, he is more often portrayed as a devout Muslim whose zealotry spelled the end of Mughal patronage of the arts – and, worse still, upset the communal harmony pervading before his reign. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/3AJ31RTwebready-ac765e5-e1776688645974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detailed painting shows a person in richly patterned Mughal clothing, wearing jewellery and holding a green leaf in one hand and a small dish in the other, set against a dark green background." title="Princess Jahanara, here pictured in 1632 at the age of about 18, continued Shah Jahan’s architectural projects, pushing through major developments such as the Delhi boulevard called Chandni Chowk (Image by Alamy)" /> Contested legacy This view is part and parcel of the politics of Mughal historiography, and leaves little room for a positive appreciation of Aurangzeb’s reign, much as the idea of Akbar’s greatness obscures that emperor’s errors and missteps. Aurangzeb’s most important legacy was in the realm of the law and the massive scholarly project of legal codification that served the increasing number of his subjects – and their progeny down the generations – who took their legal affairs and disputes to Mughal courts for resolution. On Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the empire faced a period of instability characterised by factionalism, high regnal turnover (four emperors occupied the throne in 1719 alone), and the installation of puppet rulers by powerful courtiers. But worse was to follow. First came the invasion in 1739 by Iranian general Nadir Shah. This humiliated the Mughals, though the invader was content to leave with a vast amount of booty – including the fabled Peacock Throne – never to return. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2022NF9414webready-cfe712b-e1776688765707.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Persian miniature painting shows a figure in a tall white turban and golden robe seated cross‑legged on a richly patterned carpet. A stylised tree with drooping branches rises behind them against a gold background with intricate designs." title="A portrait of a 16th-century Iranian Shah by Sahifa Banu, one of at least two Mughal women who became accomplished miniature painters (Image by Victoria and Albert Museum London)" /> Less than 20 years later, the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah emptied the coffers yet again, and publicly proclaimed the Mughal emperor his vassal. Not long after that ignominy, the Marathas – a rising Hindu-Indian power – followed in his wake. A popular saying from the times went: “What Nadir had spared, Ahmad Shah destroyed; what Ahmad Shah had overlooked, the Marathas carried away.” These misfortunes drained the empire’s reserves and damaged the king’s majesty so grievously that imperial decentralisation became imperial decline, and power shifted decisively from the capital to the provinces and regional kingdoms. It was not only petty rajas and warlords waiting in the wings who felt emboldened to stake their claims of independent authority. News of Ahmad Shah’s invasion in 1757 stiffened the British East India Company’s resolve when it went to war with the Mughal governor of Bengal that same year. The Company’s victory marked its transition from a trading organisation to a sovereign power and, ultimately, the beginnings of its Indian empire. Read more | Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires The Mughal line clung on for another century before being extinguished once and for all following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when the emperor was coerced into supporting the forces fighting the East India Company. Until then, he had lived under the protection of whichever power dominated: first the Marathas and then, from 1803, the Company. The influence of Mughal power nonetheless endured long after 1757 and even 1857 – though more as an idea than in practice. Having violently stamped out the rebellion, the British remained anxious about threats to their rule in India, and were eager to be seen as legitimate heirs to the Mughals. So they appropriated their symbols and visual language, evident in the pomp of the colonial durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911, and more prevalently in the Indo-Saracenic or Mughal-Gothic building style rolled out across the subcontinent, from Aitchison College in Lahore to the Madras High Court in what’s now Chennai. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/D8BF5Kwebready-f11bffb-e1776688859388.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical scene shows elaborately decorated elephants with embroidered fabrics and painted designs, carrying riders in traditional clothing and turbans. Other figures sit or kneel nearby in an open field." title="Ornately decorated elephants at the 1903 Delhi Durbar, celebrating the coronation of King Edward VII as emperor of India, recall the pomp and rituals of the Mughals (Image by Alamy)" /> Enduring achievements Does 2026 truly mark the 500th anniversary of the Mughal empire’s founding, or merely 500 years since Babur’s conquest of north India? Babur had actually been using the language of empire long before 1526 – though the dynasty’s precarious first half-century calls into question whether the Mughal kingdom was truly an empire before the 1570s. More importantly, ought we be celebrating a moment of conquest? Or, instead, remembering the achievements in statecraft and administration, the arts and culture, justice and trade witnessed during the Pax Mughalica in the longer term? Setting aside the martial skills of Babur and his progeny, or their personalities and predilections, the making (and unmaking) of the Mughal empire owed a great deal to a wider cast of characters. These included bureaucrats and intellectuals including Abul Fazl, and women such as Jahanara Begum – Shah Jahan’s eldest surviving child – who patronised charitable efforts, learning, arts and architecture. The ruling elite depended on artisans and merchants such as Banarasidas, as well as every one of the emperor’s subjects who paid their taxes and helped produce goods traded overseas. Their labour kept the empire in good repair, and helped the memory of its glories burn bright to the present day. Hindustani cinema – aka Bollywood – reflects how shifts in Indian politics and society have steadily reshaped popular conceptions of the Mughals. Film production in India really took off in the 1940s amid the struggle for independence from British rule. Whether intended to portray India’s rich history against the hardships and struggle under colonialism, or merely as a form of escapism, period pieces were popular. In 1944, Wajahat Mirza – who later co-wrote the 1960 epic Mughal-e-Azam about the emperor Jahangir’s youthful romance – directed Shahenshah Babar, a feature about the first Mughal emperor. After independence in 1947, the Mughal past seemed to offer an exemplar for the fledgling democratic, secular nation, especially after the horrors of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims before and during partition. The Mughals were, after all, a Muslim dynasty ruling over a majority non-Muslim population. Some films thus celebrated the relative social harmony of the high Mughal period – for example, with Adl-e-Jehangir (1955), a rather idealised depiction of Jahangir as a just ruler. Others (such as Baiju Bawra, 1952, about a musician at Akbar’s court) depicted the composite culture of the Mughal empire or focused on the emperors’ love lives. Most touched on sulh-i-kul, a policy of universal civility and peace. Two years after the death in 1964 of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, became premier. That was soon followed by the release of Noor Jehan (1967) about Jahangir’s wife, who was widely maligned as power-hungry and ruthless. In 1975, Mrs Gandhi suspended India’s democracy upon declaring the Emergency, ushering a brief authoritarian interlude that lasted until 1977. From the 1980s, India opened up to the world economy, unleashing economic growth but also a new kind of conspicuous consumption. Reflecting this, Jodhaa Akbar (2008), about Akbar’s marriage to a Hindu Rajput princess, is an extravagant gold and-jewel-encrusted vision of the Mughal past, fitting for the New India of the 2000s. But it was also intended to be a balm for the hurt unleashed by anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, and the communal strife that continued to plague India. Today, the Mughal past is being re-evaluated wholesale amid a rising tide of Hindu nationalism. A growing number of films paint the Mughals and other Muslim rulers not as heroes but as villainous invaders, among them Panipat (2019) and Tanhaji (2020), which valorise the Marathas and their conflicts with the Mughals. The Mughal past is more hotly contested than ever, and the 500th anniversary of the empire’s founding is as likely to be met with reflection on lessons it could provide for present problems as with calls for ‘retribution’ for past wrongs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2AX43H7webready-bb415d0-e1776689024327.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A movie poster features three characters: a central warrior in a red turban holding a glowing sword, a bearded man in a dark turban on the left, and a woman in traditional attire on the right. A battlefield and fortress appear in the background." title="A poster for the 2020 historical action epic Tanhaji, which celebrates the 17th-century commander of the Hindu Maratha kingdom who challenged the Mughals (Image by Alamy)" /> Jagjeet Lally is associate professor of the history of early modern and colonial India at University College London, and author of Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World (Penguin Business, 2025) This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Friends, Romans, citizens: why Rome opened its doors to people across the empire
From Romulus’s open-city policy to Claudius’s reforms, citizenship was used by Rome as both a reward and a weapon. And, as Shushma Malik explains, it enabled the burgeoning empire to build power and define identity
What made Rome so powerful? Writing in the early 16th century in his Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli (best known for The Prince) argued that the secret lay not in geography or luck, but in people – and in a ruthless flexibility in acquiring them. “Those who design a city to create a great empire must strive with great diligence to fill it full of inhabitants,” he wrote (as translated in 1997 by JC and P Bondanella). “This may be done in two ways: either through love or through force. It is done through love by keeping the pathways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come there to live… it is done through force, after nearby cities are destroyed, by sending their inhabitants to live in your city.” Rome enlarged its population through both of those two methods, enabling it to build enormous fighting forces – Machiavelli cited a figure of 80,000 men, compared with just 20,000 for Athens or Sparta at their peak. Rome flourished, said Machiavelli, not because it had an advantageous location but because of one simple but powerful policy: it made outsiders into Romans. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-113636408-4087aad-e1776332738730.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A bronze sculpture shows a she‑wolf standing alert with her head turned, while two human infants beneath her reach toward her teats." title="A bronze statue shows Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf. According to legend the twins, who founded Rome in 753 BC, were themselves refugees (Image by Getty Images)" /> This concept was integral to the city’s founding story. Romans were not from Rome – as Athenians were thought to be born from the earth of Athens – but travelled and settled there as refugees. According to myth – specifically, Virgil’s epic Aeneid – Aeneas came to Italy after fleeing from a burning Troy. Romulus and Remus, twins supposedly descended from the line of kings that traced back to Aeneas’s son Ascanius, were rescued from certain death at the hands of their great uncle, and sent floating down the Tiber in a basket. Rescued and suckled by a she-wolf, they were then raised by the herdsman Faustulus and his wife, Acca Larentia. Read more | Roman gods and goddesses: 17 of the most important deities of ancient Rome The twins founded Rome but, after an episode of brutal fratricide, Romulus became the sole ruler. One of his first acts, according to the historian Livy, was to offer asylum to all those – free or enslaved – from surrounding areas who wanted a fresh start, recruiting them to join his new city. The first Roman senators were selected from among these early Romans. Becoming Roman This origin myth was created in part to highlight the fact that citizenship could be transferred: you did not need to be born a Roman to become a Roman. As Machiavelli observed, this was also a deeply pragmatic strategy for accumulating the manpower needed to build an empire. However, it is not the case that all of those who entered into the empire – in particular, those conquered by the Romans – became citizens. Rome’s was an empire of citizens – but not necessarily Roman citizens. When Rome was expanding into Italy, especially in the fourth and third centuries BC, grants of citizenship could be offered as reward or imposed as punishment for those unwilling to comply with its demands. Gifts of citizenship could also, on occasion, be refused if the proposed grantees did not see the benefits. This was the case for a group of soldiers from Praeneste – now Palestrina in central Italy – who helped the Romans to defend Casilinum (now part of Capua) from attack by the Carthaginian general Hannibal. Livy describes how the soldiers were rewarded with double pay and an extraordinary five-year exemption from military service. However, when they were offered citizenship, the men refused, preferring instead to keep their status as citizens of Praeneste. This story reminds us that we should not take for granted the desirability of Roman citizenship over others when Rome was expanding as a Republic or, later, when it was under the control of emperors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-122315896-4dbdc3a-e1776333226539.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief shows a seated figure behind a table with small rounded objects on its surface, reaching toward a standing figure who holds a staff and raises one hand in gesture." title="A third-century AD Gallo-Roman relief depicts the payment of tax – one of the responsibilities that came with Roman citizenship, along with undertaking military service (Image by Getty Images)" /> During the Republic, citizenship was technically in the gift of the Roman citizen body. However, this changed in the late Republic, when generals such as Pompey and Caesar – and, later, Octavian and Antony – could grant citizenship on the basis of military merit. One such law that allowed this was the lex Gellia Cornelia of 72 BC, which we know about because a political opponent of Pompey’s tried to attack him by claiming that he had no right to grant citizenship, which he had offered to one Lucius Cornelius Balbus. Balbus, born in Gades (now Cádiz in Spain), had fought with the Romans in various battles against the rebel general Sertorius. Cicero, one of Balbus’s team of defenders, had a seemingly clear-cut case that not only did Balbus deserve citizenship but that Pompey unquestionably had the authority to grant it. What the trial reveals, however, are the political stakes of citizenship grants in the changing landscape of the Roman Republic. In the later period of the first century BC, citizenship – like many other aspects of a Roman’s status – had become a tool of political attack. Rights and responsibilities What did citizenship get you? The first thing to remember is that both men and women were Roman citizens. This is underlined by the right of conubium – of Roman women and men to marry and have citizen children. Roman citizens also had the right of commercium: to enter into contracts, such as trade, with other Romans and with the protection of the Roman courts. In addition, Romans had the right to appeal if they were being mistreated. Perhaps the most famous example of this is an episode in the New Testament book of Acts (22:25), in which Paul – affirming his status as a Roman citizen – insisted on being taken to Rome. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-520718047-5537cc1-e1776333432689.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A mosaic made of small coloured tiles shows a bearded, bald man with a golden halo behind his head." title="An 11th-century mosaic of Saint Paul in St Sophia’s Cathedral, Kyiv. As a Roman citizen, he was entitled to appeal to the emperor in Rome to hear the case against him (Image by Getty Images)" /> The story goes that the apostle was arrested in Jerusalem for creating a disturbance. The barracks commander ordered him to be flogged, but the centurion had to stop when Paul declared himself a Roman citizen. Even more pointedly, it’s observed that Paul had been born a Roman citizen, whereas the centurion had bought his citizenship. Ultimately, Paul declared to Festus, the procurator of Judaea, his right to go to Rome to plead his case. “You have appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you will go!” was Festus’s response, recounted in Acts 25:12. In political terms, during the Republic and early imperial period, men who held Roman citizenship had the right to vote in Rome’s assemblies and to run for magistracies if they could afford it. But this did not extend to women or, in the main, to citizens who had been manumitted from enslavement. It also did not extend to men from communities who had been granted civitas sine suffragio – citizenship without voting rights, a status first recorded in the fourth century BC. As well as rights, citizens also had duties, which included taxation and military service. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/L.CassiusLonginusdenarius63BCRRC413-1reverse-26a0f50-e1776332982945.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A silver Roman coin shows a robed figure standing and holding a small object, with a rectangular chest or altar in front of them. The inscription “LONGIN III V” runs along the right edge." title="A voter casts a ballot on a Roman denarius coin issued in 63 BC. At that time, during the Republic, male Roman citizens had the right to vote in assemblies (Image by CNG Coins)" /> There were a number of ways to become a Roman citizen, other than being born to parents who possessed the right of conubium. If an enslaved person was manumitted by a Roman citizen in one of the three legally defined ways, that person would be granted citizenship. Those who held a magistracy (political office) in a Latin community – a colony that was subject to Latin law, with some of the rights of Roman citizenship, but not all – were granted the status. Citizenship could also be granted to individuals or groups by the senate and people of Rome or, later, by the emperor for extraordinary activity or by serving in the Roman army as an auxiliary (non-citizen soldier) for 25 years. Read more | Have archaeologists just found proof of ancient Carthage's legendary anti-Roman war weapon? Positions of power There were periods in Rome’s history when citizenship expanded particularly rapidly. One was during the Social War (91–88 BC), the result of which was the extension of citizenship to more or less all free Italians. This had been a long time in coming: Italian allies had been fighting in Rome’s wars and striving for political inclusion, but had not received any formal political rights. Eventually, Rome recognised the value of other Italians to its continued imperial success. The Social War was followed by lengthy periods of military activity by Pompey in the east and by Caesar in Gaul, and individual or group grants of citizenship were made in those places. Gaul makes a particularly interesting case study. In AD 48, some 100 years after those campaigns, the question was raised whether some of those Gauls conquered by Caesar should be let into the senate. Notably, the then-emperor Claudius (ruled AD 41–54) was himself born in Lyon while his father Drusus held a post in Gaul. Claudius argued – in the face of senatorial opposition – that the Gallo-Romans had become so interchangeable with Italian Romans in their manners and characteristics that they deserved to sit in the empire’s most prestigious political body. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/ClaudiantableIMG1073-black-1e4b98f-e1776333719521.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large bronze tablet divided into two panels shows rows of engraved Latin text in capital letters, with a vertical crack running between the panels." title="A bronze tablet of AD 48 inscribed with a speech given by the emperor Claudius – himself born in Gaul – championing the right of Gallo-Romans to sit in the senate (Image by Rama Wikipedia Commons)" /> Two copies of Claudius’s speech survive: one in the Annals of Tacitus, writing in the early second century AD, and another as an inscription in Lyon from AD 48 recording Claudius’s success. Tacitus gives us some sense of the senators’ objections: how can the same people who were once such fierce enemies now be put in a position of such power? In reply, Claudius contended (as translated by AJ Woodman in 2004): “Our founder Romulus… was so effective in his wisdom that he regarded many peoples as enemies and then as citizens on the same day! Immigrants have reigned over us… [no other war] was concluded in a shorter space of time than against the Gauls. Thereafter there has been a constant and trusting peace. Now, merged as they are with us by conventions, attainments, and relationships, let them bring in their gold and wealth rather than keep them to themselves.” Claudius made a winning case for the ease with which the Gauls conquered by Caesar had embraced the elements of Roman citizenship, observing that this prepared them for leading roles in the Roman government. However, from the same emperor’s reign, we also see the other side of this approach. Claudius is recorded by another ancient historian – Cassius Dio, writing in the early third century AD – as having stripped someone of their citizenship for not behaving in a way that the emperor considered appropriate for a person who had been granted that status. As Earnest Cary’s 1924 translation has it: “[Claudius] reduced the Lycians to servitude because they had revolted and slain some Romans… During the investigation of this affair, which was conducted in the senate, he put a question in Latin to one of the envoys who had originally been a Lycian, but had been made a Roman citizen; and when the man failed to understand what was said, he took away his citizenship, saying that it was not proper for a man to be a Roman who had no knowledge of the Romans’ language.” This story highlights an important aspect of citizenship. Acting like a citizen seems, for some emperors at least, to have been as important as the grant itself. Acting Roman Roman identity was performed in several ways. Speaking Latin was one of them; another was donning the correct attire. In the second century AD, Pliny the Younger wrote a letter recounting the story of Valerius Licinianus, who was exiled by the emperor Domitian for raping the chief priest of Vesta, Cornelia. (She, in contrast, was sentenced to burial while still alive – a punishment available to the emperor for a Vestal who had ‘committed’ incestum, a violation of a religious law.) Exile included a loss of citizen status, which meant losing the right to wear elite male Roman dress – the toga. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1162718076-f5245e6-e1776333502161.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue shows a standing figure in a long, draped garment, with one arm extended and the other holding part of the fabric at the waist." title="A statue of a Vestal virgin wearing a stola – a long, pleated, sleeveless robe – and palla (cloak), the garb of respectable adult women in ancient Rome (Image by Getty Images)" /> “Have you heard that Valerius Licinianus is teaching rhetoric in Sicily?” wrote Pliny, as translated by Betty Radice in 1969. “It is not long since this senator of praetorian rank was considered one of the best advocates in Rome. Now he has sunk to his present position – the senator is an exile and the orator a teacher of rhetoric… Then, when he had made his entry [into his new classroom] clad in a Greek cloak (those who have been ritually banished are not allowed to wear the toga), he made himself ready, looked down at his dress, and announced that he would deliver his speech in Latin.” Licinianus attempted to cling onto Latin, despite the fact that as a non-citizen he was strictly prohibited from wearing Roman dress. In a similar way, the stola – a garment worn by Roman citizen women – was strictly reserved for respectable daughters of Rome. Read more | You've been getting Roman togas wrong your whole life - here's why During most of the Republic, it wasn’t possible to hold more than one citizenship at one time – becoming Roman meant losing something else. However, in the last years of the Republic, that changed, even if extant sources do not provide many examples. A grant of Roman citizenship then did not automatically mean relinquishing local citizenship – both could be held at once. For some people, Roman citizenship would have held little value in day-to-day life. Working on a local farm or operating in local trade networks did not necessarily require access to the grand operating mechanisms of empire. And a local politician with his own established networks and elite status in his community did not invariably need to be eligible for the senate in Rome to fulfil his own ambitions. In AD 212, the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to almost all of the free population of the Roman empire. However, scholars suggest that before Caracalla made the grant, no more than 33 per cent of the inhabitants of empire held Roman citizenship. Previously, the majority had operated for centuries without it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/ali016338-2-0f52d48-e1776333597701.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble bust shows a man with short, curly hair and a full beard, his head slightly turned and his expression stern. He wears a draped cloak fastened with a round clasp." title="A bust of the emperor Caracalla, who in AD 212 extended Roman citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the empire (Image by Topfoto)" /> Later in history, Roman citizenship was held up as a model to be studied and in some ways emulated. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods, children of wealthy and prominent Britons – future leaders in the British empire – were educated in the citizenship strategies of ancient Greek states and Rome. However, newer ideas – of nationality, for example – made the transferral of ancient models difficult, as the debates of the era show. Principles of jus soli – the idea that British people are subjects by virtue of where they are born – or jus sanguinis (nationality by right of bloodline) play with ideas of antiquity, but are fundamentally different, adapted and readapted for new national and imperial contexts. Carrot and stick Returning to Machiavelli, his model obscures the number of people who lived under Roman control without assuming citizenship. What an analysis of Rome’s tactics also reveals is the extent to which citizenship could be used as either the carrot or the stick – reward or punishment. But what of the Lycian who was stripped of his citizenship simply because his language skills weren’t deemed up to scratch? What does it mean not to be a Roman citizen in the Roman empire? In practice, the man probably reverted back to the citizenship he had held in Lycia (now south-west Anatolia) before Roman annexation. As we’ve already seen, many regional citizenships existed – and continued to exist – within the Roman empire at the same time. Rome provides a variety of examples, lessons, and warnings about attitudes to and mechanisms of citizenship. A state that pins its own history on inclusivity can, at the same time, punish and restrict. In other words, the long history of the Roman empire tells many stories of multiple and varied citizenships. This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin
Seventy years ago, Nikita Khrushchev stood before a packed hall in central Moscow and delivered a four-hour denunciation of Josef Stalin, one that exposed mass terror and attempted to reclaim the legacy of Leninism. So what drove this extraordinarily radical move? And did the Soviet people buy Khrushchev’s message?
When I was an undergraduate, a perennial exam question was ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’. The question gets to the heart of Soviet history, and I still ask my students to address it. What does it mean? It suggests that Stalin’s policies, especially in the 1930s, were either a logical consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 or they were a deadly departure from its promises. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his personal hold on power, he made a sharp leftward turn. His programme was headlined by a centrally planned economy, the collectivisation of agriculture, and breakneck industrialisation. It sounds like the fruits of a socialist revolution. Mass state violence accompanied this ‘great break’ in Soviet life. Collectivisation led to falls in grain output and the forcible transfer of some of it to industrial centres; famine followed, killing millions, worst of all in Ukraine. The network of Gulag labour camps dramatically expanded. Enemies of the people – innocent men and women – were shot in their hundreds of thousands during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Did these appalling atrocities subvert the liberations of 1917? Or were they the natural follow-up to the terrors of the civil war (1917–22) and a predictable explosion of the implied violence of socialism? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/HIP2591053-6c687f8-e1776154310242.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster depicts a large hand gripping a sword marked with the hammer and sickle, slicing through a snake labeled with words such as espionage, sabotage, and provocation. The left side is dark with the snake, while the right shows a bright, orderly cityscape. Russian text urges vigilance." title="A poster from 1953 proclaims “Vigilence is Our Weapon. Be Vigilant!” Millions of people had died as a result of Stalin’s violent policies during his long rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> Generations of students have written essays about whether Stalinism represented the true colours of socialism or whether it had nothing in common with the real ethics of the left. But the question was also crucial in real time, not merely decades after the event. When Nikita Khrushchev posed the question – did Stalin betray the revolution? – he turned the course of Soviet history. A rising Soviet star Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to political power seemed to fulfil the promise of the Bolshevik revolution. He was born in the village of Kalinovka, in Kursk province, in 1894. He worked as a shepherd when he was still a child. It was a tough, poor, hardscrabble life. When he was 14, the family moved to Yuzovka – today’s Donetsk – in the nearby Donbas. He trained as a metalworker and had the gift of getting on in life; when he got married in 1914, he and his wife had their own, quite decent apartment. But he worked crushing shifts during the First World War and then endured the lethal lottery of revolution and civil war, during which his wife died of typhus. Khrushchev was a hard worker, gregarious, ambitious and politically curious. He immersed himself in the diverse socialist landscape of the revolutionary Donbas and became a Bolshevik. Like so many others with proletarian credentials, he was propelled forward and upwards by the revolution. He embarked upon a new career in party and government administration in what was now the Ukrainian republic of the USSR. He rose closer to the centre of republican power. His bosses marked him out as a rising star. In 1929, they facilitated his move to Moscow. By 1935, he was in charge of Moscow city and region, a kind of super-mayor of the socialist capital. In 1938, he went back to Kyiv, but this time as boss of the whole Ukrainian republic. He was an ethnic Russian, but he had lived in Ukraine for half his life. The year after, he was elevated to the Politburo. Khrushchev had made it big, and he owed it all to the revolution. He was a pragmatic careerist and a brilliant machine politician. But he was also a true believer. He saw the revolution as the great engine of social justice and mobility. It had the potential to improve living standards and to distribute these improvements equally. In time, the legacy of the revolution would deliver communism, the Soviet utopia of the future. Read more | Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War? These principles formed Khrushchev’s view of Soviet socialism. Unlike Stalin, he was never one for the recondite nuances of the revolution’s classic texts. Instead, he equated his straightforward sense of socialism with Leninism. He revered Lenin, and never departed from an intense commitment to him. But neither did Khrushchev question the economic and industrial strategy that Stalin pushed forward in the five-year plans. Khrushchev agreed that extreme measures had to be used against ‘enemies’. The stakes were so high that no chances could be taken with the success of the Bolshevik project. Khrushchev was complicit in the development of the Gulag and the prosecution of the Great Terror of 1936–38. As the leading figure in the administration of Moscow city and region, and then of Ukraine, he spoke in favour of the need to use extreme violence against enemies and he himself consigned significant numbers of people to execution. He had blood on his hands. Yet even in the 1930s, he could not stop thinking about old colleagues and decent sorts who had ended up in the ‘meat grinder’. Their ‘guilt’ made no sense to him. He feared for himself and his family. But he had to go on; political life was like a moving train from which one could not depart. Stalin’s suffocating embrace During the war, after Kyiv fell to the Nazis, Khrushchev was transferred to the military as a political commissar, serving in Stalingrad and elsewhere. When the Germans retreated, he was sent back to Kyiv. In 1949, he resumed his old job in Moscow. Stalin constantly pulled him back and forth into a suffocating embrace, sometimes humiliating him but also placing him next to Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov at the top of the Politburo. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-170987691-b52ec57-e1776154250776.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large portrait of Joseph Stalin is displayed above a stage draped with flags and curtains. Below it, Soviet officials stand and clap during a formal assembly, with military personnel visible behind them. A banner with Russian text praising Stalin hangs across the front." title="Communist dignitaries celebrate Josef Stalin’s 70th birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre, 21 December 1949. They include: Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Stalin, Walter Ulbricht, Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov. By now Stalin had promoted Khrushchev to the pinnacle of the Politburo but still subjected him to periodical humiliations (Image by Getty Images)" /> Khrushchev navigated the turbulent politics that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 to become the leading figure in a collective leadership of Bolshevik barons. His power base was not in the central government (like Malenkov) or the security services (like Beria), or the military-industrial complex, or a republic administration. It was in the party, of which he was first secretary. He played his hand well. By 1956, he was increasingly first among equals in the collective leadership. The post-Stalin period was already known as the Thaw. In 1954, Ilya Ehrenberg released a novel with that name. The book seemed to sum up the shift towards a more open culture and addressed questions about private dilemmas as well as public life. At the same time, Stalin’s cult of personality was being dismantled in an ad hoc way in many public institutions. Large numbers of prisoners were released from the camps shortly after Stalin died, while certain social improvements, notably in policy towards the collective farms, were already under way. But all of these processes were tentative, and there was no central vision that directed them. The metaphor of ‘thaw’ – the end of the Eurasian winter – seemed to make sense: heralding a new start but revealing filth beneath the melting snow; promising glorious spring, but subject to periodic re-freezes and bitter spells. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-2158738484-6c0e32f-e1776155335214.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Several people in coats and headscarves stand at a counter while a woman on the other side sorts and distributes neatly stacked folded textiles. The scene appears to take place in a busy indoor store or distribution centre." title="Women buy socks in a state-run store, Moscow, 1954. In the early years of Khrushchev’s rule, changes in social policy improved living conditions across the USSR (Image by Getty Images)" /> A terrible question As party first secretary, Khrushchev looked at Soviet politics through a party lens. Party structures, institutions, appointments and events were under his immediate control and offered a comprehensible set of approaches for him to deal with the enormous challenges and risks of post-Stalin governance. There had not been a consistent approach to post-Stalin politics and society. A guiding message was missing. And the terrible question – what had happened to all those millions of missing people, and could it happen again? – remained unanswered. Khrushchev called a Party Congress for February 1956. Congresses were the most important events in the running of the party, held once every few years. They assembled leading members from across the USSR and formalised the party’s approach for the next political cycle. It would be the 20th Congress in the party’s history; 1,349 delegates with full voting rights set off for Moscow. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-515456560-2bdfd4f-e1776154537582.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large crowd stands closely together as several men in suits smile and speak with a woman facing them. People behind them are also dressed formally, suggesting a social or official event." title="Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress with top officials including Nikolai Bulganin (second left). Despite the apparent bonhomie, Khrushchev was about to spring an enormous surprise on his colleagues (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even while they were on their way, Khrushchev was wrestling with his own demons. Like so many other people in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had family members who had disappeared into the maw of Stalinist repression. Not long after the death of his son in military action in 1943, Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law was sent to the camps and endured 13 years of incarceration and exile. The psychological and political legacies of Stalinism left Khrushchev uneasy and on edge, both as a person and as a top politician. The Presidium, as the Politburo was called between 1952 and 1966, commissioned a top-secret investigation into the Great Terror, led by the historian and senior propagandist Pyotr Pospelov. He and his team worked exhaustively through the archives, where the dreadful events were meticulously documented in file after file of denunciations, confessions, death sentences and quasi-judicial proceedings. Pospelov read out the report to the Presidium on 9 February 1956. Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and the rest of the collective leadership sat round the table in the Kremlin. He told them that 1,920,635 people were arrested between 1935 and 1940 for counter-revolutionary ‘crimes’ like so-called sabotage and espionage. A total of 688,503 were shot. For all his complicity in events, Khrushchev did not have a bird’s-eye view of what had happened in real time. Now he knew the extent of it. Molotov and Kaganovich were old Stalinists who still sat in the Presidium and argued that this bloodshed was necessary collateral damage for building socialism, but Khrushchev and the rest of his colleagues no longer accepted this and recognised that it was time to set a new course. Khrushchev agonised in his memoirs about what he would say at the congress, but one thing seemed certain. “At this congress we had to take leadership of the party and country,” he argued to himself. “For this we had to know exactly what had happened before and what decisions Stalin had made.” The 20th Party Congress began a few days later. Khrushchev waited until the main sessions were over and then gave a speech at an extra, closed session. The Hall of the Supreme Soviet in the Great Kremlin Palace was packed. Delegates included members of the Central Committee, top party officials and representative members from around the USSR, as well as a handful of specially invited Gulag survivors. What was about to happen? The anticipation was overwhelming. Cruel and uncouth Khrushchev came to the rostrum. He coughed, perhaps with nerves. The speech went on for four hours, but he got straight to the point. Stalin was a cruel, uncouth and essentially un-Bolshevik comrade who had created his own anti-revolutionary cult of personality. This was a diversion away from Leninism; in fact, before his death, Lenin had spoken out against Stalin and his personal flaws. Khrushchev described and condemned the Great Terror, and especially its devastating effect on the party, and blamed Stalin personally for its excesses. And he bitterly demolished what he described as Stalin’s incompetence during the Second World War, with the military errors, the terrible and unnecessary losses, and his wilful personal appropriation of the people’s victory. Yet Khrushchev glossed over or missed out many other atrocities, perhaps most egregiously the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. He drew not only an explicit contrast between Lenin, the true voice of Bolshevism, and Stalin, its betrayer; he also tried to show that where Lenin had approved of violence, it had been proportionate and in the direct service of the revolution, unlike Stalin’s unlimited, unfocused and amoral atrocities. Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine The effect on the audience was extraordinary. Imagine: for 27 years, the cult of Stalin had accumulated and left its traces in the minds of the audience, many of whom were conformists who had been handed their careers by Stalin, or activists who were politically inspired by his ubiquitous and faux-humane messages. They all had something to lose. Top provincial officials were often desperately anxious about the risks of a sudden political change. Some of them really did have heart attacks and had to be carried out of the hall. But the more carefully they listened, the more they caught the subtext. For a start, there would be economic continuities from the Stalin era. The basic mechanisms of central planning, industrial management and collectivised agriculture would not change. Khrushchev was airing the crimes of the Stalin period, but he was pinning most of the blame for them on Stalin himself, which sounded like a let-off for the officials who had directly or indirectly condemned so many to death during the purges. And Khrushchev was saying that it wouldn’t happen again. This meant that the secret police would no longer be a threat to their personal safety or their job security. Khrushchev was offering a political deal, an ideological relaunch, a limited quest for redemption, and the possibility – if only that – of coming to terms with the past. For all its flaws, it amounted to a new revolutionary vision and was a turning point in Soviet history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL3387059-9eaab48-e1776154781443.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man stands at a podium with the Soviet emblem, speaking to an assembly in a large hall. Behind him, officials sit at a long bench, and above them a tall statue of Lenin is set into a wall niche." title="Khrushchev delivers his Secret Speech in a packed Hall of the Supreme Soviet. His evisceration of Stalinism triggered a number of heart attacks among his audience (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This was the Secret Speech, delivered in a closed room, out of reach of radio microphones and western observers. The plan was to give the message to Congress delegates and for them to inform the party membership and then the wider population at ‘town-hall’-style meetings. By allowing news of the condemnation of Stalin to filter out in a controlled way across the USSR and the eastern bloc, the leadership hoped to reduce the chance of unforeseen consequences and even instability. This was only partly successful. There were leaks. Major challenges to Soviet-style socialism arose in Poland and Hungary during 1956, culminating in the Hungarian Revolution and its deadly suppression. In Georgia, inside the USSR, commemorations of Stalin’s death took place in early March as they had done since 1953. Stalin was the nation’s favourite son, and before his death, when the Georgian Lavrenty Beria and others held key positions in Moscow, it had been a republic with particular privileges. As rumours about the Secret Speech swirled around the Tbilisi crowd, opposition voices emerged and protests began; it was eventually ended by force, during which at least 15 civilians were killed. Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island Meanwhile, party representatives and activists took the speech to the membership. Anna Pankratova was a leading historian, a veteran specialist in the revolutionary movement. She spoke about the Secret Speech at nine local party meetings between 20 and 23 March: 5,930 people showed up and asked 825 questions. Among many other worries, they wondered why it had taken Khrushchev so long to make the speech and why it focused so much on Stalin personally. Many of Pankratova’s interlocutors were members of the Leningrad intelligentsia. All kinds of people went to similar meetings across the USSR and had diverse responses. Some wanted more radical change; some wanted more detailed information; some were afraid; some thought it better to forget than to remember. A two-sided record The speech became the fundamental basis of the Thaw. It signalled a new relationship between the population and the government, including a tentative version of Soviet-style rights. For the rest of the Khrushchev era and the few years that followed, culture became noticeably more diverse and open. Releases from the camps continued on a large scale, and the Gulag was very significantly downgraded. There was no repeat of the Great Terror; people no longer really feared arbitrary arrest. Questions about Stalinist violence were sometimes broached in public life, providing at least some answers to victims and their families. Some of those who were innocently convicted were legally ‘rehabilitated’, though this was sadly posthumous. Accompanying this shift to a more person-centred politics and culture was a major change in social policy, which Khrushchev saw as a fulfilment of Leninism and a return to revolutionary norms. Living conditions got better thanks to a mass housing programme; cities across the USSR were transformed by the construction of five-storey blocks of separate family apartments. The pensions and benefits system was considerably expanded in 1956 and it was extended to the countryside for the first time in 1964. The length of schooling was extended. Spending on healthcare went up. Life became less pressured and risky, more stable and promising. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-2238477911-b9b5595-e1776155027766.jpg" width="619" height="412" alt="A crowd stands around a large fallen statue head that is burning from the top. The face is marked with graffiti, including “W.C.” on the forehead and other text along the side. People in coats watch the scene in an urban setting." title="A statue of Stalin lies stricken in Budapest following its destruction during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – an unforeseen consequence of Khrushchev’s reforms (Image by Getty Images)" /> Yet the Soviet Union remained a dictatorship. People were not free to travel abroad. Political censorship persisted. Central planning reduced normal levels of consumption. The KGB was powerful. The countries of east-central Europe remained socialist ‘satellites’ against their will. And while Stalinism as a complete system was gone for good, most of those who had been responsible for putting it into practice remained in office. Khrushchev was a bifurcated politician, whose record had two sides to it. The Thaw in Soviet life that was his signal achievement was likewise complex and nuanced. But when it came to the question ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’, Khrushchev gave an historic response. He made an epoch-defining, big-risk, high-octane speech – one of the hinges of the whole 20th century – and then implemented a transformative sequence of reforms that sought to reposition the Soviet Union on a Leninist footing. The results were mixed, but there was no going back to Stalinism. Dr Mark B Smith teaches history at Cambridge University and is the author of Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–91 (Allen Lane, 2026)
England's mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhouse
Nell Gwyn became famous for her love affair with Charles II, and for her love of drinking, gambling and carousing. Yet, writes Sophie Shorland, this upwardly mobile celebrity was also a canny political operator who wielded substantial power in court
On a first date with the king of England, you might reasonably expect him to pay the bill. Yet Nell Gwyn’s relationship with Charles II started as it went on: unconventionally. The celebrated actress met the king for the first time in 1668 at a London playhouse, where Gwyn caught his eye from an adjacent box; according to reports, they flirted throughout the performance. Afterwards, Gwyn and her companion joined Charles and his younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), at a hostelry. There, legend has it, once the party had eaten and drunk their fill, the landlord presented them with the tab. Upon searching his pockets, we’re told, Charles found that he had no money with him, and was forced to lean on one of the royal hangers-on to pay up. Gwyn’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events was typically droll: she joked that she had got into “the poorest company that ever [she] was in!” Across her extraordinary life, that acerbic wit never let her down. Pepys’ pin-up Nell Gwyn was, quite literally, the pin-up girl of Restoration England. Above his desk at the Admiralty, the diarist Samuel Pepys kept an engraving of the actress posing as Cupid. In it, with wings her only attire, one perfectly toned arm made an ineffectual attempt to preserve some modesty. Pepys was clearly enchanted by Gwyn – as was King Charles. Despite that inauspicious first liaison in the London tavern, the actress and the monarch embarked upon a scandalous love affair that produced two sons and set tongues wagging across the kingdom. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1751434017-f189007-e1775638623277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A monochrome engraving shows a winged, classical figure from the waist up. The figure has curled hair, holds an arrow in one hand, and gazes slightly toward the viewer." title="An engraving of a c1672 painting depicts Nell Gwyn as Cupid. A copy of this image hung above Samuel Pepys’ desk at the Admiralty, demonstrating the renowned (and lascivious) diarist’s appreciation (Image by Getty Images)" /> That relationship – coupled with Gwyn’s beguiling looks, spellbinding stage performances and razor-sharp wit – helped cement her reputation as one of the most alluring figures of the late 17th century. Her contemporaries were beguiled by her, and historians, novelists and film-makers remain just as intrigued today. But when we look back, are we celebrating the real Neil Gwyn? Is there more to this Restoration-era socialite than meets the eye? Over the three and a half centuries since she first exploded into the public’s consciousness, Gwyn has been seen mostly as an apolitical character – one more interested in living the high life than in the affairs of state. In fact, at a time when Charles’s other mistresses were widely derided for meddling in the business of government – and spending too freely from the public finances – Gwyn’s apparent lack of interest in politics only served to supercharge her popularity. One popular verse of the time perfectly captures public sentiment: “Hard by Pall Mall, lived a wench called Nell; King Charles the Second, he kept her. She hath a trick to handle his prick, But never lays hands on his sceptre. All affairs of the state, from her soul doth she hate, And leave to the politic bitches.” If this poem is to be believed, Gwyn never tried to influence the king in the affairs of state. Yet take a closer look at her life and a different picture emerges. Nell’s early years are contested: Hereford, London and Oxford all lay claim to be her birthplace. The identity of her father also remains obscure; he may have died in debtor’s prison, or may have been an army captain who lost everything to the Civil War. Read more | Making of a monarch: how the young Charles II endured war, defeat and exile before the Restoration What we do know is that, in her youth, Nell Gwyn worked as an ‘orange wench’, selling fruit and other sweet treats (possibly alongside sexual favours) to theatregoers, before becoming one of the first actresses on the English stage. She quickly became known for her appearance, endowed as she was with luxuriant auburn hair, a fashionably long nose and a slight figure. Gwyn was also blessed with killer comedic timing and a quick wit, cracking out one-liners both on and off the stage. In John Dryden’s tragic drama Tyrannic Love, Gwyn spoke the final lines of the play as herself, struggling from her character’s deathbed to declare: “As for my epitaph when I am gone, I’ll trust no poet, but will write my own. Here Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a slater’n, Yet dy’d a princess acting in St Cathar’n.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/0713633-c64800a-e1775638715191.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white illustration shows a street vendor in period clothing holding a shallow tray of round fruits, with a larger woven basket balanced on their head. Handwritten text above reads “fine Oranges fine Lemons.”" title="Mono PrintBefore forging a successful career on the stage, Nell Gwyn worked as an orange ‘wench’, selling fruit outside theatres (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gwyn’s magnetic presence onstage made her a star and attracted the attention of the king. Yet it was neither mere coincidence nor simply sexual attraction that triggered her affair with Charles, though her famed physical allure was certainly important. The two were introduced by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham – reputedly the richest man in England after the king. Buckingham was always scheming, and was described as a haphazard scapegrace who “could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it”. By pushing Gwyn in Charles’s direction, Buckingham’s intention was to curtail the influence at court of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine. The voluptuous, violet-eyed Castlemaine had long been Charles’s chief mistress – and made plenty of enemies in the process. Buckingham’s plan was to replace her with Gwyn. His plan worked a treat – so much so that, in January 1668, Pepys reported that “the king did send several times for Nelly”. After being rowed up the Thames by ferrymen, Gwyn made her way up the back stairs into Charles’s private apartments in Whitehall Palace. By the spring of 1669, she was accompanying the king to the races at Newmarket, and they were seen wandering around together in old clothes, like a married couple. She also reputedly taught him how to fish, though quite where she learned the skill is a mystery. What is certain is that their relationship endured in a way that the king’s other affairs didn’t, and their first son – named Charles to make no mistake over his paternity – was born on 8 May 1670. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463978635-7c7277f-e1775638945132.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in 17th‑ or 18th‑century dress wears a light blue gown with a low neckline, pearl jewellery, and curled hair. Behind them is a landscape on one side and rich red drapery on the other." title="Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine was Charles II’s long-standing mistress – but was edged out by Nell Gwyn after courtiers became irked by the countess’s influence over the king (Image by Getty Images)" /> Life of luxury A life of comparative privilege had begun for Gwyn. She kept an open table, and enjoyed gambling, drinking and going to the races. She was a dyed-in-the-wool socialite who embraced all of the earthly pleasures that life in the Restoration court had to offer. Hence she has mostly been seen by posterity as a good-time girl with a heart of gold. Read more | The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys Yet she also had the ear of the king, and she undoubtedly used that hotline to power to shape the course of events in the Restoration era. For example, early in her relationship with Charles, she began playing a diplomatic role, hosting the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy at her comparatively modest house off Kingsway near the City of London. Hosting ambassadors is a soft-power role typically associated with the queen – a way to be involved in diplomatic discussions and advise the king without overtly steering foreign policy. Persuading the king to commit to affairs of state wasn’t always easy. Though quick-witted and clever, Charles abhorred work, preferring to play cards and eat pigeon pie while he should have been discussing diplomacy. The king routinely brought his meetings with de Croissy to an early end so that he could take a nap. Courtiers despaired of him ever taking his job seriously. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155867058-8f6d163-e1775638818819.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A regal figure sits on a throne wearing a jewelled crown, long curly wig, and an ermine‑lined red velvet robe. The monarch holds a golden sceptre in one hand and an orb in the other, with an ornate tapestry behind." title="Charles II, probably painted in the 1670s by John Michael Wright. Never fond of work, the king was steered into important meetings by Nell Gwyn, who was his mistress from early 1668 until his death in 1685 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Not Gwyn. She laid a wager of £100 that she could get the king to attend a meeting. Then she recruited the actor and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew. Dressed for a long pilgrimage. Killigrew burst into Charles’s closet, telling the king that he was off “to hell… to fetch back Oliver Cromwell that he may take care of the affairs of England, for his successor takes none at all”. It was a bold move, but it did move Charles to go to the meeting. Gwyn won her £100. However, her influence was soon to be curbed – by another woman. Louise de Kérouaille arrived in England in 1670, charged by French king Louis XIV to report back on Charles’s affairs, and to steer the English monarch towards policies that favoured the French. With a continental elegance and a reputation as an excellent hostess, it wasn’t long before de Kérouaille caught the English king’s eye. Yet Gwyn wasn’t about to allow her French rival to wrest away the monarch’s affections without a fight. At one riotous dinner, Nell’s old friend Buckingham pretended to be Charles while she mocked de Kérouaille’s accent, saying: “Me no bad woman. If me tout me was one bad woman, me would cut mine own trote.” Though she tried to spar with Gwyn, de Kérouaille’s tongue was never quite sharp enough: she always came out second best. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL5403391-1c1ea22-e1775639143886.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in elaborate 17th‑century clothing sits with one arm resting on a surface and the other holding a small black‑and‑white dog. They wear pearl jewellery and a richly detailed blue‑and‑gold gown, with architectural elements and distant figures in the background." title="Louise de Kérouaille was encouraged to start a relationship with Charles II in order to further French and Catholic interests (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> According to a (probably apocryphal) anecdote, one day in Oxford Nell’s coach was surrounded by a mob who, taking her to be de Kérouaille, angrily harangued her for her influence over the king. Sticking her head out of the coach, Gwyn twinkled: “Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore.” (Not, in other words, the Catholic one, de Kérouaille.) The crowd blessed her and allowed her to continue on her way. Did she genuinely advocate for Protestant interests? Or were her words fired purely by a bitter personal rivalry with de Kérouaille? In November 1678, Gwyn demonstrated her allegiance to a Protestant agenda, hosting a pope-burning party at her house. At such popular pageants, effigies of the pope and other hated (usually Catholic) figures were mocked and paraded through the streets before being set alight, to great whoops of vengeful joy. Guests at Gwyn’s party taunted the likeness of the pope, who “sat in a great chair, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs [small fireworks] at it”. Gwyn also interceded effectively with the king on behalf of her friends. Among her successes was getting Buckingham released from captivity in the Tower of London after yet another of his madcap schemes backfired – in this instance, trying to force the dissolution of parliament. Controversially, the duke stayed at Gwyn’s house after his release. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period She also played a part in the fall from favour of the lord treasurer, the Earl of Danby. She and Buckingham formed a double act, Gwyn’s perfect imitation of Danby’s wife making the king laugh. As Danby’s position became more precarious, one of his supporters wrote to his father: “All this has been brewing since those entertainments at Nelly’s… and the scenes of abuse there passing on Lord Treasurer.” Danby was eventually replaced by one of Gwyn’s close friends, whose career she promoted: Laurence Hyde, a heavy drinker who “swore like a cutler”. Choppy waters Gwyn’s political interventions sometimes plunged her into dangerous waters. In 1679, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, arrived back in England from the Hague. Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, Monmouth made little secret of his desire to succeed his father to the throne. The king himself was less keen on that prospect, but he had a problem: Monmouth was not just charismatic but also a Protestant – unlike the Duke of York who, without any legitimate heirs born to Charles, was next in line. When Monmouth arrived ‘home’, he was welcomed by throngs of cheering people. And where did the wannabe king choose to stay in London? At the house of his good friend Nell Gwyn. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BAL7207607-88d96e1-e1775639274233.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person with long, dark, curly hair wears an elaborate historical outfit with a white lace collar, a deep red velvet robe, and a jeweled chain. The dark background highlights the figure’s face and clothing." title="The 1st Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, angled to take the throne – and was housed in London by Nell Gwyn (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> By then, she had become a popular symbol of anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment, and was staunch in her advocacy for Monmouth, even as he rebelled with increasing vigour against his father’s rule. Yet her support for him ultimately proved in vain. Charles stripped him of his titles and banished him from court. In response, Monmouth doubled down, conspiring to overthrow the king. Those plans discovered, Monmouth threw himself on his father’s mercy. He would not tilt for the throne again until after Charles’s death. Any damage to her relationship with Charles didn’t prevent Gwyn from continuing her diplomatic efforts. In 1681, a Moroccan embassy arrived to negotiate control over Tangier and the release of English slaves. The embassy was headed by the dashing Mohammed ben Hadou, whose excellent manners and spirited riding in Hyde Park made him an instant celebrity. Who better to entertain him than Nell Gwyn? They passed a magnificent evening together – though, it has to be said, a rather sedate one by Restoration standards: the Moroccan embassy drank only milk and water, and resolutely resisted staring at the ladies. Aware that her popularity with the English public was based on her reputation as a royal mistress who did not meddle in politics, Gwyn was careful not to visibly overstep the mark. Yet she was a canny influencer behind the scenes, advising the king and providing a means through which others could access his ear. Not just the 17th century’s good-time girl, Nell Gwyn was a political operator with hidden depths. The common touch How an actress became the toast of the nation Nell Gwyn enjoyed extraordinary popularity during her lifetime and afterwards, remembered as a kind of people’s princess – a commoner who rose through the ranks. It helped, of course, that she represented working, Protestant England in contrast to the perceived idleness, Catholicism and profligacy of the Restoration court. Gwyn never forgot either her roots or her friends. She kept up with her fellow actors, and had her difficult, alcoholic mother come to live with her. It was partly her quick wit and lack of pretension, always acknowledging her stratospheric rise, that secured Gwyn’s popularity. But she also showed glimpses of a compassionate inner self that – despite her experience as an actress – appeared to be spontaneous and added to her ‘woman of the people’ persona. She is said to have helped persuade Charles II to found the Royal Hospital Chelsea for soldiers “broken by age and war”. An excellent tipper, she had a reputation for an open table and generous giving. As one popular satire, comparing Gwyn favourably with her French rival Louise de Kérouaille, put it: “I neither run in court nor city’s score, / I pay my debts, distribute to the poor.” In fact, Gwyn ran up plenty of debts, but it was appearance that mattered: she had a reputation as someone who did not cost the public purse too much, and who gave freely and compassionately. Following her death in 1687, Gwyn left £20 a year in her will to release debtors from prison on Christmas Day, and £50 to poor Catholics “for showing my charity to those who differ from me in religeon”. After years of taunting “the Catholic whore”, Gwyn had decided on one last magnanimous act. Even today, her legacy is evident in places sprinkled around London: the Nell Gwyn pub just off the Strand, an art deco apartment block in Chelsea, a blue plaque on her former home on Pall Mall. In her story, people could – and can still – see themselves: a commoner made good, and who made the world remember her name. Sophie Shorland is a former research fellow at the University of Warwick. Her books include Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England (Atlantic, 2024) This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply
In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery. It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years. Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough. From Caracas to Paris It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors. To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-GettyImages-115106383-1d24d91-e1774617817390.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A multi‑storey brick complex with red‑tiled roofs and uniform tall windows fills the foreground. The older industrial‑style buildings sit within a townscape of smaller houses, trees, and a few commercial structures, including one with a visible shop sign." title="An aerial view of Fresnes Prison in Val-de-Marne – one of several French facilities in which Ramírez Sánchez has been held over the past three decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thanks to a large body of existing literature – declassified diplomatic cables, leaked documents and interviews with spies, officials and others – I had already learned a lot about the man from my research. For example, I found that he had not been a precociously young leftwing activist in Venezuela in the 1950s, as often claimed, but a timid and chubby teenager who steered clear of the street politics of his hometown, Caracas. In London in the 1960s, living with his mother and younger brother after his parents’ divorce, his tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins. In fact, his journey into violence appeared to have been motivated more by megalomania than Marxism. When sent to Moscow to study for an undergraduate degree by his leftwing lawyer father, Ramírez Sánchez was noticed not for his commitment to ideology, but to what the Soviet capital offered by way of nightlife. If, in 1970, he had made a trip to Jordan to find Palestinian factions dedicated to what they called the “armed struggle” against Israel, his claims to have fought against government forces in the virtual civil war there were exaggerated to say the least. It became apparent, too, that the idea he had been recruited by the KGB was probably just Cold War propaganda. One fact I dug out was the origin of his famous soubriquet: Carlos the Jackal. This was invented by British journalists in the summer of 1975, shortly after he had killed two French policemen, seriously injured a third, and then executed his superior in the breakaway Palestinian faction he had joined, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-XO). All three murders had taken place within the space of a minute inside a small apartment on Paris’s Left Bank. First, French investigators had found a false passport in the name of ‘Carlos Martinez’ at the apartment of a girlfriend. Then, reporters spotted a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal in the London home of another lover, a Basque waitress. The false ID and the book were swiftly combined, and a thousand headlines followed. Read more | The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of Terror in Vienna In the letter that dropped through my door that summer morning, Ramírez Sánchez expressed his delight at my intended visit. Sadly, this delight was not shared by French authorities, who blocked my request for an in-person meeting but did allow me to send a series of letters. Though he avoided answering my pointed enquiries about his misdeeds, he posted me dozens of printed and photocopied documents. These described his youth and the treble murder in Paris, before going into considerable detail about the attack that earned him global infamy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/IMG2705-62cdd3a-e1774619170787.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A collection of printed and handwritten documents lies spread out on a surface, many showing the name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez along with numbers and institutional headings. Some pages are typed, others handwritten in French." title="Although the French authorities denied his request for an in-person interview, author Jason Burke received numerous documents from Ramírez Sánchez via post (Image by Jason Burke)" /> The plan had been put together in the early autumn of 1975. Ramírez Sánchez was to lead a team from the PFLP-XO and a West German extremist group called the Revolutionary Cells in an attack on a meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at its headquarters in Vienna. They would seize the high-ranking ministers due to attend, demand a plane from the Austrian authorities, and then fly around the Middle East, releasing the hostages one by one at the airports of their respective capital cities. Two would not be freed: instead, the ministers from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be shot dead. The date of the attack, 21 December 1975, was a Sunday. The streets of Vienna were quiet, the air was chilly under a clear blue sky, and carols piped over the speakers of the Christmas Market opposite OPEC’s modern, seven-storey headquarters on Ringstrasse. The attackers arrived at their target at around 11am, rushed through the unguarded entrance of the building, and made their way up to the main meeting room on the first floor. Ramírez Sánchez then fired five shots, shouting: “Don’t move… I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me.” There was little resistance. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, the only female member of the team, shot dead a bodyguard of the Iraqi oil minister, before killing a plain-clothes policeman as he tried to surrender. Ramírez Sánchez then killed a Libyan economist, and explosives were wired around the building. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-541472303-0c984ab-e1774618111712.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person with curly dark hair wearing large, thick‑rimmed glasses and a collared shirt, photographed straight on against a plain background." title="One of Ramírez Sánchez’s accomplices, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, killed two men during the OPEC siege. Two years later, she was arrested after shooting two border guards in Switzerland and was sentenced to 15 years in prison (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once he was done, Ramírez Sánchez relaxed. He distributed cigarettes, chatted with his 60-plus hostages (conversing in English, Spanish and French), and ordered food from the local Hilton. Ham sandwiches – which any Muslim captives would not eat – were angrily sent back. When one of the Palestinian gunmen struggled to adjust the explosives, Ramírez Sánchez quipped, “Oh dear, I’ve told him a thousand times how to do it, and he still can’t get it right”. Similarly, when an OPEC driver tried to persuade him to free the female hostages, claiming they “might get hysterical”, Ramirez demurred, pointing to Kröcher-Tiedemann. Three unanswered questions Early the next morning, a bus arrived to take the hostages and their captors to Vienna airport, where a fully fuelled aircraft had been readied as Ramírez Sánchez had requested. He ordered the plane to fly first to Algiers, where a handful of the captives were released. The next destination was Tripoli, where Ramírez Sánchez hoped to obtain a bigger aircraft with enough range to fly around the Middle East. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-GettyImages-515113970-52211b8-e1774618468264.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a snowy airfield where several people stand between a bus and the tail section of an aircraft marked “OE‑LDB.” One person appears to be walking toward or boarding the plane, with snow‑covered ground and distant trees in the background." title="The OPEC attackers, including Ramírez Sánchez (thought to be the figure on the left, next to the bus), board the aircraft they had requested at Vienna airport. They planned to fly first to Algiers, before transferring to a larger plane in Tripoli (Image by Getty Images)" /> But he was to be disappointed. In the Libyan capital, there was a frosty reception for the angry, despondent and exhausted terrorists. No one expected them, and not a single person – even in this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ state – wanted to help. It was clear there would be no new plane. The only option was to return to Algiers, where Ramírez Sánchez was presented with an ultimatum by local authorities: he could carry out the plan to shoot the Saudi and Iranian ministers (and take his chances with Algerian security forces afterwards), or accept the $20m being offered by the Saudi and Iranian governments as ransom for the two men. Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told his team that the time had come to end their escapade. A few hours later he was on his way to a five-star hotel in Algiers, thence to a luxurious government guesthouse for a few weeks’ rest and eventually back to the PFLP-XO’s base in Aden. Over the next two decades, Ramirez Sanchez would operate from bases in Baghdad, Prague, Budapest and Damascus. While some attacks were simply motivated by personal vendettas, many were commissioned by powerful patrons, including Gaddafi. Eventually, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ would become a fugitive himself, ending up in Khartoum, where the French found him. Though I had spent months investigating this whole episode, three mysteries remained unsolved. Firstly, who commissioned the attack on OPEC? Secondly, what happened to the $20m ransom payment? Finally, how had Ramírez Sánchez escaped punishment by the PFLP-XO for his failures? My correspondence with the then 74-year-old prisoner resolved the first of these questions. Ramírez Sánchez’s account unequivocally named Libya’s president, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as the man responsible for the OPEC attack. This made sense. The mercurial Libyan leader had the means – and the motive – to embarrass pro-western Arab countries and hike the price of oil, which would boost his income. Furthermore, I had already seen testimony that a Libyan diplomat had provided weapons to the assault team in Vienna, evidence of previous Libyan support for such violence, and multiple reports of Ramírez Sánchez cursing Gaddafi as “impossible to work with” when he realised that, rather than delivering the vital new plane as presumably agreed, the Libyan leader had simply disappeared into the desert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-GettyImages-591708114-8a4a827-e1774618771964.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person wearing glasses and a collared shirt stands at a podium, speaking into two microphones and gesturing with both hands. The background is plain and dark, drawing focus to the speaker." title="According to Ramírez Sánchez, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – seen here in 1973 – was the instigator of the OPEC attack (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fame as a weapon The whereabouts of the $20m cash remained unresolved, however. It is possible that Ramírez Sánchez kept it, as some veterans of the PFLP-XO suggested to me when I tracked them down. But I found no proof, and the alleged thief himself did not respond to my questions on the matter. There is some reliable documentary evidence, too, that only Saudi Arabia actually paid up and that these funds were kept by the Algerians – the designated intermediary – as ‘compensation’ for their trouble. And why wasn’t Ramírez Sánchez shot by his comrades? Either after killing a respected member of the PFLP-XO, or after the debacle of the OPEC raid itself? Here, the correspondence offered an important and unsolicited insight. Much of what this most famous of terrorists sent to me consisted of press cuttings. These said nothing new, but confirmed something I had long suspected: that Ramírez Sánchez’s greatest talent was not as a terrorist, but as a self-publicist. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-652492568-6c4d73d-e1774618878699.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Several uniformed officers wearing dark clothing, bulletproof vests, and gold‑trimmed hats hold firearms while standing near a stone archway. A dark van with a yellow licence plate is parked behind them on the paved street." title="French police officers guard a van carrying Ramírez Sánchez ahead of a hearing in Paris, 1995. The terrorist only avoided being murdered by his former comrades because of his celebrity, says Jason Burke (Image by Getty Images)" /> If most of his attacks failed to attain their objectives, this did not matter. They all helped construct his legend, and this fame made it impossible for his outraged ‘comrades’ to consign this hero of their cause to a shallow grave in a Middle Eastern desert. It also convinced Gaddafi and other sponsors to pay Ramírez Sánchez tens of millions of dollars to carry out violent new operations in western Europe, and eventually persuaded several eastern European regimes to offer him a base in their own countries as well. The greatest weapon Ramírez Sánchez possessed, I realised, was not his Tokarev pistol or total unconcern for the suffering of others – and nor was it his undoubted ability to manipulate and charm. Rather, it was his celebrity, in which western governments and media were to some extent complicit. It was this, above all, that had allowed him to continue his career of violence at great cost to many hundreds of innocent people. Memories of his violence may have faded, but the morbid fascination with Carlos the Jackal – and sometimes other terrorists too – remains. Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s (Vintage, 2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction