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Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life
Last year, the results of a groundbreaking study into Adolf Hitler’s DNA were revealed to the world. The project’s senior historical consultant, Alex J Kay, looks at what the findings might be able to tell us about the Führer’s relationship with Eva Braun and the other women in his life
In November 2025, I was lead historian on the television documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which revealed the results of a world-first analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA. The results – as explained by the project’s lead geneticist, Turi King – revealed that Hitler had a disorder known as Kallmann syndrome. Among other things, this condition can result in impaired testosterone production, low libido, underdeveloped reproductive features and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. The revelation that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the likely implications for his private life. This finding strongly suggests a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, Hitler had a very traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the time he turned 19. He later wrote in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf that his mother’s death had been “a dreadful blow, particularly for me”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2-Traumatic-childhood-248974imagno-5c13625-e1769175795531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two black and white photos alongside each other. A woman is on the left, wearing a high collar and looking straight at the camera. On the left there is a man, wearing a jacket with several buttons down the middle. He is facing the left, and has a large moustache" title="Hitler’s parents, Klara and Alois, pictured around 1890. The future Nazi leader would go on to describe his mother’s death in 1907 as “a dreadful blow” (Image by Topfoto)" /> The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, subsequently remarked: “While [Hitler] was not a ‘mother’s boy’ in the usual sense, I have never witnessed a closer attachment.” Hitler was at his mother’s bedside when she passed away. Dr Bloch later observed: “In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.” Experiencing such loss during his formative years would have had a lasting impact on Hitler’s character. A portrait of adolescence As we have known since the medical file resurfaced at an auction in 2010, a physical examination during Hitler’s time in Landsberg prison in 1923, following his arrest for the failed Munich putsch that November, revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” – that is, an undescended testicle. This physical abnormality might help to explain the account given by Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence, August Kubizek. While living in Vienna, Hitler and Kubizek shared a room from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “my friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/4-August-Kubizek-GettyImages-1371458593-bbe65ce-e1769175883617.jpg" width="1500" height="2106" alt="A black and white photograph of a man, wearing a black suit with a black bow tie." title="A photograph of August Kubizek, Hitler’s former roommate. Kubizek would later claim that his friend had shown an “obvious indifference to the opposite sex” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed), when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” None of the accounts of Hitler’s remaining years in the Austrian capital suggests anything changed in this regard. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Tellingly, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, Ernst Hanfstaengl, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of the Nazi leader: “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” The German historian Peter Longerich, in his own biography of Hitler, goes one step further: “In view of Hitler’s personality, it seems altogether plausible that his life was asexual: any intimate relationship would simply have been incompatible with his arrested emotional development with regard to other people and with his self-perception as a public figure through and through with an extraordinary historic mission.” No room for a wife Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation. Medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. Although the serological tests carried out in 1940 did not exclude neurosyphilis, recent medical research has concluded that the suggestion that Hitler may have had neurosyphilis is unsustainable. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. As Hanfstaengl observed, Hitler must have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain Hitler’s absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children; some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw once wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public reflexes.” The identification and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may now explain why. The fact that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome surely played a part in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. According to Christa Schroeder, who served as one of Hitler’s secretaries for the entirety of his 12 years in power: “Undoubtedly Hitler enjoyed the company of beautiful women and was inspired by them. He used eroticism, but not sex. Because of the great objective he had set himself and to which he was totally committed, sexual gratification occurred mentally.” Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes may have played a bigger part in his decision not to marry and have children than he was willing to admit. Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers "Saturated with jealousy" It is with two women that Hitler is most closely associated: Geli Raubal and Eva Braun. Geli, born in 1908 (and thus 19 years younger than Hitler), was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Raubal. Geli’s father died two years after her birth, and Hitler became her legal guardian in 1923. Six years later, Geli moved into Hitler’s nine-room apartment in Munich. Hitler was overbearing and jealously possessive of his half-niece. He took her everywhere with him, and if she went out alone, she was chaperoned and had to be home early. To all intents and purposes, Geli was a prisoner. And she resented it bitterly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/6-Geli-Raubal-GettyImages-541794949-f720675-e1769176093295.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in a suit, asleep in a deckchair. To his right, a woman in a patterned dress sits on the floor, looking at him" title="Hitler with his half-niece, Geli Raubal. The former medical student would take her own life in the Nazi leader’s apartment (Image by Getty Images)" /> On 18 September 1931, Geli shot and killed herself in the apartment, using Hitler’s own pistol. According to Ian Kershaw, his emotional relationship with Geli was “more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after”. Anni Winter, Hitler’s housekeeper in Munich from 1929 to 1945, summed it up, according to Christa Schroeder, as “a platonic love saturated with jealousy”. In the autumn of 1929, the same year that Geli Raubal moved into his Munich apartment, Hitler first met Eva Braun at the Munich studio of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she worked as an assistant and, later, as a photographer herself. Eva, born in 1912, was nearly 23 years younger than Hitler. The two began spending more time together from early 1932, after several months had passed since Geli Raubal’s suicide. One of Hitler’s closest political associates, Franz Xaver Schwarz – who had joined the Nazi Party in 1922, taken part in the failed Munich putsch the following November, and then served as treasurer of the Nazi Party from 1925 to 1945 – told Allied officers in July 1945 that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun since 1931 had been “platonic”. Heike Görtemaker, the biographer of Eva Braun, is right to point out that Schwarz “had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators”. However, many other people who spent years in close proximity to Hitler said the same as Schwarz. Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker at the Berghof for eight years, claimed that there was never any evidence that the two had sex. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/8-Eva-and-sister-Gretl-GettyImages-109852808-30f2189-e1769176211496.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of two young women sitting on top of a wall, alongside a black dog" title="Eva Braun (right), with her sister, Gretl. Hitler had first met Braun at the Munich studio of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, in 1929 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The aforementioned Christa Schroeder insisted in her memoir that “Hitler was not the lover of Eva Braun”. Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced Hitler – “a personally modest and intensely shy person” – to Eva Braun, wrote in his memoir that she “became the constant companion of his leisure hours and, to the best of my knowledge, that was all there was to it”. He added: “there never was any love story”. While physical intimacy between them cannot be ruled out entirely, all available evidence suggests that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was not sexual. In Hitler’s Munich apartment, his suite of rooms in the Reich Chancellery, at the Berghof and, later, in his Berlin bunker, Eva Braun always had her own separate bedroom. Keeping secrets One disturbing fact is worth pointing out here: Geli Raubal was not the only woman intimately associated with Hitler to attempt, or die by, suicide. His brief flirtation with Maria ‘Mimi’ Reiter, born in 1909 (and thus 20 years younger than Hitler), began in the autumn of 1926 when they met in Berchtesgaden. According to Kershaw, Hitler’s letters to her “were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronising fashion”. Their friendship ended after a few months when Hitler broke off contact. Mimi Reiter unsuccessfully attempted to hang herself the following year. During her relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun attempted suicide not once but twice, in November 1932 and May 1935 (before finally killing herself, alongside Hitler, in the Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 – less than 40 hours after they had married). A few months after the second suicide attempt, she and her sister Gretl moved into a house that Hoffmann had bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. By the following year, Eva Braun had become a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler. Read more | The real Unity Mitford: meet the high society British Nazi who was rumoured to have had Hitler's child Nonetheless, whatever the nature of their relationship, most German people did not know about it until after the war. She was only once caught on camera with Hitler in public, when she sat directly behind him during the women’s skating competition at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Otherwise, Hitler never allowed her to be seen in public with him. Christa Schroeder may have succeeded in explaining both the longevity and Hitler’s true motivation in entering into his long-term companionship with Eva Braun when she wrote that “Hitler as a politician could not afford a second suicide of a young woman in his close circle… This protected him against future suicide attempts and was also a shield against all his other ardent female admirers”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/9-Hitler-and-Eva-GettyImages-514679166-302118e-e1769176611254.jpg" width="1500" height="2461" alt="A black and white photograph of a man standing in a double breasted suit, along side a woman in a dress, sitting in a chair to the right" title="Most German people did not know about Hitler and Braun’s relationship until after the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though he was, by all accounts, fond of Mimi Reiter, Geli Raubal and Eva Braun (as well as other women) in his own way, they were all much younger women whom Hitler could – and did – dominate. Heinrich Hoffmann’s assessment of Hitler's view of Eva Braun likely applied to all those women with whom he formed some sort of attachment: “To him, she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought.” Christa Schroeder concludes for all these relationships that “Hitler appears to have kept his love life platonic throughout”. In his own account, August Kubizek leaves the reader in no doubt as to his belief that Hitler was a pronounced misogynist. According to Kershaw: “Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality.” Alex J Kay is a reader in modern history at the University of Potsdam. He recently served as the senior historical consultant and co-lead on the Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. Alex J Kay and geneticist Turi King spoke to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast about their involvement in the DNA research. Listen to the full conversation.
Meet the incredible woman who saved Portugal's Jews
With the Inquisition active throughout much of Europe, the first half of the 16th century was a perilous time for Jewish people. Andreé Aelion Brooks explores how the fabulously wealthy Doña Gracia worked tirelessly to protect her community
Still in her 20s, Gracia Mendes Nasi (Nacy), better known as Doña Gracia, was recently widowed and fabulously rich. She should have been able to live in comfort for the rest of her life. Her husband, Francisco Mendes, a spice dealer and banker, had divided his wealth in his will between Gracia and his brother, Diogo. Yet without her husband’s protection, even her money could not shield her from a looming crisis. Indeed, being in possession of such a fortune in patriarchal and Catholic Lisbon in the middle of the 1530s was inherently dangerous for someone of Doña Gracia’s background. She was a converso, a term for a person forced to convert from Judaism. When the papal nuncio, an ecclesiastical diplomat, paid a visit to her palatial home in the old Jewish quarter of Lisbon, he demanded yet another bribe to keep the Inquisition from beginning work in Portugal. The Inquisition, Gracia knew, rounded up conversos, who were then charged with being insincere Catholics and imprisoned. Whether this was true or not, their assets were confiscated. Furthermore, Doña Gracia certainly wasn’t sincere in her public faith. While she had married Francisco, who was also her maternal uncle, at Lisbon Cathedral, the ceremony had been preceded by a secret Jewish wedding. Compounding Doña Gracia’s problems, representatives of the Portuguese king, John III, had also visited her. They told her they wanted to take her young daughter, Ana, to the palace to live as an adopted child of the royal family. According to local laws, the king could thus gain the use of any portion of the Mendes fortune that belonged to Ana. It was clear Doña Gracia needed to make a new start elsewhere in Europe, but there was another problem: converso families were forbidden to leave Portugal. Demonstrating the skill that would make her an outstanding leader, she set two plans running simultaneously, an approach she would follow for the rest of her life. Read more | Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition Firstly, she sent a message to the king explaining that most of the fortune he sought was with her brother-in-law, Diogo, in Antwerp. To retrieve the fortune, she needed the king’s exemption to leave the country. And, of course, she could not leave her baby daughter behind. Nor her two nephews, who were registered to begin studies at university in Louvain. Nor her younger sister, Brianda, who was betrothed to Diogo. She also contacted Diogo to bring one of his spice ships, pick up the family from Lisbon and take them to Antwerp. The greedy king, hoping to maximise the amount of money he could seize, agreed to let her travel. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-173449744-8114cab-e1768985633175.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of a man in a white and red apron, a tall white coned hat, and holding a stick in one hand. Behind him, there is a large building with many windows" title="A depiction of a man condemned to be burned on the orders of the Inquisition (Image by Getty Images)" /> But Doña Gracia had no intention of giving up her fortune so easily. Before departing for Antwerp, she had also set the second part of her plan in action. She had applied to the Vatican for a ‘Safe Conduct’, a super-passport valid throughout Christian Europe and which overrode any local laws preventing someone from travelling abroad. Throughout her life, Doña Gracia believed in doing what she could to maximise her chances of success. Her skills went beyond protecting her own family. Not only did she take the helm of her late husband’s business, an unusual enough development in itself in the late Renaissance era, but she assumed a leadership role within the converso community. With the threat of the Inquisition looming, Doña Gracia began to expand a nascent escape network that spirited members of the community out of danger and helped them travel to the Ottoman empire, which offered a haven for Europe’s Jewish community. In 1536, with the formal establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the situation for conversos in the country grew even more perilous. Read more | Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: the history of a city of many names Speaking truth to power In 1553, Doña Gracia too would relocate to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), but in the latter half of the 1530s her focus was on building a new life in Antwerp. Yet here, she encountered many of the same problems she had faced in Portugal. The rulers, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and his sister, Mary of Austria, who acted as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, were quick to pick up where the Portuguese king had left off. The royal duo tried to pledge young Ana to a marriage that would be advantageous to them. Summoned to Mary’s palace to approve the match with Don Francisco D’Aragon – an illegitimate Spanish nobleman and descendant of the royal house of Aragon – Doña Gracia played for time, repeatedly implying she was sick. But she was so opposed to the union that she was reported as saying she would rather see her daughter drown – an audacious and insulting remark. Doña Gracia didn’t back down. She told Mary that she was furious about how Ana’s selected suitor had blamed the continuing persecution of conversos on Doña Gracia’s own obstinacy. Doña Gracia’s confrontational manner shocked Mary, a blue blood who had been queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia before she was widowed and became governor. Once again, Doña Gracia was forced to leave, fleeing to the Republic of Venice in 1544. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463914533-e7876ff-e1768986146801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large snaked line of people processing through a town square, surrounded by white building with blue and orange roofs. A crowd watches on as hundreds of men in black cloaks walk behind one another" title="An 18th century depiction of the procession of criminals sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon. As the persecution intensified, Doña Gracia helped many to flee to Constantinople (Image by Getty Images)" /> Compounding her difficulties, Doña Gracia did not even have the support of her own family. While in Antwerp, Diogo had died and named Doña Gracia as the guardian of his infant daughter rather than the child’s own mother – his wife and Doña Gracia’s sister, Brianda, who was talked of as untrustworthy. This so angered Brianda that, when both were living in Venice, she betrayed Doña Gracia as a secret Jew. In 1549, Doña Gracia again had to flee, this time to Ferrara, a tolerant duchy in northern Italy. Throughout, Doña Gracia continued to be a leader among her people, despite facing many setbacks. At one point, she helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of more than 20 conversos by the Italian Inquisition – an outrageous act even by the standards of the era. But the boycott was not a success in the long run because the Jewish merchants in the Ottoman empire who used the port could not agree on a combined strategy. Doña Gracia also failed in efforts to persuade the Venetians to give the conversos one of their lagoon islands as a place to settle. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history Life in the open But Doña Gracia’s sheer persistence also paid off. In 1553, she settled in Constantinople with her entourage. Here, she could live publicly as a Jew. Moreover, she persuaded Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman empire, to grant her a long-term lease on Tiberias (in present-day Israel). She helped finance the rebuilding of a city that nestles on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it became a refuge for those conversos wishing to live in their own semi-autonomous area. Doña Gracia thus headed one of the earliest attempts to found a modern Jewish state in the Middle East. Her efforts here likely saved a significant portion of the ethnic Jewish world at a critical juncture in its history. She planned to settle in the region herself and built a mansion in Tiberias, but she died in Constantinople in 1569. In the years since, knowledge of Doña Gracia’s remarkable life has gradually faded, but that may be changing. Four years ago – during a period when the State Archives in Modena, northern Italy were closed because of the pandemic – archivist Alberto Palladini took advantage of the peace and quiet to clean out a box of old letters. It included two from Doña Gracia. These showed she spelled her last name as Nacy, not Nasi as the historical record currently suggests. It’s a small detail, but significant, if only because it hints at the possibility of further revelations should researchers go looking, which seems likely given the current interest in the lives of powerful women whose place in history has been under-appreciated. As for Doña Gracia herself, she certainly never sold herself short. As the seal for her correspondence, she used the Lion of Judah. This suggests she saw herself not just as a rich and successful businesswoman and philanthropist, but as someone descended from the House of David, a Jewish royal. Andrée Aelion Brooks is a journalist and lecturer. Her books include Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story
Taken hostage by a Barbary ship’s captain in the 18th century, a young Englishwoman found herself fighting for her freedom in Marrakech. Adam Nichols introduces a brave captive who later wrote a book about her dramatic experiences
The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered. The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself. The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children. Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side. African captivity After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots. Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife. Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem. Before the acting sultan In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives. At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”. Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.” Read more | Barbary pirates: the Muslim corsairs and their role in the slave trade Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account: “Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion. “The shock of this pronouncement was severe...I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery. “The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.” Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives. Read more | Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell Release and return The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart. Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease. Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story. Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the ‘gentle sex’ could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century
1. A female bodysnatcher? At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer? In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body – and took matters into their own hands. Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates – but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers? Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh – at that time an 84-year-old pedlar – accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/Credit-Wellcome-CollectionEliza-Rosswebready-6e9dca8-e1766488850584.jpg" width="613" height="420" alt="A black and white sketch of an elderly woman wearing a frilly bonnet and a high necked coat" title="An illustration of “the atrocious Eliza Ross” from an 1832 book about London ‘Burkers’ – bodysnatchers – including an account of her murder of elderly Caroline Walsh (Image by the Wellcome Collection)" /> On 19 August 1831, Caroline moved into the small attic room occupied by the Cook family – Elizabeth, Edward and their 12-year-old son Ned – at 7 Goodman’s Yard. With only one bed and a small table, Caroline was expected to sleep on the floor in the corner of the room. The next morning, when Ann came to check on her grandmother, Caroline was nowhere to be seen. Missing, presumed dead After searching the streets, poorhouses, hospitals and prisons for her grandmother, Ann Buton became worried, and told the police about her suspicions. But it wasn’t until October that an officer launched an investigation and arrested all three members of the Cook family. Elizabeth appeared unfazed. “With all your trouble,” she remarked, “you have not found the old woman’s body.” Elizabeth’s son, Ned, soon explained why. He told the court that on 19 August, soon after Caroline Walsh had gone to bed, his mother had suffocated the old lady. His father had been leaning out of the window at the time. Elizabeth then “lifted [the body] off the bed herself” and carried it downstairs. The next morning, Ned saw a sack in the cellar, with “partly black and partly grey” hair poking out of the top. That evening, between 11pm and midnight, Ned watched his mother carrying the sack down Goodman’s Yard. “She told me,” he continued, “that she took the body to the London Hospital.” Read more | From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain Perhaps unsurprisingly, the surgeons at the hospital denied ever having received a body from Elizabeth Ross, but the rag sellers in the market testified that she had sold them distinctive items of clothing that belonged to Caroline Walsh. Elizabeth was convicted of murder (Edward was acquitted) and was hanged on 9 January 1832. But how reliable was the evidence of a 12-year-old boy? Could Elizabeth have carried a body by herself all the way from Goodman’s Yard in Aldgate to the London Hospital in Whitechapel? In the moral panic about bodysnatching that had erupted in the early 1830s, was Elizabeth – already a woman with a bad reputation – accused and convicted of a crime she did not commit? Or does her case suggest that we need to look more closely at female involvement in body snatching? 2. Matricide – or a terrible mishap? Kitty Newton, who grew up in a troubled family, was accused of murdering her mother – but it may have been a tragic accident At 2am on 5 December 1848, in a grand house on the banks of the river Severn in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, servant Mary Corfield woke to the smell of smoke and the sound of her disabled master, Mr Dyer, crying out. Mary rushed downstairs and out of the house to call for help. Neighbours quickly came to the aid of Mr Dyer, while Mary found evidence of a fire in the kitchen – a half-burned sofa and pillows, wet sheets, and oil on the floor. The previous evening, Ann Newton – mother of the housekeeper, Kitty Newton – had decided to stay the night and sleep in the kitchen. Her burned body was found lying face down in an outbuilding on the property. The police were called, and Kitty was arrested, accused of murdering her mother. An inquest was quickly convened and witnesses called. Mary Corfield claimed that Kitty and Ann had had a turbulent relationship. When Ann visited Kitty, mother and daughter would drink and quarrel, sometimes violently. On one occasion, Mary said, Kitty had beaten Ann with a hand-whip so severely that pieces of flesh were torn from Ann’s arms and a doctor had to be called. Kitty’s uncle, Ann’s brother, suggested that his niece might have killed his sister to get her hands on an inheritance. He reported that on one occasion, when he spoke to Kitty about ill-treating her mother, she replied: “I should like to see the d*** old bitch dead and cut in quarters! She has lived too long, and has kept me out of my money till the hairs of my head are got grey!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2227135159-e8bcfff-e1766488988940.jpg" width="1500" height="995" alt="A sketch of a woman in a long black dress and top hat leaning against the rail of a box in court, with a large crowd behind her" title="A Victorian illustration of a woman in a courtroom dock. When Kitty Newton was accused of murdering her mother, a botched post-mortem helped secure a not guilty verdict (Image by Getty Images)" /> Shamed and condemned Was Kitty’s uncle telling the truth? As the newspapers revealed, hers was a troubled family. Another uncle had been convicted and hanged for beating his pregnant wife to death. Kitty’s parents had had an unhappy and violent marriage. And as a teenager, Kitty had been sent to work as a housekeeper for a third uncle, and became pregnant with his child. While the child was accepted by the family, Kitty was shamed and condemned – by her own mother, too. However, other witnesses at the inquest testified that Kitty showed great care towards her mother. The local curate suggested that Ann “was in a troubled and unhappy condition, and wished to die”. Two medical men criticised the post-mortem examination, which failed to examine Ann’s larynx or trachea, making it impossible to determine the true cause of death. The inquest jury failed to reach a consensus and, after enduring three criminal trials and spending 15 months in prison, Kitty was found not guilty and set free. She moved into a small cottage in Bridgnorth, left to her by Mr Dyer who had died while she was awaiting trial, and lived off the inheritance from her mother. Was Kitty a greedy, murderous daughter? Or had Ann accidentally (or deliberately) set fire to herself on that fateful night? After all, Victorian kitchens, which combined naked flames with flammable liquids, could be dangerous places. We may never know. 3. Pathological lies or a cry for help? Accused of murder, Jessie McLachlan issued a string of contradictory statements – but proof of her guilt remained elusive On 7 July 1862, John Fleming and his son arrived home at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow, after spending the weekend at the family’s summer house on the Firth of Clyde. The two men were greeted at the door by John’s father, James, an old man in his eighties who had decided to forgo the family holiday. But opening the door was the job of the servant, Jessie McPherson. Where was she? James said that he had not seen Jessie since Friday night, and that her door was locked. The three men went to investigate. John found a key and opened the door to Jessie’s bedroom, where they found her dead body. Her head had been smashed in, she was naked from the waist down, and there were defensive wounds on her hands. Clothes and sheets were soaked in blood, and someone had attempted to wash the kitchen floor. A post-mortem concluded that Jessie’s injuries pointed “to a female or a weak man as having inflicted them”. Further investigation revealed that Jessie’s best clothes and some of the Flemings’ silverware were missing. Evidence on a plate The police arrested James Fleming on suspicion of murder, but their attention was soon drawn in a different direction. A pawnbroker claimed that a woman had sold him some plate that matched the description of the silverware taken from the Flemings’ house. That woman was 28-year-old Jessie McLachlan, a former servant of the Flemings and a friend of Jessie McPherson, who had married a seaman and had a child. McLachlan was arrested and brought in for questioning. Over the course of a week or so, she gave three statements in response to the discovery of new evidence linking her to the crime. Each contained lies and contradictions. James Fleming was released, and McLachlan was indicted for murder. At her trial between 17 and 20 September, McLachlan’s legal counsel argued that the prosecution could not prove that McLachlan had been at Sandyford Place on the fateful weekend. But, despite further compelling evidence – including some from friends of McPherson who claimed that James Fleming was sexually harassing his servant – it was a losing battle. The judge encouraged the jury to return a guilty verdict – which they did, after deliberating for just 15 minutes. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang McLachlan responded by delivering yet another statement, which she had written while awaiting trial – though her lawyers had refused to use it in her defence. McLachlan admitted that she had been at Sandyford Place on the night when McPherson was killed – but she claimed that James had murdered McPherson after the latter rejected his sexual advances. James then secured McLachlan’s silence with a thinly veiled threat: “Don’t be feart, only if you tell you know about her death, you will be taken in for it as well as I… My life is in your power, and yours is in my power.” McLachlan’s statement was enough to cast doubt over her conviction, trigger an inquiry and save her from the gallows. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served 15 years behind bars. James Fleming , meanwhile, lived out his days as a free man. There is a further twist in this tale. McLachlan gave a fifth statement to her lawyer, in which she confessed to the murder. It was quickly retracted, but the question remains: was this an admission of guilt? Or a cry from a woman desperate to be heard, knowing that she would likely never see her young child again, and that her voice would be suppressed throughout a long prison sentence for a crime she did not commit? 4. Could a woman commit brutal murder? After a mother and baby were slaughtered, ample evidence pointed to a love rival, Mary Pearcey, as the culprit – but many couldn’t believe that a woman might be capable of such a vicious crime On the evening of 24 October 1890, the body of a brutally murdered woman was discovered behind a row of newly built houses in Belsize Park, London. Her head was “almost entirely severed from the body” and her skull, pierced in several places, had suffered “terrible blows from some penetrating instrument”. Newspapers declared that the victim must be a prostitute, the killer must be a man, and the murder could be the work of Jack the Ripper, who had not long ago terrorised the streets of the capital. They were wrong on all three counts. The body was identified next morning as Phoebe Hogg, a 31-year-old mother. She had last been seen on the afternoon of the discovery leaving the home she shared with her husband, Frank, with her 18-month-old baby, Tiggy. Her pram, covered with blood, had been found a mile and a half from Phoebe’s body. On 26 October, Tiggy’s body was found in some nettles near Finchley Road. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/BAL11978716webready-cabdf28-e1766489231180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A sketch of a crime scene, with a woman killing another woman and a baby, with an upturned pram" title="The murder of Phoebe Hogg and her baby Tiggy by Mary Pearcey, as imagined in The Illustrated Police News. Tiggy’s pram (right) remains on display in Madame Tussauds wax museum, London (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> A search of the Hoggs’ home revealed in Frank’s coat pocket a key to the lodgings of a family friend, 24-year-old Mary Pearcey. The police decided to visit the property. Opening the door, they discovered a horrific scene: blood was splattered on the walls, ceiling and floor, and two kitchen windowpanes had been smashed. They found lace curtains, clothing, a poker and a big knife all covered in blood, and a button from Phoebe’s jacket. Mary claimed that she had been killing mice. The police arrested her for murder. Read more | Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools Suspicious minds The public could not believe that a woman had committed such a brutal crime, or even possessed the physical strength to dispose of the bodies. Suspicion continued to swirl around Frank, especially when it was discovered that he and Mary were lovers. Did he want to get rid of his wife to be with Mary? Yet Frank had an alibi for the time of the murder, and there was no evidence that he had encouraged or helped Mary to kill his wife. A neighbour claimed that she had seen Mary, alone, pushing a heavily loaded pram along the street an hour before Phoebe’s body was found. Mary admitted that she had invited Phoebe and Tiggy to tea that afternoon, but denied that she had killed them. “I would not do such a dreadful thing,” she declared, adding: “I would not hurt anyone.” On 3 December 1890, Mary was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A plea for clemency on the grounds of insanity failed, and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on 23 December. She begged Frank to visit her before her execution. He had already left London – but not before he had sold Tiggy’s pram to Madame Tussauds wax museum in Marylebone Road. There it remains on display in the infamous Chamber of Horrors – a reminder that perhaps women have the potential to be killers just as brutal as men. This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain
The author's books depict an evocative slice of early 19th-century life, but many aspects of the Regency era are only hinted at in her novels, as Lizzie Rogers reveals
Ever felt like you could be Elizabeth Bennet? You’re not alone. Entering Jane Austen’s world can feel like an immersive experience. Reading her books (or watching television or film adaptations, or the many spin-offs and lookalikes), it’s easy to believe that somehow we’ve really got to know her England – and, by extension, the people who lived in it. That feeling is encapsulated in the 2008 ITV series Lost in Austen, which follows the adventures of 21st-century heroine Amanda Price. Stepping through a portal into the world of Pride and Prejudice, Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds herself in the bosom of the Bennet family, messing up episodes in the novel, trying – with varying degrees of success – to fix them and, inevitably, falling in love with Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Her opening voiceover declares that “I’ve read [Pride and Prejudice] so many times now the words just say themselves in my head and it’s like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there – it’s become a place I know so intimately… I can see that world, I can touch it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/shutterstockeditorial912719bewebready-5e6f127-e1765974181648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a modern-day adaptation of a Regency ball. A couple dance in the middle, with the man spinning the woman around. Around them, several other couples dance" title="A scene from ITV’s Lost in Austen, where 21st-century heroine Amanda Price steps into Pride and Prejudice, which she describes as “a place I know so intimately” (Image by Shutterstock)" /> This is far from a new sentiment. In March 1826, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal that Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment... What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.” Her undeniable talent for character study is one of the key reasons why Austen’s work resonates so loudly across the world. Creative retellings of her novels show how the themes, characters and plotlines easily transcend their bounds of Regency England and fit well in other countries, other cultures and other times, with new representations amending the ages, social class and genders of characters. In the 250 years since Austen’s birth, her work has morphed into a behemoth that we simultaneously modernise and have made emblematic of life in late 18th and early 19th-century England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-113633139webready-0bd035d.jpg" width="2083" height="1388" alt="An image showing an old man with a straight face, wearing a suit and coat" title="A 19th-century engraving of author Sir Walter Scott, who wrote glowingly of Austen’s writing after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obscuring obsession Thanks to her gift for evoking that era, its environment and inhabitants, it’s easy to envision ourselves inside her world. We feel able to enter it through the plots of her novels and their adaptations for stage and screen, as well as the extension of her unfinished novel Sanditon, fleshed out vividly in the ITV series running from 2019. But there is a danger that we conflate her writing too fully with the history of the time, obscuring swathes of this period through our obsession. The picture we receive is one that’s been enhanced by layers of interpretation, adaptation and the historical distance between us and the source material. The effect of them all together is “to make us read novels that aren’t actually there”, argued Helena Kelly in her 2016 book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, echoing the views of other Austen scholars. Because Austen’s work feels so modern and accessible, we miss wider perspectives that are alluded to through her clever study of the world around her – but also, importantly, many that she simply could not give us and did not have to. One person cannot capture every aspect of life in their era, nor act as the singular voice of a generation. No matter how brilliant or important the writer in question is, they cannot speak to the experience of everybody. Yes, Jane Austen was a genius, through whose pen the novel was changed forever. She defied her circumstances in life – being a woman with very little money – to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, thanks solely to her immense talent. And she does open a window into this period of history from which we can learn so much – but her work, and the questions it raises, invites us to widen our gaze. Our knowledge of both her and the time in which she lived is only enriched by expanding our understanding by exploring the work of other writers and figures that populated her world, opening our eyes to that diverse, fast-changing and momentous era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-173344128webready-9d2cff4-e1765974152772.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white pictures showing large groups of people in states of undress, fighting and drinking in the street" title="William Hogarth’s Gin Lane provides a stark portrayal of a teeming urban environment in which drunkenness and debauchery were rife (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fascinated by the intelligent satire of Austen’s novels, we might look at the art of William Hogarth. Though he died in 1764, more than a decade before the author’s birth, many of his images of 18th-century London highlight the blight of corruption and the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor well into the 19th century. His famous prints Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) could be seen as demonising the drinking habits of the working class. But his work does at least feature ordinary folk as more than just background elements. A portrait of his own servants from the early 1750s, for instance, presents distinct faces and personalities. Hogarth’s father spent time in debtors’ prison, a place more often associated with the Victorian work of Charles Dickens, and many other figures from the Georgian period also found themselves inmates. The actress and writer Mary Robinson (c1757–1800), who later became famous for her portrayal of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (and for her brief affair with the Prince of Wales), lived with her profligate husband in debtors’ prison for several months from 1775; while there, she became the family breadwinner by publishing her poetry. Read more | Beyond the podcast: Jane Austen Robinson’s memoirs, prepared from 1798 and published the year after her death, charted a life beset with immense ups and downs. They give us an insight into her youth and first marriage (“I considered chastity as the brightest ornament that could embellish the female mind,” she writes) and trace the struggles that continued to beset her into her later years. In fact, much of the preparations for those memoirs was done on envelopes because she couldn’t afford to buy fresh paper. Crime and poverty To continue our trip into the murkier corners of London during this period, consider the business dealings, crime and poverty prevalent in lower-class areas of the city. One publication that illustrates this side of urban life was Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious bestseller published annually from 1757 to 1794 that detailed names and talents of dozens of sex workers. It was interrogated by Hallie Rubenhold in her 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies, which itself inspired the television series Harlots (2017–19). These aspects of London are hinted at in Pride and Prejudice, in the form of the poverty and depravity that Mrs Bennet fears will be the fate of her daughter Lydia after she runs away to the capital with George Wickham. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2E4A0NWwebready-e008451.jpg" width="1639" height="1093" alt="A drawing of a black man with one leg, dressed in a blue jacket, checked shirt and a feathered hat, playing the violin" title="An early 19th-century illustration of sailor-turned-street performer Billy Waters, whose life “highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period” (Image by Alamy)" /> Strength in diversity Sanditon introduces Austen’s only black character: Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies. During the 18th century, it is estimated there were more than 20,000 black Britons – a significant number, in a British population that had exceeded 10 million by 1801. To explore the lives of some of these people, read Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (2022) and Mary L Shannon’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing (2024). The latter gives a voice to a black sailor in Regency Britain whose presence as a street performer was so famed across London that his name became legendary, his life shaped by those who aimed to profit from his talent. Living from around the 1770s until 1823, Waters’ life maps closely onto Austen’s, and highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England Mansfield Park, Austen’s third and perhaps most divisive novel, makes clear the links between slavery, the country house and aristocratic wealth. The titular house is built on a fortune sustained by plantations worked by enslaved people in Antigua, and its name may come from Lord Mansfield, whose judicial decisions enabled the advancement towards the abolition of slavery. Austen’s favourite poet was William Cowper, whose work fervently supported antislavery campaigns. But there were also first-person accounts of the experiences of black people in Britain in that period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2H492WTwebready-9bef977-e1765974356801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An open book with a portrait of a black man in a suit on the left page, and a title page on the right" title="First-person accounts written by the formerly enslaved – such as the letters of Ignatius Sancho (above) – helped rally Britons to the cause of abolition (Image by Alamy)" /> The letters of Ignatius Sancho, born into slavery on an Atlantic ship in 1729 and brought to England at two years old, were published in 1782, after his death. One of them – written to John Wingrave, a London bookseller, in 1778 – contains a stinging rebuke of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes – prayers – and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.” Olaudah Equiano was another high profile supporter of the British abolitionist movement whose writings shone a light on the iniquities of the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative autobiography – telling the story of his enslavement in Africa, arrival in Britain as a young man and life after purchasing his freedom in 1766 – was hugely popular when it was published in 1789. The enslaved female poet Phillis Wheatley revealed in verse her desire for intellectual fulfilment. Travelling to London from Boston with her enslavers, she was able to publish Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 – believed to be the first set of poems published by an African American. Such writings enable us to understand experiences of black people during the era, reminding us of the often-forgotten diversity of England at this time. In this vein, the second season of Bridgerton (2022) highlighted – albeit through a fictionalised lens – the experiences of south Asian people in Britain. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the British empire was in rapid ascendency, fuelled by commerce, trade and the ruthless actions of the East India Company. The author’s own cousin, Eliza Hancock – who later married Jane’s brother Henry – grew up in India as the daughter of a British surgeon to the East India Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90779123webready-cbf67a0-e1765974523630.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of three workers working in a factory, turning large wheels with cloth hanging over them into buckets" title="An 18th-century illustration of workers dyeing cloth. Jane Austen lived through a boom in industry, but others would document the struggles of the labouring poor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Long-lost sister William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, which was set during the Regency period though published in 1848, highlights through the character of Jos Sedley the wealth that could be accumulated by young people capitalising on travelling to India. Historian Durba Ghosh has noted that Thackeray had a long-lost (and possibly mixed-heritage) sister, Amelia – also known as Sarah Redfield – in India, and explored the stories of many south Asian women, demonstrating the strong connections between Britain and India at the time. Read more | Strange and surprising pastimes of the Regency Ton Thackeray’s dramatic novel is more specifically set during the Napoleonic Wars, hinted at in Austen’s work through the regular presence of a militia or naval characters, though this inclusion is often overlooked as a reflection of the lived experience of constant war and unrest. Two of Austen’s brothers were in the navy and one was in a militia regiment, while her cousin Eliza lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine. The absence of peace and a sense of perpetual uncertainty were harrowing facts of life. This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and parliamentary representation. Through the late 18th and early 19th century, villages, towns and cities grew rapidly while at the same time the voices of ordinary people were not heard. Burgeoning industry created a new class of wealthy people, while also fostering extremely testing working conditions for the labouring poor. We tend to think of these subjects as uniquely endemic to the Victorian period, taking centre stage in the writing of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, but the boom in industry was firmly rooted in Austen’s lifetime. For instance, Lancashire’s cotton industry was in full swing by the late 18th century, with some 20,000 apprentices working in cotton mills in 1800. Textile magnate Robert Peel (1750–1830), long-term MP for Tamworth and father of the future prime minister of the same name, began campaigning and introducing legislation on child labour in the early years of the 19th century. Spending time in London, Bath and Southampton, Jane Austen would have been offered significant insights into the growth of industry and urban overcrowding. We celebrate Austen’s novels for the questions she raises about the position of women in society, a subject that preoccupied many of her contemporaries. Early feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures who deserved rights accordingly in a world that granted them few, if any. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects she wrote: “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.” Wollstonecraft’s words caused a sensation – and when, after her premature death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin published her biography, so did the story of her life. She lived frequently outside the bounds of accepted social propriety – a point that enables us to delve deeper into the world of reputation, of making spaces to safely subvert societal expectations and legal doctrine, and of understanding how relationships, freedom and restriction truly worked in practice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1441698253webready-9c87b29-e1765974624755.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" title="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" /> The third season of Sanditon (2023) presented a slow-burn romance between two gay men, Arthur Parker and Lord Harry Montrose – the storyline breathing a small piece of fictional life into the rich LGBTQ+ history of this period. A visible real-life example can be found in the cottage named Plas Newydd in Llangollen, Wales where from 1780 the couple Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler created a sanctuary for queer happiness. They became famous within their own lifetimes, visited by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal pension by George III upon the intercession of Queen Charlotte. We cannot – and should not expect to – learn everything about the history of the Regency period from the pages of Jane Austen’s novels. But as fans, readers and historians, we are indebted to her for providing a gateway into this tumultuous period, into which new research is being undertaken all the time, shining light on previously unheard voices and hidden faces. It is all these lived experiences that weave a rich tapestry, helping us to better know the period in which Jane Austen lived – one that indelibly shaped her and the masterpieces she left behind.
We often refer to countries as 'female' – so why has history excluded women from nation-building?
Janina Ramirez speaks to Danny Bird about how women and their stories have been co-opted and curated by men attempting to forge nations across Europe
Danny Bird: What was the genesis of Legenda? Was there a moment when you knew you had to write this book? Janina Ramirez: From the start of my academic career, I learned from [Palestinian-American literary critic and activist] Edward Said and others the value of acknowledging one’s perspective: being transparent about who you are, rather than claiming some sense of neutral empirical truth. For me, identity rests on three pillars. First, I am a woman. Second, class: I come from an immigrant, working-class background. Third, heritage: Polish-Irish, born in Dubai, raised in the UK, married to a Spanish-Scot, with a distinctly European sense of self. With all that, I wasn’t going to get away without a Catholic upbringing: convent school, just very Roman Catholic foundations. I’m not practising now, but it gave me empathy for faith and an understanding of belief. These roots inevitably shape my work. When I published The Private Lives of the Saints [in 2015], my aunt, a Franciscan missionary, told me how proud she was. I had to laugh because the book dismantled saintly myths rather than celebrating them. Yet she was right: I was still that Catholic schoolgirl, writing about religious figures, even as I reframed them. Questions of nationality also ran through my research. My first book required careful choices of terms: ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Scottish’, ‘British Isles’ – each politically charged. By Femina [2022], the pattern was striking: nations everywhere reclaiming heritage, from Scandinavia’s Vikings to France’s Cathars. The focus of my latest book crystallised while writing about [queen and saint] Jadwiga of Poland. My grandmother, who owned a bronze of Pope John Paul II, reminded me how faith and identity intertwine. In my lifetime, that pope canonised women I now study, using them to shape national narratives. So the direction of this new book was clear even as I finished the last one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/ali053543-2webready-72fca02-e1765540085950.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Isabella of Castile, pictured in a 15th-century illumination. Five centuries after her death, the Spanish monarch is still used as an icon to shape national identity as essentially Castilian (Image by Topfoto)" title="Queen Isabella of Castile, pictured in a 15th-century illumination. Five centuries after her death, the Spanish monarch is still used as an icon to shape national identity as essentially Castilian (Image by Topfoto)" /> You explore how women such as Joan of Arc and Isabella of Castile became symbols of national identity. Do you think their stories continue to shape how nations see themselves today? I open the book with one of [French far-right nationalist politician] Jean-Marie Le Pen’s impassioned rallies at the statue of Joan of Arc on the Place des Pyramides in Paris. So yes, her story remains relevant – mocked or taken seriously, but still shaping France’s political landscape. After being expelled from the [far-right anti-immigrant] National Front, Le Pen founded an even harder-right party, naming it after Joan of Arc and making her its emblem. That’s how potent her image remains to French nationalists. Similarly, Isabella of Castile’s influence endures. When I speak with Spanish friends, they describe how the Castilian dialect is still seen as the benchmark [rather than regional dialects such as Catalan or Galician] – much like in Britain, where London can feel like a ‘brain drain’ and doesn’t reflect life in the north, Cornwall or Kent. That sense of central dominance ties directly back to Isabella and the way she imposed her vision of Spain. And that’s the heart of it: attempts to impose a single collective identity on diverse peoples – peoples with different regions, traditions and faiths – inevitably crack. Even in Isabella’s lifetime, that imposed single national identity fractured and was repeatedly reinforced, layer upon layer. We see the same dynamics now in places such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. These identities don’t simply vanish; they resist, reassert themselves and continue to challenge imposed unity. Read more | Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win” I’d love to explore how nations so often personify themselves as women – from Britannia to Marianne – embodying a strange mix of maternal or nurturing spirit, virginal purity, even martial strength. What do you think is going on there? Brilliant question! I’m very fortunate to be a colleague in Oxford of Marina Warner, the doyenne of this subject. She has written on Joan of Arc, but also a wonderful book called Monuments and Maidens, which speaks directly to this point. She shows how nations embody themselves in female form: the Statue of Liberty, Marianne in the Panthéon, Britannia looming in St Paul’s Cathedral. And you’re absolutely right: there’s a deep frustration here. The nation is imagined as a woman, yet women themselves had little to no role in building nations. It’s a profound injustice: in virtually every revolutionary moment, women were excluded from shaping national identity. In France, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ – that emphasis on brotherhood – was about raising up men, not women. Think of how the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [1789] prompted the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen [1791] in response; the author of that second declaration, Olympe de Gouges, was executed for it. Revolutions don’t work for women; they offer no place for us. Yet the most powerful symbol to unite people is often ‘the mother’. That universal image, both compelling and emotionally resonant, becomes propaganda: to serve king and country is to serve one’s motherland. Men are called to die for their ‘mother’, while real women are denied participation in politics, philosophy, architecture or law. That’s the deep irony you’ve identified: women are entirely excluded from nation-building, yet the ultimate emblem of the nation is a woman. Several of the women you write about pushed back against the expectations of their time. Why do you think some have become celebrated as heroines whereas others have been condemned? We are still enthralled by the charismatic, the extreme, the outspoken. I don’t understand why certain celebrities and influencers command such attention while thoughtful, rational voices struggle to be heard. We must be cautious about whom we choose to celebrate as heroes, both today and in the past. The figures who endure often do so because their stories are condensed into simple, powerful images that can be reproduced and instantly recognised. Take Agustina of Aragón, for example. Many women fought in Zaragoza [against invading French forces] during the Peninsular War from 1808, yet she became iconic because painters such as Goya fixed her image: a small figure on a pile of bodies, lighting a cannon’s fuse. That lodged itself in the public imagination – this is how legend works. When I began the book, I also considered including men such as Robin Hood or Alfred the Great, whose myths have likewise been reshaped into soundbites. People prefer statues, posters and slogans to complex truths. They want heroes they can identify at a glance without grappling with the full picture. That’s why I wrote the book: to question the stories we take as fact. Consider the Lady Godiva legend [in which the 11th-century noblewoman of Mercia rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to win respite for its people from oppressive taxation by her husband, the earl]. The only factual link between the historical Godgifu and the tale we know is Coventry itself. Everything else is invention. I love stories, and I open each chapter with one, but my aim is to dig beneath them – to be forensic about who these figures really were. In doing so, they become more complex, more fascinating and ultimately more thrilling than the legends that have simplified them. Read more | “In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history Were there any unexpected objects or sources that illuminated the roles of women featured in your book? Yes – particularly while researching the chapter on Greece, one of the hardest to write. The 1821 Greek revolt is often downplayed in accounts of nationhood. Because it was a rebellion against the Ottoman empire – against ‘the east’, rather than against monarchies in western Europe – it can feel like a different story from the Belgian, German or French struggles for democracy, and tends to be pushed to the margins. I wanted to foreground it. What struck me most was how this perspective connects to broader debates about Eurocentrism. Recently, at the Gloucester History Festival, I listened to Peter Frankopan, 10 years on from the publication of his book The Silk Roads, urging us not to be so western-focused, and Vince Cable, who echoed the same point in relation to China, India and Japan today. I wanted to shift the narrative away from the familiar classical thread linking Europe to Rome and ancient Greece, and instead emphasise that, for much of medieval history, Constantinople (now Istanbul) was the true hub of civilisation and power. London and the north of Europe were seen as barbaric backwaters. Greek identity in the 19th century was not just a Byronesque, romantic appeal to ancient culture. For Greeks, it was about reclaiming the legacy of Constantinople, which had fallen to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Researching the role of women in Constantinople, I was struck by the extraordinary survival of coins, enamels, jewelled crosses – objects that in most revolutions would have been melted down, yet remained intact because the Ottomans largely ignored them. Among them are coins depicting the 11th-century sisters Zoe and Theodora (left) ruling with the male title ‘emperor’ of Byzantium, rather than ‘empress’. Their images, along with artefacts carried to places such as Georgia when it was ruled by Queen Tamar (reigned 1184–1213), are stark reminders that women could and did rule empires. Indeed, at the same time as Charlemagne was trying to construct a Holy Roman Empire [at the turn of the ninth century], Empress Irene was ruling in Constantinople, viewing the Franks as peasants on the fringes of civilisation. That chapter forced me to question western national narratives and to reflect on the cycles of rise and fall in world history. It also highlighted the need for humility in how we see our place in a global story that has always been in flux, and the importance of asking where women feature in that. You also discuss the intersection where religious devotion and politics meet, through women such as Catherine of Siena. Today, would their faith make them seem radical or reactionary? Catherine of Siena [14th-century mystic and letter-writer] is a fascinating and difficult figure to grasp. I suspect that she would now be seen as a radical extremist. Her influence grew rapidly from local notoriety to involvement in politics, family disputes and the affairs of the nobility. Rejecting the cloistered life of a nun, which she deemed too modest and hidden, she instead exploited the opportunities of the Dominican Third Order, which allowed women to live partly within the rhythms of monastic life while remaining active in the world – able to marry, raise families and pursue public roles. Even this was too restrictive for Catherine. She craved visibility and seized every chance to place herself centre stage. Behind her was a group that recognised her potential and promoted her as a kind of spiritual influencer. With their support, she was propelled onto ever larger platforms, becoming more reactionary and extreme as her fame grew. Eventually, she had the ear of the pope and played a part in global politics. It was a meteoric but tragic rise. Catherine’s regime of intense self-mortification, involving starvation and other severe practices, destroyed her health and she died young [aged just 33, in 1380]. Ironically, in the medieval world, some of the very behaviours officially condemned – such as fasting and self-harm – often brought fame and were celebrated as marks of sanctity. Extreme acts, such as plunging into frozen rivers or enduring brutal beatings, drew attention, enhanced reputations and opened the way to influence. For women, especially, punishing the body was often the only route to power and legacy. This pattern was not confined to women; men pursued similar paths. Nor is it a relic of the past. Even today, religious devotion expressed through extreme bodily endurance persists – in India, for example, ascetics hold an arm aloft until it withers. We may think ourselves too rational, too secular, to be drawn into such practices, but self-punishment in the name of belief remains very much alive. The temptation is to label such figures simply as fanatics, yet the reality is more complex. Were they extremists, or merely individuals desperately trying to stand out and make a difference? Religion, identity, politics, economics – all can be forces for good but, in the wrong hands and when driven by personal ambition, they become extreme. What emerges, in Catherine’s case and beyond, is the interplay between individual striving and wider social structures – why one person rises to prominence while others remain unheard. Read more | Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena In the end, you argue that reconnecting with these stories can help us resist division and manipulation. What do you think these women have to teach us about resilience and identity today? In my conclusion, I write that Agustina lit the cannon, while Joan picked up the sword. What unites these women is their courage. In times of threat and change, they were brave – and my argument is that we must be brave, too. We need clarity of mind and sharpened intellects to face today’s challenges. We are not fighting on streets with swords, but against misinformation, propaganda and manipulation at the highest levels. We must be equipped to understand our place in the world and our communities. The book begins and ends with women who had no concept of nations as we know them, yet shared the same land as us, walked the same paths and looked upon the same mountains. Their lives offer inspiration because they survived, thrived and achieved remarkable things in difficult circumstances. By connecting with their environments, we become part of their legacy. I deeply believe in the power of local history and connecting with our surroundings – exploring archives, visiting museums, walking through graveyards. Engaging with objects and places allows us to connect with people of the past in a meaningful way. It reminds us that humans have always been complex and brilliant. We are not the pinnacle of progress, and the people of the past were not mere peasants living short, brutish lives. Their experiences are fascinating, and learning about them teaches us to be better citizens today. In our modern world, we cannot control distant geopolitical events manipulated by the powerful. What we can control is our daily interactions with those around us, with the landscape and with our communities. Humanity has always found ways to coexist, collaborate and learn from one another across cultures and generations. That shared, everyday life that I see in my medieval figures still exists. We’ve just lost sight of it. We need to reconnect with each other, with the land and with the tangible realities of life, rather than the digitised, ethereal existence of screens and texts. Humans have always lived alongside one another, and understanding those relationships is essential. This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
My history hero: Rain Newton-Smith chooses Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Economist Rain Newton-Smith chooses Helen Keller as her history hero
In profile Helen Keller was an American writer and activist. Having lost her sight and hearing at just 19 months old, she later learned how to speak, read and write. She became a prolific author and campaigner for blind and deaf people, women’s suffrage and world peace. In 1964, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson. Her ashes were interred at Washington National Cathedral with long-time companions Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson. When did you first hear about Keller? It was when I was eight or nine years old, growing up in Canada, and I borrowed a book about her from my local library. I was fascinated to learn how a teacher, Anne Sullivan, was able to connect with this deaf and blind child, and to teach her the basics of language – spelling out words such as ‘water’ on her hands – which unlocked a whole new world for her. I was also struck by the fact that Helen didn’t just go on to live a long life but became an advocate for people with disabilities, as well as a speaker and author. What kind of woman was she? She was one of five children born to a Confederate captain-turned editor, once part of Alabama’s slave-owning elite. After being struck deaf and blind as a baby, Helen initially got by using simple sign language to communicate. She learned to rely on taste, smell and touch, using her hands to read people’s lips. Despite never being able to speak as clearly as she might have liked (something she always regretted), she became a public speaker, though her words were translated for her audience by one of her constant companions – first Anne Sullivan, later Polly Thomson. Read more | 9 things you (probably) didn’t know about Helen Keller What made her a hero? The incredible tenacity and resilience she showed in overcoming her disabilities. After learning to read and write, she thrived at school and graduated from university – one of very few women then undertaking higher education. Most impressively of all, she sought to use the power of language to change the world, becoming a powerful advocate for women’s suffrage and disability rights, among other issues. She helped transform perceptions of what it was to be deaf and blind at a time when people with such disabilities were often placed in asylums and distanced from society. What was her finest hour? First, her campaigning, which helped lead to improvements in the lives of people with disabilities. Second, her role in nurturing the American Foundation for the Blind, which she supported for the rest of her life. Can you see any parallels between her life and yours? The Confederation of British Industry, like many organisations, has had its ups and downs. And though I’ve never had to face the sort of adversity that Helen did, I’ve been inspired by her resilience and persistence, and have even used her quotes in speeches. Like her, I’m naturally an optimist at heart. Many of the things she said still resonate with me today – for instance: “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” What would you ask Keller if you could meet her? I’d love to get her take on today’s world, and find out how she thought we could best advocate for change on behalf of the less advantaged. Rain Newton-Smith has been the chief executive of the Confederation of British Industry since 2023, and was its chief economist 2014–23 This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The lie of succession: did James I steal Elizabeth I's crown?
Did James I ‘steal’ Elizabeth I’s crown? Tracy Borman considers evidence that the transition from Tudor to Stuart dynasties may not have been quite as seamless as we’ve been led to believe
Richmond Palace, 22 March 1603. Elizabeth I – the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen who had ruled England for 44 years, seeing off the Armada, healing religious divisions and creating a court so magnificent it was the envy of Europe – lay dying. Her anxious advisers clustered around her bedside, urging her to do the thing she had resisted throughout her long reign: name her successor. Rousing herself from her stupor, the 69-year-old queen declared: “I will that a king succeed me, and what king, but my nearest kinsman, the king of Scots?” Wanting to make completely sure, her chief minister, Robert Cecil, asked whether that was her “absolute resolution” – to which she irritably retorted: “I pray you trouble me no more, I’ll have none but him.” That “kinsman” was James VI of Scotland, son of Elizabeth’s old rival Mary, Queen of Scots. Her closest surviving blood relative, he had emerged as the front runner in the race for the English crown. He had the support of Cecil and most of his fellow privy councillors, who had been working behind the scenes to smooth James’s path to the throne. The queen, too, had shown him favour, sharing the pearls of her monarchical wisdom during their 20-year correspondence, as if grooming him as her successor. But she had always flinched from actually naming him as such. Now, almost with her last breath, she had. Elizabeth died two days later – and the Tudor dynasty gave way peacefully to the Stuarts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-544183312webready-e7c6f5b.jpg" width="3727" height="2485" alt="A portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots. She had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth's throne, but her son would go on to be the next monarch (Image by Getty Images)" title="A portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots. She had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth's throne, but her son would go on to be the next monarch (Image by Getty Images)" /> This dramatic depiction of Elizabeth’s last-gasp naming of the Scottish king as her heir is based solely on an account by the contemporary historian and antiquarian William Camden. He had begun writing his monumental work Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth (first published in Latin in 1615) during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Camden was close to some senior members of the queen’s court, and had access to the voluminous state papers of her reign, so historians have relied on his manuscript as one of the most important and accurate sources for the period. However, none of those present at Elizabeth’s deathbed testified that she had spoken the words Camden quoted in his account, only that the dying queen had raised her hand to her head when James’s name was mentioned – an ambiguous gesture at best. Rewriting history Now, groundbreaking new analysis of Camden’s original manuscript by a team at the British Library has revealed that key passages were covered over and rewritten after Elizabeth’s death to make them more favourable to her successor. No fewer than 200 pages have been pasted in, 65 of which replaced original text with a new version. The use of imaging technology has enabled researcher Helena Rutkowska to see the words underneath for the first time in 400 years. Among the findings are that Elizabeth’s naming of James as her heir was a work of fiction, designed to make his accession appear more predetermined than it had been. In fact, she had been the only monarch in English history not to make provision for the succession. Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love If this had been more widely known at the time, it might have had profound repercussions for the Stuart dynasty. Rather than welcoming James as the king to whom ‘Good Queen Bess’ had given her blessing, the people of England might have refused to accept him. After all, England and Scotland had been bitter enemies for centuries, with fleeting periods of peace cut short by the clash of arms or threat of invasion. And James was by no means the only candidate with a strong claim to Elizabeth’s throne. Holding on by his fingertips Camden had first been commissioned to write his history of Elizabeth’s reign in 1596 by William Cecil (Robert’s father), Lord Burghley – Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, whom she dubbed her ‘Spirit’. It was not a task that the author had embraced with any alacrity, grumbling about the “piles and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts” that had been placed at his disposal. He made only a faltering start during Elizabeth’s lifetime and, as soon as she died, he quietly set down his quill, hoping that the idea would be forgotten. Fast forward to 1607 and James VI & I had been on the English throne for four years. The initially peaceful transition from Tudors to Stuarts had given way to turbulence and uncertainty, conspiracy and persecution, witchcraft and gunpowder. With the accession of England’s first Stuart monarch, everything had been transformed – from court culture to royal ceremony, religious tolerance to parliamentary authority, morality to witch-hunting. Two countries that had been fierce rivals for centuries were now forged into an uncomfortably united kingdom. The fleeting popularity that James had enjoyed as the “bright star of the north” had been extinguished, and he was holding onto his new crown by his fingertips. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/William-Camden-MMTP8W-a7d2cb2.jpg" width="938" height="1302" alt="A painting of a bearded man dressed in dark clothing with a grey ruff, sitting against a black background" title="A portrait of William Camden, based on a work of 1609, the year after James ordered him to finish his history of Elizabeth’s reign (Image by Alamy)" /> It was at this moment that James heard about Camden’s stalled biography of his predecessor, and spied an opportunity. To have a published account of Elizabeth’s reign – and, in particular, the succession – written by one of the most esteemed historians of the age would help silence any whispers of usurpation. If, that is, the author was prepared to write it to the king’s satisfaction. It was with good reason that Camden expressed reluctance when first approached by the king to restart his history of Elizabeth. Quite apart from the heavy burden of research it entailed, writing the history of a queen who, even in death, was eclipsing her unpopular successor was fraught with difficulty. Camden knew that James would not want an unbiased appraisal but one written in his favour. Only the previous year, the king had ordered an account of the gunpowder plot to be rewritten so that it was even more complimentary towards him. Restarting the history of Elizabeth was the very definition of a poison chalice, and Camden tried everything to avoid drinking from it. But James gave him no choice. At the king’s command, work on the book resumed in 1608. Camden was his subject to command, and the succession was his to rewrite. Reviving the queen By the time Camden again took up his quill, rewriting sections to James’s benefit, the cult of ‘Gloriana’ was already in full swing. Elizabeth’s former subjects were quick to forget that they had grown tired of “an old woman’s government” and had longed to have a king ruling over them. One contemporary reflected that, a few short years after Elizabeth’s death, “when we had experience of the Scottish government, then… in hate and detestation of them, the queen did seem to revive. Then was her memory much magnified.” It was not long before praising the last Tudor queen became a powerful weapon used to attack her Stuart successor. Donning their rose-tinted glasses, her former subjects harked back to a halcyon time when England had enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity, triumphed over the might of Spain, and was presided over by a glorious queen and her court. The anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, began to be celebrated each year with “joyful ringing of bells, running at tilt, and festival mirth… in testimony of their affectionate love towards her”. Read more | Why was King James VI and I obsessed with witch hunts? But this sentimental reverence masked the intense uncertainty that had been generated by the persistent refusal of ‘Good Queen Bess’ to name her heir. It’s worth revisiting the history of this reticence and the concerns it had fomented among court and populace. On 10 February 1559 Elizabeth had told the first parliament of her reign that “in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”. She then declared that God would provide for the succession and would name an heir “peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me”. This was all very well but, without the wisdom of hindsight, Elizabeth’s subjects had no idea that she would reign longer and more successfully than any of the other Tudor monarchs. Her three predecessors, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I, had reigned for six years, nine days and five years, respectively, and there was no reason to suppose Elizabeth would escape the ill health that dogged the Tudor dynasty. Indeed, nearly four years into her reign she almost died of smallpox. This catapulted the succession to the forefront of people’s minds and, once there, it would not be forgotten. “Now all the talk is who is to be her successor,” reported the Spanish ambassador, Bishop Álvaro de la Quadra, in 1562. Elizabeth’s determination not to name her heir was born of direct experience. Being heir presumptive during her sister Mary’s brief, bloody reign had placed her in great jeopardy, including a spell in the Tower under threat of execution. “I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me,” she told a delegation from parliament in 1566 that had been sent to persuade her to settle the succession. Elizabeth feared that, as soon as she named her heir, the individual chosen would be the focus of plots and rebellions, just as she herself had been during Mary’s reign. “Think you that I could love my winding-sheet?” she demanded to an ambassador, likening a named heir to a shroud. Fierce rivalry In remaining tight-lipped about the succession, Elizabeth gave rise to fierce rivalry between the blood claimants to her throne. Principal among them were Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI; his cousin Arbella Stuart; Lady Katherine Grey and her descendants; Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon; and the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain. As Elizabeth’s reign progressed, most of the rival claimants fell by the wayside, either through natural death, disinheritance or execution. In the race for Elizabeth’s throne, it was less a case of ‘who dares wins’, more ‘survival of the fittest’. In 1600, the English government official and keeper of records Thomas Wilson opined: “This crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it.” Although he admitted that it was “straightly prohibited” to discuss the succession, he went on to give an account of at least 12 people with some kind of claim to the English throne who, in his words, “gape for” Elizabeth’s death. Of these, eight were home-grown candidates and four were from overseas. James VI might have emerged as the odds-on favourite, but his accession was by no means certain. As her long reign wore on, Elizabeth showed through her subtle, steady guiding of the king of Scots that he was, if not her ideal candidate, then at least the best of a bad lot. In the years leading up to her death, she did as much as she could to secure the succession without placing herself in danger by naming an heir. For all the anxiety, intrigue and rivalry that this engendered, the wisdom of her policy was proved by the fact that, to her last breath, her personal power in England had not been challenged by any “rising sun”. But the ultimate success of Elizabeth’s plan depended on James following the advice she had drip-fed him over the years. And that is where it fell apart. It soon became clear that the king had paid only lip service to Elizabeth’s guidance, and proceeded to flout it altogether when he took her throne. He refused to “play the king”, as she had urged, by investing in the magnificence of his court and public appearances, and instead spent most of his time in private with just a handful of favourites. Parliamentary revolt More ominously, James had no intention of sustaining the delicate relationship between crown and parliament that had been the cornerstone of Elizabeth’s success. Instead, he stood firmly by the Stuart belief in the divine right of kings, which in his view gave him the right to ride roughshod over the wishes of his people and his parliaments. This soon sparked resistance from his new English subjects. After a series of bad-tempered exchanges, parliament refused to agree to James’s plan for a formal union between his two kingdoms. Undeterred, he announced that a shared currency would be issued – a 20-shilling piece known as the ‘unite’ – and commissioned a new flag, the ‘Union Jack’ (for Jacobus, or James). Thereafter, rather than working in partnership with his government, he abandoned it altogether, spending his days hunting and cavorting with his favourites. One contemporary noted that this was “the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the king’s subjects, who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign”. Read more | King James VI and I: your guide to the first Stuart monarch of England Meanwhile, growing popular resentment against the king erupted in numerous conspiracies to remove him from the throne. In June 1603, just three months after his accession, the ‘Bye’ plot came to light, involving a group of Catholics who planned to kidnap the king and secure concessions for the practice of their religion. More serious was the ‘Main’ plot to oust James and replace him with his cousin Arbella Stuart. The most dangerous conspiracy of all came in 1605, when a group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby schemed to blow up the king and his parliament. It was only thanks to an anonymous tip-off that Westminster was searched by the royal officials, and Guy Fawkes was discovered with a huge cache of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament just hours before he was due to light the fuse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-51245104webready-cdc8473.jpg" width="2844" height="1896" alt="A black and white woodcut shows a young man kneeling down, being embraced by an older man, who is the king. Behind them, there is a group of men and" title="Prince Charles is welcomed by his father, James VI & I, in a 1623 woodcut. The second Stuart monarch of England took seriously the divine right of kings, and alienated his people and parliament (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lessons not learned All of this might have made James pause to consider that perhaps he ought to follow his predecessor’s advice after all. Instead, he doggedly continued his preferred style of monarchy, no matter the cost. Worse still, in preparing his son and heir, Charles, for the throne, James passed on none of the lessons that Elizabeth had tried to teach him. Charles would be a king in the mould of his Stuart father, not his Tudor predecessor. He took his divine right to even greater extremes than his father, and dissolved parliament whenever it refused to carry out his will. As Charles’s turbulent reign wore on, the spectre of uncertainty over the Stuarts’ right to the Tudor throne – uncertainly that, we now know was all too valid – was thrown into sharp relief. By 1642, he had pushed the supremacy of the royal will too far on both sides of the border. The kingdom was plunged into bitterly fought civil wars that culminated in Charles’s execution and the destruction of the monarchy. In the space of half a century, the crown that had glittered so brightly on Elizabeth’s head had been consigned to the flames. CONTENDERS FOR THE CROWN There was no shortage of people with designs on Elizabeth I’s English throne. But who had the best chance of success? The Scottish thorn Mary, Queen of Scots had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth’s throne. She was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland. As a Catholic, she enjoyed considerable support among those in England who opposed their queen’s Protestant faith. But Henry VIII’s will had barred his Scottish relatives from inheriting the crown of England. Furthermore, a law passed in 1350, during the reign of Edward III, decreed that “aliens” (those not born on English soil) could not inherit any land there. Nevertheless, Mary campaigned tirelessly to be named heir, and was executed for trying to take the English throne by force. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10) The front runner James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded to his mother’s throne when she was ousted from it in 1567. He also inherited her claim to Elizabeth’s throne, though Mary’s execution in 1587 threw that into jeopardy, because those related to a convicted traitor were tainted by association. In his favour was the fact that by the time of Elizabeth’s death he had a proven track record of ruling a kingdom and, even better, was male. He also enjoyed the strongest support within the English government, and the tacit support of Elizabeth herself – though Henry VIII’s and Edward III’s statutes meant that James’s accession in 1603 was technically illegal. (Contender rating: 7 out of 10) The arrogant orphan Like James, Arbella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, but had the advantage of being born on English soil. Team Arbella was also bolstered by the efforts of her two indomitable grandmothers, Lady Margaret Douglas (Henry VIII’s niece) and Bess of Hardwick, who promoted the claim of “poor orphan Arbella”. Arbella, though, was her own worst enemy. Haughty and arrogant, she alienated Queen Elizabeth, and her unstable temperament made her ill-suited for the throne. During James’s reign, she secretly married another blood claimant, William Seymour, grandson of Lady Katherine Grey (see below), and spent the rest of her life a prisoner in the Tower. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10) The marrying type Henry VIII had decreed that, in the event that his three children died without issue, the crown would pass to the descendants of his younger sister Mary. This gave Katherine Grey (Mary’s granddaughter) and her descendants the strongest legal basis for their claim, strengthened by the fact that Edward VI had made the Greys his primary heirs. Katherine sought to boost her chances further by secretly marrying Edward Seymour, the nephew of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour. But this backfired: Elizabeth condemned Katherine to life behind bars, and had her two sons declared illegitimate. However, they and their descendants continued to be seen as strong contenders for Elizabeth’s throne for years afterwards. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10) The "nearest in blood" Lady Margaret Stanley was the daughter of Eleanor Brandon, younger daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary. Margaret alleged that her cousins were debarred from the succession because of Lady Jane Grey’s treason, leaving her next in line by Henry VIII’s will and “as the nearest in blood… legitimately of English birth”. Also in her favour was the fact that she had two living sons, Ferdinando and William. She was, though, Catholic. (Contender rating: 4 out of 10) The uninterested Yorkist Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon was of the old Yorkist line. His great-great-grandmother was Lady Margaret Pole, niece of King Edward IV. His grandfather had for a time been a close personal friend of Henry VIII. In stark contrast to all the other contenders, though, Hastings showed no interest in the crown, and spent his life in loyal service to Elizabeth. Still, she didn’t trust him, and it was only after years in the political wilderness that she finally appointed him to office. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10) The Spanish princess When his own attempts to seize Elizabeth’s throne by force failed, Philip II of Spain promoted those of his daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. She was said to be “of the ancient blood royal of England” through her mother, Elisabeth of Valois. As such, she was a legitimate descendant of John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III, whereas the Tudors were descended from his illegitimate line. But the people of England were notoriously xenophobic, viewing even James of Scotland as an “alien”, and unlikely to ever accept a Spanish queen. (Contender rating: 3 out of 10)
My history hero: Isabel Allende chooses Inés Suárez (c1507–80)
Novelist Isabel Allende chooses Inés Suárez as her history hero
In profile Born in Spain, Inés Suárez participated in the conquest of Chile with her lover, Pedro de Valdivia, and defended the new settlement they founded, Santiago, from an attack by the Indigenous Mapuche people. She subsequently became a symbol of the Chilean woman standing up to authority, and has been immortalised in historical novels including Allende’s Inés of My Soul (2006), inspiration for the Spanish-Chilean television drama of the same name. When did you first hear about Suárez? When I was studying Chilean history – though she is hardly mentioned in most Chilean history books, despite being the only Spanish woman to accompany 110 Conquistadors to what was then considered the end of the world. There is no monument erected in her memory. What kind of woman was she? She came from a humble family in Spain, and was originally a seamstress. Her hair was described as “flaming”, and she never had children. Interestingly, there’s no record of her suffering any accident or illness, so she must have been incredibly strong. She also had the gift of finding water, and helped save the Conquistador army when crossing the Atacama Desert. While the other Spaniards were fighting, looking for gold and raping Indigenous women, she was collecting chickens and cows, and buying land. She became the second-richest person in the country, the envy of the Conquistador captains. Unlike those men, who all died in their thirties or forties, she lived to her seventies. Read more | Two worlds collide: Spanish conquistadors and Aztecs What made her a hero? She defied everyone and did things her way, challenging the church and the world. She was unstoppable, and I love that. Women were not allowed to accompany Conquistadors unless joining a husband – and only with the permission of the king and the church. The Conquistador men didn’t feel that they needed their wives, because they were raping Indigenous women. In contrast, Inés went to Chile for love, not in search of gold or glory. What was her finest hour? Saving Santiago – today the national capital, but then just a bunch of shacks – from an attack by 10,000 Indigenous Mapuche people. Inés took charge of the defence, and the battle was brutal. Mapuche chieftains were taken prisoner – and she had them decapitated, then threw the heads over the city defences, persuading their people to back away. The fact that a woman could do such a thing is shocking to us now, but I can’t help but admire her strength. She was also capable of showing great compassion, though. Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her? She enslaved Indigenous people, which I find horrifying – but you can’t judge her by the standards of today. Can you see any parallels between her life and your own? Not really. I’m a passionate woman, and my protagonists are strong women, but I never fought off 10,000 attackers! What would you ask Inés Suárez if you could meet her now? I’d like to have met her when she was an old woman, and asked her if she had had a happy life. Isabel Allende is a Chilean American author whose books have sold 88 million copies worldwide. Her latest novel is My Name is Emilia del Valle (Bloomsbury, 2025) This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on women's contributions to the Bayeux Tapestry
"We should remember the unknown women who made the Tapestry", writes Michael Wood
Like all readers, I am sure, I was thrilled to hear the news that the Bayeux Tapestry is coming to England next year. 1066 is the most important date in British history, and the Tapestry is the greatest single source, taking the tale from the last days of Edward the Confessor through the drama of Harold and William, the Norman invasion, and the defeat and death of Harold at Hastings. The Tapestry has been in Bayeux since the Middle Ages and has never left, save briefly during the Franco-German War and under Napoleon and the Nazis, who both sought to weaponise it prior to their own invasion attempts. But it was made in England in the aftermath of the Conquest, probably at Canterbury by English needlewomen. Scholars think that it was commissioned by the Conqueror’s brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux, who features prominently on the Tapestry along with his followers. One of those, Vitalis, is singled out and named, shown mounted and in full armour, reporting to William the whereabouts of the English army. Perhaps he was the leader of a scouting detachment who had gone ahead of the Norman army. Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year The artistic inspiration was the English school of manuscript painting in Canterbury, but there may have been Roman models, too. Trajan’s Column, in particular, depicts the emperor’s Dacian campaigns in a similar manner – like a strip cartoon. Odo himself had been to Rome; so, too, had Scolland, abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, who may have designed the Tapestry – perhaps using a sketch book from his travels? It’s a huge artwork, some 68.3 metres long, but damaged at the end: perhaps as much as 3 metres is missing. It is generally agreed that the Tapestry originally finished with William’s crowning at Westminster at Christmas 1066 – a mirror image to the opening panel of the enthroned Edward the Confessor. Based on that assumption, a brilliant full-scale reconstruction has been completed by embroiderers on Alderney (alderneybayeuxtapestry.com). It’s thought that the Tapestry was commissioned for the consecration of Bayeux Cathedral in 1077. Art historian Christopher Norton suggests that its original length would perfectly fit the nave of Odo’s new church, along three walls of a rectangular space 31 metres long and 9 metres wide, taking account of doorways and architectural supports. Possibly the first record of the embroidery tells us that, in the 15th century, it was hung in the nave at Bayeux on the feast of the cathedral’s relics, 1 July, and for the following week. By the 18th century, that period stretched from the Feast of John the Baptist on 24 June till the end of July. This gives us a key clue to its original purpose: perhaps it was made specifically to be shown in the cathedral on the relic feast. On the Tapestry, Harold has a bigger role than William, and his story unfolds as a tragedy. Harold’s fate is sealed when he breaks his oath to support William’s claim to the English throne. Before then, he was a great and successful warrior. So he’s portrayed not as a Judas but as a Macbeth – a brave man led by his ambition into disloyalty. It is possible that his fateful oath was actually sworn on the cathedral’s relics at Bayeux. If the Tapestry was dedicated by Odo to his cathedral, then the part of the relics in the story is central. Read more | “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery We know nothing of the women who made it. Yet we do know that the work of Old English needlewomen was later prized abroad as opus Anglicanum, ‘English work’. We know that Earl Byrhtnoth, the hero of the battle of Maldon in 991, was depicted on a tapestry hung in Ely Abbey (now Ely Cathedral) that perhaps also commemorated the faithful retainers named in the famous Old English poem. And even middling people had embroideries in their houses depicting heroic or biblical scenes, which provided richly coloured decoration and acted as draught-proofing. In her will from the 940s, a woman called Wynflaed gives her friend her “long hall tapestry”, which must have been a fine heirloom. So much bigger in scale, the Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by a rich and powerful person at the top of society. As for its actual makers, it is only later in the Middle Ages that we start to learn the names of some of the women who created such wonderful works of art that were prized across Europe. So when we stand in front of the Tapestry next year, and take in the immense drama of the Conquest, we should also remember the unknown women who made it: the likes (let’s imagine) of Eadgyth of Sittingbourne and Ælfflæd of Whitstable. Now, they would have a story to tell. This column was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine