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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
His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence
Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era. But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-660416773webready-b8ec9d0.jpg" width="3680" height="2453" alt="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" title="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" /> Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance. His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-526930024webready-ba9bbfe.jpg" width="1500" height="1977" alt="A black and white image of a young woman with curly hair tied back. She is wearing a low cut dress and has her arm across her lap, holding a plant stalk" title="Elizabeth Pepys, depicted in an engraving of a contemporary portrait. She died aged just 29, after nearly 14 years of marriage (Image by Getty Images)" /> The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious. Ignoring infidelities Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825. Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.) Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/6-volumes-of-diarywebready-07b7f70.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Five dark brown books with gold insignia on the front, with one open book, covered in writing" title="Pepys wrote his diaries (above) in a form of shorthand called Tachygraphy, incorporating words from other languages to further obscure his meaning (Image by Pepys Library, Magdalene College)" /> Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades. By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted. That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is. Out of kilter When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned. Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings. In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’. Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him. As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them. Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down. Read more | Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened? Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer. On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell. On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].” The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back. Controlling behaviour These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye. Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/gr0099194webreadyH-2-1ea86dd.jpg" width="3109" height="2073" alt="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" title="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" /> He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children. Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669. By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants. One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering. Read more | Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.” Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto. Lost voices The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details. These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/AKG7770684webready-e35e02b.jpg" width="1500" height="1837" alt="A painting of a man in a brown shirt with white scarf and cuffs. He is looking directly at the viewer and is holding a piece of music in his left hand" title="John Hayls’ 1666 portrait of Pepys. The diarist’s “graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions”, writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by AKG)" /> It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants. Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries. Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth. Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Far away from England, the mystery of Harold Godwinson's lost crown might have just been solved
New research into the history of a long-lost Belgian church suggests that something very precious may have been sold to fund its upkeep
Overlooking Bruges’ market square and a few hundred metres away from the neo-Gothic Provincial Palace stands a popular chain hotel, providing accommodation for some of the millions of tourists that visit the Belgian city each year. Looking at this unremarkable redbrick building, it’s hard to imagine that on the same site, an important place of worship once towered over this historic metropolis: the medieval St Donatian’s Church. And a new detail that has emerged from the archives of the church leads us to consider something even harder to imagine: could the crown of England’s last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, have been sold to pay for its upkeep? A church of sanctuary and sacrilege St Donatian’s church – named after the fourth-century French saint, Donatian – was established around AD 950 by Arnulf I, the count of Flanders. Prior to its destruction during the French Revolutionary Wars, the church was a college of canons, built to hold relics of St Donatian brought to Bruges from Torhout (a municipality in West Flanders) in around 870. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/PublicDomainsander-WL-45d2aa1.jpg" width="800" height="534" alt="A sketch of a beige church with many arched windows and a tower in the centre. It has a grey roof and many smaller buildings around it too. In the corner, there is a label reading "ECCLESIA CATHEDRALIS S. DONATIANI"" title="An illustration of St Donatian's in Flandria Illustrata, 1641 (Public domain)" /> Today, the church is best-known for being the scene of the brutal murder of another Flemish count, Charles the Good, who was attacked by a group of knights in 1127. Lesser-known, however, is the fact that the place of worship also played a significant role in the exile of Lady Gunhild – sister of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson. Read more | Shakespeare didn't do the Norman Conquest, but the Bayeux Tapestry did, so where does that leave the BBC's King and Conqueror? The church became Gunhild’s final resting place, and recent research by Elisabeth van Houts, emeritus honorary professor of medieval history at the University of Cambridge, suggests that it may have greatly benefited from the spoils of the Norman Conquest. A family in exile It is one of the most famous tales in English history, detailed on the Bayeux Tapestry and depicted in BBC drama King and Conqueror: William of Normandy’s defeat of Harold Godwinson at the battle of Hastings. It fundamentally changed England’s political and social landscape, bringing with it a new language, new power structures and the eventual creation of the first national survey, Domesday Book. Harold was killed in the fighting, as was his brother, Tostig Godwinson, at the preceding battle of Stamford Bridge. But what happened to Harold’s surviving family after the Norman Conquest? The dramatic events of 1066 didn’t just end the Anglo-Saxon era and Harold’s life – they scattered his relatives across Europe. The king’s sister, Gunhild, and their mother, Gytha, fled England for Saint-Omer in Flanders, with Gunhild later moving on to Bruges. In 1786, almost 700 years after her death, the tomb of Gunhild was uncovered in St Donatian’s Church. Her tomb included a burial plaque alongside a long Latin obituary detailing her life in exile. Such details reveal that Gunhild lived a pious and simple existence in Bruges, where “she was abstained from all pleasures” and “did not eat anything that seemed sweet to her but instead took only enough to stay alive”. From this description, you would be forgiven for thinking that Gunhild lived in poverty, but in reality, she was still extremely wealthy. Indeed, the only contemporary document to discuss Gunhild, Domesday Book, reveals her vast riches, indicating that she “held the income of four manors, one in Sussex and three in Somerset, comprising approximately 30 hides, giving her an annual income of just under £30”. Much of this wealth would have been confiscated and redistributed by the Norman invaders, but Gunhild once again came into money upon her mother’s death. According to Elisabeth van Houts, “we can get some idea of [the size of Gunhild’s wealth] from the archive of St Donatian, which in the 14th century kept records of her bequest of gold and silver to the canons”. Read more | How well did Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror know each other prior to the battle of Hastings? Given that the bequest was still being written about some 300 years after Gunhild’s death suggests that it was clearly of great importance. So much so, in fact, that the canons of the late 11th century had even buried Gunhild in the church as a sign of their gratitude. Relic in the roof? So – why were the canons so thankful for this bequest in particular? Van Houts’ research suggests that some of the gifts were no less than crown jewels. According to records from 1389, “the sale of certa jocalia (‘certain jewels’ or ‘precious objects’) given by Lady Gunhild for the repair of the church’s roof, vault and choir” were approved by the Bishop of Tournai. Antonius Schoonhoven – a canon of St Donatian’s – concluded that in Gunhild’s bequests, there “were among others an imperial crown (corona augustalis) and many works of the best authors richly ornamented”. In other words, the crown of Gunhild’s brother, Harold, may well have been bequeathed to the canons of St Donatian’s before being sold to fund vital works on the church. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/3BEHX1J-Harold-WL-3f1fcc8.jpg" width="1910" height="1273" alt="An illustration showing a king dressed in red with a blue robe sitting on a throne, holding a crown on his head. Around him, there are a group of men dressed in green, red and blue, talking to each other" title="A 13th-century manuscript illustration shows Harold Godwinson being crowned as King of England, a pivotal moment in English history (Image by Alamy)" /> We may never know the truth of the matter, but as Van Houts points out, “monastic houses acted as banks providing loans and mortgages from the 11th century… [and] the canons of St Donatian at Bruges would have expected to receive charitable donations from the English noblewomen”. Therefore, it is possible that Gunhild gifted the canons these precious possessions not merely as a sign of gratitude, but because she was expected to do so. Yet even if we don’t know the exact circumstances, the items would have likely been of huge personal value to Gunhild – both financially and emotionally. Historians have long speculated on what happened to Harold’s crown after the battle of Hastings, and there are no known confirmed records of its whereabouts beyond 1066. However, this insight into Gunhild’s fate after 1066 raises the tantalising possibility that it might have ended up with her in Bruges, rather than finding its way into the hands of the Normans. View Green Video on the source website King and Conqueror is streaming on BBC iPlayer now. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
Breeze Barrington explores the extraordinary story of Maria of Modena – the Italian-born queen consort to James VII and II – and considers how her controversial childbirth in 1688 paved the way for the Glorious Revolution
Born into Italian nobility and raised with quiet ambitions of becoming a nun, Maria (or Mary) of Modena was thrust on to the European political stage as a teenage bride to James, Duke of York, who was later crowned as James VII of Scotland and II of England. Talking to Elinor Evans, cultural historian Breeze Barrington shares how Maria navigated a foreign court, vicious anti-Catholic sentiment, and personal loss, to emerge as a resilient and principled queen. Breeze Barrington is the author of The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, 2025) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-288187&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-graces%2Fbreeze-barrington%2F9781526663788%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%2520Graces%253A%2520The%2520Extraordinary%2520Untold%2Cat%2520the%2520Restoration%2520Court%2520%28Hardback%29%26text%3DA%2520spellbinding%2520work%2520of%2520history%2Cmisogyny%2520of%2520the%2520Restoration%2520court.#:~:text=The%20Graces%3A%20The%20Extraordinary%20Untold,at%20the%20Restoration%20Court%20(Hardback)&text=A%20spellbinding%20work%20of%20history,misogyny%20of%20the%20Restoration%20court." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy now on Waterstones
From a scandalous threesome to classical stardom: the actress who found redemption in Handel’s Messiah
Susannah Cibber’s journey from abuse and scandal to a role in the debut of Messiah is one of the most remarkable stories in music history. Elinor Evans spoke to Charles King, author of Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah, to reveal how an actress embroiled in a salacious courtroom drama became the emotional heart of one of the most enduring pieces of Western music
When George Frideric Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, the audience could not have anticipated the weight of emotion the work would carry. Now one of the most beloved compositions in the classical canon, Handel’s Messiah is an oratorio with powerful choruses and solos that tells the story of Christ – from prophecy and birth to passion and resurrection. The German composer hoped his new work would not just entertain, but cause an awakening of the soul in those who listened, to bring about, as he saw it, a kind of redemption through art. Listen on the podcast | Handel's Messiah: the scandalous birth of a classical masterpiece On the night it debuted as part of a concert to raise funds for the poor, perhaps no one better personified this narrative of suffering and redemption better than one woman central to the work’s debut: Susannah Cibber. Cibber was a celebrated actress and contralto, who gained a name for herself in the mid-18th century for her remarkable stage presence. But by the time she arrived in Dublin, she was infamous for another reason: a scandalous court case that had laid bare the intimate details of her personal life. As Messiah debuted, “she was notorious,” explains historian Charles King on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Everyone knew intimately these quite embarrassing details of her sexual life.” The rise and fall of Susannah Cibber Born Susannah Arne in 1714, she was raised in the Covent Garden area of London, which by the early 18th century was an area famous for its theatres and music halls. Though her father and grandfather were upholsterers by trade, a musical vein ran through her family. Her elder brother, Thomas Arne, would later compose Rule, Britannia!, and another brother also trained as an actor and singer. Though she sang from an early age, Susannah was never taught to read music (Handel would later coach her through her singing parts note by note). Susannah would soon find her calling in the theatre, making her debut in 1732, at the age of 18, in John Frederick Lampe’s Amelia, based on a drama by satirist Henry Carey. Though her singing was noted by some for a lack of polish, “she had this power on stage to make an audience feel something,” says King. Writing on the impact of Cibber’s performances in the 19th-century Annals of the English Stage, one Dr Doran recorded how “for 14 consecutive nights Susannah drowned houses in tears, and stirred the very depths of men’s hearts”. A sensational trial Susannah had gained a name for herself on the stage, and her 1734 marriage to Theophilus Cibber, a fellow actor and prominent theatre manager, was meant to cement her status as one half of a power couple in the theatrical world. Instead, it became a source of misery. Theophilus was a reckless spendthrift who was known to “sleep his way around the cast”, says King. He also reportedly misappropriated Susannah's earnings and sold her personal belongings to satisfy his debts. Perhaps most shockingly, Theophilus began orchestrating liaisons between his wife and wealthy young men for his own financial gain. One of these men was William Sloper, a squire and the son of a wealthy MP. Sloper began to lodge with the couple, and then reportedly began an affair with Susannah at Theophilus’s behest, paying for the privilege. “Susannah fell in love with Sloper,” King recounts, suggesting that Sloper perhaps saw himself as someone who could rescue Cibber from her torrid marriage. It wasn’t to be. Instead, the affair between Susannah and Sloper led to a sensational court case when Theophilus sued Sloper for “alienation of affection”, a legal means of seeking damages for a wife’s infidelity. The trial became one of the biggest scandals of the era, partly, King explains, because they centred on “the private life of an acting couple – very public figures – and the wealthy son of a parliamentarian”. “There’s a threesome involved,” King notes. “This is big news.” Read more | A threesome with his wife and mother-in-law: the scandalous story of why one Anglo-Saxon king skipped his coronation The courtroom drama, fuelled by prurient gossip, saw Susannah’s name dragged through the mud. The proceedings were transcribed and widely sold, often accompanied by lurid illustrations, and she became a symbol of public disgrace. Faced with humiliation and social exile, Susannah disappeared from the stage for three years. Though little is known of her life in this interlude, she resurfaced in Dublin in 1741 – just in time for the first performance of Handel's Messiah in 1742. An invitation for redemption Handel was himself in a precarious position by the late 1730s. Though he was the most famous composer in Britain, his career had stalled. “There was a little bit of a sense that this was the stage of his career when he should start doing his ‘greatest hits’ tour,” King observes. But financial troubles, changing musical tastes, and declining health had left the famed German searching for a new direction. An invitation to stage a series of subscription concerts in Dublin provided him with an opportunity to reinvigorate his career. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1151169742-41cd7c3.jpg" width="773" height="1024" alt="The German-British Baroque composer George Frideric Handel. We have to dispense with the idea of Handel in a fit of religious inspiration composing 'Messiah',” King explains. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="The German-British Baroque composer George Frideric Handel. We have to dispense with the idea of Handel in a fit of religious inspiration composing 'Messiah',” King explains. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> With him, he carried the manuscript of a new oratorio: Messiah. It was a work composed to a set of verses by a man named Charles Jennens, a deeply religious person who saw the work as an act of devotion. Yet Handel was not particularly religious himself. “We have to dispense with the idea of Handel in a fit of religious inspiration composing Messiah,” King explains. Instead, the composer approached the piece as a theatrical event – one that required compelling voices to bring it to life. Despite her scandal-ridden reputation, Handel turned to none other than Susannah Cibber to be one of his soloists. He had worked with her years before, when she had appeared in a minor role in one of his compositions – but this time, she would be at the heart of his new work. Did Handel select Susannah in order to court publicity? It’s plausible, as King notes. “It’s certainly something – if not a scandal – that audiences would have noted,” King says. “She was notorious by this stage.” The first performance The performance on 13 April 1742 was unlike any other. The venue, Neal’s New Musick Hall, was not a grand cathedral but a modest concert hall on Fishamble Street, Dublin. It was not held for personal profit or royal patronage, but to raise money for local charities. It drew an overflowing audience – so large, in fact, that women were asked to attend without their hoop skirts to make room. Many were surely present to witness the voice of the now notorious Susannah Cibber. When she stepped forward to sing the lyrics written by Jennens – “He was despised, and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” – the significance of Cibber’s position in a work that sang of redemption was not lost, says King. “Anyone in the audience could have done the gender switch for themselves,” he explains. “She was a person of sorrows. She was acquainted with grief.” The emotional impact was profound. “We know from a later account that the audience behaved very unusually,” King says. “Throughout the performance, people were quiet. That would have been very unusual in a theatre of this time.” One respected clergyman in the audience, Dr Patrick Delany, was reportedly so moved by Cibber’s performance, that he jumped to his feet, overcome with emotion, and is said to have exclaimed: “Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven!” Read more | The history of London’s 10 greatest live music venues At that moment, Susannah Cibber was no longer the woman at the centre of a scandal; she was the voice of redemption, embodying the very essence of Messiah’s message of suffering and salvation. “People sensed the connection between the redemption of this individual and the redemptive message of the text,” says King. Susannah Cibber’s legacy The Dublin premiere of Messiah was a triumph, setting the stage for its enduring place in the western canon of classical music. For many, to this day, explains King, the power of Handel’s Messiah lies in its spiritual depth, emotional range, and “universal message of hope and redemption”, forever linked with Cibber’s own resurgence. Over time, the work has transcended its original context to become a cultural and seasonal tradition, especially tied to Christmas. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know “Messiah is so much a part of the holiday season that it’s always there in the background,” King muses. “But its earliest audiences thought of it as a species of music like no other.” As for Cibber, she would go on to become one of the most celebrated actresses of her time, commanding the highest salary of any female performer and earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. For this Georgian actor, Messiah was not just another performance – it was a second chance.
Flower power: how plants transformed the lives of 17th-century women
Few 17th-century women could travel the world. But the world could visit them in their gardens. Susannah Lyon-Whaley reveals how exotic plants – from Chinese rhubarb to South American passionfruit – opened new horizons in fashion, food and science
Anna Buckett had never seen a pineapple. Undeterred, on 12 July 1656, she took the bold move of stitching one. While the fine stitches on her sampler show dexterity, the result is more artistic than realistic. The red pineapple looks a little like a monstrous jelly with beetle legs. Amid Anna’s stitched pinks, pansies and honeysuckles, the pineapple – a native of countries like Brazil and Suriname that would not grow successfully in English gardens until the 1700s – was out of place. She had never seen a pineapple, but Anna may have seen pictures. The first printed depiction of a pineapple in Europe was in black and white in Gonzalo de Oviedo’s Historia General de las Indias (1535). Another herbal text (1641) claimed that the fruit tasted “as if wine, rosewater and sugar were mixed together”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2HHR700cmyk-ce191d2.jpg" width="1545" height="1030" alt="A detailed and colourful piece of needlework shows a scene with two people, a lion and a horse at the top, with several plants, leaves and red pineapples across the bottom" title="A needlework sampler stitched by Anna Buckett in 1656, including her depiction of a red pineapple, resembling a “monstrous jelly with beetle legs” (Image by Alamy)" /> Anna may have been the Anne Buckett baptised in May 1643 in Middlesex, or the Ann Becket baptised in December 1644 in Surrey, though neither is certain. Like other daughters of merchants or gentlemen learning the gentler arts, she stitched both gardens she saw and those she imagined. Needlework creations of the time swarmed with peacocks, parrots, lions, leopards and sunflowers from foreign lands. In the 17th century, voyages to new colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India turned plants like tobacco and sugarcane into profits. They also sent waves of plants rippling back across the sea. For women at home, gardens made the wider world a material reality. Dainties for a queen In 1629, John Parkinson, royal herbalist to Charles I, dedicated his new book of flowers, Paradisi in Sole, to the king’s wife, 20-year-old French-born Henrietta Maria. “Knowing your maiestie so much delighted with all the faire flowers of a garden,” the work “seemed as it were destined, to bee first offered into your highnesse hands.” The more exotic and ‘outlandish’ a flower, the more fashionable. The potatoes of Canada with their small yellow blooms, wrote Parkinson, were once stewed with butter and wine as “dainties for a queene”. But by 1629 these were “growne to be so common here with us at London, that even the most vulgar begin to despise them”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1130662874cmyk-fb05112.jpg" width="3226" height="2149" alt="A black and white sketch of several intertwining plants" title="A page from Paradisi in Sole, John Parkinson’s 1629 book of flowers dedicated to Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. Parkinson urged elite women to smell and taste the blooms in their gardens" /> Paradisi in Sole was a gateway to further knowledge for ‘gentlewomen’, and Parkinson urged such women to look, smell and taste in their own domestic gardens. The crown imperial from Constantinople “doe smell somewhat strong as it were the savour of a Foxe”. Tulip bulbs tasted like “sweete onions”. The West Indian “daffodil with a red flower” was “by the Indians in their tongue named Azcal Xochitl”. Flowers introduced new smellscapes as well as sights. The scent of orange flowers – originally grown in China – in perfumed waters was favoured by ladies and queens, even if the orange fruit could be sold in playhouses by girls of dubious reputation. In a Dutch still life painting by Pieter Claesz dated 1627, a dead turkey baked into a pie clutches a sprig of orange blossom in its beak. On a table set with Chinese porcelain, a Pacific nautilus shell and Indian spices, the blossom is just one of many exotica. Sweet-smelling nasturtiums from the West Indies decked small bunches that a woman might present to a friend or receive from a lover. Blooms like jasmine, orange blossom and the delicate white flowers of the Mexican tuberose perfumed women from princesses to sex workers. A satire on a lady’s dressing room by Mary Evelyn in 1690 described gloves scented with such fragrances. In the poem Pendragon, or, The Carpet Knight his Kalendar (1698), the knight follows Selena to church, only to be overwhelmed by “a whiff of tuberose” emanating from “her skin or clothes”. A scent bottle from the Cheapside hoard of Elizabethan and Stuart jewels, found in London in 1912, is encrusted with enamel, gold and gems. Other bottles engraved with oriental-style birds and plants attested to the value of the smells they contained. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/HR2E2Tcmyk-8d05622.jpg" width="1754" height="1168" alt="A painting shows to women in dresses, with curly hair. The woman on the left wears a pearl necklace. The one on the right is holding a painting of a tulip" title="A portrait of Mary Capel (left) with her sister Elizabeth (holding a painting of a tulip). Mary was reportedly responsible for the introduction of 87 new plants into England" /> Like Anna’s pineapple, flowers were sources of artistic inspiration and invited readers to picture foreign places. Elizabeth, Countess of Carnarvon, holds her own painting of a tulip, also known as a ‘Turk’s cap’, in a portrait with her sister Mary Capel, later Duchess of Beaufort. For Mary, flowers were a scientific passion. Plants put her in touch with botanists like Hans Sloane and opened her mind to places she could only read of: the West Indies, China, Japan and Ceylon. Mary kept books of the plants she grew and collected, along with notes including their indigenous names. Among her pressed flowers at the Natural History Museum is a desiccated South American passionfruit “ripen’d at Fairford in Gloucestershire”. As a woman, Mary could not join the Royal Society, the premier organisation for the study of natural history, nor publish work in her name. Yet, in the century of her death it was reported that she was responsible for the introduction of 87 new plants, among them Virginian blush flowered speedwell and Persian bell flowered gigantic swallow wort. One hundred years after she died, botanist Robert Brown named the Western Australian gravel bottlebrush after her: Beaufortia Decussata. Prickly fig trees But not only duchesses took an interest in botany. “Mistresse Thomasin Tunstall” lived in rural Bull Bank in Lancashire, 5 miles north of Hornby Castle, far from noble courts. Tunstall collected rare native plants like the cuckoo flower and lady slipper orchid. Parkinson noted that she “hath often sent mee up the rootes to London, which have borne faire flowers in my garden”. The marginal notes in Tunstall’s copy of botanist John Gerard’s famous ‘herbal’ show her awareness of plants from the wider world. Tunstall noted that Gerard’s “Prickly Indian Fig tree” grew at “Mr Parkinson’s gardin at the siyne of the goulden morter on Ludyat Hill”. Women worked with these plants – as well as studied and collected them. A bill from the 1680s for Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II, offers rare evidence of women’s garden labour. Weeders worked among the queen’s sweet-scented tuberoses, Ethiopian bladder senna, purple Virginian honeysuckle, and apios americana sourced from the keeper of the Chelsea Physic Garden. At least one found love amid the blooms. On 19 August 1688, Katherine Griffin married Thomas Williams – one of the queen’s garden labourers – at the Holy Trinity in Knightsbridge and is subsequently listed with the weeding women as Katherine Williams. Despite being paid 10p a day or £1 a month (roughly £120 today), half as much as the male gardeners whose names are recorded in the same bills, women like Katherine were adept at their tasks. The “garden of pleasure stored with these out-landish flowers… needeth not so much or so often manuring with soyle, as another garden planted with… English flowers,” John Parkinson had written in Paradisi in Sole. But it did “neede to bee well cleansed from all annoyances… stones, weedes, rootes of trees, bushes”. A weeding woman had to know which seedlings to pull. What might she have thought of the unusual plants she was required to treat like “so many jewels”? Such work did not go unnoticed. The young noblewoman Celia Fiennes described a statue of an “old weeder woman” in the Duke of Bedford’s cherry garden that was “done so like and her clothes so well that at first I tooke it to be a real living body”. A Mortlake tapestry pictures a woman weeding. Her clothes, which are not as rich as those worn by a nearby noble couple, suggest she might be the gardener’s wife. The daffodils growing beside her were new additions to the decorative garden under names such as ‘Narcissus Africanus’, the French daffodil, and the ‘Daffodill of Constantinople’. Shining like diamonds In the garden of pleasure and the adjoining kitchen garden, North American tobacco with its pretty pink flowers became a salve for ulcers and wounds, or a syrup to treat asthma. Manuscript books of recipes compiled by women include “pellitory of Spayne” (likely the North African Anacyclus pyrethrum) in a gargle for phlegm and rhubarb from China in laxatives. Widely read printed recipes called for sugar, the crystallised product of the juice from the sugar cane plant. With its fine white powder, a lady or her maidservant could transform English roses, borage, marigolds or gillyflowers into “candie hard and glistering like diamonds”. A humbler conserve of native betony flowers and foreign sugar purporting to aid conception instructed its maker to boil “betony new and tender one pound, the best sugar three pound” until they became a syrup. At the start of the 17th century, sugar was a luxury product. But by the end of the century, plantations established in British colonies like Barbados meant sugar was affordable for the likes of yeoman farmers and their wives. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/15-Ladies-Directory-Af-d.45-titlepagecmyk-c46872d.jpg" width="1104" height="735" alt="An old double page from a book shows an illustration of a woman making syrup on the left, and on the right, a page titled THE LADIES DIRECTORY IN CHOICE EXPERIMENTS AND CURIOSITES OF PRESERVING IN JELLIES AND CANDYING BOTH FRUITS & FLOWERS" title="The Ladies Directory of “experiments and curiosities” from 1662 offers women advice on producing drinks, jellies, candied flowers and cakes" /> But ‘exotic’ flowers had a darker side. To source specimens, English women relied on imperial trade routes. The Duchess of Beaufort had trees, cuttings and saplings transported from Barbados. One of the ships that transported “poyson trees” for her in 1696 returned to the island in 1702 carrying enslaved people as cargo. Some gentlewomen may have read Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), written to attract sugar planters to the colony. He wrote of a new vegetable root “of which the negres brought the seeds” that was “very good meat” for sea voyages, “boyl’d with powdred pork, and eaten with butter, vinegar, and pepper”. Other pages detailed tortures to keep the enslaved African population in check. How much did women of the time know about their impact on ecologies and people far away? It is difficult to guess. Today, flowers imported to the UK from markets such as Kenya are plagued by instances of modern-day slavery. Are those of us who admire and purchase these travelling beauties, these innocent-looking roses, plastic-wrapped and transported thousands of miles on planes, so different from early modern women? Few 17th-century English women may have travelled the high seas to foreign climes but many, particularly the educated and wealthy, experienced the wider world through nature’s bounty. As plants shaped their view of foreign shores, they in turn made these plants into something new. In their gardens, foreign flowers were moulded into emblems of fashion and art, and exotic plants became perfumes, medicine and food. When the young Anna Buckett stitched a pineapple, the curious mind of this ordinary girl was encountering a world miles away from her English pinks and pansies. Or was it? Through books or word of mouth, pineapples had entered her own experience. Susannah Lyon-Whaley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of York This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Reshaping narratives, repatriation and Richard III : 25 lessons we've learnt from history in the last 25 years
To celebrate a quarter-century of BBC History Magazine, we asked 25 expert contributors to nominate the most important historical discoveries and revelations since the publication launched in 2000
1. Women played major roles in the Viking Age Just 25 years ago, there seemed to be little new to say about the Vikings – and that was particularly the case for Viking women. The centuries-old consensus was that Viking wives and daughters stayed at home, passively watching as the Viking Age unfolded around them. New technologies have forced a rethink, though, completely revolutionising what we know about Viking women. The first significant discovery came from a systematic survey of a nationwide database of metal-detected female dress jewellery. This demonstrated for the first time that Scandinavian women migrated to England in substantial numbers. Next, isotope analysis of teeth from the graves of Viking women showed that they had formed a key part of the migration process elsewhere, too, moving across the Viking world alongside their families. The most dramatic and most debated discovery, however, came through analysis of ancient DNA. In Birka, Sweden, an individual buried in a high-status warrior grave turned out to be biologically female. This led to a worldwide discussion of the roles of Viking women: we now agree that, though many certainly did stay at home, some played active roles in trade, craft and manufacturing processes, and even held military positions. Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, author and TV presenter. Her books include The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons (William Collins, 2023) 2. Britain has been culturally diverse for far longer than most believed The murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 signalled a turning point in the way the histories of people of African descent were taught and perceived across Europe. From that moment, the British press and institutions felt that they had to engage better with narratives about minority ethnic communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1292414316-CMYK-6ff23f7.jpg" width="1451" height="967" alt="A black and white photograph of a man sitting in a chair, leaning on one arm. He is wearing a suit." title="Walter Tull, an English footballer of Caribbean heritage, c1908–11 and (below) with the FA Amateur Cup-winning Clapton FC team of 1908–09. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army, he was killed in action in France in March 1918" /> A renewed interest in personal histories and trajectories of people of African descent in Britain showcased stories about their links to major events – from the celebrated story of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole during the Crimean War to the experiences of black British football player Walter Tull and other soldiers of Caribbean and African descent who fought for Britain during the world wars. We also saw a number of new black history courses launched in UK universities, and school classes featuring black, Asian and minority ethnic histories. Uncovering these multiple trajectories further highlights how culturally diverse Britain has been over many centuries, and why sharing stories about a common past can bring communities together. Olivette Otele is a distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. Her books include African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020) 3. The Tudors got Richard III wrong We learned many things from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park 13 years ago. We learned about the king’s physique, his diet and the injuries he sustained while fighting for crown and country at Bosworth against a foreign-backed invader. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/BAL1066157-CMYK-2-7311920.jpg" width="2889" height="1925" alt="A painted portrait of Richard III. He is wearing a red top with a gold cape around his shoulders, with a black cap that includes a gold jewel on the front" title="Richard III, portrayed after 1510 – long after his death at Bosworth. “History can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held assumptions,” says Philippa Langley (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> But, for me, two lessons in particular stand out from the discovery. The first is that history can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held traditions and assumptions – even those held by historians and archaeologists. Those of us working on the Looking for Richard Project trusted only our own painstaking, personal research in primary sources. Second, we learned that Shakespeare’s hunchback and withered arm never existed. Analysis of Richard’s skeleton – which had lain underfoot and peacefully undisturbed for 500 years – revealed that his limbs were sound, and that his spine showed a scoliosis that was invisible to onlookers. Richard’s makeshift burial in the wake of his defeat at Bosworth, in a grave cut too short, was hugely revealing. It speaks across the centuries of a victor’s disrespect for a fallen king. Philippa Langley is a historian, author and producer. Her latest book is The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023) Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case 4. Magna Carta was only part of a truly revolutionary settlement King John’s Magna Carta is perhaps the best-known document in world history, generally regarded as the first attempt to place kingship itself under the rule of law. Not surprisingly, it has been much studied. Yet a torrent of new evidence has been brought to light over the past 20 years, transforming understanding of both the document and its wider context. We now know of many more ‘original’ Magna Cartas (from its subsequent reissues) than were previously dreamed of. And incidental discoveries in archives from Paris to New England have reshaped our appreciation of what actually happened in 1215. A fortuitous discovery in Lambeth Palace Library, for example, reveals that the charter was part of a truly revolutionary settlement, with the barons briefly permitted dual control of local government in tandem with the king. We know, too, that John himself made no attempt to publish the charter. On the contrary, it was the bishops who ensured its distribution, preservation and even, in some cases, its physical copying. The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is unmasked not so much as an honest broker between king and barons but as an ideologically committed adherent of the anti-royal party. By such means can new evidence help us rewrite the past – even for the oldest and best-known stories. Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His books include John (Allen Lane, 2020) 5. We ignore the past at our peril Most compellingly, the past 25 years have reminded us that history matters. Every life-sapping conflict since the millennium – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza – has its roots deep in the past. Of course, the past does not determine the future, but the future is shaped by the past. Merely railing against adversaries or shouting ‘victory’ from the rooftops may make for good headlines but, in the absence of some understanding of ‘how we got from there to here’, such indulgence is vacuous grandstanding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2198688988-CMYK-2766b77.jpg" width="3500" height="2331" alt="A group of Sudanese women and children dressed in bright clothing sit on the ground together. They all look serious." title="Women and children displaced by the civil war in Sudan, February 2025. The roots of such conflicts lie deep in the past, says Jonathan Dimbleby (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past has never been ‘another country’. This is especially true of Europe, where the tectonic plates did not stop shifting with the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of the past 25 years have demonstrated only too cruelly that our continent is inherently, and sometimes alarmingly, unstable. All leaders claim to act in what they believe to be the national interest. The. less they make ill-judged declaratory statements of intent and the more they demonstrate a realistic vision of the future, based on a clear awareness of the past, the better it will be for all of us. History is a great mentor. Jonathan Dimbleby is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. His latest book is Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Viking, 2024) 6. Hitler tapped into hard-wired emotions to stir up hatred For my new book, I found it tremendously helpful to talk to academic psychologists and neuroscientists about the insights we can gain, in general terms, from their disciplines. For instance, I learned how Hitler – without knowing the science behind his actions – tapped into a profound truth about the way the brain works. In stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks, Hitler targeted the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. It’s a survival mechanism that, as the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky explained to me, is “hard-wired into us… and we’ll never get rid of it”. Hitler capitalised on this neurobiological tendency, and in the process did his best to subdue the parts of the brain that offer a more logical analysis. Indeed, he seemed to confirm that he was well aware of the immense power of this approach when he remarked, during a private speech to the Hamburger Nationalklub in 1926, that “the only stable emotion is hate”. Laurence Rees is a historian, author and documentary film-maker. His new book is The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Viking, 2025) 7. Hunter-gatherers and farmers joined in wild rituals 12,000 years ago Around the turn of this millennium, in a remote south-eastern corner of Turkey, an astonishing discovery was being made – one that stretched the story of humanity back more than 12,000 years. Still today, only about 5 per cent of the archaeological site known as Karahantepe has been excavated – but even that tiny fraction is changing our understanding of the beginning of society as we know it. Emerging from the earth is a giant chamber with 11 huge stone phallus columns, overlooked by the face of a man with a splendid handlebar moustache and the body of a snake. The head of a big cat is visible in the centre, and carvings on 250 obelisks in the area could be mistaken for gargoyles on any medieval cathedral.We expect the female equivalent of the chamber to be unearthed soon. Karahantepe, it turns out, is just one site in a constellation of a hundred or so – the Taş Tepeler – which together are rewriting the story of human collaboration. The orthodoxy used to be that hunter-gatherers invented farming, then settled down, then manifested religion to establish common mores to live by. But the discoveries seem to show that hunter-gatherers and the very first farmers gathered together in huge, collective spaces for wild ritual parties to share know-how and ideas. This is one of the joys of history: it is constantly protean. Every year, new finds reveal earlier and earlier evidence of human achievement and sophistication. Bettany Hughes is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her latest book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (W&N, 2024) 8. Returning stolen artefacts to Africa is no longer a naive dream Some 25 years ago, when I was starting my career in museums, a sense of optimism and renewal imbued the sector – yet the restitution of stolen African objects did not seem a realistic possibility. Today, the culture has changed profoundly. My old employer, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, has returned its contested Benin plaques; the Dutch, Germans and French have either begun programmes of return or discussed the possibility. In Britain, the Horniman has returned ownership of its Benin plaques, and the V&A and the British Museum (both restricted by law from giving collections permanently) have entered into long-term loan agreements with the Asante royal family in Ghana. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1432612271-CMYK-85c7997.jpg" width="2806" height="1869" alt="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria (Image by Getty Images)" title="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria" /> Conversations that were inconceivable a generation ago – about ethics, about custodianship, about narrative, about ghosts – have begun to happen. We have to find ways to tell complex stories of empire, enslavement and colonialism more effectively and inclusively. It’s important that museums can craft their curatorial narratives with moral confidence, and the resolution of such thorny, long-term issues is vital. There is still much to do. Our museums must go further in building partnerships and programmes with museums across the African continent. We need to learn from African expertise – and in turn we must share our resources and expertise to improve the telling of these rich and amazing histories everywhere. Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Bantam, 2012) 9. Anne Boleyn was a proto-feminist heroine Anne Boleyn is unique among English queens, and her story is remarkable, but much of the modern fascination with that tale lies in perceptions of her fuelled by films and novels. She is now revered as a feminist heroine – a concept I would once have dismissed as anachronistic. When I said as much to the historian Sarah Gristwood, she replied: “Well, actually…” and very generously allowed me a preview of her research for her marvellous book Game of Queens (Oneworld, 2016), which inspired me to find out more. Feminism was unknown in Tudor England. But in early 16th-century Europe, where Anne spent her formative years, there was an intellectual debate that questioned traditional attitudes to women, and looked forward to an era – the ‘reign of virtue’ – in which they would enjoy more power and equality. In this age of female rulers, Anne had two shining examples to study: Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Valois, both of whom she served or knew. We have to study her in this European context in order to understand the cultural influences to which she was exposed, giving her the confidence to pursue her brilliant career. Alison Weir is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey (Headline, 2025) 10. Mary Seacole was a true heroine of the Crimean War One of the most significant changes over the past 25 years is the extent to which researching and writing black history has opened up. This is partly down to the dedication of historians determined to extend knowledge of the black experience by digging deeply and stubbornly into little-consulted sources. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2PJ0WEX-CMYK-06a24e3.jpg" width="2422" height="1614" alt="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" title="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" /> In my own case, 20 years of concerted searching across digitised newspapers and in genealogical archives gave the lie to the till-then widely perpetuated view that Mary Seacole had been wildly overrated and undeserving of the ‘Greatest Black Briton’ sobriquet awarded her in 2004. For decades, detractors dismissed her as a colourful but largely irrelevant presence who had done little more than ‘sell tea and buns’ to the soldiers in Crimea. But my searches, enabled by digitisation of sources, brought me to a more complete view of a woman who deserves to be viewed as a heroine. She journeyed 1,600 miles to Crimea under her own steam and at her own expense to set up shop in the middle of a war zone – a lone black woman facing prejudice and risking her own safety to help the wounded, sick and dying. Delving into previously unseen sources over an extended period enabled me to challenge the conventional sanctification of ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ and present a fully rounded personality. Helen Rappaport is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Rebel Romanov (Simon & Schuster, 2025) 11. Public history can play a major role in understanding the past One great change over the last 25 years has been the huge growth in public history – not just as an academic discipline, though of course it rests on the work of professional historians, archivists and museum workers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-473083908-CMYK-5eef700.jpg" width="5184" height="3454" alt="A woman wearing plain clothing and with her hair in a bun sits at a spinning wheel" title="A re-enactor at a recreation of a medieval German monastery village. Such projects contribute to public – and academic – understanding of the past (Image by Getty Images)" /> Public history is the product of us all. It is about public interaction with the past, its interpretation and popularisation – changing our understanding not only of the past but also of our own times. It’s about the link between historians and the general public. Films, podcasts, radio, heritage societies, living archaeologists, local history and re-enactment groups – even readers of this magazine – are all part of it. Good popularisation is the necessary link between professionals and the population at large, without which history becomes a closed debate between historians. And in a democracy, that link is vital: it’s part of a healthy information ecosystem, our reality check in the face of the tide of fake history on social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Trump’s America the US National Council on Public History is becoming more important in keeping minds open. When I hear people argue that you can’t rewrite history – though that is our actual collective job as makers of history! – it makes me think that perhaps we should have one here, too. Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. Read his column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 12. Charles I wasn’t so very chaste Traditional accounts of Charles I, the so-called ‘martyr king’, have always presented him as a grave, austere and chaste figure – the very opposite of his indecorous, bawdy father, James VI & I, and his dissipated, promiscuous son, Charles II. Charles’s marriage to his wife, Henrietta Maria, was undoubtedly a happy one and, until the royal couple were torn apart during the Civil War, he does indeed appear to have remained true to her alone. However, in an article published in 2006, the historian Sarah Poynting revisited a series of encrypted letters written by Charles in late 1647 and 1648, while he was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight after his defeat by the parliamentarians. Previous attempts to decipher these letters had not been entirely accurate, Poynting showed, and in fact one of them revealed that Charles had been attempting to inveigle the royalist agent Jane Whorwood into his bed. Using the frankest language, Charles went so far as to suggest to Jane that she should secretly conceal herself in the ‘stool-room’ adjoining his chamber while he was out on his daily walk so that, after his return, he could dally with her at length. It was a remarkable discovery – and one that suggested previous characterisations of the king as “blamelessly uxorious” may well have been a little wide of the mark. Mark Stoyle is professor of history at the University of Southampton. His latest book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022) Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? 13. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes One of the major scientific advances in archaeology over the past 25 years has been the ability to extract and analyse DNA from the remains of long-dead people from the distant past. Such ancient DNA can shed light on how people were related to one another, on a family or population scale, and provide insights into the migration and movement of people over time. It can also tell us what diseases they had and – perhaps most compelling – what they looked like. In 2018, researchers at the Natural History Museum revealed that one of the inhabitants of Mesolithic Britain, a man who lived around 10,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes. This individual – known as ‘Cheddar Man’, because his remains were discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset – is represented by one of the oldest complete skeletons ever identified in Britain. Earlier results from remains found from Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary confirm that most hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe looked this way. The genes for lighter skin pigmentation arrived thousands of years later, in waves of migration from the east during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In addition, natural selection over time favoured lighter tones that allow more Vitamin D synthesis in the skin, essential in northerly climes. Susan Greaney is a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter 14. Premodern Japan was surprisingly progressive One of the most fascinating and dynamic periods of Japanese history was the Meiji Restoration, which began with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ended with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Japan opened up as never before to diplomatic and trading relationships with the west and, over little more than four decades, modernised its economy and society at an astonishing rate. By 1912, it had become one of the world’s great powers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-566421965-CMYK-53c95d9.jpg" width="2704" height="1802" alt="A print showing a large blue river with little boats on it. A large arched bridge crosses the river. In the background, a volcano can be seen" title="An 1856 print of rural Japan by Hiroshige. Under the Tokugawa shogunate that preceded the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan enjoyed an artistic and intellectual flourishing (Image by Getty Images)" /> For a long time, this explosion of activity was contrasted with the preceding 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. That system was regarded as feudal, backward and badly out of date, requiring rescue at the hands of modernising and westernising reformers. Much though this view of history suited western historians across the 20th century, and flattering as it was to western modernity, since 2000 historians have increasingly been exploring the myriad achievements of the shogunate. Across two and a half centuries of peace, Japanese commerce, intellectual life and the arts enjoyed extraordinary growth and creativity, from theatre through to a tourism industry and a publishing boom. Without the commercial and technical expertise, high literacy rates and great bustling cities that developed under the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration could not have happened in the way that it did. Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and creator of the IlluminAsia newsletter and podcast (illuminasia.org). His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) 15. Egypt’s great pyramids at Giza weren’t built by foreign slaves Dominating the Giza Plateau for almost five millennia, the great pyramids still capture imaginations around the world. For centuries, archaeologists and historians have tried to determine how these magnificent monuments, including the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, were created – and now we know who built them. Contrary to popular depictions, construction wasn’t completed by foreign slaves but by Egyptian employees. Excavations of a workers’ village over the past couple of decades, and the discovery of builders’ tombs in 2009, have transformed the narrative. The village, dating from the Fourth Dynasty (starting c4,600 years ago), boasted bakeries, breweries, butchers and a hospital. In the burial sites, skeletons show signs of hard labour, as one might expect, but they’re also accompanied by jars of bread and beer, ready for the afterlife. There are female skeletons, too, confirming that women played roles in building the pyramids. Hieroglyphs suggest a system of skilled labourers and artisans, from “overseer of the side of the pyramid” to “inspector of the craftsmen”. It’s also clear that villagers from surrounding areas came here to work in construction, usually in three-month stints. Their graffiti indicates that each cadre might associate themselves with one particular pharaoh or pyramid: the “friends of Khufu”, for example, or “drunkards of Menkaure”. The inscriptions confirm that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the manner and location of the burials, in the shadow of the great pharaohs, puts the slave myth to bed. Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University. His latest book is Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023) 16. Personal links to empire can reshape old narratives Astonishingly, I completed my entire education without learning about the British empire. I don’t even have a recollection of hearing the world ‘empire’ mentioned at school – and I studied History A-level! I now know that my experience is not unique. In the past 10 years or so, though, I have gained a growing understanding of not only what happened and how it shaped Britain today, but also of my own personal connection to empire and its tumultuous end. I feel lucky to be making programmes and writing books at a time when there is a greater interest in knowing about Britain’s imperial past – not that it is without complications or controversies. And things continue changing: a new generation of historians is exploring archives and asking different questions. Teachers are choosing to explore empire in all its complexity, and conversations are being had between people in the diaspora and their family members about a time when they were subjects of empire. I am learning that, just because an area of history is overlooked or not spoken of, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Read her Hidden Histories column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 17. Stonehenge was built in an already sacred area The past two and a half decades have seen a transformation in our understanding of one of the most iconic ancient monuments in Britain and, indeed, the world: Stonehenge. Archaeological research has revealed that the 4,500-year-old prehistoric ‘temple’ stood at the heart of a sacred landscape infinitely richer than previously thought. Scores of ritual monuments have been discovered in a vast halo scattered across the countryside around the monument. Even more extraordinarily, tests have revealed that one of Stonehenge’s most important stones was transported all the way from what’s now northern Scotland – and that a large number of the smaller stones had probably originally formed part of another stone circle in south-west Wales before being brought here. And research shows that some of the Neolithic people buried at Stonehenge did not come from the area but from western Britain, possibly from modern-day Wales – significant, given the origins of many of its smaller stones. We now know, too, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active in the Stonehenge area some 5,000 years before the monument existed. This remarkable new information, together with earlier evidence that a series of Mesolithic wooden obelisks may have stood adjacent to the site of Stonehenge, suggests that the area had been sacred for millennia. David Keys is the archaeological correspondent for The Independent 18. The tide seems to have turned against the British empire By the year 2000, the British empire – formerly a global superpower – had been transformed into an organisation with entirely voluntary membership, the Commonwealth. At the time, academic assessment of this extraordinary transformation resulted in a number of books – including my own – which concluded that British imperialism had been overall, and in a remarkable variety of ways, both a blessing and a curse. In the 25 years since that relatively benign consensus, however, there has been a profound anti-imperial swing resulting in a wholesale condemnation of British imperial history – shifting the dial remarkably. It is, however, vital to understand that, even at its Victorian zenith, the empire faced trenchant criticism from within. Anti-imperial attitudes were commonplace on the left wing of the Liberal Party, the infant Labour Party and the generally hostile Irish Nationalist Party. Nonconformist churches – Methodists, Congregationalists and, above all, Quakers – voiced criticisms of imperial aims and methods. Internal opposition, from resentful Afrikaners, French Canadians and diverse displaced and conquered Indigenous peoples, also inevitably arose. To cope with such internal opposition, and to prolong its existence, the imperial system undertook much self-correction – a process that led to mass devolution, the end of empire and the birth of today’s Commonwealth. In short, we are now keenly aware that there is no neat and fireproof analysis of the nature, governance and purpose of the British empire. It was such a huge, complex and long-lived organisation that almost every criticism, as well as almost every justification, has some validity somewhere and at some time. Denis Judd is professor emeritus of imperial and Commonwealth history at London Metropolitan University, and author of Empire (IB Tauris revised paperback edition, 2012) 19. The world is in danger of reverting to its darkest days After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia and eastern Europe in 1989–91, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he predicted optimistically that the demise of the Soviet system meant that western liberalism would roll out across the world, and that the future belonged to progressive democracy, with no rivals to challenge it. In fact, since the first issue of BBC History Magazine was published in 2000, history has evolved along a drastically different path to the one that Fukuyama predicted. So far, the 21st century has belonged to resurgent strongmen. In country after country, authoritarian regimes led by dictatorial rulers have come to power – and stayed there, with scant regard for democracy. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Erdogan’s Turkey, Kim’s North Korea and Sisi’s Egypt are leading examples of a worldwide trend that shows no sign of ending. So what we have learned from history in this century is a rather troubling lesson. After the terrors of the 20th century, the world is not moving into broad, sunlit uplands but is in danger of reverting to the darkest days of the past. Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist and former reviews editor of BBC History Magazine. His latest book is Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich (John Blake, 2023) 20. Technology enables deep-sea shipwreck discoveries – but we should beware hubris In recent years, sophisticated modern technologies have allowed humans to dive deeper, explore the seabed autonomously, and locate shipwrecks. Lost in 1915 in the Weddell Sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance made headlines when its wreck was rediscovered in 2022. Recovering or even visiting the wreck, which lies at a depth of 3,000 metres, are major challenges. But submersible robots were able to photograph the Endurance from every angle, enabling scientists to create a digital model of the whole vessel as well as many artefacts preserved just as they were when the crew abandoned ship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1137373443cmyk-1b64874.jpg" width="5248" height="3496" alt="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" title="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" /> The wreck of the Gloucester, lost in 1682 after hitting a sandbank while transporting James, Duke of York and his court, was discovered in 2007. Future excavation of the site could provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore a Restoration royal court frozen in time. Just as the Mary Rose Museum has captured the public imagination, making Henry VIII’s warship part of British national conversations, telling the Gloucester’s stories could transform public understanding of a historical period that laid the constitutional foundations of modern Britain. In 2025, mid-point in the United Nations ‘Ocean Decade’, a key task is to meaningfully integrate Britain’s remarkable maritime cultural heritage into ocean governance to help create a sustainable blue economy. Nonetheless, humanity should remain humble in the face of the ocean’s uncontrollable forces. The implosion in 2023 of the submersible Titan on its expedition to the wreck of the Titanic – resulting in the death of all on board – is a cautionary tale. Some 3 million shipwrecks around the world prove that the sea – so elemental, so powerful – shouldn’t be disrespected. Claire Jowitt is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of East Anglia 21. We now know how many enslaved African people were trafficked across the Atlantic The transatlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced movements of people in world history – yet for decades it was difficult to quantify. Then, in the early 1990s, an international team came together to solve this problem. The result was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which showed that 12.5 million people were transported. Of those, 10.7 million survived the journey and arrived in the Americas. Many people, particularly in the US and the UK, assumed that most enslaved people were trafficked to the United States. In fact, the database showed that fewer than 400,000 Africans were forcibly taken directly to mainland North America; about 4.8 million arrived in South America and 4.7 million in the Caribbean. First published as a CD-ROM in 1999, the database was greatly expanded in the early 2000s to include the Portuguese trade in the South Atlantic. Re-released as an open-access website in 2008, including details of an additional 7,000 journeys, it has been described as one of the greatest historical achievements of the 21st century. Though the database does not give us a rich picture of the experiences of enslaved peoples, it has been critical to understanding the scale of one of the world’s worst human-rights violations. Hannah Cusworth is a historian, curator and history education consultant Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation 22. Richard III was behind the disappearance of the princes in the Tower… probably It’s history’s most compelling missing persons case: what happened to Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, after they were placed in the Tower in 1483 on the orders of their uncle, who soon afterwards seized the throne as Richard III? The mystery has been the subject of intense debate ever since. Some three decades later, Thomas More had established the narrative that Richard had his nephews murdered with the help of his henchman, James Tyrell. There was no shortage of other suspects but, though every scrap of evidence has been pored over by generations of historians since, the trail was already cold. Recently, Tim Thornton, professor of history at the University of Huddersfield, took a novel approach. Rather than researching the events leading up to the princes’ disappearance, he traced the lives of those involved in the years that followed – and found links between Thomas More and the two men he claimed had carried out the murder for Tyrell. Then, last year, Thornton came across a book of wills in the National Archives that included one made in 1516 by a wealthy London widow, Margaret Capel, half sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell. Among her chattels listed in the will was “the chain of Edward V” – the only one of the boys’ possessions referenced in sources after their disappearance. The fact that it turned up in the family of the prime suspect makes it close to a ‘smoking gun’. Tracy Borman is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her documentary The Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery is on My5 23. History can help veterans cope with PTSD A remarkable discovery made this century is that history can be hugely therapeutic for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It might seem deeply counterintuitive but when veterans undertake top-level archaeological research on battlefields, rather than re-igniting their traumas it often tends to work in positive ways for them psychologically, and can be a useful step on their road to recovery. The work done by the organisation Waterloo Uncovered, founded in 2015 by former Coldstream Guards captain (and PTSD sufferer) Mark Evans, has been instrumental in this regard. Its mental-health experts found that, after helping to discover facts that are useful to military historians – the musket-ball scatter-pattern outside the orchard at the Hougoumont farmhouse in a key sector of the Waterloo battlefield, for example – veterans often saw improvements in their mental conditions. There are various theories about the mechanisms of this effect. Perhaps such work reminds veterans that their predecessors two centuries ago encountered much the same kind of perils they did themselves in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Evans also noted that the project provided a safe and structured environment in which veterans with shared experiences could start to open up to one another about the challenges they faced. Whatever the reason, history is helping in a tangible way today. Andrew Roberts’ latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of War-fare from 1945 to Gaza (William Collins, 2024) 24. Technology has revolutionised how historians work and collaborate One of the great things about historical research is that it keeps on moving. When I was a young historian, looking back in time required me to handle complex written materials and work out how to supplement them with reference material culture, to archaeology or to finds such as coins and lead seals. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-3433569-CMYK-2f40b22.jpg" width="2726" height="1815" alt="A sketch shows a massive explosion with black smoke billowing into the air" title="The catastrophic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, depicted in a contemporary lithograph. Technological advances enable historians to better understand the impacts of such events (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past quarter-century has revolutionised the tools available to historians. Huge advances in the sciences, combined with plunging costs, mean that we now have access to data sources that don’t just provide new insights into topics such as human migration or the spread and lethality of pandemic diseases, but also enable us to do so with increasing accuracy. These are tools we must learn to rely on. Many of these new materials are related to climate archives, enabling historians to reconstruct past periods of environmental change – or even, in some cases, to better understand the effects of single, one-off extreme events such as floods, storms or volcanic eruptions. That, in turn, has changed how historians work, not least in the ways we can collaborate more often and more meaningfully with colleagues across research groups. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a historian – to be part of the community of people interested in the past. Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University. His latest book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023) 25. Powerful female leaders weren’t the sex-crazed failures of (manmade) myth Our understanding of queenship has, thankfully, moved forward in the past 25 years – just as women’s history has also moved forward. Female rulers such as Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots have all too frequently been cited as cautionary tales about what follows when you give women power: sex and death. But in recent years, revisionist historians such as Kara Cooney, Joyce Tyldesley and Joann Fletcher have written brilliant accounts of Cleopatra, challenging the perception of her as a sex-mad failure. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-544268988-CMYK-27bfceb.jpg" width="3025" height="2016" alt="A woman with red hair tied back into a bun, wearing a brocaded red dress with a high white collar, and a lot of jewellery" title="Mary, Queen of Scots, painted c1558–60. Historical female rulers must be seen in context, says Kate Williams (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mary, Queen of Scots was surrounded by men attempting to seize her power – and, when she had a son, she was set on a course that led to her being deposed in favour of him. Lord Bothwell made her go back to his castle, where he assaulted her in an attempt to force her to marry. Past historians framed her for setting up this event. Today, though, we understand that a woman who had been seized and sexually assaulted was expected to agree to marry the man who attacked her. In Mary’s case, all of the lords were in agreement with that course of action – so what choice did Mary have? As we are increasingly coming to understand, female rulers need to be seen in context. If they lost to the powerful men of the time or, indeed, the Roman empire, we need to grasp why that happened. Such insights can shape perceptions of the past – and a future with women in power. Kate Williams is professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Her latest book is The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals (Frances Lincoln, 2024) This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”: Paula Akpan on female African leaders
Paula Akpan speaks to Danny Bird about powerful African woman leaders and the complexities of interrogating historical narratives, colonial biases and these women’s own flaws
Danny Bird: At the heart of your book are a dozen African women, many of whom held immense power and high social standing. Who were they, and when did they live? Paula Akpan: I’ve traced the lives of 12 formidable women over the past millennium. The earliest was Princess Mọrèmí of Offa, who rose to rule in Ilé-Ifẹ`, in what’s now Nigeria, in the 12th century. From there, we journey through time and across regions, weaving together stories of power, resistance and legacy. Another key figure is the 17th-century Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba – territories today in northern Angola. A master strategist and diplomatic force, they blurred gender conventions: they insisted on being addressed as both king and queen, asserting their sovereignty in a male-dominated world. We also encounter Ranavalona I of the kingdom of Imerina, encompassing much of the island of Madagascar. History remembers her as a fearsome ruler vilified even by her own people, largely due to her aggressive stand against Christianity and European imperialism – policies that reportedly resulted in the population of her realm plummeting by half during her reign in the 19th century. Yet the narrative is not solely about feared rulers. Other women are revered as icons of resistance: Nana Yaa Asantewaa of present-day Ghana, for example, who led the people of the ancient Asante town of Edweso in defiance of British colonisers. Her fight to protect the sacred Golden Stool, a symbol of Asante sovereignty, remains a powerful moment in the anti-colonial struggle. These stories are as varied as the women themselves. Some are celebrated today as symbols of strength and inspiration; others have been pushed to the margins of collective memory, their legacies forgotten or deliberately erased. Ririkumutima of Burundi, for instance, played a pivotal role in shaping key treaties in the early 20th century, yet her childhood home was demolished last century and her story was largely scrubbed from ‘official’ history. What drew you to these women? I aimed to conduct in-depth research into specific rulers, ensuring geographical breadth across the continent, while also challenging some of the dominant narratives. Figures such as Nana Yaa Asantewaa are often portrayed as entirely selfless, while the Modjadjis – the Rain Queens of the Balobedu people in South Africa – are shrouded in mystery. I wanted to interrogate these portrayals alongside lesser-known rulers I discovered during my research. It was also essential that the book not be written solely from London, drawing only on archives or institutions such as SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies]. My historical work has always aimed to be community-centred. I believe that those whose lives and legacies I’m exploring should be part of the process. It should be a dialogue – a shared conversation. This is especially important in African history, where there’s a long and harmful legacy of colonial anthropologists and explorers declaring expertise on places they had never visited. I was determined not to replicate that approach. If you’re writing a focused history of a place, it should be expected that you visit the sites you’re referencing. For instance, in exploring Njinga – their gender expression as well as their political role – I visited a queer organisation in Angola. Speaking with its members gave me insights into how they connect with a historical figure who understood gender in plural terms, yet is often remembered simply as a queen. I didn’t want to create a neat, linear history. I wanted it to reflect the complexity and richness of the narratives I encountered. That meant engaging with all kinds of voices – historians, storytellers, even taxi drivers – whose everyday recollections and interpretations added depth to the legacies of these rulers. Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation How are these women remembered by present-day Africans? Their legacies are far-reaching. But it’s not just about individual rulers; as readers move through the book, I hope they also see it as a broader history of colonisation – western, certainly, but also involving the Ottoman empire. Africans on the continent and, to a lesser extent, those in the diaspora are still grappling with the consequences of colonisation and the decisions made in that Berlin conference room in 1884–85: the division of Africa, the scramble for territory, and the arbitrary borders drawn. These borders created or reinforced ethnic divisions. Identity cards were introduced in places such as Rwanda and Burundi, and the genocides that followed were, in part, consequences of colonial hierarchies. That’s not to say that such divisions didn’t exist before, but they were exacerbated by colonial powers such as Belgium. You can trace hatred and violence – between Hutu and Tutsi, for example – back to colonisation and to what many rulers in the book were trying to resist through confrontation, diplomacy or strategic retreat. Returning to the women themselves, as I mentioned earlier, many of these rulers have been forgotten or marginalised. Consider the Dahomey woman warriors: an all-woman force who fought seasoned armies. In recent years, they’ve gained renewed attention through films such as Black Panther (2018) and The Woman King (2022). Yet many historical documents are ambiguous about whether Queen Hangbé, who founded the Agoodojıˇè regiment, even existed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2HP7K1Y-CMYK-285f0f5.jpg" width="2808" height="1871" alt="A black and white photo shows a group of warrior women wearing headdresses and carrying spears" title="Women warriors of Dahomey (now part of Benin), pictured at the turn of the 20th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries, these troops – dubbed ‘Amazons’ by Europeans – faced seasoned armies (Image by Alamy)" /> When I visited the Royal Palaces of Abomey in Benin and spoke to local historians, though, there was no doubt. Hangbé was erased from official history because she was a woman, and her reign from 1708 to 1711 was omitted for that reason. Had I relied solely on colonial sources, I’d have found scholars debating whether she was mythical. But I met the current reigning Queen Tassi Hangbé, a direct descendant who still represents her lineage. The gap between what is accepted in the west and what is known locally is striking. As a member of the African diaspora, I cannot speak for continental Africans, nor would I presume to. But from what I’ve been told, there are deep silences around these histories. One Rwandan interviewee told me she struggled to find information about a pivotal woman ruler in her country. She also shared that the word ‘feminist’ doesn’t exist in her community as it does in the west. To identify as such is to be seen as ‘uppity’ or a man-hater, and she doesn’t feel safe using the term. For her and for others, it may be empowering to see stories of erased or overlooked women brought into focus. This book is an attempt to critically engage with historical sources while contributing to the growing canon around these rulers. You state that your book is fundamentally about power. Can you elaborate on that point? The power that African rulers wielded is often overlooked, and understandings of both pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa are frequently reductive. Within these narratives, there’s often insufficient analysis of how African elites treated other Africans – particularly the lower classes and those they enslaved. This lack of scrutiny is troubling. I understand the desire to highlight wealth and heroism, especially because so much of African history focuses on suffering – colonisation, displacement and occupation. It makes sense that Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, seek to counterbalance that pain with stories of greatness. For example, Mansa Musa, 14th-century ruler of the Mali empire, is frequently cited as one of the wealthiest individuals in history. Emphasising such figures helps assert that Africans were also rulers, also kings. However, this focus can obscure the reality that many African rulers also caused harm. Like rulers elsewhere, they were often self-interested, consolidating power at the expense of others. When considering women and genderqueer figures, the narrative becomes even narrower. Women are often portrayed as selfless mothers, nurturers, life-givers – idealised in educational materials for children. But we must also confront the violence they oversaw. Under rulers including Ranavalona, Mәntәwwab of Ethiopia and others I examine in this book, violent structures were expanded. That, too, is part of African history. We shouldn’t shy away from these truths. To understand these figures fully, we must take in the whole picture. Rather than turning them into paragons, we should look at their actions and how they presented themselves, and engage with them honestly. Africa is vast, diverse and complex. Have certain regions dominated historical narratives over others? Some regions are clearly dominant in popular narratives. Ghana – the former Gold Coast and Asante territories – features heavily. Many of my Ghanaian friends appreciated that I included Nana Yaa Asantewaa. Similarly, figures such as Shaka Zulu from South Africa are often highlighted. I believe this is partly shaped by our world view. The Gold Coast and much of South Africa were occupied by the British, who imposed English across these regions. This colonial lens has influenced which African regions are viewed as most prominent – often those where English was imposed. There’s also significant emphasis on the pyramids and ancient Egyptian history. Over time, this positioned Egypt as the pinnacle of African civilisation, or at least its primary representative. Early explorers and anthropologists didn’t see similar structures elsewhere on the continent, reinforcing this perception. Colourism plays a role, too. Physical features and skin tone influenced how palatable certain groups were to colonisers. In Rwanda and Burundi, for example, the Belgians favoured the Tutsis, describing them as having ‘Ethiopianoid’ features such as long fingers, narrow noses and a tall stature. The Hutus, by contrast, were perceived as shorter and broader. These arbitrary distinctions fed racist ideas about who was ‘fit to rule’. The Belgians reinforced a hierarchy that aligned physical features with intelligence, which was typical of pseudoscientific thinking of the time. This has influenced which African histories and leaders are spotlighted. Colonial chroniclers also played a part. They dramatised accounts of figures including Shaka Zulu, filling them with gory details, and wrote fantastical tales about rulers such as Ranavalona, who was said to have tried to build enormous scissors to cut enemies in half. There was a thirst for sensational stories about distant, ‘uncivilised’ societies that captivated western audiences. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/WHA1810460-2-cmyk-acfd4bb.jpg" width="3827" height="2549" alt="A woman in a long red dress and crown stands for a portrait, facing to the left" title="Western audiences were captivated by descriptions of Ranavalona I, sovereign of the Kingdom of Madagascar, cutting her enemies in half with enormous scissors (Image by TopFoto)" /> At the core of this issue is the question: what do people imagine that precolonial African societies looked like? That’s perhapsnwhere the conversation should begin. What do historians think that these peoples were doing before colonisation, or during the occupation by Europeans? Colonisers often painted Africa as empty or undeveloped. They claimed that the land wasn’t being used, that its people weren’t harnessing resources, and that colonial intervention was necessary to bring civilisation, introducing concepts such as tenancy, property rights and the nuclear family. Missionaries often arrived with wives and children as models for what they believed African people should aspire to. Something you also ponder in the book is the ‘what if’ aspect of Africa’s history, engaging with a concept called ‘critical fabulation’. What is that? Critical fabulation originates from the work of Saidiya Hartman, a distinguished scholar who doesn’t strictly describe herself as a historian. Her work bridges history and narrative, examining source materials, often archival, and challenging them to imagine alternative possibilities. This isn’t about inventing freely, but a radical act of interpretation. Think about the fact that many African enslaved people were documented merely as cargo, listed alongside gold or mahogany yet considered of lesser value. The presence of enslaved Africans is often traceable only faintly through ship logs or fragments, highlighting their systematic erasure. Critical fabulation begins with the premise that the archive itself is a site of violence. This approach acknowledges that archivists and historians bring their own biases to the material they curate. It offers counter-histories produced using the same or similar sources – not necessarily to ‘humanise’ or ‘give voice’, but to challenge what is already accepted as fact, what is already deemed unquestionable. Read more | Zeinab Badawi on writing the history of a whole continent | “It is important to look at African history through the lens of African people themselves” In my introduction, I reference the Cape Coast incident of 1721 [in which enslaved Africans overpowered the crew on a slave ship en route to the Americas]. Colonial officials chose to present a version of those events that would be more palatable to their audience, because the idea that 17 enslaved African men and boys could escape and overpower seven white men was inconceivable – it disrupted the assumed order of their society. Recognising that colonial sources often serve specific agendas, critical fabulation and the pursuit of counter-histories confront the violence in these records and offer both alternatives and correctives. If you could have a conversation with one of these historical figures, who would it be, and why? I think I’d really like to speak to Ranavalona I. I’m fascinated by her as a ruler of Imerina who was so determined to preserve her island and its way of life against French and British colonisers that she was willing to purge any trace of foreign influence, including Christianity. That kind of single-mindedness – ultimately to her own detriment – is something I struggle to fully comprehend. And yet, despite her fierce commitment to self-sufficiency and resistance, Madagascar was colonised anyway. I’d be curious to know how she would perceive her legacy today. When I visited Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, I spoke to local Malagasy people about Ranavalona. Many either disliked her, were indifferent to her or hadn’t heard of her. Some genuinely hated what she represented. One interviewee described her as a feminist. I’m not sure I’d use that term myself, but I understand the sentiment, seeing her as a powerful woman figure. But that’s where things gets complicated with woman African rulers. Being a woman – and an African woman – doesn’t automatically make someone a positive figure. We also have to acknowledge the harm some of them caused. At the same time, many Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to. In the ongoing context of colonisation and neo-colonialism, someone like Ranavalona, who stood firm, can be a galvanising symbol, especially as a woman. It’s complex. I’d be deeply curious to know if she had any regrets. Would she have done things differently, knowing that Madagascar would be colonised regardless? Would she still have gone to such extremes, knowing that her son would quickly undo all she built after her death? How would that have affected her? She’d definitely be high on my list. Read more | Mavia of Tanukh: the warrior queen of Arabia What are some of the biggest misconceptions about African leadership, especially by women, that you aim to challenge in your book? I didn’t undertake the project with a deliberate approach, but being a black African lesbian woman brings a particular lens to how I engage with history. For example, I was especially interested in exploring Njinga’s gender, the sexualities of the Agoodojıˇè and how they engaged with women in the palace – be they sex workers, companions, or each other. This perspective allows me to highlight aspects that might be overlooked by other historians. Many scholars have dismissed the possibility that the Agoodojıˇè engaged sexually with one another, which reflects a broader resistance to recognising queerness in historical narratives. That connects to how I read Njinga, and my aim to honour the plurality of their identity. It wasn’t about setting out to challenge the dominant narrative; I naturally gravitate towards certain critical approaches, and that inevitably shapes my work. A key part of the book involved examining colonial scholars who are often quoted uncritically. Too often, we fail to interrogate the vested interests behind colonial source material. I found that many of these commentators – those critical of figures including Ranavalona and other African rulers – often held colonial administrative positions in places such as Senegal or Madagascar. Their perspectives weren’t neutral; they were shaped by colonial power and bias. All of this ties in with the lens through which I view history. Every historian brings subjectivity to their work, whether they admit it or not. The idea of objectivity is a myth. Embracing that subjectivity has allowed me to sharpen my critiques and deepen my research. Paula Akpan is a journalist, historian and public speaker whose work focuses on blackness, queerness, social politics and our relationship with technology This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine