Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2020 i History Extra

“ ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury, in the face of the Spanish navy, is one of the best-known episodes in English history. But, as with so many other events that dominate our national narrative, has the true story of the Armada been overshadowed by legend? In this month’s cover feature, on page 50, Lucy Worsley sinks some of the abiding myths of the ‘miracle’ of 1588. This issue is published a few days before the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a symbolic moment whose date now serves as the annual commemoration of the Holocaust. The BBC is marking the…

It’s always fascinating when historians pose questions on Twitter, so when Janina Ramirez (@DrJaninaRamirez) asked her followers who their ideal historical dinner party guest would be, people gladly obliged. In doing so, they perhaps revealed as much about themselves and their own interests as about their guests. Kicking off the conversation, architectural historian Jonathan Foyle (@JonathanFoyle) had a very specific man in mind. “George Shaw of Uppermill,” he declared, in reference to the Victorian antiquarian who unwittingly purchased a four-poster once owned by Henry VII. “I want to ask him which house he went to near Huddersfield in 1842 to inspect a dilapidated old bed.” Looking to more famous historical figures, Alice Roberts (@theAliceRoberts) selected the English fossil collector, dealer and palaeontologist Mary Anning, while Sharon Bennett Connolly (@Thehistorybits) picked…

The 1870 Education Act was introduced into the House of Commons 150 years ago this month. More than any prior or subsequent legislation, it brought about a system of mass education in England and Wales. For the first time, the state became responsible for the elementary (primary) schooling of all children of ages 5–10. Calls for more schools for more children, and better oversight, had come much earlier – think Charles Dickens. But by the late 1860s, pressures had mounted. Extensions of the electorate, most recently in 1867, along with the fear of falling behind international competitors, and moral panics about juvenile delinquency and popular unrest – especially in ‘slums’ – were all cited as reasons for more schools. The system of elementary schools that emerged was a complex mix…

When did Britain come closest to revolution? Closest? If we understand revolution as the overthrow of the established political order and its replacement with a new form of government, then England (if not Britain) clearly experienced a revolution in the 1640s and 1650s. Some historians avoid using the term ‘the English revolution’ to describe the events of 1642–1660. They argue that the label is associated too closely with Marxist models of revolutionary change driven by class struggle that do not fit with the available empirical evidence. Yet it is hard to think of a better word than revolution to describe the remarkable sequence of events that led from civil war to the trial and execution of Charles I, and culminated in the establishment of an English republican ‘Commonwealth’ in place…

12 August 1762 Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of King George III, gives birth to the future George IV at St James’s Palace. 15 December 1785 George marries Maria Fitzherbert in secret. The union is illegal on two counts: she is a Roman Catholic and he has failed to secure his father’s permission to marry her. 8 April 1795 Having dismissed Maria the previous year, George marries his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick, in exchange for parliament paying off his debts. The marriage is a disaster and George soon tries – and fails – to divorce her. 7 January 1796 Caroline of Brunswick gives birth to George’s only child, Princess Charlotte of Wales. Charlotte becomes the darling of the nation before dying, aged 21, shortly after childbirth in 1817. 1811 George…

In the spring of 1168, Henry II, King of England, wrote to Pope Alexander III. While correspondence between monarch and pontiff was a matter of course, this letter was notable for the menace it projected. For Henry was threatening to convert to Islam. It was not unusual for Henry to issue threats: they were fundamental to his arsenal of kingship, as vital as his carefully calculated thunderous outbursts, his diplomacy, the legendary speed at which he drove his armies and his unsurpassable siege warfare in inspiring awe among his adversaries. Henry did not discriminate between the recipients of his threats, from the pope to the lowly electors of Winchester, whom he once ordered to “hold a free election” but forbade “to elect anyone but Richard my clerk”. But this was…

Ellie Cawthorne: In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft perpetrated an extraordinary hoax that lasted several weeks and captured the imagination of the British public. What did it involve? Karen Harvey: Essentially, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to rabbits – an extraordinary claim that was supported by several people for several weeks. It turns out, of course, that it didn’t quite happen as described because, spoiler alert, women can’t gestate rabbits. The trigger for the whole hoax was an incident that occurred when Toft, a poor agricultural day-labourer, was working in a field near Godalming in Surrey. She spotted a couple of rabbits and decided to chase one. Although she failed to catch it, the idea of that rabbit wouldn’t leave her head. Toft was pregnant at the…

At the end of his 2016 book Imperial  Triumph, Michael Kulikowski highlighted that different ethnic groups – classified as ‘barbarians’ – had been settling within the Roman empire since the first century AD. As the Vindolanda tablets record, many of them forged good careers in the Roman army. He argued that the period from AD 235 brought a wider Eurasian dimension to Roman politics: over the next 50 years, 26 generals – more like warlords, with little political experience, many from the Balkans – fought it out to become emperor. ‘Empires’ in Palmyra and Gaul broke briefly from Rome; a Roman emperor was killed by the Persian Sasanian regime; various Germanic tribes were repulsed. Though Aurelian sorted out the military problems and Diocletian’s reforms stabilised the situation, the result was…

David McCullough is a two-times Pulitzer prize-winner and the bestselling biographer of John Adams and Harry Truman. In 2005 he wrote a groundbreaking book about the 17 months between King George III’s declaration of war on his American subjects in October 1775 and the arrival in March 1777 of the news in Britain of George Washington’s victory at the battle of Trenton. McCullough’s thesis is that, to win the War of Independence, all the Continental Army needed to do was to stay in existence, come what may, and that the primary reason it succeeded in doing so was down to the superb leadership skills of George Washington. On 14 January 1776, Washington commanded an army of only around 9,000 men, up to half of whom were not fit for duty.…

Why is the Second Italo-Ethiopian War an interesting setting for a novel? I grew up hearing stories of how a poorly equipped Ethiopian army took on a European powerhouse in a brutal war. I heard how men wearing traditional clothes charged at Italians who used tanks, poison gas and advanced artillery. It was a heady, inspiring myth. I wanted to write a story to honour those people, often poor and illiterate, who are swept aside for grander icons of history. Were you inspired by any true stories? I lived in Italy for about a year to research in the Fascist archives. What I realised is that the archives could provide some information, but I was looking at documents that had gone through censorship. Much of it was propaganda. I started…

“People made a concealing belt to put around Michelangelo’s David because they didn’t want to see the penis” Is the story of the nude one of exploitation, or is it more complex than that? The sense of the nude as the object of the male gaze – that’s as long as the history of the female nude itself. But we also have to think harder and more interestingly about how we look at the nude, about who’s looking, and how you can look a bit subversively. There are great examples of this. One of the paintings we talk about is a wonderful work by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) called The Tribuna of the Uffizi [a Florence gallery room where the Medici art collection was housed, see below]. There’s a lot of…

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986), dubbed ‘Supermac’, was leader of the Conservative party and Britain’s prime minister from 1957–63. Born in London and educated at Eton and Oxford, he served with distinction in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War, and was wounded at the battle of the Somme. An MP for nearly 40 years, he famously declared that most Britons had “never had it so good”, and led the Tories to victory in the 1959 election. He died aged 92, and remains Britain’s second longest-lived prime minister.…

Brian Fagan The Little Ice Age fascinates me as a vignette of people adapting to constantly changing climate conditions over several centuries. And they had no weather forecasts, nor central heating either! Brian reveals how the lives of Britons were transformed by the Little Ice Age on page 20 Stella Tillyard George IV has endured a terrible press since he acceded to the throne 200 years ago. Yet, as my latest book on the king reveals, he had strengths as well as those well-documented weaknesses. Stella brings the two, contrasting sides of George IV to life on page 34 Sundari Anitha Tired of encountering stereotypes of south Asian women as passive and domesticated, Ruth Pearson and I researched their historic contributions to the struggles for workers’ rights in the UK.…

“The climate emergency is the greatest crisis in human history” The start of a new decade is always a time for reflection, and what a crucial decade the 2020s will be. We now live in the Anthropocene, the human-made geological epoch that will leave its mark forever on our world, and the next 10 years will determine the future path of humanity on this small planet. Our current climate emergency is the greatest crisis in human history. This central inescapable fact was driven home with terrible force in the new year as we saw Australia burning, from Darwin to Tasmania. Apocalyptic images showed blood red skies, as giant whirlwinds showered the landscape with burning ash, creating lightning storms like a vision from a medieval doom painting. Hundreds of millions of…

“It was more shocking than anything in the pages of the gothic novels” There is a sub-genre of English literature known as Tasmanian gothic. It consists of sensationalist novels, such as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, set in the penal colonies of the Australian island that until 1856 was known as Van Diemen’s Land. It was to that island that around 40 per cent of all the convicts transported from Britain in the 19th century were sent. So bad was the reputation of Van Diemen’s Land that it inspired not merely gothic novels but also a petition, sent to Queen Victoria in 1854 by the island’s free settlers, in which they requested that the island be renamed Tasmania to distance itself from its dismal past. There…

“What you run here is not a factory, it is a zoo. There are monkeys here who dance to your tune, but there are also lions here who can bite your head off. And we are the lions, Mr Manager! I want my freedom!” With these words – uttered in the middle of the long, hot summer of 1976 – 43-year-old Jayaben Desai stormed out of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in London. In doing so, she triggered one of the most significant industrial disputes in modern British history. A few days later, Desai was back at the factory, but this time she had no intention of doing any work. Instead she stood on a picket line, where she was joined by 137 staff out of a workforce of 500,…

Knowledge of Arabic learning reached medieval Europe through three major routes. The first was through Christendom’s conquest of the Iberian peninsula from the ninth century. Then there was the First Crusade, which ended in the capture of Jerusalem and establishment of a Latin kingdom, ruled by a Frankish nobility, which would endure for two centuries. (Henry’s uncles and cousins were among the rulers.) Thirdly, in 1130, a Norman mercenary, Count Roger de Hauteville, founded a Norman kingdom in Sicily that would go on to include parts of northern Africa. Close links and even friendships between Christians and Muslims formed, and Christians living in these lands often adopted an Arabised way of life. Christians living similarly in Moorish Iberia were called Mozarabs . They continued to practise Christianity, while being beguiled…

Virginia Woolf first looked at flats in Mecklenburgh Square in 1915 but, horrified by a room “disfigured horribly with velvet curtains, gigantic purple cushions and the usual swarm of gilt & lemon coloured objects”, retreated to Days Library. Shortly after she did eventually move to the square in 1939, a bomb ensured “all our windows are broken, ceilings down”. Woolf is one of five female Mecklenburgh Square residents vividly evoked in this book. Francesca Wade deftly interweaves the biographies of Woolf, modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (known by the pen name HD), detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers, classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and economic historian Eileen Power. In number 44, HD heard her husband, Richard Aldington, with his mistress in the bedroom above. While living in HD’s old room in 1920, Sayers…

There comes a time in women’s lives when, often unexpectedly, they start fanning themselves over their morning coffees, worrying about forgetting people’s names, and, once the shock has worn off, calculating how much money they are saving through not having to buy what are euphemistically called ‘sanitary products’. The menopause is a predictable physiological process, but it is also fundamentally cultural. Unfortunately, even in fairly modern times, it has been pathologised. In The Psychology of Women, published in 1944, the Polish-American psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch argued that post-menopausal women who were happy were deviant and unfeminine. She likened the menopause to a “partial death”; it made women “deranged”. In Feminine Forever (1966), Robert Wilson similarly described women who had been through the menopause as sexually neutered and unfeminine. According to him,…

UNITED STATES Breaking chains A gifted orator and statesman who escaped slavery to become a national leader of the US abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass became famous in the 19th century as a result of his speeches and writing. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, newly available in paperback, explores his professional successes, the challenges associated with his growing renown, and his complex personal life. CULTURAL HISTORY Object lessons The issue of who should retain historical artefacts removed from their countries of origin by colonial powers remains hugely divisive. Human-rights barrister and broadcaster Geoffrey Robertson sets out the case for the return of objects such as the Elgin Marbles, ranging through history and delving into current issues such as Brexit and political populism. It’s a robust, opinionated take on a complex debate. AZTECS…

Harold Macmillan 1894 –1986 When did you first hear about Macmillan? I first became interested in politics when I was about 18, so it was around that time. He was already a figure of some repute when I was a graduate at Oxford University in the early 1950s. He’d been a Conservative MP since 1924, and in 1938 had published The Middle Way, in which he had advocated the broadly centrist political and economic philosophy that both he and I shared. What kind of man was he? Macmillan was a brilliant conversationalist and a great speaker, and had an incredible knowledge of history. I interviewed him for a magazine I acquired in 1959 called Man About Town (later Town), which was a bit like a British Esquire or GQ. That…

A cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi could be the earliest figurative artwork ever discovered. Writing in the journal Nature, archaeologists from Griffith Universi- ty in Australia claim that the image – which depicts a buffalo being hunted by figures with spears (above) – is 44,000 years old. The painting forms part of a 5-metre-wide panel in a cave named Leang Bulu’Sipong 4, but it is not yet clear whether all the images in the panel were painted at different times or if they form a coherent story. Have a story? Please email Jon Bauckham at jon.bauckham@immediate.co.uk…

11 FEBRUARY AD 55 Nero assassinates his stepbrother Power-mad emperor poisons rival on eve of his 14th birthday For Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, the evening of 11 February in AD 55 was always going to be special. The next day was his 14th birthday, which was widely regarded as the beginning of adulthood: a landmark event for any young Roman. But Britannicus was not just any young Roman. He was the only son of the late emperor Claudius, who had died a few months earlier. The throne had passed to Britannicus’s older stepbrother Nero, the son of Claudius’s fourth wife, Agrippina. But Nero never felt secure. Britannicus, he decided, had got to go. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero engaged the services of a poisoner, Locusta, who had already…

At the end of January 1820, Charles Greville, young man-about-town and future clerk to the Privy Council, was enjoying the good life at the Duke of Bedford’s luxurious estate of Woburn in Bedfordshire. He “shot the whole week”, he recorded in his diary, “and killed an immense quantity of game”. The solemn news that demanded his close professional attention was more laconically reported. “On Sunday last, arrived the news of the king’s death,” he wrote, adding without comment: “The new king has been desperately ill. He had a bad cold at Brighton, for which he lost 80 ounces of blood; yet he afterwards had a severe oppression, amounting almost to suffocation, on his chest.” So George III was dead, and the British crown passed to his son George IV, who,…

Frank Dikötter “At my university in Switzerland, students rather than their tutors decided when they were ready to take an exam” What was life like as a history student in Switzerland? I wasn’t exactly a model school student – I spent a great deal of time in detention, so when I announced my decision to go to university, my family and friends found it rather amusing. But once I got there I did well, mainly because I was left alone, with no teachers looking over my shoulder to tell me what to do. Attendance in many cases was not even obligatory. Students, rather than their tutors, decided when they were ready to take an exam. I used the opportunity to read widely and voraciously. What was the most interesting topic…

Clare Wright on the Australians who fought for women’s suffrage “In 1902, Australia became the first country in the world where some women won full political equality – that is, the right to vote and stand for parliament. But my book, You Daughters of Freedom, is also about what Australian women did next. After they won those rights, they came to the aid of those they called ‘their less fortunate British sisters’.” Colin Grant on the experiences of the Windrush generation “The migrants on the Windrush had a real sense that they were British. There were no Jamaican or Trinidadian passports in the 1940s – they held British passports. Many were patriotic Anglophiles, so the notion of coming to Britain was very exciting. They believed that they were making history…

In this ambitious study, Julie Peakman examines how sex, gender and empire interacted in imperial contact zones that range from the first ‘New World’ of the Americas to Polynesia and Oceania, Africa, post-colonial America and the Caribbean, India, the Ottoman empire, China and Japan. Peakman has an ear for a good story and makes engaging use of a range of historical sources, from European travellers’ journals, missionary accounts and travelogues, to sex handbooks, anthropological studies and more. Into her fluent and compelling narrative, she blends issues of historical interpretation – about the use of sexual violence to subdue whole peoples, for example, or the impact of western men’s laced-up Christian cultures of origin on their interpretations of ‘native’ women. She makes clear the difficulty of using evidence produced by white…

Interpretations of the past are always shaped by the politics and interests of their creators and the cultural moment of their production. Hence, this lengthy account of Britain’s First World War by Simon Heffer focuses on political turmoil, intrigue and infighting. It provides detailed accounts of the personal failings and foibles, prejudices and politicking of men whose disingenuous infighting, manoeuvring or procrastination led to war and compromised the British war effort. Politicians who, Heffer argues, oversaw Britain’s transition from 19th-century economic liberalism to a “highly indebted, highly taxed society in which government exerted unprecedented control over the lives of ordinary people”. Heffer may have written an important political history, but despite the masquerade of the cover images, not a social or cultural history of the era. His focus is on…