Happy Wednesday!

Let’s go…

Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of ‘Australia’

In 1770, Captain Cook sailed HMS Endeavour up the unmapped eastern edge of New Holland, stopped at a piece of land he named Possession Island, and claimed the entire coastline for King George III. He called it New South Wales.

What Cook hadn’t established was what lay behind that coastline. The western side, New Holland, had been charted by Dutch sailors since the 1600s, but nobody had linked the two coastlines into a single landmass. Someone would have to sail all the way round to prove one way or another.

Matthew Flinders…

…was born in Lincolnshire in 1774. He sailed to Tahiti in 1791 under the captaincy of a survivor of one of the great maritime dramas of the age—Captain William Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty notoriety. He then spent the closing years of the 1790s surveying the colony’s coast, proving—with his friend George Bass in 1798–99—that Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was in fact an island, separated from the mainland by what would be called Bass Strait.

Back home, Flinders had barely enough time to marry his long-time love Ann Chappell in April 1801. Within weeks, the Admiralty would dispatch Matthew to map New Holland’s unknown coast, complete the outline of the landmass, and determine the answer to the question, “Is New Holland, in fact, two landmasses?“

It would be over nine years before the couple saw each other again.

Flinders sailed out of Spithead, near Portsmouth, 225 years ago this Saturday, 18 July 1801, commanding HMS Investigator—a 330-ton former collier refitted for survey work. She was broad-beamed, shallow-drafted and built for hauling coal, not for beauty. But that was exactly what Flinders needed. A ship shaped like a bathtub doesn’t capsize in shallow water—it just sits down.

It turns out charting a coastline is hard, slow work. Flinders ran his main survey from Investigator’s deck, taking bearings on headlands and stitching them together—quick, but blind to anything tucked out of sight.

When an opening looked promising, he would anchor and send small boats in to sound it out in person. Twice on the unmapped southern coast, at Spencer Gulf and Gulf St Vincent in the south, the openings suggested they might be the mouth of straits dividing the continent. Twice, the inlets dried up.

Close by, off the newly named Encounter Bay, Flinders ran into Nicolas Baudin, who was leading France’s own survey of the southern continent from the opposite direction. Two nations, both quietly mapping the same coastline for their own purposes. Instead of trading broadsides, the two men leaned over each other’s charts and compared notes on harbours, headlands and watering holes—like rival estate agents caught showing the same house.

Flinders finally returned to England in late 1810, and after nearly nine years of letters and waiting, Ann was at last able to see the husband she had married in haste back in 1801.

It’s easy to underrate a voyage that ends with a simple ‘no’. Yet somebody had to sail thousands of miles, then row up every gulf that looked promising, to show that this vast southern land was not secretly split in two by a hidden sea.

Flinders did that work tirelessly in a refitted coal ship. He gave the continent its coastline in ink and, rather touchingly, he was also the one who championed the name it still bears today—Australia.

La Goulue - the cancan girl

Louise Weber was born 160 years ago last Sunday, 12 July 1866, in Clichy-la-Garenne, just outside Paris. She was a laundress’s daughter who had a talent for borrowing her mother’s customers’ dresses and an even better one for finishing their champagne.

By sixteen she was slipping off to Montmartre dance halls; by the early 1890s she was one of the highest-paid performers in Paris—dancing accounted for most of it, courtesanship for the rest, with a blurred line between the two.

Her stage name, La Goulue—’the Glutton‘—came from a knack for emptying customers’ glasses mid-performance, a party trick that occasionally upstaged the dancing itself.

The dancing was the real business. She turned the cancan into something closer to acrobatics—kicks that sent hats flying, a heart embroidered on her underwear for anyone still not paying attention—and became artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite model, fixed forever in posters that would outlast her fame by roughly a century.

In 1895 she walked out on the Moulin Rouge, certain she’d outgrown it. She hadn’t. Her travelling show flopped and her efforts at lion-taming were not the roaring success she had hoped for.

By 1928 she was back in Montmartre, selling peanuts outside the very cabaret she’d once ruled—unrecognised by the crowds who walked past. She died the following year, at sixty-two, the Queen of the cancan reduced to a pavement footnote, her legend living on mostly in posters hanging on other people’s walls.

And Finally…

Andrea del Sarto…

…was born in Florence 540 years ago tomorrow, 16 July 1486, the son of a tailor—hence ‘del Sarto‘, or ‘of the tailor‘. He has largely been forgotten by history, which seems a little unfair given what he achieved with a paintbrush.

By his twenties he was the finest painter working in Florence—admittedly helped by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael having left town. His frescoes for the Compagnia dello Scalzo were so precise that admirers nicknamed him ‘Andrea senza errori’—Andrea without errors.

In 1518, Francis I lured him to the French court, where Andrea’s talent went down rather better than his expense account. Entrusted with the king’s money to buy Italian masterpieces, he popped home to Florence—and simply forgot to go back.

Andrea spent the cash on a house instead and never returned. Robert Browning later immortalised the episode in verse, in ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sometimes referred to as ‘The Faultless Painter‘.

In this work, Browning produces one of my favourite lines in poetry. Andrea is talking to his wife, Lucrezia, reflecting on a lifetime of faultless, but ultimately second‑rate, work—technically perfect, but never quite reaching the heaven of Raphael or Michelangelo.

The fact that historians now suspect the story never happened will not ruin my love of this quote. In fact, I shall ignore them.

Andrea del Sarto died of plague in Florence in September 1530, aged just 44.

Question of the week… answer

Rembrandt.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born 420 years ago today, 15 July 1606, in Leiden, Netherlands, the youngest of at least ten children.

By his twenties, Rembrandt was Amsterdam’s portraitist of choice, charging handsomely to make wealthy merchants look thoughtful and important.

In 1642 he was commissioned to paint a group portrait of a civic militia company—a unit of citizen-soldiers protecting the town. This sort of job was usually delivered as a tidy row of faces, each man having paid for the privilege of being recognisable.

Rembrandt ignored the brief entirely. He gave them drama, shadow, a barking dog, a girl glowing improbably in the gunpowder smoke—and buried several paying customers in the gloom.

The result, later nicknamed The Night Watch, is now considered his greatest masterpiece and the Rijksmuseum’s most notable. The investors lost in the deep shadows were considerably less impressed.

The same year, Rembrandt’s wife Saskia died, and his fortunes began their long slide toward bankruptcy.

He died in Amsterdam in October 1669, out of fashion, his possessions long since auctioned off.

Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

ATTRIBUTIONS
The Night Watch: Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
La Goulue: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Map of Australia: Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Statue of Captain Matthew Flinders: Crisco 1492, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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Happy Sunday!

I’ve rarely met anyone entirely immune to an airport’s charms. Every ninety seconds, a multi-tonne metal tube, packed with people, luggage and in-flight snacks, hauls itself into the sky, bound for who knows where. Call it doomscrolling on your feet—same compulsion, better posture.

For me, it’s more about the airport itself; a hub where the continents converge, drawing travellers in and shunting them back out, watched over by a departures board reading like a menu of the world.

It’s a connection of pure faith: a check-in clerk with a fixed smile, a faceless voice on a tannoy, an agent at the gate checking your boarding pass barely looking up, a stranger in a hi-vis vest directing a pilot you’ll never meet toward a runway you can’t see.

Trains are more honest, I thought last Thursday, waiting on a platform to send my son off to London. The electric rail sizzles, warning you that something is approaching. Everything happens close enough to touch—the train included, though best to wait until it’s stopped.

The usual scramble—doors, bags, hurried goodbyes.

Then a moment’s silence before the electric motors strain against inertia and the train sets off. No leap of faith needed here; just rails, pointing in one direction, staying firmly on the ground. It’s round the bend and out of sight before you’ve finished waving.

Again, a strong sense of connection. Which gets you halfway to understanding canals.

For the last couple of years, I’ve spent a long weekend with a couple of old school friends on the Grand Union Canal around the historic inland port of Berkhamsted, drifting along a small stretch of the UK’s 4,000-mile canal network. The sense of connection is there, much like the railways. But there’s something else too—a creeping, unshakeable weight of history.

Yes, I know the railways define Britain’s Industrial Revolution every bit as much as the canals. Perhaps it’s the sight of the occasional neglected coal barge rusting in a siding that adds the extra weight. Perhaps it’s the maximum speed of four miles an hour. Or maybe it’s the locks, still working on gravity and ironmongery that hasn’t changed in two hundred and fifty years—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Whatever the reason, it was made possible because of a man named Egerton.

Francis Egerton...

...was born at Worsley, Lancashire on 21 May 1736, the youngest of eleven children born to Lady Rachael Russell and Scroop Egerton, 1st Duke of Bridgewater—Dickens would have wept with envy.

Francis’s early years earned him a reputation as a sickly, unpromising child. Later accounts claim that his mother had contemplated rewriting the family inheritance to cut him out. Harsh by today’s standards, but in an era of Primogeniture and strict settlements, business was business.

It’s funny how things work out. Francis’s mother never did get around to altering the inheritance. When his father died in 1745, his elder brother John duly stepped in as duke. John then obligingly died three years later without children of his own, leaving an eleven-year-old Francis as 3rd Duke of Bridgewater.

This was 1748. Britain was still catching its breath after two shocks. Firstly, there was the Jacobite rising two years earlier, a failed Stuart rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie that had marched into England before collapsing at Culloden. Then, the War of the Austrian Succession was grinding to its exhausted conclusion—a sprawling European struggle over Maria Theresa’s right to inherit the Habsburg lands in the teeth of male‑only succession rules—yet another let’s‑exclude‑women‑from‑inheritance scheme.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was gathering a head of steam, powered above all by one crucial ingredient—coal.

Young Francis...

...wasn’t an obvious candidate for greatness. His trustees, tasked with preparing him for responsibility, despaired of him—”sickly, ignorant, awkward and plain unruly“ was the verdict of one.

Their despair was reaffirmed by the young Duke’s tastes for gaming and horse racing—the standard vices of an eighteenth-century aristocrat with more money than direction. But in 1753, when he set off on his Grand Tour—compulsory for young men of his class—Francis’s life was about to be rerouted entirely.

In the south of France, he encountered the one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-long Canal du Midi, completed in 1681 under Louis XIV and Europe’s first major long-distance canal. It linked the Mediterranean Sea to Toulouse, which in turn connected to the Garonne, itself flowing into the Atlantic. Together, the combined waterways became known as the Canal des Deux Mers, or Canal of the Two Seas.

Egerton found the business of canal construction utterly gripping. If told as a child not to try to push water uphill, he had taken it as a challenge rather than as a metaphor.

A very British engagement

Back in England, life delivered its next twist. Now of age, Egerton fell for Elizabeth Gunning—the Dowager Duchess of Hamilton, and one half of a pair of Irish sisters so celebrated that London crowds reportedly gathered just to watch them walk past. The warning signs were everywhere, but Francis chose not to look.

Elizabeth had already been married to James, 6th Duke of Hamilton. They met at a St Valentine’s Day masquerade ball in 1752. James wanted her instantly... and by instantly, I mean that same night.

The calculating Irish beauty, however, wouldn’t be seduced without marriage. So James did what any duke gripped by an uncontrollable midnight urge would do. He dragged a parson out of bed and set off for a Mayfair chapel, determined to get married before common sense could prevail. Running short of an actual ring, he pulled one off the bed curtain on his way out— ‘With this curtain ring, I thee wed.’

By the morning, James was exhausted and Elizabeth was the Duchess of Hamilton.

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Happy Wednesday!

Here goes…

Dolly the sheep

Thirty years ago last Sunday, 5 July 1996, it took 277 attempts to clone a sheep from a single adult cell in a laboratory somewhere in Scotland. Only 29 embryos made it past the first round. And from those, only one lamb ever drew breath. Her name was Dolly.

Dolly the sheep was born at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell—that is, any ‘body’ cell not directly involved in reproduction.

Scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell took a cell from the udder of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe and placed its nucleus into an egg cell borrowed from a Scottish Blackface ewe that had been stripped of its own genetic material.

A second Blackface then carried the pregnancy to term and gave birth to Dolly—who arrived looking, walking and baaing like a Finn Dorset. The Blackfaces had done the heavy lifting while the Finn Dorset got all the credit.

For seven months after her July 1996 birth, Dolly lived in obscurity. Then, in February 1997, the announcement that a mammal had been cloned from an adult cell turned a lab secret into front-page news and launched a worldwide reckoning with the ethics of copying life.

Meanwhile, Dolly lived an otherwise ordinary sheep’s life. She mothered six lambs in the fields around Roslin, before arthritis and a contagious lung cancer led vets to put her to sleep in February 2003. She was six and a half years old—little more than half a Finn Dorset’s usual span.

Dolly’s celebrity didn’t end with her death. She stands today in a glass case at the National Museum of Scotland, the world’s most famous sheep frozen mid bleat.

So what? Dolly showed that an entire mammal could be built from the nucleus of a single adult cell—upending decades of biological dogma—and the field hasn’t quite looked the same since. Today, companies sell made-to-order copies of pets, high-value livestock and even rare and endangered animals, for anyone who can’t quite let go.

Yet what any of this really means for questions of individuality and identity remains an open argument, not a settled fact. Not bad, for a Finn Dorset ewe called Dolly.

The Daguerreotype

Before he captured reality, Louis Daguerre spent years faking it. As co-inventor of the Diorama, he would light a vast canvas from the front, then the back, and turn a sleepy alpine village into one mid-avalanche—or a dozing mountain into a raging volcano. Parisians queued round the block to see it.

Then, in 1829, he partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, who had already created the ‘earliest surviving photograph of a real-world scene’ in 1826-27. Niépce died in 1833, leaving Daguerre to finish the job—which he did.

By 1837 Daguerre had perfected the first commercially viable photographic process, which he modestly called the ‘Daguerreotype‘.

His first-ever photograph is thought to have been taken in 1837, although he created his earliest surviving daguerreotype, ‘Boulevard du Temple’, in 1838—publicly announced the following year.

In 1839, France did something remarkable with Daguerre’s new trick of trapping light on silver: it bought the secret outright, pensioned off the inventor and Niépce’s heir, and declared photography a gift to the world—in the interests of prestige and influence. ‘Drawing with light‘ would spread as fast as curiosity could carry it—everywhere, that is, except Britain, where Daguerre had quietly patented the process anyway, and kept the meters running for the British.

Louis Daguerre retired to the village of Bry-sur-Marne, north-central France, where he died 175 years ago this Friday, 10 July 1851.

And Finally…

Next Saturday marks World Population Day, born out of Five Billion Day on 11 July 1987, when—surprise, surprise—the world’s population surpassed 5 billion. The United Nations recognises this day to raise awareness of the issues of our rapidly growing population.

I checked out other related milestones, which were a little staggering: The global population reached 1 billion in 1804, around the time the first steam locomotive ran in Wales, Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States and Napoleon was proclaiming himself as Emperor of France.

The Industrial Revolution significantly turned up the dial from that point. If I ignore the fact that homo sapiens emerged around 250,000 years ago and consider their first known move out of Africa as a starting point, then it took 71,804 years to reach that 1 billion landmark (with a touch of poetic licence).

It then took just 123 years to reach 2 billion and 33 years to reach 3 billion. Since that point in 1960, the world has added 1 billion people to its population, on average, every 12 years!

The world’s population passed 8 billion in 2022. The 9 billion landmark is currently expected in 2036. Food for thought.

Question of the week… answer

George Walker Bush and Sylvester Stallone were born on the same day, 80 years ago last Monday, 6 July 1946.

George W. Bush arrived in a Connecticut hospital with a father already entrenched at Yale and a family whose ambitions stretched from the oilfields to the Senate.

Sylvester Stallone arrived in Hell’s Kitchen—then a working-class, gritty stretch of New York City, west of Times Square, wedged between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River—delivered by forceps clumsy enough to leave him with the slurred drawl later mistaken for artistic choice.

One inherited his swagger. The other had to write his, literally, scripting the film Rocky (1976) in three and a half days while broke enough to have sold his dog Butkus for fifty dollars. Bush rose through oil and baseball for a decade before politics caught up with him. Stallone fought upward through rejection letters before Hollywood did.

Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

ATTRIBUTIONS
Dolly the sheep: Toni Barros from São Paulo, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Boulevard du Temple: Louis Daguerre, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
George W. Bush: File:Charlie Strong with George W. Bush and Jesse Jackson.jpg: Eric Draper, LBJ Foundationderivative work: Pv21, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Sylvester Stallone, 2019: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


CC BY-SA 2.0: ​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0​
CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
CC BY-SA 3.0: ​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ​
CC BY 3.0 IGO: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/deed.en

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Happy Sunday!

Ask anyone to name a plot against the English crown, and you’ll most likely hear something along the lines of Guy Fawkes, gunpowder, and a suspiciously well-timed letter. It’s a terrific story—so terrific it has buried nearly every plot that came before it.

Which is a shame, because two decades earlier, under a different monarch, a quieter, more elegant conspiracy might have been remembered. No barrels of gunpowder, no cellar beneath Parliament, no last-minute tip-off. Just a young Catholic gentleman, a captive queen and a cypher they trusted completely—their every letter decoded and read by a spymaster who got there first.

This is the story of the Babington Plot. No bonfire night, no burning effigy, no place in the national memory. But it did get Mary, Queen of Scots beheaded, which arguably makes it the more consequential of the two.

Anthony Babington...

...was born on 24 October 1561 in the almost non-existent village of Dethick, Derbyshire. This is not a place you stumble upon. Tucked into the hills a few miles from Matlock, it amounts today to little more than a scattering of farm buildings, a small church and the weathered shell of an old manor house.

Anthony was the third son of Henry Babington of Dethick, a Derbyshire gentleman who died when Anthony was about nine, leaving the boy in the care of guardians after his mother remarried. On paper, they were all respectable Protestants.

Off paper, the Babingtons were Catholics.

The Babingtons’ careful lies

In 1558, Elizabeth I inherited a country exhausted by two decades of religious whiplash. Her instinct was to calm things down rather than crank them up further. The 1559 Religious Settlement restored Protestantism as the official faith, but with blurred edges. As such, Elizabeth took the rather vague title of ‘Supreme Governor‘ rather than ‘Supreme Head‘. Services followed an English Prayer Book whose wording walked a careful line, while churches kept just enough colour and ceremony that they still felt like Mass, not stripped-down Protestant lectures.

You still had to turn up on Sunday, but for a while the policy was refreshingly pragmatic—go through the motions in public and we’ll turn a blind eye to what you get up to at home.

Like many English Catholic families, the Babingtons kept the old faith at home, while turning up to the new church just often enough to keep the fines at bay. Anthony’s childhood, in effect, was an apprenticeship in saying one thing and believing another—useful training, as it turned out, for a career in conspiracy.

From Elizabeth’s perspective, it wasn’t tolerance, exactly—more a firm decision not to relight the fires her sister had left smouldering. The peace held uneasily until 1568.

Then Mary, Queen of Scots showed up.

Mary, Queen of Scots

The story of Mary, Queen of Scots and her eventual execution on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I is fairly well-trodden. How she ended up shuttled from one English stronghold to another, under lock and key and edging ever closer to a scaffold in the first place, is a little murkier.

It’s time to fix that, so here goes…

Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, produced several children, but only two are of interest right now: Henry VIII and Margaret Tudor. In 1503, Margaret was married off to James IV of Scotland, a match designed to do what armies had repeatedly failed to—keep the English and the Scots from each other’s throats.

Margaret Tudor and James IV’s surviving son, James V of Scotland, arrived in 1512, making him Henry VIII’s nephew—Tudor on his mother’s side, Stuart on his father’s.

James V went on to marry Mary of Guise, a French noblewoman, and in December 1542 the couple had a daughter. James died six days later, which meant his newborn, Mary Stuart, spent almost her entire life as Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary was raised in France and married the future French king Francis II at fifteen years old. Elizabeth I took the English crown seven months later. Mary wore the Scottish and French crowns for three years before Francis died when she was eighteen. There was little else to do but go home.

Scotland was not amused. Sending a glamorous Catholic queen back into a Protestant powder keg was never going to end well.

Mary’s 1565 marriage to Lord Darnley didn’t last long, though that hardly mattered—by 1567 he’d been murdered. Hastily, and bizarrely, she then married the prime suspect in her husband’s murder, the Earl of Bothwell. Bad optics even by sixteenth-century standards. Mary was finished.

Forced to abdicate in 1567 in favour of her son James VI, and beaten at Langside in a last attempt to win the throne back, Mary fled to England and asked her cousin Elizabeth for sanctuary.

Elizabeth gave Mary more sanctuary than she’d bargained for; house arrest with guards and a lock on the outside of the door.

The young Anthony Babington

Around 1577, the young Babington was sent to serve as a page in the household of George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, who had the usual duties of a great Midlands landowner... and one with considerably higher stakes.

He was jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Elizabeth’s government had dropped the ball. By parking Mary year after year in Shrewsbury’s great houses across Derbyshire and Yorkshire, they’d deposited her right in the middle of the densest Catholic network in the north, stocked with loyal households and no shortage of impressionable young men.

Babington was just a teenager. Mary was glamorous, tragic and royal—which is to say he was defenceless. By the time he left Shrewsbury’s household, he wasn’t sympathetic to her cause. He was besotted with it.

Babington comes of age

Anthony married Margery Draycot in 1579, then went up to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn. By 1580 the law had been quietly shelved in favour of court life and a circle of Catholic gentlemen with a rather more interesting sideline... smuggling priests back into England.

The system was simple enough: land trained priests at whichever minor creek or port was least observed, equip them with false papers and pass them down a chain of Catholic safe houses until they’d effectively vanished from view. They would surface only to administer Mass, then retreat back into their priest holes.

When the celebrated Jesuit Edmund Campion was hunted down and executed in 1581, the atmosphere darkened. Babington retreated to Derbyshire and settled for the uneasy role of a recusant gentleman—fined for refusing to attend Church of England services, watched with a wary eye by his neighbours, simmering with resentment of Elizabeth’s regime and continuing to nurture a strong emotional investment in Mary’s cause.

Around the same time, while travelling in Paris, Babington fell in with Thomas Morgan, one of Mary’s most dedicated supporters abroad. Morgan and his allies drew Anthony into their clandestine correspondence with the captive queen. For a few years he carried letters to and from Mary himself. Then, whether from instinct, nerves or simple common sense, Babington withdrew.

Although he didn’t realise it at the time, he was too late. A web had already been spun and the spider in the middle was none other than Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.

The Babington Plot emerges

None of that mattered. By 1586 the conspiracy had a momentum all its own. Babington was too committed—and far too fond of Mary—to leave the web for long.

That spring, a Catholic priest named John Ballard arrived in London with an ambitious plan. Shortly after, Anthony and his group of young Catholic gentlemen met at a tavern near Temple Bar to talk it through. By May, the young, gullible Babington had been talked into leading the plot.

The plan was as simple as it was outrageously ambitious: Babington would lead a group of conspirators to assassinate Elizabeth I, place Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne, and—with foreign backing mainly from Spain—restore the old religion. The Ridolfi Plot in 1571 had failed. The Throckmorton Plot in 1583 had failed. Now, in 1586, it was Babington’s turn to try his luck.

Anthony gathered six gentlemen to carry out the actual killing, but before they could move, he needed the authorisation of his queen.

Sir Francis Walsingham’s masterclass

Mary was by now held at Chartley Hall in Staffordshire under a much stricter regime than the Shrewsbury years—her correspondence supposedly cut off.

Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, had spent years tracking Catholic exiles. Babington was on his radar. There would be no surprises for Sir Francis. His informers were feeding him updates as the plot took shape. He had front seats to the show.

The villain—or hero, depending on your sympathies—was a Catholic priest-in-training called Gilbert Gifford. The ‘trustworthy‘ go-between turned out to be a double agent reporting directly to Walsingham.

Gifford’s process was simple and efficient. Letters to Mary were wrapped in a leather capsule, slipped into the hollow bung of a beer barrel, and rolled in with the regular delivery to the Chartley Hall household. Mary’s replies went out by the same route.

The Babington Letter

In reality, all correspondence first passed across the desk of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s cypher expert. He read, decoded, copied and resealed each letter before sending it on its way. Rather than wait for his prey to slip up, Walsingham was handing Babington the banana skin.

Into this trap, 440 years ago tomorrow, 6 July 1586, Anthony Babington sent his letter. It was hardly discreet. He laid the entire plot out in plain terms—six gentlemen, one assassination, a foreign invasion arriving on schedule. Then he asked Mary to bless the plot, as casually as one might ask a friend for a favour.

Mary, unaware that her most private letters had an audience of one very attentive Englishman, replied on 17 July. She discussed logistics. She discussed her own rescue. And somewhere in among all that—whatever her defenders later argued about the precise wording—she was understood to have given her blessing to Elizabeth’s murder.

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Happy Wednesday!

The first Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, is often quoted as having said that, ‘God reserves a special providence for fools, drunkards, children—and the United States of America’. Had he lived a little longer, he might have included a fourth category for a single character—Adrian Carton de Wiart.

Brussels, 5 May 1880. Adrian Carton de Wiart entered the world half Belgian, half Irish, and in a hurry. At nineteen, he decided Oxford and the law weren’t for him, slipped away, gave a false name, claimed to be twenty-five and signed up for the Boer War. The army took him at his word.

The 1914–15 campaign in Somaliland relieved de Wiart of his left eye and part of his ear. The following year at Ypres, a German artillery shell shattered his left hand. When the surgeon declined to amputate the dangling fingers, de Wiart removed them himself. By 1916 he was back on the Western Front, one-eyed, one-handed, and in good spirits.

Two years in, the Western Front had delivered mud, industrial-scale death and a front line that had barely moved. Something had to give. The British and French settled on a massive offensive along the River Somme: a week-long artillery bombardment designed to pulverise the German defences so completely that the infantry could simply walk through whatever was left.

Much of the 1914–18 Great War has faded into dates and footnotes. The Battle of the Somme hasn’t. Five months and a million casualties later, the Allies advanced scarcely seven miles—so much sacrificed for so little.

One hundred and ten years ago today, 1 July 1916, at 07:30, 100,000 British troops went over the top. They were ordered to walk, not run. The guns had done their work, they were assured, and the German defences were finished. They weren’t. By nightfall, 57,000 men were dead, wounded or missing. The first day of the Battle of the Somme remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

The following morning at the shattered village of La Boisselle, three of the four battalion commanders had become casualties. Carton de Wiart took charge of all four, moving back and forth through intense fire to organise positions, secure supplies and ensure every yard stayed held. He was shot in the ankle. Later, in the head. He remained in command throughout.

Adrian Carton de Wiart’s Victoria Cross citation in November 1916 gave him credit for averting a serious reverse on 2–3 July 1916, through “dauntless courage and inspiring example”. His memoir, Happy Odyssey, gives the medal rather less attention. There was, after all, more to cover—two air crashes, an Italian PoW camp from which he tunnelled out, and the small matter of his verdict on the whole experience... “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war...“

The Stone of Scone is coming home, it’s coming…

Thirty years ago this Friday, 3 July 1996, UK Prime Minister John Major announced in Parliament that the Stone of Scone—Scotland’s ancient coronation stone—would be going home.

It was exactly 700 years since Edward I had removed the Stone from Scone Abbey, Perth in 1296 on the first of many invasions of Scotland. Destination... Westminster Abbey.

For centuries before Edward’s men prised it from the abbey floor, the Stone of Scone was the centre-piece of each Scottish enthronement.

Edward commissioned a Coronation Chair to house the Stone, and both featured at almost every English/British coronation from Edward II (1308) through to Elizabeth II (1953), a total of 26 monarchs.

Following John Major’s announcement, later that year on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1996, the Stone crossed the border into Scotland under police escort and on to Edinburgh Castle, where 10,000 onlookers turned out to cheer.

There was a small caveat in the agreement—that the Stone be made available for all future coronations. Sure enough, in 2023, the Stone made the journey south again, briefly resuming its old position beneath Charles III at his coronation, before being sent straight back to Scotland.

The Coronation Chair is on permanent display in Westminster Abbey. I popped into the Abbey a couple of weeks ago—for a 700-year-old piece of carpentry, the chair is looking remarkably healthy.

And finally… 75,000 days ago

John Keats entered the world in London on 31 October 1795, the son of a prosperous livery-stable manager—by contrast with the starving poet he would later become.

At eight, he lost his father to a fall from a horse, while his mother followed five years later, worn out by tuberculosis. So, by his mid-teens, Keats was effectively an orphan—his affairs in the hands of a guardian more keen to lock up his inheritance than unlock his prospects.

Keats trained as a surgeon, but by the age of 21 had glimpsed the literary life and walked away from medicine to write poetry full-time.

It transpired that Keats would only enjoy four years pursuing his new passion. A year after abandoning the scalpel, he contracted tuberculosis on a walking tour of Scotland.

And yet, in that brief window, Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale, The Eve of St Agnes and To Autumn—poems now ranked among the finest in the English language. They are also ones I can recite, having had them drilled into me for my English Literature O-Level longer ago than I’d care to admit.

Despite a move to the warmer climate of Rome, John Keats died 75,000 days ago last Sunday, 23 February 1821, penniless and unaware of any inheritance that might have come his way. He was 25 years old.

As he lay on his deathbed, Keats’ friend Joseph Severn asked how he felt. He replied...

Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

ATTRIBUTIONS
Carton de Wiart: Cecil Beaton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
John Keats: William Hilton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Royal Irish Rifles: Royal Engineers No 1 Printing Company., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Coronation Chair with Stone of Scone: Cornell University Library (No restrictions or No restrictions), via Wikimedia Commons.

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(read time: 7 mins.)

On 4 July 1946, the Soviets renamed Königsberg as Kaliningrad—after Mikhail Kalinin, the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet. The logic wasn’t entirely clear. Kalinin—humble, quietly decent and completely spineless—was hardly a figure whose credentials demanded a city.

Doom scrolling has developed a well-earned reputation. This is the practice of picking up your phone for thirty seconds and resurfacing three hours later, slightly hollowed out and with absolutely nothing to show for it.

There is, however, a far more rewarding version of the same condition, and it involves a map. Same bottomless rabbit hole, but none of the self-loathing afterwards.

Get lost in any such map and you can fritter away an entire afternoon, curious about everything and bored by nothing. Stumble from one obscure corner of the world to the next with each discovery pulling you further in. Joy.

For instance, have you ever looked closely at a map of Europe’s Baltic coastline? Squeezed between Poland and Lithuania, you’ll find an odd patch of territory that, at first sight, looks like an orphan who’s been separated from its motherland.

That orphan goes by the name of Kaliningrad Oblast—a Russian exclave perched on the Baltic coast some 240 miles from the nearest point of mainland Russia.

Its capital is the city of Kaliningrad, which today serves as home to the Russian Baltic Fleet and Russia’s primary foothold on the Baltic Sea.

As it turns out, the orphan is remarkably well-armed. Kaliningrad is one of the most heavily militarised corners of Europe. It bristles with air-defence batteries, combat aircraft, missile systems and, quite possibly, nuclear warheads all looking west.

There is a delicious irony buried in all this—Kaliningrad wasn’t always Russian, and this westward-pointing fortress was developed by people who were far more interested in looking east.

Where it all started…

For centuries, the Prussian stronghold of Twangste occupied the banks of the lower Pregel. Then, in 1255, the Teutonic Knights—a German crusading order that had grown out of the Third Crusade—pushed into Prussian territory and built a fortress on the site. The Knights named it Königsberg, or ‘the king’s mountain’, after Ottokar II of Bohemia, a sponsor of the Teutonic expedition.

The name is a little bizarre, as the city and the surrounding region had no mountains to boast of.

By the same logic, the Netherlands might be renamed ‘the Rockies‘ or the Norfolk Broads rebranded as ‘Everest Base Camp‘. Why not christen a goldfish as ‘Great White‘ or declare a wet Tuesday in Slough as the ‘Golden Age‘? That’s enough now.

Logic was never the point. History has always awarded the naming rights to whoever wins.

The thriving city of Königsberg

Name aside, over the next seven centuries, Königsberg grew into a major Baltic trading port, the capital of East Prussia and a key city of the Prussian kingdom. By the time Prussia stood at the heart of a unified Germany, the old fortress had sprouted merchant houses, guildhalls and university cloisters, and was widely counted among Central Europe’s great centres of culture and learning.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg in 1724 and died there in 1804. It’s rumoured that he had never travelled more than ten miles from the city.

By 1939, Königsberg was a sizeable metropolis of roughly 370,000 people, brimming with merchants, soldiers and scholars. The streets were lined with 19th-century apartment blocks, guildhalls and department stores while the trams rattled by. It was a confident, bourgeois capital of bustling cafés and crowded lecture halls.

Then, on 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Over the next six years, Königsberg would be bombed, besieged and erased from the map.

The Second World War comes to Königsberg

The old Prussian port became a military hub and staging ground for Wehrmacht units along the Baltic front. The city watched as troop trains headed east and the wounded headed back. By 1944, the tide had turned. Now the guns were pointing back at Königsberg.

The city was heavily damaged by two Royal Air Force raids between 26 and 30 August 1944, which laid waste to much of Königsberg’s historic heart and left tens of thousands homeless. By January 1945, with Germany’s defeat all but certain, Soviet and Western Allied armies were racing across Nazi-occupied Europe, seizing as much territory as they could before the Reich finally collapsed.

In April 1945, troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front took Königsberg by storm. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had already been absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940, so the ruined East Prussian capital slotted neatly into the USSR’s expanding jigsaw.

Hitler had earmarked Königsberg as the gleaming eastern face of his Thousand-Year Reich. The Red Army had different plans. The Germans were driven out, Soviet settlers were shipped in from across the union—arriving to rubble, shortages and a city they had never asked for.

​The would-be beacon of German civilisation had become something rather different: a Soviet watchtower looming over the West.

Mikhail Kalinin...

...was born into a peasant family, and had risen through the revolutionary ranks to become Stalin’s nominal head of state—a position of considerable ceremonial grandeur and virtually no power whatsoever.

The Soviet propaganda machine cast him as the ‘All-Union Elder‘—modest, unassuming, happiest in simple clothes, eating with train crews and porters rather than troubling any gilded dining rooms.

In other words he was seen as a reassuring figurehead that ordinary citizens might write to with their problems. Nikita Khrushchev later confessed he could never quite establish what practical work Kalinin had actually carried out. Neither, it seems, could anyone else.

There was a darker side to this. From the gulags, thousands of prisoners and their families wrote to him—’Grandpa Kalinin‘—begging the All-Union Elder to intervene on their behalf. He never did.

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Happy Wednesday!

Here goes…

I’ll have a gazeta

Lorenzo Priuli had done well for himself. Born in 1489, he had risen to become the 82nd Doge of Venice, taking the throne on 14 June 1556 as the presiding authority of the most powerful trading republic in Europe. Venice ran on information. Shipping routes, commodity prices, foreign wars, political gossip, diplomatic manoeuvres, court scandals.

In 16th-century Venice, news wasn’t a luxury. It was currency. Priuli understood that better than most.

Under the Doge’s watch, Venice did something quietly revolutionary. The government began publishing the Notizie Scritte—’Written Notices‘—a monthly handwritten digest of political, military and economic news. For the price of a coin, anyone could buy it.

That small copper coin was called a ‘gazeta‘.

Readers would ask for ‘a gazeta‘—a coin’s worth of news. Over time, nobody was quite sure whether they meant the coin or the news sheet. It hardly mattered. Venetian gazeta became Italian gazzetta, then crossed into French and English as gazette—a word we still use today.

By 1665, the British government had launched The Oxford Gazette*—shortly after renamed The London Gazette—today regarded as the oldest surviving English newspaper.

Priuli died on 17 August 1559, but the habit his Venice helped crystallise—a state that packages its intelligence and sells it as news—has outlived him by five centuries.

*The British government had temporarily moved to Oxford to escape the Great Plague, hence ‘Oxford Gazette’.

The Gin Craze

In 1688, when the Dutch Prince-turned-King William of Orange sailed into England, he brought with him firm Protestant principles and a Dutch fondness for gin.

The new regime taxed French wine and brandy to the point of abstinence and, keen to punish the French and please the landowners in a single stroke, opened the distilling trade to all comers. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

By 1730, London was producing 10 million gallons of gin a year, distributed through seven thousand dram shops and assorted premises. The Gin Craze was in full flow. The average Londoner was getting through 14 gallons annually—enough to float a barge, if not quite to fill the Thames.

Back-street distillers filled the gap left by the legitimate trade with their own concoctions, marketed under cheerful names and cut with ingredients that had no business being inside a human body.

Parliament repeatedly tried to stop it. Between 1729 and 1751, it passed five Gin Acts—raising duties, tinkering with licences, and pulling whatever levers were available. The trade dodged each one.

So what ended the craze?

The Gin Act to end all Gin Acts was passed on 25 June 1751, to suppress the retail market. Nature did the rest. Poor harvests pushed up grain and food prices while wages fell. The poorest Londoners hadn’t miraculously lost the urge to drink themselves senseless; they simply couldn’t afford to any more.

If you want to find out a little more about the Gin Craze how tariffs played their part in creating it, check out The Madness of the English Gin Craze and the Mercifully Sobering Gin Act 1751.

And Finally…

Flora MacDonald was born in 1722 on the windswept Hebridean island of South Uist.

Her father, Ranald MacDonald of Milton, was a tacksman under the Clanranald chiefs, and died when Flora turned two years old. She was educated in Edinburgh, returned to the islands, and was, by all accounts, managing perfectly well.

Then Bonnie Prince Charlie came along and changed everything.

The Battle of Culloden had been a catastrophe, and Charles Edward Stuart was now a wanted man. Since April 1746, he had been moving through glens and island hovels with a £30,000 price on his head—government troops behind every ridge, options narrowing by the week.

By June, Charles had arrived on Benbecula, an island connected to South Uist by a causeway. He was wet, exhausted and out of ideas. Flora’s stepfather, Captain Hugh MacDonald, helped obtain travel passes for Flora and her party, including one for an Irish maid named Betty Burke. Betty Burke would be, in reality, six feet of hunted Stuart pretender in a dress that had clearly been made for someone else.

Two hundred and eighty years ago this Saturday, on the evening of 27 June 1746, Flora and Bonnie Prince Charlie—a.k.a. Betty Burke—set off in a small open boat and crossed the Minch ‘over the sea to Skye‘, while Hanoverian troops scoured the hills behind them.

They came ashore near what is now Rudha Phrionnsa, Prince’s Point, north of Uig, and made their way to Portree. There, Flora and Charles said their goodbyes.

Bonnie Prince Charlie would eventually make his way back to safety—and anonymity—in France.

Flora was arrested within weeks and taken south to London, where she spent the better part of a year as a state prisoner, including a stint in the Tower of London. The Act of Indemnity freed her in 1747.

By the time she was released, Flora had become a cause célèbre—the lady who had smuggled a prince in a petticoat across to the Isle of Skye.

Flora’s motivations for rescuing the most wanted man in Britain have never really been established. She was no fire-breathing Jacobite supporter, so perhaps we should believe Flora herself, who said she acted purely out of charity.

The English writer Samuel Johnson stayed with Flora and her husband, Allan MacDonald, on Skye in 1773, and left impressed by her calmness and courtesy. Nearly ninety years after Flora’s death on 5 March 1790, a tall Celtic cross was raised over her grave at Kilmuir, bearing an inscription in words attributed to Johnson:

…

Question of the week… answer

France.

Most national anthems were carefully commissioned—grand gestures from grand committees. France’s was written overnight by a man whose entire legacy fits onto the back of a postcard.

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle was born on 10 May 1760 in Lons-le-Saunier, forty miles northwest of Geneva as the crow flies. He spent his career as an army captain with an occasional sideline in composing and writing verse, none of which set the world alight.

It was April 1792. France had declared war on Austria—the first shot fired in what would become the French Revolutionary Wars—and the mood in Strasbourg was, to put it mildly, charged.

The Mayor of Strasbourg—who also ran the local Masonic lodge—asked his guest Rouget de Lisle to write something rousing for the troops.

Claude went back to his quarters and, in a single night of patriotic fever, produced one of the most stirring pieces of music ever written. He called it the War Song for the Army of the Rhine. He had created his legacy in one remarkable evening’s work.

With France at war and the Revolution under threat, the Legislative Assembly called for volunteers. In Marseille, five hundred young volunteers formed a battalion and set off for Paris—a march that took nearly four weeks.

The battalion, les fédérés, sang Rouget de Lisle’s song the entire way to Paris. Parisians, hearing it for the first time, associated it with the men who’d brought it—and over time, the War Song for the Army of the Rhine became known as ‘La Marseillaise‘.

Rouget de Lisle died on 26 June 1836, in his mid-seventies, poor and largely forgotten, in a small house at Choisy-le-Roi.

Death, at least, brought some recognition. Rouget de Lisle now rests in Les Invalides on the same military complex as Napoleon.

“Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé ! (Repeat)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !

Chorus

Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons, marchons !
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !”

CLAUDE JOSEPH ROUGET DE LISLE

Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

Attributions
The Oxford Gazette: John Overholt, CC BY-SA 2.0, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751: British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Flora MacDonald monument: DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
“The Departure of the volunteers of 1792”: Jebulon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

CC0: ​https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/​
CC BY-SA 2.0: ​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0​
CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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(read time: 10 mins.)

What happened next would define John Zephaniah Holwell’s life, and arguably reshape the history of the Indian subcontinent. In Calcutta, Holwell and the surviving British soldiers and civilians were rounded up and crammed into a small guardroom known as the Black Hole. It measured roughly eighteen feet by fourteen. By the morning, 21 June 1756, most of the prisoners had died.

You’ve heard it. You may have even said it. It conjures a place that is overwhelmingly crowded, oppressively dark, somewhere you’d rather not be.

Your teenage son’s bedroom, essentially.

Most English idioms turn out to have rather dull origins. Not this one. The Black Hole of Calcutta was a real place, a real chamber and a real atrocity.

John Zephaniah Holwell...

...was born in Dublin on 17 September 1711, son of Zephaniah Holwell, a timber merchant of London, and grandson of the astrologer John Holwell. The Holwells had long moved in ‘interesting’ circles. For ‘interesting’, read ‘chronically short of money’.

Holwell was educated partly at a school in Richmond, Surrey, and partly in Iselmond, near Rotterdam, where he acquired some knowledge of bookkeeping and modern languages. It was an eclectic preparation for life, little of which would prove useful for what lay ahead.

Zephaniah, ever the merchant, saw Rotterdam as the making of his son and apprenticed him to a bank in the city—it was, after all, one of the great commercial centres of the 18th century. The plan was sound. John, unfortunately, was not—the intensity of banking got the better of his health, and he came home.

Finding that ledgers left him cold, John abandoned the counting house for the operating theatre, returning to London to train under Andrew Cooper, senior surgeon at Guy’s Hospital. An unusual career change for sure. I suppose both professions required a cool head, but only one demanded that the client be physically restrained.

Training completed, Holwell sailed for Calcutta in 1732 as a surgeon’s mate on the merchant ship Duke of Cumberland. He was twenty years old. Bengal was the sort of place where ambition counted more than background—where a young man with little to his name could make something of himself. If he lived long enough.

The East India Company…

…was founded in 1600, when Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a group of London merchants seeking a share of the lucrative spice trade.

Initially focused on the East Indies, the Company found itself outmuscled by the Dutch and turned its attention to the Indian mainland—a trading post at Surat in 1612, then Madras, Bombay and eventually Calcutta by the end of the century.

By the mid-18th century, the Company was no longer just a trading enterprise. It was evolving into a state within a state—fielding its own armies, running its own courts and conducting its own diplomacy. It was throwing its weight around the Indian subcontinent with breathtaking confidence. Bengal, the richest province of the ailing Mughal Empire, had become its commercial crown jewel.

The Company had dug itself in at Calcutta on the Hooghly river and ringed its warehouses with the stronghold Fort William, named after King William III. The arrangement worked well enough, provided that the nawab—the Muslim ruler or governor—and his officials didn’t look too closely at what the ‘trading’ company was accumulating.

The original fort, completed by 1706, became the commercial and administrative heart of British-held Bengal. By the 1750s, however, it was regarded as badly sited and poorly defended—a vulnerability that Bengal’s new nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah, would soon exploit.

Holwell’s unlikely promotion

Meanwhile, Holwell had spent more than two decades climbing the Company ladder. After a short spell as surgeon at the factory in Dacca, he returned to Calcutta in 1736 and settled in for eleven years collecting titles—alderman of the Mayor’s Court, principal surgeon of the Bengal presidency and twice Mayor—doctoring the sick and sitting on committees in roughly equal measure.

His grandest title came in 1751, when he was made perpetual zamindar of the Twenty-Four Parganas—the Company’s man on the spot for land revenue and law and order in the district. It sounded imposing, but for all the grandeur, he was still a bureaucrat at heart.

Crisis at Fort William

In 1756, Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula ordered the British in Calcutta to stop extending Fort William. As far as the nawab was concerned, the Company was building a fortress on his doorstep without bothering to ask. He was ignored. This was a mistake.

In response, Siraj-ud-Daula marched on Calcutta with an army said to have numbered 50,000 men, accompanied by 500 elephants and fifty cannon. It was not, by any measure, a subtle approach.

The British response was even less subtle. Governor Drake, most of his staff and many of the city’s British residents deserted the fort and scrambled aboard the Company’s ships on the river, leaving women, children and Anglo-Indian clerks to their fate. It has to be one of the most impressive acts of collective cowardice in colonial history. Behind them, they left a garrison of 170 soldiers under the improvised command of John Zephaniah Holwell… the tax collector.

If Holwell had written a CV for the post, he might have talked up his transferable skills: calm under pressure, astute when assessing hopeless situations and effective when persuading people to do things they’d rather not. As for collecting revenue, balancing ledgers and navigating Company bureaucracy, it turns out that they weren’t much use against a besieging army.

The outlook wasn’t promising. Apart from Holwell’s lack of military prowess, there were only two mortars in the fort, much of the powder was too damp to use, while the grapeshot had mostly been eaten by worms.

By afternoon, with the situation beyond saving, Holwell surrendered—on the understanding that quarter would be given.

It wasn’t.

The Black Hole of Calcutta

What happened next would define Holwell’s life, and arguably reshape the history of the Indian subcontinent.

After the surrender on 20 June 1756, Holwell and the surviving British soldiers and civilians were rounded up and crammed into a small guardroom known, with typical military understatement, as the Black Hole—the lock-up for petty offenders. It measured roughly eighteen feet by fourteen.

Being imprisoned in a cramped cell in 40-degree heat, fierce humidity and no ventilation was bad enough. Being forced to strip first added an indignity that Holwell, a man of considerable pride, would have found unbearable.

By the morning of 21 June 1756, most of the prisoners had died from suffocation, heat, crushing or dehydration in that airless room.

The survivors were let out on the nawab’s orders. Holwell was so exhausted he had to be carried out. He survived because he was fortunate enough to find himself near one of the cell’s two windows in the crush. He later wrote: “We had been but a few minutes confined before everyone fell into a perspiration so profuse, you can form no idea of it.“

John Holwell had survived the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Holwell was dispatched in irons to Murshidabad, the nawab’s capital and released a few weeks later at the intercession of the Begum—the nawab’s grandmother. She remembered how fairly he had treated local petitioners while relieving them of their money. A tax collector saved by his own decency—go figure.

Systematic exploitation by the East India Company

With news of Holwell’s night in the Black Hole still ringing in his ears, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Clive sailed from Madras, retook Calcutta in January 1757, and set about settling accounts with some enthusiasm.

That June, with 3,000 men, he faced Siraj-ud-Daulah’s army of 50,000 at Plassey. The odds were somewhat improved by the nawab’s own commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar, who had been paid off beforehand and kept most of his troops standing politely aside.

Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah was captured and executed within the week, and in 1758 Clive became the Company’s governor in Bengal. From that point, the East India Company was no longer merely trading in Bengal—it was learning how to strip-mine a province.

The story that changed everything

Holwell didn’t publish his account of the Black Hole of Calcutta until 1758, in a pamphlet with the memorably modest title, “A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and others, who were suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort William, at Calcutta“. It became one of the must‑read atrocity stories of the eighteenth century.

In Holwell’s account, of the 146 people crammed into the Black Hole, only 23 came out. The dead remained standing—the crush too great for them to fall. Three sides of the hole were solid brick; the fourth had two small barred windows and almost no air. Prisoners screamed, clawed at the windows and trampled on the weak. Bribes to the guards went unanswered. Some drank sweat wrung from their own clothing.

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Happy Wednesday!

The birth of the Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition may be the most confidently name-dropped chapter in history where almost nobody can get beyond the title. Often, people’s knowledge begins with Monty Python and ends shortly after with a shrug or an oblique reference to torture.

Yet it was real enough: a royal-church tribunal established in 1478 to hunt down heresy, a chain of command, offices, staff and a heroic volume of paperwork. Not a mood or a metaphor—an actual organisation, and a surprisingly durable one.

The backstory starts in 711 when Muslim armies overran the old Visigothic Kingdom and the Iberian Peninsula became something rare: seven centuries of Christians, Muslims and Jews living alongside one another in a state of more or less managed unease.

From the 11th century, that balance had begun to shift. The crowns of Castile and Aragon—Portugal joining the effort in due course—pushed southward, and Muslim dominance slowly fractured under the pressure.

But it was the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469, joining the two most powerful Christian kingdoms at the hip, that was decisive. The Reconquista—the centuries-long campaign to push Muslim rule off the peninsula—was entering its final act.

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(read time: 12 mins.)

King Richard II rode out to Smithfield. Wat Tyler’s men were waiting, armed and ready to fight. Tyler rode out from their lines to speak with the king—a tiler from Kent, face to face with the King of England. Then, in the heat of the June afternoon, Tyler called for a flagon of water, rinsed his mouth, and spat it out in full view of the royal party. In one minute, everything changed.

If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.

A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.

On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.

A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event from 15 June 1381.

That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.

His name was Wat Tyler.

The English feudal system...

...was crystallised by William the Conqueror after 1066, from roots back in Anglo-Saxon England. William imposed a new order on old inequalities. The principle was simple: with the exception of Church lands, England belonged to him.

How’s that for simple?

He then distributed land rights downward in exchange for loyalty and military service. Barons and bishops received large estates which they carved up among lesser lords and knights on similar terms. At the bottom of the pile, the peasants—serfs or villeins—worked the land in exchange for the right to live on it... and little else.

It was a medieval pyramid scheme, with William firmly at the top. The Domesday Book of 1086 was his great audit of the whole arrangement—a meticulous survey of who held what, what it was worth, and what they owed for it. Nobody appealed the findings.

By 1348, the feudal system was looking frayed. Knights were more often paying cash than riding to war. Towns were filling up with merchants and craftsmen who didn’t fit into the old pyramid. Some serfs had negotiated their way out of serfdom. The Church held vast estates and answered to Rome rather than Westminster.

Then the plague arrived. With little warning, the old rules stopped working.

The Black Death...

The Black Death arrived in England in 1348, probably through the port of Melcombe Regis, Weymouth on the Dorset coast. Victims developed hideously swollen, darkened lymph nodes, sweated and shivered, sometimes coughed blood—and were often dead within days.

Whole villages vanished, harvests rotted in the fields and the Church lost priests faster than it could ordain replacements.

In total, the plague killed between a third and a half of the population within two years. Imagine if every other person you have ever seen or met was now dead. It was a staggering number.

Huge swathes of the workforce had simply disappeared. Those who remained found themselves strangely indispensable.

Lords watched on as labourers slipped away to neighbouring estates offering better terms. For the first time in living memory, peasants had leverage. The brutal arithmetic of supply and demand had done what centuries of feudal habit could not—made the common man’s labour unmistakably valuable.

Change didn’t happen overnight. Instead, over the next thirty-five years, a string of decisions and disasters conspired to make an already unhappy situation considerably worse.

Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351, fixing wages at pre-plague rates and trying to prevent peasants from seeking better-paid work elsewhere. Resentment simmered just beneath the surface.

The Black Death kept coming back with fresh waves in 1361–62, 1369 and 1374–5, each one killing more labour and tilting economics even further in the peasants’ favour.

The Hundred Years’ War ground on. The celebrated victories at Crécy and Poitiers were fading into memory while new campaigns bled the treasury dry. It was not going well.

And then came the final straw.

Parliament imposed a third poll tax in 1381, following previous levies in 1377 and 1379—but this time charging three groats per head on everyone over fifteen.

By the spring of 1381, the tax collectors were running into more than grumbles. Instead of harvesting revenue, they were sowing the seeds of revolution.

In Essex, towards the end of May, a crowd of men from nearby villages drove a royal tax commissioner clean out of Brentwood. Within days, the unrest had spread and both Essex and Kent were in open revolt.

At this point, our central character took to the stage.

Wat Tyler

Almost nothing is known of Wat Tyler’s early life. He was probably born in the early 1340s, around the time of the first Black Death. He may have been a roof tiler—hence the name. He was from Kent. Or possibly Essex.

That’s about it. As it turns out, Wat Tyler’s moment in the light of history would last just nine days.

But what a nine days they were.

7 June 1381: The Kentish rebels

Tyler was chosen as the captain of the Kentish rebels soon after they had stormed Rochester Castle. Why him? Well, I could tell you that he was a natural leader—commanding, decisive, with the kind of authority that could turn a crowd into an army. I could suggest that he had some military experience and the confidence of a man who had nothing much to lose. But I’d be guessing.

10 June 1381: The March on Canterbury

The Kentish men marched on Canterbury, arriving in force to a surprisingly sympathetic welcome. They threw open the jails, burned bundles of legal and tax records, drove out Archbishop Simon Sudbury’s officials and declared him deposed.

Sudbury himself—also Lord Chancellor and closely associated with the hated poll tax—had the good sense to have fled to the relative safety of the Tower of London.

12 June 1381: The March on London

The two rebel factions now marched on London. The Essex men came in from the north and east, camping on the fields at Mile End. The Kentish rebels approached from the south, gathering at Blackheath—the open heath above the Thames, just south of Greenwich.

On the same day Tyler was chosen as captain, a wandering radical priest, John Ball, was freed from Maidstone prison. He would become one of the revolt’s most incendiary voices.

That evening, Ball preached to an assembled crowd of armed men. His sermon turned on a single rhetorical question:

If Adam dug the earth and Eve spun the wool—just two people doing what was needed to survive—where, Ball was asking, was the need for noblemen?

The gathered crowd liked what they heard. The loose swirl of grievances that had brought them to Blackheath was hardening into something that genuinely threatened the Crown.

By the way, if you ever get a little confused over the finer points of the British class system, check out my thirty-second guide here.

13 June 1381: The Kentish men march on the Savoy Palace

The following day, Tyler led his men to London Bridge. The defences were up—the city authorities had given the matter some thought. Not enough, as it turned out.

Sympathetic Londoners opened the gates uncontested and thousands of Kentish rebels poured into the city. The French had been trying to take London for fifty years. They should have just knocked.

Once inside, the Kentish men drove west, opened the Fleet Prison, then headed for the lawyers’ district at the Temple, feeding piles of legal records to the flames when they arrived.

From Temple, they turned along the Strand towards the biggest prize of all: the Savoy Palace—the magnificent London residence of John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle and, in many eyes, the most powerful man in England.

The palace was looted and set ablaze. England held its breath.

14 June 1381: Richard II meets the Essex men.

Richard II was fourteen years old.

He was not yet the calculating, tyrannical figure history would later sketch. He was a teenager with a crown, hemmed into the Tower of London with what remained of his court, surrounded by thousands of furious subjects. His principal commanders were scattered across the country, while his powerful uncle, John of Gaunt, was out of reach in Scotland.

Right now, Richard was on his own.

He rode out to Mile End to meet the Essex rebels. He agreed in principle to almost everything they asked—an end to serfdom, fixed money rents in place of labour services, and a pardon for all who had risen up. It was an astonishing capitulation.

Many of the rebels were willing to take yes for an answer. They received their sealed charters from the teenage king and began drifting back towards their villages.

Meanwhile...

Once the king was at Mile End, a force led by the formidable woman Johanna Ferrour—the same Ferrour linked to the burning of the Savoy Palace the day before—pushed into the Tower of London.

The gates were opened from within and the rebels more or less walked in. The garrison, without their king and unsure which way the wind was blowing, offered little resistance.

Inside, the rebels hunted down royal officers and foreigners—lawyers, ministers and even Flemish traders unlucky enough to be within reach.

Two of the most hated men in England—Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Sir Robert Hales, the king’s treasurer, both blamed for the poll tax—were dragged out and beheaded unceremoniously on Tower Hill. Their heads were displayed on London Bridge.

Sudbury’s mummified skull, axe marks and all, still rests in St Gregory’s Church in his home town of Sudbury, Suffolk.

15 June 1381: Tyler’s fateful audience with the king

Richard had faced down the Essex rebels at Mile End, but he still had the Kentish army to deal with.

He rode out to Smithfield. Wat Tyler’s men were waiting, armed and ready to fight. Tyler rode out from their lines to speak with the king—a tiler from Kent, face to face with the King of England.

In one minute everything changed.

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Happy Wednesday!

Another great midweek line-up for you, so let’s dive straight in.

Hiram Bingham III and the Inca Empire

When Hiram Bingham III, the son of missionaries, was born in Honolulu in 1875, his parents rather hoped he would follow their lead. Hiram had other ideas. A historian of Latin America at Yale, his mind was perpetually elsewhere—obsessed with the lost cities of the Inca.

At its height by the 1530s, the Inca Empire ran like a spine down the Andes—today’s southern Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, all the way into Chile and Argentina.

In barely a century, the Inca had constructed near-impossible road systems through mountainous terrain, with cities of interlocking stone so precisely cut that they needed no mortar. Then Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, murdered the emperor, and the whole extraordinary enterprise began to unravel.

A century of empire isn’t nothing—Alexander the Great’s empire collapsed within a decade of his death in 323 BCE, while France’s First Empire under Napoleon barely managed ten years (1804–1814). On the other hand, Byzantium carried the Roman flame for around 1,100 years and—depending on where you start and stop the clock—you can stretch ‘Rome‘ itself across more than two millennia.

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(read time: 11 mins.)

William Pitt the Elder called Magna Carta “the Bible of the English constitution.” By 1606, when the first English settlers crossed the Atlantic, Magna Carta had been part of English law for nearly four centuries. When the detested Stamp Act’s repeal came before the House in early 1766, Pitt declared Americans as “the sons, not the bastards, of England.“ Those who had resisted the Stamp Act, he added, were “defenders of the cause of liberty.”

A couple of weeks ago while in London, I took a small detour to look at a new Banksy that was causing quite a stir just up the road from the National Gallery. I’m not easily impressed. This one was impressive.

In case you’ve never heard of Banksy, he is an anonymous street artist who has spent the last few decades leaving stencilled images on walls around the world without asking anyone’s permission and, as a result, has become one of the most extraordinarily successful artists on the planet.

The work I was standing in front of was a little different. It was a statue. A man in a suit, face wrapped in a flag so he can’t see where he’s going, is walking straight off his plinth into the void. It’s packed with symbolism, but the truly mind-bending point isn’t the meaning—it’s the existence. The piece is about twenty feet tall, must weigh close to a tonne and looks as though it has been standing there as long as Florence Nightingale and Edward VII, who have been sharing the same patch of Waterloo Place for over a century.

Nobody saw it go up. Nobody knows how. It simply appeared one morning, fully formed, entirely unbothered. Awesome.

The rumour on the street is that Banksy originates from Bristol, which brings me, in a fairly straight line, to a very famous statue in that city.

In June 2020, a crowd of protesters in Bristol looped a rope around the neck of a bronze statue of Edward Colston, the 17th-century merchant whose considerable fortune was bound up with the slave trade. The figure was then hauled from its plinth and pitched into Bristol’s Floating Harbour just yards away. The whole sequence was over in minutes. The argument it triggered wasn’t.

It was the moment a debate that had been simmering for years finally boiled over. Colston had been standing there since 1895, celebrated as a great civic benefactor while his sideline in the transatlantic slave trade was airbrushed from the record.

Once Colston hit the water, the floodgates opened. In London, the statue of Scottish slave trader Robert Milligan was quietly removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands. In Oxford, campaigners fixed their sights on Cecil Rhodes, gazing serenely down from Oriel College, while in Westminster, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was boarded up overnight... just in case.

The question being asked was simple: whose version of history are we actually commemorating—and do we still agree with it?

In the months that followed, that question was asked across Britain and around the world, as monuments on every continent came under renewed scrutiny.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that a certain statue in Charleston, South Carolina, is still standing.

America’s first public monument...

...stands inside the Charleston County Courthouse on Broad Street. It turns out that the 10-foot-high marble figure—17 feet including the plinth—has had rather a difficult two and a half centuries.

It was first unveiled on 5 July 1770 at the crossroads of Broad and Meeting Streets, commissioned by the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly. The English sculptor, Joseph Wilton, depicted the subject in classical Roman style: wrapped in a toga, one arm raised towards the heavens in defence of American liberties and the other cradling a scroll—the Magna Carta. Dignified. Permanent. Immortal.

Well, actually, not so immortal...

In the spring of 1780, the Revolutionary War was blazing through the South, and General Sir Henry Clinton arrived outside Charleston with fourteen thousand soldiers and ninety ships. He wasn’t there to negotiate. For six weeks, his guns methodically tightened around the city until the American garrison—hungry, isolated, and running out of options—surrendered. It was the greatest British victory of the entire war, and the worst American defeat.

Amid the cannon fire, the burning buildings and the chaos, a British round shot found its way to the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets and neatly removed the statue’s upraised right arm. The British had managed to mutilate a monument to an English statesman who had spent much of his career arguing in Parliament against fighting this very war. We can only assume the gunner was not a student of irony.

Since then, the statue has been shuffled from site to site but now appears, for the moment at least, to have come to rest at the County Courthouse.

...William Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham

‘The Great Commoner‘ was born in Westminster in 1708, grandson of Thomas “Diamond” Pitt, a former East India Company governor at Fort St George in Madras. His grandfather had returned from India with a fortune and one of the great Golconda stones, later cut and sold to the French regent, Philippe II. In other words, the Pitts had money, connections and, for good measure, a hereditary gift for gout. William inherited all three.

Pitt first rose to speak in the House of Commons in April 1736, already marked by the gout that would dog him for life. In later years he sometimes arrived at Westminster swathed in bandages, propped up on crutches with one foot encased in a bucket-sized gout-boot.

If the House was tempted to titter, it didn’t last long. Politician and writer Horace Walpole, recalling one speech in 1755, told a friend there was...

As war minister and Secretary of State, Pitt steered the country to its defining victories in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), turning Britain into a formidable imperial power. British regulars and colonial troops drove the French from key posts across North America, including Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, which was rebuilt and renamed Fort Pitt in his honour.

While the honour itself was never in question, the spelling has proved more challenging over the years. General Forbes, writing home after the victory, called the place Pittsbourgh, which subsequently morphed to Pittsburgh, then Pittsburg, then back to Pittsburgh, where it remains today.

Prime minister from 1766 to 1768, Pitt had already earned the nickname the ‘Great Commoner‘ by spending most of his career in the House of Commons and refusing every peerage that would have carried him into the Lords. In an age when high office was a licence to help yourself, he made a point of declining the backhanders that came with the job. In Georgian politics, this was considered faintly eccentric.

Which, given what was coming, would prove to be rather important.

Magna Carta

Magna Carta was born in 1215 out of a simple arrangement that had gone badly wrong. King John taxed his barons heavily, dispensed justice arbitrarily and squandered men and money on losing wars in France.

The barons had reached their limit.

When John refused to change course, the barons seized control of London and marched him to Runnymede, a water-meadow by the Thames, where they presented him with a list of demands so comprehensive that his clerks needed an entire charter to write them all down. They called it Magna Carta. John sealed it on 15 June 1215—he had little choice—establishing a principle that, up to that point, had been unthinkable: even a king was subject to the law.

John, naturally, had other ideas. He promptly had the Magna Carta annulled by Pope Innocent III and plunged back into civil war with his barons.

When John died in 1216, his nine‑year‑old son Henry III needed those same barons back on side. His councillors reissued a Magna Carta Lite, going a little gently on the taxation clause. Not bad statecraft for a nine-year-old, even if he did have a little help.

Successive kings continued to reissue Magna Carta, pruning the taxation clauses each time since monarchs found them a little inconvenient.

Edward I was forced to climb down in 1297 when he tried to levy additional taxes for wars against Scotland, Flanders and France without consent.

Charles I ran into fiercer resistance in the 1620s and 1630s, attempting to raise taxes for wars against Spain and France without consulting Parliament. It ended in civil war and cost him his head.

And yet Magna Carta survived all of it—the annulments, the pruning, the convenient reissues—and transformed from a failed peace deal into something far more powerful: a foundational statement of the rule of law and the liberties of English subjects.

Magna Carta and America

By 1606, when the first English settlers crossed the Atlantic, Magna Carta had been part of English law for nearly four centuries. Long enough for a baronial grievance to become a birthright.

No person could be imprisoned without lawful cause—the seed of habeas corpus. No one punished without the judgment of their peers—the ancestor of the jury. Property could not be seized on a royal whim. Even the king was subject to the law, not floating cheerfully above it.

And tucked away in the small print was the clause that would one day prove explosive: that the king had no right to levy new taxes without the consent of those who paid them—the medieval ancestor of “no taxation without representation.”

When King James I issued the First Charter of Virginia in 1606, he guaranteed the settlers and their descendants all the liberties and rights of anyone born in England. The men who boarded those ships didn’t think of themselves as pioneers of a new legal order. They were Englishmen abroad, and they packed their rights accordingly.

Charters followed in other states, each guaranteeing the same English rights to due process, jury trial and consent to taxation ultimately rooted in Magna Carta.

When the Founding Fathers sat down to write the Constitution and subsequently the Bill of Rights, they were drawing on rights that English law had been developing since 1215.

They hadn’t invented a new idea. They had simply decided that, this time, nobody was going to take it away from them.

America and William Pitt the Elder

In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act—the first direct internal tax ever imposed on the colonies. Until now, taxes had fallen on imports and exports. This was different. Now taxes fell on everyday items: the documents they signed, the newspapers they read, even the playing cards they shuffled.

Pitt once called Magna Carta “the Bible of the English constitution.” He meant it. When Parliament began treating the American colonists as a convenient revenue stream rather than as British subjects with British rights, he took it personally.

The Act’s repeal came before the House in early 1766. Pitt was bedridden with gout as he told a friend:

Once in the chamber, he turned on his own brother-in-law George Grenville—the Act’s architect—and declared Americans as “the sons, not the bastards, of England.“ Those who had resisted the Stamp Act, he added, were “defenders of the cause of liberty.”

The Stamp Act was dead. Pitt’s speech had done much of the heavy lifting.

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Happy Wednesday!

Not long ago, I wrote about a plucky eleven-year-old girl from Westfield, New York who, in October 1860, wrote to the then-unbearded Abraham Lincoln. Grace Bedell had seen the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign portrait and she had a suggestion for him…

Lincoln took her advice. On 16 February 1861, as the president-elect’s train rolled east toward Washington for his inauguration, it made an unscheduled stop at Westfield, New York—where Lincoln stepped out and asked the assembled crowd if they could produce the small girl who had sent him the rather specific grooming advice.

When Grace Bedell was brought forward, he bent down to her and, showing off his new beard, said to her...

And that, I thought, was that. However, a few days later, I received an email from a reader—thank you, Cheryl from Vienna, ME—who suggested that the story didn’t end there.

It turns out that in 1860, a young lithographer in Springfield, Massachusetts—one Milton Bradley—had produced a handsome portrait of Lincoln: clean-shaven, distinguished and thoroughly presidential. It was doing a roaring trade.

That was good news because lithographs were expensive and laborious to produce. A lithographer like Milton Bradley had to draw the image painstakingly onto treated stone or a metal plate, from which hundreds of impressions could then be pulled. Once the plate was made, changing it was no simple matter.

Then Grace Bedell picked up her pen. Lincoln grew the beard. Within weeks, Bradley’s handsome, clean-shaven portrait no longer looked anything like the man on the campaign trail. His lithograph had become obsolete.

Faced with ruin, Milton turned to board games—a natural pivot, since the same lithographic press that had produced his portraits could just as easily print boards and cards.

He turned out to be rather good at it. The Checkered Game of Life sold 40,000 copies in its first year, and the Milton Bradley Company went on to give the world Candy Land, Battleship, Twister, and Connect Four.

The gaming giant Hasbro acquired the whole enterprise for $360 million in 1984. All because of a little girl’s letter.

Milton Bradley himself died 30 May 1911, aged 74.

Patrick Henry

In 1765, reeling from the debt accumulated from the Seven Years’ War, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a direct tax requiring colonists to buy stamped paper for almost every kind of printed matter—newspapers, legal documents, licenses, even playing cards.

The uproar it provoked is now widely seen as one of the sparks that helped set the colonies on the path to the American Revolution.

The Brits might have got away with it but for the intervention of an up-and-coming lawyer from Studley, Virginia… Patrick Henry.

Patrick was born on 29 May 1736. It turned out that he would be celebrating his 29th birthday in some style. On 29 May 1765, Henry stood up in the Virginia House of Burgesses and delivered a rampaging speech against the Stamp Act.

Some members of the House grew concerned when Henry suggested that King George III might follow in the footsteps of Julius Caesar or even Charles I. But Henry was defiant. When the Speaker stood up and shouted “Treason!”, Henry retorted…

The speech established Patrick Henry as a leading voice for revolution. His memorable quote would be remembered as an early watchword of the coming revolution, foreshadowing his later cry of...

And Finally…

‘Aptronym’
(noun)

​A person’s name that matches their job or one of their main characteristics.
CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY

Jaime Lachica Sin was born in Aklan, the Philippines, in 1928—the fourteenth of sixteen children... which probably accounts for his renowned sense of humour.

Jaime had entered the priesthood in 1954 and risen steadily through the ranks, becoming Bishop of Jaro in 1967.

He was a strong moral voice against repression and corruption, and a pivotal figure in the peaceful ousting of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

​In 1974, he became Archbishop of Manila and, on 24 May 1976, he was appointed Cardinal-Priest of Santa Maria ai Monti by Pope Paul VI in Rome.

​From that point onwards, he would be addressed as Cardinal Sin.

Question of the week… answer

British Guiana.

On 26 May 1966, the Union Jack was lowered over Georgetown and a new flag climbed the pole in its place.

The Golden Arrowhead—Guyana’s national flag—was raised for the first time as British Guiana passed into history and the independent nation of Guyana was born.

The colony’s recorded European history stretched back to 1499, moulded in turn by the Spanish, Dutch, French and British. African slaves were transported to work the sugar plantations and—after emancipation in 1838—indentured labourers arrived from India, Madeira, China and Portugal, creating one of the most diverse populations in the Americas.

Today, Guyana is among the fastest-growing economies on the planet, driven by offshore oil discovered in 2015. Three hundred and fifty years of colonial rule, and it turned out the real treasure was under the seabed all along.

Thank you for joining me. Enjoy the rest of the week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

ATTRIBUTIONS
The bearded Abraham Lincoln: Alexander Gardner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Grace Bedell, 1870s: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Patrick Henry’s “If this be treason, make the most of it!”: Peter F. Rothermel (1812–1895), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cardinal Jaime Sin: Ernmuhl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Guyana’s national flag—the Golden Arrowhead: Whitney Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

CC BY-SA 3.0: ​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ​

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(read time: 12 mins.)

On 30 May 1896, just a few days after his coronation, Tsar Nicholas II had a decision to make. Over a thousand of his subjects lay dead at Khodynka Field. Should he go to the French ambassador’s ball or mourn publicly with his people?

There is a particular kind of political suicide that doesn’t involve a scandal, a war or even a bad decision. It involves a party.

Take revolutionary France in October 1789. With Paris already in open revolt and bread shortages driving women into the streets, the King’s Guards at Versailles staged a lavish banquet in the opera house to welcome the newly arrived Regiment of Flanders. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made the mistake of showing up.

The press duly reported the ‘orgiastic excess‘ of the evening as yet another symbol of aristocratic indifference to the starving masses—and drew its own conclusions. Four days later, so did thousands of the women of Paris, who marched on Versailles armed with pitchforks and whatever else came to hand.

The party, in every sense, was over. The royal family left that afternoon and never went back.

Four years later, Louis XVI was beheaded in the square which is now Place de la Concorde. Marie Antoinette followed him to the guillotine nine months later.

Or how about Iran in October 1971? In a country where rapid modernisation sat alongside deep poverty—where whole villages still had no piped water—Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi decided the moment called for a party. Not just any party. A 2,500th-anniversary celebration of the Persian Empire, staged among the ruins of Persepolis.

French chefs were flown in. Tons of imported delicacies followed. A small city of air-conditioned silk tents rose from the desert floor. Dozens of kings, presidents and princes dined on caviar and some of the most expensive wines on earth.

Outside that glittering bubble, most Iranians got on with the business of being poor.

Ayatollah Khomeini, watching from exile, could hardly believe his luck. The whole spectacle had handed him a ready-made script for revolution, and he put it to good use. Just over seven years later, the Shah was gone.

More recently, in the summer of 2020, while the United Kingdom was living under the tight restrictions of Covid-19—families barred from visiting dying relatives in hospital, funerals reduced to a handful of distanced mourners—the staff of 10 Downing Street were doing what any responsible government would do in a national emergency. They were having a party.

Several parties, as it turned out. In the garden, in the offices, in the corridors—wherever there was a flat surface and a bottle of bubbly. Prime Minister Boris Johnson attended a birthday gathering held in his honour in the Cabinet Room in June, for which he was later fined by the Metropolitan Police, becoming the first sitting British prime minister in history to have been found guilty of breaking the law.

It was a distinction he accepted with characteristic good grace, which is to say he denied everything. No guillotine was erected on Whitehall. No pitchforks were raised. But something in the public’s mind snapped, and no amount of optimism or blond hair-ruffling ever quite fixed it.

Three parties. Three catastrophic misreadings of the room. None of them brought the roof down immediately—but neither were they forgotten either. And yet, for sheer obliviousness, none could touch Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who managed the trick right at the start of his reign.

Nicholas Aleksandrovich Romanov...

... was born on 18 May 1868 at Tsarskoye Selo, a fantasy of baroque palaces and manicured parkland, of frozen lakes and gilded spires.

The ‘Tsar’s Village‘ was 17 miles from St Petersburg and considerably further from reality. This was where the Russian imperial family lived at a careful distance from the world they ruled. For Nicholas, it was simply home... which left him uniquely unqualified for everything that came next.

His father, Alexander III, was a man of almost mythological physical stature: tall, barrel-chested and built for the express purpose of intimidating everyone in the room. He bent iron pokers for amusement and ruled the largest empire on earth with the serene confidence of a man for whom failure was not an option.

This was unfortunate for Nicholas, because it meant Alexander never got around to preparing his son for the job.

The young Nicolas was, by most accounts, a conscientious student of more-than-average ability. He was also slight, introverted and softly spoken—not the obvious characteristics of a fearsome autocrat.

In his less charitable moments, Alexander dismissed Nicholas as ‘girlish‘. Disconcertingly, the tsarevich was inclined to agree. And yet the throne awaited, and somebody had to sit on it.

Tsar Nicholas II

When Alexander III died unexpectedly of kidney disease in November 1894—at forty-nine—his court and his family were shocked. Nicholas wept. He was twenty-six. He became Tsar of all the Russias. He had no choice.

Nicholas was, by nature, a man of extraordinary self-restraint—shading into shyness—with a genuine love of military life and an unshakeable belief in the divine right of tsars to do exactly as they pleased. He had absorbed his father’s politics completely, even if he hadn’t inherited his father’s spine. Russia would be ruled by the tsar alone; the tsar answered to God, and nobody else needed to be consulted. It was an agreeable arrangement, provided you were the tsar.

Nicholas married Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt—a granddaughter of Queen Victoria—barely three weeks after his father’s death, the court still deep in formal mourning. The wedding party must have been a riot.

He would not be crowned for another eighteen months. There was a great deal to arrange.

The coronation

Russian Imperial coronations were not merely ceremonies—they were choreographed statements of divine authority. Peter the Great had shifted the capital to St Petersburg in 1712, but emperors still made the journey back to Moscow to be crowned in the Dormition Cathedral inside the Kremlin. The old sacred heart of Russia was where God’s representative on earth got his paperwork signed.

The coronation of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna took place on 26 May 1896, in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. It was everything it was supposed to be—solemn, magnificent, charged with ceremony. The Kremlin blazed with electric light, a novelty for many of those looking on.

Nicholas received the Imperial Crown of Russia, Alexandra stood at his side, and the metropolitan anointed them both with holy oil. For one golden moment, it looked like the beginning of something glorious.

The fateful party

The people’s party came four days later, 30 May 1896, at Khodynka Field, on the north-western edge of Moscow. Here, away from the cathedral incense and the gilded robes, the new Tsar would make his gesture to the masses. Not through ceremony and silk, but through... sausages and a commemorative mug.

The gifts were modest, to put it kindly: a Vyazma gingerbread, a piece of sausage, a small bag of sweets and nuts, a bread roll from the celebrated Moscow baker Filippov and a brightly painted enamel mug bearing the new tsar’s monogram—the whole lot tied up in a gaudy cotton headscarf. It was the kind of stuff you might find at a village fête, had village fêtes been organised for emperors.

Khodynka was not actually a park. It was a military training ground, criss-crossed with ditches, gullies and trenches dug for exercises, all hidden beneath a thin skin of grass. Officials had chosen it for its size and proximity to central Moscow. Warnings that the ground should be levelled, or the worst hollows properly filled, were brushed aside.

The night before, the crowds began to arrive. Rumours had swept through Moscow that there were not enough gifts to go around. By dawn, more than half a million people had poured onto Khodynka Field.

The Khodynka Field disaster

People near the front began stumbling into the trenches. Those behind couldn’t see why; they kept pushing. The field started swallowing people. Eighteen hundred police and Cossack patrols couldn’t hold the line. The surge became a stampede. When it was over, 1,389 people were dead and 1,300 more injured.

For a mug and a bread roll.

The mug would forever be referred to as the Cup of Sorrows.

The mistake

And here is where Nicholas II made his mistake. That evening, he was due at the French ambassador’s ball. On the city’s edge, over a thousand of his subjects lay dead on Khodynka Field. The choice was not a complicated one. Cancel the ball. Go to the wounded. Mourn publicly, visibly—act like a tsar.

Nicholas went to the ball.

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(read time: 13 mins.)

On the afternoon of 23 May 1701, at five o’clock, low tide, they reached Execution Dock at Wapping. The pirate William Kidd was led to the scaffold, a noose placed around his neck. The cart was drawn away. Kidd dropped… Every buried chest, every desert island, every X-marks-the-spot in every pirate story you have ever encountered owes something to William Kidd and that moment.

Picture the least likely man in the world you’d cast as a pirate legend.

No slow-burning fuses braided into his beard. No swaggering, rum-soaked buccaneer haunting the Caribbean. No skull and crossbones, no wooden leg, no parrot with strong opinions.

Picture instead a respectable Scottish sea captain in his fifties. A churchgoer and property owner. A man with a fine townhouse, a wealthy wife, two daughters and a thoroughly solid reputation.

That man was William Kidd. A surprising amount of what you think you know about pirates—the buried treasure, the map, the desperate hunt, the legend—traces back to him. Not because he was a great pirate. Not even because he was much of a pirate at all.

But I’m getting ahead of myself...
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​

William Kidd…

…was born around 1654, most likely in Dundee, Scotland—though Greenock on the River Clyde has its advocates, and—the history record being what it is—we may never know for certain.

William’s father was a seaman—a working man of the North Sea and North Atlantic. What Kidd got up to until his first appearance in history books, some thirty-five years later, nobody quite knows. We can assume he went to sea. The details, apparently, not worth recording.

What we do know is that Kidd was no choirboy.

By 1689, William was sailing the Caribbean as part of a French pirate crew under one Captain Jean Fantin. Sailing under a French flag didn’t sit comfortably with him—and Kidd being Kidd, he solved the problem in the most direct way possible. While Fantin was ashore, he led a mutiny, seized the ship and sailed her to the English colony of Nevis. There, he renamed her the Blessed William—presumably in honour of the new Dutch king on the English throne, William of Orange.

The governor of Nevis, Christopher Codrington, promptly recruited Kidd and the Blessed William into a small squadron tasked with preying on French shipping in the West Indies. The payment terms were straightforward enough—the crew would be reimbursed, so to speak, by the French.

Whether by chance or design, this was Kidd’s moment to step out of the murky world of French buccaneers and clean up his act; to become—in the lingo of the age—a privateer.

​

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Pirates

Piracy is almost as old as seafaring itself. The ancient Greeks complained about it. The Romans, too—though Julius Caesar took a characteristically Roman view of the inconvenience. Captured by Cilician pirates in 75 BCE and held for ransom, he promised on his release to return and crucify them all. Then did exactly that. A man of his word, at least.

The golden age produced a remarkable cast, each more improbable than the last. Henry Every pulled off the largest pirate heist in history—seizing the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695, stripping her of gold, silver and jewels—then disappeared from the face of the earth. Never caught, never found. Then there was Calico Jack Rackham, distinguished chiefly by two members of his crew: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both of whom were far more frightening than he was.

Edward Low achieved a grimmer sort of fame—a man of such extravagant cruelty to his captives that even his fellow pirates found him a bit much. And let’s not forget a character occupying a category of his own. Stede Bonnet—wealthy middle-aged Barbadian landowner, pillar of respectable society—bought himself a ship in 1717, the Revenge, and turned pirate. Apparently, to escape his marriage.

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Privateers

By the Middle Ages, piracy in European waters had become almost institutional. Governments, unable to stamp it out, did the next best thing: they licensed it.

In 1243, King Henry III of England began issuing what became known as privateering commissions—licences granted to specific individuals to seize enemy ships at sea and share the plunder with the Crown.

The difference between a pirate and a privateer was, essentially, a piece of paper. One was a criminal. The other was a criminal with a letter from the King. A pirate robbed ships. A privateer robbed ships on behalf of the Crown, took a smaller cut and was considerably better dressed at the trial.

The merchant whose ship had just been boarded and relieved of its cargo wouldn’t have found the distinction particularly consoling.

Merchants aside, it was a neat arrangement—profitable for the Crown, attractive to investors and convenient for men who were going to rob ships anyway. It stayed that way for over six centuries, until the Declaration of Paris in 1856 abolished privateering altogether.

The word itself, ‘privateer’, had only entered common usage in the 1660s, clipped from the idea of a ‘private man of war’. By the time William Kidd set sail in 1696, piracy and privateering were in full flourish, and the line between them was as thin as the piece of paper on which a commission was written.

In Kidd’s case, that line would prove to be the difference between life and death.

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A respectable life in New York

In February 1690, Kidd found himself hoisted by his own petard. Having directed one mutiny, he was toppled by another—his crew turned, stole the Blessed William, and sailed off without him. Having brushed down his pride, he was reassigned a further ship, the Antigua, and headed for New York.

New York in the 1690s was a most accommodating port for pirates in the English colonies—a bustling harbour, cosmopolitan city and relaxed enough for someone like Kidd to operate without too much harassment. He settled, married the wealthy widow Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, raised two daughters and built a respectable life as a merchant captain.

William Kidd was prosperous, middle-aged, and trusted by people in high places. Life was good.

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The proposal

Around 1695, while visiting London, Kidd met a fellow New Yorker Robert Livingston. Livingston had the ear of Richard Coote, the 1st Earl of Bellomont, who had the ear of the Crown. And he had a proposition for Kidd: build a private warship, hunt down pirates and French vessels in the Indian Ocean, and split the proceeds.

The other backers funding the venture were not shadowy underworld figures, but leading members of the Whig government: Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney, was Master General of Ordnance and a close confidant of King William III. Sir John Somers held the offices of Solicitor General and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Admiral Sir Edward Russell was First Lord of the Admiralty and Treasurer of the Navy.

These gravity-defying titles entered a room before their owners did. Together, they represented about as much of the English establishment as it was possible to squeeze into one place.

In short, they were quietly looking to invest their own money in a privateering voyage—blurring the line somewhat between law enforcement and grand larceny.

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Captain Kidd takes the bait

In theory, Kidd didn’t need the hassle. He was respected, comfortable, and doing perfectly well out of the booming Atlantic trade. But the sums of money on offer were difficult to ignore.

So was the flattery. For a colonial captain with solid connections but no official naval rank, being hand-picked by some of the most powerful men in England and handed a royal commission was not the sort of thing you turned down. The risks, on paper at least, seemed manageable.

“Our trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd…” began the King’s commission, authorising him to seize pirates and—as an agreeable side hustle—attack and loot French shipping wherever he found it.

A new ship was built at Deptford for the purpose: the Adventure Galley, a 280–ton galley-frigate with some 34 guns, rigged for both sail and oar. One hundred and fifty men signed on under the classic “no prey, no pay” arrangement.

In 1696, King’s commission stowed and his new ship beneath him, Kidd sailed from England. He had no idea what was coming.

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The commission turns sour

The Indian Ocean proved uncooperative. Disease claimed some of the crew, others deserted. Months passed with little gained. The Adventure Galley rotted beneath their feet and the mood was heading the same way.

In October 1697, tempers boiled over. Kidd’s gunner, William Moore, was on deck sharpening a chisel when a Dutch vessel appeared on the horizon. Moore pressed Kidd to attack her—pure piracy, and a direct affront to their Dutch-born king. Kidd refused.

Kidd ended the heated argument by hurling an iron bucket at the gunner. It fractured his skull. Moore was dead by the following morning.

The iron-bucket incident would turn out to be a miscalculation with consequences.

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Temporary relief arrived on 30 January 1698. Kidd raised French colours and took his greatest prize: the 400-ton Quedagh Merchant—an Indian vessel hired by Armenian merchants and laden with satins, muslins, silks, gold and silver. Her captain was an Englishman, but he carried papers—or ‘passes‘—from the French East India Company, placing him under the protection of the French Crown.

Under the terms of Kidd’s commission, a ship sailing under French protection was a legitimate target. He watched over those passes with great care. They were, he believed, his insurance policy.

He was wrong about that, too.

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A series of unfortunate events

While Kidd and his crew were toasting their French haul, news of the Quedagh Merchant had reached England. Celebration would soon turn into something else entirely.

The Nine Years’ War between England and France had ended in September 1697—just months before Kidd took his prize. His commission authorising him to attack French shipping had been drawn up in wartime. In peacetime, the legalities were considerably shakier.

In addition, much of the Quedagh Merchant’s cargo belonged to Muklis Khan, a nobleman with close connections to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb—who responded by embargoing all East India Company trade. A Scottish privateer’s escapade was bringing one of the world’s most powerful trading enterprises to its knees.

This was a diplomatic and commercial crisis of the first order. Someone was going to have to answer for it.

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Buried treasure

Kidd remained blissfully unaware of the storm he had caused until he put in at Anguilla in April 1699, more than a year later. What he learned there stopped him cold. He had been declared a pirate by the Crown. Every colonial governor in the Americas had orders to arrest him on sight.

He soon discovered how quickly doors could slam. Danish-controlled Saint Thomas refused him entry. He sold off much of the cargo, exchanged the Quedagh Merchant for a smaller, less recognisable sloop—the Antonio—and did what any sensible man in his position would do. He ran.

Although his leading financial backer, Lord Bellomont, had offered clemency, Kidd needed a backup insurance policy. Slipping quietly into Oyster Bay to reconnect with his wife and daughters, he arranged to offload and bury his treasure with the Gardiner family on their island off the eastern tip of Long Island. It was a substantial haul—1,111 ounces of gold, together with silver, rubies, diamonds, candlesticks and Spanish currency.

Then Kidd sailed for Boston, Massachusetts.

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The arrest

Kidd’s instincts had been sound. After Bellomont lured him to Boston in July 1699, he was promptly arrested. He offered up the Gardiner’s Island location as a sweetener, and even proposed fetching another fifty thousand pounds’ worth of buried treasure from the Caribbean, if only they’d let him do it himself. No chance.

Kidd was shipped to London in 1700 and thrown into Newgate Prison, where he spent the better part of a year languishing. In Westminster, a new Tory-dominated Parliament saw an opportunity—Kidd could help to embarrass the Whig grandees who had bankrolled the whole venture. However, he refused to implicate his backers, confident they would intercede on his behalf. They didn’t.

Politically useless, Captain William Kidd was sent to trial in May 1701.

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The trial

The proceedings at the Old Bailey were a sham.

Kidd was forced to represent himself against experienced prosecutors. The French passes taken from the Quedagh Merchant were never produced in court. Without them, his claim to have acted within the law collapsed.

The fatal blow came from two of his former mutineers, who took the stand and, by all accounts, perjured themselves—testifying that the attack on William Moore had been premeditated, elevating the charge from manslaughter to murder.

For Kidd, being ‘hung out to dry’ was not so much an idiom as a forecast.

Exhausted and abandoned, he eventually stopped defending himself altogether. “I will not trouble this court any more,” he said, “for it is folly.”

Guilty on all charges. Murder. Five counts of piracy.

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The execution

Kidd spent his last days in Newgate. He heard his final sermon from the prison chaplain. He wrote to Robert Harley, the powerful Tory Speaker of the House of Commons, offering to reveal the location of further hidden plunder worth £100,000 in exchange for his life. Harley declined.

On the afternoon of 23 May 1701, Kidd and Darby Mullins—the one member of his condemned crew not to receive a reprieve—were loaded onto horse-drawn carts and paraded through London. Street peddlers worked the edges of the crowd that lined the route. So did the pickpockets.

At five o’clock, low tide, they reached Execution Dock at Wapping. Kidd was led to the scaffold, the noose placed around his neck. The cart was drawn away. Kidd dropped…

…the rope broke, pitching the condemned man—by some accounts mercifully dulled by drink—into the Thames mud alive and shaken. He was hauled to his feet, manhandled back up to the scaffold, and strung up a second time. Some in the crowd shouted for his release—the broken rope was a sign from God, they cried.

Nobody in authority was listening. Neither was God. Kidd was hanged again. This time, the rope held.

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The aftermath

After the customary three high tides had passed, Kidd’s body was cut down and coated in tar to slow its decay. He was then unceremoniously stuffed into a gibbet—a made-to-measure iron cage—and suspended at Tilbury Point on the lower Thames, where he would be visible to every ship entering or leaving the port.

There he remained for over two years. Gruesome, certainly, though Oliver Cromwell’s head was displayed above the Houses of Parliament for twenty-five.

The respectable New York merchant-captain ended his days as a tarred and rotting warning on the Thames estuary.

His powerful Whig backers, every one of them, died in their beds.

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Kidd’s legacy

The repeated references to buried treasure turned William Kidd into a myth that caught fire and refused to be extinguished.

A ballad—Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas, or The Famous Pirate’s Lament—was printed shortly after his execution. The story was largely fanciful but, in effect, fixed Kidd in the public mind as a notorious pirate. Fake news with a catchy tune.

The folklore mutated further over the following century, and tales of buried treasure surfaced. Washington Irving’s 1824 collection Tales of a Traveller included The Devil and Tom Walker, built around rumours of Kidd’s treasure buried in a New England swamp. Edgar Allan Poe used the legend in The Gold-Bug in 1843, centring his plot on a cache buried by Captain Kidd. Even Robert Louis Stevenson admitted that Treasure Island was influenced by Irving’s portrait of Kidd.

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(read time: 11 mins.)

Rudolf Hess had Hitler’s ear, his loyalty and his protection. But Hess was out of his depth. The Deputy Führer was—in practice—a loyal puppy in a room full of hungry wolves. To resurrect himself, Hess hatched a one-man plan. With the support of his anonymous astrologer, he would fly to Scotland, arrange an audience with King George VI and broker a peace settlement between two countries currently bombing each other flat. What could possibly go wrong?

Last Friday, we celebrated the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough—broadcaster, naturalist and all-round good egg—which fell, rather beautifully, on the same day as the anniversary of VE Day, marking the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Last year marked the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, and with so few veterans still with us, we were flooded with stories from the war even more so than normal—the strategic successes and the catastrophic blunders, the fine margins that separated defeat from victory, the individual acts of heroism that still take the breath away.

And then there were the other stories.

Alongside the courage and the sacrifice, the Second World War produced a remarkable collection of tales no novelist would have dared submit to a publisher.

I have written recently about Karl Adolf Schlitt, the German U-boat commander whose submarine was sunk by a toilet malfunction, and about William of Orange—the carrier pigeon, not the former King of England—whose flights from the front lines saved thousands of lives.

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There are plenty more where they came from. What about the British ‘corpse spy’ Glyndwr Michael, whose floating body hoodwinked the Germans in Operation Mincemeat, or ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, the British commando officer who charged into battle armed with a Scottish broadsword and bagpipes—presumably on the basis that if the sword didn’t finish them off, the bagpipes probably would.

Then there were the Monuments Men—a ragtag collection of museum directors, artists and curators who raced across Europe rescuing millions of stolen artworks from Nazi hideouts, armed with little more than maps and trucks.

And what about the secret American unit of artists, engineers and radio operators who conjured entire phantom armies from inflatable tanks, forged radio traffic and theatrical sound effects, leaving the Germans chasing shadows across the French countryside.

Remarkable, every one of them.

But there is one story I have always found quite extraordinary, which I don’t think has ever received quite the attention it deserves. It involves a senior Nazi official, a Messerschmitt, a field in rural Scotland and one very surprised Duke.

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Rudolf Walter Richard Hess…

…was born on 26 April 1894 in Alexandria, Egypt—a rather unlikely birthplace for one of the most senior figures in the Third Reich. His father, Fritz, ran a prosperous export business there, and Rudolf grew up in a comfortable villa on the Mediterranean coast, cocooned in the orderly, self-contained world of the German merchant class abroad.

It was a pleasant enough childhood which took a turn in 1908 when, at the age of 14, Rudolf was packed off to a boarding school in Bad Godesberg, a borough of the city of Bonn, back in the motherland. It was there that he absorbed the culture, the language and—rather less helpfully, as it turned out—the politics that would come to define him.

The question of Hess’s intelligence has never been entirely settled. He attended university, wrote coherently throughout his life and was held in genuine esteem by his intellectual mentor, Karl Haushofer. So far, so promising.

On the other hand, he has been described as credulous, impressionable and prone to ‘magical thinking‘—a man who put his faith in astrology, alternative medicine and conspiracy theories. He used divining rods to check for underground water before sleeping, hung magnets above his bed and was a devoted enthusiast of telepathy and mesmerism, the rather whacky 1770s treatment for mental illness practised by Franz Anton Mesmer, which I wrote about last week.

Rudolf also demonstrated a spectacular talent for misjudging both people and situations. For the record, the man whose trust he craved above all others was a certain Adolf Hitler. And then there was the issue of Scotland… but we’ll come to that.

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First World War

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Hess enlisted in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment before transferring to infantry service. He was wounded twice—once by shrapnel at Verdun in 1916 and again by a bullet through the chest in 1917.

At this point, he was transferred to the German Flying Corps as a pilot trainee in October 1918, though the war ended before he could distinguish himself in the air.

It was a solid if unspectacular war record—a detail Hess would spend the next two decades trying to reshape.

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Munich 1920—a city simmering

After the war, Hess drifted into the ferment of post-war Munich—a “bubbling cauldron of resentment, nationalism and dangerous ideas“.

He enrolled at Munich University in 1919, where he fell under the spell of Karl Haushofer, a geographer and political theorist whose teachings on Lebensraum—the idea that a nation required living space to survive and grow—would become one of the intellectual cornerstones of Nazi ideology.

But it was another Munich figure who would define the rest of Hess’s life.

In early 1920, Adolf Hitler was making a name for himself delivering speeches for the German Workers’ Party at small gatherings in Munich beer halls. He spoke passionately about the humiliation of Versailles, the betrayal by Jews and Marxists and the need for national renewal.

Rudolf Hess attended one of these early speeches and was, by all accounts, transfixed. He joined the newly-formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party) that same year, becoming member ‘number 16’. He was among the inner circle at the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923—the shambolic attempt to seize power in Munich that ended with gunfire in the streets, Hitler’s arrest and Hess fleeing to Austria.

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Hess, Hitler and Landsberg Prison

Hitler had been arrested two days after the Putsch collapsed.

Rudolf slipped out of Munich in the immediate chaos, took brief refuge with the Haushofer family and fled across the border into Austria. Haushofer convinced him that staying in exile would look cowardly and that Hitler needed his loyal lieutenant beside him in the dock.

Hess returned, was arrested, tried and sentenced to Festungshaft—fortress confinement—at Landsberg Prison.

Rudolf found himself in confinement with Hitler. Up to this point, his relationship with Hitler could be described as intensely admiring and subordinate. By the time he had left Landsberg Prison having acted as private secretary and transcriber for Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he was less a political colleague of the future Führer and more a devoted disciple—a lapdog who had found his owner and would follow him anywhere.

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Hess’s slide

Through the 1930s, Hess had been a climber. By 1933 he was Deputy Führer, and in 1935 a signatory to the Nuremberg Race Laws—the legal backbone of Nazi racial policy.

He had Hitler’s ear, his loyalty and his protection.

But Hitler had reached a verdict on Rudolf. Surrounded by the cold ambition of Hermann Göring, the bureaucratic menace of Heinrich Himmler and the ruthless political instincts of the rising Martin Bormann, Hess looked like a man out of his depth. He was still Deputy Führer in name, but in practice was a loyal puppy in a room full of hungry wolves.

Rudolf was being sidelined. The man who had transcribed Hitler’s manifesto was no longer being invited to the meetings where history was being decided.

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The idea

The Deputy Führer had long harboured a belief—shared, to a degree, by Hitler himself in the early stages of the war—that Britain and Germany need not be enemies. The real enemy, in this worldview, was Soviet Russia. A negotiated peace with Britain would free Germany to turn east without the ruinous burden of fighting on two fronts.

Simple enough in theory.

There was, however, a small chink in this idea. Nobody in the British government had asked for his opinion—a detail about which a lesser man might have taken the hint.

Instead, Rudolf Hess would take to the skies.

He hatched a one-man plan. He would fly to Scotland—alone, uninvited, unannounced and, as it turned out, unwanted—land on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, convince him to arrange an audience with King George VI and broker a peace settlement between two countries that were, at that precise moment, engaged in bombing each other flat.

What could possibly go wrong?

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When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Elżbieta Zawacka joined the Polish underground resistance. Her life became a catalogue of selfless, heroic acts. On 3 May 2006—at the age of 97—she was promoted to brigadier general of the Polish Land Forces.

Elżbieta Zawacka was born in 1909 in the city of Toruń. The city had passed into Prussian hands during the Second Partition of Poland in 1793 and, by the time of her birth, was part of the German Empire.

This enforced German nationhood would not suppress Elżbieta’s fierce nationalistic passion. What followed was a life of such improbable range and courage that, were it submitted as fiction, a sensible editor would send it back with a note: “Too much”. So consider this the highlights…

Poland regained independence on 11 November 1918, emerging from 123 years of partition as the First World War ended. Elżbieta joined the newly formed PWK (Women’s Military Training) in December 1930. The organisation prepared Polish women for auxiliary roles in national defence.

By 1937, Zawacka had risen to become commander of PWK’s Silesia district, while continuing to teach mathematics. By the outbreak of the Second World War, she had helped train an estimated 700,000 women in military auxiliary skills.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, ‘Zo’ joined the underground resistance without hesitation. As a courier for the Home Army, she had crossed enemy borders more than a hundred times—and that was by April 1942. She carried intelligence in books, food parcels, toothpaste tubes and cigarette lighters—her fluent German keeping the suspicion of border guards at bay.

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In 1943, Elżbieta undertook a thousand-mile journey across occupied Europe—through Germany, France, Andorra, Spain and Gibraltar—to reach the Polish government-in-exile in London, carrying critical intelligence.

While in London, rather than take a well-earned time-out, Zawacka wasted no time lobbying her government to grant women equal rights in the armed forces. She also joined the Polish special forces, training for covert operations. Elżbieta was multi-tasking on steroids.

On 10 September 1943, Zawacka parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Poland to resume operations with the resistance. When the Warsaw Uprising erupted on 1 August 1944, she was thrown into the heart of a desperate attempt to liberate the capital before Soviet forces arrived.

The uprising lasted 63 days before dwindling food and ammunition forced a surrender. The human cost was staggering: 175,000 civilians perished, mostly through mass executions, while 16,000 resistance fighters fell in battle or were executed.

Zo survived the war, but the Soviets now occupied Poland—so once again she resisted. In 1951, she was arrested for anti-communist activities. After four years of torture and interrogation, Elżbieta was released from prison on 24 February 1955.

Her ordeal was far from over. The communist authorities harassed Zo for a further 34 years, until communism finally collapsed in 1989.

In June 1989, Elżbieta lived to see Poland’s first partially free elections since the Second World War. On 3 May 2006—at the age of 97—she was promoted to brigadier general of the Polish Land Forces by President Lech Kaczyński, becoming only the second woman in Polish history to hold that rank.

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(read time: 11 mins.)

But for Sigmund Freud, one pathway into the mind stood out—the most direct and most revealing of all… dreams. The net result was Die Traumdeutung—The Interpretation of Dreams—published on 4 November 1899. It wasn’t a book solely about dreams, but a technical blueprint for his emerging psychoanalytic method.

At some point in your life, somebody must have asked what you dreamed about the night before. It is one of those questions that sounds perfectly innocent until you actually try to answer it.

You perform a rapid editorial review of the previous eight hours, discard ninety per cent of the material on grounds of dignity, and offer your companion a heavily redacted summary that bears only a passing resemblance to what actually occurred behind your eyelids.

“Just a bit of work stuff,” you say. “Nothing interesting.”

The actual answer is considerably more complicated and involves a sequence of events that would take several hours to describe and make no narrative sense whatsoever.

It features at least three people you haven’t thought about since 1992, takes place in a building with too many staircases and not enough exits, involves you being either completely naked or catastrophically late—possibly both—and ends, just as things are getting interesting, with your alarm going off.

You don’t share this. Nobody shares this. We have tacitly agreed, as a species, that whatever happens between approximately 11 pm and 7 am stays strictly between us and the bed sheets.

Nonetheless, throughout human history, dreams have been a serious business. The ancient Egyptians regarded them as prophetic visions or messages from the gods. Medieval Europeans tended toward demons or their own disordered bodies.

Then along came the Enlightenment when dreams were filed under ‘natural causes’, just neurological noise, and everyone breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

That is, until a certain Viennese doctor called Sigmund Freud came along and said, “Not so fast”. At the turn of the twentieth century, he published a book that proposed something rather different: that dreams were messages, but not from gods or demons.

From yourself.

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Sigmund Freud…

…was born on 6 May 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia—a small market town now part of the Czech Republic. He was the first child of Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, and his wife, Amalie, who was twenty years Jakob’s junior and thought the world of her eldest boy, her ‘golden Sigi’.

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Moravia in the 1850s was part of the vast, creaking Habsburg monarchy. Napoleon had come and gone; the continent was recalibrating and the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum across Europe. Jewish families like the Freuds occupied an uneasy social position—technically emancipated after the revolutions of 1848, the Springtime of Nations, but still threading their way through thick layers of ingrained prejudice.

When Sigmund was four, the family moved to Vienna. He would spend almost his entire life there.

An early signal of Freud’s life’s work came when, at about seven years old, he was caught urinating on the floor of his parents’ bedroom. His father was furious and is said to have snapped, “Nothing will ever come of this boy”.

The effect of these words on Sigmund was profound. His father’s verdict, delivered over a puddle, haunted him for decades. He would later treat the experience as ‘formative humiliation’.

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Freud the student

Sigmund was an exceptional student, usually first in his class throughout his schooling. He devoured Shakespeare in the original English and collected languages with the obsession most boys reserved for sport.

In 1873, he enrolled in the medical faculty of the University of Vienna. His first love was research and he spent years dissecting crayfish and eels in the laboratory of the distinguished physiologist Ernst Brücke.

Brücke, one of Freud’s early mentors, took him aside one day to explain that there was little money in pure research and that he ought to consider clinical medicine instead.

Freud took the advice.

But it would be a collaboration in the 1880s with Josef Breuer, a well-regarded Viennese physician, that would shift the course of Freud’s life. He would become obsessed with the emerging science of the mind, particularly the mystery of the unconscious.

Before we go there, let’s rewind a little…

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Two thousand years of psychology

For roughly two thousand years, the dominant medical explanation in Europe for mental disturbance was the theory of the four humours—blood (sanguine), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric) and black bile (melancholic), inherited from ancient Greek medicine and stubbornly refusing to retire until well into the 18th century.

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Treatment usually involved purges, bloodletting and dietary adjustments. If the humours were out of balance, you ‘corrected’ them. That patients often failed to improve—or got worse—did little to disturb the theory; the fault was in the patient, not the model. ​ ​

By the 15th century, Europe had begun to experiment with the first asylums and madhouses—small, scattered institutions where the mentally ill could be shut away.

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Out of Curiosity

London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital was founded in 1247 as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, a religious house offering general charitable care.

By the early 15th century, it was admitting people deemed insane and became associated with the care and confinement of the mentally ill. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in the 16th century, church-administered charitable care was replaced by something a little more bureaucratic and indifferent.

In the centuries that followed, patients might be chained to the walls of their cells or to their beds and put on public view; crowds of Sunday visitors wandered the wards—a penny a ticket for the privilege of gawping.

The institution that became shorthand for human misery, chaos and neglect gave English its word for pandemonium—Bedlam.

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“And pat! he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam.”
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​William Shakespeare – King Lear 1605, when Edgar enters and adopts the persona of Tom o’ Bedlam, a wandering beggar who had been discharged from Bethlem Royal Hospital.

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By the 18th century, the theory of the four humours was beginning to fray, though the new wisdom still fell well short of Enlightenment.

Across the late 18th and 19th centuries, the medical mainstream dabbled in all sorts of remedies for the ‘mad’: moral therapy, where patients were treated with kindness; hydrotherapy in its various chilly forms and—bizarrely—spinning-chair treatments, in which patients were strapped into a chair and whirled at speed until they vomited, fainted or finally ‘settled.’

Phrenology, meanwhile, offered to interpret mental conditions from the bumps on your skull, a 19th–century ‘science of the mind’ that briefly enjoyed serious attention in polite society.

Increasingly, the respectable way to study the mind became to study the brain—neurology. If you couldn’t find a lesion, a tumour, a measurable anatomical cause, then you didn’t have a diagnosis, just a mystery.

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Out of Curiosity

In the 1770s, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese-trained physician, proposed that an invisible magnetic fluid flowed through all living things and that illness—including mental illness—resulted from blockages in this flow.

Treatment involved patients sitting around a wooden tub—the baquet—filled with magnetised water and iron filings, gripping iron rods protruding from the lid, while Mesmer swept about the room—resplendent in a lilac silk robe—gesticulating with his hands, less like a physician and more like a magician who had misplaced his wand.

Patients convulsed, wept, fainted and frequently... reported feeling better. They were, in short, mesmerised.

Although the magnetism theory was later debunked, it became evident that these positive results were less a reaction to invisible forces and more the product of the patients’ own minds.

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Over the following hundred years, the Industrial Revolution transformed the physical world beyond recognition. The science of the mind—however—didn’t get the memo. Treatments remained largely a matter of guesswork, good intentions and the occasional bucket of cold water.

This all changed in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt opened what is generally considered the first experimental psychology laboratory, in Leipzig. Wundt set about measuring mental processes with scientific precision—reaction times, sensory perception, attention—a determined attempt to quantify the mind. It was exciting, methodical, and focused on conscious experience. The unconscious wasn’t on Wundt’s agenda.

Psychology was crossing the floor from philosophy to science.

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… now, back to that collaboration in the 1880s with Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer had been treating a young woman referred to in the literature only as ‘Anna O.’—a patient diagnosed with what was then called ‘hysteria’.

For centuries, doctors had treated hysteria as a woman’s complaint rooted in the womb—the word derives from ‘hystera’, the Greek for uterus—in which the uterus could become displaced or overheat (really!) to produce symptoms of anxiety, depression, paralysis, convulsions and fits.

The medicine of the day had very little to offer her.

What Breuer had stumbled upon, almost by accident, was that when Anna O. talked—really talked—about her memories, her fears, her past—her symptoms sometimes eased or vanished. She jokingly called it ‘the talking cure’. It was a throwaway line that lodged in Freud’s mind.

His journey into the unconscious deepened when he attended the lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in 1885–86.

In front of packed audiences, Charcot used hypnosis to summon and then relieve the symptoms of hysteria. It was part legitimate medical demonstration, part parlour trick—scandalous and enthralling in equal measure.

Charcot argued that hysteria was a disorder of the nervous system, not of the uterus, and that it could appear in men as well as women. He demonstrated that mental states could produce physical symptoms without any detectable neurological cause.

The power of suggestion.

The young Sigmund Freud later recalled that he was ‘electrified’ by Charcot’s work.

Freud’s predecessors had established, often clumsily, that the unconscious mind lay just below the surface of human awareness. But they lacked a single, coherent clinical method for exploring that hidden territory. This was Freud’s opportunity.

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Dreams

To create a clinical methodology for the unconscious mind—psychoanalysis—Freud first had to work out how to reach it. After all, it operated beneath the surface, hidden from view. The patient sitting on the couch didn’t know what was down there—if they did, they wouldn’t need the couch.

He developed a toolkit. One element was free association: saying whatever came to mind without censorship or editing. Another was the analysis of slips of the tongue—the small betrayals we now call Freudian slips. A third was to treat neurotic symptoms as coded messages from the unconscious waiting to be deciphered.

But for Freud, one pathway into the mind stood out—the most direct and most revealing of all. Dreams.

He reasoned that in waking life, the conscious mind acts as a gatekeeper—suppressing those desires, fears and memories that the unconscious is straining to express. Without that inner censor, we would be overwhelmed, socially unfiltered and unable to function.

During sleep, the inner gatekeeper relaxes and loosens its grip, allowing more unconscious material to surface.

For Freud, dreams were therefore “the royal road to the unconscious”. Not a detour, not a curiosity, but the most direct route.

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The Dreamers

The Greeks, Babylonians, Assyrians, ancient Chinese, Indians and Egyptians—and cultures across Africa and the Americas—all interpreted their dreams. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Jacob’s Ladder, from Aristotle to Joseph—he of the technicolour coat—the message across three thousand years and every inhabited continent was the same: pay attention to your dreams, or pay the consequences.

In what we now call the Chester Beatty Dream Book, the ancient Egyptians had fastidiously recorded hundreds of dreams and their outcomes: dreaming of a large cat—good harvest; seeing their bed catching fire—bad news.

On the face of it, Freud was only echoing what the Egyptians had claimed three thousand years earlier—dreams meant something, and there was a way to read them.

But here’s the difference: Freud’s system was psychological rather than prophetic. When he asked about a patient’s dreams, it was personal. The dream’s surface story was merely the starting point for excavation. By encouraging the patient to recall a dream and then ‘free associate’—to say whatever came to mind—buried memories, some reaching back to childhood, could be resurfaced. It was analytical gold.

Freud’s dream analysis went much further. Drawing on his own dreams and those of his patients, he came to see them as the unconscious mind caught in the act. They weren’t messages from gods or demons. Neither were they signals of wandering wombs or stomach vapours.

They were the disguised fulfilment of desires the waking mind had deemed too dangerous, too embarrassing or too unacceptable to acknowledge in daylight.

Freud’s dreams were his laboratory. Without the dreams, there was no psychoanalysis. He had secularised thousands of years of dream theology. Out with the priest. In with the analyst.

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The Interpretation of Dreams

Through the 1890s, Freud collected cases, tested theories and dissected his own dreams with the rigour of the research scientist he had once been. He kept meticulous notes of everything he studied, read, discussed and theorised.

The net result was Die Traumdeutung—The Interpretation of Dreams—which appeared in November 1899. It wasn’t a book solely about dreams, but a technical blueprint for his emerging psychoanalytic method—with dreams as its central exhibit. It is considered Freud’s most important work—though not his most readable.

It turned out that Freud’s tour de force was an immediate flop—piles of unsold copies sat on the publisher’s shelves for years. The critics ranged from baffled to dismissive. Some simply ignored it.

Freud was neither shocked nor surprised. He had expected as much.

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The tide turns

However, by the 1920s, Freud’s ideas had landed and were gaining real momentum. Psychoanalysis had crossed the Atlantic. Notions of the unconscious mind, of ego and id and of childhood experience shaping adult life were gaining traction in clinics, universities and popular culture.

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(Read time: 10 mins)

Forty-five minutes. That is how long the Battle of Culloden lasted on 16 April 1746. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men ran like dead weights across 350 yards of boggy ground, their ranks shredded by grapeshot and musket fire before they ever reached the bayonets of Cumberland’s infantry.

There’s a long-standing quip in England—propagated, naturally, by those good folk in the north—that southerners think the known world ends at Watford Gap—a rather unglamorous service station on the M1, some 75 miles north of London. Venture beyond it, the jibe goes, and you risk a nosebleed.

Southerners, for the most part, have never heard of Watford Gap. Which, I guess, is the point.

It turns out that civilisation doesn’t stop at Watford Gap. Run your finger up a map of the UK and you roll over the Midlands and sprawl of Birmingham, then Manchester—billed as the world’s first modern industrial city.

Road signs appear for towns you thought only existed in soap operas and history books about the Industrial Revolution: Wigan, Stockport, Bury, Bolton, Oldham.

Keep running your finger north and off to the right lie the proud former shipbuilding cities of Newcastle and Sunderland.

Press on through the wild beauty of Northumberland and you’ll slip over the border into Scotland, reaching the latitude of the nation’s two great cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh. You feel, at this point, that you must surely be near the top. You are not.

Keep heading north—a long way north. Cross the Cairngorms, glimpse Aberdeen away to the right on the North Sea, and eventually you arrive in Inverness—the northernmost city in the United Kingdom and capital of the Scottish Highlands.

In 1746, Inverness sat 570 miles from the throne of George II—ten days’ hard riding from London, assuming the weather cooperated. In Scotland, it rarely did.

Five miles east of Inverness, there is a patch of open moorland where the silence has never quite recovered. Culloden. There is little drama in the landscape—a treeless, boggy heath with no obvious reason why 1,500 men died here in under an hour on a grey April morning in 1746.

But they did.

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And with them died something else. A dynasty’s last military gamble, a Jacobite dream and the last serious attempt to put a Stuart back on the throne of Britain.

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Bonnie Prince Charlie

The man responsible for the audacious attempt to reclaim the British throne nearly sixty years after his grandfather was removed from the old English throne was Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria Stuart—quite the name to grow up with.

History would remember him rather more simply as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Charles was born in 1720, but not in Scotland. It turns out that one of Scotland’s greatest romantic heroes was born in Rome, spoke English with an Italian accent, and had spent precisely one week on Scottish soil before 1745.

His father was James Stuart—the Old Pretender—son of the deposed James II of England and VII of Scotland. His Jacobite supporters styled him James III of England and VIII of Scotland—royal titles that existed only in their toasts and their dreams.

The Stuart court originally decamped to the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France in 1689, as honoured guests of Louis XIV. The French, never ones to pass up an opportunity to inconvenience the English, received them with considerable warmth.

James Stuart never relinquished what he saw as his rightful inheritance. By 1719, yet another scheme to reclaim the British throne had collapsed miserably, and the French—now shifting towards peace with Hanoverian Britain—felt the Stuarts had outstayed their welcome.

The entourage decamped to the Palazzo Muti in Rome, a handsome if rather draughty residence, courtesy of Pope Clement XI.

And it was here, in the dying hours of 1720, that the future of the Stuart claim arrived.

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Out of Curiosity

To understand the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart family tree needs a moment’s attention. There were James’s and Charles’s everywhere, the dynasty having exhausted its imagination for first names somewhere around the second generation, so a recap might help:

The Stuarts had ruled Scotland since 1371. When James VI of Scotland also became James I of England after Elizabeth I died without leaving an heir in 1603, the crowns were united.

James I inherited the Henry VIII problem—England was now Protestant, but a restless Catholic minority still simmered. He survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, though his son Charles I would prove less fortunate, losing his head by parliamentary order in 1649.

Charles I’s son, also Charles, spent more than a decade in exile while Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan regime ran England with the joyless efficiency of a man who had cancelled Christmas—which, in fact, they had.

When the English experiment in republicanism faltered in 1660, Parliament asked Charles if he would kindly come back, which he did—as Charles II.

Charles II did a reasonable job of steadying the ship, but when his brother James II took over, he proved rather too Catholic and was bundled off-stage after barely three years, in 1688.

Now thoroughly confused about succession, the English invited a Dutch Protestant called William to come over and take charge. He was married to Mary, James II’s Protestant daughter—are you keeping up with this? The pair ruled jointly as William III and Mary II until Mary’s death in 1694, after which William soldiered on alone until 1702.

The last Stuart monarch, Anne—another of James II’s Protestant daughters—then ruled as Queen until her death in 1714.

Anne, inconveniently, left no surviving heir, so the English found themselves hunting Protestants abroad again and, with some desperation, settled on George of Hanover—a 54-year-old German prince who spoke no English, had never visited England and didn’t particularly want to.

And it was into this world—a German on the British throne, the Stuart claim very much alive in the imagination of the French and the Jacobites—that Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was born in Rome in 1720, son of James Stuart and grandson of the deposed James II.

Clear as mud?

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Bonnie Prince Charlie grew up multilingual, charming and restless. He was tutored in the arts of kingship, military strategy and statecraft—groomed, in short, to occupy a throne that existed purely in his father’s imagination. He became an excellent horseman, a passable musician and, crucially, charismatic. People liked him.

This was his life—heading only in one direction.

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‘The Forty-Five’—The Jacobite Uprising of 1745

By the summer of 1745, Charles realised that the French had lost interest in a grand invasion for his sake. He was on his own.

After a couple of false starts, and with rather more courage than strategic sense, he slipped out from the Loire coast—probably near Saint-Nazaire—and in July came ashore on the tiny Hebridean island of Eriskay.

So far so good—but here’s the problem: The accompanying French ship, the Elisabeth, was so badly mauled in a running fight with a Royal Navy warship that she had to limp back to France, taking with her practically the entire arsenal for the campaign.

By the time Charles stepped ashore on Eriskay, he had seven companions, no meaningful weapons, no French troops and no money.

The first clan chief he met told him to go home. With commendable speed, Charles responded that he was home.

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Bonnie Prince Charlie’s plan was to whip up Jacobite sympathisers as he marched south through Scotland, gathering an army the way a snowball gathers momentum on a winter mountainside—all the way to the front door of George II at St James’s Palace in London.

Somehow, against every reasonable calculation, it worked.

Clan after clan rallied to the white cockade. By September, Charles had taken Edinburgh without firing a shot, held court at Holyroodhouse and routed a government army at Prestonpans in a matter of minutes. It was audacious. It was exhilarating. And it was, as events would prove, as good as it was ever going to get.

Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army pushed south into England. At Derby, in early December 1745, they were only 125 miles from London.

But then a wave of common sense overcame his Highland commanders as they checked their arithmetic: The expected English Jacobite support had amounted to a trickle. Despite word of the march already spreading fear throughout London, they still had little chance of defeating the British Army.

Charlie’s outrage could not stop the Jacobites voting to turn around. The snowball was heading back up the mountain.

In that moment, the Jacobite dream evaporated.

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Back north and into trouble.

The retreat north began on 6 December 1745—Black Friday, as the Jacobites called it. It was grim and demoralising. Charles’s army was cold, hungry and dwindling, with government forces under William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland closing in behind them.

By the night of 15 April 1746, Charles was back in the Highlands, trudging towards Inverness. His men had been on the march for days, some hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours and many had simply melted away into the hills. They could go no further.

Ahead lay Culloden Moor—a bleak, boggy expanse of open ground five miles east of Inverness. Charles decided it was a good place to make a stand.

It wasn’t.

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The Battle of Culloden

Forty-five minutes. That is how long the Battle of Culloden lasted on 16 April 1746.

Cumberland’s artillery opened up on the Jacobite lines across the open moor, and Charles—positioned at the rear—waited too long to order the Highland charge.

As the artillery fire rained down, the helpless—and freezing—clansmen were torn apart. By the time the order to charge finally reached the front line, it was too late.

The exhausted men ran like dead weights across 350 yards of boggy ground, their ranks shredded by grapeshot and musket fire before they ever reached the bayonets of Cumberland’s infantry.

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Within an hour, around fifteen hundred men lay dead or dying on the moor—most of them Jacobites. It was over almost before it had begun.

Not content with victory on the moor, Cumberland pursued the remnants of the uprising with a ferocity that would earn him the nickname ‘The Butcher’. Wounded men were put to the sword where they lay. Suspected sympathisers saw their homes plundered and burned.

What followed would reshape Highland society for a generation: clan structures dismantled, tartan banned, the carrying of arms forbidden.

Scotland would never be quite the same again.

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As for Charlie….

Having led his men disastrously from the back, Bonnie Prince Charlie left the field once it was clear the battle was lost.

For five months, he was hunted across the Highlands and islands. He slept in caves, crossed mountains in driving rain and ate what he could find.

He was hidden and sheltered by ordinary people—Jacobite sympathisers who risked everything for him. Despite a bounty of £30,000 on his head—the equivalent of around £7 million today—nobody claimed the prize.

In September 1746, a French frigate picked up the last Stuart off Loch nan Uamh, near Arisaig—almost the same stretch of coast where he had first set foot on Scottish soil fourteen months earlier.

Bonnie Prince Charlie sailed to France, and never returned.

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Out of curiosity

During his escape, Flora MacDonald—a young woman from the Western Isles—helped smuggle Bonnie Prince Charlie from Benbecula to Skye, disguised, somewhat optimistically, as her Irish maidservant ‘Betty Burke’. Charles was six feet tall and conspicuously royal. Betty Burke was not a triumph of disguise, but it worked nonetheless.

The dramatic escape with Flora MacDonald later inspired the famous, mournful song we now know as “The Skye Boat Song,” with its image of a ‘bonnie boat’ carrying the prince over the sea to Skye.

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing.
Onward, the sailors cry!
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.

If you get a moment, listen to The Skye Boat Song​.

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Annie MacLeod first heard the melody when crossing on a boat trip to Skye in the 1870s, when the rowers broke out with a Gaelic song “Cuachag nan Craobh”, or “The Cuckoo in the Grove”.

Written around 1782, it was the lament of a lovelorn man rejected by a woman who had chosen, in his grief, to discuss the matter with a cuckoo. The cuckoo’s feedback isn’t recorded.

Sir Harold Boulton—an Englishman, and therefore perhaps an unlikely custodian of Scottish romantic history—then wrote new Jacobite lyrics for the tune in the 1880s, and The Skye Boat Song was published in 1884.

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The aftermath

The rest of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s life is a melancholic postscript. The French, unimpressed by his drunken and erratic behaviour during the Seven Years’ War, quietly gave up on him, and he slid deeper into alcohol. A late marriage produced no legitimate heirs and no happiness.

Charles Edward Stuart died in Rome in 1788, a hopeless drunk and a long-forgotten footnote in history. He was 67 years old.

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Bonnie Prince Charlie is one of history’s great romantic figures—which is to say, someone whose story is more compelling in the telling than the living. The Forty-Five was reckless, underfunded and ultimately catastrophic for the people who believed in it most.

And yet. The courage of a young man landing on a windswept island with seven companions and the unshakeable conviction that he was coming home is genuinely something. The loyalty of those who hid him, at enormous personal risk, is something more.

Culloden closed a chapter of British history that had been a century in the writing. What followed—the repression of the Highlands, the erosion of clan society, the Clearances and the long dispersal of the Scottish diaspora—makes it one of the most consequential single hours in the history of these islands.

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

Steve
CHIEF STORY HUNTER & WRITER

ATTRIBUTIONS
Bonnie Prince Charlie: ​Cosmo Alexander​, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Battle of Culloden: ​David Morier​, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
London to Culloden: ​Equestenebrarum​, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Oliver Cromwell inspects the decapitated body of Charles I: ​Paul Delaroche​, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Eriskay, Skye & Culloden: ​Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting)​, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

CC BY-SA 3.0: ​https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ​
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(Read time: 10 min)

Virginia Hall was born on 6th April 1906. Years later, she would find herself in Vichy France, under cover as a reporter for the New York Post—the first active female field agent in France for Churchill’s controversial Special Operations Executive (SOE).

When it comes to entertainment, few thrills compare to watching the world’s great illusionists—David Copperfield, Penn & Teller, Derren Brown, Siegfried & Roy. On the face of it, each act is unique. But look closer, and they share one defining quality: sheer, unapologetic audacity.

The misdirection that pulls your eye just far enough in the wrong direction. The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sleight of hand. And then the final reveal—hiding in plain sight the whole time, if only you’d known where to look. Each of those elements requires nerves of steel and absolute self-belief.

Recent history has produced at least one performer who had these skills in abundance. But she was no illusionist. Her theatre wasn’t a Vegas stage or a West End show. It was Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War—and her audience was the Gestapo. The price of a bad performance wasn’t a slow handclap. It was arrest, torture and almost certain death.

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Virginia Hall

In 1906, Maryland was a state caught between two worlds. Baltimore was a prosperous, confident city—Johns Hopkins University was a model of American scientific education, while the harbour bustled with trade.

However, for most women, the social rules were rigid, the expectations clear. Women in the United States could not yet vote—that would come fourteen years later. As for careers, anything beyond the domestic was considered eccentric at best, and at worst, mildly scandalous.

Virginia Hall was born 6 April 1906, into a family that divided its time between an elegant city home and a 110-acre retreat in the countryside near Parkton.

She attended the elite Roland Park School and grew up with every comfort; the sort of upbringing that seemed to point in only one direction—marry well, manage a household and leave the larger world to the men.

Virginia had other ideas.

She was cantankerous, headstrong and far more interested in horses, hunting and foreign horizons than in the society marriage her mother had mapped out for her.

In her twenties, Virginia roamed and studied across Europe. She picked up French, German and Italian along the way, before landing a post as a consular clerk for the US State Department—firstly in Warsaw, then Smyrna in Turkey, and finally Venice.

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The consular work brought Virginia into the embassies, but only through the back door—typing and filing while others carried the titles and made the decisions. What she wanted was a commission as a Foreign Service Officer, one of the real diplomats who actually spoke for the United States.

There was a catch. Of the several hundred Foreign Service Officers on the State Department’s books, exactly six were women.

Virginia’s application was repeatedly rejected. Each time she would pick herself up, dust herself down and try again—which, as it turned out, was rather good training for what was coming.

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The accident

In December 1933 while stationed in Smyrna, the energetic Baltimorean joined friends on a snipe shoot along the marshes of the Gediz peninsula. Climbing a fence, Virginia stumbled and simultaneously discharged her shotgun into her left foot. Bleeding heavily, she was rushed to hospital.

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Despite the surgeons’ best efforts, Virginia’s leg was amputated below the knee. Back home in Maryland, she was fitted with a seven-pound wooden prosthetic—aluminium foot, leather straps and all the elegance of a fence post. Rudimentary by today’s standards, but considerably better than the alternative.

Hall named her new companion Cuthbert. As soon as she learned to walk again, she returned to work. As for future applications, the State Department now had two reasons to turn her down.

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World War II—1940

War broke over Europe in 1939 while Virginia was stationed in Tallinn, Estonia. After one final rebuff from the State Department, she resigned, went to Paris, and signed on as an ambulance driver in France—swapping diplomatic back rooms for the chaos of retreating armies.

When France fell in June 1940, Virginia trekked over the Pyrenees into Spain. On one occasion at Irun railway station, she struck up a conversation with British agent George Bellows. That meeting would change her life.

Within months, Hall found herself in Vichy France, under cover as a reporter for the New York Post—the first active female field agent in France for Churchill’s controversial Special Operations Executive (SOE).

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Out of Curiosity

When France fell in June 1940, the armistice carved the country into two: German-occupied north and west, and a so-called Free Zone in the south.

Under pressure from the Nazis, a compliant French government installed itself in the southern spa town of Vichy, under the elderly Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Pétain and his ministers dutifully carried out Hitler’s bidding, while maintaining the polite fiction of French independence.

This collaborationist regime would later be referred to as Vichy France.

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Privately, Virginia’s supervisors in London gave her a few days before the Gestapo would catch up with her. They were spectacularly wrong.

In Lyon, she built a clandestine network—codenamed ‘HECKLER’—from scratch. She recruited volunteers from every background, organised safe houses, coordinated arms drops and threaded escape routes through occupied territory for downed Allied airmen.

Among Virginia’s most valuable recruits was Germaine Guérin, the owner of Lyon’s most prominent brothel. German officers, it turned out, were more talkative with their trousers off—and the pillow talk of the master race proved remarkably useful.

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The First Act—misdirection

In October 1941, twelve SOE-linked agents gathered for a meeting in Marseille. Virginia instinctively chose not to go. Vichy police raided the meeting and the twelve men were sent to the Mauzac internment camp near Bergerac.

Virginia resolved to get them out.

Too well known to go anywhere near the prison herself, she recruited Gaby Bloch—wife of one of the prisoners—to make regular visits to Mauzac with food parcels. What the guards didn’t know was what the tins and packages contained.

One of the captured agents used the hidden tools from the food parcels to fashion a key to the barracks door. Meanwhile, Virginia located the safe houses, arranged vehicles and prepared disguises for the escapees.

Virginia’s masterstroke was in the detail. When twelve agents walked calmly out of the barracks door to freedom on 15 July 1942, she immediately seeded disinformation that RAF aircraft had already whisked them back to England.

By the time the Vichy authorities worked out that the escapees were still in France, Virginia had already moved them by truck and train to Lyon, across Spain and, eventually, back to England.

The Germans were incandescent. They poured hundreds of Gestapo and Abwehr agents into the areas around Lyon.

Local Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie—later to earn the title of ‘the Butcher of Lyon’—made Hall his prime target, vowing to get his hands on “that limping bitch”.

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Through 1942, Hall’s networks were repeatedly betrayed, most notoriously by Abbé Robert Alesch, a Catholic priest who was secretly working for German intelligence. Her colleagues were arrested one by one.

In September, Virginia radioed London: “My time is about up”.

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The Second Act—Now you see her, now you don’t

On 7 November 1942, the American consulate warned Virginia that Germany planned to occupy the Free Zone the following day. Klaus Barbie’s Gestapo would have a free hand. The most wanted woman in occupied France had only hours.

Hall burned her papers, told nobody she was leaving—not her doctor, not her brothel owner, not a single soul in her network—and boarded a train south to Perpignan.

From there, she hired a guide—a reluctant one, who had serious doubts about a woman with a prosthetic leg tackling a 7,500-foot mountain pass in the depths of winter. Virginia went anyway.

The route rose through heavy snow for fifty miles over two days, the temperature dropping savagely with every hour of altitude gained. With each step, Cuthbert ground her stump to a raw and bloody mess.

At a safe house partway across the mountains, Virginia paused to radio London: “Cuthbert is being tiresome, but I can cope.”

London replied: “If Cuthbert is troublesome, have him eliminated.”

She smiled, kept walking, and crossed into Spain—where she was arrested for illegal border crossing. American diplomatic pressure finally secured Hall’s release.

The deception was simple and devastating. One day Virginia Hall was the most wanted woman in France. The next, she had ceased to exist. No farewell, no trace, no trail. Klaus Barbie and his five hundred agents were left grasping at shadows.

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The Third Act—Hidden in plain sight

Once back in Britain, Virginia demanded to return to France.

The SOE said absolutely not. Too well known. Too compromised. Too dangerous. So Virginia quit the SOE and joined the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who had no hesitation sending her straight back to France.

In March 1944, she arrived in darkness by boat on the Brittany coast.

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This time she went back as an elderly French peasant woman—shuffling, stooped, entirely unremarkable. Virginia had dyed her hair grey, filed her own teeth down to age herself, padded her clothes to kill her figure and buried Cuthbert’s telltale limp inside the slow, arthritic hobble of old age.

Nobody gave the old woman a second glance.

The most wanted Allied spy in France was hiding in plain sight—selling cheese to German soldiers while transmitting intelligence from barns and organising, arming and training three full battalions of Maquis fighters ahead of D-Day.

Klaus Barbie’s wanted posters were everywhere. His agents were searching frantically. And all this time, the limping lady was right under their noses, shuffling past them in the village square.

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