HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-19T19:04:58.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00England’s mistress: how Nell Gwyn won the heart of Charles II – and became a political powerhousehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/englands-mistress-how-nell-gwyn-won-the-heart-of-charles-ii-and-became-a-political-powerhouse/2026-04-13T14:30:56.000ZOn a first date with the king of England, you might reasonably expect him to pay the bill. Yet Nell Gwyn’s relationship with Charles II started as it went on: unconventionally.

The celebrated actress met the king for the first time in 1668 at a London playhouse, where Gwyn caught his eye from an adjacent box; according to reports, they flirted throughout the performance. Afterwards, Gwyn and her companion joined Charles and his younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), at a hostelry. There, legend has it, once the party had eaten and drunk their fill, the landlord presented them with the tab.

Upon searching his pockets, we’re told, Charles found that he had no money with him, and was forced to lean on one of the royal hangers-on to pay up. Gwyn’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events was typically droll: she joked that she had got into “the poorest company that ever [she] was in!” Across her extraordinary life, that acerbic wit never let her down.

Pepys’ pin-up

Nell Gwyn was, quite literally, the pin-up girl of Restoration England. Above his desk at the Admiralty, the diarist Samuel Pepys kept an engraving of the actress posing as Cupid. In it, with wings her only attire, one perfectly toned arm made an ineffectual attempt to preserve some modesty. Pepys was clearly enchanted by Gwyn – as was King Charles. Despite that inauspicious first liaison in the London tavern, the actress and the monarch embarked upon a scandalous love affair that produced two sons and set tongues wagging across the kingdom.

That relationship – coupled with Gwyn’s beguiling looks, spellbinding stage performances and razor-sharp wit – helped cement her reputation as one of the most alluring figures of the late 17th century. Her contemporaries were beguiled by her, and historians, novelists and film-makers remain just as intrigued today. But when we look back, are we celebrating the real Nell Gwyn? Is there more to this Restoration-era socialite than meets the eye?

Over the three and a half centuries since she first exploded into the public’s consciousness, Gwyn has been seen mostly as an apolitical character – one more interested in living the high life than in the affairs of state. In fact, at a time when Charles’s other mistresses were widely derided for meddling in the business of government – and spending too freely from the public finances – Gwyn’s apparent lack of interest in politics only served to supercharge her popularity.

One popular verse of the time perfectly captures public sentiment:

“Hard by Pall Mall, lived a wench called Nell;

King Charles the Second, he kept her.

She hath a trick to handle his prick,

But never lays hands on his sceptre.

All affairs of the state, from her soul doth she hate,

And leave to the politic bitches.”

If this poem is to be believed, Gwyn never tried to influence the king in the affairs of state. Yet take a closer look at her life and a different picture emerges.

Nell’s early years are contested: Hereford, London and Oxford all lay claim to be her birthplace. The identity of her father also remains obscure; he may have died in debtor’s prison, or may have been an army captain who lost everything to the Civil War.

• Read more | Making of a monarch: how the young Charles II endured war, defeat and exile before the Restoration

What we do know is that, in her youth, Nell Gwyn worked as an ‘orange wench’, selling fruit and other sweet treats (possibly alongside sexual favours) to theatregoers, before becoming one of the first actresses on the English stage. She quickly became known for her appearance, endowed as she was with luxuriant auburn hair, a fashionably long nose and a slight figure. Gwyn was also blessed with killer comedic timing and a quick wit, cracking out one-liners both on and off the stage. In John Dryden’s tragic drama Tyrannic Love, Gwyn spoke the final lines of the play as herself, struggling from her character’s deathbed to declare:

“As for my epitaph when I am gone,

I’ll trust no poet, but will write my own.

Here Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a slater’n,

Yet dy’d a princess acting in St Cathar’n.”

Gwyn’s magnetic presence onstage made her a star and attracted the attention of the king. Yet it was neither mere coincidence nor simply sexual attraction that triggered her affair with Charles, though her famed physical allure was certainly important.

The two were introduced by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham – reputedly the richest man in England after the king. Buckingham was always scheming, and was described as a haphazard scapegrace who “could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it”. By pushing Gwyn in Charles’s direction, Buckingham’s intention was to curtail the influence at court of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine. The voluptuous, violet-eyed Castlemaine had long been Charles’s chief mistress – and made plenty of enemies in the process. Buckingham’s plan was to replace her with Gwyn.

His plan worked a treat – so much so that, in January 1668, Pepys reported that “the king did send several times for Nelly”. After being rowed up the Thames by ferrymen, Gwyn made her way up the back stairs into Charles’s private apartments in Whitehall Palace. By the spring of 1669, she was accompanying the king to the races at Newmarket, and they were seen wandering around together in old clothes, like a married couple. She also reputedly taught him how to fish, though quite where she learned the skill is a mystery. What is certain is that their relationship endured in a way that the king’s other affairs didn’t, and their first son – named Charles to make no mistake over his paternity – was born on 8 May 1670.

Life of luxury

A life of comparative privilege had begun for Gwyn. She kept an open table, and enjoyed gambling, drinking and going to the races. She was a dyed-in-the-wool socialite who embraced all of the earthly pleasures that life in the Restoration court had to offer. Hence she has mostly been seen by posterity as a good-time girl with a heart of gold.

• Read more | The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys

Yet she also had the ear of the king, and she undoubtedly used that hotline to power to shape the course of events in the Restoration era. For example, early in her relationship with Charles, she began playing a diplomatic role, hosting the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy at her comparatively modest house off Kingsway near the City of London. Hosting ambassadors is a soft-power role typically associated with the queen – a way to be involved in diplomatic discussions and advise the king without overtly steering foreign policy.

Persuading the king to commit to affairs of state wasn’t always easy. Though quick-witted and clever, Charles abhorred work, preferring to play cards and eat pigeon pie while he should have been discussing diplomacy. The king routinely brought his meetings with de Croissy to an early end so that he could take a nap. Courtiers despaired of him ever taking his job seriously.

Not Gwyn. She laid a wager of £100 that she could get the king to attend a meeting. Then she recruited the actor and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew. Dressed for a long pilgrimage. Killigrew burst into Charles’s closet, telling the king that he was off “to hell… to fetch back Oliver Cromwell that he may take care of the affairs of England, for his successor takes none at all”. It was a bold move, but it did move Charles to go to the meeting. Gwyn won her £100.

However, her influence was soon to be curbed – by another woman. Louise de Kérouaille arrived in England in 1670, charged by French king Louis XIV to report back on Charles’s affairs, and to steer the English monarch towards policies that favoured the French. With a continental elegance and a reputation as an excellent hostess, it wasn’t long before de Kérouaille caught the English king’s eye. Yet Gwyn wasn’t about to allow her French rival to wrest away the monarch’s affections without a fight.

At one riotous dinner, Nell’s old friend Buckingham pretended to be Charles while she mocked de Kérouaille’s accent, saying: “Me no bad woman. If me tout me was one bad woman, me would cut mine own trote.” Though she tried to spar with Gwyn, de Kérouaille’s tongue was never quite sharp enough: she always came out second best.

According to a (probably apocryphal) anecdote, one day in Oxford Nell’s coach was surrounded by a mob who, taking her to be de Kérouaille, angrily harangued her for her influence over the king. Sticking her head out of the coach, Gwyn twinkled: “Pray, good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore.” (Not, in other words, the Catholic one, de Kérouaille.) The crowd blessed her and allowed her to continue on her way.

Did she genuinely advocate for Protestant interests? Or were her words fired purely by a bitter personal rivalry with de Kérouaille? In November 1678, Gwyn demonstrated her allegiance to a Protestant agenda, hosting a pope-burning party at her house. At such popular pageants, effigies of the pope and other hated (usually Catholic) figures were mocked and paraded through the streets before being set alight, to great whoops of vengeful joy. Guests at Gwyn’s party taunted the likeness of the pope, who “sat in a great chair, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs [small fireworks] at it”.

Gwyn also interceded effectively with the king on behalf of her friends. Among her successes was getting Buckingham released from captivity in the Tower of London after yet another of his madcap schemes backfired – in this instance, trying to force the dissolution of parliament. Controversially, the duke stayed at Gwyn’s house after his release.

• Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period

She also played a part in the fall from favour of the lord treasurer, the Earl of Danby. She and Buckingham formed a double act, Gwyn’s perfect imitation of Danby’s wife making the king laugh. As Danby’s position became more precarious, one of his supporters wrote to his father: “All this has been brewing since those entertainments at Nelly’s… and the scenes of abuse there passing on Lord Treasurer.” Danby was eventually replaced by one of Gwyn’s close friends, whose career she promoted: Laurence Hyde, a heavy drinker who “swore like a cutler”.

Choppy waters

Gwyn’s political interventions sometimes plunged her into dangerous waters. In 1679, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, arrived back in England from the Hague. Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, Monmouth made little secret of his desire to succeed his father to the throne. The king himself was less keen on that prospect, but he had a problem: Monmouth was not just charismatic but also a Protestant – unlike the Duke of York who, without any legitimate heirs born to Charles, was next in line. When Monmouth arrived ‘home’, he was welcomed by throngs of cheering people. And where did the wannabe king choose to stay in London? At the house of his good friend Nell Gwyn.

By then, she had become a popular symbol of anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment, and was staunch in her advocacy for Monmouth, even as he rebelled with increasing vigour against his father’s rule. Yet her support for him ultimately proved in vain. Charles stripped him of his titles and banished him from court. In response, Monmouth doubled down, conspiring to overthrow the king. Those plans discovered, Monmouth threw himself on his father’s mercy. He would not tilt for the throne again until after Charles’s death.

Any damage to her relationship with Charles didn’t prevent Gwyn from continuing her diplomatic efforts. In 1681, a Moroccan embassy arrived to negotiate control over Tangier and the release of English slaves. The embassy was headed by the dashing Mohammed ben Hadou, whose excellent manners and spirited riding in Hyde Park made him an instant celebrity. Who better to entertain him than Nell Gwyn? They passed a magnificent evening together – though, it has to be said, a rather sedate one by Restoration standards: the Moroccan embassy drank only milk and water, and resolutely resisted staring at the ladies.

Aware that her popularity with the English public was based on her reputation as a royal mistress who did not meddle in politics, Gwyn was careful not to visibly overstep the mark. Yet she was a canny influencer behind the scenes, advising the king and providing a means through which others could access his ear. Not just the 17th century’s good-time girl, Nell Gwyn was a political operator with hidden depths.

Sophie Shorland is a former research fellow at the University of Warwick. Her books include Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England (Atlantic, 2024)

This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and timehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/star-witness-how-the-royal-observatory-transformed-our-understanding-of-astronomy-and-time/2025-11-26T09:00:37.000ZThe big bang moment

1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution

In the 17th century, the great  maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack.

On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”.

Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory.

It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up.

The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675.

With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber’, completed in 1676, was grand in appearance. Unfortunately, it was also unsuitable for mapping the stars, as it was 13.5° askew from the meridian, an imaginary north-south line connecting the poles. So Wren designed another building nearby. This one would last for the remainder of Flamsteed’s tenure, before being demolished, rebuilt and extended as the Meridian Observatory.

As for Flamsteed, he went on to conceive Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), by which he produced an average (‘mean’) 24-hour day that could be tracked using a mechanical clock year round. And that would have ramifications across the planet.

• Read more | A brief history of astronomy

Dressed for success

1767: How a man in a padded suit transformed the art of navigation

No one could accuse Nevil Maskelyne of not being dedicated to his job. In the dead of night across the mid-1760s, the fifth Astronomer Royal could be found staring up at the sky for hour upon hour, while straining his ears to hear the beats of a nearby clock.

Dressed in an extravagant padded suit made from wool, silk and linen, Maskelyne was prepared for all that a British winter could throw at him. Not even perishing temperatures could stand in the way of the task in hand: to devise a ‘lunar distance method’ to calculate longitude at sea. This technique required mariners to measure the angular distance between the moon and a specific star, then compare it to Greenwich time. And they all used data gleaned from Maskelyne’s meticulous study of the movement of the stars.

This was, however, far from a one-man endeavour. Maskelyne was joined on his freezing vigils by his assistant, David Kinnebrook, and enlisted a network of mathematicians – dubbed ‘computers’ – to work remotely on calculating the predicted position of the moon over the year ahead. The Astronomer Royal even had a team of ‘comparers’ check the  computers’ work (which paid off when two of them were found to be copying one another’s work).

All this enabled Maskelyne to produce the Nautical Almanac, the first edition of which was made available on 6 January 1767. It quickly became an essential tool in navigation, reducing the time taken to make longitude calculations from hours to minutes. Updated annually, the Almanac became a required element of navigators’ training, and set the trend for mariners to calculate their position relative to Greenwich.

High standards

1833: A curious metal sphere regulates clocks

It can be seen from miles around – and with good reason. Sitting atop the Royal Observatory is a large red, metal ball that rises to the top of a mast at the same time every day, and drops a few minutes later. For those who haven’t set eyes on it before, it makes for a strange sight. But what is it there for?

To answer that question, we need to rewind to 1764 when John Harrison, the celebrated English clockmaker, sent his fourth marine timekeeper, later known as ‘H4’, on a trial voyage to Barbados. The clock performed exceptionally well, losing a mere 39.2 seconds over 47 days at sea. To Harrison’s delight, it proved that such devices could provide mariners accurate reference times for calculating longitude.

Other clockmakers developed Harrison’s innovative ideas into a standard design that was cheaper and easier to reproduce. By the 1820s, the ‘marine chronometer’ was being used on both commercial and Royal Navy ships. But these chronometers only worked if they were telling the correct time when ships left port. That’s where the Greenwich ‘time ball’ came in. 

A time ball is a large spherical device that drops at a predetermined time of day, enabling mariners to set their clocks by it. The first modern example of this technology was erected in Portsmouth in 1829. Greenwich’s, however, would be the most famous. It was installed in 1833 on Flamsteed House, at the heart of the Observatory, providing maximum visibility from the Thames. Ever since, it has risen halfway up the mast at 12.55pm, climbed to the top at 12.58pm and then dropped at precisely 1pm GMT.

Soon time balls were appearing at harbours and observatories around the globe, meaning that mariners could check their chronometers against accurate clocks, even during the longest of voyages.

Timetable drama

1852: Greenwich rides to the railways' rescue

Take a stroll down Corn Street in the heart of Bristol and you’ll come across a clock mounted to the wall of the city’s old corn exchange. There’s nothing unusual about that, you may think. But take a closer look and you’ll notice that this elegant 1820s timepiece has two hands for minutes: a red one for GMT and a black one for local Bristol time. The clock is a curious snapshot of a bygone age, and also a marker of a technological conundrum that the Royal Observatory played a central role in solving.

The mid-19th century was very much the age of the railways – by the 1840s tracks were snaking across the country. This was all well and good. But when, in 1847, the railway companies decided to coordinate their timetables across Britain using GMT, they ran into a problem. Back then, Britain’s cities relied on local times set by sundials, varying by as much as 30 minutes between west and east. So how could the railway companies ensure that these times were perfectly aligned?

Enter George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal. Airy reasoned that a new technology – that of sending impulses via telegraph wires to a series of synchronised dials – could provide a solution. And so he ordered a new timepiece – the Shepherd Motor Clock – to be installed at the Royal Observatory. From 1852, the clock began sending daily time signals to railway stations across London and Kent, along with hourly signals to the Electric Telegraph Company on London’s Strand for national distribution. Train travel would never be the same again and, by 1880, GMT had been embraced as Britain’s legal Civil Time.

• Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period

A moment in the sun

1874: Greenwich leads the race to record the transit of Venus

For astronomers everywhere, 9 December 1874 was like Christmas come early. Star gazers counted down the days to this landmark date, while George Biddell Airy ordered expeditions to Egypt, New Zealand and the Indian Ocean to observe the amazing event unfolding overhead.

That event was a transit of Venus, a rare astronomical phenomenon in which the planet appears to cross the Sun as a slow-moving black dot. This was the first time that the transit had occurred since 1769, and the first such event since the invention of photography in the 1820s. Little wonder astronomers were excited.

And their excitement was justified. By timing the transit’s key moments as seen from different locations on Earth, star gazers can measure the Sun–Earth distance, known as the ‘astronomical unit’. This yardstick (just under 93 million miles) is still used by scientists today.

Ahead of the 1874 transit, Airy ordered special telescopes known as photoheliographs to project the Sun’s disc onto glass plates. However, his teams struggled with the kit, and the photoheliographs failed to capture the transit with any great accuracy.

Despite those issues, the transit of Venus inspired a renewed interest in sun studies. Greenwich assistant EW Maunder started to compile a daily record of sunspot observations. In 1904, Maunder and his wife, Annie, assembled 30 years of sunspot data into the ‘butterfly diagram’ that still underpins our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle.

A degree of certainty

1884: The world aligns itself to Greenwich

John Flamsteed had been dead for more than a century. Yet, on 13 October 1884, his great brainchild, Greenwich Mean Time, truly went global. On that day, delegates at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC voted in favour of making Greenwich the world’s prime meridian, or 0° longitude.

The decision was influenced by a combination of technological supremacy and pragmatism. Greenwich was one of only four observatories with a suitably accurate telescope – the Airy Transit Circle Telescope – to define a meridian. And more than 70 per cent of shipping companies by tonnage already relied on the Greenwich meridian.

The delegates also agreed that the Universal Day – a 24-hour period to be used as a common reference to record events around the world – should begin at midnight GMT on the Greenwich meridian. This would hardly have come as a surprise: a year earlier, railroads in the US had already agreed to use standard time zones based on hourly meridians from Greenwich.

The delegates assembled in the American capital that October day voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Universal Day, and countries started to define their own standard time zones as hourly intervals before or after Greenwich. The result was the familiar time-zone system we use today.

Seeing double

1893: The Royal Observatory makes its biggest statement yet

Was Greenwich under threat? The International Meridian Conference of 1884 might have confirmed the Royal Observatory’s primacy in the world of astronomy. But, within a year, the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, was voicing his concerns that the principal telescope at Greenwich was being overtaken by newer, better instruments at rival observatories across Europe and North America. Determined to keep Greenwich out in front of the chasing pack, Christie persuaded the Admiralty to fund a new instrument, and that 28-inch diameter lens telescope – still the largest of its type in Britain – came into use in 1893.

Most other telescopes at Greenwich were designed to be fixed into position to ensure the accurate measurement of the stars for timekeeping and navigation. The Great Equatorial Telescope – named after its mount, which kept the instrument moving parallel to the Earth’s equator – was part of a new generation designed for astrophotography. With a clockwork drive that kept the instrument moving in sync with the stars from east to west, it could be used to take photos with very long exposures stretching to several hours, capturing impressive views of faint gas clouds (nebulae).

However, astronomers struggled to configure the heavy glass lens for photography, and so the telescope was reassigned to the study of double stars. By measuring the changing angle between an orbiting pair of stars, the astronomers could now calculate the mass of these distant suns.

All that came to an end in 1971 when the Great Equatorial Telescope was finally retired. However, you can still see this extraordinary instrument – housed in its distinctive onion-shaped dome – at Greenwich today.

• Read more | A brief history of daylight saving time

Pip pip hooray

1924: GMT is piped into homes across Britain

If we want to know the time in 2025, all we have to do is check the phone in our pocket, or glance at the digital watch on our wrists. Across most of the 20th century, of course, that wasn’t an option. If Britons sought an accurate time-check that they could, quite literally, set their clocks and watches by, then they had to turn on their radios and listen out for the familiar strains of the ‘six pips’.

The six pips first entered the public consciousness on 5 February 1924, when the ninth Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson (below), announced a collaboration with the BBC. The Royal Observatory would start sending electrical impulses down a telephone wire to the newly created broadcaster. These would then be converted into a series of six audio alerts – or ‘pips’ – that would go out on the radio on the hour, every hour.

But while some technologies were underscoring Greenwich’s enduring relevance, others were undermining it. In the 1930s, scientists developed clocks based on the natural vibration of quartz crystals; then, a decade later, the first atomic timekeepers began to appear. Both offered reliability and accuracy that the system of measuring time by the stars couldn’t match.

This wasn’t the only threat to the Royal Observatory’s pre-eminence in the 20th century. As the march of industry impacted visibility across London’s skies, so Greenwich’s suitability for the practice of astrophysics declined. Soon it became clear that the Observatory would have to move. And it did so twice – first to East Sussex in 1957; then to Cambridge in 1990. Eight years later, it shut altogether. 

Time had finally caught up with the great old scientific institution. But its huge contribution to the fields of astronomy, timekeeping and navigation cannot be doubted – as the many thousands of people who visit the Royal Observatory museum that now occupies the famous Greenwich complex will no doubt testify. John Flamsteed would surely be proud. 

Dr Louise Devoy is senior curator at the Royal Observatory and author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects (October, 2025)

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Maria of Modena: The queen who started a revolutionhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/maria-of-modena-the-queen-who-started-a-revolution/2025-08-11T09:03:21.000ZShortly after the queen rose on 10 June 1688, she felt a familiar swell of pain. “Send for the king!” she called, while her ladies helped her back into bed.

Maria (Mary) of Modena was in labour. Soon the room in St James’s Palace began to fill: some 70 people crowded in to watch the queen give birth. There was no screen to shield her, and the bedcurtains were kept open as she screamed in pain: “I die! Oh! You kill me! You kill me!”

Her cries were so terrible that many said they could hardly bear to listen. Yet the king – James II & VII – exhorted the members of his council to come nearer, to look more closely. He had heard the rumours that the pregnancy was fake, and was determined to ensure that no one could say this child was not born of the queen.

The sight of so many faces so close to Maria was overwhelming; she could not give birth with so many men looking on her, she said. But while James stooped to cover her face with his periwig, the rest of her body remained on full display – and everyone present witnessed that crucial moment.

That evening, the London Gazette reported the news to the citizens of the capital: “This day between 9 and 10 in the morning the Queen was safely delivered of a PRINCE.” Protestant England now had a Catholic heir – and a constitutional crisis.

It did not take long for the crisis to unfold. To keep the queen warm as her labour began, a serving woman had placed a bedpan full of hot coals under the blankets. That simple act prompted whispers that a child had been smuggled in – and, whether or not anyone believed the rumour, it provided sufficient pretext for seven politicians and nobles to invite William of Orange to invade England, launching the episode now widely known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

If Queen Maria of Modena is known today, it is for these events of 1688. But behind the story of political upheavals lies another tale – of an Italian Catholic princess who, at just 15 years old, was sent to a Protestant country that feared ‘popery’ more than anything else. There she would marry a man 25 years her senior, heir to the English throne. It is the story of a young woman whose purpose in life was seen as the breeder of heirs, but who deserves to be viewed as far more than merely a Catholic womb.

Dynasty in decline

Maria Beatrice d’Este was born on 5 October 1658 in Modena, around 23 miles north-west of Bologna in northern Italy. Though once a great ruling dynasty, by the mid-17th century the Estensi family was much in decline. Maria’s father died when she was not yet four years old, leaving her two-year-old brother, Francesco, to take his place as Duke of Modena, with their mother, Laura, acting as regent. A formidable and highly educated woman, Laura kept her children at what Maria later called an “awful distance” from her, and was determined that both of them would be scholars.

Much of Maria’s education took place in the convent attached to the palace, and she felt at home in that life of devotion to God, in a place of education, community and friendship. While still a child, she determined that she would become a nun. Unbeknown to her, events unfolding in England would soon change the course of her life.

Anne Hyde, the first wife of James, Duke of York – younger brother of King Charles II – died in 1671. Her body was hardly cold before talk turned to James’s remarriage. Charles’s nine-year marriage to Catherine of Braganza had produced no children, so James was the heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, and would have to make a dynastic match with one of the princesses of Europe. James sent his trusted friend the Earl of Peterborough as ambassador extraordinary, to find him a wife and future queen. After many months of searching, Peterborough encountered a portrait of a beautiful young girl, and wrote to James and Charles that he had “found his mistress and the Fortune of England”.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if James II and VII had kept his throne?

The fact that Maria wanted to become a nun mattered little to these powerful men. When she told Peterborough that she would rather throw herself in the fire than marry James, he replied that he “could not believe… that she was made for any other end than to give Princes to the World”.

Tellingly, another powerful man had taken an interest in the match: Pope Clement X. He informed Maria by letter that, in marrying James, she would open herself “to a vaster field of merit than that of the virginal cloister”: by bearing Catholic heirs, she could bring England back to the true faith. After reading this letter, she cried for three days – to the extent that she was held down by force. Peterborough merely wrote that: “The princess at last gave herself up to the will of her friends.” Over in England, James sent a note to his daughters, Mary and Anne, explaining that he had “found a new playfellow”. They were 11 and 8 years old, respectively; Maria was 14.

Controversial match

Maria arrived at the hedonistic court of the ‘Merrie Monarch’ in 1673, completely unprepared for what she encountered there.

“I cannot yet adapt myself to this state – a state to which, as you know, I have been opposed,” she wrote to her former mother superior. “Many nights I weep and grieve and cannot get rid of this melancholy.”

The match caused controversy. Cruel and scurrilous pamphlets circulated, in which it was hoped that she would “be envenom’d with the pox” and to “die before 20, rot before 16”.

But though young in years, Maria was resourceful. She learned English quickly, and began to navigate court politics by using the kind of soft power for which the Estensi family was so celebrated – notably, through patronage of the arts. The poet John Dryden wrote verse in her honour, Dutch artist Peter Lely painted her portrait, and the court was filled with the sounds of Italian opera – “the first that had been in England of this kind”, according to renowned diarist John Evelyn.

As her friendship with her stepdaughters burgeoned, Maria encouraged their talents for singing and dancing by commissioning The Masque of Calisto. This was a lavish spectacle even by the standards of the Restoration court, and the princesses – along with Maria’s favoured maid of honour, Sarah Jennings (later Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne’s ‘favourite’) – took the starring roles.

Shortly before the masque’s first performance, Maria gave birth to her first child. It was not the hoped-for boy, but the infant’s parents were overjoyed, and named her Catherine Laura – Catherine after the queen, Laura after Maria’s mother. Soon after, Maria had her daughter baptised in her rooms – as a Catholic. When her brother-in-law, King Charles II, learned what she’d done, he smiled and patted her hand. That was all very well, Charles said, but the child would be raised in the English church, so she would have to be baptised again, as a Protestant.

This experience gave Maria a concrete understanding of her position at court for the first time. Her children were not just her own, but children of the crown; though she gave birth to them, she had no say over their upbringing. (Tragically, Catherine Laura did not live long; though Maria was pregnant a total of 12 times, only two of her children survived to adulthood and one outlived her).

• Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution?

Maria’s own life as Duchess of York was one of constant uncertainty, as anti-Catholic feeling intensified. Parliament was increasingly divided into two factions, Tories and Whigs; the former supported hereditary monarchy, while the latter was implacably opposed to James ever becoming king. Meanwhile, tensions were rising more broadly in London. The years after Maria’s arrival in England were marked by two plots. The first, the so-called ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678, was a series of accusations by the fantasist Titus Oates, who claimed to have unearthed treasonous Catholic plans to kill the king. Despite being a complete fabrication, it resulted in imprisonments and the execution of some of Maria’s close friends, and she and James were sent into exile – first in Brussels, then in Scotland.

The second plot was real, and came shortly after James and Maria’s return to court in 1682. Had it been successful, the ‘Rye House Plot’ of 1683 would have seen Charles and James assassinated, with James, Duke of Monmouth – Charles’s favourite illegitimate son – made king.

It was over the years following the Rye House Plot that Maria was finally able to recreate something of the life of female friendship and intellectual endeavour that she had enjoyed in the convent in Modena. Two of her maids of honour, Anne Kingsmill (later Finch) and Anne Killigrew, were prodigiously talented: both were poets, and Killigrew was also a painter. Among her maids more generally, Maria encouraged a culture of learning and intellectual endeavour, and both Annes produced work in her honour.

Two pieces in particular provide a snapshot of this shared creative life, both depicting Maria as the goddess Venus. The first, a collaboration between Kingsmill and Killigrew, was a masque entitled Venus and Adonis – a proto-feminist retelling of the classical myth. The second was Killigrew’s painting Venus Attired by the Graces, featuring both Annes among the Graces. A new dawn of women’s art and poetry seemed on the horizon.

A Catholic queen

On 6 February 1685, Charles II died suddenly, aged 54. Maria mourned him deeply – though was wary of displaying her grief in public. “I was so greatly afflicted by the death of King Charles that I dared not show how much,” she wrote, “lest I be suspected of hypocrisy.” Despite their worries about the reception they might encounter, James and Maria were welcomed as the king and queen. This gave her an opportunity for greater patronage: the writer Aphra Behn wrote a celebratory coronation ode, and Anne Killigrew painted coronation portraits. Then tragedy struck again in April when Killigrew died of smallpox, aged just 25.

The new king, James II & VII, had learned all the wrong lessons from the execution of his father, Charles I; he thought that anyone who disagreed with him was against him, and believed that all of parliament were his enemies. His longstanding mistress, Catherine Sedley, was made a countess, and seemed to hold more influence over him than anyone, including his wife. It was said that Maria “loves her husband in all sincerity” but that “she is an Italian, and very proud”. She decided that, unlike queens who had come before, she would not tolerate this situation, and told James to choose: his mistress or his wife. If he continued his affair, she would leave England. “Give her my dower,” she told him. “Make her Queen of England, but let me see her no more!” If James was surprised by this outburst, he would soon be even more astonished when he encountered Maria’s priests, all on their knees, begging him to send away his mistress and save his soul. Overwhelmed, he agreed.

These growing tensions were heightened by the absence of a male heir. Maria had not been pregnant in three years so, at the end of August 1687, went to Bath to take the waters in search of fertility. Her treatment became a form of popular entertainment: members of the public flocked to the galleries to watch her bathe as an Italian orchestra performed. Almost immediately afterwards Maria became pregnant but, no sooner had she found out, rumours began – fuelled (perhaps even started) by King James’s daughter Anne, whose own anti-Catholicism had turned her against her father and stepmother.

Hot coals in a bedpan

After the keenly observed birth of Prince James Francis Edward in June 1688, the rumours only intensified. Some said that the pregnancy had been a hoax; others claimed that Maria had miscarried, or that the child had been a girl and replaced with a boy. All agreed that the child, who was given the title of Prince of Wales, had been smuggled into the room in a bedpan, even though at least two Protestant witnesses saw the bedpan full of hot coals at the beginning of the labour.

The seven men who wrote to encourage the invasion by James’s nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, exploited these rumours, including in their letter the claim that the child was an imposter. William ensured that his fleet landed on 5 November – a day on which effigies of the pope were ritually burned in bonfires.

Fearing for their safety, James and Maria took their baby and fled into exile at the court of Louis XIV in France. They never stopped believing they might be able to get back the throne. But it wasn’t to be, and they remained at Saint-Germain-en-Laye for the rest of their lives. Here, freed from the obligations of queenship, Maria could once again devote herself to patronage of the arts and of women’s education. In some ways, her life had come full circle: she became the patron of a convent of the Visitation – the same order that she had wanted to join as a child.

Maria outlived her husband by 17 years, bearing him another child in exile. She “has been overwhelmed with calumnies,” James said of Maria on his deathbed. “But time, the mother of Truth, will I hope, at last make her virtues shine as bright as the sun.”

Breeze Barrington is a cultural historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the 17th century. Her latest book is The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court (Bloomsbury, 2025)

This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Reshaping narratives, repatriation and Richard III : 25 lessons we've learnt from history in the last 25 yearshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-quarter-century-of-bbc-history-magazine-25-lessons-weve-learnt-from-history-in-the-last-25-years/2025-06-18T08:00:37.000Z1. Women played major roles in the Viking Age

Just 25 years ago, there seemed to be little new to say about the Vikings – and that was particularly the case for Viking women. The centuries-old consensus was that Viking wives and daughters stayed at home, passively watching as the Viking Age unfolded around them.

New technologies have forced a rethink, though, completely revolutionising what we know about Viking women. The first significant discovery came from a systematic survey of a nationwide database of metal-detected female dress jewellery. This demonstrated for the first time that Scandinavian women migrated to England in substantial numbers. Next, isotope analysis of teeth from the graves of Viking women showed that they had formed a key part of the migration process elsewhere, too, moving across the Viking world alongside their families.

The most dramatic and most debated discovery, however, came through analysis of ancient DNA. In Birka, Sweden, an individual buried in a high-status warrior grave turned out to be biologically female. This led to a worldwide discussion of the roles of Viking women: we now agree that, though many certainly did stay at home, some played active roles in trade, craft and manufacturing processes, and even held military positions.

Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, author and TV presenter. Her books include The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons (William Collins, 2023)

2. Britain has been culturally diverse for far longer than most believed

The murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 signalled a turning point in the way the histories of people of African descent were taught and perceived across Europe. From that moment, the British press and institutions felt that they had to engage better with narratives about minority ethnic communities.

A renewed interest in personal histories and trajectories of people of African descent in Britain showcased stories about their links to major events – from the celebrated story of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole during the Crimean War to the experiences of black British football player Walter Tull and other soldiers of Caribbean and African descent who fought for Britain during the world wars.

We also saw a number of new black history courses launched in UK universities, and school classes featuring black, Asian and minority ethnic histories. Uncovering these multiple trajectories further highlights how culturally diverse Britain has been over many centuries, and why sharing stories about a common past can bring communities together.

Olivette Otele is a distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. Her books include African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020)

3. The Tudors got Richard III wrong

We learned many things from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park 13 years ago. We learned about the king’s physique, his diet and the injuries he sustained while fighting for crown and country at Bosworth against a foreign-backed invader.

But, for me, two lessons in particular stand out from the discovery. The first is that history can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held traditions and assumptions – even those held by historians and archaeologists. Those of us working on the Looking for Richard Project trusted only our own painstaking, personal research in primary sources.

Second, we learned that Shakespeare’s hunchback and withered arm never existed. Analysis of Richard’s skeleton – which had lain underfoot and peacefully undisturbed for 500 years – revealed that his limbs were sound, and that his spine showed a scoliosis that was invisible to onlookers. Richard’s makeshift burial in the wake of his defeat at Bosworth, in a grave cut too short, was hugely revealing. It speaks across the centuries of a victor’s disrespect for a fallen king.

Philippa Langley is a historian, author and producer. Her latest book is The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023)

• Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case

4. Magna Carta was only part of a truly revolutionary settlement

King John’s Magna Carta is perhaps the best-known document in world history, generally regarded as the first attempt to place kingship itself under the rule of law. Not surprisingly, it has been much studied. Yet a torrent of new evidence has been brought to light over the past 20 years, transforming understanding of both the document and its wider context.

We now know of many more ‘original’ Magna Cartas (from its subsequent reissues) than were previously dreamed of. And incidental discoveries in archives from Paris to New England have reshaped our appreciation of what actually happened in 1215.

A fortuitous discovery in Lambeth Palace Library, for example, reveals that the charter was part of a truly revolutionary settlement, with the barons briefly permitted dual control of local government in tandem with the king. We know, too, that John himself made no attempt to publish the charter. On the contrary, it was the bishops who ensured its distribution, preservation and even, in some cases, its physical copying.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is unmasked not so much as an honest broker between king and barons but as an ideologically committed adherent of the anti-royal party. By such means can new evidence help us rewrite the past – even for the oldest and best-known stories.

Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His books include John (Allen Lane, 2020)

5. We ignore the past at our peril

Most compellingly, the past 25 years have reminded us that history matters. Every life-sapping conflict since the millennium – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza – has its roots deep in the past.

Of course, the past does not determine the future, but the future is shaped by the past. Merely railing against adversaries or shouting ‘victory’ from the rooftops may make for good headlines but, in the absence of some understanding of ‘how we got from there to here’, such indulgence is vacuous grandstanding.

The past has never been ‘another country’. This is especially true of Europe, where the tectonic plates did not stop shifting with the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of the past 25 years have demonstrated only too cruelly that our continent is inherently, and sometimes alarmingly, unstable.

All leaders claim to act in what they believe to be the national interest. The. less they make ill-judged declaratory statements of intent and the more they demonstrate a realistic vision of the future, based on a clear awareness of the past, the better it will be for all of us. History is a great mentor.

Jonathan Dimbleby is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. His latest book is Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Viking, 2024)

6. Hitler tapped into hard-wired emotions to stir up hatred

For my new book, I found it tremendously helpful to talk to academic psychologists and neuroscientists about the insights we can gain, in general terms, from their disciplines. For instance, I learned how Hitler – without knowing the science behind his actions – tapped into a profound truth about the way the brain works.

In stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks, Hitler targeted the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. It’s a survival mechanism that, as the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky explained to me, is “hard-wired into us… and we’ll never get rid of it”.

Hitler capitalised on this neurobiological tendency, and in the process did his best to subdue the parts of the brain that offer a more logical analysis. Indeed, he seemed to confirm that he was well aware of the immense power of this approach when he remarked, during a private speech to the Hamburger Nationalklub in 1926, that “the only stable emotion is hate”.

Laurence Rees is a historian, author and documentary film-maker. His new book is The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Viking, 2025)

7. Hunter-gatherers and farmers joined in wild rituals 12,000 years ago

Around the turn of this millennium, in a remote south-eastern corner of Turkey, an astonishing discovery was being made – one that stretched the story of humanity back more than 12,000 years.

Still today, only about 5 per cent of the archaeological site known as Karahantepe has been excavated – but even that tiny fraction is changing our understanding of the beginning of society as we know it. Emerging from the earth is a giant chamber with 11 huge stone phallus columns, overlooked by the face of a man with a splendid handlebar moustache and the body of a snake. The head of a big cat is visible in the centre, and carvings on 250 obelisks in the area could be mistaken for gargoyles on any medieval cathedral.We expect the female equivalent of the chamber to be unearthed soon.

Karahantepe, it turns out, is just one site in a constellation of a hundred or so – the Taş Tepeler – which together are rewriting the story of human collaboration. The orthodoxy used to be that hunter-gatherers invented farming, then settled down, then manifested religion to establish common mores to live by. But the discoveries seem to show that hunter-gatherers and the very first farmers gathered together in huge, collective spaces for wild ritual parties to share know-how and ideas.

This is one of the joys of history: it is constantly protean. Every year, new finds reveal earlier and earlier evidence of human achievement and sophistication.

Bettany Hughes is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her latest book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (W&N, 2024)

8. Returning stolen artefacts to Africa is no longer a naive dream

Some 25 years ago, when I was starting my career in museums, a sense of optimism and renewal imbued the sector – yet the restitution of stolen African objects did not seem a realistic possibility. Today, the culture has changed profoundly. My old employer, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, has returned its contested Benin plaques; the Dutch, Germans and French have either begun programmes of return or discussed the possibility. In Britain, the Horniman has returned ownership of its Benin plaques, and the V&A and the British Museum (both restricted by law from giving collections permanently) have entered into long-term loan agreements with the Asante royal family in Ghana.

Conversations that were inconceivable a generation ago – about ethics, about custodianship, about narrative, about ghosts – have begun to happen. We have to find ways to tell complex stories of empire, enslavement and colonialism more effectively and inclusively. It’s important that museums can craft their curatorial narratives with moral confidence, and the resolution of such thorny, long-term issues is vital.

There is still much to do. Our museums must go further in building partnerships and programmes with museums across the African continent. We need to learn from African expertise – and in turn we must share our resources and expertise to improve the telling of these rich and amazing histories everywhere.

Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Bantam, 2012)

9. Anne Boleyn was a proto-feminist heroine

Anne Boleyn is unique among English queens, and her story is remarkable, but much of the modern fascination with that tale lies in perceptions of her fuelled by films and novels. She is now revered as a feminist heroine – a concept I would once have dismissed as anachronistic. When I said as much to the historian Sarah Gristwood, she replied: “Well, actually…” and very generously allowed me a preview of her research for her marvellous book Game of Queens (Oneworld, 2016), which inspired me to find out more.

Feminism was unknown in Tudor England. But in early 16th-century Europe, where Anne spent her formative years, there was an intellectual debate that questioned traditional attitudes to women, and looked forward to an era – the ‘reign of virtue’ – in which they would enjoy more power and equality.

In this age of female rulers, Anne had two shining examples to study: Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Valois, both of whom she served or knew. We have to study her in this European context in order to understand the cultural influences to which she was exposed, giving her the confidence to pursue her brilliant career.

Alison Weir is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey (Headline, 2025)

10. Mary Seacole was a true heroine of the Crimean War

One of the most significant changes over the past 25 years is the extent to which researching and writing black history has opened up. This is partly down to the dedication of historians determined to extend knowledge of the black experience by digging deeply and stubbornly into little-consulted sources.

In my own case, 20 years of concerted searching across digitised newspapers and in genealogical archives gave the lie to the till-then widely perpetuated view that Mary Seacole had been wildly overrated and undeserving of the ‘Greatest Black Briton’ sobriquet awarded her in 2004.

For decades, detractors dismissed her as a colourful but largely irrelevant presence who had done little more than ‘sell tea and buns’ to the soldiers in Crimea. But my searches, enabled by digitisation of sources, brought me to a more complete view of a woman who deserves to be viewed as a heroine. She journeyed 1,600 miles to Crimea under her own steam and at her own expense to set up shop in the middle of a war zone – a lone black woman facing prejudice and risking her own safety to help the wounded, sick and dying.

Delving into previously unseen sources over an extended period enabled me to challenge the conventional sanctification of ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ and present
a fully rounded personality.

Helen Rappaport is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Rebel Romanov (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

11. Public history can play a major role in understanding the past

One great change over the last 25 years has been the huge growth in public history – not just as an academic discipline, though of course it rests on the work of professional historians, archivists and museum workers.

Public history is the product of us all. It is about public interaction with the past, its interpretation and popularisation – changing our understanding not only of the past but also of our own times. It’s about the link between historians and the general public. Films, podcasts, radio, heritage societies, living archaeologists, local history and re-enactment groups – even readers of this magazine – are all part of it.

Good popularisation is the necessary link between professionals and the population at large, without which history becomes a closed debate between historians. And in a democracy, that link is vital: it’s part of a healthy information ecosystem, our reality check in the face of the tide of fake history on social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Trump’s America the US National Council on Public History is becoming more important in keeping minds open. When I hear people argue that you can’t rewrite history – though that is our actual collective job as makers of history! – it makes me think that perhaps we should have one here, too.

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. Read his column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here

12. Charles I wasn’t so very chaste

Traditional accounts of Charles I, the so-called ‘martyr king’, have always presented him as a grave, austere and chaste figure – the very opposite of his indecorous, bawdy father, James VI & I, and his dissipated, promiscuous son, Charles II. Charles’s marriage to his wife, Henrietta Maria, was undoubtedly a happy one and, until the royal couple were torn apart during the Civil War, he does indeed appear to have remained true to her alone.

However, in an article published in 2006, the historian Sarah Poynting revisited a series of encrypted letters written by Charles in late 1647 and 1648, while he was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight after his defeat by the parliamentarians. Previous attempts to decipher these letters had not been entirely accurate, Poynting showed, and in fact one of them revealed that Charles had been attempting to inveigle the royalist agent Jane Whorwood into his bed.

Using the frankest language, Charles went so far as to suggest to Jane that she should secretly conceal herself in the ‘stool-room’ adjoining his chamber while he was out on his daily walk so that, after his return, he could dally with her at length. It was a remarkable discovery – and one that suggested previous characterisations of the king as “blamelessly uxorious” may well have been a little wide of the mark.

Mark Stoyle is professor of history at the University of Southampton. His latest book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022)

• Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?

13. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes

One of the major scientific advances in archaeology over the past 25 years has been the ability to extract and analyse DNA from the remains of long-dead people from the distant past. Such ancient DNA can shed light on how people were related to one another, on a family or population scale, and provide insights into the migration and movement of people over time. It can also tell us what diseases they had and – perhaps most compelling – what they looked like.

In 2018, researchers at the Natural History Museum revealed that one of the inhabitants of Mesolithic Britain, a man who lived around 10,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes. This individual – known as ‘Cheddar Man’, because his remains were discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset – is represented by one of the oldest complete skeletons ever identified in Britain. Earlier results from remains found from Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary confirm that most hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe looked this way.

The genes for lighter skin pigmentation arrived thousands of years later, in waves of migration from the east during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In addition, natural selection over time favoured lighter tones that allow more Vitamin D synthesis in the skin, essential in northerly climes.

Susan Greaney is a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter

14. Premodern Japan was surprisingly progressive

One of the most fascinating and dynamic periods of Japanese history was the Meiji Restoration, which began with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ended with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Japan opened up as never before to diplomatic and trading relationships with the west and, over little more than four decades, modernised its economy and society at an astonishing rate. By 1912, it had become one of the world’s great powers.

For a long time, this explosion of activity was contrasted with the preceding 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. That system was regarded as feudal, backward and badly out of date, requiring rescue at the hands of modernising and westernising reformers. Much though this view of history suited western historians across the 20th century, and flattering as it was to western modernity, since 2000 historians have increasingly been exploring the myriad achievements of the shogunate.

Across two and a half centuries of peace, Japanese commerce, intellectual life and the arts enjoyed extraordinary growth and creativity, from theatre through to a tourism industry and a publishing boom. Without the commercial and technical expertise, high literacy rates and great bustling cities that developed under the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration could not have happened in the way that it did.

Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and creator of the IlluminAsia newsletter and podcast (illuminasia.org). His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024)

15. Egypt’s great pyramids at Giza weren’t built by foreign slaves

Dominating the Giza Plateau for almost five millennia, the great pyramids still capture imaginations around the world. For centuries, archaeologists and historians have tried to determine how these magnificent monuments, including the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, were created – and now we know who built them.

Contrary to popular depictions, construction wasn’t completed by foreign slaves but by Egyptian employees. Excavations of a workers’ village over the past couple of decades, and the discovery of builders’ tombs in 2009, have transformed the narrative.

The village, dating from the Fourth Dynasty (starting c4,600 years ago), boasted bakeries, breweries, butchers and a hospital. In the burial sites, skeletons show signs of hard labour, as one might expect, but they’re also accompanied by jars of bread and beer, ready for the afterlife. There are female skeletons, too, confirming that women played roles in building the pyramids.

Hieroglyphs suggest a system of skilled labourers and artisans, from “overseer of the side of the pyramid” to “inspector of the craftsmen”. It’s also clear that villagers from surrounding areas came here to work in construction, usually in three-month stints. Their graffiti indicates that each cadre might associate themselves with one particular pharaoh or pyramid: the “friends of Khufu”, for example, or “drunkards of Menkaure”.

The inscriptions confirm that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the manner and location of the burials, in the shadow of the great pharaohs, puts the slave myth to bed.

Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University. His latest book is Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023)

16. Personal links to empire can reshape old narratives

Astonishingly, I completed my entire education without learning about the British empire. I don’t even have a recollection of hearing the world ‘empire’ mentioned at school – and I studied History A-level! I now know that my experience is not unique.

In the past 10 years or so, though, I have gained a growing understanding of not only what happened and how it shaped Britain today, but also of my own personal connection to empire and its tumultuous end. I feel lucky to be making programmes and writing books at a time when there is a greater interest in knowing about Britain’s imperial past – not that it is without complications or controversies.

And things continue changing: a new generation of historians is exploring archives and asking different questions. Teachers are choosing to explore empire in all its complexity, and conversations are being had between people in the diaspora and their family members about a time when they were subjects of empire. I am learning that, just because an area of history is overlooked or not spoken of, it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Read her Hidden Histories column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here

17. Stonehenge was built in an already sacred area

The past two and a half decades have seen a transformation in our understanding of one of the most iconic ancient monuments in Britain and, indeed, the world: Stonehenge.

Archaeological research has revealed that the 4,500-year-old prehistoric ‘temple’ stood at the heart of a sacred landscape infinitely richer than previously thought. Scores of ritual monuments have been discovered in a vast halo scattered across the countryside around the monument.

Even more extraordinarily, tests have revealed that one of Stonehenge’s most important stones was transported all the way from what’s now northern Scotland – and that a large number of the smaller stones had probably originally formed part of another stone circle in south-west Wales before being brought here. And research shows that some of the Neolithic people buried at Stonehenge did not come from the area but from western Britain, possibly from modern-day Wales – significant, given the origins of many of its smaller stones.

We now know, too, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active in the Stonehenge area some 5,000 years before the monument existed. This remarkable new information, together with earlier evidence that a series of Mesolithic wooden obelisks may have stood adjacent to the site of Stonehenge, suggests that the area had been sacred for millennia.

David Keys is the archaeological correspondent for The Independent

18. The tide seems to have turned against the British empire

By the year 2000, the British empire – formerly a global superpower – had been transformed into an organisation with entirely voluntary membership, the Commonwealth. At the time, academic assessment of this extraordinary transformation resulted in a number of books – including my own – which concluded that British imperialism had been overall, and in a remarkable variety of ways, both a blessing and a curse.

In the 25 years since that relatively benign consensus, however, there has been a profound anti-imperial swing resulting in a wholesale condemnation of British imperial history – shifting the dial remarkably.

It is, however, vital to understand that, even at its Victorian zenith, the empire faced trenchant criticism from within. Anti-imperial attitudes were commonplace on the left wing of the Liberal Party, the infant Labour Party and the generally hostile Irish Nationalist Party. Nonconformist churches – Methodists, Congregationalists and, above all, Quakers – voiced criticisms of imperial aims and methods. Internal opposition, from resentful Afrikaners, French Canadians and diverse displaced and conquered Indigenous peoples, also inevitably arose.

To cope with such internal opposition, and to prolong its existence, the imperial system undertook much self-correction – a process that led to mass devolution, the end of empire and the birth of today’s Commonwealth. In short, we are now keenly aware that there is no neat and fireproof analysis of the nature, governance and purpose of the British empire. It was such a huge, complex and long-lived organisation that almost every criticism, as well as almost every justification, has some validity somewhere and at some time.

Denis Judd is professor emeritus of imperial and Commonwealth history at London Metropolitan University, and author of Empire (IB Tauris revised paperback edition, 2012)

19. The world is in danger of reverting to its darkest days

After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia and eastern Europe in 1989–91, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he predicted optimistically that the demise of the Soviet system meant that western liberalism would roll out across the world, and that the future belonged to progressive democracy, with no rivals to challenge it.

In fact, since the first issue of BBC History Magazine was published in 2000, history has evolved along a drastically different path to the one that Fukuyama predicted. So far, the 21st century has belonged to resurgent strongmen. In country after country, authoritarian regimes led by dictatorial rulers have come to power – and stayed there, with scant regard for democracy. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Erdogan’s Turkey, Kim’s North Korea and Sisi’s Egypt are leading examples of a worldwide trend that shows no sign of ending.

So what we have learned from history in this century is a rather troubling lesson. After the terrors of the 20th century, the world is not moving into broad, sunlit uplands but is in danger of reverting to the darkest days of the past.

Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist and former reviews editor of BBC History Magazine. His latest book is Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich (John Blake, 2023)

20. Technology enables deep-sea shipwreck discoveries – but we should beware hubris

In recent years, sophisticated modern technologies have allowed humans to dive deeper, explore the seabed autonomously, and locate shipwrecks. Lost in 1915 in the Weddell Sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance made headlines when its wreck was rediscovered in 2022. Recovering or even visiting the wreck, which lies at a depth of 3,000 metres, are major challenges. But submersible robots were able to photograph the Endurance from every angle, enabling scientists to create a digital model of the whole vessel as well as many artefacts preserved just as they were when the crew abandoned ship.

The wreck of the Gloucester, lost in 1682 after hitting a sandbank while transporting James, Duke of York and his court, was discovered in 2007. Future excavation of the site could provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore a Restoration royal court frozen in time. Just as the Mary Rose Museum has captured the public imagination, making Henry VIII’s warship part of British national conversations, telling the Gloucester’s stories could transform public understanding of a historical period that laid the constitutional foundations of modern Britain.

In 2025, mid-point in the United Nations ‘Ocean Decade’, a key task is to meaningfully integrate Britain’s remarkable maritime cultural heritage into ocean governance to help create a sustainable blue economy.

Nonetheless, humanity should remain humble in the face of the ocean’s uncontrollable forces. The implosion in 2023 of the submersible Titan on its expedition to the wreck of the Titanic – resulting in the death of all on board – is a cautionary tale. Some 3 million shipwrecks around the world prove that the sea – so elemental, so powerful – shouldn’t be disrespected.

Claire Jowitt is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of East Anglia

21. We now know how many enslaved African people were trafficked across the Atlantic

The transatlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced movements of people in world history – yet for decades it was difficult to quantify. Then, in the early 1990s, an international team came together to solve this problem. The result was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which showed that 12.5 million people were transported. Of those, 10.7 million survived the journey and arrived in the Americas.

Many people, particularly in the US and the UK, assumed that most enslaved people were trafficked to the United States. In fact, the database showed that fewer than 400,000 Africans were forcibly taken directly to mainland North America; about 4.8 million arrived in South America and 4.7 million in the Caribbean.

First published as a CD-ROM in 1999, the database was greatly expanded in the early 2000s to include the Portuguese trade in the South Atlantic. Re-released as an open-access website in 2008, including details of an additional 7,000 journeys, it has been described as one of the greatest historical achievements of the 21st century. Though the database does not give us a rich picture of the experiences of enslaved peoples, it has been critical to understanding the scale of one of the world’s worst human-rights violations.

Hannah Cusworth is a historian, curator and history education consultant

• Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation

22. Richard III was behind the disappearance of the princes in the Tower… probably

It’s history’s most compelling missing persons case: what happened to Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, after they were placed in the Tower in 1483 on the orders of their uncle, who soon afterwards seized the throne as Richard III?

The mystery has been the subject of intense debate ever since. Some three decades later, Thomas More had established the narrative that Richard had his nephews murdered with the help of his henchman, James Tyrell. There was no shortage of other suspects but, though every scrap of evidence has been pored over by generations of historians since, the trail was already cold.

Recently, Tim Thornton, professor of history at the University of Huddersfield, took a novel approach. Rather than researching the events leading up to the princes’ disappearance, he traced the lives of those involved in the years that followed – and found links between Thomas More and the two men he claimed had carried out the murder for Tyrell. Then, last year, Thornton came across a book of wills in the National Archives that included one made in 1516 by a wealthy London widow, Margaret Capel, half sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell. Among her chattels listed in the will was “the chain of Edward V” – the only one of the boys’ possessions referenced in sources after their disappearance. The fact that it turned up in the family of the prime suspect makes it close to a ‘smoking gun’.

Tracy Borman is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her documentary The Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery is on My5

23. History can help veterans cope with PTSD

A remarkable discovery made this century is that history can be hugely therapeutic for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It might seem deeply counterintuitive but when veterans undertake top-level archaeological research on battlefields, rather than re-igniting their traumas it often tends to work in positive ways for them psychologically, and can be a useful step on their road to recovery.

The work done by the organisation Waterloo Uncovered, founded in 2015 by former Coldstream Guards captain (and PTSD sufferer) Mark Evans, has been instrumental in this regard. Its mental-health experts found that, after helping to discover facts that are useful to military historians – the musket-ball scatter-pattern outside the orchard at the Hougoumont farmhouse in a key sector of the Waterloo battlefield, for example – veterans often saw improvements in their mental conditions.

There are various theories about the mechanisms of this effect. Perhaps such work reminds veterans that their predecessors two centuries ago encountered much the same kind of perils they did themselves in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Evans also noted that the project provided a safe and structured environment in which veterans with shared experiences could start to open up to one another about the challenges they faced. Whatever the reason, history is helping in a tangible way today.

Andrew Roberts’ latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of War-fare from 1945 to Gaza (William Collins, 2024)

24. Technology has revolutionised how historians work and collaborate

One of the great things about historical research is that it keeps on moving.

When I was a young historian, looking back in time required me to handle complex written materials and work out how to supplement them with reference material culture, to archaeology or to finds such as coins and lead seals.

The past quarter-century has revolutionised the tools available to historians. Huge advances in the sciences, combined with plunging costs, mean that we now have access to data sources that don’t just provide new insights into topics such as human migration or the spread and lethality of pandemic diseases, but also enable us to do so with increasing accuracy. These are tools we must learn to rely on.

Many of these new materials are related to climate archives, enabling historians to reconstruct past periods of environmental change – or even, in some cases, to better understand the effects of single, one-off extreme events such as floods, storms or volcanic eruptions.

That, in turn, has changed how historians work, not least in the ways we can collaborate more often and more meaningfully with colleagues across research groups. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a historian – to be part of the community of people interested in the past.

Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University. His latest book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023)

25. Powerful female leaders weren’t the sex-crazed failures of (manmade) myth

Our understanding of queenship has, thankfully, moved forward in the past 25 years – just as women’s history has also moved forward.

Female rulers such as Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots have all too frequently been cited as cautionary tales about what follows when you give women power: sex and death. But in recent years, revisionist historians such as Kara Cooney, Joyce Tyldesley and Joann Fletcher have written brilliant accounts of Cleopatra, challenging the perception of her as a sex-mad failure.

Mary, Queen of Scots was surrounded by men attempting to seize her power – and, when she had a son, she was set on a course that led to her being deposed in favour of him. Lord Bothwell made her go back to his castle, where he assaulted her in an attempt to force her to marry. Past historians framed her for setting up this event. Today, though, we understand that a woman who had been seized and sexually assaulted was expected to agree to marry the man who attacked her. In Mary’s case, all of the lords were in agreement with that course of action – so what choice did Mary have?

As we are increasingly coming to understand, female rulers need to be seen in context. If they lost to the powerful men of the time or, indeed, the Roman empire, we need to grasp why that happened. Such insights can shape perceptions of the past – and a future with women in power.

Kate Williams is professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Her latest book is The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals (Frances Lincoln, 2024)

This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>The battle of Worcester: Cromwell’s last battlehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/battle-worcester-what-happened-who-won/2023-06-17T07:11:16.000ZClimb the 235 steps to the top of the tower of Worcester Cathedral and, once you’ve recovered your breath, you’ll be rewarded with a remarkable bird’s-eye view of the city below you. You’ll also be standing on the very spot where, on 3 September 1651, Charles II watched his tired and outnumbered army prepare to do battle with the forces of Oliver Cromwell. It would be the final battle of the Civil War.

After his father’s execution in 1649, the throne had passed, in theory at least, to Charles II. Charles was supported by the Scots, who disapproved of Charles I’s beheading (he had been their king as well) and had fallen out with their former English parliamentarian allies, particularly over religion. Parliament reacted by sending an army north which, led by Oliver Cromwell, defeated the Scots at Dunbar on 3 September 1650. Hostilities dragged on but on 1 January 1651, Charles was crowned king by the Scots at Scone. That July, the English crossed the Forth and, after defeating the Scots at Inverkeithing, cut their army off from its chief source of supplies. Hoping to tempt Charles and his Scottish army into hostile English territory, Cromwell left the border unguarded. Charles took the bait. At the beginning of August, he led his army into England.

• Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War

The battle of Worcester: in context

Who fought?

Royalists (Charles II): 10,000 Scots, 2,000 English Commonwealth (Cromwell): 28,000 English

Losses

Royalists: 2,000 killed, 10,000 captured Commonwealth: 300 killed and wounded

Who won?

The result was complete destruction of Charles’s army

If the young king had hoped that hordes of supporters would rally to his cause, he was to be disappointed. The English may have disliked the Republic, but they hated the Scots even more, and, after nine years’ intermittent fighting, they were thoroughly tired of war. Not only did the hoped-for reinforcements fail to materialise in any great numbers, but Charles’s army began to shrink as Scottish stragglers were mopped up by the English forces that were shadowing his army in ever-increasing numbers. On 23 August, having been forced to ditch his plan to advance on London by the sheer weight of numbers that were now facing him, Charles entered Worcester. Morale among his forces was low. His troops were tired, hungry and miles from home and, while most would have fought hard to defend their homeland, this adventure down south was a different proposition altogether. David Leslie, the commander of Charles’s Scottish cavalry, had fallen into a deep depression after being defeated at Dunbar, and expressed doubts that his troops would fight at all. Meanwhile, the forces of parliament were closing in.

Realising that they were likely to be attacked, Charles’s men began strengthening the city’s defences. Earth was piled up against the medieval stone city walls to dampen the impact of cannon balls, and a large earth fort, dubbed Fort Royal, was thrown up outside the city’s Sidbury Gate to defend the eastern approach to Worcester. Much of this work was done by forced labourers from surrounding villages. Six months later, they would be set to work again, this time to demolish the defences they had been made to dig.

By now, Charles probably had about 12,000 men under his command in Worcester. About 10,000 were Scottish, the rest English. By 17th-century standards at least, this was a substantial force, but it was dwarfed by the massive army that the English parliament was preparing to deploy against it. Commanded by Cromwell, it was a mixture of regular troops and soldiers from various local militias and, at 28,000 strong, it was one of the largest armies ever to take the field in England.

Charles II on the run. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Crushing defeat

On 2 September, Charles’s forces suffered a further blow to their morale when the Earl of Derby, the leader of the one English rebellion in support of the would-be monarch, turned up at Worcester with the news that his little army had been crushed at Wigan in Lancashire.

On the same day, in a bid to at least improve the clothing of his tattered army, Charles ordered £453 worth of cloth from a local draper. But there would be no time to make this into uniforms for, on 3 September, Cromwell’s mighty war machine rolled into action. The significance of the date wouldn’t have been lost on Cromwell’s men. It was the first anniversary of his great victory at Dunbar and, to underline the point, the English used the same rallying cry – ‘The Lord of Hosts’ – as they had at that battle. For anyone who knew their Bible (and many did), the message was clear. ‘The Lord of Hosts’ was taken from a rather ominous passage in the Book of Jeremiah which read, “This is the day of the Lord God of Hosts, a day of vengeance, his sword shall devour his enemies. It will be drenched with their blood.”

Seeking to make the most of his huge advantage in numbers, Cromwell planned to envelop Worcester from the south, east and west. The main drawback to this plan was a liquid one: running south to north past Worcester, the River Severn effectively cut his army in two, while troops advancing to the west faced an additional obstacle in the form of the River Teme, which joined the Severn just south of the city. But the English had found a solution to this problem in the form of a number of wooden boats, which they planned to lash together to form improvised pontoon bridges. While Cromwell remained with the bulk of his army on the eastern side of the Severn, his future son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, led 12,000 red-coated soldiers in an attack in the west. The Scots fought hard, progress was slow and there was some bitter fighting in and around the village of Powick just south of the Teme. (Ironically, this was the site of one of the earliest actions of the Civil War in England, when Royalist cavalry routed their Roundhead counterparts in 1642).

A bridge too far

Seeing what was happening and anxious to maintain momentum, Cromwell personally led three brigades of his army across the first pontoon bridge, which had been built across the Severn. Faced with this threat to their flank, the Scots fell back across Powick Bridge and took up new defensive positions north of the Teme. Once again, Fleetwood’s troops were faced with stiff resistance, but the Scots simply didn’t have enough men to defend everywhere. A new pontoon bridge was set up across the Teme, and using this, the bridge at Powick and another crossing further west, the English eventually broke through. Initially, the Scots fell back in good order, but as more and more Parliamentarians arrived on the scene, the retreat turned into a rout and they rushed for the town bridge across the Severn and the apparent safety of the city itself.

Watching these events from the tower of Worcester Cathedral, Charles believed that he still had an outside chance of victory. He reasoned that, in crossing the Severn to help Fleetwood, Cromwell had seriously weakened his forces to the east. Rushing down the tower’s steep spiral staircase, he gathered together what forces he could and led them in a desperate sortie out of Worcester’s eastern Sidbury gate. Three hours’ desperate fighting ensued as the Scots initially drove the Parliamentarians back from their positions around Perry Wood and Red Hill and even captured two cannon. Sensing an opportunity, Charles called on David Leslie, who had assembled his cavalry outside the city, to come forward and support him. But with no confidence in his men, Leslie never moved.

All is lost

For Charles, the game was up. His outnumbered troops could advance no further, and by now, Cromwell was transferring troops back across the Severn to join the fray. The Scots battled on, using the butt-ends of their muskets when they ran out of ammunition, but eventually they were driven back into the city. Cromwell’s men stormed into Fort Royal and fired its cannon into the mob of retreating Scots who, according to one onlooker, were now so desperate to escape that they were “readier to cut each other’s throats than defend themselves against the enemy”. The Parliamentarians charged into Worcester, hot on the heels of the fleeing Scots, but royalist resistance lasted just long enough for Charles to escape out of St Martin’s gate. Tradition has it that he left by the back door of his New Street headquarters just as some Parliamentarian dragoons were coming in the front.

Around 2,000 of Charles's men were killed in the battle, which Cromwell called “his Crowning Mercy”. Most of the rest were captured. The Parliamentarians lost 300 men. Although Charles eventually escaped, Worcester shattered the Stuart cause for a decade. It also confirmed the political dominance of England, and Westminster in particular, over the rest of Britain, the effects of which continue to resonate today.

In 1660, Charles II was invited to return as monarch (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

What happened next?

Oliver Cromwell was now the most powerful man in the Republic, but Britain remained deeply divided and there was little agreement over how the country should be governed. In 1653, Cromwell became head of state as Lord Protector, but was never able to secure widespread support for his regime and, ultimately, his power rested on the fact that he had the army to back him. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, his son and successor, Richard, proved incapable of holding the country together and, in 1660, Charles II was invited to return as monarch.

• Read more about the Restoration

What happened to Charles II after the battle?

Charles would spend the six weeks after Worcester as a wanted man – a fugitive in his own country. Thanks to the loyalty of some of his subjects, his own resourcefulness and quick-thinking, and some large slices of luck, he eventually made it to safety on the Continent. Charles’s time on the run gave him something no other monarch of the time had – an insight into the everyday lives of the ordinary people in his realm. The Republic’s failure to find a political settlement led to Charles’s restoration as king in 1660. During his 25-year reign, he often proved callous and cynical, and was quite prepared to throw his advisors to the wolves. But he never forgot the loyalty of those who stood by him in those dark days of defeat.

This article was first published in the April 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed

]]>“Radical ideas that had been preached and published could not be unthought”: Clare Jackson on the legacy of the Restorationhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/clare-jackson-legacy-of-the-restoration-reign-of-charles-ii/2023-04-20T07:24:55.000ZThe Restoration of Charles II in 1660 was a monumental turning point in England’s history. It followed 20 years of bloody civil wars and constitutional crisis during which a larger proportion of the British and Irish populations died than in both World War I and World War II combined. Between 1649 and 1660, England had been a republic for the only time in its history.

Charles II’s restoration as monarch therefore offers a fascinating case study in post-conflict resolution. Accompanied by official injunctions to forgive and forget, the ‘Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’ (1660) conferred a general pardon on everyone except a small number of named individuals directly involved in his father Charles I’s execution in 1649.

• Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period

But trying to put back the political clock and imagine away two decades in which worlds had been turned upside down was not straightforward. Radical ideas that had been preached and published could not be unthought, and the popular mood was febrile. As the rector of Bath Abbey, Joseph Glanvill, warned in 1667, a “people that rebelled once, and successfully, will be ready to do so often”, just “as water that has been boiled, will boil again the sooner”.

The restored government faced natural disasters, too, such as the Great Fire of London in 1666 – still a popular feature of the Key Stage 1 national curriculum today. Through Samuel Pepys’s eyewitness accounts, primary schoolchildren encounter one of history’s most brilliantly evocative diarists who buried his prized Parmesan cheese in his garden to save it from the flames.

• Read more | A timeline of the Restoration period

Significantly, the fire fanned erroneous suspicions that foreign Catholics had set fire to London, just four years after Charles II’s original hopes of offering “a liberty to tender consciences” had been frustrated by the Act of Uniformity (1662), which imposed harsh penalties on Protestant nonconformists. Indeed, the Restoration remained a persecuting society: the last era in English history when the state coercively sought to secure religious uniformity before the Toleration Act was passed in 1689.

The Restoration also saw the emergence of England’s first political parties, as ‘Tory’ defenders of Charles II’s monarchy defeated attempts by a ‘Whig’ opposition in the late 1670s to prevent his brother, James, from inheriting the throne. Succeeding as England’s last Catholic monarch in 1685, James II (who was also James VII of Scotland) then embarked on a disastrous attempt to re-Catholicise the British Isles, which led to the armed intervention of his Dutch son-in-law and nephew, William of Orange, three years later.

Haunted by fears of a renewed descent into the bloodbath of civil war, England’s political leaders achieved, instead, what generations of historians have acclaimed as the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89, which secured the system of Protestant, parliamentary monarchy that still governs England today.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]>Making of a monarch: how the young Charles II endured war, defeat and exile before the Restorationhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/making-of-a-monarch-young-charles-ii-civil-war-defeat-exile-restoration/2023-04-19T07:59:17.000ZIt’s the early hours of 15 October 1651, and most of the residents of the West Sussex town of Shoreham-by-Sea are asleep in their beds. But not all of them. Two men walk silently across a beach and board a boat. A couple of hours later, before the Sun has crept above the horizon, the vessel slips out to sea. And barely anyone has even noticed.

As turning points in English history go, the duo’s departure made for a fairly unremarkable scene. Yet a turning point it undoubtedly was. One of the men was, in fact, the future King Charles II. And he was fleeing for his life. A few months earlier, Charles had launched a bid to win back the kingdoms that Oliver Cromwell’s forces had seized from his father, Charles I, in the Civil Wars that raged across the British Isles.

That bid had ended in defeat and so the younger Charles was forced to beat a silent retreat back across the Channel – accompanied by his close friend, Lord Wilmot – before Cromwell’s forces caught up with him. And catch up with him they nearly did. Hours after Charles departed for the continent, his pursuers swept into Shoreham in search of their prey.

They would have good reason for rueing this nearest of misses, for Charles wouldn’t be down and out forever. Nine years later, he would return to English shores – this time not as a hapless fugitive but as the master of all surveyed.

• Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period

As his boat pulled away from Shoreham on that October morning, Charles could have been forgiven for wondering how he found himself in this perilous predicament. This was not how it was meant to be. When he was born at St James’s Palace in May 1630, his inheritance was the three crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the awesome power that came with being a divinely appointed ruler in the 17th century. On the day on which he was born, a brilliant star shone brightly in the daytime skies over London. Today, this is believed to have been a supernova; back in 1630, it was interpreted as a sign of great things to come.

Charles II: a young boy at war

It was not to be. At 12 years old, Charles’s pampered childhood – spent chiefly at the courts of St James and Whitehall in London and Richmond Palace in Surrey – was shattered by war. Over the preceding years, tensions between Charles I and an array of opponents over religious policy, the power of parliament and the question of the king’s divine right to rule had reached boiling point.

In 1642, those tensions exploded into outright conflict – and the consequences for the king and his family would prove catastrophic. The younger Charles may have only been a boy, but he wasn’t sheltered from the conflict. He was present when his father raised the royal standard at the battle of Edgehill, the first pitched battle of the Civil Wars, and was made a commander of royalist forces in the West Country when he was just 14.

But soon the tide of the war was turning decisively in favour of the king’s parliamentarian enemies and, in March 1646, his eldest son was forced to flee the mainland. It wouldn’t, of course, be for the last time. The then Prince Charles initially made for the royalist strongholds of the Scilly Isles and Jersey before crossing the Channel to mainland Europe.

At first, he joined his mother – the French-born Henrietta Maria – near Paris, where he lived under the protection of the French king, Louis XIV. Later, however, he moved to the Hague (in the modern-day Netherlands), where his brother-in-law William II, Prince of Orange, seemed more likely to offer support to the royalist cause.

• Read more | A timeline of the Restoration period

All the while, back in England, things were going from bad to worse for Charles’s father. The war was now heading inexorably in parliament’s favour, and, in May 1646, the king placed himself in the hands of a Scottish army, who later handed him over to English parliamentarian forces. By the end of 1647, Charles I would find himself in captivity in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

But what would the parliamentarians do with their royal prisoner? The answer came in dramatic fashion in early 1649, when the leaders of the New Model Army and the more radical parliamentarians put the king on trial for high treason. After being convicted, he was beheaded in Whitehall. The execution of Charles I was a truly stunning event that sent shockwaves coursing through Europe’s courts.

• Read more | Killers of the king: the men who dared to execute Charles I

The question that was now being asked was, what would the dead king’s son do next? The answer arrived in June 1650, when Charles sailed to Scotland with the aim of wresting back his father’s kingdoms. There, on 1 January 1651, he became the last monarch to be crowned north of the border, at a coronation ceremony at Scone Palace in Perthshire.

Unfortunately, Charles’s return to the mainland hadn’t gone unnoticed by Oliver Cromwell, now the most powerful man in the three kingdoms. The parliamentarian leader was determined to crush Charles’s campaign before it had begun and sent an army north to stamp out the royalist uprising. That army inflicted a bloody defeat on the Scots at Dunbar, killing 3,000 and taking a further 10,000 prisoner.

Battle of Worcester: bloodbath for the royalists

Yet Charles hadn’t given up all hope of regaining his father’s kingdoms quite yet. In fact, soon he had devised a new plan: to march an army into England, join up with his supporters there, and drive towards London. But Charles had failed to read the room. South of the border there simply wasn’t the appetite for more death and destruction, especially death and destruction meted out by a marauding Scottish army. When Charles marched south, the anticipated explosion of popular support didn’t materialise.

Even Charles I’s former royalist capital of Oxford refused to open its gates to the Scottish army. The invasion turned into a fiasco; one that reached a nightmarish crescendo when a parliamentarian army numbering 28,000 men caught up with Charles II’s army in Worcester. With the Scottish army less than half the size of its opponents, and absolutely exhausted, the result was a bloodbath.

What would have made Cromwell’s victory even more complete was if his forces had captured Charles. Yet somehow the fugitive king slipped through the net: first by hiding in an oak tree, then, assisted by a young woman named Jane Lane, whose brother was an officer in the royalist army, riding to Bristol. From there, the king travelled to the beach at Shoreham where he and his friend Lord Wilmot made their getaway to the European continent.

Following the defeat at Worcester, Charles’s hopes of ever regaining what he believed to be his rightful inheritance seemed to be well and truly expunged. And so he spent the next eight years enjoying the hospitality of various royal courts, filling his days partying, riding, sailing and womanising.

Bough for the king: when Charles II had to hide up a tree

In 1651, a young Charles narrowly escaped the clutches of the parliamentarian forces thanks to an unlikely hiding place

The search was on. A massive parliamentarian force had just crushed a Scottish army, led by Charles II, at Worcester. Now, to put the icing on the cake, all the victors had to do was capture the fugitive king himself. With his army emphatically beaten and supporters deserting him in droves, it would surely be the easiest of tasks. Yet, as Charles’s pursuers would discover over the next few days, the king was resourceful, elusive and not entirely without sympathisers. Among those still willing to support the king were the Penderels. This family of Roman Catholic farmers spirited the exhausted monarch – now disguised as a woodman – to their home, Boscobel House, nearly 40 miles from Worcester. Here, Charles was joined by a fellow royalist fugitive, William Careless. And it was Careless who came up with a quite remarkable plan: for the pair to evade their would-be captors by hiding in a nearby oak tree. And that’s exactly what they did, hurrying to the oak as dawn broke on 6 September 1651. “While we were in the tree we see soldiers going up and down in the thickest of the wood searching for persons escaped, we seeing them now and then peeping out of the woods,” Charles II would later recall. The soldiers failed to find their quarry and Charles would, against all odds, escape to France. 

End of the republic: return of the king

But soon his prospects were to take another turn – and, once again, the trigger was a dramatic change of events in England. On 3 September 1658, Cromwell died. With his passing, the cement that had held together the republican regime that had ruled in the absence of the monarchy, began to crumble. The army didn’t trust Oliver’s nominated successor, his son Richard, and so in May 1659 they forced him into retirement.

In a kingdom increasingly living under the yoke of high taxes and declining trade, what followed was a period marked by disputes between parliament and army. Enter George Monck. This Scotland-based parliamentarian general sensed that the public was becoming increasingly receptive to the idea of a restoration of the monarchy and so, in February 1660, Monck marched an army south into England with the aim of bringing that about.

In March, with a parliament that was now full of newly elected royalist supporters, Monck began to make private overtures to Charles. The events of spring 1660 marked an astonishing change of fortunes for the exiled king. The famed diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys had recently reported that Charles and his court were virtually living in rags, not a coat among them worth more than 40 shillings. Yet now he was on the cusp of regaining his father’s throne.

A critical development in that scenario being realised was the Declaration of Breda (named after the Dutch city in which the king was residing), in which Charles set out the terms for the restoration of the monarchy. In the declaration, he struck a strikingly conciliatory tone, offering a full pardon to all who appealed to him within 40 days, except those who had signed his father’s death warrant in 1649.

• On the podcast | Dr Clare Jackson tackles listener questions on the Restoration

He also offered “liberty to tender consciences” (unless religious differences threatened national peace), and payment of arrears of army pay. In a letter addressed to the speaker of the House of Commons, the king even extended an olive branch to MPs, appealing to them as “wise and dispassionate men and good patriots”.

The campaign behind the restoration had now gained an unstoppable momentum. Soon, people were flooding into Breda to wish him well, including Sir John Grenville, who came with a large sum of money from the new Convention Parliament and the City of London. When Charles saw this, Pepys reports, he became “so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the Portmanteau before it was taken out”.

A few days later, having received deputations from parliamentary commissioners in the Hague, Charles set sail for England. By the time his fleet emerged over the horizon, thousands of people had lined Dover’s iconic white cliffs. They were there to welcome the ultimate survivor: their returning king.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]>Art, culture and science in the Restoration periodhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/restoration-charles-ii-patron-art-science-culture/2023-04-18T07:41:35.000ZWhile Charles II has gone down in history as the ‘Merry Monarch’ due to his well known pleasure-seeking proclivities, that nickname belies his dedicated patronage of science and the arts during his nearly 25-year reign. What’s more, it was a connection to his pursuit of pleasure that spurred him on to one of his most significant commissions.

In the mid-17th century, many minds were concerned with the ‘longitude problem’. The challenge of finding a ship’s precise longitude at sea had haunted sailors for centuries. While latitude – the measurement of distance north or south of the Equator – was known, when out of sight of land, ships’ crews had no method of telling how far east or west they were, meaning terrible consequences for many vessels.

• Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period

One of Charles II’s mistresses, a Frenchwoman named Louise de Kéroualle, was aware of the puzzle. She heard a rumour through the French court that an astronomer and fellow countryman, Sieur de St Pierre, had devised a means of determining longitude at sea by observing the moon’s position in relation to the background stars. Intrigued, she pressed the king to investigate, leading Charles II to set up a Royal Commission to examine the new proposals.

This commission marked the start of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich – the oldest scientific institution in Great Britain, founded by the king in 1675 – and the appointment of John Flamsteed to the role of astronomical observator (later astronomer royal). Many thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries had begun to question received knowledge, turning instead to observation and experimentation, and the Restoration was an era when many titans of science flourished.

‘Take nobody’s word for it’

Figures such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren all gained prominence through the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, on 28 November 1660 and granted a royal charter from Charles soon after. Founded on the principles of scientific experimentation, the early society was made up of leading philosophers, mathematicians and inventors, who elected as their motto nullius in verba (‘take nobody’s word for it’).

• Read more | A timeline of the Restoration period

The society’s members produced some of the era’s most eminent work. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia was published in 1665, a groundbreaking study of minute objects through a microscope (an invention dating from around a century earlier that had been improved by a Dutchman named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the early 1660s).

Alongside detailed drawings of gnats, louses and fleas, Hooke took care to record the methods of his experiments, including the tactic of dousing his subjects in alcohol. One ant was so “troublesom to be drawn”, noted Hooke, that he used brandy which “knock’d him down dead drunk, so that he became moveless”. Hooke’s study of objects that had been previously invisible to the naked eye was pivotal in advancing understanding of the natural world.

• Read more | 9 places where British astronomy flourished

Polymath Christopher Wren, who served as the Royal Society’s president between 1680 and 1682, was deeply engaged in the challenge of determining longitude, and is another figure inextricable from innovation during the Restoration era. In 1663, Wren designed a ‘weather-clock’ that would record temperature, humidity, rainfall and barometric pressure.

As well as his experiments in anatomy, astronomy and geometry, Wren is today best known for his work as an architect. Wren was sought by Charles II for the construction of new harbour defences at Tangiers (between 1661 and 1684, the Moroccan port city was occupied by English forces). Wren refused, though was later tasked with the restoration of Old St Paul’s Cathedral to a more classical style. Before work could get fully underway, the site was ravaged by the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Wren took on the full redesign, resulting in the spectacular landmark that survives to the present day – though true to the society’s principles, the project was not without some experimentation. During the build, Wren used new techniques with gunpowder to demolish walls that remained after the fire; however, Wren’s chosen method wasn’t easy to control, and several workers were killed. By 1669, he had been appointed King’s Surveyor of Works, and supervised the building and maintenance of all the royal palaces.

As well as taking a keen interest in architecture and science, Charles II was also patron to a mass of artwork. His investment wasn’t merely aesthetic; the king was savvy to the prestige and power that a collection of art could convey. One of his first acts as king was to hunt down the many works that had belonged to his late father, a large number of which had been sold by the government during the Interregnum.

• On the podcast | The Restoration: everything you wanted to know

Over the course of his reign, Charles amassed a significant collection, with art playing a vital role in representing his legitimacy and authority as monarch. He often employed foreign painters, most notably the Dutchman Peter Lely, who often painted the king wearing his robes of the Sovereign of the Order of the Garter. Charles also recognised the value of art in strengthening diplomatic ties – in 1660 he accepted a gift that included sculpture and furniture from the Netherlands (although the present did not ensure peace; by 1665, the Second Anglo-Dutch War had begun).

Art wasn’t all business for the king. Charles’s willingness to experiment meant changes for the lives of women, too. During his years spent abroad in exile, the king had witnessed women performing in public theatres on the continent. Upon his restoration to the throne in 1660, the king overturned the rigid Puritan rules that had banned theatrical performances, and decreed that women should be allowed to act on the stage.

Female actors such as the king’s mistresses Moll Davis and Nell Gwyn were able to make a name for themselves, while other women, such as Aphra Behn, were able to achieve success as writers. While undoubtedly offering one form of progress, the parts for women were often bawdy and specifically intended to titillate Restoration audiences; so-called ‘breeches roles’ saw women playing men.

These roles offered the chance for theatregoers to see the shape of women’s legs – and perhaps also give a glimpse into how social progress continued to be shaped by the king’s own indulgent lifestyle.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]>Your ultimate guide to the Restoration periodhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/restoration-period-guide-when-how-civil-war-monarchy-charles-ii/2023-04-17T08:22:03.000ZWhat was the Restoration?

In short, the Restoration was the re-establishment of Charles II as king of England following more than a decade of different types of constitutional regime. Charles II’s father, Charles I, had acceded to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1625, but his reign had been tumultuous. In the late 1630s, his authority had started to collapse, and he’d faced increasing challenges to his rule in all three kingdoms, which blew up into what we think of now as the Civil Wars.

The conflict lasted through the 1640s until the decision was taken by a purged parliament and army leaders to put Charles I on trial, and he was executed in 1649. At that point, his eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, who was 18, was immediately named as his father’s successor in Scotland, thereby becoming King Charles II. The Scots very pointedly declared the young man to be not only king of Scotland, but also of England and Ireland.

He spent the next 11 years in exile, trying to support royalist attempts to re-establish the monarchy during the unstable years of first the English Commonwealth, and then the Cromwellian Protectorate. There was a bewildering succession of short-lived regimes that followed Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, but in the spring of 1660, parliament made the decision to invite Charles II back as king of England.

Today, we tend to date the Restoration from the re-establishment of the monarchy in 1660, but Charles II always dated the start of his reign as the moment of his father’s death on 30 January 1649.

How did the Restoration come about?

You might think that the Interregnum – the period between Charles I’s death and Charles II’s restoration – would have been a time of settling down following years of upheaval, but the reality was that there was never any real security about what the next year might look like. Part of the reason for Oliver Cromwell’s popularity was that he appeared to bring stability.

I think most historians would probably say that the way the Restoration turned out in 1660 was the result of several complex factors that only came together in the 18 months before it actually took place. Cromwell died in September 1658, and it was quickly announced that his eldest son, Richard, would succeed him as lord protector, even though he had little in the way of military or political experience. Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate was short-lived, and he was unable to command the confidence of MPs, or indeed the army, on whose power the Protectorate essentially sat.

• Read more | A timeline of the Restoration era

A series of confusing constitutional experiments followed Richard’s resignation in May 1659, and there was a lot of affection for what was known as the ‘good old cause’ (re-establishing a Republic). But increasingly, there were also irreconcilable divisions between the army and many civilian politicians, as well as a general feeling of constitutional exhaustion and a desire for normality.

And all the time, there was Charles II’s court in exile, biding its time and ready to offer everything that the English people thought they needed at that stage – stability, traditional government and so on – but waiting for the right moment to make a serious move. It was much more desirable for Charles II that his own people restore him to the throne; there were serial offers, especially in the late 1650s, from countries like Spain and France to help with an armed invasion on his behalf. But that wouldn’t have done much to help Charles’s legitimacy or credibility with the English people.

After this succession of different types of constitutional regime, there was a great deal of instability, to put it mildly, and in 1660, parliament invited Charles II to reclaim his throne. Charles himself was skilful in helping to draft literature confirming that, if restored as king, he would not prioritise vengeance. The Declaration of Breda, drafted by the exiled court in April 1660, made it clear that Charles wanted to offer stability, to respect the rule of law, and work with a free parliament.

On the religious front, he famously promised “liberty to tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted... for differences of opinion in matters of Religion”. It was certainly a reassuring manifesto and one that seemed to offer stability and legitimacy.

• Read more | "Charles II had to appeal to public opinion more than his predecessors did": Clare Jackson on the 'star king'

How was Charles II received when he returned to England?

Once his return had been agreed, things happened very quickly; Charles, who was staying in the Protestant Dutch town of Breda where he worked closely with the English deputations, was less than a day’s sailing from England. After a series of farewell banquets and ceremonies, he sailed to Dover, famously accompanied by a 27-year-old Samuel Pepys, who recorded it all in his diary.

Upon landing they moved with a lot of pomp and ceremony to Canterbury and, finally, on 29 May 1660 (Charles’s 30th birthday), he made his entry into London where there were crowds of people cheering and welcoming him. He then attended dinner in the Banqueting House – the same building his father had been executed in front of in 1649, and is now the only surviving part of the Palace of Whitehall. Most people, I think, were relieved and surprised that his return had taken place in so bloodless a manner, and that the emphasis was on celebration rather than division.

How quickly would news of Charles II’s return have spread?

Very quickly. When Charles I was beheaded on 30 January 1649, the news had travelled to Edinburgh fast enough for Charles II to be crowned king of Scotland just a few days later, on 6 February. One of the interesting dilemmas of the Restoration for the exiled court was that owning any image of Charles II had been made a crime during the 1650s, so there were few pictures of the king when he returned in 1660. Consequently, there was much anxiety to distribute images of him; some of these were crudely drawn tavern signs and woodcuts, and many purists were appalled at the character of such images.

But the Restoration court needed to disseminate as many likenesses of him as possible. A state portrait is traditionally commissioned at the accession of a new monarch, but, because of the precariousness of the situation, it was decided not to create a formal portrait of Charles’s English coronation in 1661. More than any other monarch, Charles II was always aware that his survival on the throne depended on his subjects wanting him there.

• Read more | How Charles II put Britain back together after the Civil War

Despite this, there was still a great amount of state theatre to the occasion. Charles had decided that his coronation day would be 23 April 1661 – St George’s Day – and for the rest of his reign, the great National Saint’s Day and his crowning would be celebrated together.

Were there any repercussions for the Cromwell family?

One thing I’ve always found remarkable was the obvious vengeance directed at Oliver Cromwell himself. Despite all the Restoration’s rhetoric of forgetting and moving on, vengeance was targeted towards those directly involved in Charles I’s execution. Accordingly, Cromwell’s body – like those of other regicides who had died before 1660 – was exhumed, subjected to a ritual hanging, drawing and quartering, with his head placed on a spike.

I studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the college that Cromwell had attended as an undergraduate, and to which, in 1960, his severed head was entrusted and buried. To this day, the exact location of the head within the college is a secret, such is the sensitivity that surrounds it. But apart from that, there was remarkably little vengeance directed towards the living members of the Cromwell family; even Richard was left alone and lived until he was 85.

What was life like in Restoration England?

There were lots of different strains to it. The image of Charles II as the ‘Merry Monarch’ has become almost synonymous with the era – the flowing curls, cavalier costumes, the reopening of the theatres. For the rest of the country, though, on a day-to-day basis, there must have been a lot of apprehension. This was a population that had risen in revolt against their government and then lived through a bewildering and discombobulating 20-year period.

The radicalism of the Civil Wars and the ideas that had been articulated – be it about annual parliaments or universal suffrage – could never be simply ‘unthought’. The historian Jonathan Scott has talked about this being a population that had all the hallmarks of something like PTSD, living through a traumatic period and instinctively inclined to become alarmed by any moment of instability, fearing a return to civil war and revolution.

• On the podcast | Dr Clare Jackson discusses the reestablishment of the monarchy in 1660

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when Charles’s reign became unstable during the so-called Exclusion Crisis [when moves were made to exclude Charles’s Catholic brother and heir, James, Duke of York, from the succession], there were real fears that ‘1641 is come again’ and the chaos of civil war would be repeated.

Did the Restoration have a discernible impact on the status of women in society?

For most women, restoring the monarchy was assumed to restore all the patriarchal structures and authority that had been in place before the Civil Wars. There had been something of an explosion of female publishing and petitioning during the conflict and later, too, in the 1650s, but a lot of that would have declined during the Restoration period.

But women’s agency is evident in other areas of life. A lot of women had been widowed in the Civil Wars, and many continued to occupy  responsible roles into the Restoration or spent years petitioning on behalf of injured or deceased family members. So there were different avenues of female influence.

• Read more | Was Charles II too randy to rule?

The idea of state mistresses was something that Charles II’s reign really epitomised in a way that the English monarchy hadn’t seen before, and many people looked to the king’s mistresses, particularly the French-born Louise de Kéroualle, who became duchess of Portsmouth, as alternative avenues to Charles. That’s just one sort of woman in a privileged position, though; the general emphasis was very much on re-establishing traditional, patriarchal norms of social order.

Many of the more radical ideas about gender that had emerged in the preceding decades couldn’t be forgotten, though, and we find that, wrapped up in the fears of a descent back into civil war that were expressed by many men at the time, were concerns about the return of the sorts of articulate women who were publishing in the 1650s.

Dr Clare Jackson was speaking to Elinor Evans

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]>A timeline of the Restoration periodhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/timeline-restoration-monarchy-charles-ii-key-moments/2023-04-17T08:21:01.000ZChart the most pivotal moments in the Restoration period with our timeline, from Charles II's homecoming to the highs and lows that came to define his quarter-century reign:

30 January 1649

King Charles I is beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

1 January 1651

Charles II is crowned king of Scotland at Scone Abbey having already, in June 1650, reluctantly promised to establish Presbyterianism (a branch of Protestantism originating in Scotland) across all three kingdoms.

3 September 1651

Hoping to take back the English crown, Charles II and his mainly Scottish army take on Oliver Cromwell’s superior forces at Worcester and lose. The young king narrowly evades capture and is forced to flee to France, disguised as a servant.

• Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration era

3 September 1658

Oliver Cromwell dies, aged 59. His eldest son, Richard, succeeds him as lord protector.

May 1659

With little political or military experience, Richard Cromwell is unable to command the respect or confidence of the army and parliament. Nine months after his father’s death, he resigns, ending the Protectorate.

4 April 1660

The exiled king issues the Declaration of Breda, outlining his terms for a restoration of the monarchy, including freedom of religious conscience and a “general pardon” for those who swear loyalty to him. It is made public on 1 May.

29 May 1660

Charles II triumphantly enters London on his 30th birthday. His huge procession makes its way to Whitehall, where the king meets with peers and MPs, who queue to kiss his hand.

• Read more | How Charles II put Britain back together after the Civil War

November 1660

The Royal Society is founded at Gresham College, London.

30 January 1661

The bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Robert Blake, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton – all instrumental in the trial and execution of Charles I – are exhumed and posthumously hanged, drawn and quartered, after which their heads are placed on spikes above Westminster Hall.

23 April 1661

Charles II is crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. The loss or destruction of the Crown Jewels during the Commonwealth era has seen new pieces of royal regalia specially made for the occasion.

19 May 1662

The Act of Uniformity enforces the use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. More than 2,000 clergymen refuse to comply and are expelled from the Church of England.

21 May 1662

Charles II marries the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza.

October 1662

In need of money, Charles agrees to sell Dunkirk, which has been in English hands since 1658, to Louis XIV of France for 5 million livres (around £320,000). The price is later brought down by a 12 per cent discount.

March 1665 – July 1667

The Second Anglo-Dutch War, stemming from commercial rivalry between England and the Dutch Republic, ends in victory for the Dutch.

1665–66

The Great Plague of London kills as many as 100,000 people, roughly 20 per cent of the city’s population. It is the worst outbreak of plague in England since the Black Death of 1348.

February 1666

Catherine of Braganza suffers a miscarriage. She will lose two more pregnancies before 1669 and will never bear a living heir for the king.

• Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London

2 September 1666

The Great Fire of London begins in a baker’s shop off Pudding Lane. Some 13,200 houses, as well as St Paul’s Cathedral, are destroyed. The financial costs are estimated at £10 million.

Summer 1667

Charles forms the Cabal ministry, a private group of high councillors who help him extend his power. The first letters of the names or titles of the five most prominent men – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – give the Cabal its name.

April 1668

Charles begins a relationship with orange seller-turned actor Nell Gwyn.

June 1670

Charles signs a secret treaty with Louis XIV. In it he promises to convert to Catholicism at a future date and provide warships and soldiers to help the French war against the Dutch, in return for French subsidies.

March 1672

Charles bypasses parliament and issues the Declaration of Indulgence, which states that penal laws against Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters will be removed. Parliamentary protests see the proclamation revoked.

1672–74

According to the terms of his secret treaty with the French king, Charles sends the English navy to support France in its war with the Dutch Republic.

March 1675

John Flamsteed is appointed the first astronomer royal. He is charged with drawing up an accurate map of the night sky, which can be used for navigation.

September 1678

A renegade Anglican clergyman named Titus Oates informs parliament of a fictitious plot (known as the Popish Plot) alleging that members of the Jesuit religious order are planning to assassinate Charles II and bring his brother James, Duke of York to the throne.

• On the podcast | Dr Clare Jackson tackles listener questions on the reestablishment of the monarchy

1679–81

A parliamentary bill is introduced in May 1679, intended to exclude Charles II’s Catholic brother and heir from the succession. The so-called Exclusion Crisis continues until 1681, when Charles dissolves parliament for the last time before his death.

May 1679

The Habeas Corpus act is passed, ensuring that no one can be imprisoned unlawfully. The term – Latin for “you may have the body” – has ancient beginnings in the common law of England, dating back before the creation of Magna Carta in 1215.

Early 1683

A group of Protestants, including James, Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of Charles II), plan to murder the king and his heir in the Rye House Plot.

6 February 1685

Charles II dies at the Palace of Whitehall, having apparently suffered a stroke a few days earlier. In his final moments he converts to Roman Catholicism, taking Communion, and is anointed with holy oil. His younger brother succeeds him as James VII and II.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

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