HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-08-26T16:33:09.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Sweaty farters and violent vomiting: why riding in a Georgian-era carriage wasn't as glamorous as you thinkhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-riding-in-a-georgian-carriage-wasnt-glamorous/2026-08-26T16:33:09.000ZImagine gliding across the English countryside in the plush comfort of a horse-drawn carriage. Snugly seated, your mind wanders as you gaze over rolling hills and meandering streams from its velvet-lined interior, perhaps on your way to a seaside holiday retreat or a lavish ball. It’s an enviable thought for the modern traveller, more accustomed to traffic jams, potholed roads, late buses and crowded train rides.
On our TV screens, the elegant coaches of Bridgerton and Pride and Prejudice, ornately decorated and finely upholstered, whisk the socialites of Georgian Britain to and fro in style. Usually drawn by four horses and fully enclosed to protect passengers from the elements, dazzling coaches boomed in popularity among London’s wealthy elite between the 17th and early 19th centuries.
The introduction of stagecoaches in the 1640s meant that coach travel, although still prohibitively expensive for the working class, soon became a highly sought-after service. Public routes connected England’s towns and cities via a network of coaching inns. A typical stagecoach held six passengers inside, with up to eight on its roof – and it is less picturesque to imagine the aftermath of a carriage tipping over or an unfortunate passenger falling beneath its wheels (neither was an uncommon occurrence). There were highwaymen too, always eager to part travellers from their possessions.
Among the perils of coach travel, however, new research argues that some less dramatic threats predominated: motion sickness, invasions of your personal space and the dreaded stench of flatulent passengers.
Why the Georgian coach was a “miserable vehicle”
In a new study, published in Social History of Medicine, historian Alun Withey challenges the romanticised view of coaches in popular culture, using letters, diaries and medical texts to uncover what those journeys really felt like.
It was often, we learn, a bumpy ride. “For many this was no gentle waft through the Georgian countryside,” writes Withey, senior lecturer in history at the University of Exeter. “It was a rattling, lurching plunge down tracks and roads that were rough and knotty in good weather, and perilous in bad.”
The diarist Anne Lister complained in 1822 of being “exceedingly jolted” while travelling along bad roads. Some years earlier, another woman grumbled that she was “heartily tired with the jumbling and jolting of our miserable vehicle”.
Not only might travellers arrive at their destination bruised and battered by these careening coaches, but women risked breaching standards of propriety if they were thrown towards male passengers.
Worse yet was the vomiting this motion sickness could induce – a danger well known to England’s sailors but not to coach riders who, cruelly confined within the carriage, had no means of escape. By 1700, the term “coach-sick” was being used to describe this new type of nausea.
Karen Harvey, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham, believes this research is further proof that coaches were a “usually uncomfortable, perhaps scary” method of travel.
“Withey wants to get to the way that people are experiencing travel and those really visceral bodily sensations of just feeling sick and being bashed and thrown about on bumpy surfaces,” she tells HistoryExtra.
John Locke feared his philosophical career might be cut short in 1656 as he journeyed beside an overweight woman. “Had the coach (as it might) overturned and she fell upon me,” he later wrote to his father, “I should have been dead and buried.”
Sweaty farters, stale smoke and strong perfume – why coach travel was an olfactory “arms race”
And then there was the stench. On a sweltering summer’s day, long before the invention of deodorant, travellers packed into a stagecoach could do little more than stink.
“18th-century coaches are one example of many places – pleasure gardens, coffee houses, balls, public theatres – where people are jumbled together and forced to experience the smells of other people’s bodies or consumption habits,” William Tullett, senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York, tells HistoryExtra.
In 1777, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham moaned about the reek of tobacco in a carriage he shared with a soldier, a judge and a Welsh drover. He later decried those “stewing boxes they call coaches”.
Riders seeking to protect themselves from the stench of their sweating, coughing or farting companions sometimes carried scent bottles containing strong perfumes. These odours could themselves be pungent, prompting fellow passengers to try to block them out. The result, Tullett observes, was “an arms race of comfort and discomfort”.
This new research shows that coach travel was not quite as quaint as popular culture might have you believe – although Withey notes that the unfortunate passengers were useful guinea pigs for contemporary physicians studying the effects of motion on the body and mind.
How coach travel was like modern commuting – and why historians have taken so long to prove it
Historians have studied 18th-century coach travel before but this new research, Harvey explains, more concerned with the experience of “a person squished in a carriage that might be smelly, wet [and] packed” than with the economic, technological or social implications of the adoption of coach travel.
“For me, history is all about people, and if you’re interested in people then you really need to understand how the past felt,” she adds.
On the originality of Withey’s work, Tullett notes: “There’s a sense in which the idea that 18th-century and early 19th-century travel – coach travel in particular – was uncomfortable is something that no one had really done the research to prove definitively.” Withey’s study is part of a relatively new academic focus on “embodiment” in history, where people in the past are understood as occupying physical bodies subject to discomfort, injury and other sensations, which greatly influenced how they understood the world around them.
- Read more | She held wealth, power and prestige: so why did this Georgian aristocrat fake her daughter’s death?
“It’s a really interesting article that probably couldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago,” Harvey concludes. “And I think it’s a wonderful illustration of the cutting-edge way that we can combine these different historiographies in order to try and reconstruct what life really felt like.”
There are modern parallels to be drawn, too. This new research, explains Tullett, “speaks to a lot of modern-day concerns about how we behave on public transport”.
Georgian travellers frequently grumbled about disorderly children, incessant chatterboxes, inconsiderate smokers and creepy men gawking at female passengers, complaints you still hear from commuters today.
]]>He made a fortune from Britain’s slave trade. But did he regret it?https://www.historyextra.com/period/early-modern/edward-colston-regret-role-in-slave-trade/2026-08-23T10:05:08.000ZEdward Colston spent much of his life constructing an image of virtue.
He gave money to schools, hospitals, churches and almshouses. He supported his native city of Bristol so extensively that, long after his death in 1721, his name remained attached to streets, buildings, institutions and annual commemorations. For generations, he was celebrated locally as a model philanthropist: a wealthy man who had used his fortune for public good.
That fortune was inextricably connected to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.
Did Colston ever acknowledge the contradiction between his public charity and his involvement in human trafficking? Did he express remorse for the suffering from which he profited?
“There’s no record of any regret or anything like that,” says historian Richard Stone, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
“If anything, Colston probably would have been quite proud of his life, proud of his achievements, and proud of everything he’d done.”
Who was Edward Colston?
As Stone explains, “Edward Colston was a 17th- and early 18th-century merchant.”
“I always like to put ‘philanthropist’ as an afterthought because I think it’s important to balance what he was and who he was.”
Colston was born in Bristol in 1636 into a prosperous merchant family connected to the city’s commercial elite. Bristol was already one of England’s leading ports, trading with Ireland, continental Europe and, increasingly, the Atlantic world.
Much of Colston’s career, however, was made in London. He traded in goods, lent money and moved within the expanding commercial and financial networks that were helping to turn England into a major imperial and maritime power.
“He was a merchant and moneylender who was involved in many different things,” Stone says, “but the one he’s most noted for is his involvement with the Royal African Company.”
The Royal African Company was established under royal patronage in the 17th century. Its activities included trade in commodities such as gold and ivory. Most notoriously, it also organised the capture, purchase and transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Colston became involved with the company in 1680.
“It had a monopoly granted by the king, giving it exclusive rights to trade with Africa, including, of course, the trafficking of enslaved people,” Stone says. “He was quite a big player in the company.”
“We know he was actively involved in decisions about buying and selling enslaved people in Africa and then, of course, shipping them across the Atlantic. He eventually rose to become deputy governor, which was basically the CEO,” Stone explains. “So, by the end of his involvement with the Royal African Company, he was the person in charge of Britain’s slave-trading company.”
The exact scale of Colston’s personal profit is difficult to calculate. But what isn’t in doubt is his seniority. During the years of his involvement, company ships transported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans into the Atlantic plantation economy.
No surviving letter, diary entry or instruction records Colston expressing repentance for his role in the slave trade.
The transatlantic slave trade was legal, commercially important and supported by the English crown. It was sustained by merchants, investors, shipowners, politicians and consumers across the country – all of whom financially benefited from the practice.
But there were some who spoke out against slavery as an aberration. Some European religious groups, including sections of the Quaker movement, increasingly criticised slavery. Sailors, missionaries and observers recorded the horrific conditions aboard slave ships and on plantations.
So, Colston didn’t live in a world where no alternative view was imaginable, or where no one had begun to question the morality of slavery. But he did belong to a commercial, political and religious culture that gave men of his class powerful reasons not to question the system from which they benefited. Law, profit, empire, racial ideology and social status all helped normalise enslavement while entirely diminishing the experiences of the enslaved.
How much did Colston give away?
At the same time, Colston’s philanthropy was genuinely extensive.
Stone cites figures calculated by researchers associated with the Bristol Radical History Society.
“They reckon he gave about £83,000 over the course of his life to various different causes, which is about £18.1 million today according to standard inflation calculations. Of that, around £63,000 – probably about £13.7 million today – went to causes in Bristol.”
Such comparisons are necessarily imprecise, and Stone agrees that there is “some uncertainty” about how the figures translate. Even so, it’s clear that Colston gave substantial sums.
His donations supported education, religious institutions, almshouses for elderly or impoverished people, and charitable schemes designed to impose discipline and order on those who received assistance.
Who created the “cult of Colston”?
Colston’s posthumous reputation was something that he had played an active hand in designing.
“In terms of cementing his legacy, I think there’s very little doubt that this was a big part of it,” Stone says.
“He wanted to perpetuate his name. He wanted that immortality. People often say that he wanted no pomp or ostentation in his funeral because he says so in his instructions for it,” Stone explains. “But then he goes on to give a detailed list of how many carriages there should be and who should attend from the various schools and institutions.”
His tomb, too, was an advert for his generosity.
“On the back of his tomb there’s a list of all the charities he gave to.”
“So who started the cult of Colston? Well, Edward Colston.”
Colston’s philanthropy was also highly selective. He supported causes that reflected his religious, political and social beliefs. As Stone notes, “I think he had a concern for the future and for the kind of society he thought should exist. Colston was very particular in his views.”
Colston was a committed High Church Anglican. That meant he belonged to a strand of the Church of England that emphasised hierarchy, episcopal authority, ceremony and loyalty to the established church. Politically, he was a High Tory, devoted to monarchy, social order and the established religious settlement.
“If someone was a Whig, he’d fall out with them. If someone was a Dissenter – a Quaker or another nonconformist – he didn’t want them attending his schools.”
Dissenters were Protestants who worshipped outside the Church of England, including Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers. Many faced legal and social restrictions during Colston’s lifetime.
Colston’s schools were not intended to encourage independent or progressive thinking. “He was very specific in the instructions he gave about how the boys in his school should be educated, who should be admitted, and what they should be given.”
“Even the people in his almshouses were subject to detailed rules: no drinking, no swearing, nothing like that.”
“He wanted to shape the way people behaved. He wanted to shape the future of society in his own image, and he used charitable giving as a vehicle to do that.”
As for how Colston would have reacted to still being spoke about today, Stone says that “on the one hand, I think he’d be delighted that he’s being remembered and that his name is still known.” This would satisfy the desire for immortality visible in his charitable foundations, funeral arrangements and tomb.
“On the other hand, I think he’d probably be arguing with us, asking why we’re being so critical. Why aren’t we talking about the positives? Why are we condemning his business activities?”
How do we reconcile these many, complicated facets of Colston?
“People often talk about Colston the monster,” Stone says. “I tend to try to think about him as a human being because I think that’s really important.”
Humanising Colston does not mean minimising the suffering caused by the trafficking and enslavement of Africans, or treating his actions as unavoidable products of his time. But it does reflect that support for practices later condemned as immoral can often be committed by people who believe themselves principled, respectable and morally justified.
“There’s a lesson there that any of us have the potential to do the wrong thing while believing it’s the right thing,” Stone says.
Focusing only on Colston creates another problem.
“He draws all the fire, and we forget that there were over 2,000 other people in Bristol who also invested in the trafficking of enslaved people,” Stone says.
“I always say that not to defend Colston, but as a reminder that we should be thinking about everyone else as well.”
Bristol, Liverpool and London became major centres of Atlantic commerce in a vast system of exploitation. Colston’s prominence in that system makes him an important subject of scrutiny, but concentrating every moral judgement on him can allow the wider structures – and thousands of other participants – to fade from view.
Richard Stone was speaking to Dave Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]>Tudor England's witch hunts killed hundreds of women. The death toll was nearly even worsehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/tudor-englands-witch-hunts-nearly-even-worse/2026-08-19T14:29:59.000ZOn 29 July 1566, a widow from a small village in Essex was brought before a crowd of people gathered at the gallows in Chelmsford and hanged. She had been convicted of a shocking crime: using witchcraft to kill her husband and one of her neighbours, aided by a demonic cat called Satan (at the time, spelled Sathan).
Agnes Waterhouse was not quite the first person to be executed as a sorceress in England, but her trial – alongside Elizabeth Fraunces and her own daughter, Joan – was the first major witch hunt under the new Witchcraft Act of 1563.
It did not take long for witch-mania to grip England. Details of Waterhouse’s magical crimes were outlined in a popular pamphlet, complete with vivid woodcut illustrations of the alleged witch and her feline accomplice, which later turned into a toad and then a dog with horns.
Although some 500 people (90 per cent of them women) were executed as witches over the next century, historians have long pointed out that Tudor England’s attitude towards witchcraft was lenient compared to other countries.
About 75 per cent of those accused were not executed. Killing by witchcraft was a capital offence, but those found to have used magic to injure others or seek treasure were initially imprisoned for a year, with regular appearances in the pillory. Others were acquitted and walked free because of a lack of evidence.
In contrast, Switzerland saw tens of thousands of cases of witchcraft, with up to 3,500 people executed as a result. In Scotland, following a Witchcraft Act also passed in 1563, around 2,500 witches were executed by strangulation and their bodies burned.
But new research suggests England was only a few crucial decisions – and one untimely royal death – away from seeing an incredibly violent witch hunt in which thousands of women could have been interrogated, possibly tortured, and burned at the stake for even the most minor acts of sorcery.
How Tudor England narrowly escaped a regime of “unbridled religious zealotry”
In their recent study, The English Witchcraft Act of 1563 Revisited, published in The English Historical Review, Oxford University historians Alexandra Gajda and George Southcombe reexamine the fiery debates that resulted in the 1563 Witchcraft Act.
The researchers argue that the legislation was not, as some historians suggest, targeted at Catholic plotters who sometimes used spells and enchantments in their conspiracies against Elizabeth I. Instead, they contend it was the result of “a series of paths not taken” that almost “made the history of English witchcraft look very different”.
When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, Protestant reformers viewed witchcraft as a burning issue that required radical action from parliament.
MPs in the House of Commons attempted to resurrect an old religious proposal devised by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer in the early 1550s and which would have had a profound impact on the history of England’s witch hunts.
The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum defined witchcraft as “a pact or treaty with the devil and his servants”, for which the punishment was being burned at the stake as a heretic, as happened in Germany, France and Switzerland.
This proposed revision of ecclesiastical law also mandated severe punishments for, among other sins, blasphemy, bigamy, drunkenness and adultery. This was to be enforced across the country by church wardens and priests granted new, authoritarian powers.
“Had this law code been implemented in any meaningful way, England would have become one of the most closely policed confessional states in Europe,” Gajda and Southcombe write, adding that this could have enabled a brutal witch hunt “inspired by unbridled religious zealotry”.
- Read more | Scotland's season of the witch
By 1553, the Reformation had the vocal support of the country’s evangelical clergy and seemed destined to succeed. It was only due to Edward’s death at the age of 15 in July that this radical proposal was never entered onto the statute books.
“This is by far the most interesting part of the article, and the most valuable,” Diane Purkiss, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and author of The Witch in History (Routledge, 1996), tells HistoryExtra.
“It certainly looks as if England could have ended up with something like the Geneva code on witchcraft, which in a comparative study with nearby Catholic regions comes off as remarkably violent.”
So why did the effort by some MPs in 1563 to revive this law and launch a more ferocious witch hunt fail?
It was partly for practical reasons: unlike in continental Europe, English courts dismissed evidence where torture was used to obtain confessions of having made a diabolical pact. Thus, the eventual 1563 Act stressed the tangible harms caused by sorcery, such as illness and death, rather than treating it as a spiritual crime.
Some clergymen also worried about legislation impinging on spiritual matters, while many lawyers argued there was no legal precedent for burning witches as apostates, and some judges doubted the existence of magical powers entirely.
The Witchcraft Act of 1563 nonetheless angered Puritans, who wanted legislation which condemned both malevolent witches and “cunning folk” who claimed to use magic for good. But efforts to introduce amendments in 1566 failed and it was soon clear that the more moderate act was here to stay.
What can historians learn from the persecution of “lonely old women talking to their cats”?
Historian and folklorist Francis Young thinks this new research shows that the relative leniency of England’s witch hunts was not inevitable. “What I found really interesting about the study is the stuff about the attempts to draft a law during Edward VI’s reign,” he tells HistoryExtra.
“We might have very possibly ended up with something more like the 1563 Scottish Act, which effectively criminalises superstition itself.”
Purkiss suggests the study ought to have gone into more detail on the potential paths the English witch hunt could have gone down had earlier legislation been different. But, she adds, it nonetheless paves the way for “really useful” future research “on witchcraft prosecutions under the early Tudors – that is, before Elizabeth I”.
Although Tudor popular culture often imagined witches gathering with Satan, forming diabolical pacts and setting out to destroy the Christian realm, it tended to be elderly women who faced accusations because of personal grudges and community tensions.
For Young, whose books on the supernatural include Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, the new research is just one piece in a larger puzzle about how a landmark statute was ultimately most used “to catch lonely old women talking to their cats”.
He concludes: “There’s always this question about the gap between the intention behind the Act and how it played out, and I think that gap remains a problem. This study looks like it goes a way towards resolving that, but I don’t think it’s completely resolved.”
]]>Why did witches confess?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-witches-confess/2026-08-07T13:54:50.000ZWho were the people that were accused of witchcraft in the 1640s British witch trials? And why did they confess to being in league with the devil? In this episode, Marion Gibson breaks down the trial and interrogation records left behind by the witch hunters, to reveal the real stories of the individuals who were accused.
Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Marion explains why so many of these seemingly ordinary individuals actually agreed to the witchcraft accusations...
]]>A terrifying plague ravaged Europe for nearly 400 years – but one surprising group had the most to fearhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/black-death-switzerland-research-young-labourers/2026-08-04T10:15:35.000ZFor about 370 years, the people of medieval and early modern Europe lived in fear of the plague.
The infectious disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, first arrived on the continent in 1347. Spread by fleas living on rats, the Black Death ravaged major cities and rural villages alike, killing as many as 50 million people, between a third and half of Europe’s population.
The “pestilence”, as it was commonly known, did not vanish after this pandemic. It continued to regularly break out in smaller epidemics around Europe until the early 18th century. Those who fell ill exhibited terrifying symptoms, which varied depending on the type of plague they had.
Bubonic plague caused buboes – painful swellings, usually in the groin, armpits or neck; septicaemic plague could turn skin black; and the pneumonic plague, which might make a person cough up blood, was spread in tiny airborne droplets when a person coughed or sneezed.
The plague was widely feared as a sign of God’s wrath. Many contemporary accounts portrayed the disease as a great leveller which touched all parts of society – whether peasants, aristocrats, clergy or royalty.
But new archaeological research on burial sites in Switzerland suggests the disease was not an impartial killer, with higher death rates among poor, young labourers who could not afford to stay at home.
Who were the victims of Switzerland’s last plague epidemic?
Researchers at the University of Basel examined the remains of 15 people buried in the former cloister garden of a 17th-century monastery-turned-hospital in Basel, one of the largest cities in Switzerland.
DNA testing revealed that at least five had been infected with the Yersinia pestis bacterium. Each of the four graves contained multiple bodies, indicating they were buried during a plague epidemic which caused mass casualties.
A clay pipe found on one of the skeletons – bearing an artisan’s insignia – allowed the archaeologists to date their burials to the final major plague outbreak in Switzerland, which reached Basel in 1667.
The average age at death among the burials was remarkably young, at just 17.7 years, and only four had lived beyond 20 years old. Most of the skeletons exhibited signs of strenuous physical activity, including four individuals who had previously suffered fractured bones. A number had spinal or shoulder lesions – damaged tissue caused by injuries – which were common among urban apprentices and workers.
These findings, published in the journal Antiquity, suggest working youths from the lower social classes were most likely to die in early modern plague outbreaks.
Why were poor, young labourers so vulnerable to the plague?
Physiological stress, a poor diet and ill-health are all known to increase a person’s susceptibility to the plague and other illnesses. Young labourers with physically demanding jobs were particularly vulnerable – especially if they could not stay at home, struggled to afford food and did not have access to medical care.
“Work strain was of particular interest for us, as this represents one of the most important factors for vulnerability during a pandemic,” explains osteoarchaeologist Laura Rindlisbacher, who led the research. “If somebody can’t forgo work to survive, even the danger of contracting a deadly disease cannot stop these persons from working.”
Plague epidemics were especially dangerous because Basel’s council, wanting to protect trade, refused to close the city gates, which helped the disease spread through the city’s busy markets and then along trade routes into Italy and beyond. An outbreak in 1610 killed 3,500 inhabitants (about 30 per cent of the city’s population).
- Read more | It felt like the end of the world, but this medieval ‘apocalypse’ left a legacy no one saw coming
Wealthier citizens often tried to avoid the plague by fleeing the city, whereas the poor lived in unhygienic, cramped conditions that increased their risk of infection. Pamphlets and letters from the time allude to this inequality – but this new study offers direct evidence.
“What’s really exciting about this piece of research is the multidisciplinary approach and, in particular, the use of archaeology,” Alex Bamji, associate professor of early modern history at the University of Leeds, tells HistoryExtra. “A lot of the research suggesting that social status impacted plague has been based on documentary sources, so it’s exciting to see it confirmed by the study of human remains.”
Because manual labour could lead to injury, Bamji believes this research has a broader historical relevance.
She notes: “This research doesn’t just tell us something about plague, it also tells us something about disability, about the impact of manual work on people’s bodies – and that’s a real growth area of interest among scholars.”
What can a centuries-old plague tell us about illness today?
The researchers hope to make 17th-century socioeconomic divisions relevant to the present day through comparison with a much more recent pandemic: Covid-19.
Alongside the young ages of the Basel plague victims, Rindlisbacher says: “We were also surprised by how clearly some of the social determinants of well-being and survival observed during the Covid-19 pandemic also emerged for the early modern period.”
Even within the lower classes, those with less access to medical care or social support networks – including non-citizens and servants – bore the brunt of the epidemic.
Several academic studies have similarly suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic revealed inequalities in society, including in the UK – with some professions or communities impacted more than others.
The Black Death
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For Marc Oxenham, emeritus professor of bioarchaeology at the Australian National University, however, this new study needs to go further to justify its conclusions. Though academics have long linked plague mortality with conditions such as stress and poor health, it requires substantial evidence to show that one was caused by the other.
“They are not demonstrating that this occurred in their study. They simply can’t as they don’t have any control samples,” Oxenham tells HistoryExtra. “I’d also point out that a sample of 15 is not enough to prove anything.”
Despite this, Rindlisbacher tells HistoryExtra that this initial research “was never intended to be more than a case study of the 15 confirmed plague victims”, but only “to present the individuals, the genetic data and the historical context of the 1667–68 plague outbreak”.
She adds that she and her co-researchers are in the final stages of a more comprehensive study that will include comparisons with other graves.
What’s indisputable is that these plague victims, unearthed beneath what is now a concert hall in central Basel, are yet more grim evidence of the devastation wreaked by the plague for hundreds of years. For those who survived, like the Covid-19 pandemic for many of us, it was an ordeal they would not forget.
“A lot of people who lived in cities would experience one epidemic of plague during their lifetime,” Bamji observes. “In a way, that’s a bit like the impact of Covid. That may be the single pandemic that affects any of us in our lifetimes, but it’s obviously had a massive cultural impact.”
]]>Was Shakespeare a secret political radical? One play's hidden symbols reveal the truthhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-shakespeare-a-secret-political-radical/2026-07-09T12:01:46.000ZWhen the budding playwright William Shakespeare arrived in London around 1590, he was stepping into a theatrical world which was exciting, experimental – and incredibly dangerous.
The Tudor authorities operated a brutal regime of censorship designed to stamp out political disobedience, supported by spies, violent interrogation and torture.
Queen Elizabeth I – a monarch who employed her own spymasters – was particularly anxious about the potential power of plays, which drew thousands of spectators to the city’s playhouses and could influence ambitious courtiers during performances at the royal court. Many went on to become printed bestsellers.
- Read more | Elizabeth I’s shadowy spy network was tasked with uncovering secret conspiracies. Here’s what it found
She ordered that all dramatic performances be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be staged. Any material questioning the Crown’s political authority or its religious agenda would be strongly repressed. This did not prevent political ideas from reaching the stage, but it forced playwrights to communicate indirectly, through historical parallels, allegory and double entendre.
Playwrights who flouted this censorship were arrested, interrogated, fined and sometimes imprisoned. Ben Jonson, for example, was locked up in 1597 and all copies of his “slanderous” play The Isle of Dogs were destroyed, while co-writer Thomas Nashe had his home raided.
Scholars have long believed that Shakespeare disguised his criticisms of the Elizabethan court by setting many of his plays in foreign countries, where he was free to critique courtiers and even monarchs.
But new research argues that the Bard was a daring political rebel who used one of his most famous plays to express support for a radical court faction shortly before it mounted a rebellion against the Queen.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Essex Rebellion
Shakespeare experts Dr Chris Laoutaris and Dr Yasmin Arshad have uncovered cryptic ties between a mysterious portrait, Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex – a disgraced nobleman who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601 and was subsequently beheaded.
These connections suggest not only that the playwright may have been sympathetic to the Earl, but that Essex’s supporters saw Shakespeare and his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as allies who could help them launch a popular revolt against the Crown.
In one scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, written in 1599, the sight of a wounded stag – languishing and “weeping” at the edge of a stream – greatly upsets a character.
The arrow-struck animal is described as “innocent” and a herd of deer that refuse to help it are criticised as “greasy citizens”.
On its own, the episode can be read as a broader satire on human selfishness. Laoutaris and Arshad argue, however, that contemporary audiences may also have recognised a more specific political reference. They suggest this expression of pity for a mistreated animal was a coded message of support for the Earl of Essex, who would go on to lead his doomed uprising only two years later.
This could also explain why As You Like It was temporarily banned from being printed in 1600, an act of censorship which historians have long puzzled over.
And it would suggest Shakespeare held dangerous political allegiances for which others had been imprisoned or even lost their heads.
The key clue is a portrait known as the Persian Lady, painted in the 1590s by Tudor court artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. It depicts a woman dressed in opulent, oriental clothing, who is crowning a teary-eyed stag with a garland of pansies.
A riddling sonnet below laments the sitter’s “restless mind”, musing that “With pensive thoughts my weeping stag I crown/whose melancholy tears my cares express”.
Laoutaris and Arshad have pinpointed Lady Penelope Rich as the glamorous woman, whose identity has baffled art historians for centuries.
The poetic verses, they say, allude to another Penelope: Odysseus’ wife from The Odyssey, whose mind is also presented as restless – and to whom the beautiful Lady Rich was often compared by the many poets, artists and musicians she inspired. The Earl of Essex was Lady Rich’s brother. A dashing courtier, he was once a cherished favourite of the aging Elizabeth.
In their new study, published in the Times Literary Supplement, the researchers point out that Essex’s coat of arms featured a stag, meaning he may be the weeping deer Lady Rich is comforting in the portrait.
The portrait and the play emerged as Essex’s relationship with the Queen was deteriorating, although the full rebellion still lay ahead. At the time of the portrait’s composition, Essex was disgraced and under arrest for agreeing an unauthorised truce with rebels in Ireland, whose uprising he had been unable to put down by force, before illegally returning to England. This caused a rift between the leading courtly factions.
To support their cause, Essex’s supporters had circulated scandalous libels accusing his enemies at court of corruption, which the researchers say also alluded to the image of a stag.
Is everything we thought we knew about Shakespeare’s politics wrong?
If this research is correct that Shakespeare’s “weeping” stag was a message of support for the controversial Earl, it could upend academics’ view of the Bard’s willingness to publicly take political sides.
“The stag in As You Like It could only have been regarded with suspicion by the Elizabethan censors,” explains Laoutaris of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, who says it accompanied “an avalanche of libels from Essex’s supporters, as well as from Essex and Lady Rich themselves”.
The description of Shakespeare’s deer as a “poor and broken bankrupt” reflected Essex’s precarious finances. Even after being liberated in August 1600, he was stripped of his public offices and never regained his lucrative sweet wine monopoly.
Laoutaris adds that the animal is described as “sequestered”, which could be a reference to Essex’s arrest, and was also the term for the legal process by which someone’s “land and property were forcibly confiscated after engaging in illegal or subversive activity”.
The argument becomes more consequential when the play is considered alongside a better-known encounter between Essex’s followers and Shakespeare’s company, with the findings shedding new light on the Essex faction’s decision to commission a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Globe by the Chamberlain’s Men on 7 February 1601 – just a day before the Earl assembled about 300 supporters and marched into London.
In the play, King Richard II is deposed as England’s monarch. It’s usually thought that Shakespeare’s troupe was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had nothing to do with the short-lived coup, which lasted a single day.
The new research may suggest that Essex’s men turned to the players because they knew Shakespeare was sympathetic to their cause – and hoped a rousing performance could encourage London’s public to rise up in support of the Earl.
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Arshad says: “Shakespeare uses language and imagery that is provocative, tipping humour over into satire, and that would have been deemed potentially libellous by the authorities.”
As You Like It was among three Shakespeare plays to be temporarily restricted from publication in August 1600, she notes. Another was Henry V, which includes a chorus “praising Essex to the skies” for his military action in Ireland, written before he had fallen out of favour.
Arshad explains: “All the plays that were ‘staied’ were published shortly afterwards, except As You Like It, which wasn’t issued until after Shakespeare’s death, in the First Folio of 1623. Henry V was published initially without the chorus that championed the Earl of Essex.”
This new research suggests this delay in publication may be related to the politically radical message Shakespeare had smuggled into the play – offering sympathetic support for a spurned former favourite of Elizabeth’s only a couple of years before he mounted an ambitious, if unsuccessful, rebellion.
]]>Why were the Tudors obsessed with kissing each other, and what made them stop?https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/obsessed-with-kissing/2026-06-20T10:15:45.000ZCompared with parts of southern Europe, England now tends to be seen as a relatively restrained culture, less comfortable with public displays of affection and far less given to greeting friends or acquaintances with a kiss. But this modern image of English reserve would have surprised some foreign visitors to late medieval and Tudor England.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, travellers from the continent repeatedly remarked on how openly affectionate the English seemed to be.
As historian Ian Mortimer noted, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that sits awkwardly with modern assumptions. “We’re not known for being particularly amorous in our approach to strangers,” he says. But the historical evidence suggests that English attitudes to kissing were once rather less squeamish.
Kissing in Tudor England
By the 16th century, London was attracting increasing numbers of foreign visitors, especially wealthy young European men travelling for education, diplomacy or curiosity. They toured famous sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London, and many recorded their impressions in travel journals.
One of them was Alessandro Magno, a Venetian visitor who wrote about England in 1562. He was surprised, he wrote, to see English men and women kissing “in the middle of the street as at home”.
- Read more | The most common accidental way to die in Tudor England reveals surprising truths about daily life
Magno also described a rough-and-ready game played between young men and women who did not necessarily know each other, in which the women were thrown to the ground and only allowed to rise after they had been kissed. “Here they kiss each other a great deal,” he observed.
What startled him even more was that this custom extended into domestic hospitality. “If a stranger enters a house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips,” he wrote, “they think him badly brought up.”
This was not a new Tudor habit. There is evidence that such customs had deeper roots in Britain.
Before he became Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini travelled widely through Europe, including Scotland in the 1430s. In his autobiography, he also commented on local kissing customs. The exact nuance depends on the translation, but the general point is clear: he found the relative ease and informality of kissing striking enough to mention.
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One modern translation renders his observation as meaning that in Scotland “a woman’s kiss means less than a handshake does in Italy”. In other words, kissing did not necessarily carry the emotional or erotic charge that later societies would assume. It could instead function as a routine social gesture.
Another well-known testimony of British kissing culture comes from Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar, who visited England around the turn of the 16th century.
He was enchanted by the English habit of greeting with kisses. In one oft-quoted letter, he described the country as a place where kisses greeted arrivals, departures and chance encounters alike. According to a 1901 translation of his epistles, he wrote that wherever one went in England, one was welcomed and dismissed with kisses, and that “wherever a meeting takes place there is kissing in abundance”.
Erasmus was so delighted by the custom that he urged his friend, the poet Faustus Andrelinus, to travel to England and experience it for himself.
Kissing and the plague
At times, however, the custom came under pressure.
In 1439, King Henry VI permitted his subjects to omit one particularly significant act of ceremonial kissing: kissing the royal hand. This was no trivial matter. Such a kiss was a visible expression of allegiance, and there were concerns that omitting it might cast doubt on a subject’s loyalty.
The reason for relaxing the custom was the return of plague. England suffered repeated outbreaks of the Black Death and related epidemics across the 14th and 15th centuries, and in 1439 contemporaries regarded the disease as especially severe.
- Read more | Love and marriage in medieval England
Although people did not understand germs in the modern sense, they were not oblivious to contagion. As the historian Dr Hannes Kleineke has argued, there was at least a practical awareness that physical closeness could help spread disease. Suspending the kiss of allegiance, then, shows that even in a society accustomed to kissing, public health emergencies could temporarily alter accepted behaviour.
But though the plague interrupted the practice, it did not end it.
A German visitor to London in the 1460s reported that among the English “to offer a kiss is the same as to hold out the right hand, for they do not shake hands”. That comparison suggests that kissing occupied the social role that a handshake would later fill: a conventional, everyday gesture of greeting.
Why kissing fell out of fashion
So what changed?
One important factor was religion. As England turned towards Protestantism in the 16th century, certain traditional forms of physical greeting began to attract suspicion. Kissing could be associated with the Catholic “kiss of peace” exchanged during the mass, as well as with the greeting customs of Catholic countries such as France and Italy.
At the same time, broader moral and social changes altered how kissing was understood. As English culture absorbed more puritanical values, kissing increasingly came to be seen as an intimate act.
That shift had consequences for relations between both men and women, and men with one another. As ideas about sexuality hardened, and as same-sex desire became more explicitly named and legislated against, forms of physical closeness that had once been socially permissible became more suspect.
Later examples show that non-romantic kissing did not vanish from English life altogether. Lord Nelson is famously said to have asked Captain Sir Thomas Hardy to kiss him as he lay dying after the battle of Trafalgar, though historians continue to debate exactly what was said and what it meant.
Even so, by then the world described by Erasmus and Magno had largely receded. The easy, customary kissing of strangers, guests and acquaintances was no longer a normal feature of English social behaviour.
Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]>350 years ago, drinkers were given the choice to save their homes or their pub. Their choice might shock youhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-of-northamption-save-the-pub/2026-06-05T10:45:32.000ZWhen a huge fire broke out in Northampton in September 1675, drinkers in a local pub were faced with a choice – they could either save their homes or the pub. They chose to save the pub, while more than 80 per cent of the rest of the town burned down.
The Great Fire of Northampton ripped through the town in a similar fashion to the more famous Great Fire of London of 1666.
In 1675, Northampton was a market town specialising in leather tanning and shoemaking. Most of its buildings were constructed with wood, plaster, and straw, and packed tightly together. 1675 had been a particularly dry year thanks to a drought, so when an open fire was left unattended on St Mary’s Street, flames quickly engulfed the town.
The townspeople fled to the market square, with some bringing their possessions to try to save them – but the square was narrow and the stacked objects helped the fire spread.
The blaze took out around 700 of Northampton’s 850 buildings, including all of the pubs inside the town walls – apart from one, says Ian Mortimer, author of Mortimer’s A to Zs of English History, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Residents poured beer on a pub to save it from fire
“The Great Fire of Northampton took out all the pubs bar one, right in the middle. It was a pub called, appropriately, The Last,” Mortimer says. The ‘last’ referred to the foot-shaped piece of wood used to shape shoes, which would have been a common sight in Northampton due to its long history of shoemaking.
This story comes from the journals of Thomas Baskerville, a topographer who travelled around England and recorded his observations on the towns and places he visited.
Baskerville wrote that the “straingeness [sic] of this preservation” of a single pub led him to ask the landlord how the building was still standing while “all the other houses for a good distance round about it burnt down.”
“The landlord said that when the fire broke out, all the drinkers in there decided whether they were going to go home and rescue their own homes, or stay and collectively try to preserve the pub. Being good drinkers, they decided to preserve their pub,” Mortimer says.
In the 1670s, pubs were important multifunctional spaces for eating, drinking, political meetings, and socialising. They were often the centres of community in towns, so it’s no wonder that the locals thought it so crucial to save.
“They hauled all the barrels of beer up onto the roof of the building and slowly poured it down the outside of the building to keep it cool throughout the fire,” Mortimer says.
In Baskerville’s account, he doesn’t specify that the people who saved the pub were patrons – he writes that it was the innkeeper’s “friends” who “hoist[ed] some hogsheads of beer out of his sellar [sic].”
But either way, Mortimer says, “It was a huge risk, and probably a moment in the annals of British firefighting that people decided to fight fire with beer and won.”
Rebuilding the town
The town’s Recorder, James Compton, the 3rd Earl of Northampton, held an emergency meeting the next morning to organise relief efforts, and got an Act quickly passed through Parliament to ensure the rebuilding of the town.
The townspeople benefitted from the lessons learned from the Great Fire of London nine years previously, because while a similar Act had taken six months to be passed in the capital, it only took six weeks in Northampton.
Local people, businesses, and universities donated a total of around £25,000 to help Northampton recover, one-tenth of which was pledged for the rebuilding of the main church.
King Charles II also donated more than 1,000 tonnes of timber to be used to reconstruct the church and reduced taxes on the town for seven years after the fire. A statue of him, dressed in a Roman toga, was erected on the new portico of the church.
The order in which the reconstruction efforts were conducted reveals people’s priorities at the time. Some of the first buildings to be tackled were Sessions House, the centre of justice and administration for the town, and All Saints Church. Sessions House would have dealt with law, order, and the administration of the local economy, while the church was a source of strength and community, showing how bureaucracy worked and how important religion was to the people at the time.
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The town was improved after the fire
Although the fire caused 11 deaths and made hundreds homeless, there was an upside. When Northampton was rebuilt, it was modernised in terms of its look, functioning, and urban planning.
The Act decreed that all new buildings be covered with lead, slate, or tiles to prevent fires, and new buildings were mostly made from far-less-flammable stone or brick. It also banned any “perilous trade” that involved fire in the main parts of the town, and ordered the streets and main square be widened, which would slow any future fires but also improve the layout of the town.
Visitors to Northampton saw the new buildings as a big upgrade. In Baskerville’s diaries from 1681, he wrote that the town had, “Phoenix like, risen out of her ashes in a far more noble and beauteous form, the houses of the streets being now built in very good order with excellent freestone and 'bellconies', and some of the inns are such gallant and stately structures the like is scarcely elsewhere to be seen.”
Baskerville even wrote that York “must have a purgation by fyre if ever it arise in beauty like Northampton or London.”
Ian Mortimer was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]>"It was like going out naked": Which common accessory did Tudors dare not leave the house without?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/hat-wars-of-early-modern-england/2026-05-17T09:45:19.000ZToday, people are generally free to wear what they please. But in the early modern period, individual attire was closely monitored by the authorities – because a sartorial misstep could threaten the established social order.
The cost, cut and colour of your clothes signified your status in society. Dressing above your rank or income was strictly prohibited in England by a string of sumptuary laws dating back to 1463. Legislation enacted under Elizabeth I decreed that only members of royalty were permitted to wear purple silk or gold cloth. Some other colours and furs were restricted to the nobility.
These laws, which were hard to enforce and failed to keep up with changes in fashion, were repealed in 1604. But parish preachers and other influential community members continued to apply more informal constraints on the dress of ordinary people.
Though these restrictions were defied at various times in the 17th century, clothing remained an indicator of a person’s place in England’s social hierarchy.
According to new research, however, one clothing accessory frequently sparked conflict in England – especially as the country descended into civil war. It was so cherished by its wearers that many would sooner part with all their money than go without it. Surprisingly, it was also one of the most commonplace articles: the hat.
How were hats used as social and political weapons in early modern England?
In a study in The Historical Journal, historian Bernard Capp argues that hats were key components in established etiquette, the flouting of which could cause serious conflict. This was widespread but has sometimes eluded historians because it operated under unwritten rules.
Almost everybody in early modern England wore some form of headgear, from broad-brimmed hats and simple cloth caps to coifs and towering ‘steeple’ hats. The size, shape and material of a hat could draw admiration or criticism, and hats were subject to constraints along with other pieces of clothing.
But Capp, emeritus professor of history at the University of Warwick, argues it was what people did with their headwear that made the hat a potentially incendiary fashion item – and almost impossible to control.
Men were expected to doff (‘do off’) their hats when in friendly company or in the presence of a social superior. “Everybody in that period knew the significance of doffing your hat, though there was no actual law that said you had to take off your hat in respect,” Capp tells HistoryExtra. “It was instilled from childhood, and there were sanctions and pressures if you didn’t do as you were expected to do.”
As a result, keeping your hat firmly on your head became an act of defiance. A person might, for example, refuse to doff their cap in front of a constable whose authority they rejected. But the stakes could be even higher.
The rejection of ‘hat-honour’, Capp has found, took on an incendiary political meaning as England descended into civil war in the 1640s. Two leaders of the proto-communist Digger movement wore their hats proudly in 1649 as they told General Fairfax that he was “but their fellow creature”.
- Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War
“For radical groups like the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, that was a very easy way to demonstrate their defiance against political authority or the church establishment,” Capp says.
There was a moral imperative to headwear, too. To go outside without a hat was “almost like going out naked”, Capp says, and suggested that a person might be mentally ill, abjectly poor or in search of trouble. That was why, in 1659, the father of a rebellious young man chose to stop him attending Quaker meetings by confiscating his hats. Without them, the youth dared not leave his house.
One of Capp’s discoveries is that victims of highway robbery in the early 18th century sometimes prioritised their hats over much more expensive valuables to avoid the humiliation of being seen hatless. “This shame in being bareheaded is interesting,” Dr Danae Tankard, a reader in social history at the University of Chichester, tells HistoryExtra. “I think it is not something people have specifically picked up on before.”
In 1718, a gang of three thieves stole £15 from William Seabrook – but he succeeded in begging them to spare his hat. A victim whose wig and hat were taken from him by a highwayman in 1733 received an apology from the criminal in prison after complaining it was “very unusual for men of his profession to take such things”.
Read more | The extraordinary legend of highwayman Dick Turpin
These anecdotes, and a dozen similar scenarios, are among the Old Bailey records, newly uncovered by Capp, previously overlooked by historians.
Is it time to rethink the importance of the humble hat – and other ‘mundane’ items?
For Mark Stoyle, professor of history at the University of Southampton, the research suggests that the hat, and other everyday items, may need to be re-evaluated by historians. “What this article shows us is the strangeness of the past – that what might seem banal to us actually had a real significance at the time that we might completely miss,” he explains to HistoryExtra.
The study is part of a growing historical subfield studying the importance of ‘gesture’ – everyday behaviour often unnoticed by historians but which shaped early modern life – Stoyle adds.
Accessories might be affixed to a hat to declare a political view or sentiment. Though Cavaliers and Roundheads wore the same type of hat, Stoyle explains, they added partisan labels and badges – small gestures with major significance. “What might seem a trivial thing to us, actually had a huge resonance at the time,” he says.
Tankard cautions that hats still need to be understood as “merely one aspect of a much broader field of early modern fashion accessories”. Despite this, she says: “The hat is more demotic, so everybody wears one, from the very wealthy down to the very poor, which gives it a significance beyond some other accessories.”
Both historians agree that Capp’s research sheds new light on everyday life in early modern England, and on how the humble hat became a tool of political defiance and social communication.
Stoyle notes that, though historians have long known about the Quakers’ refusal to take their hats off in the presence of social superiors, the new study helps contextualise this form of protest.
“What Capp’s saying is that this is not just about the Quakers – this is going on in society as a whole. And he’s extending that discovery further back in time, and then forward in time”, concludes Stoyle. “It’s a laborious task, but I think it throws up some really interesting evidence.”
]]>Power, pomp and the Peacock Throne: the Mughal empire at 500https://www.historyextra.com/membership/power-pomp-and-the-peacock-throne-the-mughal-empire-at-500/2026-04-20T15:46:07.000ZBoy meets girl. Boy and girl fall deeply in love. Boy’s disapproving father forbids their union. The pair strive to be together, against the odds – but, in a tragic denouement, their young love is thwarted forever.
It’s a timeless trope that’s long been stock in trade of Bollywood cinema. But when the girl is a courtesan and dancer, and her suitor is an imperial prince whose father – the Mughal emperor Akbar – holds the power to sentence her to death by immurement (being bricked up in a wall), the result is a sensational, lavish box-office hit. Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal), a 1960 blockbuster that smashed records for Indian cinema, is now an established classic.
That film, based on a legend about the prince who later ruled as the emperor Jahangir, is rooted in the popular consciousness of the Mughal empire. That mighty, influential and long-lasting power was, according to one definition, founded 500 years ago this month, and ruled much of India for som e three centuries. The film touches on themes of romance, power, conflict, control and more, all linked in many minds with that dynasty. But who were the real Mughals, how are they remembered today – and is that legacy accurate?
The dynasty originated in 15th-century central Asia with a prince named Babur, whose ancestors included Genghis (or Chinggis) Khan. Babur was an even more direct descendant of Timur (Tamerlane), who died in 1405. Having created an empire stretching from the Black Sea to the borders of Ming China, Timur’s life later served as inspiration for the playwright Christopher Marlowe and composer George Frideric Handel.
By the time of Babur’s birth in 1483, however, Timur’s empire had shattered into numerous smaller emirates, with various pretenders hungry for power. Sucked into this maelstrom after being crowned Emir of Fergana (now in eastern Uzbekistan) in 1494, Babur was ousted from that throne at the turn of the 16th century.
Timeline: rise and fall of the Mughals 1504: Ousted as emir from the Fergana Valley (now eastern Uzbekistan), Babur and his followers head south and capture Kabul 1526: Babur defeats the Delhi sultan and establishes the foundations of the Mughal empire 1540: Babur’s son and successor, Humayun, is defeated by rival sultan Sher Shah Suri and exiled in Iran, retaking Mughal lands in 1555 1560–70s: Following a regency government, Humayun’s son Akbar comes of age and begins administrative reform and fresh expansion. He is succeeded in 1605 by his son Jahangir 1632: Construction of the Taj Mahal begins in Agra on the orders of Shah Jahan, who succeeded Jahangir in 1628 1638: Shah Jahan commissions a monumental walled city to serve as the new imperial capital, today known as ‘Old Delhi’ 1681: Aurangzeb, who took the throne from his father Shah Jahan in 1658, shifts his court to Aurangabad to manage territorial expansion 1707: Aurangzeb dies, and lengthy tussles among would-be successors follow, with seven more emperors taking the throne in less than 13 years 1717: Emperor Farrukhsiyar signs important trading rights over to the British East India Company, which proves pivotal to its expansion 1739: Nadir Shah of Iran defeats Mughal forces, seizing the Peacock Throne and other booty. His rivals also make bids for power, weakening the empire further 1757: Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah defeats the Mughals. The East India Company bests the Mughal governor of Bengal and begins its process of conquest 1857: Bahadur Shah Zafar backs the Indian Rebellion against Company rule in India. He is then deposed and exiled, ending centuries of Mughal monarchy
With a band of followers, he headed south and captured Kabul in 1504, proclaiming himself padshah (emperor) in 1508. His new kingdom lay on the long-distance trade routes connecting the Indian subcontinent with the ancient Silk Roads. Though Vasco da Gama had discovered a direct sea route from Europe to Asia a few years earlier in 1498, and the Portuguese were starting to embark on imperial enterprise in the Indian Ocean world, it would be several decades before ships replaced caravans in the east–west trade. So Babur was able to command tax revenues from the passing commercial traffic.
The real prize, though, was Al-Hind, or Hindustan, as north India was known by contemporaries in the region. (Ironically, Babur later lamented in his autobiography that India was “a place of little charm”, the lack of good horses and his beloved musk-melons chief among its many perceived defects.) So Babur and his followers launched raiding expeditions to the south.
Soon they were invited by disgruntled north Indian elites to challenge the last of the so-called Delhi sultans who ruled over Hindustan from their capital in that city. On 21 April 1526, in a battle at Panipat some 50 miles north of Delhi, Babur’s forces proved victorious.
Delhi had been the capital of successive royal dynasties for centuries, attracting learned and wise men from far and wide to become a spiritual centre of great repute. These points were not lost on the Mughal empire’s founder, who was quick to pay homage at the gardens, tombs, mosques and monuments of Delhi’s important kings and saints. Timur had done the same in 1398 after his conquest of the city. Babur was effectively retracing his famous ancestor’s footsteps, linking himself to royal power and establishing his legitimacy as an emperor.
Turbulent decades
The first decades of Mughal rule were turbulent, the empire remaining fragile and far from consolidated. Besides the last vestiges of the old regime and numerous Indian rajas or kings resistant to Mughal power, challengers emerged from within Babur’s family itself. In keeping with Timurid political culture, Babur was seen as the first among equals by his relatives who considered themselves to possess as much legitimacy as him, and an equal claim to the throne. Some, such as Muhammad Zaman Mirza, chose to try their luck; his rebellion was quashed in the 1530s. Others – including Babur’s cousin Mirza Haydar Dughlat, who governed Kashmir – established toeholds of their own farther afield.
Babur died in 1530, having ruled the new empire for less than five years, and was succeeded by his son, Humayun. That emperor’s early reign was marked by near-constant threats to his authority, and in 1540 Humayun was toppled from the throne and exiled by Sher Shah Suri, a sultan with a base in northern India. In 1555, though, Humayun returned with the military support of the Safavid shah. His triumph was short-lived: he was dead within a year of his reconquest, following an accident. So the task of securing the Mughal imperium fell to his son, Akbar ‘the Great’ (reigned 1556–1605).
Awareness of Akbar’s greatness did not originate in posthumous tributes but was carefully established by the emperor’s own courtiers, not least the Mughal grand vizier and polymath Abul Fazl. In biographical, genealogical and historical works that emphasised Akbar’s excellent pedigree and portrayed his birth as nothing short of a miracle, the padshah was presented as a supernatural figure, preternaturally well-tempered, wise and just. Artists represented him larger than life; thanks to the steady stream of pictures brought by Jesuit missionaries and ambassadors from European courts, Mughal painters appropriated iconographic elements including the solar nimbus or halo to distinguish the emperor as a saintly, otherworldly being.
Akbar’s greatness became a pillar of Mughal ideology, and was perpetuated by his heirs and most loyal nobles. All this would have rung hollow, however, had it not been accompanied by tangible achievements. It was from Akbar’s reign that the empire was consolidated, thanks to the standardisation of weights and measures, the wholesale re-surveying of the imperial lands to ascertain reliable figures of annual yields ahead of setting (reasonable) tax rates, and the transformation of the system of government. In a move aimed at reducing the tendency towards waywardness or rebellion, the institution of the imperial nobility was transformed into a graded and much more hierarchical system, with a steady rise in rank offered in return for loyalty to the emperor.
For commoners, what mattered most was that the kingdom was peaceful, society harmonious, and trade flourishing. Their point of view is reflected in the incredibly rich autobiography penned by a Jain merchant named Banarasidas. He was 19 at the end of Akbar’s reign, and lived to see the reigns of two further emperors. Overcome by the rumours of Akbar’s death (from dysentery), he swooned and split open his head in the courtyard of his home. Meanwhile, his fellow townsmen were also beset with grief at the loss of an emperor whose rule they linked to their personal security and wellbeing.
This outpouring of genuine affection was also connected with the interest in a broad range of religious teachings espoused by Akbar and, later, by his son Jahangir. The Mughals were Sunni Muslims, but the fruits of the emperors’ dialogues with other faith leaders was a short-lived syncretic religion or ethical system, Din-i Ilahi, and the much more enduring policy and practice of sulh-i-kul, universal civility or peace. Both pre-dated Enlightenment codes of tolerance by more than a century. Mughal toleration certainly aroused admiration among Europeans, and not only those who were religious minorities in their homelands. Indeed, Sir Thomas Roe – who left a widely cited account of the early 17th-century Mughal empire – noted the dramatic contrast with sectarian persecution and violence in England.
Inclusive empire
The Mughal empire was highly cosmopolitan, integrating people of different backgrounds and religions. It was also central to the success of the trading system that spanned the Indian Ocean. Indian cotton textiles were bartered for spices in south-east Asia. From the late 16th century, too, demand for spices and other Indian goods was swelling, fuelled by both Asian merchants and European trading organisations – first the Portuguese crown, then the English and Dutch private trading companies – with knock-on effects for the Mughals.
- Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen
The decision to expand the empire’s frontiers to Gujarat and Bengal did more than bring Mughal rule all the way to the Indian subcontinent’s western and eastern seaboards. It also resulted in the incorporation of two of the most prosperous provinces and their entrepôts, chief among them Surat, the Bandar-i Mubarak or ‘Auspicious Port’. Akbar’s successors continued the process of imperial expansion, though it was his great-grandson Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor, who extended imperial rule over much of the peninsula, enlarging the imperial domain to its greatest extent.
As tax revenues from the growing empire poured into the imperial coffers, the Mughal court became more magnificent, impressing ambassadors from all over Europe and Asia. Akbar, Jahangir (reigned 1605–27), and Shah Jahan (r1628–58) are often called the ‘Great Mughals’, reflecting the flourishing of the arts, architecture and culture during their reigns. This was a time of innovation, when Indian, Islamic and European motifs, forms and techniques were blended into a new tradition – the Mughal style.
The emperor was, of course, key to this development. Jahangir’s interest in flora and fauna sat well alongside the naturalistic current in imperial painting prompted, in part, by the influx of Netherlandish art and he is said to have instructed court artists to make studies from life. Shah Jahan was more interested in buildings, and the complex of gardens and structures known as the Taj Mahal– its centrepiece an iconic, breathtaking white marble mausoleum – is a pinnacle of Mughal architecture.
Projects commissioned by Rajput ruler and general Man Singh and other important nobles were also pivotal to the formation of the Mughal style. So, too, was the cultural patronage of imperial and royal women. Take Shah Jahan’s daughter, Princess Jahanara, who was the most senior figure in the imperial harem, and the richest woman in the empire. She was the driving force behind several large-scale architectural projects – Chandni Chowk, the tree-lined boulevard of shops and squares bisected by a canal in what’s now Old Delhi, is among her most famous and enduring legacies. Sahifa Banu, meanwhile, was one of at least two women known to have been trained by Mughal masters such as Persian miniaturist Aqa Reza. Her portrait of an Iranian monarch (shown on the previous page) is in the V&A Museum’s collection in London.
Shah Jahan’s son and successor, Aurangzeb (r1658–1707), is seldom called a ‘Great Mughal’. Instead, he is more often portrayed as a devout Muslim whose zealotry spelled the end of Mughal patronage of the arts – and, worse still, upset the communal harmony pervading before his reign.
Contested legacy
This view is part and parcel of the politics of Mughal historiography, and leaves little room for a positive appreciation of Aurangzeb’s reign, much as the idea of Akbar’s greatness obscures that emperor’s errors and missteps. Aurangzeb’s most important legacy was in the realm of the law and the massive scholarly project of legal codification that served the increasing number of his subjects – and their progeny down the generations – who took their legal affairs and disputes to Mughal courts for resolution.
On Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the empire faced a period of instability characterised by factionalism, high regnal turnover (four emperors occupied the throne in 1719 alone), and the installation of puppet rulers by powerful courtiers. But worse was to follow. First came the invasion in 1739 by Iranian general Nadir Shah. This humiliated the Mughals, though the invader was content to leave with a vast amount of booty – including the fabled Peacock Throne – never to return.
Less than 20 years later, the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah emptied the coffers yet again, and publicly proclaimed the Mughal emperor his vassal. Not long after that ignominy, the Marathas – a rising Hindu-Indian power – followed in his wake. A popular saying from the times went: “What Nadir had spared, Ahmad Shah destroyed; what Ahmad Shah had overlooked, the Marathas carried away.”
These misfortunes drained the empire’s reserves and damaged the king’s majesty so grievously that imperial decentralisation became imperial decline, and power shifted decisively from the capital to the provinces and regional kingdoms. It was not only petty rajas and warlords waiting in the wings who felt emboldened to stake their claims of independent authority. News of Ahmad Shah’s invasion in 1757 stiffened the British East India Company’s resolve when it went to war with the Mughal governor of Bengal that same year. The Company’s victory marked its transition from a trading organisation to a sovereign power and, ultimately, the beginnings of its Indian empire.
The Mughal line clung on for another century before being extinguished once and for all following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when the emperor was coerced into supporting the forces fighting the East India Company. Until then, he had lived under the protection of whichever power dominated: first the Marathas and then, from 1803, the Company. The influence of Mughal power nonetheless endured long after 1757 and even 1857 – though more as an idea than in practice.
Having violently stamped out the rebellion, the British remained anxious about threats to their rule in India, and were eager to be seen as legitimate heirs to the Mughals. So they appropriated their symbols and visual language, evident in the pomp of the colonial durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911, and more prevalently in the Indo-Saracenic or Mughal-Gothic building style rolled out across the subcontinent, from Aitchison College in Lahore to the Madras High Court in what’s now Chennai.
Enduring achievements
Does 2026 truly mark the 500th anniversary of the Mughal empire’s founding, or merely 500 years since Babur’s conquest of north India? Babur had actually been using the language of empire long before 1526 – though the dynasty’s precarious first half-century calls into question whether the Mughal kingdom was truly an empire before the 1570s.
More importantly, ought we be celebrating a moment of conquest? Or, instead, remembering the achievements in statecraft and administration, the arts and culture, justice and trade witnessed during the Pax Mughalica in the longer term?
Setting aside the martial skills of Babur and his progeny, or their personalities and predilections, the making (and unmaking) of the Mughal empire owed a great deal to a wider cast of characters. These included bureaucrats and intellectuals including Abul Fazl, and women such as Jahanara Begum – Shah Jahan’s eldest surviving child – who patronised charitable efforts, learning, arts and architecture. The ruling elite depended on artisans and merchants such as Banarasidas, as well as every one of the emperor’s subjects who paid their taxes and helped produce goods traded overseas. Their labour kept the empire in good repair, and helped the memory of its glories burn bright to the present day.
Hindustani cinema – aka Bollywood – reflects how shifts in Indian politics and society have steadily reshaped popular conceptions of the Mughals. Film production in India really took off in the 1940s amid the struggle for independence from British rule. Whether intended to portray India’s rich history against the hardships and struggle under colonialism, or merely as a form of escapism, period pieces were popular. In 1944, Wajahat Mirza – who later co-wrote the 1960 epic Mughal-e-Azam about the emperor Jahangir’s youthful romance – directed Shahenshah Babar, a feature about the first Mughal emperor. After independence in 1947, the Mughal past seemed to offer an exemplar for the fledgling democratic, secular nation, especially after the horrors of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims before and during partition. The Mughals were, after all, a Muslim dynasty ruling over a majority non-Muslim population. Some films thus celebrated the relative social harmony of the high Mughal period – for example, with Adl-e-Jehangir (1955), a rather idealised depiction of Jahangir as a just ruler. Others (such as Baiju Bawra, 1952, about a musician at Akbar’s court) depicted the composite culture of the Mughal empire or focused on the emperors’ love lives. Most touched on sulh-i-kul, a policy of universal civility and peace. Two years after the death in 1964 of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, became premier. That was soon followed by the release of Noor Jehan (1967) about Jahangir’s wife, who was widely maligned as power-hungry and ruthless. In 1975, Mrs Gandhi suspended India’s democracy upon declaring the Emergency, ushering a brief authoritarian interlude that lasted until 1977.
From the 1980s, India opened up to the world economy, unleashing economic growth but also a new kind of conspicuous consumption. Reflecting this, Jodhaa Akbar (2008), about Akbar’s marriage to a Hindu Rajput princess, is an extravagant gold and-jewel-encrusted vision of the Mughal past, fitting for the New India of the 2000s. But it was also intended to be a balm for the hurt unleashed by anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, and the communal strife that continued to plague India. Today, the Mughal past is being re-evaluated wholesale amid a rising tide of Hindu nationalism. A growing number of films paint the Mughals and other Muslim rulers not as heroes but as villainous invaders, among them Panipat (2019) and Tanhaji (2020), which valorise the Marathas and their conflicts with the Mughals. The Mughal past is more hotly contested than ever, and the 500th anniversary of the empire’s founding is as likely to be met with reflection on lessons it could provide for present problems as with calls for ‘retribution’ for past wrongs.
Jagjeet Lally is associate professor of the history of early modern and colonial India at University College London, and author of Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar: Commerce and Everyday Life in the Mughal World (Penguin Business, 2025)
This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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