When did our kings and queens start using surnames?

History Extra

Monarchs in Britain have adopted second names such as ‘Fair’, ‘Ironside’ or ‘Harefoot’ since at least the ninth century...

 Although early British monarchs may have adopted second names, these were not hereditary and were more in the way of nicknames.

The Irish and Welsh rulers kept this system and did not adopt surnames. The first English monarch to use a hereditary surname was Edward IV. He used the surname Plantagenet to emphasise that he was descended from the elder branch of the royal family – unlike Henry VI who came from a younger branch.

The name Plantagenet refers back to Henry II who came to the throne in 1154. Although it had not been used in formal documents before Edward IV, it must have been in informal use during that period as it was clearly of practical benefit to Edward.

The first Scottish king to have a surname is generally said to have been John de Balliol, who gained the throne in 1292 after the death of Margaret, heiress to Alexander III. However, John’s surname was more of a title indicating his hereditary lordship, an objection that could also be made to Robert the Bruce (ruled 1306–1329). The first Scots king undeniably to have a surname was Robert Stewart (or Stuart) who gained the throne in 1371 and ruled for 19 years. His surname derived from the family’s traditional role as Stewards of Scotland.

This Q&A was answered by historian and author Rupert Matthews.

Bluetooth Treasure: Metal Detector Dings on Silver of the Danish King in Germany

Ancient Origins

Over one thousand years ago, Danish King Harald Bluetooth had to flee his homeland. He would have taken whatever treasured possessions he could as he sought safety in distant lands. Fast forward to January 2018, when a man and a boy armed with metal detectors decided to take a chance at treasure hunting on an eastern German island in the Baltic Sea. What they found was so significant the location of their discovery was kept under wraps.

 Amateur archaeologist René Schön and his 13 year old student Luca Malaschnitschenko are the discoverers of 600 coins - 100 minted during Bluetooth’s reign and 500 other chipped pieces which range from a 714 Damascus dirham to a 983 penny.

 DW reports the two treasure hunters also found jewelry - such as braided necklaces, rings, brooches, and pearls - as well as a Thor’s hammer (an amulet for protection and power, linked to the famous Norse god, Thor ).

Part of the silver Bluetooth treasure found in Germany. ( YouTube Screenshot )

And it all began with a metal detector on the island of Rügen dinging on what the metal detectorists first thought was a “worthless piece of aluminum”, according to The Guardian . After cleaning the artifact up, it was found to actually be a piece of silver…and more was on the way.

The Guardian reports the treasure trove “may have belonged to the Danish king Harald Bluetooth.” Harald Bluetooth was the 10th century king who unified Denmark and promoted Christianity to his subjects. Today, Harald Blåtand (‘Bluetooth’) is a household name thanks to the wireless technology standard which bears a combination of the runes of his initials.

Harald's initials in runes and his Bluetooth nickname. ( haraldgormssonbluetooth)

The location of the Bluetooth treasure was found in January, but it was kept secret until the professionals, joined by Schön and Malaschnitschenko, were able to excavate land 400 sq. meters (4,300 sq. ft) around the site of the original discovery. It was probably hard for the discoverers to keep the secret to themselves, “This was the (biggest) discovery of my life,”

The Guardian reports Schön told the German news agency DPA. The Guardian reports lead archaeologist on the dig, Michael Schirren also told DPA “This trove is the biggest single discovery of Bluetooth coins in the southern Baltic Sea region and is therefore of great significance.”

One of the coins found at the site. ( YouTube Screenshot )

But DW says the discovery is not the first example of a Bluetooth artifact found in the region. In the 1870s, someone unearthed gold jewelry also linked to the Danish king on the island of Hiddensee, next to Rügen.

A relief showing Harald Bluetooth being baptized by Poppo the monk. ( CC BY 3.0 )

Archaeologist Detlef Jantzen suggests the artifacts provide physical evidence for Bluetooth’s flight to Pomerania in the late 980s, stating “We have here the rare case of a discovery that appears to corroborate historical sources.”

Top Image: A selection of silver jewelry from the Bluetooth treasure. Source: YouTube Screenshot

By Alicia McDermott

9 of the worst monarchs in history

History Extra

Mary, Queen of Scots lacked political skill says Sean Lang. (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

History has no shortage of disastrous rulers; this list could easily have been filled with the Roman Emperors alone. Rulers have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France or Tsar Nicholas II.
Some royal stinkers were limited in their capacity to do serious harm: the self-absorbed Edward VIII by his abdication, the narcissistic prince regent and king, George IV, by the constitutional limits on his power. And the mass murderer and self-proclaimed ‘Emperor’ Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Empire might have featured on this list had his imperial status been international recognised, but it wasn't.
Nearly-rans include the French Emperor Napoleon III, whose delusions of competence led to disaster in Italy, Mexico and finally defeat at the hands of Bismarck, and the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, a ludicrously gauche and immature ruler but not actually responsible on his own for launching Germany, and the rest of Europe, into the First World War.
The nearly-rans also include the extravagant waste of money and space that went by the name of King Ludwig II of Bavaria; and absentee monarchs like Richard I of England and Charles XII of Sweden – both of them great military leaders who spent much of their reigns away at war, including time in captivity, instead of seeing to the affairs of their kingdoms.
Here, then, is my list of the nine worst monarchs in history…

 

Gaius Caligula (AD 12–41)

There are plenty of other contenders for worst Roman Emperor – Nero and Commodus for example – but Caligula's mad reign sets a high standard. After a promising start to his reign he seems to have set out specifically to intimidate and humiliate the senate and high command of the army, and he gave grave offence, not least in Jerusalem, by declaring himself a god; even the Romans normally only recognised deification after death.
Caligula instituted a reign of terror through arbitrary arrest for treason, much as his predecessor Tiberius had done; it was also widely rumoured that he was engaged in incest with his sisters and that he lived a life of sexual debauchery, and this may well be true. The story of his making his horse a consul, meanwhile, may have been exaggerated, but it was not out of character.
Caligula’s unforgivable mistake was to jeopardise Rome's military reputation by declaring a sort of surreal war on the sea, ordering his soldiers to wade in and slash at the waves with their swords and collecting chests full of seashells as the spoils of his ‘victory’ over the god Neptune, king of the sea and by his failed campaign against the Germans, for which he still awarded himself a triumph. He was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in AD 41.
Caligula’s successor, Claudius, was an improvement but, despite the favourable picture in Robert Graves's famous book I, Claudius, not by much.

 

Pope John XII (954–964)

Even by the lax standards of the medieval papacy, John XII stands out as a disaster of the highest order. He was elected pope at the ripe old age of 18 as part of a political deal with the Roman nobility, and he inherited a conflict for control of Italy between the papacy and the Italian king Berengarius.
John had the support of the powerful German emperor Otto I, who swore to defend John's title, but John himself was too taken up with a life of drunken sex parties in the Lateran to care too much either way. He recovered from his hangover enough to accept Otto's oath of undying loyalty and then promptly linked up behind Otto's back with his enemy, Berengarius.
Understandably annoyed, Otto had John overthrown and accused, among other things, of simony (clerical corruption), murder, perjury and incest, and he replaced him with a new pope, Leo VIII. However, John made a comeback and had Leo's supporters punished ruthlessly: one cardinal had his hand cut off and he had a bishop whipped.
Full-scale war broke out between John and Otto, until John unexpectedly died – in bed with another man's wife, or so rumour had it.

 

King John (1199–1216)

The reign of King John is a salutary reminder that murder and treachery may possibly be forgiven in a monarch, but not incompetence.
John was the youngest and favourite son of Henry II, but he had not been entrusted with any lands and was mockingly nicknamed John Lackland. He tried unsuccessfully to seize power while his brother Richard I was away on crusade and was sent into exile upon Richard's return.
On his accession John had his own nephew Arthur murdered, fearing Arthur might pursue his own, much better, claim to the throne, and he embarked on a disastrous war with King Philippe-Auguste of France in which he lost the whole of Normandy. This singular act of incompetence deprived the barons of an important part of their power base, and he alienated them further with arbitrary demands for money and even by forcing himself on their wives.
In exasperation they forced him to accept Magna Carta; no sooner had he sealed it, however, than he then went back on his word and plunged the country into a maelstrom of war and French invasion. Some tyrants have been rehabilitated by history – but not John.

_{c1215, the seal of King John of England to the agreement with the barons. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

King Richard II (1377–99)

Unlike Richard III, Richard II has good reason to feel grateful towards Shakespeare, who portrayed this startlingly incompetent monarch as a tragic figure; a victim of circumstances and of others' machinations rather than the vain, self-regarding author of his own downfall he actually was.
Learning nothing from the disastrous precedent of Edward II, Richard II alienated the nobility by gathering a bunch of cronies around him and then ended up in confrontation with parliament over his demands for money.
His reign descended into a game of political manoeuvre between himself and his much more able and impressive uncle, John of Gaunt, before degenerating into a gory grudge match between Richard and the five Lords Appellant, whom he either had killed or forced into exile.
Richard might have redeemed himself by prowess in war or administration, but he possessed neither. Henry Bolingbroke's coup of 1399, illegal though it no doubt was, brought to an end Richard's disastrous reign. Richard II has his defenders nowadays, who will doubtless take issue with his inclusion in this list, but there really is very little to say for him as a ruler.

 

Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ (1547–84)

Prince Ivan Vassilyevitch grew up at the hazardous court of Moscow, his life often in danger from the rivalry of the boyars – nobles. It gave him a lifelong hatred of the nobility and a deep streak of ruthless cruelty – aged 13 he had one boyar eaten alive by dogs.
Ivan was Prince of Muscovy from 1533, and in 1547 he was crowned Tsar (Emperor) of all Russia – the first ruler to hold the title. He crushed the boyars, stealing their lands to give to his own followers; he also condemned millions of Russians to a permanent state of serfdom.
Ivan took a vast area of Russia as his personal domain patrolled by a mounted police force with carte blanche to arrest and execute as they liked. Distrusting the city of Novgorod he had it violently sacked and its inhabitants massacred, and he embarked on a disastrous and ultimately unsuccessful series of wars with Russia's neighbours.
Ivan beat up his own pregnant daughter-in-law and killed his son in a fit of rage. Ivan was in many ways an able ruler, but his ruthlessness, paranoia and taste for blood earn him his place in this list.

_{c1580, Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia from 1533, known as 'Ivan the Terrible'. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)}

 

Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–67)

We are so familiar with the drama and tragedy of Mary's reign that it is easy to overlook the blindingly obvious point that she was absolutely useless as queen of Scotland. Admittedly, ruling 16th-century Scotland was no easy task, and it was made harder still for Mary by the stern Presbyterian leader, John Knox, and her violent, boorish husband, Lord Darnley.
Nevertheless, Mary showed none of her cousin Elizabeth's political skill in defusing religious or factional conflict, and she headed into pointless confrontation with Knox and the Presbyterians. At a time when female rule was generally regarded with suspicion in any case, she played up to the stereotype by appearing to live in a cosy world of favourites – including her unfortunate Italian guitar teacher, David Rizzio.
Mary’s suspected involvement in the spectacular murder of Darnley on 10 February 1567 was a political mistake of the first order; her marriage three months later to the main suspect, the Earl of Bothwell, was an act of breathtaking stupidity. It is hardly surprising that the Scots overthrew Mary and locked her up.
Having escaped, she was mad to throw away her advantage by going to England, where she could only be regarded as a threat, instead of to France, where she would have been welcomed with open arms.

 

Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612)

Some historians are kinder to Rudolf than in the past, but by any standards he was a disastrous ruler. He was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1576, though he was prone to long bouts of deep depression and melancholia and he spent most of his time dabbling in alchemy and astrology.
A staunch Catholic, Rudolf tore up the religious settlement that for the past 20 years had kept Germany's Catholics and Protestants from each others' throats, and embarked on a crusade to eradicate Protestantism from Germany's towns and villages.
When the Protestants formed a self-defence league, the Hungarians rose in revolt and the Turks launched an offensive, Rudolf shut himself up in Prague Castle and refused to speak to anyone. Eventually the Habsburgs had to agree to replace Rudolf with his brother, Matthias, who restored the religious peace in Germany and signed treaties with the Turks and Hungarians, only for Rudolf to fly into a rage and start up the Turkish war again.
Rudolf reluctantly signed the letter of majesty granting freedom of worship to Protestants in Bohemia but then embarked on a programme of persecution. The Bohemians appealed to Matthias for help, and in 1611 Rudolf was forced to hand power over to his brother. He died a year later, having laid the foundations for the disastrous Thirty Years’ War that would tear Europe apart within six years of his death.

^{c1590: Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1576, as Vertumnus, ancient Roman god of seasons who presided over gardens and orchards. From the Stoklosters Slutt, Balsta, Sweden. (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)}

Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar (1828–61)

At a time when the Europeans were spreading their colonial holdings around the world, Queen Ranavalona was able to keep Madagascar free of British and French control, but she did so by establishing a rule so ruthless that it has been estimated that the population of her kingdom was halved during her reign.
Queen Ranavalona maintained her power by retaining the loyalty of the Malagasy army and imposing regular periods of forced labour on the rest of the population in lieu of taxation. On one notorious occasion she organised a buffalo hunt for herself, her nobles and their families and followers, and she insisted that an entire road be built in front of the party for them all to advance to the hunt in comfort: an estimated 10,000 people died carrying out this particular piece of folly.
Queen Ranavalona faced several plots and at least one serious coup attempt; as she grew more paranoid she forced more people to undergo the notorious tangena test: eating three pieces of chicken skin before swallowing a poisonous nut that caused the victim to vomit (if it did not actually poison them, which it often did). If all three pieces were not found in the vomit, the victim was executed.
Having encouraged Christianity at the start of her reign, Queen Ranavalona changed policy and instituted ruthless persecution of native Christians. She survived all plots against her and died in her bed.

 

King Leopold II of Belgium (1865–1909)

Leopold's place in this list results not from his rule in Belgium, but from the crimes committed in the enormous kingdom he carved out for himself in Congo. He obtained the territory by international agreement and named it the Congo Free State; it was not a Belgian colony, but the king's personal fiefdom.
The CFS was presented to the world as a model of liberty and prosperity, devoted to the elimination of slavery. Only gradually did the world learn that it was in fact a slave state in which the Congolese were ruled by terror.
As Leopold raked in the riches from Congo's enormous reserves of copper, ivory and rubber, the Congolese were forced to work by wholesale mutilation of their wives and children, usually by chopping off their hands or feet. Mutilation was also widely used as a punishment for workers who ran away or collected less than their quota.
An investigation by the British consular official Roger Casement revealed that the Belgian Force Publique regarded the Congolese as little more than animals to be killed for sport. The king fought a high-profile legal battle to prevent details of his regime in Congo from being made public, and it took an international campaign to force him to hand Congo over to the Belgian government.

Leopold's name is forever associated with the Congolese reign of terror, and that alone justifies his inclusion in this list.

The 10 worst Britons in history

History Extra

Illustrations by Jonty Clark

The result is a fascinating, if not strictly scientific, top 10, showing the most wicked, harmful and downright evil character of each century in the past thousand years. The rogue’s gallery includes some famous, and not so famous (or infamous) names: there’s a king, a prime minister and (somewhat surprisingly) a couple of churchmen. It’s a thought-provoking and perhaps controversial list. Read on to discover who were the worst Brits of all...

 

1000–1100

Eadric Streona

Nominated by Professor Sarah Foot of Sheffield University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
Eadric Streona (died 1017) might have been Aethelred II’s chief counsellor and ealdorman of Mercia – but he has a reputation for deception, treachery and murder.
I nominate him because of the villainous part he played in England’s defeat by the Danish king, Cnut. He was implicated in the murder of Gunnhild and Pallig in 1002 and of Ealdorman Aelfhelm in 1006 – at which time the ealdorman’s two sons, Wulfheah and Ufegeat, were blinded. In 1009 when the English were ready to attack the Danes a Chronicler reported that the whole people “was hindered by Ealdorman Eadric, then as it always was”. In 1015 he was directly involved in the murder of two thegns (noblemen) – Sigeferth and Morcar – who, according to chronicles, he “enticed” into his chamber where they were “basely killed”.
In the same year, having been in command of King Aethelred’s army, he changed sides and joined Cnut. He subsequently switched sides a further couple of times, in 1016 joining first Edmund Ironside and then deserting him at the battle at Assandun (Ashingdon) to rejoin Cnut who pursued Edmund into Gloucestershire where the latter died in mysterious circumstances.
This cruel, unscrupulous individual grew rich out of the proceeds of royal taxation and was a traitor to the English cause. But having being initially rewarded by Cnut – when he’d become king of all England – Eadric was killed in 1017 having outlived his usefulness to the new regime. It was a fitting end.
Sarah Foot is the author of Monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

1100–1200 

Thomas Becket

Nominated by Professor John Hudson of St Andrews University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
There are a handful of characters in history about whom prejudice seems impossible to avoid. One such is Thomas Becket (c 1120–70), Archbishop of Canterbury. He divided England in a way that even many churchmen who shared some of his views thought unnecessary and self-indulgent. And he has remained a figure inspiring both devotion and detestation.
He was a founder of gesture politics, with the most acute of eye for what would now be called the photo-opportunity. He was also a master of the soundbite. When put on trial in front of a secular court, he refused to accept its jurisdiction, stating “such as I am, I am your father; I will not hear your judgement”. He pushed his way from the court chamber, bearing his cross before him. Complex issues were confronted by a mixture of inflexibility and grand display.
When he left England during his dispute with Henry II, he went to the kingdom of France, furthering the conflict between Henry and the French king, and at the very least opening himself to the accusation of being a traitor. Certainly he was viewed by some as hypocritical, as he changed dramatically from his ostentatious life-style before he was archbishop. As archbishop, he also looked to contemporary medical views for help in retaining some enjoyable habits, claiming to have to drink wine rather than water because it better suited his stomach.
He was also greedy. In 1164 he was brought to trial in part on charges of embezzlement during his time as royal chancellor, the position he held before he became archbishop of Canterbury. The truth of such charges must remain uncertain. However, the wealth of Thomas and his following by the late 1150s was immense and famous. How did he assemble such wealth? Presumably by profiting from his position in the royal administration.
Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 a fittingly grisly end. However, it also ensured that, as a martyr, he became a saint with a cult that spread with tremendous speed.
John Hudson is author of The Oxford History of the Laws of England (Oxford University Press).

1200–1300

King John

Nominated by historian Marc Morris

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
Once described as a man of “superhuman wickedness”, King John of England (1167–1216) has had a pretty awful press. Perhaps his most damning critic was Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans, who in the mid 13th century wrote: “Foul as it is, Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of King John”.
This kind of verdict was eagerly seized on by 19th-century historians to create the monster of legend, the Bad King John. However, the fact remains that John committed some wicked deeds and was a deeply unpleasant person. He was unpleasant in many ways – in the way he behaved towards people; he was untrusting; he would snigger at people while they talked; he couldn’t resist kicking a man when he was down. What’s more, he was a bully and a gloater. Stories about his cruelty are legion, and the deed which has most damned him in the eyes of the world is the murder, possibly by his own hands, of his nephew Arthur – a rival for the throne.
Granted, John was competent when it came to the small-scale tyrant stuff – he could lead an army, he was energetic and dynamic – but his charisma was all negative. He didn’t inspire loyalty, so people deserted him. That was partly why he lost his father’s continental lands – in effect, squandering the family inheritance.
He was clearly one of the worst kings in English history and his reign will always by defined by that one great evil deed – the murder of his nephew. One good thing to come out of his reign was Magna Carta, an attempt to limit his abuses and ensure they could not be repeated.
Marc Morris is author of The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Boydell, 2005).

1300–1400 

Hugh Despenser (the Younger)

Nominated by Nigel Saul, professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway, London University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
I nominate Edward II’s appalling favourite, the Younger Hugh Despenser (died 1326). Despenser was neither so well known nor so notorious as his predecessor in Edward’s favour, Piers Gaveston, but he was far worse. Gaveston was just a playboy. Despenser was pure evil.
Dominant at court in the last years of Edward’s reign, he set about eliminating his enemies and amassing a vast territorial empire in South Wales. His rapacity knew no bounds. He gobbled up the lands and possessions forfeited by those who opposed him and his king. He browbeat the weak and the vulnerable into signing away their estates. He tricked people into parting with their property.
Women were especially vulnerable to his ambitions. Alice Lacy, the Earl of Lancaster’s widow, was thrown into prison and forced to sign away her rights. The widow of Sir John Gifford of Brimpsfield was ejected from her estates. Lady Baret of Swansea was allegedly tortured so badly that she went out of her mind. Visiting merchants were robbed of their property. In a stained glass window in Tewkesbury Abbey, Despenser looks all arrogant and swagger.
But pride cometh before the fall. In the autumn of 1326 the tyrannical regime Despenser headed was toppled, and Edward deposed. At Hereford in November he was visited with the full penalties of the traitor. He was drawn, and then hanged from a gallows 50 feet high; his intestines were torn out and burned in front of him.
Nigel Saul is author of The Three Richards: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III (Hambledon & London, 2005).

1400–1500 

Thomas Arundel

Nominated by Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
Thomas Arundel (1353–1414), administrator and archbishop of Canterbury, earns his place in this list of infamy not for a single infamous act, but for the long-term effect of his success in bringing together church and state, as never before, in the persecution of unorthodox religious opinion.
In this link between religious ideas and sedition lay the foundation for a system of persecution of religious ideas in England which would be used by rulers for centuries. Until Arundel, England had no part in the intensive inquisitorial and persecutory activities which had long been common practice on much of the Continent. The Concordat between Henry IV and Arundel gradually created such a system through ordinances and statutes.
At Oxford in 1407 he phrased ordinances – later extended as Constitutions for the realm – which limited the translation and reading of the Bible in English. The programme was completed shortly after his death, when secular officials, royal justices and sheriffs, were required by oath to enquire into heresy wherever their powers took them. As a result, he made life harder for a generation of people who wished to express and explore their religious ideas, to read the Bible in a language they understood, and discuss the “big questions”, while his clearing out of “venomous weeds” from Oxford meant that intellectual life there became bland for a very long time.
Above all, by enlisting royal officials, and encouraging neighbours to snoop, suspect and inform – he authorised a thoroughly unpleasant involvement of the state in people’s lives.
Miri Rubin is author of The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (Penguin, 2005).

1500–1600

Sir Richard Rich, Lord Rich of Leighs

Nominated by David Loades, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wales

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
I’ve chosen Sir Richard Rich (1496/7–1567), who seems to have had no principles, political or religious, but simply joined whichever side seemed likeliest to further his career.
According to John Foxe (author of the Acts & Monuments of the English Martyrs, first published in 1563), he was personally responsible for the torture of Anne Askew – who’d broken off her marriage to an orthodox Catholic – in 1546 and was charged with heresy. He is reputed to have operated the machine himself despite the fact that women (and especially gentlewomen) were supposed to be exempt from torture.
He is alleged to have committed perjury to secure the conviction of Thomas More for treason. He promoted Protestantism under Edward VI, and then persecuted Protestants under Mary.
A lawyer by profession, Rich was a man who was constantly on the make, constantly on the lookout for the main chance. He became a powerful minister to Henry VIII and was Lord Chancellor during much of King Edward VI’s reign.
It is difficult to quite know what to make of him personally but nobody seems to have been very fond of him. Greedy he certainly was, and cruel – to judge from the Anne Askew affair. He was responsible for several burnings of heretics in Essex, and acted as a bigot because it was convenient to appear as such at that time.
In short, Rich was a slippery and unprincipled opportunist. For centuries after his death his name was a byword in the county of Essex for wickedness. Right up to the 20th century, it was said “better a poor man at ease than Lord Rich of Leighs”.
David Loades is the author of Intrigue and Treason: the Tudor Court 1547–1558 (Pearson, 2004).

1600–1700 

Titus Oates

Nominated by John Adamson, a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
The self-styled Dr Titus Oates (1649–1705) was in a league of his own, both in the depths of his vileness – a comprehensive blend of vanity, murderous con-trickery, and serpentine guile – and the scale of the evil for which he was responsible.
He was the principal promoter, in 1678, of the fantasy that there was a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II (with silver bullets) as a prelude to a French-backed Catholic reconquest of the country.
Undoubtedly his most evil act was allowing 16 innocent laymen, and eight Catholic priests, to go to a hideous death (the penalty for treason being partial hanging, castration and disembowelment alive, and then the quartering of the corpse) as a result of his spurious accusations.
Oates’s entire career was built on the purveyance of various forms of malice and falsity. At the height of the Popish Plot mania, he laid an indictment against the Lord Chief Justice who, refusing to succumb to the popular hysteria, had acquitted four of the men implicated by Oates’s accusations. He would have willingly sent these four, and the Chief Justice, to the gallows for his own aggrandisement.
Anyone who is prepared to see innocent men go to their deaths – and particularly grisly deaths at that – on accusations that he knows to be false qualifies as cruel, bloodthirsty, and a bigot. What makes Oates’s knavery all the more invidious is that his motives appear to have been largely financial: he expected, and eventually obtained, a substantial reward from the Whig interests which profited from his accusations.
In 1678–79, Oates’s actions arguably brought the country close to the brink of another civil war. And while Oates did not create anti-Popery, his fantasies certainly sharply exacerbated a religious hatred that would endure in British society well into the 19th century. In short, he was a thoroughly odious individual.
John Adamson is author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007).

1700–1800

Duke of Cumberland

Nominated by Professor Rab Houston, chair of modern history at St Andrews University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
The Duke of Cumberland (Prince William Augustus, 1721–65) showed his wickedness in many ways, not least in his contempt for opponents and for his own men who failed to live up to his strict standards.
He showed a particular disdain for the defeated Jacobites after the battle of Culloden in 1746, who he regarded as cowardly, dishonourable and undeserving of mercy. Thus fleeing soldiers were pursued and slaughtered while the wounded could expect no help except to be shot, bayoneted or clubbed to death.
At a time when the etiquette of warfare was considered very important, Cumberland was able to dispense with it by labelling the Highlanders as inhuman savages. He even condemned officers who had shown mercy to the Jacobite soldiers after the battle, when his orders were to give no quarter. The Highlanders hated him, renaming a weed Stinking Billy in mockery of the English renaming of a flower Sweet William in his honour.
In effect, he used the full power of the fiscal-military British state to commit genocide on the mainland of Britain. He was the equal of Cromwell in Ireland, terrorising a whole people into submission.
The English welcomed the Duke’s victory but opinion turned against him equally quickly. He acquired the title of Butcher because, when told that he was to be made an honorary freeman of a London company for his services against the Jacobites, some wag said it would have to be the Butchers. The Duke’s successes were recognised by his being voted an income of £40,000 per annum in addition to his revenue as a prince of the royal house. It was, in effect, blood money earned by war crimes.
While much of Cumberland’s reputation rests on the immediate events surrounding Culloden, he was also a strong advocate and savage pursuer of the suppression of Highland culture. He left behind him the largest army of occupation ever seen in Britain in order to pacify the Highlands while permanent fortifications were built.
He contributed to a policy of cultural imperialism by disarming the Highlands, abolishing the wearing of Highland dress, suppressing certain surnames linked with the rebellion and seeking to extirpate Catholicism from the land. He even suggested transporting whole clans like the Camerons and MacPhersons to the colonies – a sort of ethnic cleansing.
By helping to destroy the social nexus of the clan that was at the heart of Highland society, he helped sever the bond between chiefs and clanspeople that had been the basis of Highland society for centuries.
Lastly, by institutionalising the prejudice that the Highlanders were uncivilised, Cumberland also contributed to the racist views responsible for their later misfortunes.
Rab Houston is the editor of The New Penguin History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Penguin, 2005).

1800–1900

Jack the Ripper

Nominated by Professor Clive Emsley of the Open University

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
No-one can touch the serial killer Jack the Ripper for sheer wickedness during 19th-century Britain. Firstly, because he preyed on the most pathetic and vulnerable women in London’s East End. Secondly, for the sheer horror of his brutal crimes.
During his murder spree in the autumn of 1888, Jack the Ripper definitely killed five prostitutes – and possibly a couple of other women too – in the most appalling and extreme circumstances. His victims were disembowelled, their intestines draped over their shoulders and their breasts cut off. This man was manifestly a savage brute and while he may have had mental problems – he must have had, to do what he did – they can’t excuse his terrible actions.
The murders had huge repercussions at the time – and have influenced our view of serial killers ever since. For months after the murders women across the land, be it in Norwich or Newcastle, were terrified to go out at night. And while the press might have coined the name by which this most notorious serial killer is known, this does not detract from the savagery of his crimes. Of course, we assume it was “Jack”, and it probably was, but it just might have been “Jill”.
The Ripper has become a villain – for all time – and his shadow extends to the present day. And the way in which the world responds to modern serial killers such as the Yorkshire Ripper is influenced by the way we responded to the most notorious serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper.
All sorts of people have been accused of being Jack the Ripper: the painter Walter Sickert; rogue royals; Freemasons, you name it – but it seems unlikely we’ll ever know his true identity. However, this has just served to add to the mystique surrounding this most wicked of men.
Clive Emsley is the author of Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 (Hambledon, 2005).

1900–2000

Oswald Mosley

Nominated by Professor Joanna Bourke of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, London

_{Illustration by Jonty Clark}
Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was the founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. He remains an inspiration for far-right groups in Britain and thus continues to have a pernicious impact on our society. His authoritarian politics relied on anti-Semitism and anti-immigration, and the party’s willingness to use violence was most notoriously exhibited at the Fascist rally at Olympia in 1934.
His most evil act was inciting anti-Semitic feeling and in 1934, the BUF launched an anti-Semitic campaign in the East End of London, home to one-third of British Jews. He attacked the “big Jews” for threatening the economy and the “little Jews” for “swamping” British cultural identity. While he never succeeded in turning Britain Fascist, 70 per cent of respondents under 30 chose Fascism, when asked to choose between it and Communism, in a Gallup Poll in 1937.
He was handsome and charming, and his early career – in the Conservative and then Labour Party – showed him to be a man of ideas and energy. In the early 1920s, his opposition to the “Old Men” who supervised the carnage of the First World War won him many supporters. However he was vain, megalomaniac, and had delusions of grandeur, although Attlee observed that his theatrical displays were routinely derided (at one meeting, when Mosley strode on stage with his arm uplifted, a voice called out, “Yes, Oswald dear, you may go to the lavatory”).

It would be difficult to find a more unpopular politician than Mosley in 1945: he was widely regarded as a traitor and a symbol of Fascism. On his death in 1980 his son Nicholas concluded that his father was a man whose “right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory” while his left hand “let the rat out of the sewer”.
Joanna Bourke is the author of An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Granta, 2000).

8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Woodvilles

History Extra

Elizabeth Woodville (1437–1492) in 1463. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

king

One of 12 surviving siblings, Elizabeth herself was the product of a runaway match between Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, and a knight, Sir Richard Woodville. Here, Susan Higginbotham, author of The Woodvilles: The War of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family, reveals eight things you might not have known about Edward IV's in-laws…

1) Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, could have become queen

When Henry V died in 1422, he left his infant son, Henry VI, as king. During the royal minority, Henry V's younger brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, governed the kingdom – Bedford was in charge of the crown's French possessions, while Gloucester handled affairs at home.
In 1433, the widowed Bedford took as his second wife Jacquetta de Luxembourg, the 17-year-old niece of the Bishop of Thérouanne. Had little Henry VI died, under the usual order of succession Bedford would have become king of England, and Jacquetta his queen.
This, of course, did not happen. Instead, Bedford died after just two years of marriage, leaving Henry VI to grow up to rule disastrously on his own, and Jacquetta to make a shocking, secret marriage to Sir Richard Woodville, the son of Bedford's chamberlain. But although Jacquetta never wore a crown, her daughter Elizabeth would, through making her own clandestine marriage to Edward IV.

2) Elizabeth Woodville founded Queens' College – again

Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's queen, founded a college at Cambridge in 1448. When Henry VI lost his crown to Edward IV, the college fell on hard times. Enter Elizabeth, Edward's queen. In 1465 she refounded the college, and gave it its first statutes 10 years later.
It is often said that the placement of the apostrophe in Queens' reflects the fact that two queens founded the college, but the college disputes that story. Even if Elizabeth can't claim credit for the placement of an apostrophe, her portrait hangs in the college.

3) Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, was accused of witchcraft

In 1469, Edward had a falling-out with Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, over foreign policy and over what Warwick believed was the undue influence Edward gave to upstarts such as the Woodvilles.
Relations between the two deteriorated to the point where Warwick revolted against Edward, taking him prisoner and killing Elizabeth Woodville's father and her brother John.
During this period of upheaval, a follower of Warwick produced some lead images that he claimed Jacquetta had made for the purposes of witchcraft and sorcery. Despite the shock of her recent bereavement, Jacquetta refused to be cowed by the accusations, and wrote to the mayor and the aldermen of London for their assistance, which they granted.
Further intervention proved unnecessary, however, for Warwick found it decidedly awkward to keep holding the king captive, and released him. With Edward back in charge, the king’s council cleared Jacquetta of the charges against her. The accusations of witchcraft did not die, however, but were revived by Richard III in 1484, when his parliament declared that Jacquetta had used witchcraft to procure her daughter's marriage to the king.

_{Elizabeth Woodville with Edward IV in 1464. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)}

4) Anthony Woodville helped save London from a Lancastrian attack

Warwick reconciled with Edward IV, but the amity was short-lived. In 1470, Warwick allied with the exiled Margaret of Anjou to put the now imprisoned Henry VI back on the throne. Having been forced to flee the country, Edward IV returned to reclaim the throne and defeated the Lancastrians at the battles of Barnet (14 April 1471) and Tewkesbury (4 May 1471).
The Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury, however, did not end the conflict. Although Warwick was killed at Barnet, and Henry VI's teenage son was killed at Tewkesbury, Henry VI remained alive inside the Tower of London. With the thought of freeing him, a Neville relation known as the Bastard of Fauconberg launched an attack on London, which Edward had left in the charge of the Earl of Essex and Anthony, Earl Rivers, Elizabeth Woodville's brother.
As Fauconberg's men attacked Aldgate, Anthony drove them back, thus helping save London for the Yorkists – a feat his contemporaries would remember in verse: "Through his enemies that day did he pass / The mariners were killed, they cried "Alas!"

 

5) While abroad, Anthony Woodville was robbed

The most cultivated of the Woodville family, Anthony went on pilgrimage to Italy in 1476. The 2nd Earl Rivers did not travel light, and in Venice he was robbed of his jewels and plate, which were worth at least 1,000 marks.
It helps a traveller, however, to be the brother-in-law of the king of England. The Venetians promptly set about searching for the criminals and restoring to Anthony his jewels – which had been purchased by local citizens – while arranging to reimburse those who had bought the purloined goods in good faith. When Anthony finally resumed his travels, the Venetians were probably happy to see the last of him, as he had been a rather expensive visitor.

6) Anthony Woodville was a ‘techie’

In late 1475 or early 1476, William Caxton brought a newfangled device to England – the printing press. Soon he had produced the first book printed in England: an edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ever-popular Canterbury Tales.
The nobility, however, were slow to embrace this new technology, with Edward IV himself preferring to amass illuminated manuscripts. One nobleman, however, seized upon this new opportunity to disseminate knowledge to the masses: Anthony Woodville. He translated three books for Caxton to print, and may have been responsible for sending several others to press as well.
Caxton even made a joke about Anthony's love life. In his epilogue to Anthony's translation of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (a book which, sadly, has not withstood the test of time), Caxton noted that Anthony had omitted some of Socrates' unflattering observations about women. He surmised: “But I suppose that some fair lady hath desired him to leave it out of his book. Or else he was amorous on some noble lady…”

_{c1800: Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers. Engraved by Gerimia from the book A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors published 1806. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)}

7) The Woodvilles didn't rob the treasury

In 1483, Edward IV suddenly died, leaving a 12-year-old heir, Edward. By the time the dust settled, Edward IV's younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was king (Richard III), and Prince Edward and his younger brother had been taken to the Tower of London, never to be seen again.
For reasons that remain debatable, Gloucester arrested Anthony Woodville and several others after Edward IV's death, and Elizabeth Woodville fled into sanctuary. Legend has it she took with her part of the royal treasury, which she supposedly divvied up between one of her brothers and her oldest son from her first marriage. But did this really happen?
The sole source for the story is an Italian observer, Dominic Mancini, who reported the treasury story only as a rumour he had heard, not as an established fact. Richard III never accused Elizabeth or her family of stealing royal treasure, nor is there is any evidence that he believed any treasure was missing. In fact, as historian Rosemary Horrox has shown, excursions against the Scots had left the treasury seriously depleted by the time Edward IV died, and defending the realm against French pirates left England even poorer.
One Woodville, however, did acquire a very large sum during this time: Sir Edward Woodville, Elizabeth Woodville's youngest brother, who was busy patrolling the seas when Anthony was captured. In mid-May 1483 he seized some £10,250 in English gold from a vessel, claiming it for the crown. Soon afterward, learning that Gloucester had ordered his arrest, Edward sailed to Brittany – presumably taking his gold with him, for it was never heard of again.

8) Sir Edward Woodville lost his teeth for Ferdinand and Isabella

Having helped Henry Tudor defeat Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, Edward went to Spain the following year to fight the ‘infidels’, possibly in fulfillment of a vow. Having joined forces led by Ferdinand and Isabella to fight the Moors, Edward was mounting a scaling ladder when he was struck by a stone that knocked him unconscious and cost him his two front teeth.
Visited later by Henry VII and his queen, Edward quipped of his missing teeth: “Our Lord, who reared this fabric, has only opened a window in order to discern the more readily what passes within.”
When Edward finally returned to England, he did not go empty-handed: Queen Isabella sent him away with 12 Andalusian horses, two beds with rich hangings, and other valuables. But Edward's next foreign adventure proved to be his last: in 1488, he was killed while fighting for Brittany against France.

Susan Higginbotham is the author of The Woodvilles: The War of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (The History Press, March 2015), the first non-fiction book on the Woodville family. 

Isabella of France: the rebel queen

History Extra

Isabella of France. From the book 'Our Queen Mothers' by Elizabeth Villiers (1936). (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Here, writing for History Extra, Warner offers a vivid account of this most fascinating and influential of women…

Isabella of France married King Edward II of England in Boulogne, northern France, on 25 January 1308 when she was 12 and he was 23. She was the sixth of the seven children of Philip IV, king of France from 1285 to 1314 and often known to history as Philippe le Bel or Philip the Fair, and Joan I, who had become queen of the small Spanish kingdom of Navarre in her own right in 1274 when she was only a year old.
Isabella’s two older sisters, Marguerite and Blanche, died in childhood, as did her younger brother, Robert. Her three older brothers all reigned as kings of France and Navarre: Louis X, who died at the age of 26 in 1316; Philip V, who died aged 30 at the beginning of 1322; and Charles IV, who died at the age of 33 in 1328. The three brothers were the last kings of the Capetian dynasty that had ruled France since 987. As they all died leaving daughters but no surviving sons, they were succeeded by their cousin Philip VI, first of the Valois kings who ruled France until 1589.
Isabella’s son Edward III of England claimed the throne of France in the 1330s as the only surviving grandson of Philip IV, and began what much later became known as the Hundred Years’ War.
Isabella arrived in England for the first time on 7 February 1308. She never met her husband’s father Edward I (or ‘Longshanks’), who had died on 7 July 1307, and she certainly never met William Wallace (as depicted in Braveheart), who had been executed on 23 August 1305.
She and Edward II were jointly crowned king and queen of England at Westminster Abbey on 25 February 1308, exactly a month after their wedding. Isabella was too young to play any role in English politics for a few years, and likewise too young to be Edward’s wife in more than name only. Since the early 1300s, Edward II had been infatuated with a young nobleman of Béarn in southern France called Piers Gaveston, whom he made Earl of Cornwall and married to his royal niece Margaret de Clare in 1307.
Gaveston was assassinated in June 1312 by a group of English barons sick of his excessive influence over the king. The barons were led by the wealthy and powerful Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was Edward II’s first cousin and Isabella’s uncle (the younger half-brother of her mother, Joan I of Navarre). The king finally gained his revenge on Lancaster 10 years later when he had him beheaded for treason in March 1322.

_{Edward II. Wood engraving c1900. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)}
Queen Isabella, now 16 or 17, was already pregnant with her first child when her husband’s beloved Piers Gaveston was killed, and her son was born at Windsor Castle on Monday 13 November 1312. He was the future Edward III, king of England from January 1327 until June 1377. Three more children were born to the royal couple. They were John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in August 1316; Eleanor of Woodstock, duchess of Guelders, in June 1318; and Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland, in July 1321.
Isabella and Edward II seemingly had a successful, mutually affectionate marriage until the early 1320s, and certainly it was not the unhappy, tragic disaster from start to finish as it is sometimes portrayed. Most of the negative stories often told in modern literature about the couple – for example that Edward gave Isabella’s jewels or wedding gifts to Piers Gaveston in 1308, that he abandoned her weeping and pregnant in 1312 to save Gaveston, or that he cruelly removed her children from her custody in 1324 – are much later fabrications.
An eyewitness to the royal couple’s extended visit to Isabella’s homeland from May to July 1313 stated that Edward loved Isabella, and that the reason for his arriving late for a meeting with Isabella’s father Philip IV was because the royal couple had overslept after their night-time “dalliances”. During this trip, Edward saved Isabella’s life when a fire broke out in their pavilion one night, and he scooped her up and rushed out into the street with her, both of them naked.

_{Edward III. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}
Unfortunately, Edward II’s excessive favouritism towards his last and most powerful ‘favourite’, Hugh Despenser the Younger, an English nobleman who had married one of Edward’s nieces in 1306 and who was appointed as the king’s chamberlain in 1318, was to cause an irrevocable breakdown in Isabella and Edward’s marriage in and after 1322. Isabella had tolerated her husband’s previous male favourites, including Piers Gaveston and Roger Damory (a knight of Oxfordshire who was high in Edward’s favour from about 1315 to 1318), but she loathed and feared Hugh Despenser. Not without reason: Despenser seems to have gone out of his way to reduce Isabella’s influence over her husband and even her ability to see him, and Edward II allowed him to do so. When Edward went to war with Isabella’s brother Charles IV of France in 1324, he began to treat Isabella as an enemy alien and confiscated her lands.
Isabella was not a person to tolerate such disrespect. In March 1325, Edward sent her to France to negotiate a peace settlement with her brother, which she did successfully. Some months later, Edward made a fatal error. As Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Ponthieu and a peer of the realm of France, he owed homage to Charles IV as his liege lord, but for various reasons was reluctant to leave an England now seething with discontent and rebellion against his and Hugh Despenser’s greedy and despotic rule. Edward therefore sent his elder son and heir Edward of Windsor, not quite 13 years old, in his place to perform the ceremony in September 1325.
With her son under her control and under the protection of her brother, Isabella imposed an ultimatum on Edward for her return to England and to him: that he would send Despenser away from court and allow her to resume her normal married life with him and her rightful position as queen, and restore her to her lands. Edward, highly dependent on Despenser, refused. Isabella therefore had no choice but to remain in France.
She began some kind of relationship with an English baron named Roger Mortimer, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1322 after taking part in a baronial rebellion against the king and his favourite but escaped in 1323. Mortimer was a man with the ability and the will to lead an invasion of England and destroy Hugh Despenser and his father, the Earl of Winchester, and, if need be, bring down the king himself. Although their relationship has been romanticised to a considerable degree in much modern literature, it is far more likely to have been a pragmatic political alliance than a passionate love affair, at least in the beginning.
Isabella betrothed her son Edward of Windsor to a daughter of the Count of Hainault in modern-day Belgium in order to secure ships, mercenaries and cash to invade England. Her invasion force arrived in England on 24 September 1326, the first to do so since her great-great-grandfather Louis of France had attempted to wrest the English throne from Edward II’s great-grandfather King John in 1216. The king’s support collapsed almost immediately, and his two half-brothers, the Earls of Norfolk and Kent, and cousin the Earl of Lancaster, joined the queen. Hugh Despenser and his father, and the king’s loyal ally the Earl of Arundel, were caught and grotesquely executed.

_{Isabella of France at Hereford upon her invasion of England, 1326. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo)}
A parliament was held in London at the beginning of 1327, which decided that Edward II must be forced to abdicate his throne to his 14-year-old son Edward of Windsor. Finally accepting that he had no other choice, he did so, and Edward III’s reign began on 25 January 1327 – his parents’ 19th wedding anniversary. The young king married the Count of Hainault’s daughter, Philippa, a year later.
A regency council was set up to rule the country in Edward III’s name until he came of age. Although Queen Isabella and her favourite Roger Mortimer were not appointed members of it, it seems that they ruled England for several years. Within a very short time, their greed and self-interest made them as unpopular as Edward II and Hugh Despenser had been; Isabella had little capacity for learning from her husband’s mistakes.
In the meantime, the death of the former Edward II at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire on 21 September 1327 was announced, and his funeral was held at St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester (now Gloucester Cathedral) on 20 December 1327. How Edward died, whether by suffocation or illness or something else – the infamous red-hot poker is a later invention and dismissed by modern experts on the era – or whether Edward even died at all is still a matter of passionate debate. There is, however, no real reason to suppose that Isabella of France ordered the murder of her own husband. She had sent him gifts while he was in captivity in 1327.

_{Tomb of Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral. (© Angelo Hornak/Alamy Stock Photo)}
Edward III’s first child – a son, Edward of Woodstock – was born on 15 June 1330 when he was 17, and the king was already chafing under the tutelage of his mother and her despised favourite Mortimer. On 19 October 1330, still a month short of his 18th birthday, the king launched a dramatic coup against the pair at Nottingham Castle, and had Mortimer hanged on 29 November. Isabella was held under house arrest for a while, and was forced to give up the vast lands and income she had appropriated; she had awarded herself 20,000 marks or 13,333 pounds a year, the largest income anyone in England received (the kings excepted) in the entire Middle Ages. It was hardly a wonder that Edward III found his coffers almost entirely empty.
Isabella of France was of high royal birth, and her son the king perforce treated her with respect and consideration; he claimed the throne of France through his mother, so could hardly imprison her. After her short period of detention she was allowed to go free and some years later was restored to her pre-1324 income of £4,500. For more than a quarter of a century Isabella lived an entirely conventional life as a dowager queen, travelling between her estates, entertaining many royal and noble guests, listening to minstrels and spending vast sums of money on clothes and jewels. The idea that her son locked her up in Castle Rising in Norfolk and that she went mad is merely a (much later) fabrication with no basis whatsoever in fact.
The dowager queen of England died at Hertford Castle on 22 August 1358, aged 62 or 63, and was buried on 27 November at the fashionable Greyfriars church in London. Her aunt Marguerite of France, second queen of Edward I, was also buried here, and so, four years later, was Isabella’s daughter Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland. Roger Mortimer, however, was not: the often-repeated tale that Isabella chose to lie for eternity next to her long-dead but never forgotten lover is a romantic myth.

The dowager queen was buried with the clothes she had worn at her wedding to Edward II 50 years previously and, according to a rather later tradition, with his heart on her breast. Sadly, the Greyfriars church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, rebuilt then destroyed again by bombs in the Second World War, and Isabella’s final resting-place is therefore lost.
Kathryn Warner is the author of Isabella of France: The Rebel Queen (Amberley Publishing, 2016).

To kidnap a king: the foiled plot to abduct Edward VI

History Extra

King Edward VI by an unknown artist after Hans Holbein the Younger. Oil on panel, c1542, National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, power was quickly grasped by Edward Seymour, who became both lord protector and Duke of Somerset. He was unwilling to share power with his younger brother, who had been little esteemed by the old king. The relationship between the pair was further soured when Thomas married Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s widow. The younger Seymour hoped to be appointed guardian of the king, but there was little prospect of his brother relinquishing the role.
Thomas Seymour had been pleased to be appointed Lord High Admiral early in 1547, telling his friend Sir William Sharington that it gave him “the rule of a good sort of ships and men. And I tell you it is a good thing to have the rule of men”. He suffered disappointment, however, when Lord Clinton was instead appointed to head the English navy that summer in the Protector’s invasion of Scotland. Thomas Seymour remained in London, kicking his heels about the court as Somerset surged northwards, winning a victory against the Scots at the battle of Pinkie, east of Edinburgh, on 10 September 1547. With the protector gone, Thomas Seymour was able to gain access easily to the king in his apartments at Hampton Court.
Sitting with his royal nephew one day, Thomas told Edward that Somerset would never be able to dominate in Scotland “without loss of a great number of men or of himself; and therefore that he spent a great sum of money in vain”. This hit a nerve with the king, since Somerset was widely believed to be embezzling Henry VIII’s treasury and alienating his lands. Thomas chided his nephew that he was “too bashful” in his own affairs, and that he should speak up in order to “bear rule, as other kings do”. Edward shook his head, declaring that “I needed not, for I was well enough”, yet he registered his uncle’s words.

_{Thomas Seymour, c1545. Original publication from the original by Hans Holbein. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}
When Thomas came to him again that September, he told the child that “ye must take upon you yourself to rule, for ye shall be able enough as well as other kings; and then ye may give your men somewhat; for your uncle is old, and I trust will not live long”. Edward’s reply was chilling: “it were better that he should die”. Indeed, there was little love lost between the monarch and the lord protector. Thomas also informed Edward that “ye are but even a beggarly king now,” drawing attention to the fact that he had no money with which to play at cards or reward his servants. Thomas would, he assured Edward, supply him with the sums required. In return, Edward assured his uncle that he was happy to take “secret measures” to ensure that he replaced Somerset as royal governor.
Somerset’s absence in Scotland had handed the king to his brother, and Thomas meant to capitalise on it. He trawled through royal records, seeking out precedents to support his bid to become the king’s governor, and he began to build support at court. He was, however, incapable of concealing his actions: word soon reached Somerset that a plot was afoot and, abandoning a promising situation in Scotland, he hurried southwards. He re-established control, banning his brother from meeting with the king. This had little effect, however, since Thomas was friends with several members of the privy chamber. It was a simple matter to communicate with the boy over the coming months.
The relationship between the brothers remained frosty into the following year. The death in childbirth of Thomas’s wife, Katherine Parr, on 5 September 1548 also failed to heal relations. Although Katherine had once been so furious with the protector that she had threatened to bite him, she had been a restraining hand on her husband. With her death, he moved headlong towards his ruin.
Henry VIII’s younger daughter, Princess Elizabeth, had originally lived with Katherine and Thomas, but had been sent away after the queen had caught her husband embracing the girl that June. Thomas Seymour had toyed with marrying the teenager before he wed the queen, and had carried out a flirtation with her for more than a year at the queen’s residences at Chelsea and Hanworth and in his own London residence, Seymour Place. With Katherine’s death, Thomas became, as Elizabeth’s governess, Katherine Ashley, informed her, “the noblest man unmarried in this land”. Soon, her cofferer, Thomas Parry, was meeting privately with Seymour in London. It seemed that Elizabeth was prepared to consider marriage with the king’s younger uncle.

Who was the real Edward VI?

At the same time as his negotiations with Elizabeth’s servant, Thomas Seymour was also plotting to bring down his brother. For some months he had been attempting to win friends in the counties by visiting important local men. In October 1548 he informed his ally, Sir William Sharington that from his own tenants and servants he could muster 10,000 men. Sharington was himself a useful ally, since he was the under-treasurer of the Bristol mint and had been counterfeiting testoons [silver coins] since the spring of 1548, stamped with his own initials and a bust of Henry VIII.
In the autumn of 1548, Seymour asked Sharington how much money would be required to pay and ration 10,000 men for a month, before declaring “God’s faith, Sharington, if we had £10,000 in ready money; that were well, could not you be able to make so much money?”. The coiner agreed that it could be done and set to work. Thomas began to provision Holt Castle, a fortification that stood at an important crossing point on the River Dee, giving access to south Wales.
Thomas Seymour was a regular visitor to the king’s chambers during the winter of 1548–9. He was there on the evening of 6 January 1549, where he spoke jovially to the king’s attendants, unaware that the Bristol mint had been searched by the protector’s servants that day. While Thomas Seymour appeared nonchalant at Sharington’s arrest a few days later, he understood the implications that it had for his own plot. On the night of the arrest, John Fowler, who was Seymour’s chief contact in the king’s privy chamber, came to him in a state of alarm, lamenting that “I am utterly undone”. Privately, Seymour resolved to bring his plot forwards.
From around 10 January, he began to invite the Marquess of Dorset and the Earl of Huntington – both men he believed he could trust – to Seymour Place in the evenings. The talk was mundane, but on each evening the meetings would break up suddenly, with Seymour setting out alone for the court at Westminster. There, his behaviour was suspicious. He would go quietly into the buttery, where alcohol for the court was kept. Pouring himself a drink, he would wait alone among the bottles and barrels until John Fowler appeared. Each time, he asked “whether the king would say anything of him?” “Nay in good faith” replied Fowler. At once melancholy, Thomas wished aloud that Edward was five or six years older. At the end of each visit, the king’s younger uncle would insist that Fowler “bring him word when the king was rising”. Every morning he did so.

_{Anonymous portrait of Katherine Parr, c1545. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)}
By day, Seymour was still attending parliament, but his strange behaviour was beginning to be noticed. While talking to John Fowler on one occasion, Seymour was informed about orders that had been given to ensure that the king remained safely locked away at night. Thomas asked what was meant by this, but Fowler said he could not tell. Thomas concurred: “No I neither. What is he afraid that any man will take the king away from him? If he think that I will go about it, he shall watch a good while”. It was hardly a baseless concern, as Fowler himself could attest, since Seymour had once commented to him that “there is a slender company about the king”, before stating that “a man might steal away the king now, for there come more with me than is in all the house besides”. Such a course, if successful, would, de facto, give Seymour the coveted governorship of the king’s person.
On 16 January, a servant informed Thomas Seymour that the Earl of Rutland, whom he considered a friend, had made a deposition against him to the council. Hearing this, he began to suspect “by diverse conjectures” (as he later admitted) that the council intended his arrest. That evening, Seymour’s brother-in-law, the Marquess of Northampton, found him in a state of high agitation, rehearsing the day’s events out loud.
After sending Northampton away, Seymour went to court, arriving in the evening. Once there he spoke to the king’s guards, scattering their watch as he sent them on various errands. With a key that had been given to him by one of the king’s chamberlains he was able to open the door to the room adjoining the king’s bedchamber, “which he entered in the dead of night”. There, he disturbed the little dog, which usually slept in the king’s bedroom, and was his “most faithful guardian”. In the ensuing panic he stabbed the dog to death with his dagger, before fleeing home once more to Seymour Place.
The next day Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Later, he would be accused of trying “to instil into His Grace’s head” the idea that he should “take upon himself the government and managing of his own affairs”. In his evening visits to court the week before, did he meet with the king and plan an “abduction” with him? It would seem plausible that the bedchamber key had been given to him on Edward’s command, since none of his attendants was ever accused of this.
In the Tower, Seymour, while at his lowest ebb, wrote the lines of verse: “forgetting God to love a king / Hath been my rod, or else nothing”. His protests of innocence, too, insofar as he made any defence, were based on the claim that he had had the king’s confidence and approval in everything. How could it be treason to do as the king asked? He probably hoped to collect Princess Elizabeth at Hatfield on the way out of London. At Holt Castle, the three could then wait for the protector to fall before Thomas Seymour – the king’s new brother-in-law – emerged to take his place.
Unfortunately for Seymour, by leaving his dog in the chamber outside his bedroom the boy-king had botched his own escape attempt. On 20 March 1549, Thomas Seymour lost his head for it.

Elizabeth Norton is a historian of the queens of England and the Tudor period. She is the author of England's Queens: The Biography and The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor, which looks at the relationship between the future Elizabeth I and Thomas Seymour, the uncle of King Edward VI.

Henry VIII’s mistresses: who else did the Tudor king sleep with?

History Extra

Portrait of Mary Boleyn, mistress of Henry VIII, by Holbein the Younger. (Hever Castle Ltd/Bridgeman Images)

Popular history is so well versed in the six wives of Henry VIII that they require little introduction. From the colourful bodice-ripper series The Tudors (2007–10) to the flickering candlelight of Wolf Hall (2015), we are reminded of the old mantra we learned at school: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. 

 

We might also be forgiven for thinking that the king was so busy keeping up with the women to whom he was legally united that he had little time for any others. However, Henry, with his “angelic” face, athletic build and red-gold hair, had an eye for the ladies, and in his early years, particularly, few were able to resist him. 

 

Paradoxically, we can learn most about Henry’s mistresses through his wives. Anne Boleyn’s refusal to sleep with the king in the late 1520s was all the more successful because until this point he was accustomed to other women saying yes. Two of them in particular are known to us: Elizabeth Blount and Anne’s own sister, Mary, who were Henry’s lovers in the late 1510s and early 1520s after he started to question his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. 

 

Bessie Blount

Elizabeth, or ‘Bessie’, is the first woman who is known, with any certainty, to have been Henry’s mistress. She was born at Kinlet in Shropshire in around 1500, making her just a teenager at the time she arrived at Henry’s court. Her family home fell under the jurisdiction of Catherine of Aragon’s first husband, Arthur, so it is not impossible that the young Catherine saw Bessie as a baby during her residence at Ludlow Castle in 1501–02. In fact, it is quite likely that Bessie’s parents capitalised on this early connection to place their daughter in the queen’s household. 

 

Two court dances suggest the duration of Bessie’s tenure. Bessie is recorded as being one of eight in a masque performed to celebrate new year 1515, partnered by Henry himself. Then, in October 1518 she was paired with courtier Francis Bryan during a masque performed at Durham House in London. It was around this time that she fell pregnant with Henry’s son. 

 

The pregnant Bessie disappeared from court, taken in secret by Henry’s leading minister, Thomas Wolsey, into the safety of the Essex countryside. There, at the Augustinian priory of St Laurence at Blackmore, also known as ‘Jericho’, Bessie gave birth to Henry Fitzroy, the king’s only acknowledged illegitimate child. 

 

Henry stayed at two of his nearby properties that summer, Havering-atte-Bowe (aka Havering-atte-Bower) in August and Beaulieu in September, which would have allowed him to visit his newborn son, had he been minded to do so. What Catherine thought of the arrangement, or whether she was then aware of the situation, is not recorded. Wolsey stood in as godfather and the boy would later be given such significant titles as the Duke of Somerset and Richmond. 

 

A marriage was arranged for Bessie to Gilbert Tailboys in 1522 (although some sources suggest 1519) and she retired from court for a time, bearing at least two more children (some sources suggest three while others say four) in the early 1520s. The uncertainty of the children’s birth dates has led to speculation that they were fathered by Henry, although by this time we know he had moved on to Mary Boleyn. Bessie remarried in the 1530s following Tailboys’ death and lived long enough to predecease Henry Fitzroy (who died in 1536), serving briefly as a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves shortly before her own death in around 1540.

 

^{Henry Fitzroy, illegitimate son of Henry VIII and his mistress Elizabeth Blount. (The Print Collector/Getty Images)}

 

Mary Boleyn

Another masque marks the entry of the Boleyn sisters to the Tudor scene. In March 1522, Mary took the part of Kindness and Anne that of Perseverance in the Chateau Vert pageant at York Place. Henry was among the eight men led by the figure of ‘Ardent Desire’ to lay siege to the castle to rescue the women. 

 

Anne had recently returned from the French court, which Mary had left several years before – rumours still persisted that Mary had been intimate with Francis I. In February 1520 Henry had attended Mary’s wedding to his gentleman of the privy chamber, William Carey, or at least sent a gift in addition to his offering of 8s 6d. The exact moment Mary became Henry’s mistress is unclear, but it is interesting that her marriage coincided with substantial gifts from Henry to her father and husband. 

 

Much of Mary’s personality and education eludes us, as do the details and duration of her affair with Henry. Both she and Anne were already known to Henry as the daughters of Sir Thomas Boleyn who, along with Wolsey, had masterminded the magnificent Anglo-French meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Yet it was Mary who caught Henry’s eye first and her two children, Catherine and Henry, born in 1524 and 1526 respectively, have sometimes been attributed to the king. As Mary was married, though, the children were legally considered to be those of her husband, who always treated them as such. 

 

By the time of Henry Carey’s birth, though, the king’s attention had wandered to the enchanting, dark-eyed Anne Boleyn. We only know about his prior relationship with Mary because he required a dispensation to marry her sister, and had to admit to the affair. When questioned about his relations with the Boleyn girls and their mother, Henry replied, tellingly, “never with the mother”.

 

After Carey’s death from the sweating sickness, Mary remarried for love, returning briefly to court during her sister’s reign and admitting her secret. Mary was banished for her indiscretion and lived out her days in the Essex countryside.

 

^{Hever Castle, Kent. The seat of the Boleyn family, including Anne and her sister Mary, who was one of Henry VIII’s mistresses. (Peter Thompson/Heritage Images/Getty Images)}

 

Henry’s relations with Bessie and Mary are known to us almost by accident. If Henry Fitzroy had not lived, or had Henry not been forced to declare his past relationship with Mary, he might today be lauded by historians for his faithfulness to Catherine of Aragon. 

 

These accidental survivals raise the question of what other secrets have remained concealed in Henry’s private life. Glimmers of possible affairs can be read into his associations with other women at his court. In 1534, during the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote that Henry had “renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of his court” and that Anne attempted to “dismiss the damsel from her service”.

 

Referred to as the ‘imperial lady’, the identity of this woman cannot be verified, but her presence seems to have put a strain upon Henry’s marriage, occasioning harsh words between husband and wife. ‘Imperial’ may not have referred to the woman’s origins but instead highlighted her sympathies to the cause of Rome and Henry’s rejected daughter, Mary. 

 

Also from this era date the rumours of Henry’s involvement with Anne Boleyn’s cousin, Margaret (or ‘Madge’) Shelton, who may be the same person as a Mary Shelton, who until recently was assumed to be Anne’s sister. Chapuys’ letters from February 1535 make reference to a Mistress Shelton, and any affair she had with Henry would date to that year. Early in 1536 Madge was engaged to the ill-fated Henry Norris, who lost his head along with Anne Boleyn that May. Mistress Shelton was suggested as a potential wife for the widowed king two years later, but she married another man in 1546 and lived well into the reign of Elizabeth I. 

 

^{Mary Shelton, after she married to become Lady Heveningham. By Hans Holbein the Younger. (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II/Bridgeman Images)}

 

Other women

Most of the other reputed mistresses who may have shared Henry’s bed date from the earlier part of his reign. During Catherine of Aragon’s first pregnancy, in 1509, Henry was embroiled with Anne Hastings, sister of the Duke of Buckingham and a newly married member of Catherine’s household. Henry’s close friend William Compton appears to have acted as a go-between, although Anne later went on to have an affair with Compton himself. Henry sent her away from court in retaliation. 

 

There was also a ‘Madame the Bastard’ who kept Henry dancing into the small hours of the morning in 1513 at the court of Margaret of Savoy, and Étiennette de la Baume, whose plaintive letter to Henry asking for assistance reminded him of the promise he had made her when leaving France that year, and that he had called her his ‘page’. 

 

There was the mysterious Jane Popincourt, who was refused entry to France by Louis XII, with the comment that she should be burned, plus a host of other ladies who received gifts from Henry at some point, or danced with him in a masque. Their connections with Henry are only fleeting and suggested, yet they might hint at secrets that the king had hidden more successfully than those of Bessie and Mary.

 

Given Henry’s desire for an heir, it is unsurprising that various stories survive that connect him with illegitimate paternity. The timing of these is interesting, with three in particular dating from the period when the king was wooing Anne Boleyn and, apparently, refraining from sex. If Henry did not sleep with Anne until 1532, Tudor medicine would have advised him not to remain completely celibate, as this would have been thought to imperil his health. Accordingly, Henry may have sought solace elsewhere. 

 

Mary Berkeley had been married in 1526 to her uncle’s ward, Thomas Perrot, settling in Pembrokeshire. Perrot had been knighted by Henry that year and was a great hunter; it is thought that Mary was part of Catherine’s household, placing the pair at court during these years. Mary’s eldest son, John, was born in November 1528 and reputedly bore a great resemblance to the king. As a young man John was in the king’s favour – Henry once intervened to prevent him from being punished after he was drawn into a brawl. Later involved with piracy, debt, deception and scandal, John’s reputed parentage may have been a convenient way to escape retribution. 

 

^{Henry VIII wearing the outfit worn for his marriage to Anne of Cleves. Painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)}

 

In the same way, another man claimed to be Henry’s son, with perhaps the same intentions. Thomas Stukeley was employed as a standard bearer in 1547, placing him in his late teens. The son of Jane Pollard, who was married in around 1520 to Sir Hugh Stukeley, Thomas is thought to have been conceived when Henry stayed at their Devon home of Affeton Castle. Thomas was something of a romantic figure, and poems and plays written about him after his death (for example, George Peele’s 1590s work The Battle of Alcazar) served to inflame such rumours. 

 

Finally, the child arguably most likely to be related to Henry is an Ethelreda, or Audrey, Malte. If Henry had sought sexual satisfaction from someone other than Anne Boleyn, he is more likely to have turned to a woman of the lower classes, who were considered to be more ‘earthy’ and would not complicate lines of dynastic inheritance. Audrey’s mother was a Joan or Joanna Dingley, employed as a royal laundress, and the girl was raised by one of the cutters in the king’s wardrobe [who cut clothing patterns out of cloth]. John Malte “and Awdrye his base daughter” received a grant of £1,312 from the king while he lay on his deathbed, a huge sum for mere servants. Nothing more is known of Joanna or her daughter.

 

What this exploration of Henry’s love life makes tantalisingly clear is the fragile nature of the surviving sources. Henry’s desire for secrecy, and his ability to achieve it, are coupled with the problematic nature of rumour and second-hand accounts that date from this period. It may be that Chapuys exaggerated, or that Perrot made false claims; perhaps, in the case of Jane Popincourt, Louis XII was mistaken; or Anne Hastings’ sister was being over-protective.

 

What we know for certain is that our scant knowledge of Henry’s affairs with Bessie and Mary reached us accidentally and indirectly. Far from being a prude, Henry was a very private man and took measures to cover his tracks. When it comes to the question of who shared the king’s bed, it is likely that we will never know the full truth.

 

Amy Licence is a journalist and historian and the author of books including In Bed With the Tudors (Amberley Publishing, 2012), The Six Wives and Many Mistresses of Henry VIII, (Amberley Publishing, 2014) and Elizabeth of York: The Forgotten Tudor Queen (Amberley Publishing, 2013).