The original suffragette: the extraordinary Mary Wollstonecraft

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Her argument – outrageous at the time – was that women were capable of reason, and deserved to have that recognised. Now it’s our turn to recognise her contribution to women’s rights.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797)

Meet the original suffragette: Mary Wollstonecraft. The founder of feminism, a philosopher, travel writer, human rights activist, she was a profound influence on the Romantics, and an educational pioneer. In Virginia Woolf’s words, “we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.” This may be true, but it’s not as true as I’d like. The writer of Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) sank into relative obscurity after her death, aged 38. Why?

Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 into a picturesquely bleak family. She had a violent alcoholic father, and a weak, unsympathetic mother. Despite her inauspicious beginnings, she dragged herself upwards, eventually becoming a self-supporting bestselling international human-rights celebrity. The self-supporting bit is key – for her, independence was “the grand blessing of life”.

She argued, apparently outrageously, that women were capable of reason – all they lacked was education. An early role model, she translated and reviewed essays on natural history, and she was speaking the language of human rights before the term existed. She didn’t exclude men, or indeed anyone. Perhaps her most quotable maxim is “I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves.”

Wollstonecraft saw marriage as slavery and had her first child out of wedlock. When she set off on a mysterious mission, chasing a Norwegian captain along the treacherous shores of the Skagerrak, she took her baby with her. And knocked off a bestseller along the way. Has there been another treasure-hunting single mum philosopher on the high seas?

But Wollstonecraft died not one, but two deaths. First in childbirth, bringing the author Mary Shelley into the world – the agonising post-partum infection took 10 days to finish her off. She left behind two daughters and a devastated husband, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin.

Godwin, still grieving, wrote her first biography. And in doing so, he unwittingly brought about Wollstonecraft’s second death: her reputation was killed in the scandal following the revelation of her unconventional life and loves. Overnight she became toxic. The shockwaves were massive, and lasting. Wollstonecraft’s enemies couldn’t contain their glee: here was proof irrefutable that she was a whore, a “hyena in petticoats” as Horace Walpole described her.

Scurrilous poems did the rounds, including an exceptionally unpleasant piece of work called The Un-sex’d Females. This was poetry functioning as an 18th-century Twitter: mocking Wollstonecraft as a “poor maniac” a “voluptuous” victim of “licentious love.” The author also crowed that “she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable.” In that oldest of misogynistic chestnuts: she was asking for it. She was a trouble-maker, and she died a woman’s death. Take note, ladies!

Even Wollstonecraft’s friends and allies stepped back; silenced, shaking their heads. Wollstonecraft’s legacy was trashed for well over a century and even today, despite a number of outstanding modern biographies, there’s still no significant memorial to her anywhere.

Mary on the Green is the campaign for a statue of Wollstonecraft in the north London area of Stoke Newington, where she lived, worked, and founded a school. The historian Mary Beard wrote in support that “every woman who wants to make a difference to how this country is run, from the House of Commons to the pub quiz, has Mary Wollstonecraft to thank”.

This article was previously published in The Guardian

Bee Rowlatt is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and has reported for the World Service, Newsnight and BBC2. The co-author of the best-selling Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad as well as one of the writers featured in Virago’s 2013 anthology Fifty Shades of Feminism, she won the K. Blundell Trust award for In Search of Mary.

Bee’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival 2018, entitled. ‘Equality For Women: From Mary Wollstonecraft To The Suffragettes And Beyond is on Wednesday 27th June. Tickets are available here.

Those Magnificent Men..

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One summer’s afternoon, in 1917, Grahame Donald attempted a new manoeuvre in his Sopwith Camel. He flew the machine up and over, and as he reached the top of his loop, hanging upside down, six thousand feet above the ground, his safety belt snapped – and he fell out. He was not wearing a parachute; they existed but were not issued to British pilots in the belief that their availability would impair fighting spirit. Hurtling to earth, with nothing to break his fall, Donald’s death was less than a minute away – but it didn’t come. In an interview given fifty-five years later, he says: 

The first two thousand feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably ‘firma’. As I fell, I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her.

The Camel had continued its loop downwards, and Donald claims that he landed on its top wing – which he grabbed with both hands. Hooking a foot into the cockpit, he managed to wrestle himself back in, before taking the controls, and executing ‘an unusually good landing.’

If you were told this story by a man propping up a bar, you might smile politely and check your watch. But if it was told by Air Marshal Sir Grahame Donald KCB, DFC, AFC to a member of staff at the Imperial War Museum, you might feel inclined to believe it. 

At the time of his unlikely escape, Grahame Donald was a member of the Royal Naval Air Service, the naval wing of the flying services, but he would not be for long. On 1 April 1918, the RNAS amalgamated with its army cousin, the Royal Flying Corps, to form a new service, the Royal Air Force. 

Over the previous three and a half years of the war, the army and navy branches had competed for limited resources, each pursuing its own strategic ends, and it was now felt necessary to impose some kind of unity. 

Soldiers and sailors found themselves shoehorned together into an upstart service with no traditions, and many were not happy. One described the Royal Air Force as a ‘complete hotch potch’ whilst another complained that the new blue-grey uniform made him look like an actor in a comic opera. Most, however, were too busy fighting a new kind of war in the skies over France, to concern themselves with the politics of the world’s second independent air force. The Royal Air Force had been pipped at the post. Three weeks earlier, the Finnish Air Force, consisting of one aircraft and a man to fly it, had been formed.

The men who came together to form the Royal Air Force were leaping into the unknown. When the first four squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps flew across the channel to France, days after the outbreak of war in August 1914, it was unclear what role they would play. They began by watching the movements of the enemy, but the generals were not initially inclined to believe reports gathered by ‘fleets of flying birdcages’. The birdcages proved accurate, however, and aerial reconnaissance reports were soon relied on by both sides. 

Once cameras were fitted onto aircraft, they were used to map the entire Western Front in minute detail. The changing nature of the conflict gave the aeroplane its second crucial role. As the war stabilized into a stalemate of mud, wire, and attrition, artillery became the army’s most important weapon, and aircraft were used to range gunfire onto enemy positions, by flying over the target, and reporting the accuracy of each shell burst, back to the battery in Morse code.

These jobs (as well as bombing, and, in later years, ground strafing) made up the daily work of the Royal Flying Corps. This work was the reason for its growing importance, and it was to protect the aircraft, and to prevent the enemy from carrying out similar work, that aeroplanes were turned into fighting machines. This is how the great aces came to prowl the skies in search of prey; it is why young men engaged in gladiatorial dogfights to the death. 

There were no dogfights at the start, however. In the earliest days, rival airmen would wave as they passed each other, but before long, they began arming themselves with revolvers and rifles. The chance of hitting one moving aircraft from another with a single bullet was minimal, although lucky strikes did occur. Gilbert Mapplebeck was a pilot with 4 Squadron, who was hit in the thigh by a rifle bullet fired from a German machine. He was unfortunate enough to be carrying loose change in his pocket, and the force of the bullet drove a twenty-five franc piece into his groin, slicing away the tip of his penis. 

Aircraft were turned more fearsome when mounted with machine guns aimed away from the propeller, but the aeroplane’s fighting potential truly began to reveal itself in the spring of 1915, when Anthony Fokker – a young Dutch designer working for the Germans – perfected a synchronizing gear that enabled a machine gun to fire safely through the spinning blades. The aircraft Fokker had offered his services to the British authorities before the war, and been turned down, and his successful invention now threatened to clear the skies of British aircraft. An arms race took hold, its goal being aerial dominance, and for the remainder of the war, aerial superiority swung back and forth between the sides.

This was a new concept of warfare; one in which progress depended not on past experience, nor on the views of the authorities, but on the initiative of the young airmen themselves. Only they truly knew what could – and could not – be done in an aircraft. In 1914, they decided to toss darts over the side of their machines. By 1918, they were dropping mammoth 1660 pounder bombs on German cities from the bomb racks of their Handley Page heavy bombers.  And just as they used initiative in the air, so they demonstrated it on the ground.  Individualist, unkempt, lacking in traditional military discipline, First World War airmen represented a new breed of soldier. When Archibald James, a pilot with 5 Squadron, returned from leave, he brought with him eight clear breaches of discipline:

Before returning to France I had bought from the local pack of harriers in Sussex, four pairs of hounds.  These I took out with me to France.  And when I arrived, they were greeted with a minimum of enthusiasm by my ardent soldier commanding officer. A considerably strained relationship ensued but the hounds were great fun.  I hunted hares of which there were quite a number in Bayeux-Armentières sector, with a most distinguished field, beautifully mounted on their first chargers.  There were only two or three little thorn hedges in the whole of our area, which extended nearly up to the gun lines. And these we periodically jumped as often as possible to keep up the illusion that we were a hunting club.

It was only an airman amongst First World War combatants who could have attempted to mimic the life of a country gentleman, whilst actively engaged in a struggle as bloody as the hare’s. It was as though the stresses of daily flying might be overcome by a grand gesture, or an imitation of normality. Robert Loraine, West End actor, squadron commander, and wearer of an entirely redundant monocle, built a theatre on his aerodrome, in which he staged anti-war plays, with the parts taken by those airmen who had survived the day’s flying.

The strains that these men were overcoming were huge. During the Battle of Arras in 1917, the life expectancy of a new pilot fell to eleven days. One sensitive man who struggled against his fears was the highest scoring British ace of the war, Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock VC. Tactician, socialist, supporter of Irish Home Rule, Mannock was a spontaneous, working class man, who generously nurtured young pilots, and machine gunned wounded Germans on the ground. He carried a revolver with him into the air, with which to take his own life, rather than burn. Whilst at home on leave, he broke down in front of an old friend:

We were sitting in the front talking quietly when his eyes fell to the floor, and he started to tremble violently. This grew into a convulsive straining. He cried uncontrollably, muttering something that I could not make out. His face, when he lifted it, was a terrible sight. Saliva and tears were running down his face; he couldn’t stop it. His collar and shirt-front were soaked through. He smiled weakly at me when he saw me watching and tried to make light of it; he would not talk about it at all. 

Mannock was killed – as were so many other successful pilots – when he broke his own rules of flying safety. His aircraft burst into flames after being hit by ground fire. It is not known whether he ended his own life, or was consumed in the blaze.  

And yet, in spite – or perhaps because of – the strain under which they lived, airmen became heroes to the public. In a war in which the majority of fighting was remote and impersonal, they engaged in tactical duels, watching an opponent’s facial expression, circling and straining to get on his tail. Pilots came to be known as ‘knights of the air’. One of these knights was William Leefe Robinson, a man who received the Victoria Cross, not for fighting against other aeroplanes, but for shooting down the first Zeppelin airship over British soil. A mood of euphoria gripped the country in the wake of his act, as though he had personally freed the country from the grip of a tyrant. In a letter to his parents, Robinson wrote:

As I daresay you have seen in the papers – babies, flowers and hats have been named after me, also poems and prose have been dedicated to me. Oh, it’s too much! I am recognized wherever I go about Town, now, whether in uniform or mufti. The city police salute me, the waiters, hall porters and pages of hotels and restaurants bow and scrape, visitors turn round and stare. Oh, it’s too thick!

As a ‘reward’, Robinson was sent out to France, to fly the Bristol Fighter, a prestigious new aircraft. He was shot down on his first flight over enemy lines, and taken prisoner. The prison guards did not bow and scrape. They mistreated him, and he fell ill, dying after his repatriation.

The story of infantry fighting on the Western Front, with its vivid evocations of suffering and wasted life, has captured the modern imagination. Yet taking place above the very same Western Front was a conflict of intense human emotion, of young men growing up in an exciting and terrible world, of chivalry, of fear and danger, of the creation of modern warfare. Twenty-seven years after the end of the war, the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. That event was only made possible by the ‘lessons’ that were learned during this period. The First World War in the Air is a conflict that deserves to be far better known.

Joshua Levine practised as a barrister for several years before becoming an actor and author of seven critically acclaimed histories. His plays have been performed on the London stage and he has written and presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4. He fronted the documentary film Dunkirk: The New Evidence for Channel 4 and most recently he worked as Historical Consultant on Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dunkirk.

He will be speaking about ‘The Aviation Heroes of the First World War’ at Chalke Valley History Festival on Monday 25th June – tickets are available here.

Five things that may change your mind about Queen Victoria

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Queen Victoria ruled from 20 June 1837 to 22 January 1901, making her the second longest reigning monarch in Britain. To many she is thought of as a dour, rigid monarch – perhaps because she is oftentimes seen dressed in black and with a downturned expression in her portraits. However, the real Queen was engaged with her work and remained interested in her subjects across the globe for over 63 years. Here are five things you may be surprised to find out about the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India:

1. She liked curries

Queen Victoria tasted her first authentic Indian curry in 1887 when her servant Abdul Karim cooked it for her. She pronounced the curry to be ‘excellent’ and then ordered that curries would be cooked in the Royal kitchens every day. For thirteen years till her death, curries were always cooked and served at luncheon. Victoria’s favourite curries were chicken curry and daal.

She longed to eat a mango from India, but the sea journey was so long, they were always rotten by the time they reached her.

2. She learnt to read and write in Urdu

Victoria wanted to learn Urdu or Hindustani as it was known, and requested Abdul Karim to teach her. He was soon promoted to be her teacher or Munshi. She took her lessons every day, never missing one, even if she was travelling. Towards the end of her life, she could write half a page of fluent Urdu.

She completed 13 volumes of her Hindustani Journals, one for each year that she spent in the company of Abdul Karim. Her last entry, two months before her death, was in November 1900. Victoria died in January 1901.

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Nutmeg Tree, Sumatra, 1824

3. She was Empress of India, but never visited

Victoria was given the title of Empress of India in 1876 by her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. She was delighted with the title and longed to visit India, but the sea journey was too long and she never did. She once wrote that she would give anything to see the Taj Mahal.

She sent artists to India to paint the ordinary people and artisans, so she could understand the real India.

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Taj Mahal Walters by Edwin Lord Weeks, 1883

4. She was nearly dethroned on grounds of insanity

In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, the court was in a complete crisis over her relationship with Abdul Karim, her Munshi. The Household described it as the ‘Year of the Munshi’ and referred to it as ‘Munshimania’.

Her doctor, Sir James Reid, told the Queen that people in high places said that she was not sane, and that the time would come when he would have to step forward and say so. He said he had a long conversation with the Prince of Wales, who was very serious on the subject and had made up his mind to come forward if necessary, as it affected him and the throne.

The Queen flew into a rage, summoned Reid and said he had behaved ‘disgracefully’.

5. She was buried wearing John Brown’s ring

Victoria had given written instructions to her doctor, Sir James Reid, about the arrangements for her funeral. One of these was that she would wear the ring that John Brown had given her in 1875, and which she had always worn after his death. She also wanted two other items to be buried with her. These were a photograph of John Brown and a lock of his hair in a case. The doctor carried out her last wishes and placed these objects in her hand, wrapped in tissue. He then covered these with flowers so that the rest of the family could not see them.

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Queen Victoria and John Brown by W. and D. Downey

Shrabani graduated in History from St Stephen’s College, Delhi and completed her Masters from Delhi University. In 1983 she began her career as a trainee journalist at The Times of India in Bombay. She moved to London in 1987, and has since then been the correspondent of the Calcutta-based newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika and The Telegraph. Her books include Curry: the Story of the Nation’s Favourite Dish, Spy Princess: the Life of Noor Inayat Khan and, most recently, Victoria and Abdul which was turned into a feature film directed by Stephen Frears starring Judi Dench, Simon Callow, Michael Gambon and Eddie Izzard.

Shrabani will be speaking about Victoria and Abdul at Chalke Valley History Festival on Saturday, 30th June – tickets are available here.

Histrionics 2017

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For many, our history panel show is the highlight of the Festival. This video was taken at CVHF 2017 when we had Charlie Higson in the chair and John Sessions, Tracy Borman, Andy Zaltzman and Dan Snow on the panel.

Our ever-popular history panel show returns on Friday, 29th June 2018 with Fast Show comedian and author Charlie Higson as quizmaster. Returning team captains John Sessions and Dan Snow will be joined by Helen Castor and, for the first time, Al Murray. Sixty minutes of quickfire historical humour with new rounds and challenges for the teams. Tickets can be purchased here.

HISTORY, FAKE NEWS AND MYTH

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Myth has an insidious way of working into way into history. Stories that ring true, that appeal to our prejudices, become ‘fact’. Sometimes they are rooted in contemporary propaganda, the old lies giving a veneer of respectability to the new.  But they are also nurtured by attitudes hard-wired into us over centuries.

In my Tudor books I described how our patterns of thought have distorted the reputations of historical figures, particularly women. But in the case of my latest book, White King, a biography of Charles I, there was still more to do. The character of the king and the women around him have been so maligned that readers have turned away from one the most dramatic reigns in British history: a tale of court glamour and political populism, of misogyny and religious violence, that speaks to our time.

The title of this book – White King – is drawn from a sobriquet used by Charles’s contemporaries, and was inspired by the story that he was crowned in white. It is a sobriquet that is unfamiliar today. I hope it inspires curiosity and encourages readers to approach the biography of this damned monarch with an open mind.

Charles the Martyr, and Charles the Murderer, lauded by his friends, and condemned by his enemies, is now largely forgotten, but in popular memory something just as extreme remains. He is pinned to the pages of history as a failed king, executed at the hands of his own subjects, and now preserved like some exotic, but desiccated insect. In many accounts it seems that Charles was doomed almost from birth, his character immutable.

We like to believe we have turned our back on our old prejudices, but the way we remember him shows they lie just below the surface, still influencing the way we think.

In the past disabilities were seen as marks of man’s fallen nature. The twisted spine of Shakespeare’s Richard III was an outward sign of a twisted soul. We still use the same shorthand (think of the disfigured Dr Poison in the current film Wonder Woman). And it is common for Charles’s fate to be read back into the physical difficulties of his early childhood, as if his weak legs were physical manifestations of weakness of character.

The determination and resilience Charles showed in overcoming his disability, emerging as an athletic adult, is surely more interesting. But instead of the narrative of a courageous survivor we are told childhood stories that predict only failure.

Notable is the story that when Charles was badly behaved, his father, King James, insisted that another child – a boy called Will Murray – was beaten. The tale of the whipping boy even appears under Murray’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is an important work of record.

Yet the first reference to Charles’s whipping boy dates to over seventy years after his death, in Gilbert Burnet’s ‘History of my Own Times’. There is an earlier reference, dating to only six years after Charles’s death, to the Tudor King Edward VI having a whipping boy. But there is no contemporary evidence for this either. Indeed the very earliest reference to any whipping boy (that I have found) appears in Samuel Rowley’s Jacobean play ‘When you see me, You know Me’ in which Henry VIII has a ‘whipping boy’, ‘Browne’.

The play was written the aftermath to the English publication of King James’s tracts on divine right kingship, with their assertion that no subject could legitimately raise their hand against God’s anointed – and this is the true origin of the myth. It has been accepted by repetition and because it fits the script that Charles alone was responsible for the suffering of the civil wars.

From the sickly child, for whose failings others were punished, the traditional story then has Charles maturing into an effete adult. There is little hint of the virility a king who sired a brood of children Henry VIII could only have envied. Indeed, the happiness of Charles’s marriage is grist to the mill.

In the early modern period, ‘effeminate’ was not a term of abuse for homosexuals. It described men who enjoyed female company. This attitude remains evident in the vogue for the ‘bromance’, with its philosophy of ‘bros before hoes’, and was expressed succinctly by the character in the movie Layer Cake who observes,  ‘f****** females is for poofs’.  Charles is judged less than a man because he loved his wife, and her reputation is itself shaped by misogyny as well as the anti-Catholic attitudes that are almost in British DNA.

Since Eve, women have supposedly seduced men into evil. So (according to the propaganda of their enemies) Henrietta Maria, persuaded Charles to become a Euro-Catholic-tyrant in Protestant, parliamentary, Britain, and sets him on the path to ruin. This propaganda is still embraced as fact and even inflated. In biographies of Henrietta Maria it sometimes seems she is never allowed to grow up from the child bride of 1625. She is depicted as silly and petulant, a reflection of the belief, drawn from ancient Greece, that women are creatures of emotion, not reason. The word ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek word hersterika for uterus, the source, supposedly of women’s extreme and uncontrollable mood swings.

Conversely in appearance she is painted as the crone, even when only a bride of fifteen.  Contemporary comment on Henrietta Maria’s appearance in middle age, when she was sick and traumatized, is taken out of time and context and used to describe her when young, so that the beauty of her youth vanishes, as if it was only ever a witch’s spell that masked the hag ( for behind the seductive Eve lies the serpent). In one book published in 2017 the teenage Henrietta Maria is described with teeth ‘protruding like javelins from a fortress’, and her arms withered. That Charles would listen to a woman so worthless is another reason to despise him.

Yet Charles was a passionate Protestant, and the real Henrietta Maria a ‘lovely’ girl, with a ‘brilliant mind’, who rode with her own armies and proved every bit as remarkable as any of Henry VIII’s wives.

White King does not seek to restore Charles to the pedestal of the peoples martyr some placed him on after his death, but to rediscover the man of flesh and blood, to place him in the context of his times and amongst his contemporaries – the women who led events, along with the men. Principled and brave but also flawed, Charles inspired both great hate and great loyalty, and died on a scaffold loved in a way his son, the merry cynical Charles II would never be. In the truth lies his tragedy, and in myths we see only ourselves.

An edited version of this appeared in Waterstones earlier this year

Leanda de Lisle is the highly acclaimed author of three books on the Tudors and Stuarts, including the bestselling The Sisters Who Would Be Queen and Tudor: The Family Story. A former weekly columnist on the Spectator, Guardian and Daily Express, she contributes to numerous national publications.

Leanda will be speaking about the White King at Chalke Valley History Festival on Saturday 30th June. Tickets are available here.

Behold America: A History of America First And The American Dream

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Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers including the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and New York Times Book Review, and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio, where appearances include Question Time, Newsnight and The Review Show. She will be speaking at CVHF 2018 on Saturday 30th June, about a history of “America First”.  Tickets are available here.

The secret pigeon service: Heroes who risked all for the birds dropped behind enemy lines who flew home with vital intelligence and left the Nazis flapping

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This article was previously published in the Daily Mail on 18 February 2018

Enemy searchlights had caught its outline as the RAF Whitley reached Nieuport on the coast of Nazi-occupied Belgium, and the German batteries opened up. But unscathed, the pilots pressed on, heading inland as instructed.

Just minutes later, passing above the darkened fields of Flanders, the crucial moment had arrived. The flaps of the aircraft were lowered and, from a height of between 600 and 1,000ft, a British ‘agent’ parachuted gently to the ground.

This was July 1941, and an extraordinary new development in the intelligence war with the Wehrmacht was in full swing. So important was the information gleaned from this particular mission, it would end up on Churchill’s desk.

A member of a Royal Air Force aircrew holding a carrier pigeon taking part in Operation Columba beside a Lockheed Hudson of Coastal Command around 1942

An RAF pilot takes a carrier pigeon on board his Halifax bomber before a raid in World War Two – the pigeons were useful – among other things – to take home SOS messages if the plane’s radio was shot up (June 1943)

Secret messages were packed into cylinders that were attached to pigeons’ legs

Yet the figure floating down through the Belgian night was no normal operative, vulnerable to capture, to torture or to worse. For this was Operation Columba, a largely forgotten yet essential weapon in the fight against Nazi Germany, and one that played an important role in turning the fortunes of the War.

And the spy it was despatching behind enemy lines? A pigeon.

I first stumbled across this remarkable tale by chance one morning, while covering a quirky news story for the BBC. The boney leg of a dead pigeon had been found in a chimney in Surrey and attached to it was a message which, after investigation, had stumped even the top code-breakers of GCHQ, unable to decipher a seemingly random series of letters. What might this strange relic mean? No one seemed entirely sure. Could pigeons have been used in the Second World War, perhaps? Again, information was scarce.

My interest piqued, I spent a morning in the National Archives in Kew, West London, pulling up any and every relevant file – and one of the bundles that landed on my desk immediately stood out. Marked with the words ‘Secret’ and ‘Columba’, it contained compelling details of an operation, including tiny pink slips of paper that transpired on closer inspection to be messages from ordinary people living in occupied Europe.

They had clearly been brought back to Britain by pigeon. Filled with the day-to-day realities of wartime, the slips offered an intriguing insight into the small frustrations and dark tragedies of life under occupation.

None of them, however, compared with the one labelled Message Number 37. More like a work of art than an official document, it contained tiny, beautiful inky writing, too small to read with the naked eye and densely packed into an unimaginably small space. And detailed, colourful maps. Who had written it? And what had happened to them? There was little to work with as the message was identified with no more than a code-name – Leopold Vindictive.

After three years of searching, I finally found my answer in rural Belgium. The story of this unlikely spying mission began in April 1941. There had been attempts to drop secret agents behind German lines since the summer of 1940, but they were perilous. Some agents died before they hit the ground. Others were captured all too quickly.

So slim were the intelligence pickings that the secret services were even instructed to see if a Yorkshire astrologer and water diviner known as ‘Smokey Joe’ could help. MI6 had agents abroad, but the human networks were a mess.

In 1940, it was even claimed that German troops in Norway were practising the bagpipes and training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits. And so an unlikely new strategy was devised – of dropping homing pigeons into occupied Europe in the hope they would fall into the hands of sympathisers who would send them home with information useful to the Allies.

Each bird would be placed in a special box with a parachute attached, and a tiny green Bakelite cylinder – about the size of a pen top – was placed around one leg.On the outside of each container was an envelope with a questionnaire, written in Dutch or French, some rice paper for the return message, a pencil, and a bag of pigeon food.

The latest edition of a resistance newspaper printed in London was enclosed, or sometimes a copy of the Daily Mail, to prove the bird had come from England.

Details of the operation were kept secret from the pigeon fanciers who volunteered the birds. So who was behind this outlandish mission?

Today, everyone is familiar with MI5 and MI6, but few have heard of MI14, let alone its sub-section MI14(d). Its job was to understand the German occupation of Western Europe. Working out of a basement room in the War Office in Central London, it initially comprised just two officers: Brian Melland, a former theatrical actor, and ‘Sandy’ Sanderson, who had served with the Highland Division in the First World War. This was the unit in charge of the Secret Pigeon Service.

Operation Columba got under way on the night of April 8, 1941. A Whitley crossed into Belgium near Zeebrugge then headed for the French border, where the pigeons in their containers were pushed out. Two days later, in the bowels of the War Office, at 10.30am, MI14’s phone started ringing. The first bird had made its way home to its owner in Kent. Columba message number one was phoned in.

It had come from a village called Le Briel in northern France and contained real information. ‘Pigeon found Wednesday 9th at 8am,’ it began. ‘The German troop movements are always at night. There are 50 Germans in every Commune. There is a large munitions dump at Herzeele 200 metres from the railway station. Yesterday, a convoy of Horse Artillery passed towards Dunkirk… The Bosches do not mention an invasion of England. Their morale is not too good. The RAF… should come to bomb the brick works as the proprietor is a …’ The next word was marked as ‘illegible’.

The message ended with ‘I await your return, I am and remain a Frenchman.’ At 3pm, message number two arrived, this time from Flanders.

‘There are only a few troops here and no petrol dumps,’ it read. ‘But yesterday some artillery arrived and the men say they are going to Yugoslavia where other troops and wagons are also moving.’

After three months, 221 birds had been flown into occupied territory, many from Newmarket racecourse – home to a top-secret RAF squadron whose job was to carry out ‘Special Duties’ for British intelligence – and released over Flanders, Normandy and Brittany. Forty-six had returned, 19 with messages, of which 17 contained information.

Often people were fearful at discovering a spy pigeon, and understandably so. Many decided it was better the pigeon died than they did. Some villagers even made the choice more palatable by roasting and eating the bird. Others went straight to the local police station or Nazi occupiers in return for a reward.

The people responsible for the remarkable Message 37 were braver than that, and fiercely anti-Nazi. The pigeon and its container had been retrieved in July 1941 from fields near Lichtervelde by an unnamed Belgian farmer. Concealing them in a sack of potatoes, he took them to the Debaillies, a patriotic family of two sisters and three brothers who ran a corner shop.

One of the brothers, Michel, was a pigeon fancier. The Debaillies summoned two family friends, Hector Joye, a former soldier with a love of military maps, and a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Raskin, who had worked as an intelligence gatherer sketching German military positions during the First World War to aid allied reconnaissance. Brothers Arseen and Gabriel drove along the coast and through the neighbourhoods around Bruges, taking notes.

Joye gathered intelligence on a chateau occupied by German troops. Raskin tapped church-goers for information.

After a few days, the priest set about transferring the maps and the wealth of information to the two tiny sheets of rice paper. He worked through the night of July 11 using a magnifying glass and a fine-tipped pen until all the space was filled.

The rice paper was folded and placed inside the cylinder attached to the pigeon’s foot. Then the group did something contrary to every rule of spycraft: they stood for a family portrait in a courtyard behind the shop. At first sight, it could be any other family picture, but look more closely and you can see that Marie, the elder sister, is holding a resistance newspaper, Margaret is holding the parachute. Arseen holds a pencil, Gabriel the British intelligence questionnaire, and Michel clutches the pigeon.

In front of them, is a chalkboard with the dates of the bird’s arrival and departure, its ring number and the phrase ‘Via Engeland’ to mark its destination. And at the top are three capital V’s – the symbol of Victory. Climbing up on to the roof, Michel then released the bird. At 8.15am the pigeon rose high into the sky, circled to get its bearings, then made for the Channel and home. By 3.30pm, it was back at its loft in Lattice Avenue, Ipswich, with the canister arriving in the War Office on July 13.

Homing pigeons played an important role in both world wars – their homing ability, speed and ability to get to high altitudes meant they were often used as military messengers

Melland pulled out the first sheet of paper, nine inches square, and the closer he looked, the more astonished he was. The transcript came to a remarkable 5,000 words and took up 12 pages. It was gold dust. It indicated hidden German emplacements, munitions depots and fuel dumps. It highlighted a telephone exchange and nearly a dozen factories playing a role in the German war effort.

There were precise battle damage assessments of recent British raids in Brussels. A map showed a château that was the central communications installation for German High Command in the whole sector. Message 37 rapidly made its way around Whitehall and was shown to Churchill himself. It represented more than just a collection of useful facts. It summed up a spirit of resistance, confirming to Britain’s leaders that some of those living under the tyranny of Nazi occupation were willing to risk their lives to help.

Mary, a carrier pigeon, was hit by shrapnel, wounded by pellets and attacked by German war hawks as she flew over the Pas De Calais

Mary, a carrier pigeon, was hit by shrapnel, wounded by pellets and attacked by German war hawks as she flew over the Pas De Calais

The message was signed with the codename ‘Leopold Vindictive’ and asked for a response on the Dutch and Belgian BBC radio news. On July 15, only three days after Michel had set the bird free, the Belgians heard this on their radio: ‘Leopold Vindictive 200, the key fits the lock and the bird is in the lion’s cage.’ Sadly, the Leopold Vindictive story does not have a happy ending.

The group of amateur spies gathered more intelligence but future pigeon drops failed to reach them. In growing frustration, they trusted a chain of resistance contacts but the Germans closed in. They arrested and tried Raskin, Joye and Arseen Debaillie. On October 18, 1943, in Dortmund, all three were guillotined.

But still Operation Columba pressed on. Between April 1941 and September 1944, a total of 16,554 pigeons would be dropped in an arc from Copenhagen in Denmark to Bordeaux in the South of France. Only one in ten made it back alive. Some were lost on planes shot down before they had a chance to be released. Some lay unfound in a field.

The Germans responded of course. Rewards were offered and punishments were draconian. An MI6 agent reported that a notice displayed in one Belgian town offered 625 francs to anyone who delivered a British pigeon. Rumours began to emerge that the Germans were planting false pigeons to trap people.

Marksmen were stationed on the coast of northern France while a Columba report from the Loire Valley said that pigeons fell into enemy hands after a German observation post spotted the RAF flight passing overhead.

But Operation Columba’s most deadly foe proved to be a natural one. It was the hawk. German hawks were flown along the coast from Belgium, France and the Netherlands to catch and kill Columba birds as they headed for Britain.

Yet the ones that survived more than proved their worth, helping to pave the way for D-Day and victory.

And for the French and the Belgians living under Nazi occupation, there was something else besides: the hope that these remarkable birds, released up into the freedom of the skies, would race back safely to their homes and help free their nation from tyranny.

© Gordon Corera, 2018

Gordon Corera is a journalist and the author of several books on intelligence and security issues. Since 2004 he has been a Security Correspondent for BBC News, where he covers terrorism, cyber security, the work of intelligence agencies and other national security issues.

He will be speaking at CVHF on Friday 29th June about the Secret Pigeon Service – tickets are available here.

Where did all the Philosophers go?

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In 532 AD the final members of one of Greece’s most famous school of Philosophy – the Academy – left Athens for good. After 900 years, the Academy had been closed down. Historian, journalist and author of The Darkening Age Catherine Nixey explains the circumstances that led to their departure.

It is hard to imagine what they must have felt.

In AD 532, a band of seven men set out from Athens. They were some of the greatest thinkers of their day; the “flower of the philosophers of our age” as one historian put it. Yet they were no longer welcome in Athens. Or indeed in Europe. All were members of the Academy, the name of the philosophical school founded by Plato almost 900 years before. The philosophers were proud of their heritage, tracing their history in a “golden chain” back to Plato himself. Now that chain was about to be broken.

A new power had taken control of the empire and this new power had little time for these philosophers – or indeed for anyone who dissented from its viewpoint. This power was Christianity.

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, had come to power in 312 AD after seeing a flaming cross in the sky before a battle. He won the battle and thereafter become a warrior of Christ. Constantine’s reign, wrote the Christian historian Eusebius, was a wonderful time. The dark days of Roman rule were over and everywhere men ‘greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes’.

Christians may have done. Not everyone did.  Almost as soon as Constantine took power, hints of the terrible persecution that would follow started appearing.

From the 330s onwards, the ancient Roman temples started to be attacked. The attacks were smaller, at first, but as the century wore on they grew in number and violence. By the 380s AD, tribes of ‘black-robed men’ roamed the east of the empire, smashing the faces, arms, genitals and hands off the ancient statues of the gods.

As one eyewitness put it, these thugs attacked temples with ‘sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows… and the priests must either keep quiet or die.’

In around AD 385 a beautiful statue was smashed in Palmyra. In AD 392 the most beautiful temple in the world was razed to the ground. Over a century later, the Parthenon itself was attacked. The famous – but battered – Parthenon marbles still bear the scars of Christianity’s fervour.

Fierce new laws were bellowed out in town squares. In AD 356, it became illegal – on pain of death – to worship images. The sermons of a new generation of hardline Christian clerics rounded with a similar ferocity on non-Christian writings. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ advised one set of Church guidelines.
Books by Christian critics were sought out, and destroyed. In times of political crisis, philosophers and intellectuals made easy targets.

Those seven philosophers in Athens knew well just how easy. One spring day in 415 AD their predecessor, the brilliant mathematician and philosopher Hypatia, had been flayed alive by Christians. They thought that she was from Satan because she used mathematical symbols and astrolabes.

Some of those seven philosophers had experienced torture themselves. The brother of one had been strung up by his wrists and beaten with rods by Christians. A colleague had been flogged till the blood ran down his back.

Odium was poured on philosophical works that contradicted Christianity – and those works suffered accordingly. As Augustine gloated, the opinions of such philosophers have been ‘completely eradicated and suppressed’. Another Christian saint rejoiced that the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. The copying of classical texts plummeted. Ninety per cent of all classical literature was lost in the centuries following Christianisation. Ninety-nine per cent of all Latin literature. It wasn’t purely the fault of Christianity – time and the bookworm played their part. But Christianity played its part. With vigour.

Then, in AD 529, the end came. The ‘impious and wicked pagans’ were to be allowed to continue in their ‘insane error’ no longer. A series of legal hammer blows fell: anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. Anyone who was baptized – but who then continued to sacrifice – they, too, would be executed.

Then came ‘Law 1.11.10.2’. In comparison to some of the others, it sounds almost underwhelming. ‘Moreover,’ it reads, ‘we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’. It might sound underwhelming. It was not. After attempting to resist for a while, the philosophers were forced to concede defeat. They shut up their school, left their jobs, their home and walked away. Out of Athens. Out of Europe. And – given how few remember them today – out of history.

It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.

Catherine Nixey studied Classics at Cambridge and subsequently worked as a Classics teacher for several years, before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at The Times where she still works. The Darkening Age is her first book and received an RSL Jerwood Award.

She will be speaking at CVHF 2018 on this subject, painting a dark but riveting picture of life at the time of the ‘triumph’ of Christianity and give a gripping account of how the early Christians annihilated the teachings of the Classical world. Tickets are available here.

The King’s Witch

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I always look forward to the Chalke Valley History Festival, but this year will be even more special because I will be talking about The King’s Witch, my debut novel, which is set just a stone’s throw away at Longford Castle.

Situated on the banks of the River Avon close to Salisbury, Longford is one of the finest examples of the Elizabethan prodigy houses.  It was built by Sir Thomas Gorges and his wife Helena, a favourite of the Virgin Queen, and was the inspiration for Philip Sidney’s ‘Castle of Amphialeus’ in his famous work, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.  Thomas and Helena were very happily married and had eight children.  It is the third of these, Frances, who is the heroine of my novel.

Little is known about the real Frances, which in many respects makes her an ideal subject for a novel.  Her life spanned one of the most dramatic periods in our history: from the glory days of Elizabeth I to the execution of Charles I.  No wonder I needed three books to tell it!  The King’s Witch is the first in the trilogy and begins with Elizabeth’s death before exploring the turbulent early years of James I’s reign, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

This was a dangerous time to be alive.  The new Stuart king was cut from a very different cloth to his Tudor predecessor.  Intolerant and dogmatic, he had no intention of upholding Elizabeth’s policy of not ‘making windows into men’s souls’.  It was soon obvious that he was going to stamp his extreme brand of Protestantism onto the English people, which spelt danger for any subject who still clung to the old Catholic faith.

James also brought with him the violent persecution of suspected witches that had seen thousands of innocent women put to the flames in Scotland.  A woman had only to be unmarried, poor, or be practised at healing to be under suspicion, and an accusation alone was enough to bring her to trial – as Frances, a skilled healer, discovers to her cost.

For all the king’s puritanical views, however, the court over which he presided was shockingly decadent.  In place of the cultural vibrancy and strict morality that had defined the Elizabethan court was drunkenness, depravity and excess in every form.  Little wonder that James’s new subjects soon harked back to the ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth and began nurturing a dangerous resentment against their new king.

As a dark campaign to destroy both King and Parliament gathers pace, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Frances is surrounded by danger, finding happiness only with the king’s precocious young daughter, and with Tom Wintour, the one courtier she feels she can trust.  But is he all that he seems?

The novel was inspired by the research I carried out for my non-fiction book, Witches, an account of James I and the English witch hunts.  It has taken several years to craft my initial sketch of a story into the finished novel that will be published this June, and I learned a huge amount along the way.  Although it is still history, writing a novel is a very different discipline to non-fiction.  I had to learn to ‘show not tell’, to interweave period details into dialogue, rather than writing them verbatim as I would in a non-fiction account.  Given that so much of Frances’s history is unknown to us, I also had to employ a great deal of imagination – and straying from the facts is not something that comes naturally to a historian!

But I hope the result brings one of the most turbulent events in British history to life, and – though this is tantamount to treason – to entice us to look beyond the Tudor period.  I cannot wait to tell the Chalke Valley audience all about it on 27 June.

Tracy Borman is joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust. She studied and taught history at the University of Hull and was awarded a PhD in 1997. She is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books, including Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, Matilda: Wife of the Conqueror, First Queen of England, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen and Witches: A Tale of Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction. She is also a regular broadcaster and public speaker, giving talks on her books across the UK and abroad.

Tickets to Tracy’s talk at CVHF on Wednesday 27th June are available here.

THE SCOTTISH CAMPAIGNS OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS

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This article was first published in Turning Points of the Ancient World on 18 March 2018.

The year was AD 207. In Rome the great warrior-Emperor, Septimius Severus, was bored. He’d hacked his way to power in AD 193 in the ‘Year of Five Emperors’, then fought two campaigns in the East (including the sack of the Parthian capital Ctesiphon). He had seen off the usurpation of the British governor Clodius Albinus and campaigned in his native North Africa. But now, he was reduced to fretting about his squabbling sons, Caracalla and Geta, in the Imperial capital.

Then, a golden opportunity presented itself for one final stab at glory, in far off Britannia, the ‘Wild West’ of the Roman Empire. This story is told in book form for the first time by archaeologist and historian Simon Elliott in his new work ‘Septimius Severus in Scotland: the Northern Campaigns of the First Hammer of the Scots’. Below, he gives a brief insight into his work as an introduction to this new appreciation of what was the largest campaigning army ever to be gathered and unleashed in the islands of Britain.

The Scottish Campaigns of Septimius Severus

Britannia was always a troubled province, particularly at the beginning of the 3rd century AD after Albinus’ attempt to seize the purple in AD 196/ 197. Having suffered periodic unrest along the northern border throughout the 2nd century AD, two major tribal confederations had emerged in the region of modern Scotland by AD 180.

These were the Maeatae (based in the central Midland Valley either side of the Clyde – Firth of Forth line) and the Caledonians to their north. At the end of the 2nd century, after Albinus’ failure, the then governor Virius Lupus had been forced to pay huge indemnities to both to prevent further trouble.

The Battle of Lugdunum: 197 AD. A significant proportion of Albinus’ army had been troops from the British legions. Artwork by © Johnny Shumate

These enormous injections of prestigious wealth to the northern elites of unconquered Briton further assisted the coalescence of power among their leaders, and trouble again erupted at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. This was quickly stamped out by Lupus and his successor Lucius Alfenus Senecio who then began to rebuild the northern defences which had fallen into disrepair after Albinus’ usurpation attempt. However, in AD 206/ 207 a disaster of some kind occurred in the North. This was dramatic enough for Senecio to write an urgent appeal to Severus in Rome. In it, he said that the province was in danger of being overrun and he requested either more troops or the Emperor himself to intervene in the province.

Severus’ response was ‘shock and awe’ writ large. He decided to launch an expeditio felicissima Brittannica. For this he gathered his wife Julia Domna, the bickering Caracalla and Geta, key Senators and courtiers, the Imperial fiscus treasury, his Praetorian Guard, the legio II Parthica – which he had based near Rome – and vexillations from all the crack legions and auxiliary units along the Rhine and Danubian frontiers. The whole were transported to Britain by the Classis Britannica in the spring of AD 208.

Roman Soldiers at the time of Severus. Artwork by © Johnny Shumate.

On his arrival, he established York as his Imperial capital. There he was joined by the provincial incumbent legions – legio VI Victrixalready based there, legio II Augusta from Caerleon and legio XX Valeria Victrix from Chester – together with the auxiliary units based in Britain. This gave him an enormous force totalling 50,000 men, together with the 7,000 sailors and marines of the regional fleet.

To support such a colossal force the fort, harbor and supply base at South Shields was selected as the main supply depot. The existing site was dramatically extended, with immense new granaries being built that could hold in total 2,500 tonnes of grain. This was enough to feed the whole army for two months. From South Shields the ships of the Classis Britannica fulfilled the fleet’s transport role, using the Tyne and eastern coastal routes to keep the army on the move once the campaign began. This included extensive use of the regional river systems wherever possible. Meanwhile the fort at Corbridge on Dere Street, just short of Hadrian’s Wall, was also upgraded, again for use as a major supply base. Here the granaries had been rebuilt, even before Severus’ arrival.

When all was ready in the spring of AD 209, Severus launched the first of his two assaults against the Maeatae and Caledonians in the far north of the province. Joined by Caracalla, he left Geta behind in York to take charge of the Imperial administration with the support of Julia Domna. The immense force marched north along Dere Street, crossing Hadrian’s Wall and then hammering through the Scottish Borders, destroying all before it. The whole region was cleansed of opposition, and, notably at this time, the Antonine fort at Vindolanda south of the Wall was demolished, with Late Iron-Age roundhouses being built there on a Roman grid pattern instead. This could have been a concentration camp for the displaced local population.

Septimius Severus in Scotland: 208-211 BC. Mapwork by © Battles of the Ancients.

Today we can trace the line of march north through the Scottish Borders by following the sequence of enormous 67ha marching camps which were built to house and protect the army at the end of each day’s march. These are at Newstead, St Leonards (the largest at 70 ha), Channelkirk and Pathhead. Any resistance here would have been in the form of defended settlements such as hillforts, which were quickly stormed and destroyed.

Severus next reached the Firth of Forth at Inveresk where Dere Street turned west to cross the River Esk crossing. He then re-built the old Antonine fort, supply base and harbor at Cramond to serve as the next link in his supply chain after South Shields. Then he built a bridge of 900 boats at South Queensferry, before dividing the force into two separate but still huge legionary spearheads. The larger featured two thirds of his available troops (most likely with the three British legions who were used to campaigning in this theatre) under the fitter Caracalla. Meanwhile the smaller one featured the Praetorian Guard, other guard units and the legio II Parthica, under the ailing Severus, who was suffering from severe gout at the time. The other units in the overall force such as the auxilia were divided between the two as required.

A Roman Soldier of the 3rd Century AD: Artwork by © Johnny Shumate.

Caracalla now led his larger force in a lightning strike south west to north east directly along the Highland Boundary Fault. As he progressed he built a sequence of 54 ha marching camps to seal off the Highlands from the Maeatae and Caledonians who were living in the central and northern Midland Valley. These camps were located at Househill Dunipace near Falkirk (the stopping off point before crossing the Forth), Ardoch at the south western end of the Gask Ridge, Innerpeffray East, Grassy Walls, Cardean, Battledykes, Balmakewan and Kair House. The latter location was only 13km south west of Stonehaven on the coast, where the Highland line visibly converged with the sea.

With the Highlands and the route northwards to the Moray and Buchan Lowlands now sealed off, the Emperor next sent the Classis Britannica along the coast which was also sealed off. This left the Maetae and Caledonians in the central and northern Midland Valley in a very perilous position as they had nowhere to run to.

Severus now took full advantage, leading his second legionary spearhead across the bridge of boats on the Firth of Forth again. However, instead of following Caracalla, he headed directly north across Fife to the River Tay, through land heavily settled by the Maeatae. He built two further marching camps to secure his line of march, 25ha in size, at Auchtermuchty and Edenwood. Reaching the Tay, he then rebuilt and re-manned the Flavian and Antonine fort, supply base and harbor at Carpow. This completed his east coast supply route to keep the enormous overall army in the field, now linking South Shields, Cramond and Carpow. Severus then built another bridge of boats, this time to cross the Tay, before striking directly north into the isolated northern Midland Valley, his legionaries brutalising all before them.

Roman.Britain.Severan.Campaigns

The campaign then became a grinding guerrilla war in the most horrific conditions, with weather even worse than usual. Both key primary sources, Cassius Dio and Herodian, graphically describe Severus’ campaign. Dio, in his Roman History, says (76.13):

“…as he (Severus) advanced through the country he experienced countless hardships in cutting down the forests, levelling the heights, filling up the swamps, and bridging the rivers; but he fought no battle and beheld no enemy in battle array. The enemy purposely put sheep and cattle in front of the soldiers for them to seize, in order that they might be lured on still further until they were worn out; for in fact the water caused great suffering to the Romans, and when they became scattered, they would be attacked. Then, unable to walk, they would be slain by their own men, in order to avoid capture, so that a full fifty thousand died (clearly a massive exaggeration, but indicative of the difficulties the Romans faced). But Severus did not desist until he approached the extremity of the island.”

Meanwhile Herodian, in his History of the Roman Empire, says (3.14):

“…frequent battles and skirmishes occurred, and in these the Romans were victorious. But it was easy for the Britons to slip away; putting their knowledge of the surrounding area to good use, they disappeared in the woods and marshes. The Romans’ unfamiliarity with the terrain prolonged the war.”

Weight of numbers eventually told in the Roman’s favour and, with the entire regional economy desolated, the Maetae and Caledonians sued for peace. Unsurprisingly, the resulting treaty was very one sided in favour of Rome. Severus immediately proclaimed a famous victory, with he, Caracalla and Geta given the title Britannicus and with celebratory coins being struck to commemorate the event. Campaigning, at least in the short term, was now over to Imperial satisfaction. However, as always in the Roman experience of the far north of the Britain, such a state of comparative calm was not to last.

The Emperor, his sons and the military leadership wintered in York. Sadly for them however the terms which had so satisfied the Romans in AD 209 were not so agreeable to at least the Maeatae as in AD 210 they revolted again. The Caledonians predictably joined in, and Severus decided to go north again to settle matters once and for all. On this occasion he’d obviously had enough of the troublesome Britons, giving his famous order to kill all the natives his troops came across.

This second campaign re-enacted the AD 209 campaign exactly, though this time solely under Caracalla as Severus was too ill. It was even more brutal than the first as afterwards there was peace along the northern border for four generations afterwards, the longest in pre-modern times. Archaeological data is now emerging to show this was because of a major depopulation event, indicating something close to a genocide was committed by the Romans in the central and upper Midland Valley.

At the end of the campaigning season the remaining native leadership again sued for peace, though on even more onerous terms than previously. The ‘Severan surge’ then headed south again to winter once more near York, leaving large garrisons in place. However, any plans to remain in the far north were cut short when Severus died in York in February AD 211. Caracalla and Geta were far more interested in establishing their own power bases in Rome and quickly left. Severus’ huge force of 50,000 men then gradually returned to their own bases. The northern border was once more re-established on Hadrian’s Wall again, with all the effort of the AD 209 and 210 campaigns ultimately counting for naught excepting the unusually long-lasting peace afterwards.

Dr Simon Elliott is an archaeologist and historian specialising in Roman Britain and the Roman military. His PhD, at the University of Kent, focused on the presence of the latter in the south-east of Britain during the Roman occupation.

Simon will be at CVHF on Friday 29th June to talk about Septimius Severus. Tickets are available here.