History Cafe

The US had a paradoxical strategy to ensure repayment of its WW1 loans. It would make Germany economically prosperous to ensure Germany was in a position to pay reparations to France and Britain (as per the Treaty of Versailles). This would mean that impoverished Britain and France could keep repaying the interest on their wartime loans to the Americans. Economist Maynard Keynes, aware that Britai...

Carl Siemens, chair of Siemens the German electronics business, complained in 1929, ‘the whole world belongs to the Americans.’ If you want to understand how it was that American businesses ended up investing so heavily in Germany in the 1920s and 30s – so heavily that eventually they enabled Hitler to arm the fascist Third Reich - then you have to start by going back to the First World War. It st...

Why did fashion become so much more conservative in the 1930s? We look at the puritanical Hays Motion Picture Production Code that banned indecent passions, and at MGM’s Adrian Greenberg, the most powerful Hollywood designer of his day. The arrival of colour film stock and the invention of the close-up meant Adrian designed for the camera, experimenting with hats and calf-length dresses that flatt...

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. So here's our offering from the History Café Christmas Party! Have a good one. Hosted on Acast. Se...

The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As his father had done, King James I's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil ,built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament....

We dig deeper into the animosity between the King, James I of England and VI of Scotland and his Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils (father and son) against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father was Elizabeth I's Chief Minister, like his...

To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almos...

The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the mo...

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND - FOR 5 NOVEMBER! We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mo...

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who won the Battle of Britain? For good strategic reasons Churchill claimed victory. But the Germans, who saw the eight months of the Blitz as part of the same campaign, achieved much of what they intended. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Battle of Britain was never as close as the popular story has it. The RAF was too well organised and supplied. But is that why the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London? Or was there another reason? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Churchill talks up the threat of invasion, even though it looks impossible. ‘I might as well send my men straight into a sausage machine,’ writes the German Chief of Staff. But invasion preparations still go on. Who is bluffing who? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Britain is gripped by fear of invasion. Government leaflet 'If the Invader Comes' calls for pepper and ‘a sharp knife to kill them if necessary.’ Churchill goes on BBC and says ‘we await undismayed by the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight.’ So why in private is Churchill saying he doubts the invasion would ever take place? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Germans make extraordinary preparations for the immense task of invading Britain in 1940. Why bother when neither Hitler nor any senior German officer wanted to do it or thought it was possible? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most of those executed for their beliefs under Philip and Mary 1555-58 came from places with a long history of religious dissidence. It matches European evidence that many – perhaps most – of those burned at the stake were not Protestants, but ‘anabaptists’ or people with similar beliefs – usually poor - whom both Protestants and Catholics were persecuting. The government of Edward VI had already...

Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to gras...

Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No,...