History Cafe

True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

August 6, 2025 • 33 mins

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. (R)

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#29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

July 29, 2025 • 32 mins

As his father had done, 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.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terri...

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#28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

July 23, 2025 • 31 mins

We dig deeper into the animosity between the king and Cecil whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father and son had spies everywhere and openly boasted of their policy of entrapment. (R)

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#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

July 16, 2025 • 33 mins

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 almost a year, before spying a handy cel...

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#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

July 9, 2025 • 30 mins

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 money he so badly needs. Job done. (R...

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#25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

July 2, 2025 • 34 mins

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 James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (R)

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#24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

June 25, 2025 • 32 mins

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. (R)

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#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

June 18, 2025 • 41 mins

On 14 July 1916 senior officers finally decided to ignore Haig. At the Battle of Bazentin Ridge they put to use everything that was good practice and broke in to the German lines. But because junior officers at the front were not permitted to take a decision, and their commanders in their chateaux were hopelessly out of touch, it was never converted into a ‘break through.’ Another 9,000 lives lost for very little gain.

After the di...

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#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

June 11, 2025 • 41 mins

At the southern end of the line, next to the French, British units took all their objectives on the first day of the battle. They succeeded mainly because their maverick commanders had learnt from the French how to bombard the Germans accurately, putting them out of action long enough for the infantry to mop up. They’d also been assisted by the French big guns. By lunchtime some of these units were being served a hot meal in a newl...

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#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

June 4, 2025 • 43 mins

The French decided they only had enough artillery to attack on a 9-mile front if they were to neutralise the German guns so that their infantry were not needlessly slaughtered. Haig had fewer guns – enough for perhaps 4 miles of front – but he chose to attack across 16 miles. 57,000 British soldiers died on the very first day, 1 July 1916, and no ground was gained. The French achieved all their objectives and lost 1,500 men. This i...

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#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 28, 2025 • 40 mins

On the eve of the Somme the British had far too few artillery guns, and most of the ones they had were the wrong sort. They needed five times as many heavy guns before they could launch an attack. The few big guns they did have were grossly inaccurate, sometimes missing a target by one mile. They were firing shells that were not fitted with delayed-action fuses which meant the German machine-gunners were safe in their deep undergro...

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#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 21, 2025 • 40 mins

The British Army wanted to throw men against machines. Its generals had not thought about how to cross 100-200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. They had been offered plenty of designs for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks but had ignored them. It was Churchill, head of the Royal Navy, who eventually funded the development of the first ‘tank’. But they arrived late at the Somme and were so badly deployed they cou...

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#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

May 14, 2025 • 37 mins

Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board: trench warfare, the machine gun and the tank to name a few. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders. Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themse...

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#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 7, 2025 • 40 mins

1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench w...

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#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

April 30, 2025 • 32 mins

We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from W...

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#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

April 23, 2025 • 26 mins

As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

April 16, 2025 • 24 mins

2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all the...

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#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

April 9, 2025 • 38 mins

Amundsen reached the South Pole a month before Scott, but his story never captured the imagination of the English. They wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making. Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because he believed British spirit was stronger than the polar cold, or Germa...

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#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

April 1, 2025 • 37 mins

When Scott took a fifth man with him to the South Pole he signed each man’s death warrants. Not for the first time, Scott’s endless calculations for four men – pages and pages of scribbled notes on weights and distances and food and cooking fuel to carry – proved to be a waste of time. His surgeon had already warned him he’d calculated too little food per day for manhauling a sled. What’s more they only had four pairs of skis. They...

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#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

March 26, 2025 • 35 mins

Over a year before he and two of his men starved to death, just two days’ march from a depot with food and fuel, Scott confided to young biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘This is the end of the pole.’ He wasn’t questioning his planning or his leadership. He was blaming what he saw as the failure of their ‘transport,’ their dogs and ponies. Now they would have to rely on the British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges into blizza...

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History Cafe

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}#29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

Popular Podcasts

#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot