Darren Harris

October 30, 1485. Henry Tudor is crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey. Two months earlier, he had won the crown at Bosworth, where Richard III was killed charging toward him. Henry's claim to the throne was thin. He had spent most of his adult life in exile in Brittany and France, and many in England barely knew who he was. He moved fast to secure it. He dated the start of his reign to the day before Bosworth. That made everyone who fought for Richard a traitor against the rightful king, and it let him seize their lands. He created a personal bodyguard, the Yeomen of the Guard, who still exist today. A few months after the coronation, he married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. The marriage united the rival houses of Lancaster and York, symbolized by the Tudor rose. It still took years to make the throne safe. In 1487, Yorkist rebels crowned a boy pretender named Lambert Simnel, and Henry had to beat them at the Battle of Stoke, often called the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Another pretender, Perkin Warbeck, troubled him for most of the 1490s. Henry survived it all and died in his bed in 1509. His son became Henry VIII.

In January 1842, a British army marched out of Kabul with roughly 4,500 soldiers and around 12,000 camp followers, including women and children. A week later, one exhausted army surgeon on a dying horse rode up to the walls of Jalalabad. When asked where the army was, he reportedly answered that he was the army. It's one of the most famous disasters in British military history. And it was lost long before the retreat began. In 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan to put a friendly ruler, Shah Shuja, on the throne and keep Russian influence out. It worked at first. The army settled in Kabul, families came up from India, officers held horse races and played cricket. Afghanistan seemed handled. Then London cut the subsidies that had been keeping the tribal chiefs quiet. Resentment boiled over. On November 2, 1841, a mob in Kabul attacked the house of Sir Alexander Burnes, a senior political officer, and hacked him to death. Chance one: crush it on day one. Thousands of British and Indian troops were a few miles away. The uprising started as a riot. A fast, hard response might have ended it that afternoon. The commander, Major General William Elphinstone, was elderly, crippled by gout, and had never wanted the job. He hesitated. The riot became a revolt. Chance two: the fortress. The British had built their main base, the cantonment, on low, flat ground overlooked by hills and forts, with a long perimeter that was hard to defend. Worse, most of their food and supplies were stored in a separate fort outside the walls. Above the city stood the Bala Hissar, a powerful citadel with room for the whole force. Officers begged to move into it. It never happened. Within days the supply fort fell, and the army was left on short rations in a position it couldn't hold. Chance three: leave while you still can. Through November the army could have fought its way out toward India before winter closed the passes. Instead it sat, starved and negotiated. In December the British envoy, Sir William Macnaghten, went to meet Akbar Khan, the son of the ruler the British had deposed. Macnaghten was killed at the meeting, and his body was paraded through the Kabul bazaar. Even then, Elphinstone agreed to a deal. Hand over most of the cannon and some hostages, and the army would get safe passage to Jalalabad, about 90 miles away. They left on January 6, 1842, in deep snow. The promised escort never came. Afghan fighters lined the heights of the mountain passes and fired down into the column. Sepoys from the plains of India froze in clothing never meant for an Afghan winter. Camp followers panicked and jammed the narrow passes. In the Khoord Kabul pass alone, thousands died. Women and children were handed over as hostages along the way, and Elphinstone himself was taken. He died in captivity a few months later. On January 13, the last organized remnant, mostly men of the 44th Foot, made a final stand on a hill at Gandamak. They had about twenty muskets left between them. That same day, Dr. William Brydon reached Jalalabad. The popular story says he was the only survivor. He wasn't. Many of the hostages, including women and children, were later recovered, and some sepoys and camp followers straggled in or escaped over time. But Brydon was the only man to make it through that retreat to Jalalabad as the army itself ceased to exist. An entire army was lost to an old general who couldn't decide, a base nobody should have built, and a promise from the enemy that anyone looking at the situation honestly should have known was worthless.

October 29, 1618. Walter Raleigh asked to inspect the axe before they used it on him, ran his thumb along the edge, and said it was sharp medicine that would cure all his diseases. Then the executioner hesitated, and Raleigh told him to strike. He was being killed for a fifteen year old treason conviction that everyone knew was rigged, revived to satisfy the Spanish ambassador over something Raleigh's son had done in South America. Raleigh's career under Elizabeth I was the Elizabethan age in one man. He put down a Catholic rising in Munster, became Captain of the Queen's Guard in 1587, and worked as a privateer, which is the polite term for a pirate with a royal licence. In 1591 he secretly married Bess Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting, which the Queen regarded as a personal betrayal, and both of them went to the Tower for a month. He bought his way back with the capture of the Madre de Deus in 1592, a Portuguese carrack whose cargo was worth a staggering amount, and in 1595 he was commissioned to go and find El Dorado. He went to Guiana, found no golden city, and wrote a book about it that was more persuasive than the evidence warranted. That book is why he kept believing in it for the next twenty years. Then Elizabeth died, and James I came south from Scotland with one overriding foreign policy goal, which was peace with Spain. Raleigh was the most famous Spain-hating privateer in England. He was the opposite of everything the new reign wanted. In 1603 he was accused of involvement in a plot to put Arbella Stuart on the throne. The trial was a disgrace even by the standards of the time. The main evidence was a confession from Lord Cobham, who retracted it and then re-made it, and Raleigh was denied the right to have Cobham brought into court to face him. The prosecutor Edward Coke abused him from the bench. Raleigh defended himself so well that the trial started turning public opinion in his favour, which is a rare thing for a man already convicted in everyone's mind. He was condemned, then reprieved at the last moment, and spent the next thirteen years in the Tower. And that is where he did the work he should be remembered for. He had rooms, his wife and son with him at times, a garden and a laboratory, and he wrote The History of the World, an enormous unfinished book that got as far as 130 BC and was a bestseller for a century. It was one of Oliver Cromwell's recommended books for his son. He also kept telling anybody who would listen that there was a gold mine in Guiana. In 1617, James was broke. So he let Raleigh out to go and find it, with one absolute condition. Do not fight the Spanish. The expedition was a catastrophe. Disease wrecked the crews. Raleigh fell ill and stayed in Trinidad while his son Walter led the party up the Orinoco. They attacked the Spanish settlement of San Thomé. Walter Raleigh the younger was killed in it, along with Spanish settlers. So Raleigh came home with no gold, no son, and a war crime against a country his king was trying to befriend. The Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, who had enormous influence at James's court, demanded his death. And here is the mechanism, which is the bit that makes it so cold. James did not need a new trial. Raleigh was still a condemned man under the 1603 sentence, which had only ever been suspended. All James had to do was let the original sentence take effect. He was executed for a treason he almost certainly did not commit, in order to punish him for something he had not personally done. On October 29, 1618, at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, he turned up extravagantly dressed and in evidently good humour. He gave a long speech denying the treason. He asked to see the axe and made the line about sharp medicine. He told the crowd that the heart was what mattered, not which way his head lay on the block. When the executioner froze, he said strike, man, strike. It took two blows. His wife Bess took his head home and kept it. In 1660 it was found and buried at St Mary's Church in West Horsley, where his son Carew is also buried. His body is under the chancel of St Margaret's, Westminster, next to the Abbey. James got his Spanish peace, briefly. Within four years his son was in Madrid failing to arrange a Spanish marriage and England was sliding toward the war with Spain that Raleigh had spent his whole life arguing for. The last thing he ever wrote, reportedly in his Bible the night before, was a short poem ending on the hope that the Lord would raise him up.