Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb

In 1812, Lamb, the aristocratic wife of future British prime minister William Lamb, embarked on a tempestuous public affair with the celebrated English poet George Gordon Byron, whom she described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Byron shot to stardom with his narrative poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” published in 1812, and went on to become a major figure in the Romantic movement. After he broke off his months-long liaison with Lamb, who he once called “the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives,” she tried to stab herself and later burned Byron in effigy in front of local villagers. Lamb remained seemingly obsessed with her former paramour and spread rumors that he was having an affair with his half-sister, Augusta, who in 1814 gave birth to a child alleged to have been fathered by the poet. In 1816, following a brief, disastrous marriage to William Lamb’s cousin, Annabella Milbanke, the scandal-tinged Byron (who over the course of his life became notorious for his many affairs) left England permanently. That same year, Lamb published a novel, “Glenarvon,” which was loosely based on her relationship with the literary bad boy. In 1824, the 36-year-old Byron died from illness in modern-day Greece, where he’d gone to help support the war for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Lamb, who published several novels after “Glenarvon,” died four years later.

Read more

Abraham Lincoln and Mary Owen

It might not have been an epic breakup, but for the man who would go on to become one of America’s greatest presidents, the split was awkward. In 1831, Lincoln, then in his early 20s, moved to New Salem, Illinois. There, he became enamored with a young woman named Ann Rutledge, who got sick and died in 1935. Later, a local married woman with whom the broken-hearted Lincoln was acquainted, Elizabeth Abell, told him she’d convince her sister, Mary Owens, to come to Illinois if Lincoln would promise to tie the knot with her. Lincoln had briefly met the Kentucky-based Owens a few years earlier while she was visiting her sister and found her attractive. After the future president jokingly said yes to Abell’s offer, Owens arrived in town under the assumption she was betrothed, and Lincoln realized he’d made a mistake. Determined to keep his word, though, Honest Abe didn’t break off the engagement. However, the future 16th U.S. president, who moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1937 to work as a lawyer, did write to Owens to let her know she wouldn’t like the state capital. Lincoln’s accidental engagement subsequently unraveled, and in 1839 he met Mary Todd at a dance in Springfield. The two wed in 1842.

Read more

Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn

The poster boy for bad breakups, the teenage Henry became king of England in 1509 and soon afterward married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his older brother Arthur. By the mid-1520s Henry had grown unhappy that Catherine hadn’t produced a male heir; although she’d given birth multiple times, only one daughter lived past infancy. Additionally, the Tudor king had become besotted with Anne Boleyn, the sister of one of his mistresses. Intent on tying the knot with Boleyn, Henry, a Catholic, asked Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his first marriage. The pope refused, not wanting to upset Catherine’s nephew, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Henry married Anne in 1533 anyway and was excommunicated by the pope. The monarch subsequently had himself declared head of the Church of England and took over the nation’s monasteries, selling off much of the land. Anne, who gave birth to a daughter in 1533, eventually fell out of favor with Henry when she failed to provide him with a son. In 1536, she was found guilty of trumped-up treason charges and beheaded. Henry had four more wives: Jane Seymour, who died shortly after giving birth to a son; Anne of Cleves, whose marriage to Henry was annulled so he could wed wife No. 5; Catherine Howard, who was beheaded for treason and adultery; and Catherine Parr, who avoided the fate of her predecessors and managed to stay married to the king until his death in 1547.

Read more

King Edward VIII and Great Britain

In December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated the throne—in effect breaking up with Britain—so he could wed Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee with whom he’d been having an affair. The oldest son of King George V and Queen Mary, Edward was proclaimed king in January 1936 following the death of his father. Later that year, when the new monarch informed British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin he planned to marry Simpson, who’d just been granted a divorce from her second husband, Baldwin tried to talk him out of it, arguing that the Church of England, government officials and the British people wouldn’t accept a divorced woman as queen. Edward chose love over the crown and became the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate. On December 11, 1936, he publicly announced his decision during a radio broadcast, stating: “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.” Prince Albert, Edward’s younger brother (and father of Britain’s current queen, Elizabeth) became king and Edward, who became known as the Duke of Windsor, left England. In 1937, he and Simpson married in France. The two spent the rest of their lives mainly on the European continent and in the U.S., and for many years had a strained relationship with the British royal family. However, when Edward died in 1972 he was buried in the cemetery for royals near England’s Windsor Castle; his wife was laid to rest there when she died in 1986.

Read more

But some American suffragists

In 1907, an American Quaker named Alice Paul was studying in England when she joined British women in their campaign for suffrage. Over the next three years, while doing graduate work at the Universities of Birmingham and London, Paul was arrested and jailed three times for suffragist agitation. After returning to the United States, she joined the National American Suffrage Association, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, but soon grew impatient with that organization’s mild-mannered tactics. In 1913, Paul and fellow militants formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later the National Woman’s Party. Their demonstrations outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House in 1917 culminated in the so-called “Night of Terror” that November, during which guards at Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse brutally beat some 30 female picketers. At the time, Paul herself was serving a seven-month stint in prison, where she was force-fed and confined to a psychopathic ward. In January 1918, a district court overturned all the women’s sentences without ceremony; that same month, President Wilson declared his support for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (later the 19th Amendment) granting female suffrage.

Read more

Britain was far more militant than its counterpart in the United States.

The movements for female suffrage in Britain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had many common links, but there were some significant differences between them. For one thing, British women seeking the vote called themselves “suffragettes,” while Americans preferred the more gender-neutral “suffragists.” A far more important difference was the degree of militancy of the two movements. Under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), thousands of suffragettes demonstrated in the streets, chained themselves to buildings, heckled politicians, broke store windows, planted explosive devices and engaged in other destructive activities in order to pressure Britain’s Liberal government to give women the vote. In a particularly gruesome (and public) display, Emily Wilding Davison was fatally trampled by a racehorse owned by King George V when she tried to pin a sash advertising the suffragette cause to the horse’s bridle during the Epsom Derby in 1913. More than 1,000 suffragettes were imprisoned between 1908 and 1914; when they engaged in hunger strikes to draw public attention to their cause, prison officials responded by force-feeding them. Such militant tactics ceased when World War I broke out, as Pankhurst and the WSPU threw all their support behind the patriotic cause. In 1918, the British government granted suffrage to all women over the age of 30, ostensibly in recognition of women’s contributions to the war effort.

Read more

Susan B. Anthony (and 15 other women)

In 1868, a group of 172 black and white women went to the polls in Vineland, New Jersey, providing their own ballots and box in order to cast their votes in that year’s national election. Between 1870-72, around 100 women tried to register and vote in the District of Columbia and states around the country. Finally, in 1872, Susan B. Anthony led a group of 16 women in demanding to be registered and vote in Rochester, New York. All 16 were arrested, but only Anthony would be tried for violating the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed “the right to vote…to any of the male inhabitants” of the United States over 21 years of age. Judge Ward Hunt would not permit Anthony to take the stand in her own defense, and eventually directed the jury to issue a guilty verdict. He sentenced Anthony to pay a $100 fine, which she refused to do, challenging the judge to hold her in custody or send her to jail. Hunt declined, knowing this would allow her to appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although her case was closed at that point, “Aunt Susan” earned widespread respect and inspired younger women with her courageous example, helping to ensure that her cause would eventually triumph some 14 years after her own death.

Read more

A woman ran for political office nearly 50 years before women got the vote.

Victoria Woodhull rose from poor and eccentric origins (as children, she and her sister Tennessee Claflin gave psychic readings and healing sessions in a traveling family show) to become one of the most colorful and vivid figures of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. In 1870, with backing from railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, the sisters opened a stock brokerage firm. They used their Wall Street profits to bankroll a controversial newspaper, which supported such causes as legalized prostitution and free love. Victoria won increased respect from women’s rights activists when she argued on behalf of female suffrage in front of the House Judiciary Committee in early 1871, and the following year the Equal Rights Party nominated her for president of the United States. By the time of the general election in 1872, Woodhull’s enemies had gotten the better of her temporarily, and she spent Election Day in jail after publishing an article that accused the popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery. She was eventually acquitted of all charges, moved to England and married a wealthy banker.

Read more

The women’s rights movement launched its own fashion craze.

In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York debuted a radical new look: a knee-length skirt with full Turkish-style pantaloons gathered at the ankle. Amelia Jenks Bloomer, publisher of a trailblazing newspaper for women called The Lily, wrote articles about Miller’s outfit and printed illustrations of it, wore a similar getup herself and urged other women to shed their heavy, bulky hoop skirts in favor of the new style. In addition to revealing the fact that women actually had legs under their skirts (shocking!), the so-called “bloomers” made it easier for their wearers to get through doorways, onto carriages and trains and along rainy, muddy streets. Bloomers quickly became so popular that they became synonymous with the women’s rights movement—and infamous among the movement’s critics. Though activists such as Susan B. Anthony discarded the style after they realized they were getting more attention for their dress than their message, this early fashion rebellion would eventually help women claim the freedom to wear what they wanted to wear.

Read more

many abolitionists and women’s rights activists parted ways over the question of female suffrage.

In the early years of the women’s rights movement, the right to vote was just one of many goals of women’s rights activists, whose broad agenda included equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage and a married woman’s right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body. But during the post-Civil War debate over the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which would give citizenship and suffrage to African-American men, many women’s rights activists refocused their efforts on the battle for female suffrage. While Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others campaigned against any suffrage amendment that would exclude women, some of their former allies—including Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and Frederick Douglass—argued that this was “the Negro’s hour” and female suffrage could wait. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony founded the female-only National Woman Suffrage Association, which stood in opposition to Stone and Blackwell’s American Woman Suffrage Association. The rift between the two sides endured until 1890, when the two organizations merged to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association.

Read more

The U.S. women’s suffrage movement had its roots

Most supporters of women’s rights were introduced to reform efforts through the abolition movement of the 1830s, many of them as members of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) led by William Lloyd Garrison. Abolitionist societies provided women with opportunities to speak, write and organize on behalf of slaves, and in some cases gave them leadership roles. Among such prominent female abolitionists were the sisters Angelica and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the former slave Sojourner Truth, whose “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in 1851 earned her lasting fame. In 1840, when Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they were forced into the gallery along with all the women who attended. Their indignation led them, eight years later, to organize the first U.S. women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.

Read more

Adolf Tolkachev

The previous five examples notwithstanding, not every traitorous Cold War spy supported the communist cause. In early 1977, for instance, Soviet electronics engineer Adolf Tolkachev began dropping notes into the cars of U.S. diplomats, asking to meet with an American official. The CIA originally ignored him, worried that it would fall into a KGB trap. But Tolkachev, who worked at a military aviation institute in Moscow, persisted and eventually gained the CIA’s trust. From 1979 to 1985, he regularly stuffed classified documents into his coat in order to photograph them at home with a CIA-supplied camera. His CIA handlers would then intermittently pick up this film, along with handwritten messages, after taking great care to avoid KGB surveillance. From Tolkachev, the CIA learned that U.S. cruise missiles and bomber planes could fly under Soviet radar. It also gained great knowledge of new Soviet weapon systems, thus saving the U.S. military an estimated $2 billion in research and manufacturing costs. For this spy work, the CIA paid Tolkachev more than $1 million—the majority of which was held in escrow pending his planned defection—and supplied Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and other Western rock albums for his son. Yet he appears to have been motivated more by revenge than money, telling his CIA handlers about the murder of his wife’s mother and the imprisonment of her father during Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. (Tolkachev was furthermore upset by the government’s treatment of contemporary dissidents he admired.) The collaboration came to an abrupt end in 1985, when it’s believed that former CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, and possibly Aldrich Ames as well, told the Soviets about Tolkachev’s activities. He was executed the following year.

Read more

Aldrich Ames

The son of a CIA analyst, Wisconsin-born Aldrich Ames wasted no time in joining the agency himself, starting there in high school as a part-time clerical worker and later becoming a full-fledged spy. Posted to such places as Turkey and Mexico, Ames spent much of his three-decade-long career attempting to coax Soviet officials into the CIA’s service. Despite an obvious drinking problem and poor performance reviews, he advanced to become head of the counterintelligence branch of the CIA’s Soviet division. In 1985, however, while going through a financially disastrous divorce, Ames walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., and offered to trade secrets for money. Paid some $2.7 million over the next nine years, he in return left classified documents at prearranged drop sites for the KGB to pick up later. He moreover disclosed the identities of virtually every secret agent working for the Americans within the Soviet Union, at least 10 of whom were subsequently executed. “[They] died because this warped, murdering traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar,” the CIA’s director said later. Though U.S. officials had suspected the existence of a mole for quite some time, Ames avoided arrest until 1994, when the FBI finally closed in after uncovering incriminating evidence in his trash and on his computer. He is currently serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

Read more

The Cambridge Five

Incredulous that a Conservative member of Parliament could be a communist spy, the British authorities were likewise thrown off by the elite educations and upper-class backgrounds of the so-called Cambridge Five, who were recruited into the Soviet sphere around the time they attended the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. Within a decade or so of graduation, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross had all worked their way up to important intelligence posts, which they used to pass an array of secrets to the Soviets. For example, thanks to these double agents, who were reportedly motivated by ideology, not money, the Soviet Union learned about an Allied plan to send anti-communist insurgents into Albania, as well as Allied military strategy during the Korean War. Upon discovering that the authorities were closing in, Philby, who ironically headed the anti-Soviet section of MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA), tipped off Maclean and Burgess, prompting them to defect to Moscow in 1951. Philby joined them there in 1963, whereas Cairncross ended up in Italy and France. Blunt, meanwhile, confessed in exchange for immunity from prosecution and was allowed to stay in Britain. None of the five ever faced espionage charges.

Read more

Ray Mawby

Ray Mawby, a one-time electrician, served from 1955 to 1983 in the House of Commons, where he championed so-called traditional British values (he campaigned, for example, against the legalization of homosexuality). For Conservative Party members like him, hatred of communism was practically a prerequisite. Yet in 2012, a dozen years after his death, a BBC reporter unearthed a file showing that Mawby had been a mole for Czechoslovakia, then part of the Soviet bloc. Hundreds of pages of documents revealed that Mawby, who was given the codename Laval, began secretly handing over intelligence not long after Czech agents first approached him at a November 1960 cocktail party. Lacking access to classified information, Mawby supplied them instead with political gossip, such as the existence of a confidential investigation into a Conservative Party colleague. More insidiously, he also apparently provided floor plans of the prime minister’s parliamentary office, as well as details about the prime minister’s security team. For each helpful tidbit, Mawby received £100, which, his handlers implied, went toward his drinking and gambling habits. In later years, they upped the total to £400 per year. Though Mawby at one point met several times a month with his handlers, their collaboration appears to have ended in 1971. Remarkably, some Labour Party politicians are also known to have been in cahoots with the Czechs.

Read more

Mr Klaus Fuchs

Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Klaus Fuchs fled his native Germany for the United Kingdom, where he received a doctorate in physics and eventually became a citizen. During World War II he was invited to join Britain’s clandestine atomic bomb development program, despite his known communist leanings, and from there was sent to the United States to take part in the Manhattan Project. Upon returning to the U.K., Fuchs secured a prestigious post at a nuclear energy research center. In 1950, however, he was apprehended after U.S. agents discovered that for years he had been handing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, who by now had their own atomic bomb. Fuchs confessed, telling the authorities that he “had complete confidence in Russian policy” and that “the Western Allies deliberately allowed Russia and Germany to fight each other to the death.” Though Fuchs claimed not to know his American contact’s true name, the FBI quickly traced a trail back to the Rosenberg spy ring, resulting in the arrest of the Rosenbergs and several co-conspirators. Compared to the Rosenbergs, Fuchs got off easy. After nine years in British prison, he immigrated to East Germany, where he continued working as a nuclear physicist until his retirement in 1979. A winner of the Karl Marx Medal, East Germany’s highest civilian honor, Fuchs died in 1988 at age 76.

Read more

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Married in 1939, New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were devoted communists who allegedly headed a spy ring that passed military secrets to the Soviets. The scheme got underway sometime after 1940, when Julius became a civilian engineer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He was dismissed in 1945 once the military learned of his communist sympathies, but not before recruiting Ethel’s brother, an Army machinist working on the Manhattan Project, to turn over handwritten notes and sketches pertaining to the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, other Rosenberg recruits purportedly delivered thousands of pages of documents detailing new radar and aircraft technologies. At trial following their 1950 arrest, Ethel’s brother testified against them, and a judge sentenced them to death, declaring their crime “worse than murder.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower then sealed their fate by denying a petition for executive clemency. The two were sent to the electric chair at New York State’s Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953, marking the first time American civilians had ever been executed for espionage. Although worldwide protests erupted over the Rosenbergs’ treatment, with many people feeling they had fallen victim to McCarthy-era red baiting, the post-Soviet release of decrypted KGB messages proved that Julius had in fact been a spy. The evidence against Ethel is less ironclad, and her guilt remains in dispute.

Read more