Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama examines the turbulent years in Britain from 1649 to 1689, from Oliver Cromwell's republic to Charles II's restoration and James II's subsequent pro-Catholic rule from which he was quickly deposed. This is the dramatic story of the revolutionary period after the execution of Charles I, when Cromwell ruled with an iron hand and Charles II attempted to restore the lustre of the monarchy.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama examines the turbulent years in Britain from 1649 to 1689, from Oliver Cromwell's republic to Charles II's restoration and James II's subsequent pro-Catholic rule from which he was quickly deposed. This is the dramatic story of the revolutionary period after the execution of Charles I, when Cromwell ruled with an iron hand and Charles II attempted to restore the lustre of the monarchy.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00You
00:30On January the 30th, 1649, the English killed their king. It had happened before, of course,
00:46all those Edwards and Richards violently done in by their own subjects, but this was different. Now
00:54the British monarchy itself had been exterminated. Now there was just the people and its Parliament,
01:00the keepers of the liberties of England. But what was the point of freedom when you
01:07were frightened? What the people really wanted to know was who would keep them safe?
01:12Who would stop the soldiers from burning and pillaging, allow people to sleep quietly in
01:24their beds? Who would protect them from the wars of religion and politics which seemed to go on
01:30and on and on? Would it be Parliament or would it be a great general like Oliver Cromwell?
01:42It doesn't matter, said the hard-headed philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a royalist who'd come back to
01:49Cromwell's England. What the country needs is a strong ruler who embodies all the people.
02:00Whatever or whoever can save the country from anarchy, whatever can save you from yourselves,
02:07never mind about what's right or wrong. Put yourself in the hands of the power
02:12that protects the all-powerful Leviathan.
02:22If that's Oliver Cromwell, then so be it. It's the reasonable thing to do.
02:29But the Scots, the English and the Irish were not about to be reasonable because they were much too
02:34busy being righteous. Over the next half century, righteousness would kill a lot of the British.
02:41At the end of it all, reason would appear, but not before a lot of tears have been shed.
02:47Tears of rapture and tears of grief.
03:34Biting their nails about the plight of kingless Britain. For many, this was the dawn of a new age.
03:42It's true, no one had foreseen this during the Civil Wars, but in giving them victory,
03:47the Almighty had shown them that Albion must be turned into Jerusalem. He had lain the Stuart
03:55Kings in the dust. The only king to follow now was King Jesus, and the only true government,
04:02that of his saints.
04:04Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand.
04:27The kingdom of God was at hand. The most blessed revolution of all,
04:31and no one was more convinced of this than Albion's holy warrior, Oliver Cromwell.
04:41Religion was not at first the thing contended for,
04:44but God brought it to that issue at last, and at last it proved that which was most dear to us.
04:51Cromwell called himself a seeker, and what he sought all his life was God's destiny for himself
04:59and for his country. At first, he'd been innocent of the Lord's design. For years,
05:05he'd just led the life of an obscure East Anglian country gentleman.
05:11Just as Cromwell was beginning to make his way in the world,
05:14some sort of crisis happened to his modest family.
05:18Some sort of crisis happened to his modest fortune.
05:23But what the world might have seen as misfortune was, through the cunning of the Almighty,
05:29his saving grace. He underwent some kind of religious conversion.
05:35The vanities were stripped away so he might be opened to the light.
05:40Oh, I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light. This is true. I hated godliness,
05:48yet God had mercy on me. Oh, the riches of his mercy.
05:58The sense that God had some special service for him made a new man of Cromwell. He knew where
06:06he was going. He knew what had to be done. What had to be done was to tear the sword
06:13out of the hands of the untrustworthy, papist-loving king.
06:20He went to war as a complete novice, with no military experience whatsoever.
06:26But his sense of divine appointment was his armour. It made him supremely confident,
06:32cool under fire, but never reckless.
06:37An aura of invincibility began to cling to him.
06:41He became the driving force of the godly revolution.
06:48When the vanquished king defied God's judgment, his blood was needed to expiate the crime.
06:56But it became obvious that doing away with the monarch
07:00was no guarantee of doing away with the monarchy.
07:04For if Charles couldn't be among his subjects in person, his proxy could.
07:13The Greek word icon means both an image and a copy, and the icon basilicae,
07:19the spitting image of the king, appeared within a week of his execution.
07:24It was an instant bestseller, going through 35 editions in a year,
07:28and it made Charles an imperishable martyr.
07:33A latter-day Christ, sacrificed for the sins of his people.
07:38Like Christ, Charles too would be resurrected, wearing his heavenly crown,
07:43and made flesh in the person of his son, Charles II,
07:47awaiting the call from exile in France.
07:54The poet John Milton, an ardent champion of the parliamentary commonwealth,
07:59was hired to attack the cult of the king martyr as so much wicked idolatry.
08:05To persuade the fearful and the gullible, they didn't need a Charles I.
08:10In fact, they didn't need any Stuart monarch.
08:13Look, he wanted to say, just stop worrying about the dead king.
08:18You're the sovereign now.
08:19Come to think of it, you've always been the sovereign.
08:23Kings have been yours to hire or fire.
08:28But when Cromwell and Milton told the people
08:31that it was time for them to govern themselves,
08:34they didn't, of course, mean to be taken literally.
08:37What? Every jumped-up weaver or ploughman with some sixpenny book learning,
08:42announcing he'd just appointed himself the magistrate of mucking on the world,
08:47granting himself the vote?
08:48Heaven forbid!
08:50That way lay chaos.
08:53No, the people should put the government of the state
08:56into the hands of the kind of men God saw fittest to exercise it,
09:00incorruptible men of substance and piety.
09:05Oh, I see, said free-born John Lilburn, the leveller,
09:09an ex-army officer who wanted to level the distance
09:12between the mighty and the humble, the rich and the poor.
09:15You mean the same kind of people who got us into this mess in the first place?
09:19We've all known a John Lilburn, haven't we?
09:22Some of us have even been John Lilburn.
09:25First of the barricades, first to be arrested, won't shut up.
09:29But love him or hate him, you know he won't go away.
09:35To Squire Cromwell, he was a pain in the neck.
09:38At the time, he was a man of the people.
09:41He was a man of the people.
09:42He was a man of the people.
09:44He was a man of the people.
09:45He was a man of the people.
09:47To Squire Cromwell, he was a pain in the neck,
09:50a dangerous loudmouth capable of wrecking discipline in the army.
09:57Lilburn, for his part, detested the new regime.
10:03All you intended when you set us a-fighting
10:05was merely to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants
10:09so that you might get up and ride in their stead.
10:12The soldiers read free-born John
10:15and actually believed they should have a vote.
10:17Give them an inch and they'd take a mile.
10:20Pretty soon, the men would start believing
10:22their officers were the tyrants Lilburn and the Levellers said they were.
10:29They had to be stopped.
10:31An army was not, repeat not, a commune.
10:39I tell you, you have no other way to deal with these men
10:43but to break them or they will break you.
10:46Yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure
10:50shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders
10:55and frustrate and make void all that work
10:58that with so many years' industry, toil and pains you have done.
11:03I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.
11:09Off to the tower went the Leveller leaders, like so many traitors.
11:15But then something astounding happened.
11:18A petitioning campaign to demand the release of the Levellers
11:22was mobilised in London by Leveller women.
11:26Now, for the Puritans, the cardinal virtues of women were silence and meekness.
11:31But these women were shameless, obstinate, loud-mouthed
11:36and, it has to be admitted, brave.
11:41Leveller women had always been involved in the movement's political campaigns.
11:46Elizabeth Lilburn had been politicised through her efforts
11:49to spring her reckless husband from one prison or another.
11:54Mary Overton had been brutally punished for printing and distributing her husband's tracts,
12:00tied to the end of a cart and dragged through London's streets
12:04with her six-month-old baby, pelted and abused like a common whore.
12:09But the most impassioned and articulate of the sisters
12:12was a woman called Catherine Chidley.
12:14She started as a charismatic preacher and turned to politics
12:18in an attempt to make the Commonwealth understand
12:22the particular sufferings of her sex.
12:27Considering that we have an equal share and interest with men in the Commonwealth
12:32and it cannot be laid waste,
12:34and considering that poverty, misery and famine,
12:38like a mighty torrent, is breaking in upon us
12:42and we are not able to see our children hang upon us and cry out for bread
12:47and not have wherewithal to feed them,
12:49we had rather die than see that day.
12:56This was not what Oliver Cromwell had expected from Jerusalem.
13:02It got worse.
13:09In May 1649, some hundreds of soldiers mutinied
13:13and tried to combine forces in Oxfordshire.
13:17Cromwell rode hell for leather 50 miles in a day
13:21and caught them in the middle of the night at Burford.
13:25One of the prisoners, Anthony Sedley, locked in the church,
13:28expecting the worst, carved his name into the font.
13:34The next morning, three of his comrades-in-arms
13:37were led out into the churchyard and shot.
13:43Then Oliver went off to get an honorary degree in law from Oxford.
13:48He was a man of the law.
13:50Oliver went off to get an honorary degree in law from Oxford.
13:56And he made sure that the mutinous soldiers were shipped off to a place
14:01where they could vent their frustration on someone else.
14:05Angry are we, was his line.
14:08Want to know who's to blame for prolonging the civil wars?
14:15Say hello to the Antichrist across the Irish Sea.
14:20The target of Cromwell's march through blood was an army of royalists
14:24holding out in Ireland in the name of King Charles's son.
14:28In fact, it was as much Protestant as Catholic.
14:31But in his conviction, they were the legions of the devil.
14:34Cromwell was not about to make nice distinctions.
14:41At Drogheda, on the main road between Dublin and Ulster,
14:45he made it only too clear what he had in mind.
14:48There's no point sidestepping this horror, is there?
14:52This was Cromwell's war crime.
14:54An atrocity so hideous, it's contaminated Anglo-Irish history ever since.
15:00But we need to get right just what this atrocity was.
15:04What it wasn't was the indiscriminate butchery of women and children.
15:08No eyewitnesses ever claimed to have seen any such thing.
15:13But what Cromwell did order, unhesitatingly and with impunity,
15:18and without any mercy, was, in any case, an act of unspeakable murder.
15:33At least 3,000 royalist soldiers were butchered at Drogheda.
15:39The vast majority after they had surrendered and disarmed.
15:48At St Peter's Church, Cromwell had his soldiers burn the pews
15:53beneath the steeple to smoke out the defenders,
15:56who were incinerated in the flames.
15:59The general saw no need to hang his head about the massacre.
16:04We are come to break the power of a company of lawless rebels
16:08who, having cast off the authority of England,
16:10live as enemies to human society,
16:13whose principles are to destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them.
16:21We come by the assistance of God to hold forth and maintain
16:26the luster and glory of English liberty
16:29in a nation where we have an undoubted right to it.
16:34This is absolutely authentic, Oliver Cromwell,
16:37and today it makes for unbearable reading.
16:41No, it's not the confession of a genocidal lunatic,
16:45but it is the confession of a narrow-minded, pig-headed,
16:48Protestant bigot and English imperialist,
16:52and that surely is bad enough.
16:58Cromwell treated Ireland like the primitive colony he thought it was,
17:03moving the native Irish off their farms and using the land to pay his soldiers.
17:09But before he could finish his pacification,
17:12if that's what he thought it was,
17:14another piece of unquiet Britain rose up to mock him.
17:20For the Scots had invited the 20-year-old Charles II
17:23to come and be their king and went to war on his behalf.
17:31Cromwell lured them into England in the summer of 1651,
17:36where the Scottish army found itself caught
17:38between two massively bigger forces.
17:45At the Battle of Worcester on the 3rd of September,
17:48it went down to a ruinous and irreversible defeat.
17:57Charles went on the run, hidden by royalist sympathisers,
18:00until he could get smuggled out of the country.
18:07So, when Oliver Cromwell returned to London in the autumn of 1651,
18:13it was as an English Caesar,
18:15the like of whom had not been seen since the days of Edward I.
18:21If Cromwell was God's Englishman,
18:23it was because he felt in his marrow
18:25that England was God's true promised land.
18:28And the best thing that could happen for Britain
18:31was that it become as English as possible.
18:36The Stuart dream of a united Britain, of course,
18:39had been what had started the Civil Wars.
18:42Now, Cromwell had ended them by making that dream a reality,
18:46not as a united kingdom,
18:48but as a united republic of Great Britain.
18:55But what kind of republic was it supposed to be?
18:58As much as anyone, Cromwell knew the country was exhausted
19:02from almost 50 years of war.
19:06It was time, as he said, to heal and settle.
19:12But this didn't mean business as usual.
19:14Surely, God didn't mean for so much blood and treasure
19:18to have been spilled,
19:19only so that ungodly lawyers and moneybrokers could get richer.
19:25And that seemed to be the way things were going
19:27under the government of the Parliament,
19:30the keeper of the liberties of England as its style itself.
19:36It still sat as it had when its members had been purged by the army
19:40to allow the trial of the king to proceed,
19:43ridiculed by its enemies as the Rump.
19:47To Cromwell, the Rump was a monstrosity,
19:50a bastion of selfishness and greed,
19:53more like Sodom than Jerusalem.
19:56Worst of all, it showed no signs at all of wanting ever to close down.
20:02When it came up with a bill designed to replace old members
20:06and keep itself going indefinitely, this was the last straw.
20:15On April 20th, 1653, Cromwell marched down to Westminster
20:20in the company of a troop of musketeers.
20:24Moses was descending from the mountain,
20:28and he was not a happy prophet.
20:35Well, at first, it seemed as though the Member for Cambridge
20:37might actually behave himself.
20:40Cromwell sat in his usual seat, he doffed his hat,
20:44he asked the Speaker, respectfully,
20:46if he could have a word with him.
20:49But as he warmed to his task, the niceties were tossed aside,
20:53and he began to berate the astounded members
20:56for their indifference to justice and to piety.
21:00"'I expect you think this is not parliamentary language,' he said.
21:04"'Well, I confess it is not,
21:07"'and neither do I think it is.
21:10"'It is not parliamentary language,' he said.
21:15"'Well, I confess it is not,
21:17"'and neither are you to expect any such from me.'"
21:23The hat went back on. This is always a very bad sign.
21:26And Cromwell started to march up and down
21:29in the middle of the chamber now,
21:30shouting that the Lord had done with them
21:33and had chosen instruments more worthy of their calling.
21:37Now, some poor soul tried to stop him in full spate,
21:40but by this time, Cromwell was in exterminating angel mode
21:44and brushed him aside contemptuously.
21:46"'You are no Parliament,' he bellowed.
21:49"'I say you are no Parliament.'
21:51"'And with that,' he called in the musketeers.
21:54"'The boots entered, heavily, noisily.'"
21:59Parliament was shut down.
22:07This was a depressingly modern moment.
22:10A classic coup d'etat, in fact.
22:12It was at this point that Cromwell crossed the line
22:15from mere bullying to outright dictatorship.
22:18And in so doing, he undid at a stroke
22:21the entire point of the war that he himself had fought
22:25against the King's unparliamentary conduct.
22:28Cromwell liked to claim he was striking a blow
22:31against what he called ambition and avarice,
22:34but what he really wounded, and fatally,
22:37was the Commonwealth itself.
22:40EXPLOSION
22:49This is the point at which Cromwell could have seized power,
22:53and everyone expected him to.
22:57But Cromwell wasn't working for himself.
23:00He was working for God.
23:03In Parliament's place, he would set up an assembly of men
23:06hand-picked for their piety.
23:09It would be an assembly of saints.
23:12And his language was very different,
23:14as he exhorted them to go about their business.
23:22Love all the sheep, love the lambs,
23:26love all, tender all.
23:31But mystical rapture and politics don't go well together,
23:35at least not in Britain.
23:37And in a few months, the unworkable assembly collapsed,
23:40its leaders begging Cromwell to put it out of its misery.
23:47He duly obliged.
23:51Now there seemed no alternative but to take the crown,
23:54to become Oliver I.
23:58But this was still a step too far for a man whom God had told
24:02to punish the haughtiness of kings.
24:05So instead, he chose to become a Lord Protector.
24:08That had a good ring to it.
24:10Authority, but not tyranny.
24:14He was king in all but name, but a constitutional sovereign,
24:19ruling with a council and a newly elected Parliament.
24:25His great hope was for a settling,
24:28but the truth was that the Protector himself was anything
24:31but settled in his own mind about the direction he should take the country.
24:37Should Britain be righteous or reasonable?
24:40It was a civil war he fought over and over again in his own head.
24:46Squire Cromwell could see the virtues of a reasonable state of affairs.
24:51Given a little breathing space, the old world of the counties
24:54was coming ever so cautiously back to life.
24:58Magistrates were sitting at courts,
25:00gentlemen riding to hounds,
25:02war-damaged houses being repaired,
25:05children being married off,
25:07friends and neighbours asked to dinner.
25:13And not least, when some of those gentlemen
25:15were elected to the Protectorate Parliaments,
25:17the old connections between Westminster and the counties,
25:21the secret of English government,
25:23were at last being put back together.
25:27But the righteous side of Cromwell fretted
25:30that this return to an older way of doing things was only too successful,
25:34that it was not so much healing as backsliding.
25:38Royalism by the back door.
25:41So, in 1655, Cromwell turned his mastiffs loose.
25:49The major generals.
25:51It was their job to take righteousness out into the shires,
25:55the Protestant Taliban on horseback.
25:58Muffle the bell ringers, snoop on the ale houses,
26:02lock up the fornicators, cancel Christmas.
26:11John Evelyn, ardent royalist and gentleman of letters,
26:15who grudgingly endured the Leviathan,
26:18was one of countless people who found themselves
26:21on the short end of the generals' bullying.
26:25I went with my wife to London to celebrate Christmas Day,
26:30Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter Chapel.
26:33As he was giving us the holy sacrament,
26:36the chapel was surrounded by soldiers.
26:41All the communicants and assembly surprised and kept quiet.
26:45All the communicants and assembly surprised and kept prisoner by them.
26:49Some in the house, others carried away.
26:56It was a public relations disaster for the Protectorate.
27:00The prudent Cromwell reasserted himself over the pious
27:04and he got rid of the major generals in a hurry.
27:10There were some places, though, where the two instincts worked together
27:14and changed Britain as a result.
27:16And this is one of them, the synagogue of Bevis Marks in London.
27:23Historians sometimes complain that it's difficult to find hard evidence
27:27of any good at all that came out of the Protectorate.
27:30Well, this is hard enough evidence for me.
27:33For it was on these unforgiving, backless oak benches
27:37that the first Jews to be admitted since the expulsion
27:41360-something years before, parked their behinds.
27:45It was under the Protectorate that Jews were allowed finally
27:49to worship openly and to live openly
27:52in what became a little piece of early multicultural London.
27:56It's Oliver Cromwell we have to thank for that,
27:59for opening a new chapter of Anglo-Jewish history, my history.
28:04HE SINGS IN ITALIAN
28:17His apocalyptic timetable told him that the conversion of the Jews
28:22would herald the coming of the last days.
28:25But his business sense told him that through their network
28:28in the Dutch and Spanish trading world,
28:31the Jews could be a priceless source of commercial and military intelligence.
28:38Piety and pragmatism, those twin qualities so often at odds
28:42inside Cromwell's personality, this time came together
28:46to make him, as far as the Jews were concerned, a true Lord Protector.
28:52But not king.
28:54In the end, and so unlike the king he had destroyed,
28:58Cromwell could never shake off his sense of unworthiness.
29:02It was what saved him, and Britain, from a true dictatorship.
29:08Oliver Cromwell believed he worked for God.
29:11Real dictators think they are God.
29:14It was those men who fancied themselves little gods,
29:17Charles I or the Republican oligarchs,
29:20who most aroused Cromwell's contempt.
29:23Simplicity was a word he used all the time about himself
29:27and it was the highest of moral compliments.
29:30But to prolong the Protectorate,
29:32Cromwell actually needed to be more of a Leviathan
29:35than he could ever stomach,
29:37and that is both his exoneration and his failure.
29:43And it's one of the most extraordinary ironies of British history
29:47that Cromwell's Protectorate,
29:49demonised by both Royalists and Republicans alike,
29:52ultimately formed the blueprint for our constitutional monarchy.
29:56A chief executive who chose his government,
29:59but who were both answerable to a regularly elected Parliament.
30:05But Cromwell himself would not live to see this happen.
30:12On September 3rd, 1658, the anniversary of the Battle of Worcester,
30:17Cromwell died while an immense black tempest
30:21was raging over England,
30:23ripping out trees and sending Belfrys crashing to the ground.
30:35It was, the old wives said, the devil coming for his soul.
30:41What Oliver Cromwell left behind
30:43was not a workable political system, but a vision.
30:47Now, he may have been an angry, ruthless, overbearing man,
30:51perhaps even a manic depressive,
30:53but that vision was something of startling sweetness,
30:57a sighting of Jerusalem,
30:59a place where everyone would be free to receive Christ in their own way,
31:04provided that they did not disturb the people of England,
31:08provided that they did not disturb the peace and conscience of anybody else.
31:13After all his marches and slaughters
31:16and fits of table-pounding, red-faced fury,
31:20what it turned out Oliver Cromwell wanted for everyone was a quiet life.
31:27But Catholics were excluded from this vision,
31:30because for Cromwell, as for the country at large,
31:33Catholicism meant tyranny.
31:36The Protector may have left the country safe from despots,
31:39but not from anarchy.
31:41And after his death, it returned with a vengeance,
31:44power swinging between the soldiers and the politicians,
31:47sleepless nights, the nagging questions from ten years before.
31:52Who will keep us safe?
31:54Who do we obey?
31:55Where do we find a sovereign to protect us?
31:59It took another hard-headed soldier to see the only way to restore order.
32:04General George Monk had been a royalist in the Civil War
32:08and a Cromwellian when it seemed that only the Protector could keep the peace.
32:13Now he realised that with the Lord Protector gone,
32:16there was only one person who could take his place.
32:22That was a new king.
32:25The irony about the restoration of Charles II was that he came to the throne
32:29not because England needed a successor to Charles I.
32:33He came to the throne because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.
32:46There was universal rejoicing, bonfires and feasting.
32:50The chaos brought by Cromwell's death was ending
32:53and this new Charles seemed just what everyone had hoped for,
32:57a model of sweet reason.
33:00That, at any rate, is what Samuel Pepys thought.
33:04Pepys was a pure product of Cromwell's England.
33:07He was present when the new king boarded his flagship home.
33:11En route, the tall, dark-haired man strode up and down the quarterdeck,
33:16telling the story of his escape after the Battle of Worcester.
33:21Here was a king full of charisma.
33:26He had magic.
33:33But would his reason survive the emotions stirred by his return?
33:39The diarist John Evelyn recorded,
33:41with unrepentant royalism burning in his breast.
33:45This day came in his majesty to London, after a sad and long exile,
33:51with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot,
33:54brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy.
33:58The ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing.
34:02I stood in the strand and beheld it and blessed God.
34:06I stood in the strand and beheld it and blessed God.
34:09And all this without one drop of blood,
34:12and by that very army which had rebelled against him.
34:18The king was crowned at Westminster on the 23rd of April, 1661.
34:24His reign was backdated to the day after his father had been beheaded.
34:30But even before the king had been crowned,
34:32there were those with long memories who were looking for revenge.
34:38On January the 30th, 1661,
34:41exactly 12 years after Charles I's severed head dropped into the straw,
34:47the remains of Cromwell and the regicides were dragged from their tombs
34:52and hanged from the common gallows at Tyburn,
34:55before being buried in a deep pit.
34:59Over the next months, 11 other king killers were hanged,
35:03drawn and quartered.
35:10The old Cromwellians watched all this in tactful, furtive silence.
35:15They wondered just how reasonable this new regime might actually be.
35:22Killing the Killjoys, though, Charles knew,
35:25would not damage his popularity.
35:27Given a free vote, the people would,
35:30especially after the major generals, vote for pleasure over piety.
35:40And leading the dance, of course, was Charles himself,
35:44constitutionally incapable of being so churlish
35:48as to spurn any woman generous enough to invite him into her bed.
35:52They all did.
35:58This was the golden age of ogling.
36:01If Puritan England had been governed by the ear,
36:04wide open to receive the word of God,
36:07the Restoration restored the sovereignty of the eye.
36:13Its ruling passion was scopophilia, the addiction of the gaze,
36:20whether eyeballing an outrageous wig, a plunging neckline,
36:25a louse caught in the lens of a microscope
36:28or the constellations of the stars.
36:41Charles's boyish enthusiasm with the latest optical instrument
36:45suggested he might turn out to be a new kind of Stuart,
36:48one whose vision dwelled not in cloudy realms of absolutism
36:52but which was precisely focused, concerned to observe reality,
36:57political as well as physical.
36:59He might, in fact, turn out to be that most unlikely thing,
37:02a reasonable Stuart king.
37:06This was a Stuart for whom the physical world was his alpha and omega,
37:11who was earthy in his realism.
37:15All too earthy, some thought, as they looked down in disgust
37:19at a theatre of indolence punctuated by debauchery
37:23that had become the court.
37:26They were not so worldly, not so rational,
37:29as to be free of the fear that someday there would be a reckoning.
37:34Someday soon, as it turned out.
37:38In the summer of 1664, a comet appeared in the skies over England.
37:44Its sallow tail could be seen with unprecedented clarity
37:48through the lens of the new telescopes owned, among others, by the king.
37:53But what most people saw was disaster in the offing.
37:58They had all read their almanacs.
38:00They knew that the apocalypse would be heralded by pestilence, fire,
38:05and war.
38:12A year later, thousands of bodies killed by bubonic plague
38:16were being tossed each week into the great pit of Aldgate.
38:21And there was nothing that science could do about it
38:24except count the dead with the care demanded by modern statistics.
38:30My father, death, no one so true
38:41Did share it
38:46Come away, come away
38:53Come away, dead
39:03One-sixth of London's population perished.
39:08The infection ebbed with the onset of autumn,
39:11but the trepidation hung around,
39:14for the number of the beast was 666.
39:23And sure enough, up from the smoky regions of hell,
39:27in the first week of September, 1666,
39:30came the diabolical fire.
39:38In the early hours of Sunday, September 2nd,
39:41the Lord Mayor of London was woken from his sleep
39:44to be told that a fire had started in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane.
39:49His response was,
39:51Pish! That woman might pit it at!
40:05As he snored on, the flames reached the warehouses
40:08flanking the Thames between the Tower and London Bridge,
40:12brimful of tallow, pitch and brandy.
40:17A monstrous fireball came roaring and sucking out of the narrow streets,
40:21feeding on the overhanging bays and gables.
40:27In another hour, two to 300 houses had been swallowed by the flames.
40:40John Evelyn, who'd been saying for years
40:42that overcrowded London was a disaster waiting to happen,
40:45took no joy in the fulfilment of his prophecy.
40:52Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle.
40:56God grant mine eyes that I never behold the like again
40:59who now saw 10,000 houses all in one flame.
41:05The noise and crackle and thunder of the impetuous flames,
41:09the shriek of women and children, the hurry of people,
41:13the fall of towers, houses and churches like a hideous storm.
41:19London was, but is no more.
41:39When the rain started, a week after the outbreak of the fire,
41:42allowing an early stop-taking,
41:44the scale of the devastation horrified even the pessimists.
41:4913,200 houses had been destroyed,
41:52along with some of the most famous buildings of the city.
41:58St Paul's Cathedral was in ruins.
42:02The new Leviathan, it seemed, had no fire insurance.
42:07Still, there were those who were determined
42:10that London would rise as a phoenix from its ashes
42:14and, like the reborn, rebuilt Rome, astonish the world.
42:20This sort of thing had long been on the mind of Christopher Wren,
42:24mathematician, architect and brilliant prodigy of the Royal Society.
42:29So when Roman antiquities were found in the debris around St Paul's,
42:33one of them a tablet bearing the Latin inscription,
42:36Resurgam, I shall arise, Wren took the message to heart.
42:44London had once been a great Roman city
42:47and now would outdo the ancients.
42:51With great piazzas, broad avenues calculated
42:54to afford geometrically satisfying vistas
42:57and up to 50 new churches.
43:01And at its heart would be a new St Paul's,
43:04a cathedral the like of which had never been seen in northern Europe.
43:10He even built a giant wooden model
43:12to show the king and clergy just what they would be getting.
43:18How could they not be awestruck by the huge dome
43:21that used the same technology as a microscope
43:24to flood the interior with light?
43:35SINGING
43:54But there was a problem.
43:57Wren had designed his cathedral as a Greek cross,
44:00sacrificing the traditional floor plan of a Protestant church
44:04in favour of perfect acoustics and light.
44:08You can almost hear the mystified, angry complaints of the reverends.
44:13And where exactly is the choir supposed to go?
44:16And how do we process up a nave which isn't there?
44:21Most of all, they said, well, call us old-fashioned,
44:24but this looks suspiciously to us like a Catholic basilica.
44:28We'll be, if you pardon the phrase, damned
44:30if we're going to let St Paul's turn into St Peter's.
44:36When the king joined the critics
44:38and told him to go back to the drawing board,
44:40Wren's normally very dry eyes are said to have filled with tears.
44:45He would have his chance to build his domed cathedral,
44:48but only when it was joined to a long nave,
44:51something resembling a traditional church.
44:55The irony was that for all his Roman enthusiasm,
44:58Wren believed he was building a truly Protestant church.
45:03But his timing was terrible.
45:07Ever since the days of the Reformation,
45:09Britain had been victim to anti-Catholic fear.
45:13And once again, in Charles's reign, it erupted.
45:20Not all of it was misplaced.
45:22Charles was suspected of having secret Catholics in his government,
45:26and so he did.
45:28He was also suspected of making secret treaties
45:31with the militantly Catholic Louis XIV of France,
45:35and so he had.
45:38But there was worse, much worse.
45:41The king's own brother, James, Duke of York,
45:44had actually converted to the Roman church,
45:47and he made no secret of it.
45:49With no children born to the king,
45:51the first Catholic ruler since Bloody Mary was an imminent prospect.
45:57There was shivering in the shires.
46:01A century before, England's Queen Elizabeth had been threatened
46:04with Catholic assassination plots.
46:07The Jesuit lurking in the shadows
46:09was a permanent fixture in the popular nightmare.
46:14So when an ex-Jesuit called Titus Oates
46:17concocted a pack of lies about a plot to murder the king,
46:21invite a French invasion,
46:23and create a Catholic state under James,
46:26he tripped the Guy Fawkes alert.
46:30And when the magistrate investigating the charges
46:33was found mysteriously murdered on Primrose Hill,
46:36it seemed obvious that Oates knew what he was talking about.
46:40It sent the jittery country right over the edge.
46:45SCREAMING
46:58Anti-Catholic violence swept the country.
47:01Riots, burnings, lynch mobs, kangaroo courts.
47:08For some politicians, the ugly mood of the country
47:11was a golden opportunity to press their favourite cause.
47:15James, Duke of York, should never be allowed to sit on the throne.
47:20He had to be excluded.
47:22Anything to stop the cycle of religious wars from breaking out again.
47:29It was an extraordinary crisis in the history of the British monarchy.
47:33For at stake were not only the lives of hundreds of those victimised
47:38by all the lies and hysteria, but the fate of the polity itself.
47:42Because to concede exclusion was to accept that Parliament
47:46had the right to judge who was fit or unfit to occupy the throne.
47:50And that was a concession Charles II was absolutely not about to make.
47:58But Charles met the most serious crisis of his reign
48:01with his most powerful weapon.
48:04Reason.
48:06He offered a compromise.
48:08His brother would be allowed to succeed
48:10if he agreed to be a private Catholic
48:13and not to lay a finger on the Church of England.
48:17Riding the wave of paranoia,
48:19the newly elected Parliament, summoned to Oxford, turned him down.
48:24They assumed that memory was on their side,
48:27that this Charles would remember the fate of his stubborn father,
48:31who had triggered a war when he, too,
48:33had been suspected of being soft on Catholicism.
48:38But historical memory is a double-edged sword.
48:47When the Commons filed into the Great Hall of Christchurch
48:50to hear what they thought would be the royal capitulation,
48:53they found themselves instead confronted by a leviathan in ermine.
48:59This is the King's will, he said, in effect.
49:03Take it or leave it.
49:07It was a breathtaking gamble.
49:10Backed up by the House of Lords,
49:12Charles had left the exclusionists in the Commons
49:15no alternative but to go to war.
49:21And he was betting that the memory of the last of his brothers
49:25and he was betting that the memory of the last round
49:28would be a deterrent.
49:31He was right.
49:33The granite and marble tombs of the dead from Edge Hill,
49:36Mastermoor and Worcester were still being carved.
49:40That war had begun as a parliamentary protest
49:43and ended in Puritan crusade.
49:46Who wanted that back?
49:48Not the exclusionists.
49:51They blinked first.
49:56James did get the keys to the kingdom when his brother died in 1685
50:01and he inherited a new parliament with a massively royalist majority,
50:05along with widespread public sympathy.
50:09Within three years, though, he had squandered it all.
50:18James never had any intention of hiding his faith.
50:22His Catholicism wasn't just a private comfort
50:25to be celebrated away from the public gaze.
50:28No, James was going to be a visible Catholic king.
50:33But he was playing a dangerous game.
50:40When James tried to reverse anti-Catholic laws,
50:43the pillars of the establishment,
50:45the country gentry and the Church of England, were horrified.
50:50When the bishops complained, the king declared,
50:53I shall find a way to do my business without you.
50:58The protesting bishops were locked up in the tower.
51:06James's timing was disastrous.
51:10For he was doing all this when Louis XIV,
51:13the militantly Catholic king of France, was threatening Europe.
51:20By January 1688, James had managed to alienate
51:24all his natural allies and to turn himself
51:27into an even more dangerous version of his father, Charles I.
51:32He was even filling the officer ranks of the army with Irish Catholics.
51:40The only consolation was that at 52, he had no son.
51:45The next in line to the throne was his daughter Mary,
51:48a staunch Protestant who'd married the Dutch prince,
51:51William of Orange, hero of the resistance to Louis XIV.
51:56On June 10th, 1688, all this changed.
52:01James's wife, Mary of Modna, gave birth to a boy
52:05who was duly baptised with Roman rites.
52:09Now, not only was the king Catholic, so was his dynasty.
52:15What could be done?
52:17Well, something quite extraordinary.
52:21A group of seven leading statesmen sent a message to Holland
52:24with an explosive request.
52:27Prince William, they asked,
52:29would you mind invading Britain and saving us from a Catholic king?
52:37William of Orange wanted to save his country
52:39from Catholic despots, all right, but the country he had in mind,
52:43first, foremost and always, was the Dutch Republic.
52:47English politics were always a sideshow for William to the main event.
52:52That was the Great European War against Louis XIV.
52:58What choice did he have?
53:00There would be British troops in that war.
53:03To make sure they'd be fighting for him, not against him,
53:06exactly 100 years after the Spanish Armada
53:09had failed to do the very same thing,
53:12William set out to conquer Britain.
53:20He was nothing if not farer.
53:2260,000 copies of William's manifesto blanketed England
53:26in an effort to present the planned invasion
53:29as a response to a spontaneous uprising against the Catholic tyrant.
53:35It was so persuasive that he succeeded in making James
53:38seem the foreigner in his own land
53:40and the Dutchman the true Brit.
53:47The fate of the Armada was a sobering thought,
53:50so his Dutch invasion force made the Spanish one seem puny.
53:54This time, there were 600 vessels and up to 20,000 troops.
54:01HE SINGS
54:14He landed at Torbay on November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day.
54:19Obviously, God was a Protestant.
54:23When he realised that this Protestant invasion
54:26was really going to oust him,
54:28James' courage failed him.
54:30His resolution in meltdown,
54:32his knights haunted by the ghost of his beheaded daddy,
54:36he fled the kingdom.
54:46William claimed that he'd come just to restore English liberties,
54:50but now he had Dutch soldiers in the streets.
54:54And if he'd decided to be king after all,
54:57who was going to say otherwise?
55:06In February 1689,
55:08William of Orange and Mary Stuart
55:11were proclaimed King and Queen of England.
55:16But during the ceremony, something profoundly novel happened.
55:20A Declaration of Rights was read out,
55:23listing the conditions under which the new monarchs
55:26would be allowed to sit on the throne.
55:31Parliament had changed the job description of the ruler.
55:34It turned out that the country did not need Leviathan.
55:38What it wanted was a chairman of the board,
55:41and Dutch William fitted that role to a T.
55:46William III would fight his wars by asking, not demanding,
55:50funds from the elected representatives of the people.
55:55And ruling together with Parliament,
55:57his government looked remarkably like a reasonable version
56:01of Oliver Cromwell's protectorate.
56:07History has called this a glorious revolution.
56:11It was probably neither.
56:13But afterwards, the British monarchy would never be the same again.
56:24But the old monarchy had one last desperate play to make.
56:29In March 1689,
56:31James landed in Ireland with 20,000 French troops.
56:37The Catholic Irish flocked to their king.
56:40Like the English,
56:42they had become pawns in someone else's chess game.
56:47Outside the Rocheda, two armies,
56:50two worlds faced each other across the River Boyne.
56:54One belonged to the old world of faith and fervour.
56:58The other, Dutch and German professionals,
57:01were part of a modern war machine.
57:17No prizes for guessing who won.
57:21Nobody.
57:33It is the patriotic duty of Irish men and Irish women
57:38to engage in that legitimate armed struggle.
57:42We will never surrender!
57:46Never! Never! Never! Never!
57:53I would appeal to Unionists
57:55to engage fully in the search for a lasting peace.
58:05By Christ and St Patrick
58:09The nation's our own
58:13Lili Berlero
58:17Bolana
58:21La