Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama's epic history reaches the 18th century and the birth of modern Britain. Due to an economic explosion, the consumer society is born, agriculture becomes big business and London becomes the fastest growing city in Europe.
However, many in Scotland are unhappy with the union of the Scottish and English parliaments. When Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite army advance on London, the country's new-found peace and prosperity are threatened.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama's epic history reaches the 18th century and the birth of modern Britain. Due to an economic explosion, the consumer society is born, agriculture becomes big business and London becomes the fastest growing city in Europe.
However, many in Scotland are unhappy with the union of the Scottish and English parliaments. When Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite army advance on London, the country's new-found peace and prosperity are threatened.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00In the Britain of King William III, turning up late could get you killed.
00:05The business of state was meant to run like clockwork.
00:09Time was money, money was power.
00:17In the Highlands of Scotland, though,
00:19the timeless tradition of the clans still ruled.
00:23To William's annoyance, some of those clans were still in power.
00:27To William's annoyance, some of those clans remained
00:30obstinately loyal to his predecessor, James II,
00:34the Stuart King, driven out in 1688.
00:39Even worse, those Jacobites had won a short-lived victory
00:43over William's troops at the Battle of Killiecrankie.
00:58William's right-hand man in Scotland, the Lord Advocate,
01:01believed it was high time to teach the clans a lesson in loyalty.
01:06The chiefs were given a deadline to pledge an oath of allegiance,
01:10January 1st, 1692.
01:13Acknowledge William as your lawful king.
01:16Those who make the pledge will be rewarded.
01:19Those who don't, punished.
01:21The chief of the Macdonald clan of Glencoe
01:24missed his appointment by five days.
01:33At dawn on February 13th, 1692,
01:36Williamite troops from the Argyll regiment,
01:39already quartered in Glencoe, were ordered to carry out a massacre.
01:44They butchered 38 of the clan, and the rest of the village,
01:48old men, women and children, some half-naked,
01:51fled into a raging snowstorm, where many of them died.
01:58In London and Edinburgh, news of the massacre at Glencoe
02:02was greeted with pious professions of shock,
02:05especially, of course, from those
02:07who'd actually had the responsibility of organising it.
02:10An inquiry was held, but needless to say, it was a sham.
02:16And if the intention had been to cow the Jacobites into submission,
02:20it had all gone horribly wrong.
02:22The massacre was a public relations disaster for William's government.
02:27The Scottish Parliament voted it an act of murder.
02:32How could victim and perpetrator ever be reconciled now?
02:36How could Scotland, stricken with poverty,
02:39with its national pride deeply wounded,
02:42ever come together with its rich and ruthless neighbour?
02:46But come together they did, and the two countries,
02:49which had for centuries been divided by politics and religion,
02:53would make a future together, based on profit and interest.
02:57What began as a hostile merger would end as a full partnership
03:01in the most powerful going concern in the world, Britannia Incorporated.
03:07It was one of the most astonishing transformations
03:10in European history, and this is how it happened.
03:15MUSIC
03:46MUSIC
03:57In England, the 1690s were the years when the victors of 1688
04:02congratulated themselves on a glorious revolution.
04:11In Scotland, they were years of purgatory.
04:16MUSIC
04:19After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.
04:24For several summers in a row, the sun refused to appear.
04:28Torrential rains poured down.
04:30Cattle and sheep became diseased with foot rot.
04:34Fields of barley and oats turned into mildewed slurry.
04:38The Jacobite clergy said this was God's wrath
04:42for turfing out the rightful king.
04:48In all this darkness, there were some who saw the light,
04:52a light that was going to shine hot and strong on Scotland.
04:57A plan that would transform the country from impotence and destitution
05:02into riches and power beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
05:06It would make Scotland, or its colonial trading post,
05:11or Caledonia, the hub of the universe.
05:15And where was that to be?
05:17Well, of course, in Panama.
05:22A group of merchants and bankers, including William Paterson,
05:26the Scottish founder of the Bank of England,
05:29had the idea of creating a Scottish trading post
05:32on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama.
05:35At first sight, the idea sounds like the purest lunacy,
05:39but take a look at the map of world trade and it becomes visionary.
05:43A major obstacle to east-west trade was the long, dangerous
05:47and ruinously expensive journey round Cape Horn.
05:51A trade route that cut through Panama was an obvious boon.
05:55At Darien, the distance between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans
06:00was only 40 miles.
06:02Goods could be carried across the narrow strip of land
06:05to waiting merchant ships.
06:10The trading economy of the world would be revolutionised
06:14and Scotland would run it.
06:24The Darien scheme instantly captured the imagination
06:27of the Scottish people.
06:29Men and women from all walks of life
06:31and from all over Scotland queued up to invest in the venture.
06:40So when the First Fleet sailed from the Firth of Forth in July 1698,
06:45flying the saltire and the extraordinary company flag
06:49of Indians, llamas, towered elephants and the beaming, rising sun,
06:55it was carrying more than the 1,200 people
06:58selected to be the lucky colonists.
07:01It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.
07:05But the only information the Company of Scotland had about Darien
07:09was from a pirate surgeon called Lionel Wafer,
07:12who claimed he knew the Caribbean like the back of his hand
07:16and had convinced them the place was paradise.
07:19The climate was mild, he said,
07:21the soil fertile and the natives friendly.
07:24They were also vain, spending much of the day combing their long hair.
07:30So, naturally, the ship's cargo included combs, thousands of them.
07:35And the rest of the ship's cargo says something about the conditions
07:39they were expecting to encounter.
07:42Crate loads of catechisms and Bibles for converting the pagans,
07:461,400 hats, an even greater supply of wigs.
07:50The Darienites were expecting to live like lairds of the lagoon.
07:55But before the ship got anywhere near Darien,
07:58the dream had turned into a nightmare.
08:0240 crew and passengers died on the long voyage.
08:07And when they found their golden island,
08:09it was, of course, a mosquito-infested swamp.
08:14The natives did not, it seemed, want their combs or anything else.
08:19In the sweltering, grimy,
08:21In the sweltering, rainy jungle,
08:23all the colonists' efforts went into lugging cannon
08:26into a primitive stockade, bravely christened Fort St Andrew.
08:31They were dying now, of disease and hunger,
08:35at a rate of ten a day, and their supplies ran with maggots.
08:42And there was no outside help.
08:44Tropical New Caledonia was a direct threat to the ship.
08:48Tropical New Caledonia was a direct threat
08:51to the English trading empire,
08:53and a government in Westminster was determined it should fail.
08:59A law was passed, making it illegal for any Englishman
09:02to invest in the scheme
09:04or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.
09:08When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh,
09:12all they found were hundreds of graves.
09:19Back home, when the full extent of the disaster sunk in,
09:24the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.
09:28They consumed a full third of Scotland's liquid capital,
09:32but the most serious casualty of the fiasco
09:35had been the last, best hope of a national rebirth,
09:39Scotland going it alone.
09:41That hope died in the malarial swamps of Darien.
09:48Many laid the failure of Darien squarely at England's door
09:52for its deliberate sabotage of the scheme.
09:55A wave of anglophobia swept the country,
09:58startling the men who ran things in Westminster.
10:01They became even more worried when it looked likely
10:04that Queen Anne, who had succeeded William in 1702,
10:08would die childless.
10:10A crisis over the succession loomed.
10:13For the defenders of the Revolution of 1688,
10:16whoever succeeded her simply had to be Protestant.
10:20In Scotland, however, after the humiliation of Darien,
10:24many Scots now favoured Anne's half-brother,
10:27the Catholic James Edward Stuart,
10:30who was living in exile with England's old enemy, France.
10:35Westminster could not tolerate these kinds of threats
10:38from its own backyard.
10:40It knew it had to take away Scotland's independence
10:44and insist on full political union.
10:48The creation of a single British state under a single parliament
10:52was now a matter of immediate urgency.
10:58The Westminster politicians knew they needed a sweetener
11:02to make the union more palatable, and this is it.
11:06In this chest was deposited the equivalent,
11:09the exact amount that had been lost in the Darien adventure,
11:13all £398,000 of it.
11:17You can almost hear the advocates of union saying,
11:20as they beamed broadly,
11:22now this is what union means.
11:25You seem to be a little hard-pressed for funds, my dear fellows.
11:29Well, now Scotland's debts will be Britain's.
11:33Sink or swim, we shall do it together.
11:38The equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions,
11:42was in a carrot dangled before members of the Scottish Parliament.
11:46And by now, there were many who were already looking south,
11:50saw reality, smelt the profits.
11:53But behind the carrot, of course, lay the stick.
11:56Westminster threatened to block Scottish exports to England
12:00unless Scotland entered union negotiations.
12:07The writing was on the wall.
12:10In short, Lord Belhaven delivered a lament
12:13over the funeral pyre of Scottish independence.
12:19I see our ancient mother Caledonia,
12:22like Caesar sitting in the midst of the Senate,
12:25attending the final blow and breathing out her last.
12:31We are an obscure, poor people,
12:34though formerly of better account,
12:36we have moved to a remote corner of the world
12:39without name and without alliances.
12:44In 1707, the deed was done.
12:47A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.
12:50It took just ten weeks to go through the Scottish Parliament,
12:54six through Westminster.
12:58Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.
13:07What kind of nation was this Great Britain?
13:13To answer that question, all you needed to do
13:16was to go along to the new Royal Naval Hospital,
13:19a palatial retirement home for pensioned-off servicemen in Greenwich.
13:27It was a triumphal statement
13:29of how Britain saw its place in the world in the early 18th century.
13:37MUSIC PLAYS
13:49On the ceiling, painted by Sir James Thornhill,
13:52a jubilant allegory celebrates the reign of William of Orange
13:56and his wife Mary.
14:02Thornhill's design is a shameless steal
14:05of mirrors in Versailles,
14:07but the artistic larceny is, of course, making a point.
14:12Here, Apollo, the sun god,
14:14shines not on the Catholic sun king, Louis XIV,
14:18but on the British monarchs.
14:21Over there, in France, despotism and potpourri.
14:25Over here, thanks to William, liberty and Protestantism.
14:30Over there, the curses of serfdom, misery and superstition.
14:35Over here, the blessings of navigation, trade and science.
14:42But, of course, you don't go to ceiling paintings
14:45for the unvarnished truth.
14:47The truth was that we had been at war for almost 25 years,
14:52give or take a few intermissions,
14:54and during that time,
14:56Britain had been completely transformed by the experience.
15:00It was no longer a case of gallant little England
15:03defending the sceptred isle against the serid ranks of despots.
15:08Now, we sat at the heart of the greatest war machine in the world.
15:18That machine couldn't work without the lubrication of money.
15:23So along came a national debt needed to pay for it all.
15:27And this debt needed servicing.
15:29So enter the armies of money men,
15:32accountants, tax assessors, customs and excise officers.
15:38Buried inside all the crowing propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling,
15:42there was one crucial nugget of truth.
15:45Louis XIV could demand money for his wars.
15:49William III had to ask for it.
15:53Almost everywhere else in Europe,
15:55the more military the state, the stronger the king,
15:58except in Britain.
16:00Here, it was Parliament, not the monarchy, who signed the cheques.
16:04The longer the war went on, the stronger Parliament became,
16:08as the purse on which it sat grew bigger and bigger.
16:12What's more, the kind of politics raging in Britain
16:15we can now recognise as distinctly modern.
16:18Two parties, the Whigs and Tories,
16:21electrically opposed not just about the policies of the day,
16:24but about the entire political character of the nation
16:28and the upheaval of 1688 that had created it.
16:33The Whigs and Tories were not just two parties
16:36who, when the barricading was done,
16:38could meet up for a drink and a bawdy joke.
16:41They went to different taverns, different coffee houses,
16:44different clubs. They were two armed camps.
16:49And the artillery barrages that flew between them
16:52were often red-hot.
16:56A quarter of a million votes were at stake in elections,
17:00more than 20% of the adult male population,
17:03and nothing was spared to grab them.
17:06Money, drink, libels, gangs of toughs.
17:10This was all-out war at the hustings.
17:14Tories accused the Whigs of being fanatics,
17:17the dregs of the populace, atheists, Commonwealth men.
17:23Whigs accused Tories of being willing tools
17:26of the Jesuits and the French.
17:32Since the Revolution had said there should be an election
17:35every three years, this guaranteed an awful lot of politics.
17:44The political temperature reached fever pitch in 1714
17:49when Queen Anne died with no heir.
17:52To make sure of a Protestant successor,
17:55no fewer than 57 individuals with blood ties to Anne
17:59were passed over to arrive at the next King of England,
18:03an uncharismatic middle-aged man who didn't speak English.
18:08George, Elector of Hanover, now King George I of Great Britain.
18:16It was the Whigs who backed his arrival in Britain
18:19and were rewarded when the new King appointed a Whig government.
18:23In response, the Tories ridiculed the new King as a lecherous dolt.
18:28His coronation was greeted with rioting in 20 towns.
18:39But by far the most serious trouble now came from across the border.
18:44The Union had failed to dampen enthusiasm in Scotland
18:48for the Jacobite cause.
18:50In fact, quite the opposite.
18:52The promised miracle of trade and abundance
18:55had failed to cross the Firth of Forth
18:58and all of Scotland was suffering from high taxes,
19:01impoverishment, and a lack of jobs.
19:04And all of Scotland was suffering from high taxes imposed by Westminster.
19:10The Jacobite leader, the Earl of Mar,
19:13buoyed up by promises of support from English Tories and Jacobites,
19:17declared James the rightful King at Braemar
19:21and proceeded to raise an army.
19:25The Jacobite slogan of King James and no Union
19:29meant support from both the Highlands and Lowlands came swiftly.
19:3410,000 men joined the rebellion.
19:43And when news came through of a Jacobite rising in Lancashire,
19:47the government knew it was in serious trouble.
19:52But the Earl of Mar set new records for military ineptness.
19:56After the Battle of Sheriffmure, which ended in a draw,
20:00and with his troops still outnumbering the Hanoverian army,
20:03Mar moved energetically into retreat.
20:07By the time James Edward Stuart landed at Peterhead on December 22nd,
20:12it was all over.
20:20The Hanoverian dynasty remained,
20:23but the Jacobite rising was yet another demonstration
20:26of just how unstable the new political order was.
20:30After this stormy start to the 18th century,
20:33if anyone would have predicted it would be followed by decades of calm,
20:37they would have been thought an absurd optimist.
20:40Yet that's exactly what happened.
20:45And it came about through the efforts not of a king,
20:48a religious leader or even a general,
20:51but a political manager of uncanny genius.
20:59He'd been, like his father and grandfather before him,
21:02a Norfolk squire and an MP.
21:04He'd moved smoothly through the big money jobs,
21:08paymaster general, Chancellor of the Exchequer,
21:11and he would come to dominate British political life
21:14for a quarter of a century.
21:16He was Robert Walpole.
21:21Although he never actually had the title,
21:24Walpole was, in effect, Britain's first Prime Minister.
21:28And under his leadership, the British economy boomed as never before.
21:43Walpole's appeal was to shameless self-interest.
21:47And on the pursuit of it, he believed would come the country's greater good.
21:51Which would you prefer, he might have said,
21:54a battle over principles and religious convictions?
21:57Well, that was only going to lead to war, turmoil and poverty.
22:02Or would you rather have what I can offer you,
22:05peace, political stability and low taxes,
22:08what today we'd call a healthy business environment?
22:13From the beginning, Walpole, nicknamed Cock Robin,
22:17had made a bet that the politics of the future
22:20would be about portfolio management
22:23rather than religious passion or legal debate.
22:26In 1712, he'd been sent to prison for embezzlement
22:30and the experience had given him a painful lesson
22:33in how tightly intertwined were political and financial fortunes.
22:39But perhaps his greatest asset
22:41was his unerring grip on the psychology of loyalty.
22:46Walpole made a point of taking every new week member
22:50of the House of Commons out to dinner, tête-à -tête.
22:53And there, with a glass of his best claret in your fat little hand
22:58and a haunch of mutton juicily oozing on the trencher,
23:02and Cock Robin's glittering eyes twinkling amiably at you,
23:06assuring you that the life of the party, the state of the nation,
23:10depended on you, the new member from little mucking on the world.
23:14How could you not express undying devotion and loyalty to his interest?
23:22Walpole sat at the controlling centre of a vast empire of patronage.
23:27The jobs at his disposal conferred honour as well as cash on the holder
23:33and they were dangled on a string by the great political puppeteer.
23:40In retrospect, we can see that Walpole built Britain's, in fact,
23:44the world's first modern party political machine.
23:48He had placemen in Parliament primed to vote as he directed.
23:52He had George I and then George II eating out of the palm of his hand.
23:58And just in case anyone was tempted to flirt with the opposition,
24:02he had the kind of information that could make life really difficult for them.
24:06In short, Walpole had the goods.
24:12The goods, in fact, in every sense of the word,
24:15for as well as looking after the country's interest,
24:18Walpole made sure he looked after his own.
24:22Just how much of a fortune he made for himself is spectacularly on view
24:27here at his country house in Norfolk, Houghton Hall.
24:33Houghton was the Whig Xanadu, the last word in opulence.
24:38Anything that riches could buy, Walpole bought.
24:41Marble, mahogany, figured damask, shimmering silks and satins,
24:46classical sculpture, glorious Renaissance and Baroque art,
24:50all shipped to his East Anglian pleasure dome.
24:55But Houghton was not just about living the good life,
24:59much as its master undoubtedly revelled in it.
25:02It was also a statement of grandeur,
25:05meant to stun sceptics into recognising
25:08that only someone truly in command of the nation's fortunes
25:12could possibly afford something like this.
25:16King George may have had the throne,
25:19but Conrad was the only man in the world
25:22King George may have had the throne, but Cock Robin had the palace.
25:27There's no doubt that Walpole's appeal to self-interest was infectious.
25:32With the glittering prizes dangled before their noses,
25:36the governing class of the country,
25:38just 180 peers and 1,500 country gentry,
25:42lined up to trade in party passion for Palladian houses.
25:47They stopped shouting and started building.
25:53And what they built was designed to insulate them
25:57from the grabbiness of the real world.
26:00And Robert Walpole showed them the way.
26:05This stone column marks the spot where the village of Houghton once stood.
26:09It had been here for centuries, but now it was just an inconvenience.
26:13It was much too close to Walpole's great house
26:16and it definitely spoiled the view.
26:18So he simply had it demolished and moved down the road.
26:24Of course, they could tell themselves, and they did,
26:27that their great houses and parks
26:29were not just monuments to wealthy self-indulgence.
26:33They were also a testimony to the greatness and glory of the nation.
26:41Stephen Switzer, one of the leading landscape architects of the day,
26:45certainly saw this as his duty.
26:48Magnificent gardens, statues and waterworks
26:51complete the grandeur of the British nation.
26:54It is then that we may hope to excel the so much boasted gardens of the French
26:59and make that great nation give way to the superior beauties of our gardens,
27:04as her late prince has to the invincible force of British arms.
27:09Well, this was the kind of battle
27:11the rich and powerful in Hanoverian Britain
27:14really liked to fight, war by gardening.
27:23Stourhead in Wiltshire
27:25is one of the great 18th-century landscape gardens.
27:29Taking their inspiration from the villas of ancient Rome,
27:32aristocrats like Sir Henry and Sir John
27:34who built Stourhead
27:36even thought of their parks as a kind of public education
27:40and encouraged the locals to pay a visit,
27:43provided, of course, they stuck rigidly to the designated tour route.
27:48That route would not just meander between ponds and trees,
27:52but towards little classical buildings
27:54designed to kindle feelings of virtue and patriotism in their breast.
28:00But sharing all this pastoral graciousness only went so far.
28:07For the ruling class, their land was now a money pump.
28:11Big, profit-yielding farms replaced strip farming
28:15and smallholders were taken over by the rich and powerful.
28:21In the 18th century, the rich and powerful
28:24Big, profit-yielding farms replaced strip farming
28:27and smallholders were turfed off their land.
28:30Too bad.
28:32Landowners needed all the money they could get to keep up appearances,
28:36not just in the country, but in the town
28:39and, above all, in the place which was the biggest,
28:42brashest, fastest-growing city in Europe, London.
28:47Here, the winners and losers of Walpole's Britain
28:51jostled side by side.
28:54700,000 of them, one in ten Englishmen.
28:59Foreign visitors were astounded at the noise,
29:02the hectic throngs packing the streets,
29:05the tireless hucksterism, the glittering greediness of it all.
29:11The modern morality tales of the painstakingly rich
29:15and the bourgeoisie tales of the painter and engraver William Hogarth
29:19are peopled by innocents arriving dewy fresh from the country...
29:25..surrendering to the temptations of the city
29:28and falling hopelessly into a deep, dark sink of iniquity and disease.
29:39But however much moralists frowned on the new consumerism
29:43of the city, economic realists knew it was the way forward.
29:48Come by my greens and flowers, find your houses to adorn...
29:55There had been other great emporium cities in Europe,
29:58but nothing like this.
30:00London had invented serious shopping
30:03and it had something like 20,000 shops to prove it.
30:08London shops would lure the customer to buy something
30:11he never thought of acquiring.
30:13Novelty items like Oriental goldfish,
30:15which became an aristocratic marvel.
30:19Caged canaries, finches and parrots.
30:23Unheard-of luxuries became commonplace,
30:26priced to appeal to the middle class.
30:29China from Holland, from which to sip your tea.
30:33Exotic fruits like pomegranates and pineapples.
30:37The first commercially available condoms,
30:40lambskin for the rich, linen soaked in brine for the not-so-rich.
30:46London's consumer culture was Mephistopheles,
30:49winking an eye, crooking a finger and proffering credit.
30:56But terrible things could happen to those who ran out of credit
31:00and ran out of time.
31:03A debt of just £2 would get you locked up in a debtor's prison.
31:09The prison, like almost everything else in greedy,
31:12managerial Hanoverian Britain, was a business,
31:15a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
31:19£5,000 was the price one John Huggins
31:22paid for the wardenship of the Fleet Prison,
31:25the equivalent of half a million pounds today.
31:28The way he could recoup his investment
31:30was to charge the inmates for their stay,
31:33the hotel from hell, including, of course,
31:36the rent for their shackles.
31:38A fiver would get you your own cell,
31:41a few shillings more, something approximating food.
31:45Less than that and you took your chance in the packed common prison,
31:49sleeping on the floor, no air, no sanitation.
31:53And smallpox waiting to get you.
31:59Who were the real criminals?
32:01Was the cry on the streets and in the coffeehouses
32:04and in the newspapers of London?
32:06Everywhere you looked, the line between the law enforcers
32:10and the lawbreakers seemed arbitrary.
32:14In 1725, the Lord Chancellor of the Republic of England
32:19In 1725, the Lord Chancellor was convicted of embezzling £80,000.
32:25People had had enough.
32:29In the 1730s, satires and essays and poems and pictures
32:33documented a rising wave of revulsion
32:36at the world Walpole had brought into being.
32:42A sense that beneath all the platitudes about peace and stability
32:46lay squalor and corruption.
32:52A walk through London, for example,
32:54was a walk over prostrate bodies, big and little.
32:59Infants whose mothers were unable or sometimes unwilling to raise them
33:04were abandoned on the streets.
33:10But there came a point when someone was tired enough
33:14of stepping over half-dead babies found in the gutter
33:17to do something about it.
33:23That someone was a 53-year-old retired merchant sea captain
33:28called Thomas Coram.
33:32Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts
33:35from the transatlantic timber trade.
33:37All he wanted was to settle down to a quiet life in Rotherhithe
33:41where he could smell the Thames and the sea.
33:44But the sight of all those tiny abandoned corpses
33:47wouldn't leave him in peace.
33:49Worse, he knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the workhouse
33:53and sent out to wet nurse was close to 100%.
34:00So Thomas Coram determined to tap some of that newfound wealth
34:05to create a foundling hospital,
34:08a place where babies could be deposited, legitimate or illegitimate,
34:12and would be given a decent chance of survival.
34:17For nearly 20 years, he made himself a nuisance to his friends,
34:21petitioning the king and everyone else until the funds got raised.
34:26In 1741, the hospital opened its doors to its first children.
34:31Not surprisingly, it couldn't cope with demand.
34:34To decide which children could and couldn't get places,
34:37there was a heartbreaking lucky dip.
34:40Mothers lined up to draw wooden balls out of a bag.
34:43A white ball, and your baby was in.
34:46A red ball, you were on the reserve list.
34:49A black ball, well, you were back on the streets.
34:54Inside this cabinet are some of the saddest things
34:57left to us by the 18th century,
35:00because these are the keepsake tokens
35:02given to their babies by desperate mothers
35:05just at the point when they were going to leave them
35:08to the tender mercies of the foundling hospital.
35:12There's a whole world of sorrow and love in this extraordinary cabinet,
35:18and it speaks not just of the very destitute.
35:21Some of the pieces, like this beautiful Mother of Pearl Heart,
35:25with the initials, presumably, of the little baby on it,
35:28suggest that some of these mothers were actually quite well-to-do.
35:32But in many other cases, the pieces speak of real hardship.
35:37They were just the things that the mothers found
35:40they happened to have on them at the time they had to get rid of the children.
35:45Some of these mothers had really nothing at the last minute
35:48to offer their little babies except a nut,
35:51a nut which was meant to be worn as a pendant.
35:54Look, there's a little hole
35:56where the string was supposed to be strung through there.
35:59Sometimes things which had a little work on them,
36:02like this beautiful sewn heart there.
36:06Or most desperate of all, perhaps, just this flimsy little piece of ribbon.
36:11You can imagine a mother on the point of saying goodbye for the last time to her baby
36:16just taking a bit of ribbon from her hair or her wrist
36:19and giving it, as she hoped, to her child.
36:23Now, if this wasn't heartbreak enough,
36:26it only gets worse when you know that none of these things
36:30ever found their way to the children.
36:35And, of course, the Foundling Hospital couldn't hope to work miracles overnight.
36:40Nearly half the babies died in the house in the first year,
36:44but that was a huge improvement over the usual figures.
36:49This was the middle-class parish at work.
36:52Well-off, busily charitable and as much interested in virtue as in wit.
36:58There'd been philanthropy before, of course,
37:01but this was the first time that businessmen came together
37:04with high-profile artists, writers and sculptors
37:08in a campaign of conscience to attack a hideous evil
37:12in what was supposed to be a Christian modern metropolis.
37:19The charges of the hospital, if they survived,
37:22would be employed in the service of the nation,
37:25most likely in the navy if they were boys
37:27or in domestic service if they were girls.
37:30The Foundling Hospital was philanthropy with a purpose.
37:38Its charges would be model Britons of the future,
37:42not gin-soaked syphilitic rakes.
37:45They were going to be sober, educated, industrious,
37:49God-fearing and, above all, patriotic.
37:55This was Britannia's time.
38:16The lyrics for this chest-thumping new song
38:19were written by two Scots for a play about King Alfred the Great
38:23and they were sung lustily by the merchants and businessmen
38:27who saw Britain's future lay with the blue-water empire of trade.
38:35But someone was in the way of this prosperous future
38:39and that someone was Robert Walpole.
38:42As far as the merchants were concerned,
38:44Walpole and his cronies cared too much about land
38:47and not enough about business.
38:50So they were not amused when Walpole raised the taxes
38:54on the kind of things that made money for them, beer and coal,
38:58while making damn sure to keep the land tax low.
39:05Now, what would be the only thing that could raise those land taxes?
39:09Well, war, of course.
39:11So no wonder Walpole unforgivably pussyfooted around the Spanish
39:16when they presumed to interfere with our ships.
39:22When he signed a treaty with Spain
39:24that was seen as an unpatriotic sell-out,
39:27the merchants were even more incensed.
39:34Walpole's effigy was burned in the streets
39:37by crowds roaring for his political head.
39:41Walpole's allies and time-servers in Parliament
39:44were suddenly nowhere to be seen.
39:47His political enemies closed in gleefully for the kill.
39:52To deprive them of the satisfaction, Walpole walked,
39:56a broken man, back to his wine and his dogs at Houghton.
40:02It was the end of an era.
40:05Now the Gung-ho patriots could have their get-rich war
40:09and they must have thought it would be a breeze.
40:16Britain could fight abroad because it was so united at home.
40:21But in 1745, that unity would prove a bitter illusion.
40:28The Jacobite cause had refused to die,
40:31especially amongst the clans of north-west Scotland,
40:34where it fed off the British.
40:38In 1745, the Gung-ho patriots were forced to surrender
40:42to the British.
40:44The British were forced to surrender to the Gung-ho patriots.
40:48The Gung-ho patriots were forced to surrender to the British.
40:52The Gung-ho patriots were forced to surrender to the British.
40:56They were forced to surrender to the British,
40:58where it fed off continued opposition to the Union.
41:03What the Jacobites needed was a figurehead,
41:06and in 1745, they got one,
41:09a leader many saw as a model of virile fearlessness,
41:13the son of James Edward Stewart,
41:15the man known to us and to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
41:20The fact that the prince's full name was Charles Edward Louis
41:25should tell us that the prince was less the incarnation
41:29of the old Scotland of the clans
41:31and much more a fully-fledged graduate of the pan-European,
41:35Italo-Polish, Franco-Irish, Catholic international community.
41:42But still, he was a Stuart,
41:44and that blood certainly mattered to the prince himself,
41:47who, at the age of 24, sailed from France to Scotland
41:51to win back the throne for his father.
41:56On the 19th of August, 1745,
41:59Prince Charles Edward Stuart stood here at Glenfinnan,
42:03watched his family standard being raised
42:06and told the assembled clansmen he'd come to make Scotland happy.
42:10Well, that would have been news to some of the crofters
42:13who'd already been threatened with having their cottages burned
42:16unless they joined the Jacobite army.
42:19But the sight of Bonnie Prince Charlie
42:21and compared to George II and to his own embittered ageing father,
42:26he certainly was Bonnie,
42:28standing here in the Glen
42:30at the head of Loch Shield in his tartan plaid,
42:33did seem to promise, if only for a moment,
42:36a new Scottish future,
42:38or, at the very least,
42:40the end of the miserable captivity of the Union.
42:43But happiness, well, that was going to prove a lot harder to come by.
42:51The structure of clan society
42:53meant that support for the prince gathered quickly.
42:57In England, families were more and more becoming a kind of business.
43:01In the Highlands of Scotland, though,
43:03kinship was really much more a matter of blood.
43:06Clan loyalty was built around the idea,
43:09even when it was a mythical idea, of a common ancestor.
43:13Now, the grandest landlords in the Highlands,
43:16just like their lowlands counterparts,
43:18were becoming connoisseurs of fine claret and chamber music.
43:22But as far as the local laird was concerned,
43:25well, he had a lot in common with his crofters.
43:27They both spoke Gaelic, they both wore tartan plaid and sporran,
43:31and they both made sure they'd have broadswords and daggers at the ready
43:35when the chief called.
43:44Buoyed by the prince's claim
43:46that the French were behind the rebellion
43:48and planned an imminent invasion,
43:50Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army moved swiftly,
43:53catching the woefully inadequate Hanoverian forces in Scotland
43:57completely unprepared.
44:00But when the prince finally took what was the big prize, Edinburgh,
44:04he hadn't won over the whole of Scotland.
44:07The lowlands were overwhelmingly loyal to King George.
44:10In fact, it's quite possible
44:12that more Scots fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie than for him.
44:21Nonetheless, it seemed that the prince couldn't put a foot wrong.
44:25And when his army faced the Hanoverians at the Battle of Prestonpans,
44:29they won a resounding victory.
44:36At Holyrood House, debate raged as to what to do next.
44:41The Highland chiefs, sceptical of finding support in England,
44:45advised Charles to make the Stuarts masters of the north,
44:49but to go no further.
44:51But for Charles, nothing less than a conquest of England would do,
44:55and he won the day by a single vote.
45:00The Jacobites were on their way south.
45:04In rapid succession, Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester
45:09all fell to the prince's army
45:11without a shot being fired in their defence.
45:14With the Jacobites approaching Derby at the beginning of December,
45:18and with the bulk of His Majesty's forces off fighting in Europe,
45:22there was something close to pandemonium in London and the south.
45:26There was a run on the Bank of England,
45:28and all the shops in London closed.
45:31The handful of soldiers left behind to protect the capital
45:35was, shall we say, of the kind of calibre to inspire much confidence.
45:41But just as in 1715, it could be said the Jacobites defeated themselves.
45:46And they didn't do it on the field of battle,
45:49but in this room at Exeter House in Derby on December 5th, 1745.
45:56The prince and his chiefs argued bitterly
45:59whether to go forward or retreat.
46:02London is just 130 miles away, said the prince.
46:06Move on the capital and the French will come.
46:09Besides, we've got precious little time.
46:12The Redcoats will be back from Europe soon.
46:17No, said Lord George Murray, joint commander of the prince's army.
46:21I no longer believe the French are coming.
46:24It's time to cut our losses. It's time to go home.
46:29This time, the prince lost the vote by a substantial margin.
46:36The Jacobites turned about and headed north,
46:39beginning the long tramp back to Scotland
46:42through dreadful winter weather,
46:44pursued by those newly returned British regiments.
46:48Their retreat turned into a nightmare.
46:52It was hard to know which was more murderous,
46:55the snows of December and January,
46:57or the vengeful, pursuing troops of George II's son,
47:01the Duke of Cumberland.
47:05Cumberland gave a taste of what he was capable of at Carlisle.
47:09The garrison had been captured by Jacobites on their march south,
47:13but they were unable to hold out against Cumberland's advance.
47:18Into this tiny space were crammed hundreds of Jacobite soldiers,
47:24locked up without any air or any water.
47:29What they did have were these shiny stones,
47:34smooth, damp, slimy,
47:37a terrible memento of their distress.
47:40To this day, they're called the Redcoats.
47:45To this day, they're called Licking Stones
47:48because the imprisoners were brought to such horrible extremity
47:53that they were forced and reduced to sliding their tongues
47:58in these cavities to try and collect
48:00the pathetic amount of moisture gathered on the rock.
48:05This really was Hanoverian Britain's Black Hole of Calcutta.
48:15By the time that winter turned into spring in the Highlands,
48:19it was unmistakably clear that whatever its temporary successes,
48:23the Jacobite War was lost.
48:25With every week that passed,
48:27the Hanoverian advantage in men, money and guns tolled.
48:34The two armies eventually faced each other at Culloden, near Inverness.
48:39Cumberland's force was only a third a big,
48:42Cumberland's force was only a third a big again as the princes,
48:45but it was lethally better equipped.
48:48A new verse of the national anthem proved to be prophetic
48:52as the big guns began to fire.
48:57God grant that martial weight
49:04May by thy mighty aid
49:11Victory bring
49:17May he sedition hush
49:24And like a torrent rush
49:30Rebellious scots to crush
49:38God save the King.
49:49Just an hour after the firing had started,
49:52there were 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders lying slaughtered.
49:56Only 50 of the Hanoverians had perished.
50:00And it was perhaps better to be one of those felled by the Hanoverian guns
50:05as it spared you the sight of the British soldiers coming at you
50:08while you lay wounded to finish you off with their newfangled bayonets.
50:13As one Hanoverian officer noted...
50:16Our men, what with killing the enemy,
50:18dabbling their feet in blood and splashing it about one another,
50:22looked like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.
50:29Charles Edward survived the battle
50:32and gave the order, every man for himself.
50:36He went on the run until it was safe to be shipped back to France.
50:42In England, the victory was riotously celebrated.
50:46Effigies of Bonnie Prince Charlie were burned at the stake.
50:49But many in Scotland too were pleased to see the end of the Jacobite threat,
50:53delighted, in fact, the prince had gone.
50:56But in the heartland of his support in north-west Scotland,
50:59Charles Edward left behind a population prostrate
51:03before the avenging army of the Duke of Cumberland,
51:06determined to break the Jacobite clans forever.
51:21Villages were burned to the ground.
51:24Captured men hanged or shot.
51:26Cattle were stolen, thousands driven from their homes.
51:30Even the wearing of highland dress was banned
51:33in an effort to strip the clans not just of their possessions
51:37but of their identity.
51:45The hopes and dreams of the Jacobites
51:47had to live in the secret world of things now,
51:50things that could be hidden or disguised.
51:53A lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair
51:56or the mysterious emblems engraved on wine glasses.
52:00Take a look at this board, for example.
52:02At first sight, it seems an indecipherable smudge of paint.
52:07But if you look at it the right way,
52:09reflected against the silvered mirror of a cylinder,
52:13it turns into the lost love, the boy born to be king,
52:17the saviour across the water.
52:20Unhappily for the keepers of the Jacobite flame,
52:23Charles Edward in exile went rapidly downhill.
52:27Too many mistresses, far too much drink.
52:30Years of indolence made him prematurely decrepit.
52:43But the romantic myth of Bonnie Prince Charlie
52:46would survive the wreckage of his real history.
52:49It would live in the poems and popular ballads,
52:52where he would always be the dashing, charismatic boy prince.
53:10But Jacobitism as a political force was spent.
53:15In the decades following Culloden,
53:17a transformation would take place in Scotland.
53:21The Jacobite warriors, who'd been unable to break Britannia,
53:25were given an alternative to returning
53:28to their old obsessions of clan loyalty.
53:31Join the future, join the army of the British Empire.
53:35Many thousands took the offer.
53:37Instead of being the perennial victims of that empire,
53:41they now colonised it.
53:44In the cities, too, a new Scotland was being born.
53:49In just 20 years or so after Culloden,
53:51it became commonplace to refer to Edinburgh and Glasgow
53:55as hotbeds of genius.
53:57The collapse of the backward-looking cult of honour
54:00had made room for the flowering
54:02of the forward-looking cult of modernity.
54:07In the academies, drawing rooms and reading clubs
54:10of the Scottish cities,
54:12hopeless dreams were replaced by the appetite
54:15for hard facts and hard cash.
54:22The first British theory of progress
54:24was sketched out by Scottish philosophers
54:27like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.
54:30They looked at the tragedy of their own country
54:32and saw in its history the entire arc of human social evolution,
54:37from hunting and gathering societies to settled farmers
54:41and finally to true civilisation,
54:43the world of commerce, science and industry,
54:46the world of the towns.
54:55It was another Scot, Robert Adam,
54:57who became the first British king of architectural style.
55:01Less than 20 years after Bonnie Prince Charlie
55:04had retreated from Derby,
55:06a different kind of Scottish conqueror came back to Derbyshire
55:09and this time he was invincible.
55:23At Kedleston Hall, Robert Adam built in a new style
55:27for a new kind of aristocrat.
55:29Its owner, the first Lord Scarsdale, was a true New Britain,
55:34rich not just from land but from the coal mines of Derbyshire.
55:40What he wanted was a house that would not overpower the visitor
55:44with vulgar displays of swaggering wealth
55:47but somewhere that would speak instead of Roman grandeur,
55:51of noble classical austerity, of loftiness of mind,
55:55of purity of tastes, a palace of contemplation,
55:59a temple of virtue.
56:04Could the accumulation of private riches
56:07somehow be a force for general happiness?
56:14The Scot who made the deepest mark on the future of Britain
56:17certainly thought so.
56:19In 1746, while the last survivors of Cumberland's butchery
56:23were being hunted down,
56:25Adam Smith, the son of a customs officer,
56:28had an exhilarating vision of the future.
56:31That vision was based on Smith's rejection of guilt and sin,
56:35but it would be his revolutionary book The Wealth of Nations
56:39which would mark Scotland's farewell to sentimental self-destruction.
56:44Upbeat and optimistic about the happiness of material life,
56:48Smith laid out, as a matter of scientific fact,
56:51mankind's natural drive to self-betterment.
56:56Allowed to follow their natural urges,
56:59men would create, without even willing it, a better world,
57:03richer, freer, more educated.
57:06The best thing that government could do was get out of the way
57:09and allow the invisible hand of the market to do its work.
57:18The economic world was like a watch, he wrote,
57:21its springs and wheels all admirably adjusted
57:24to the ends for which it was made.
57:27So, too, the countless movements of men would perfectly interact
57:31for the purposes for which God had made them.
57:35That purpose was progress,
57:37and it was one of history's sweetest ironies
57:40that it had fallen to Scotland, poor, bloodied, mutilated Scotland,
57:44to show Britannia the way ahead.
57:47So, if you want to see the future,
57:49forget the pompous monuments of England's past.
57:53Come north, instead, to the new towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh
57:57and see the future of Britain.
58:00The future, perhaps, of the world.
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