Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama looks beyond the romantic stories of Cavaliers and Roundheads to the real story of the English Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands died, countless families were torn apart and the nation was divided. Two events unique within British history resulted: the public execution of the monarch, Charles I, and the creation of a republic.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama looks beyond the romantic stories of Cavaliers and Roundheads to the real story of the English Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands died, countless families were torn apart and the nation was divided. Two events unique within British history resulted: the public execution of the monarch, Charles I, and the creation of a republic.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00CHOIR SINGS
00:11England and Scotland, two realms divided, until now.
00:16In 1603, they had come together in one person,
00:20James VI of Scotland and First of England.
00:24He wanted to be known as the King of Great Britain.
00:28But what was this new thing in the world, this Great Britain?
00:32In the first years of the 17th century,
00:35only the mapmakers could tell you.
00:39One of them, a busy ex-tailor called John Speed,
00:42published his atlas of 67 maps
00:45called The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain
00:49and covering every inch of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.
00:55What lay behind Speed's atlas was an optimistic vision
00:59of happy, harmonious Britannia coming together
01:02under a king who was determined to bring unity
01:05after centuries of war and hatred.
01:10And in the vale of the Red Horse in Warwickshire,
01:13John Speed had a glimpse
01:15of what this British heaven on earth might look like.
01:19The meadowing pastures with the green mantles
01:22so embroidered with flowers
01:24that from Edge Hill we might behold another Eden.
01:31On 23 October 1642, another man, King Charles I,
01:36surveyed the same landscape from the same ridge.
01:40The meadows were now full, not with cows and hare bells,
01:44but cannon, pikes and musketeers.
01:48By nightfall, there would be 3,000 British corpses
01:52lying in the freezing mud.
01:54Here at Edge Hill, Eden had become Golgotha.
02:07Over the next long years,
02:09the nations that both James and Charles yearned to bring together
02:13would tear each other apart in murderous civil wars.
02:17Hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost
02:20in battles, sieges, epidemics and famine.
02:25A raw body count fails to measure the full enormity of a disaster
02:30which reached into virtually every part of Britain,
02:33from Cornwall to County Connacht, from York to the Hebrides.
02:38It tore apart communities of the parish and the county,
02:42which all through the turmoil of the Reformation
02:45did not agree on how the country should be governed
02:48and who should do the governing.
02:50Men who had broken bread together now tried to break each other's heads.
02:55Men who had judged together now judged each other.
03:01At the end of it all,
03:03there would be a united Britain, as the Stuarts had hoped,
03:06but it would not be a united kingdom.
03:09It would be a united republic.
03:15THE STUARTS
03:18THE STUARTS
03:20THE STUARTS
03:22THE STUARTS
03:24THE STUARTS
03:26THE STUARTS
03:28THE STUARTS
03:30THE STUARTS
03:32THE STUARTS
03:34THE STUARTS
03:36THE STUARTS
03:38THE STUARTS
03:40THE STUARTS
03:45THE STUARTS
03:47THE STUARTS
03:51The Civil Wars were not just an unfortunate accident
03:54or an occasion to dress up as cavaliers and roundheads.
03:58They were, in fact, that most un-British event, a war of ideas,
04:02ideas that mattered deeply to contemporaries,
04:05because at the heart of them was an argument about liberty and obedience.
04:09That argument became lethal here at Edge Hill,
04:13and it's been there for generations down through British history.
04:17As a matter of fact, that argument has never really gone away.
04:23To the survivors, looking back, the issue was simple.
04:29Whether the king should govern as a god by his will
04:32and the people govern by force as beasts,
04:35or whether the people should be governed by their own consent...
04:40Yes, that's the voice of a Republican in exile, Edmund Ludlow,
04:45but that same voice, that same memory, would be heard through the centuries
04:49and in revolutions far beyond our shores,
04:52in America in 1776, in France in 1789.
04:59It goes against the grain, doesn't it?
05:01A bit embarrassing, not to say painful,
05:04to be thought of as the fountainhead of revolutions.
05:07It's not very British.
05:09All that shouting, all that Bible-waving, all that killing.
05:13So was it all an aberration, then?
05:16Well, no, actually.
05:21These wars were the crucible of our modern history,
05:25for out of the fires of these wars
05:27came eventually a genuinely parliamentary monarchy.
05:31But, of course, no-one understood that at the time.
05:34No-one was reading from a script which commanded,
05:37go forth and be democratic.
05:43So when the 24-year-old Charles became king,
05:46no-one in their right mind could possibly have imagined
05:49a war between Parliament and the Crown.
05:52No succession in over two centuries
05:55had been as settled or as unthreatened.
05:59Charles may have been smaller than life,
06:02long-faced, painfully formal,
06:04private to the point of being secretive,
06:07a stickler for decorum, as cool, as still and as pallid as marble.
06:12But to many, this was actually rather a welcome contrast
06:15with his father, James,
06:17who'd been loudmouthed, pedantic and uncouth.
06:23But from the beginning,
06:26for those who were paying attention,
06:28there was something ominously distant
06:30about this small man on a big horse,
06:32too lofty to bother with a coronation procession,
06:36a man who believed that kings were little gods on earth.
06:41Charles saw himself as the father of the nation
06:44and, like any 17th-century father,
06:46he thought he was responsible for the well-being of his family,
06:50but, in return, he expected to be strong,
06:53and, in turn, he expected to be strictly obeyed.
06:58Of course, like James before him,
07:00he would listen to the people
07:02through their representatives in Parliament,
07:04but only when he chose
07:06and only on matters he saw fit to be discussed.
07:14But the House of Commons was filled with historians and lawyers
07:19and even Parliament was not simply a matter of royal convenience.
07:23Ever heard of Magna Carta?
07:28For these men, parliamentary history,
07:30the history they were reading and writing,
07:32was an ongoing epic of liberty
07:34and they were the keepers of the flame.
07:40The countdown to the civil wars started now,
07:43though nobody heard it.
07:45It was a countdown that could have been stopped time and time again,
07:48but the ticking grew louder and louder
07:50until, by 1642, it would be deafening.
07:54And what triggered that countdown?
07:56Money.
08:00One of the first things this young king did
08:03was declare war on Spain
08:05and nothing was more ruinously expensive than foreign war.
08:09There was the added complication that, in England,
08:12even little gods on Earth
08:14had to go cap in hand to Parliament for the money to fight.
08:18For Charles, the issue was personal.
08:21Wars of religion were tearing Europe apart.
08:25Protestants and Catholics were killing each other
08:28from Sweden to Hungary with unspeakable cruelty
08:31and they'd forced his own sister, the Queen of Bohemia, into exile.
08:38And in his quiet way, Charles burned to be a Christian warrior.
08:44There was also the matter of his older brother, Henry.
08:47A champion of the joust, celebrated by the poets as a Protestant hero,
08:52Henry was supposed to have been king,
08:54but he had died when Charles was a boy
08:57and his armour had passed onto him.
09:05It was too big.
09:10All his life, Charles would try and fit the steel,
09:13try to become the gartered Charlemagne beneath the British oak.
09:19And this war against Spain would be his big chance.
09:23Surely Parliament would cough up the money for the great Protestant crusade?
09:28Oh, yes, was the answer, but...
09:31And it was a big but.
09:33You see, with all due respect, we don't much care
09:36for your choice of commander, the Duke of Buckingham,
09:39so while we are happy to fork over subsidies,
09:42we rather think we'll make it a short-term contract.
09:45Renewable, to be sure, if he turns out all right.
09:50But Parliament knew perfectly well it wouldn't.
09:54From the start, Parliament had Buckingham's number.
09:57To them, he was an upstart nobody, a peacock with a pretty face
10:01who'd been promoted outrageously above the great earls of the land.
10:08He'd been James' favourite.
10:10Probably more than a favourite if the court scandal was to be believed.
10:14And now he'd wormed his way into Charles' favour, too.
10:18The pair of them had travelled together incognito to Spain
10:22in a bid to woo the Spanish Infanta for Charles.
10:25They'd returned from their escapade empty-handed.
10:31But to the young, insecure Charles,
10:33glamorous, worldly Buckingham had become his idol.
10:37To the rest of the court, however, Buckingham was a parasite,
10:40a pest, a viper.
10:42Why in God's name would one give him a blank cheque?
10:51It was obvious what would happen to the money, and it did.
10:54Buckingham blew a cool £240,000 in a raid on France so botched
11:00it seemed the act of a saboteur, not a supremo.
11:05So if Charles wanted a penny more than his darling had to go...
11:11..presumed to talk to the king about his choice of trusted generals
11:15and ministers, presumed to tell the king,
11:18presumed to lay down the law,
11:20why, that was an end of kingship itself.
11:27So in 1626, Charles did what he assumed kings worth the name
11:31were perfectly entitled to do.
11:33He would dismiss Parliament and collect the money himself
11:36through a forced loan.
11:38It was the politest bullying.
11:41Charles was always polite.
11:52The gloves were off.
11:54Loan refusers were threatened, prosecuted.
11:57Two of them, Sir Francis Barrington and Sir Edmund Hamden,
12:01died, either in prison or shortly afterwards.
12:05Many did pay up, but their compliance spoke of fear as much as loyalty.
12:15They'd always been professional grumblers when it had come to tax,
12:18but these country gentlemen were now speaking
12:21a new and dangerous language.
12:23No tax could be lawful without the consent of Parliament, they said.
12:29The money ran out again in 1628
12:32and Charles was forced to call another Parliament.
12:39Speaker after speaker rose to the rostrum
12:42in defence of the liberties of England.
12:45They drafted a formal list of their grievances in a petition of right,
12:49which Charles graciously conceded
12:52as the price for saving his beloved Buckingham.
12:56Any slight chance of Charles honouring it,
12:59and it was slight enough to begin with,
13:01went out of the window when, later in 1628,
13:05Buckingham was assassinated to national cheering.
13:17Convulsed with grief and hardened by rage,
13:20Charles shut Parliament down.
13:23As the doors were being closed,
13:25one MP, Sir John Elliot, stood up and roared
13:29that anyone imposing a tax without Parliament's consent
13:33would be a capital enemy to this kingdom and Commonwealth.
13:39Charles disagreed. Elliot was the traitor.
13:42So off to the Tower of London he went, where he died in 1632.
13:48But for Charles, the rainstorm of words had now mercifully stopped.
13:53In their place, beamed sunlight from the heavens.
13:57Triumphantly, too, the war with Spain was now over,
14:01so no more begging for money, no more of that aggravation.
14:06So in 1630, as far as Charles was concerned,
14:09people were forced to pay the price.
14:13His father, James, had always preached peace,
14:16and James was now much on Charles' mind.
14:23Charles decided his father's memory deserved something special,
14:27and, courtesy of the Flemish Catholic painter, Peter Paul Rubens,
14:31he would get it.
14:33Not one, but three pieces of his father's memory
14:37A go-for-broke manifesto for the Stuart dynasty.
14:51They would be placed way up high on the ceiling of the building
14:54he had inherited from James,
14:56Inigo Jones's masterpiece, The Banqueting House in London.
15:01In 1636, they were triumphantly hoist aloft for all the world to see.
15:07There are three visions here of James' benevolent rule.
15:11In one panel, James is depicted as the bringer of peace and prosperity.
15:19In the other, James is depicted as the ruler of the world.
15:24In one panel, James is depicted as the bringer of peace and prosperity.
15:30In the central panel, Rubens gives us James being carried to heaven as a god.
15:39In the third, he is Solomon,
15:41being offered the two crowns of England and Scotland.
15:47The Banqueting House in Whitehall simply takes your breath away
15:50by the sheer cheek with which it ignores the English Channel.
15:54Its piece of Italy transplanted into Britain,
15:57classical columns, tall windows,
15:59the ultimate architectural lightbox
16:02designed to flood the Stuart monarchy with brilliance.
16:08It was also meant to pin any unbelievers to the floor
16:11through the heavyweight power of its muscled allegories,
16:15singing the virtues of the godlike king.
16:18So when you walked in here and you remembered
16:20that the Stuarts had described kings as little gods on earth,
16:24you realised they were not kidding.
16:31The Banqueting House was Charles' absolutist dreamland.
16:36It was here that Charles could act out the grandest of his fantasies,
16:40that his three kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland,
16:43were finally yoked together in harmony
16:46under the ruler who was firm but just.
16:52What better way to give this new British court a European makeover
16:56to turn it into a byword for Baroque gorgeousness?
17:01There would be a stunning new royal art collection
17:04gathered from all over Europe,
17:06of the quality to make popes and emperors moan with envy,
17:10Mantegna's, Titian's, Rembrandt's.
17:14Charles' unprepossessing French queen, Henrietta Maria,
17:18with her sallow skin and discoloured teeth,
17:20was airbrushed into stardom
17:22by the glossiest glamourist of them all,
17:25Antony van Dyck.
17:32And beyond the palace,
17:34the king was satisfied to see his will being done,
17:37people he disapproved of being made to desist.
17:43I like not this.
17:50Out in the shires, his taxes were being collected,
17:53his justice was being carried out,
17:55and the skies had not fallen in.
17:57Who missed the talkers, the Parliament now?
18:00Surely nobody.
18:02Sooner or later, Charles was going to have to come down to earth,
18:06and when he did, he'd be bound to notice that his earthly kingdom
18:10was ruled not by images, but by words.
18:13Now, unlike the invitingly soft scenery of Rubens' fantasy kingdom,
18:18words were hard things, black and white things.
18:22And in the hands of wordsmiths, lawyers, preachers, printers,
18:26they had a razor-sharp edge
18:28that would cut right through all that Stuart mush about British Union
18:33and bring the playground of the gods crashing to the ground.
18:38The naysayers had not gone away and they had not shut up.
18:43The men who had declared taxes without parliamentary consent
18:46to be illegal in 1625 still thought this in 1635.
18:52Yes, they reluctantly forked up,
18:55but it didn't stop them smouldering with rage.
18:58Typical was a Buckinghamshire landowner called John Hamden.
19:04John Hamden was not some abrasive, unworldly hothead.
19:08He was a very well-respected and important member
19:11of the county community.
19:17Hamden had been deeply moved by the plight of Sir John Elliot in prison.
19:22He'd visited him and looked after his teenage boys.
19:26Now he would inherit the mantle of tax resistor,
19:29this time against ship money,
19:31the tax that paid for the upkeep of the navy.
19:34Why should counties with no coastlines pay this?
19:38It was iniquitous.
19:40It may only have been a few shillings
19:42and, in the end, Hamden lost his case, but he won the argument.
19:46The embers were hot again.
19:49And alongside the lawyers in Parliament,
19:52Charles now faced another group of intransigent critics
19:56who had something even more unanswerable than Magna Carta,
20:01and they, of course, were the Puritans.
20:04For the hotter kind of Protestants, the Puritans,
20:07the Stuart obsession with harmony and unity
20:10was at best meaningless claptrap
20:13and, at worst, it was a plot to delude the gullible
20:17into bending the knee to Rome again.
20:20For them, the reality was conflict,
20:23the unbridgeable division between the saved and the damned.
20:28There was an endless battle going on
20:30between the saints and the legions of the devil.
20:33The fires had already been lit in Europe,
20:36for the Reformation was a war, and that war had not yet been won.
20:45The Puritans looked around them,
20:47but all they could see from this king
20:49was a betrayal of the godly Reformation,
20:52peace with Catholic Spain abroad,
20:54and at home, even worse, a church ruled by bishops
20:57who were a little better than papists,
20:59bishops who berated the Puritans
21:01for having taken the Reformation too far.
21:07In the face of this cosmic battle,
21:09to stay still, to keep silent, was a sin and a crime.
21:17For the Puritans, Charles I ought to have been a custom-built king,
21:21austere, decorous and chaste.
21:24But the fact was his religion still seemed to need
21:27Protestant mumbo-jumbo, all those signs and mysteries.
21:32Even this would have been palatable
21:34had he not wanted to foist it on everyone else,
21:37to force everyone to kneel at its shrine.
21:43The Puritans declared war
21:45against any creeping signs of Romanism in the church.
21:49Paintings and statues, crucifixes and altar rails.
21:56And it escaped nobody's notice
21:58that Charles was married to a Catholic.
22:05These men were very much in a minority,
22:08but, of course, being the elect,
22:10they expected to be in a minority, the party of redemption.
22:14In fact, they glorified, in the slightness of their numbers,
22:18the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army.
22:25Men like the London woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington,
22:28would be in the front line of this battle,
22:31a stormtrooper of the Reformation, ready to fight every waking hour.
22:38You may see now how Antichrist doth plot
22:41against the poor Church of God,
22:43but so long as we put our trust in the Lord,
22:46let us once again take note of his great deliverances
22:50from those great and devilish blood-sucking Papists.
22:55Of course, Charles was not going to lose any sleep
22:58over the Nehemiah Wallingtons of this world,
23:01but Puritanism was not just the faith of merchants and artisans.
23:08There were plenty among the gentry and the nobility too
23:11who believed just as passionately in the word of Scripture
23:15and, for all of them, it was an article of faith
23:18that nobody, neither Pope nor King,
23:20would ever be allowed to flout the word of God.
23:28And Charles would never be allowed to forget it.
23:36Yes, finally, they were a minority.
23:40But it was one of Charles' most costly errors
23:43to let so many in the Protestant middle of the country
23:47come to regard him as a greater threat to their church
23:50than the Puritan militants.
23:52And for this fatal error, Charles had one man to thank,
23:56William Laud, whom he made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.
24:01Poor old Laud, is there anything good to be said for Laud
24:05and the principles he stood for?
24:09He's gone down as one of the most arrogant and destructive men
24:12in our history.
24:14But put yourself in his vestments and it looks a bit different.
24:18Far from being an elitist,
24:20Laud thought it was the Puritans who were the authoritarians.
24:24Thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.
24:28Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.
24:32It was the Puritans, with their obsession with reading and preaching,
24:37their gloomy fatalism, their endless battle cries,
24:41who deprived the ordinary people of what they needed from the church.
24:45Colour, spectacle, a sight of the Saviour
24:48in the form of his cross upon the altar,
24:50the comforts of ritual, sacrament and ceremony,
24:54a fence to keep dogs off the communion tray,
24:57and most of all, the consoling possibility
25:00that sinful souls might at the end be received into Christ.
25:06What was so very wrong with that?
25:10Well, what was wrong was that Laud was not presenting his programme as an option.
25:14He was presenting it as an order.
25:16Believe this, worship like this, pray like this, or take the consequences.
25:27Anyone who defied him found himself before his special tribunal.
25:32Dissidents like Prynne, Burton and Baswick
25:35became Laud's highest-profile victims.
25:41They had their ears cut off.
25:49Laud's iron fist went unopposed for the time being.
25:54By the mid-1630s, Charles could see no obstacle
25:58to consummating the Great Stuart Plan
26:01of harmony across the Three Kingdoms,
26:04whether they wanted it or not.
26:06England was under control,
26:08and thanks to the brutal tactics of his Lord Deputy in Ireland,
26:12Charles's other right-hand hard man, Thomas Wentworth,
26:16so too was England.
26:19That just left Scotland,
26:21and in particular its obstinate, cantankerous Presbyterian kirk.
26:27It had a galling and, to Charles, completely unacceptable contempt
26:32for the authority of bishops,
26:34and the fact that it was the only place in the world
26:37where the Church of England had ever been.
26:40It was the only place in the world
26:42where the Church of England had ever been.
26:45It was an unacceptable contempt for the authority of bishops.
26:49Charles was determined to break this.
26:52Then the whole realm could pray and worship as one.
26:57But the obsession with union,
26:59which so consumed both James and Charles,
27:02would in the end turn out to guarantee
27:05nothing but hatred and division.
27:09Charles, born in Dunfermline, was himself Scottish,
27:14so surely there could be no problem with this.
27:17Well, oh, yes, there could.
27:19It had taken Charles eight whole years
27:22to even bother travelling to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation.
27:26He'd become Scotland's very first absentee king,
27:30and there would be a price to pay.
27:39MUSIC FADES
27:49Charles was completely incapable of appreciating Calvinism's call
27:54for a great moral purification.
27:57As far as he was concerned,
27:59Scotland and England were not all that different.
28:02If one kingdom had been bent to his royal will
28:05and a firmness, so would the other one.
28:08But, of course, the Scottish Reformation had been nothing like England's.
28:12South of the border, changes had happened in the church
28:16at a slow and fitful pace.
28:18In Scotland, Calvinism had struck
28:21in great, electrifying bursts of charismatic conversion,
28:25backed up by preachers, teachers and ministers,
28:28and only forced into a reluctant and periodic retreat by James I,
28:33who, unlike his son, had known when to stop.
28:41So when Charles announced the introduction into Scotland
28:45of the new prayer book,
28:47he would discover just how little he understood
28:50of the kingdom of his birth.
28:54The Royal Council had very obligingly let it be known
28:58that the prayer book had to be introduced, at the latest,
29:01by Easter 1637.
29:04Then there was a printing delay,
29:06and this gave ample time for the Calvinist preachers and lords
29:10to organise exactly what they were going to do.
29:13Archbishop Lord, the King, the Council, the bishops,
29:16everyone fell straight into the trap.
29:20Now, who ever thought a little thing like this
29:23would start a revolution?
29:27The British wars began here, in St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh,
29:32on the morning of July 23rd, 1637,
29:36and the first missiles that were launched were not cannonballs,
29:39they were footstools.
29:44They were launched straight down the nave,
29:47and their targets were the dean and bishop of the cathedral.
29:50The right reverends had just started to read
29:53from a royally authorised new prayer book,
29:56and it was this attempt to read from the liturgy
29:59which had triggered a deafening outburst of shouting and wailing,
30:03especially from the many women gathered in the church.
30:09The prayer book riots, though, were just the fuse.
30:12What those who lit it wanted was to blow up the bishops
30:15and the whole royal church establishment in Scotland.
30:24On February 28th, 1638,
30:27a national covenant was signed in a four-hour ceremony,
30:30along with sermons and psalms,
30:33exhorting the godly to be the new Israel.
30:39The next day, the covenant was brought here
30:42to the open churchyard at Greyfriars,
30:44where hordes of ordinary Scots added their signature.
30:48Signatures were made and distributed
30:50the length and breadth of Scotland.
30:53For countless thousands of Scots, signing the covenant
30:56was just an extension of the vows they took in Kirk,
30:59banding them with God.
31:01But very rapidly, the document assumed the status
31:04of a kind of patriotic scripture,
31:07determining who and who was not a real Christian,
31:10who and who was not truly a Scot.
31:14For Charles, there was no question of negotiating.
31:17They were all rebels. They must all be punished.
31:22There was just one snag.
31:24It wasn't Charles who had the formidable army, but the Scots,
31:27veterans of the wars of religion in Europe.
31:31Facing his first really crucial test,
31:34Charles the British Charlemagne found he couldn't raise money
31:38and he couldn't raise men.
31:40It took one bruising skirmish
31:42for Charles to see the folly of further fighting.
31:46A truce was hastily signed.
31:51But he wouldn't back off.
31:56By now, Charles was desperate enough for men and money
31:59to do what he must have hoped he'd never have to do again,
32:03call a parliament.
32:05After 11 years of gathering dust,
32:07the House of Commons would once again be full of passionate argument
32:11and legal fury.
32:17If Charles thought that 11 years
32:19meant the old quarrels had been forgotten,
32:21he was ignoring a force new to British politics, the news.
32:26For the great political dramas of the last 20 years
32:29had been hotly consumed by a reading public,
32:32addicted to newspapers, pamphlets,
32:34woodcuts and the so-called sixpenny separates,
32:37recording all the debates and controversies
32:40and dispatched around the shires.
32:45The 1640 parliament took up exactly where it had left off in 1629
32:50when Charles had closed it down.
32:55It must have come as an unpleasant surprise then
32:58when this new parliament, instead of laying immanually
33:01grievances aside, immediately began to resurrect them.
33:05This parliament lasted only three short weeks
33:09before once again Charles suspended it.
33:16But his list of options was getting shorter by the day
33:20and they were all bad.
33:22He wasn't going to cave into the Scots
33:25and he wasn't going to reopen parliament.
33:28But there was a third way,
33:30courtesy of his Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth.
33:34Why not use an Irish Catholic army to crush the Presbyterian Scots?
33:40Grateful for his advice, Charles made Wentworth Earl of Stratford,
33:44but hesitated.
33:46Charles knew that Protestant England was hardly likely to approve
33:50of a Catholic army attacking their brother, Scots.
33:55What followed in 1640 was a breakdown of deference
33:59of frightening magnitude.
34:03Officers were being attacked by their own men.
34:06The latest round of fighting with the Scots was a disaster.
34:10Newcastle, with its priceless coal, was captured.
34:14To get it back, to get the Scots out of England,
34:17Charles needed cash fast.
34:20He had no choice now.
34:22He would have to reopen parliament.
34:27There'd never be a better opportunity for John Pym
34:31and his fellow parliamentary leaders to rein in the king.
34:38Pym had discovered, whether he understood the word or not,
34:42the elixir of freedom.
34:45Pym had discovered, whether he understood the word or not,
34:48the elixir of revolution.
34:51Yesterday's truism, obey the king, is tomorrow's bad joke.
34:56Yesterday's unthinkable, abolish all bishops,
35:00seems to be tomorrow's necessity.
35:05All round London were enormous seething crowds,
35:08practically laying siege to Westminster.
35:11John Pym's demands were simple and blunt.
35:15No taxes ever without parliament say so.
35:19Parliament's to be elected every three years.
35:22And most decisively of all, looking right into Charles' eyes,
35:26no parliament, especially not this one,
35:29could be dissolved without its own consent.
35:33When Charles, through gritted teeth, conceded
35:36it was the destruction of the absolute monarchy.
35:39Or was it?
35:41The king did still have one card he could play,
35:44that Catholic army that Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford,
35:47had raised in Ireland.
35:52Pym now knew he would have to annihilate Stratford
35:56if he was to defend parliament from this threat.
36:00So in the spring of 1641, Stratford was impeached.
36:04Sick and grey-haired,
36:06it was frustratingly impossible to convict of treason.
36:09So Pym resorted to an act of attainder instead.
36:13This merely required a burden of suspicion.
36:17When Stratford had spoken of an Irish army reducing the kingdom,
36:21hadn't he meant England, argued Pym?
36:24But there was one problem.
36:26The act of attainder needed the signature of the king.
36:30Poor Charles.
36:32Memories of Buckingham must have flooded back into his mind.
36:36For a king obsessed by loyalty,
36:38how could he abandon Stratford, his most faithful ally?
36:42It was Stratford himself who spared Charles the agony of indecision.
36:47He knew that only his own death
36:49could save the king and the country from further upheaval.
36:53In a final letter written to Charles,
36:56Stratford begged the king to do what had to be done.
37:20Weeping, Charles signed the warrant.
37:23Stratford was led out onto Tower Green,
37:26surrounded by jeering crowds and beheaded.
37:38Charles never forgave himself for this act of betrayal.
37:42But it had never occurred to Stratford
37:45that his death would actually make things worse for Charles
37:48rather than better.
37:50And what happened next was the worst that could happen.
37:54Ireland erupted.
37:56With Stratford executed,
37:58Irish Catholics felt unprotected against Protestant reprisals.
38:02In a pre-emptive strike, they attacked first.
38:07Late in 1641, news of Irish killings began filtering through England,
38:12graphically illustrated by a campaign of atrocity prints.
38:17Now, bad things did happen,
38:19but the usual fantasy pictures of impaled babies
38:22tripped the wire of Anglo-Protestant paranoia.
38:26In 1641, Stratford was forced into exile.
38:30Even worse, it was rumoured that the Catholic rebels
38:33claimed to be acting on behalf of the king.
38:36The Puritan press hit the streets, screaming,
38:39''We're next!''
38:41Charles was painfully aware
38:43how costly his dream of a united Britain had become.
38:47First, the Presbyterian Scots
38:49had brought down his personal royalty,
38:52and then he was forced into exile.
38:56With events now spiralling out of control,
38:59Pym saw this was the moment
39:01to try and strip the king of virtually all his authority.
39:05Charles' response was to try to arrest him,
39:08but Pym and four other parliamentary leaders
39:11had been tipped off that the king was not to be arrested.
39:15The King of England, Charles V,
39:17had been accused of being a traitor,
39:19and the King of England, Charles V,
39:21had been accused of being a traitor.
39:24Charles was tipped off that the king was marching on Parliament
39:27with an armed guard.
39:29They waited till the last moment and slipped out of the back.
39:32Charles was left empty-handed.
39:38It was an unmitigated fiasco.
39:41The gamble had only been worthwhile
39:43so long as Charles was sure of absolute success.
39:47Exposed now, just as Pym had wanted,
39:50as a naked, abject failure,
39:52Charles appeared to be something worse than a despot.
39:55A blundering despot.
40:00Both sides were moving fast beyond any point of reconciliation.
40:05Pym made it clear that Parliament now needed to protect itself
40:09and England from the king.
40:11It set about raising an army.
40:14In July 1642,
40:16Bulstrode Whitelock thought out loud about the abyss facing the country.
40:22It is strange to note how insensibly we have slipped
40:25into this beginning of a civil war
40:27by one unexpected accident after another,
40:30as waves of the sea which have brought us this far
40:34and which we scarce know how.
40:37What the issue shall be, no man alive can tell.
40:40Probably few of us here may live to see the end of it.
40:47What's truly amazing and very touching about the spring and summer of 1642
40:51is the abundance of evidence we have about the agonies of allegiance.
40:55The real soul-searching that people went through
40:58when they were pondering the most painful and weightiest decision of their lives,
41:02which side to join themselves to,
41:05and how earnestly and how honestly they tried to justify that decision
41:09to their families, their friends, and not least to themselves.
41:15Cruelest of all, it tore fathers away from sons.
41:20The sad history of one Buckinghamshire family says it all.
41:25The Vernies had been the very model of a loving,
41:28companionable gentry family, but they were torn apart in this crisis.
41:33Rayford sat next to his father during the great parliaments of 1640,
41:38but now he not only expressed support for the parliamentary cause,
41:43but actually swore the oath required of all members
41:46after the militia ordinance.
41:49Now, oaths were very serious things in the 17th century,
41:53and taking this one split Rafe not only from his father,
41:57but from his hot-haired, younger, royalist brother, Edmund,
42:00who absolutely failed to see why Rafe should not be honouring
42:04not only his father, but the king.
42:07And yet, and yet, the Vernies did remain a family.
42:12Rafe had made his vow to Parliament,
42:14but his father felt under no less an obligation to Charles.
42:18It was a bond of personal loyalty which held,
42:21despite Edmund having little enthusiasm for what the king had done.
42:27I do not like the quarrel,
42:29and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent
42:32to what they desire, so that my conscience is only concerned
42:36in honour and gratitude to follow my master.
42:41I have eaten his bread, and served him near 30 years,
42:46and will not do so baser thing as to forsake him.
42:53In the third week of August 1642, Charles raised his standard.
42:59The Rubicon had been crossed.
43:01The honour of holding Charles' personal flag in the battle
43:05fell to Sir Edmund Verney.
43:07He swore only death would prise it from his hands.
43:21By the time the Royalist army arrived at Edge Hill,
43:24its prospects had been transformed.
43:27It was now about 20,000 strong,
43:29about 14,000 of whom took up position on the ridge
43:33in the early afternoon of October 22nd.
43:36At the top of the hill were the king and his two sons,
43:39Charles, the Prince of Wales, and the nine-year-old James, Duke of York,
43:43along with Prince Rupert and his toy poodle, Boy.
43:48It was here that Charles I planted his flag.
43:59In mid-afternoon, the commander of the parliamentary army,
44:03the Earl of Essex, began to cannonade the Royalist infantry.
44:07Balls thudded and hissed in the grass,
44:09taking a life here, a limb there.
44:14Then Prince Rupert led his cavalry forward down the hill.
44:18For the men in the Parliament lines,
44:20watching a distant trot turn into a canter and then a charge
44:24and seeing their own muskets have no effect
44:27on the suddenly terrifyingly hurtling horsemen,
44:30the moment of truth had arrived.
44:34GUNFIRE
44:40War slammed into them.
44:42Big, dark horses, bright, deadly steel.
44:45They panicked and broke, Rupert's horsemen following fleeing troopers
44:49all the way to the baggage train.
44:52Rupert must have thought, this was going to be easy.
44:55But by now the parliamentary infantry had crawled forward,
44:59the two great phalanxes of pikemen
45:01heaving and pushing at each other amidst the musket fire
45:04until a drop of exhaustion.
45:09Somewhere amidst the smoke, fire and steel was Sir Edmund Verney.
45:14The royal standard clenched in his hand made him an obvious target.
45:18They never even found his corpse.
45:21There lies a knight
45:24Slain under his shield
45:28With a dove
45:36In the following months, the war broke down
45:38into grim, grinding local conflicts.
45:41Parliament held on to London,
45:43the King tried to nail down bases of strength in the north and south-west.
45:49The south-western campaign was especially savage.
45:53Towns like Exeter and Taunton changed hands.
45:56Local families were divided between brothers and cousins.
45:59Old friends became new enemies.
46:02Two such opponents, men in every other respect virtually indistinguishable,
46:07were William Waller, a parliamentary general,
46:10and Rafe Hopton, a royalist.
46:12In a lull in the fighting,
46:14Hopton wrote to Waller asking for a meeting.
46:17Waller felt he had to turn him down,
46:19but wrote back in terms which spoke of the deep sorrow
46:22he felt at their broken friendship.
46:25It's the classic lament of this terrible civil war.
46:30To my noble friend, Sir Ralph.
46:33Sir,
46:35my affections to you are so unchangeable
46:38that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person.
46:43But I must be true to the cause wherein I serve.
46:47That great God which is the searcher of my heart
46:50knows with what a sad scene I go upon this service,
46:54and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy.
46:59But I look upon it as an opus domini,
47:02which is enough to silence all passion in me.
47:06We are both upon the stage and must act those parts
47:09that are assigned to us in this tragedy.
47:12Let us do it in a way of honour
47:14and without personal animosities whatsoever the issue be.
47:20I shall never relinquish the dear title
47:23of your most affectionated friend and faithful servant,
47:27William Waller.
47:30The scythe of mortality, always busy, never fussy,
47:34swept up all kinds and conditions of men,
47:37officers and rank and file,
47:39musketeers and troopers,
47:41camp whores and settlers,
47:44young apprentices who put on a helmet for the very first time
47:48and hardened old mercenaries who'd grown rusty
47:51along with their cuirasses,
47:53soldiers who had no idea where to get a pair of boots
47:56or anything to fill their bellies
47:58and peasants who simply had absolutely nothing left to give them,
48:02drummer boys and buglers,
48:04captains and cooks.
48:09By the autumn of 1643,
48:12Parliament was utterly demoralised.
48:15Bristol had fallen to the Royalists,
48:17the King had established a court and a military government in Oxford.
48:21Many parliamentarians, weary of the poverty and slaughter,
48:25were making noises about peace.
48:27Bulstrode Whitelock wrote...
48:30Women are weary of their being robbed of children,
48:34of their chastity and their parents.
48:36Is it not time for us to be weary of these discords
48:40and to use our utmost endeavours to put an end to them?
48:48This was not what John Pym wanted to hear.
48:51Even as he was dying, tortured by cancer of the bowel,
48:55to squash a peace movement,
48:57he pulled off a last coup which would transform the war.
49:05On September 25, 1643,
49:08an alliance was struck between Parliament and the Scots,
49:12the Solemn League and Covenant.
49:15In 1637, Scotland had begun the resistance against Charles I.
49:20Seven years later, the Covenant would all but finish him off.
49:28At Marston Moor, outside York, on a wet afternoon in July 1644,
49:33the full force of the Anglo-Scots alliance
49:36hammered the Royalist army.
49:38It was the bloodiest battle of the war.
49:41The name of Charles' army was annihilated.
49:44Among the victors was the MP for Cambridge,
49:47a cavalry officer with iron in his soul.
49:57His name was Oliver Cromwell,
49:59and he was, he thought, doing the Lord's work.
50:03Cromwell was himself an East Anglian country gentleman,
50:06but he knew that gentility was no use in this war.
50:10Only effective fighting men.
50:13After Edge Hill, he had told John Hamden...
50:16I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain
50:19that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows
50:22than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.
50:27In the winter of 1644-45,
50:30Cromwell and a Yorkshire general, Sir Thomas Fairfax,
50:33set about to make a new kind of army,
50:36prepared to accept discipline
50:38in return for decent supplies of food, boots and shelter.
50:42And it would be an army that knew what it was fighting for.
50:47I fight for the preservation of our Parliament
50:50in the being whereof, under God,
50:53consists the glory and welfare of this kingdom.
50:57GUNFIRE
51:05At Naseby, in June 1645,
51:08the two wings of the new model army closed in
51:11on a royalist force about half their size.
51:15At the end of the fighting, nothing was left of the royal army
51:19except the dead left strewn across the fields.
51:27The last royalist strongholds were taken one by one.
51:30Bristol, Carlisle.
51:32At Basing in Hampshire,
51:34one of the most vicious sieges in a war full of them
51:37came to a long, drawn-out, bloody conclusion.
51:43The war was over and Parliament had won.
51:46So, finally, God had spoken.
51:50Surely, even Charles could see that.
51:53Surely, that would be an end to the bloodshed
51:56and the country could return to reasonableness.
52:02And there were many in Parliament aching for just this,
52:06a settlement that would allow Charles to keep his throne,
52:09some kind of return to what had been on the table back in 1642.
52:15Surely, after all the blunders and bloodshed,
52:18the botched coups and the futile slaughters,
52:21he would do the right thing.
52:23He would share power.
52:25But Charles was constitutionally incapable
52:28of being a constitutional king.
52:31He gagged at the idea of being reduced to a subaltern monarchy,
52:35a monarchy in which the king was the sole ruler.
52:38He was the sole ruler.
52:41He gagged at the idea of being reduced to a subaltern monarch,
52:44taking, not giving, orders.
52:47The war might be over, for now,
52:49but for Charles, the plotting was not.
52:52For the next two years, in a bid to reverse his defeat,
52:55Charles tried to play off Parliament against the army,
52:58the army against Parliament and the Scots against both.
53:06Oliver Cromwell finally realised
53:08that as long as Charles was around,
53:10he was always going to be a rallying point for the discontented,
53:13and there were bound to be a lot of them.
53:16But Cromwell was also enraged by Charles' presumption
53:19of defying the verdict of God,
53:22so clearly revealed at the battles of Mastermoor and Naseby.
53:26It was evident then that King Charles had to go.
53:29Whether or not he had to die, that was another matter.
53:34A second civil war flared up,
53:36once more requiring from Cromwell all his military ruthlessness.
53:41With his annihilation of the Royalist Scottish Army in 1648 at Preston,
53:46Charles' final hope had gone.
53:52Any thought of conciliation with the king was now purest folly.
53:58Those MPs who persisted in the idea that Charles could be reasoned with
54:03now had a furious and vengeful army to answer to.
54:07When Colonel Thomas Pride used his troops
54:10to weed out any MPs suspected of going soft on Charles,
54:14the country realised there was a new power in the land.
54:21This was the soldiers' show now.
54:24Britain belonged to them, and they belonged to God.
54:27They had no desire to go back to a country of princes, lords and gentlemen.
54:31They wanted Jerusalem now.
54:44And they wanted the biggest sinner of them all, the man of blood,
54:47Charles Stuart, to feel the fire of God.
54:53He felt the fire of God's wrath.
54:58The final question could be addressed, what should happen to Charles?
55:10Cromwell agonised, prayed and wept,
55:13beseeched the Lord of Hosts to give him an answer.
55:16In the end, politics, not prayer, decided it.
55:20It was decided if the country was ever to heal.
55:23But not done away with in some dark corner.
55:26No, Charles was going to be tried in the open and then beheaded in public.
55:36This would be the great turning point in British history.
55:40The trial would kill one kind of Britain and give birth to another,
55:44a republic, a kingless state of God.
55:48So for both Charles and Oliver Cromwell,
55:51the final act would become a theatre, a classroom, a debating chamber.
55:56Charles would play the classic Stuart part, that of holy martyr,
56:00as his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had done.
56:03Imposing, dignified, tragic.
56:06But he knew, as well as Oliver Cromwell did,
56:09that the outcome was never in doubt.
56:11The king would die.
56:13The only question was as what? Martyr or traitor?
56:17What had he learned?
56:19In the end, the answer was nothing.
56:27On January 30, 1649, he was led out through the banqueting house
56:32onto the scaffold erected right outside in Whitehall.
56:36The windows were all boarded up,
56:39so Rubens's great anthem to the godlike omnipotence of kings
56:43was invisible in the gloom.
56:46The light got out of it.
56:52But Charles didn't need the pictures.
56:54He had the script off by heart.
56:58A subject and a sovereign are clean, different things.
57:17So the last words out of Charles' first mouth were the truth.
57:23With nothing left to lose for himself
57:25and everything to gain for his son,
57:28he was not about to confuse anyone
57:30about the nature of the kingdom that God had ordained.
57:34It was the same kingdom that Rubens had painted on that ceiling.
57:39The anointed sovereign, answerable only to the Almighty,
57:44laying down laws for the benefit of his subject.
57:48He offered justice and he expected obedience.
57:51That was it. Take it or leave it.
57:54It had always been about that, really,
57:57and all the pious hopes of turning Charles into a parliamentary monarch
58:02were just so many castles in the air.
58:05There were three ravens sat on a tree
58:12Down a down a hay, down a dome
58:19They were as black as they might be
58:26With a dome
58:33The one of them said to his mate
58:41Where shall we our breakfast take
58:47With a dome
58:51Derry, derry, derry, down, down