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In the face of threats from overseas and rebellion in Scotland, a new sense of Britishness emerges and a national hero is born.
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00:23The National Maritime Museum holds over 2 million artefacts,
00:28national treasures from Britain's past.
00:35Today, an object that hasn't been seen in public for two decades
00:40is being taken out of storage.
00:49This is an object that I really wanted to see for a really long time,
00:54because I think it's one of the most remarkable historical artefacts
00:59held in this country.
01:02It's a survivor of an event that is pivotal to the history of Britain
01:07and the story of the Union.
01:08But perhaps, strangely, this British national treasure
01:13is actually the flag of another country.
01:24This is the ensign of a Spanish warship called the San Ildefonso,
01:30and it was flying this flag in 1805
01:33when that ship was captured by HMS Defence,
01:36one of the ships in the fleet commanded by Nelson at Trafalgar.
01:47Cannonballs and grapes shot ripped through the flag
01:50and burnt holes in it.
01:52Parts of this flag have been on fire,
01:54and it's blackened from the smoke,
01:56which is literally trapped in the fibres.
01:59You can really feel the violence of the Battle of Trafalgar
02:03200 years later through this flag.
02:17After the battle, the ensign of the San Ildefonso
02:21was brought back to Britain,
02:23where it was to play a role in another event
02:26that took place on a winter's day three months after the battle.
02:32This is a copy of a painting
02:34that shows the great and the good,
02:36all gathered together under the great dome of St. Paul's
02:40for the state funeral of Lord Nelson.
02:43And on this side of the painting,
02:45shown hanging over one of the great arches of the cathedral,
02:48is a flag from one of the captured Spanish ships.
02:51Well, this flag, shown in this painting,
02:54is that flag.
02:56Because that's an object that's borne witness
02:59to two really important moments in the story of the Union.
03:03Not just the Battle of Trafalgar,
03:04but also Nelson's funeral.
03:06Because that was a moment
03:08in which Nelson became a new type of British hero.
03:12One of a handful of individuals
03:14around whom ideas and emotions about Britishness
03:18would evolve and develop.
03:21The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
03:25the state that made Nelson into a national hero in 1805,
03:29was then just four years old.
03:33Its immediate origins lay in two unions.
03:37One of 1801 that had united Britain and Ireland,
03:41and an earlier Act of Union of 1707,
03:45that had brought England and Wales together with Scotland.
03:50It was in the decades between the Act of Union
03:53and the Battle of Trafalgar,
03:55that millions of people,
03:57who had previously thought of themselves only as being Scottish,
04:01English, Welsh or Irish,
04:03began to also regard themselves as British.
04:07And Britishness went from being little more than a political idea
04:12to become, for some people,
04:14a meaningful and a living identity.
04:23Britain has never been an easy country to define or understand.
04:28It's a state made up not of one,
04:32but of four nations.
04:34Each with its own history,
04:36its own institutions,
04:37cultures,
04:38languages and identities.
04:42If anybody was to say to me,
04:44oh, so you're British,
04:45I would always correct them,
04:46say no, I'm Irish.
04:47I'm British first and Scottish second.
04:50Well, I'm a Brit.
04:55I'm a very proud Brit,
04:56but I'm also an English woman.
04:59Over five tumultuous and violent centuries,
05:02those four nations were slowly brought together
05:07by the power of faith,
05:10by the wealth of empire,
05:13by the threat of invasion.
05:16But that history has always been one
05:19of rival competing identities, loyalties,
05:24and nationalist passions.
05:28This long history of union and disunion
05:33continues to define how people see themselves
05:36and the country today.
05:40For this series,
05:41we invited people from all four nations,
05:43people of different backgrounds,
05:45faiths and politics,
05:47to share their personal views on our history.
05:52How it binds us together.
05:54It represents a lot of good things,
05:57things that have made us great.
06:00Or divides us.
06:01If we're talking about recent past,
06:04time for a divorce.
06:06And why it still matters.
06:09I always describe the union as a family.
06:11Families will always get on together.
06:13You know, we fought.
06:14The big question of today
06:16is can the great historic forces
06:19that built the United Kingdom
06:21still hold us together.
06:23Are we merely passing through
06:26one of the many periods of turbulence
06:29in this long history?
06:31Or are we perhaps slowly approaching
06:34the end of the union?
06:36Are our generations right now
06:39in the 21st century destined to become
06:42the last of the Britons?
06:44Or will the union survive?
07:01The 18th century
07:02at the beginning of the 18th century,
07:04Britishness was more of a political idea
07:07than a living identity.
07:09and the future existence of the new British state far from certain.
07:18In Edinburgh, the ancient parliament stood empty,
07:23power having drained away to Westminster.
07:28In 1713, just six years after the Act of Union,
07:33a motion for it to be repealed was put to the House of Commons.
07:37It was rejected, but by just four votes.
07:45And the state that had been rushed into existence remained divided.
07:50There was no established British culture or traditions and no common language.
07:57For much of the previous century, even before the Act of Union,
08:02the people of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales had, in theory at least,
08:07been united by one thing, a shared monarch.
08:11They'd all been ruled by the kings and the queens of the Scottish House of Stuart.
08:17But in 1714, George I of the German House of Hanover,
08:22a Protestant and a relative of the Stuarts, was offered the throne.
08:26Many Catholics, along with people opposed to the Union,
08:31and people who just didn't like the Hanoverians and the new British state,
08:36coalesced around the exiled Catholic Stuarts, and they became known as the Jacobites.
08:42And they were particularly strong and influential here in Scotland.
08:50The Jacobites were supported by Britain's Catholic enemies, France and Spain.
08:56And in 1715, the Jacobites raised an army to overthrow the Hanoverians
09:02and install a Catholic Stuart King.
09:05And four years later, they conspired to land Spanish troops as part of an invasion of Britain.
09:13Both rebellions were defeated.
09:18Yet even after these defeats, the old aristocratic families of Scotland,
09:23in their grand houses and castles,
09:26continued to plot against the Hanoverian kings and the Union.
09:34One of those powerful families lived here, Strathallen Castle in Perthshire.
09:41And in 1745, the owners of this castle received a letter.
09:49The date on this letter is the 5th of September, 1745.
09:55This is a military order given in the midst of a rebellion.
10:00It's addressed to our trusty and well-beloved cousin and counsellor, William Viscount Strathallen.
10:10Now that is William Drummond.
10:12And at the top of the letter, it tells us who it's from.
10:26Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 is not the Prince of Wales, nor is he the regent of Scotland, England, France
10:35and Ireland.
10:36He is the grandson of the last Stuart King, James II, and his father, another James, is in exile in
10:45France.
10:46And he is the man that many people in Scotland and Ireland, also in England and Wales,
10:52regarded as the legitimate king.
10:55Now, in September 1745, Charles Edward Stuart is in Scotland.
11:01And this is what he writes to William Drummond.
11:04We were posing a special trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage and good conduct,
11:13to hereby constitute and appoint you to be Brigadier General of His Majesty's forces.
11:19So this is William Drummond being appointed to become a senior military commander in a rebellion.
11:3212 days after Charles Stuart wrote his letter to William Drummond, he led the Jacobite army into Edinburgh.
11:42Seven weeks later, the Jacobites crossed the border and invaded England.
11:49Victory would bring down the Hanoverian kings.
11:54Defeat would guarantee terrible.
11:57Retribution.
12:05William Drummond travelled to Perth to raise money and soldiers for the Jacobite cause,
12:11leaving his wife Margaret and their daughters at Strathallen Castle.
12:17This is a picture of William.
12:22This is the cause for which he has already risked everything.
12:26And once again, he's going to risk this house, the lands that his family owns.
12:33And he's also putting his family in danger, isn't he?
12:35Yes. He's also potentially ruining his, the inheritance of his title, his estates, etc., is all going too.
12:43So the idea of the name is also going as well. Their name is the land and the land is
12:49the name. You know, they're so intimately connected with it.
12:51Because this cause is just so powerful, so essential to who he is that it's worth taking that risk.
12:57I don't know if he ever queried the cause he's following because he's, he immersed himself so completely in it.
13:03This is a staunch Jacobite.
13:07And it's interesting that William actually sends his two younger sons down to his brother Andrew in London.
13:13In London?
13:14In London. Andrew had been working as a goldsmith, I believe, but he's now moved into banking at this point.
13:19So he's got a very, very strong business in London.
13:22Is the hope that his sons will somehow keep the Drummond Lion or his name and the family going if
13:30things go wrong?
13:30I think that's right. He's quite cleverly sort of, you know, having a backup plan.
13:35And this is a portrait of his wife, Margaret. She is an ardent Jacobite herself. And this is a power
13:43Jacobite couple.
13:44When William goes to Perth, she is left behind and she is not only managing the estate in his absence,
13:51she's also trying to entice, encourage and cajole men from this estate to join the army and or give money
14:02to the army.
14:02So she's raising forces. She's raising forces for the rebellion.
14:05Yes.
14:08But in December 1745, the Jacobite army was forced to retreat back to Scotland, where William Drummond joined them.
14:21Government raiding parties were dispatched to punish the Jacobite families who had supported the rebellion,
14:27which led them to Strathallen Castle, where Margaret Drummond and her daughters awaited them.
14:37The government forces know that this house is one of the centres of the rebellion.
14:43So as they march up towards Perth, they're going to come here.
14:46They also probably know that William is not here. Margaret and her daughters are certainly here.
14:54At the beginning of February, we have this document that describes one of these raiding parties.
15:00They stripped the young ladies' gowns from off their backs.
15:04They threatened to force my lady's wedding ring from off her finger.
15:08The idea of trying to remove someone's wedding ring is an attack on her marriage.
15:12And of course, William is a well-known Jacobite too, and he's also still with the Jacobite army.
15:17What seems to be happening here as well is that sort of degrading of the Jacobite women.
15:22Somehow they're subhuman. They're somehow no longer women, no longer to be looked after.
15:28So they're being manhandled and roughed up.
15:35After the attack on her home and her family, Margaret was arrested and brought to Edinburgh.
15:49In 1746, Margaret Drummond was in this room in Edinburgh Castle.
15:55And she was here because this was her prison cell.
16:01And it was while she was here that the rebellion of the Jacobites and the dreams of the stewards
16:08were brought to a final and a violent end.
16:12In April 1746, eight months after William Drummond had been appointed
16:18brigadier-general in the Jacobite army. That army was defeated by government forces at a place called Culloden,
16:27120 miles north of Edinburgh. And among those who were killed at Culloden was William Drummond.
16:39The defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 still raises powerful emotions for some in Scotland
16:49today.
16:51I feel genuinely sad about the Battle of Culloden. It was basically a massacre of Scots.
16:57It's widely felt as something to be lamented. The regret and overwhelming sorrow and kind of lives on with us.
17:07So yeah, it just, it makes me angry as well.
17:15For the Drummond family, the consequences of defeat were unsurprisingly disastrous.
17:22Margaret Drummond was eventually released from her prison cell at Edinburgh Castle,
17:26but now she was marked out as a traitor and so had to flee to exile in France.
17:33And the family's estates were confiscated. All that remained in Britain of the family of Margaret and William Drummond
17:41were their two younger sons, Robert and Henry, who had been rushed to London on the eve of the rebellion.
17:52After the rebellion, the British state, with the help of some clan chiefs,
17:57launched a campaign to repress the Scottish clans.
18:02An act of parliament disarmed the Highlanders and made it illegal to wear Highland dress.
18:08And many Scots, who lacked the wealth of families like the Drummond's,
18:13faced far more calamitous consequences than exile in France.
18:18Hundreds of Jacobite prisoners were executed or died in prison.
18:24Hundreds more were transported to the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean.
18:30The Highland way of life was demonised. Their power was completely taken away from them.
18:36Their way of life was taken away from them.
18:39I think there's a lot of mythology that's created round about Culloden.
18:43But for me, it all does also represent a change. It represents the consolidation
18:47of British nationalism, British imperialism over Scotland.
18:54But as well as retribution, the British state set out to better integrate Scotland into the Union.
19:03Within a decade of Culloden, the Scottish clans who had fought against Britain
19:08were being incorporated into the British army, becoming the legendary Highland regiments.
19:18And the government also set out to draw Scotland more deeply into a then booming British economy.
19:26That economy was expanding rapidly as both trade and the empire grew.
19:32And at its centre was one dominant city, London.
19:46In the middle decades of the 18th century, the population of this city was around three-quarters of a million.
19:53Around one in ten of the entire population of Britain lived in this one city.
19:59The population of Edinburgh around the same time was about 60,000.
20:04The population of Cardiff, just a couple of thousands.
20:07But what was really unique about London was that it dominated multiple aspects of national life.
20:15It was the country's key port, and the Thames was a vital trade archery.
20:20It was the centre of parliament and government, and it was the seat of the monarchy.
20:25And the city of London was the centre of the growing world of finance, of banking and insurance.
20:32London dominated theatre, the arts, printing and publishing.
20:36This city in those years was in one of the many phases in its history,
20:41when its gravitational pull was so enormous that it was just sucking in money and talent from across the country.
20:52London was where those who had done well from the union with Scotland,
20:56and those who had made their fortunes out in the empire, spent their money.
21:03It was where their tastes and fashions were catered for.
21:09And Georgian London became a raucous mega city.
21:16I've got a digital scan of an 18th-century book, and it has one of those ridiculously long 18th-century
21:23titles.
21:24It's called The London Directory for the Year 1775, containing an alphabetical list of the names and places of abode,
21:33of the merchants and principal traders of the cities of London and Westminster and the borough of Southwark.
21:40And looking through this, it becomes really evident, very quickly, that London in 1775 was full of men who had
21:48come to the capital from other parts of England, from Wales, from Scotland and beyond.
21:54There's a listing here for Sir Watkin Lewis, and he's described as a knight and an alderman.
22:01He was a Welsh lawyer who had come to London and then become deeply involved in the world of finance
22:06in the city of London.
22:08He was a future Lord Mayor of London.
22:11Now, all of these men had come to this city because just as it is today, this was where they
22:17could build their fortune.
22:19And one of the families listed in this directory and doing exactly that, building up the family firm, was a
22:27family that we've already met.
22:30Here is a listing for one Robert Drummond Esquire and co-bankers of Charing Cross.
22:37Now, this Robert Drummond is the son of William Drummond, who had died at the Battle of Culloden.
22:46His mother was Margaret Drummond, who'd been imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle.
22:51And yet, just 30 years after the Jacobite Rebellion, this son of Jacobites, this son of traitors,
23:02is listed in the London Business Directory as a banker at Charing Cross, in the very centre of London and
23:09in the very centre of the Union.
23:25Robert and his younger brother Henry had left Scotland on the eve of the Jacobite Rebellion.
23:33They went to work for their uncle, the founder of Drummond's Bank.
23:40The bank is still trading today from the same site in Charing Cross that was listed in the Business Directory
23:47of 1775.
23:52The kind of banquet at the moment represents the financial sinews of the Union beginning to play up.
23:58Alongside Drummond's, we've got Coots, we've got Barclays, we've got a prominence of Scottish banking.
24:03So this is a union that began in 1707 with the idea that Scotland was backwards financially compared to England.
24:13And yet, within a few decades, the Scots are in London at the very centre of the financial system.
24:19The London Scots community has been growing since the 1603 Union.
24:23By the time Drummond's is really taking off in the middle of the century, it's probably 40,000 to 60
24:29,000.
24:29Now, to put that into context, that means there's more Scots in London than in any other city other than
24:36Edinburgh.
24:37You've studied the financial records of Drummond's Bank.
24:41Do you find any evidence that the fact that Henry and Robert are the sons of a man who was
24:49a traitor,
24:50is that an impediment? Does that get in their way at all?
24:53Not in the slightest.
24:54In a sense, we're dealing with hard economic reality and realpolitik in London.
25:00The accounts show us that by the 1790s, we're looking at profits from 30,000 to 50,000.
25:07Now, today's money, that means that in 1791, the bank's surplus profit is in the region of £6 million.
25:15In today's money?
25:15In today's money, yeah.
25:17And the end result is the sort of personal wealth for Henry Drummond with approximately £10,000.
25:25That's about approximately £1.6 million. That does not include his assets,
25:30both in the co-partnership or his landed estates.
25:33That's just the cash he has in hand.
25:34That's just the cash he has in hand, exactly.
25:37So he's worth more than that?
25:38He's worth many, many times more than that.
25:42What are they doing with that money?
25:44The Drummond's are increasingly providing the 18th century equivalent of dark money for politics.
25:50Now, a good example of that is the approach by King George III in March 1784
25:57to Henry for the exorbitant amount of £24,000.
26:02Mr. Drummond may be surprised to receive this from his majesty, meaning, can you give me £24,000?
26:10So it's asking for money for the election of March 1784 to support William Pitt.
26:17And Drummond's are helping the king finance, I mean,
26:25rig re-election? Is that too far?
26:27Absolutely. This set of letters show just how absolutely central the Drummond's have become
26:35to the very nodes of political power in Britain.
26:39So a British king is borrowing money from Scottish bankers whose father wanted to kill his grandfather?
26:48When the fact that the father dies at Culloden, that was within 38 years,
26:53so you're effectively talking one generation, that traitor's family are acting as private bankers to the monarch,
27:02in a sense gives you an idea of how flexible and, in a sense, integrative the union is.
27:08It's really capable of taking people you would expect to be very marginal into the centre pretty quickly.
27:19Across the Irish Sea was another booming Georgian city.
27:31Dublin was dominated by the Protestant minority who controlled the Irish parliament
27:37and were using their wealth to transform the Irish capital into a city of classical Georgian architecture.
27:53But outside the city, in the country, was a very different island.
27:59There lived the Catholic majority, who were excluded from voting and barred from holding public office.
28:11When revolution broke out in France in 1789, it inspired some Irish reformers to believe
28:18that it might be possible to unite Protestants and Catholics and end British rule.
28:26The government in London, soon at war with revolutionary France, feared the French would send troops
28:32to support any Irish rebellion and then use Ireland to launch an invasion of Britain.
28:41The ideas that come out of the French Revolution, they have a very particular impact in Ireland.
28:46Yes, they do. The French Revolution provides an inspiration for reformers in Ireland.
28:53The ideas and fervour of the revolution focus on an organisation, the United Irishmen.
28:59And what's their programme?
29:00The reform of the existing Irish parliament. To begin with, they're comparatively moderate.
29:08It's only later in the day that they shift towards much more radical and ultimately revolutionary agenda.
29:14But I guess the key thing is in that name, the United Irishmen.
29:18This is about getting above sectarian division. It's about unifying across
29:24hitherto potent religious divides, uniting in the one common cause of reform.
29:31How does the British state react to the emergence of the United Irishmen?
29:35It's historic allies in Ireland and the government of Ireland are the Protestant descendancy interest.
29:41It has to keep them on side. But it also, after 1793, more than ever, it needs the numbers of
29:48Catholic Ireland to feed into the armies on the continent.
29:52So this is one of those many moments in the story of the union where pragmatism is the order of
29:58the day.
29:59Yes. However, the pragmatism rapidly is displaced by a fear.
30:06Wolf Tone, one of the key leaders of the United Irishmen, is in France negotiating with the French leadership.
30:14So you have this island you're dependent upon economically and for military manpower,
30:18but it has these organisations that are negotiating with your enemy.
30:23They're in France trying to persuade the French to invade.
30:25Yes, indeed. And at the end of 1796, there's a major French naval expedition in the southwest of Ireland.
30:34And had it not been for the stormy conditions of the time, the landing of that would have created chaos
30:41and potentially overturned British rule in Ireland.
30:44What do the British state do in that situation?
30:46They're imprisoning, they are torturing, they are hunting above all for weapons.
30:54We have here some examples of pike heads.
31:00They look like they've been made by a blacksmith.
31:03The same guy who could put a shoe on a horse can make one of these.
31:07Well, that's exactly the case. This is about local communities arming themselves.
31:12And these weapons are deployed by insurgents who, having taken their enemy off his horse using this hook,
31:22and in using this blade, in plunging it into their enemy's body, are looking at their enemy face to face,
31:30into his eyes.
31:33How many did the British confiscate?
31:36Tens of thousands.
31:38So the British forces are going around farms and villages and they are confiscating these weapons,
31:43because they know a rebellion is coming, and that rebellion does arrive in 1798.
31:48Perhaps 50,000 rebels take to the field.
31:52They're facing a larger number of crown forces, perhaps upwards of 70,000.
31:58As many as 30,000 are killed.
32:02And that bloodshed resonated at the time, and indeed it resonates still.
32:08The British are able to crush, suppress this rebellion.
32:13But the system that's supposed to keep peace in Ireland, the separate Irish parliament,
32:18allowing the Protestant minority to dominate, that's failed.
32:22This has been a systems failure.
32:24The British government, I think, recognizes that a radical political strategy is called for.
32:32And that radical political strategy is going to be union.
32:35It's going to be a parliamentary union.
32:37So it turns to exactly the idea that it had turned to in 1706, 1707,
32:42when Scotland could have been a bridgehead for an invasion by Catholic powers.
32:46The answer is a union.
32:49The answer, so far as London is concerned, is a union between an economically more powerful partner,
32:56England, and ostensibly lesser and more controllable partners, in this case,
33:04Ireland, but also historically, the beginning of the 18th century, Scotland.
33:07And this is a moment we've had the height of the Scottish Enlightenment.
33:12There's a real confidence amongst the ruling class in Scotland that they've made a successive
33:17union, that this is a model.
33:19Yes, that combination, I think, of cultural confidence, as well as economic success,
33:25seems to be on the table so far as Ireland is concerned.
33:30So it is, among others, the Scots who are saying to the Irish that this is a solution not just
33:36to
33:37stop rebellion, but a solution to Ireland's advancements and progress.
33:41Some Scots are certainly saying it's worked for us, it should work for you as well.
33:50As it happened a century earlier in 1707 with Scotland, union with Ireland meant that Irish MPs
33:58would now sit at Westminster, and that the Irish Parliament in Dublin would be closed.
34:06To persuade members of Ireland's government to vote themselves out of a job, the British government
34:12offered them all sorts of inducements, honours and high-paying government positions.
34:20But at the time, and for centuries after, there were rumours that the British state had not merely
34:26offered inducements, but had secretly bribed their opponents in Dublin.
34:33And then, in the 1990s, a cache of secret government documents from the time of the Act of Union
34:40were discovered at the National Archives.
34:45These are lists of money that was being sent from London to Ireland in the months leading up to the
34:54Act of Union.
34:55On the back of this document, it says SS Memo.
35:01Now, SS stands for Secret Service.
35:05This is 18th century Britain's equivalent of MI5.
35:09And on the other side, at the top, it says cash paid out of SS account.
35:17And then it lists two payments, both for £10,000, one made in January 1800, the other in March 1800.
35:27And we can actually follow this money to another document.
35:31And this reads, received from John King, two sums of £10,000 each, for which I promise to be accountable.
35:42And it is signed, Castlereagh.
35:45Now, John King worked for the Secret Service.
35:49And Castlereagh, that's Lord Castlereagh.
35:53That is the British government's chief secretary in Ireland.
35:57So this is money coming from the British Secret Service to the man who in 1800 was leading efforts to
36:04persuade people in Ireland to support a union with Britain.
36:09And there are other documents in this file that list other transfers of money.
36:15This one is titled Rough Memo respecting payments out of the SS fund for Ireland.
36:24And all of this is taking place behind closed doors.
36:28And it's being recorded in documents that went missing for two centuries.
36:36The documents that have now come to light don't tell us exactly how much money the Secret Service siphoned into
36:44Ireland,
36:45or which MPs were bribed into supporting the Act of Union.
36:51But what we do know is that on the 7th of June 1800, MPs gathered in this room and voted
36:59the Irish Parliament out of existence.
37:04Six months later, on the 1st of January 1801, the Kingdom of Great Britain that had been created in 1707
37:13by the Act of Union between Scotland, England and Wales ceased to exist.
37:20A new nation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was created.
37:26And the Union Flag was adapted to incorporate the Irish Cross of St. Patrick.
37:35More than 200 years later, the union between Ireland and Britain continues to divide opinion.
37:44The gaze on that flag is just the gaze on what you belong to.
37:48You could hardly call it a union at all. It was annexation in reality.
37:52It was a foreign power for most people coming over, taking away their political freedom.
37:57We were able to share people, resources, ideas amongst these four nations, which I think is incredible.
38:03Our culture was lost because of it, and our people are still divided because of it, I would say.
38:07I think on the balance, it was a force for good.
38:20The 1707 Act of Union had been designed to prevent the French from using Scotland as a bridgehead for invasion.
38:30The 1801 Act had been intended to stop Ireland being used in exactly the same way.
38:38But in 1803, two years after the union with Ireland, the threat of French invasion was greater than ever.
38:51Because of the arrival on the world stage of one man.
39:01In 1803, Napoleon was assembling a new invasion army and a fleet of ships to carry them across the channel.
39:14This is the Fort D'Alert, or at least what's left of it.
39:18It's just outside the harbor here at Boulogne.
39:21This is one of those places where you can really see layers of history, one on top of another.
39:28Now, most of this fortress long ago collapsed into the sea, but from the bit that's left,
39:34it's possible to work out that the bottom layer is made of stone blocks.
39:38Now that is the fortress that was manned by the army of Napoleon as it prepared for the invasion.
39:45The idea was that this fortress would help defend all of the ships that would be gathered here to cross
39:51the channel.
39:51The top layer, that's made of concrete.
39:55And that was built by another army in another war.
39:59That's a concrete gun platform that was built by Hitler's army in 1942.
40:11The fear of invasion in 1803 began to transform the nation.
40:16For the first, but not the last time in the history of the Union, there was mass mobilization.
40:23Out of a population of only 15 million, a fighting force of 600,000 soldiers and sailors was assembled.
40:33A quarter of all British men would serve under arms.
40:40There's no shortage of wars between England and France in the 18th century.
40:45But the wars of the 1790s between revolutionary then Napoleonic France in the early 19th century,
40:52they're different because the threat of invasion this time is just very, very real.
40:57The threat changes the whole sense of people's sort of investment and involvement in the war,
41:02simply because they can actually see the French forces across the channel.
41:06It's very intimate, it's very personal, and it seems very real.
41:12And so that you get a print describing the state of Great Britain and the continent of Europe.
41:19Here's France and here's Britain.
41:21France is a sort of terrorscape of violence and oppression, and here's Napoleon.
41:27He's holding three chains because he wants to chain up these beasts, these three lions,
41:35the United Naval Regular and Volunteer Force of England, Scotland and Ireland.
41:43Did people find added strength in the idea that this was now a United Kingdom?
41:49Yes, they did, or they were at least profoundly encouraged to do so.
41:55This is a play which I wish we could read, but we'd have to do lots of funny accents,
42:02and we would thereby get into trouble with the inhabitants of the various countries.
42:07Beyond my skill set if you want accents, yeah.
42:10Me too. But this is invasion, scene two, drama, you know, coming to the rescue.
42:15Enter John Bull.
42:17And Taffy of Wales, Sandy of Scotland, and Patrick of Ireland, and here they are.
42:22Here they are, look. Taffy has a leak on his bonnet.
42:26Very subtle.
42:27Exactly. The nations are dancing together.
42:31And this is just after there's been a rebellion in Ireland, and yet here's Patrick.
42:36I know.
42:36There's a great insistence on Patrick.
42:38In defense of his native land, an Englishman, a Scotchman, a Welshman,
42:44and an Irishman are one and the same people.
42:49It's a powerful evocation of the idea of Britishness.
42:52It is.
42:52That we accept these distinctions.
42:54These are four nations, but this idea of brotherhood in the face of a threat is very,
42:59very strongly expressed here.
43:12While still preparing for his invasion, Napoleon commissioned this monument at Boulogne.
43:19But to carry the army across the channel, the French first needed to defeat the Royal Navy.
43:30So when Nelson's ships faced the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in October 1805,
43:37the fate of the United Kingdom was in the balance.
43:45In a five-hour battle, the British sank or captured 22 enemy ships for the loss of none.
43:53It was an overwhelming victory, a battle that became part of British national folklore.
44:02Nothing binds anybody together like adversity.
44:05And definitely the experience of being put on this little island together with all of these enemies
44:13surrounding, I definitely think that helped people turn to each other.
44:18We saw ourselves as the protectors, as the saviors. It was so huge coming from the past we'd had.
44:25We were a different nation. We were a different people.
44:29It is the victor that gets to write the history.
44:31It's glorified in a particular way that the story always shines and reflects on us as victors.
44:43The survivors of Trafalgar returned to their homes and families across the four nations.
44:51While HMS Victory brought home Nelson's body. Three months later, the man who had become Britain's greatest military hero was
45:01laid to rest in an extraordinary ceremony.
45:06His coffin lay in state in the painted hall at Greenwich for three days.
45:13It was then ceremoniously transported up the Thames on a barge and later carried through the streets, followed by 10
45:23,000 sailors and soldiers to St. Paul's Cathedral.
45:29The crowd that lined the streets of London was said to have been the biggest ever seen in Britain.
45:36Trafalgar did not end the war with France or end the risk of invasion, but the battle and Nelson became
45:44part of a new national mythology.
45:51At St. Paul's, with the flag of the captured Spanish warship, the San Ildefonso, hanging from the archers, Nelson became
45:59an almost sacred figure.
46:04And the traditions invented in 1806 at Nelson's funeral were returned to one and a half centuries later.
46:15In 1965, the funeral of another British war hero, Winston Churchill, was designed to echo the funeral of Nelson.
46:25Nelson, there was a three-day lying in state, a huge parade again to St. Paul's Cathedral.
46:37And Churchill's coffin made a sombre journey down the Thames.
46:49Even before Nelson's funeral, one British city had rushed to create the first permanent memorial to him.
46:58That city wasn't London or Edinburgh or Cardiff.
47:03It was Dublin.
47:07The capital of a nation that had been rushed into the Union just six years earlier.
47:15A nation that two years before that had been the site of a rebellion against Britain.
47:24This little book is a record of what the elite of Dublin did in the weeks and the months after
47:30the Battle of Trafalgar.
47:32And what it tells us is that on the 23rd of November, 1805, so just two weeks after news of
47:40Nelson's victory had arrived here in Dublin,
47:43the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor, called a meeting of the bankers, merchants and citizens of the city of Dublin
47:51at the Royal Exchange.
47:53And at that meeting, it was resolved unanimously that a monument be erected in the city of Dublin to record
48:01to future ages the brilliant victories of the late Lord Viscount Nelson.
48:06At the front here is the plan, and it's for a huge monumental pillar that was 134 feet tall, including
48:16the statue of Nelson at the top that was 13 feet tall.
48:20In October 1809, just four years after the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson's pillar was finally open to the public in
48:29Dublin, a full 34 years before Nelson's column was built in London.
48:37But this monument to a British hero was destined to have a very different history to the many other columns
48:45and statues created in Nelson's memory elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
48:52It was erected in the centre of Dublin, on what is now O'Connell Street.
48:58But if you walk down O'Connell Street today, Nelson's pillar is no longer to be found.
49:11This is the head of the giant statue of Nelson that used to stand on top of Nelson's pillar.
49:19And the reason it is so battered and so disfigured is because Nelson's pillar came to a violent end.
49:27It became one of the lightning rods for the struggles over Ireland, the Union, and the rights of the Catholic
49:36majority.
49:37Over the decades, there were many attempts to have it removed.
49:41Until, late one night in 1966, a bomb was placed inside the pillar by the IRA, and it was blown
49:50up.
49:58The head of the statue was later recovered from the rubble and is today in a Dublin library.
50:07Statues, whether we like it or not, are statements of power, as well as memorials.
50:13And they can often mean different things to different people.
50:18To people in Ireland who embraced the Union with Britain, who came to see themselves as British as well as
50:25Irish,
50:26a monument to Nelson and Trafalgar in the centre of their capital city was merely a celebration of British identity
50:33and British history.
50:35But to other people in Ireland, in the years after Trafalgar, decades in which opposition to the Union increased,
50:43that same memorial was regarded not as a monument to a great British hero, but as a symbol of British
50:51domination over Ireland.
50:56Next time, in the 19th century, the United Kingdom emerged as the most powerful nation in the world.
51:04Yet, beneath the surface, there were deep internal divisions.
51:08There were protests in England and Scotland, an uprising in Wales, and a catastrophic famine in Ireland.
51:47There were protests in England and Scotland in Wales, and a
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