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00:07England and Scotland, two realms divided, until now.
00:12In 1603, they had come together in one person,
00:16James VI of Scotland and I of England.
00:20He wanted to be known as the King of Great Britain.
00:23But what was this new thing in the world, this Great Britain?
00:27In the first years of the 17th century, only the mapmakers could tell you.
00:34One of them, a busy ex-taylor called John Speed,
00:38published his atlas of 67 maps called The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain
00:44and covering every inch of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.
00:50What lay behind Speed's atlas was an optimistic vision
00:53of a happy, harmonious Britannia coming together
00:57under a king who was determined to bring unity
01:00after centuries of war and hatred.
01:05And in the Vale of the Red Horse in Warwickshire,
01:08John Speed had a glimpse of what this British heaven on earth might look like.
01:15The meadowing pastures with the green mantles so embroidered with flowers
01:19that from Edge Hill we might behold another Eden.
01:26On October the 23rd, 1642, another man, King Charles I,
01:32surveyed the same landscape from the same ridge.
01:36The meadows were now full, not with cows and harebells,
01:40but cannon, pikes and musketeers.
01:43By nightfall, there would be 3,000 British corpses lying in the freezing mud.
01:49Here at Edge Hill, Eden had become Golgotha.
02:02Over the next long years,
02:04the nations that both James and Charles yearned to bring together
02:08would tear each other apart in murderous civil wars.
02:12Hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost
02:15in battles, sieges, epidemics and famine.
02:20A raw body count fails to measure the full enormity of a disaster
02:25which reached into virtually every part of Britain,
02:28from Cornwall to County Connaught,
02:30from York to the Hebrides.
02:33It tore apart communities of the parish and the county,
02:37which all through the turmoil of the Reformation
02:39had managed to agree on how the country should be governed
02:42and who should do the governing.
02:45Men who had broken bread together
02:47now tried to break each other's heads.
02:49Men who had judged together
02:51now judged each other.
02:56At the end of it all,
02:57there would be a united Britain
02:59as the Stuarts had hoped.
03:01But it would not be a united kingdom.
03:03It would be a united republic.
03:11We'll see you next time.
03:11We'll see you then.
03:12Bye.
03:12Oh, my God.
03:45The Civil Wars were not just an unfortunate accident or an occasion to dress up as cavaliers
03:52and roundheads. They were, in fact, that most un-British event, a war of ideas, ideas that
03:57mattered deeply to contemporaries, because at the heart of them was an argument about
04:02liberty and obedience. That argument became lethal here at Edge Hill, and it would echo
04:08for generations down through British history, and, as a matter of fact, that argument has
04:14never really gone away.
04:17To the survivors, looking back, the issue was simple.
04:23Whether the king should govern as a god by his will, and the people govern by force as
04:28beasts, or whether the people should be governed by their own consent.
04:35Yes, that's the voice of a Republican in exile, Edmund Ludlow. But that same voice, that same
04:42memory, would be heard through the centuries, and in revolutions far beyond our shores. In
04:48America in 1776, in France in 1789.
04:55It goes against the grain, doesn't it? A bit embarrassing, not to say painful, to be thought
05:00of as the fountainhead of revolutions. It's not very British. All that shouting, all that
05:06Bible-waving, all that killing. So was it all an aberration, then? Well, no, actually.
05:16These wars were the crucible of our modern history. For out of the fires of these wars came, eventually,
05:23a genuinely parliamentary monarchy. But, of course, no one understood that at the time.
05:29No one was reading from a script which commanded, go forth and be democratic.
05:37So when the 24-year-old Charles became king, no one in their right mind could possibly have
05:44imagined a war between Parliament and the Crown. No succession in over two centuries had
05:50been as settled or as unthreatened.
05:59Charles may have been smaller than life, long-faced, painfully formal, private to the point of being
06:05secretive, a stickler for decorum, as cool, as still, and as pallid as marble. But to many,
06:12this was actually rather a welcome contrast with his father, James, who'd been loud-mouthed,
06:18pedantic, and uncouth.
06:22But from the beginning, for those who were paying attention, there was something ominously
06:27distant about this small man on a big horse, too lofty to bother with a coronation procession,
06:33a man who believed that kings were little gods on earth.
06:39Charles saw himself as the father of the nation, and like any 17th-century father, he thought he
06:45was responsible for the well-being of his family, but in return he expected to be strictly obeyed.
06:52Of course, like James before him, he would listen to the people through their representatives
06:58in Parliament, but only when he chose, and only on matters he saw fit to be discussed.
07:09But the House of Commons was filled with historians and lawyers, and for them, Parliament was not
07:15simply a matter of royal convenience. Ever heard of Magna Carta?
07:22For these men, Parliamentary history, the history they were reading and writing, was an ongoing
07:28epic of liberty, and they were the keepers of the flame.
07:34The countdown to the Civil Wars started now, though nobody heard it. It was a countdown that
07:41could have been stopped time and time again, but the ticking grew louder and louder, until by 1642
07:47it would be deafening. And what triggered that countdown? Money.
07:56One of the first things this young king did was declare war on Spain, and nothing was more ruinously
08:02expensive than foreign war. There was the added complication that in England, even little gods on
08:09earth had to go cap in hand to Parliament for the money to fight. For Charles, the issue was personal.
08:17Wars of religion were tearing Europe apart. Protestants and Catholics were killing each other from Sweden to
08:24Hungary with unspeakable cruelty, and they'd forced his own sister, the Queen of Bohemia, into exile.
08:33And in his quiet way, Charles burned to be a Christian warrior.
08:39There was also the matter of his older brother, Henry. A champion of the joust, celebrated by the poets
08:46as a Protestant hero, Henry was supposed to have been king. But he had died when Charles was a boy,
08:52and his armour had passed on to him.
09:01It was too big.
09:05All his life, Charles would try and fit the steel, try to become the gutted Charlemagne beneath the British oak.
09:14And this war against Spain would be his big chance. Surely Parliament would cough up the money for the
09:21great Protestant crusade.
09:24Oh yes, was the answer. But, and it was a big but.
09:28You see, with all due respect, we don't much care for your choice of commander, the Duke of
09:33Buckingham. So while we are happy to fork over subsidies, we rather think we'll make it a
09:39short-term contract. Renewable, to be sure, if he turns out all right. But Parliament knew perfectly well
09:47it wouldn't. From the start, Parliament had Buckingham's number. To them, he was an upstart nobody,
09:54a peacock with a pretty face, who'd been promoted outrageously above the great earls of the land.
10:03He'd been James' favourite. Well, actually, more than a favourite, if the court scandal was to be believed.
10:08And now he'd wormed his way into Charles' favour, too.
10:12The pair of them had travelled together incognito to Spain, in a bid to woo the Spanish Infanta for Charles.
10:20They'd returned from their escapade empty-handed.
10:25But to the young, insecure Charles, glamorous, worldly Buckingham had become his idol.
10:31To the rest of the court, however, Buckingham was a parasite, a pest, a viper. Why in God's name
10:38would one give him a blank cheque?
10:45It was obvious what would happen to the money, and it did. Buckingham blew a cool £240,000
10:53in a raid on France so botched it seemed the act of a saboteur, not a supremo.
11:00So if Charles wanted a penny more than his darling had to go...
11:06Presume to talk to the king about his choice of trusted generals and ministers.
11:12Presume to tell the king. Presume to lay down the law.
11:15Why, that was an end of kingship itself.
11:22So in 1626, Charles did what he assumed kings worth the name were perfectly entitled to do.
11:29He would dismiss Parliament and collect the money himself through a forced loan.
11:34It was the politest bullying.
11:36Charles was always polite.
11:47The gloves were off.
11:50Loan refusers were threatened, prosecuted.
11:53Two of them, Sir Francis Barrington and Sir Edmund Hamden, died, either in prison or shortly afterwards.
12:01Many did pay up, but their compliance spoke of fear as much as loyalty.
12:11They'd always been professional grumblers when it had come to tax,
12:15but these country gentlemen were now speaking a new and dangerous language.
12:20No tax could be lawful without the consent of Parliament, they said.
12:25The money ran out again in 1628 and Charles was forced to call another Parliament.
12:35Speaker after Speaker rose to the rostrum in defence of the liberties of England.
12:40They drafted a former list of their grievances in a petition of right,
12:45which Charles graciously conceded as the price for saving his beloved Buckingham.
12:52Any slight chance of Charles honouring it, and it was slight enough to begin with,
12:58went out of the window when later in 1628 Buckingham was assassinated to national cheering.
13:13Convulsed with grief and hardened by rage, Charles shut Parliament down.
13:24As the doors were being closed, one MP, Sir John Elliot, stood up and roared that anyone imposing
13:31attacks without Parliament's consent would be a capital enemy to this Kingdom and Commonwealth.
13:39Charles disagreed, Elliot was the traitor, so off to the Tower of London he went, where he died in 1632.
13:51But for Charles, the rainstorm of words had now mercifully stopped.
13:56In their place, beamed sunlight from the heavens.
14:00Triumphantly too, the war with Spain was now over, so no more begging for money, no more of that aggravation.
14:08So in 1630, as far as Charles was concerned, peace had broken out in Britannia.
14:16His father James had always preached peace, and James was now much on Charles' mind.
14:26Charles decided his father's memory deserved something special, and courtesy of the Flemish Catholic
14:32painter Peter Paul Rubens, he would get it. Not one, but three huge painted tributes.
14:39A go-for-broke manifesto for the Stuart dynasty.
14:54They would be placed way up high on the ceiling of the building he had inherited from James,
14:59Inigo Jones' masterpiece, the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
15:08In 1636, they were triumphantly hoist aloft for all the world to see.
15:15There are three visions here of James' benevolent rule.
15:19In one panel, James is depicted as the bringer of peace and prosperity.
15:25In the central panel, Rubens gives us James, being carried to heaven as a god.
15:34In the third, he is Solomon, being offered the two crowns of England and Scotland.
15:42The Banqueting House in Whitehall simply takes your breath away by the sheer cheek
15:47with which it ignores the English Channel. It's a piece of Italy transplanted into Britain,
15:52classical columns, tall windows, the ultimate architectural light box,
15:58designed to flood the Stuart monarchy with brilliance.
16:03It was also meant to pin any unbelievers to the floor through the heavyweight power
16:08of its muscled allegories, singing the virtues of the godlike king.
16:13So when you walked in here and you remembered that the Stuarts had described kings as little gods on
16:19earth, you realised they were not kidding.
16:27The Banqueting House was Charles' absolutist dreamland.
16:31It was here that Charles could act out the grandest of his fantasies,
16:36that his three kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland, were finally yoked together in harmony
16:42under the ruler who was firm but just.
16:48What better way to give this new British court a European makeover, to turn it into a byword for
16:54Baroque gorgeousness? There would be a stunning new royal art collection, gathered from all over
17:01Europe, of the quality to make popes and emperors moan with envy – Mantegna's, Titian's,
17:08Rembrandt's. Charles' unprepossessing French queen, Henrietta Maria, with her sallow skin and discoloured teeth,
17:16was airbrushed into stardom by the glossiest glamourist of them all, Antony van Dijk.
17:27And beyond the palace, the king was satisfied to see his will being done,
17:33people he disapproved of, being made to desist.
17:38I like not this.
17:45Out in the shires, his taxes were being collected, his justice was being carried out,
17:50and the skies had not fallen in. Who missed the talkers, the parliament now? Surely nobody.
17:58Sooner or later, Charles was going to have to come down to earth, and when he did,
18:02he'd be bound to notice that his earthly kingdom was ruled not by images, but by words.
18:08Now, unlike the invitingly soft scenery of Rubens's fantasy kingdom, words were hard things, black and
18:16white things. And in the hands of wordsmiths, lawyers, preachers, printers, they had a razor-sharp edge
18:23that would cut right through all that Stuart mush about British Union, and bring the playground of the
18:29gods crashing to the ground.
18:34The naysayers had not gone away, and they had not shut up. The men who had declared taxes without
18:41parliamentary consent to be illegal in 1625 still thought this in 1635. Yes, they reluctantly
18:49forked up, but it didn't stop them smouldering with rage. Typical was a Buckinghamshire landowner
18:57called John Hampden. John Hampden was not some abrasive, unworldly hothead. He was a very
19:04well-respected and important member of the county community.
19:12Hampden had been deeply moved by the plight of Sir John Elliot in prison. He'd visited him and looked
19:18after his teenage boys. Now he would inherit the mantle of tax resister, this time against ship money,
19:26the tax that paid for the upkeep of the navy. Why should counties with no coastlines pay this? It was
19:33iniquitous. It may only have been a few shillings, and in the end, Hampden lost his case, but he won
19:40the
19:40argument. The embers were hot again. And alongside the lawyers in parliament, Charles now faced another
19:49group of intransigent critics who had something even more unanswerable, the Magna Carta, Holy
19:55Scripture. And they, of course, were the Puritans. For the hotter kind of Protestants, the Puritans,
20:02the Stuart obsession with harmony and unity, was at best meaningless claptrap. And at worst, it was a plot
20:11to delude the gullible into bending the knee to Rome again. For them, the reality was conflict, the
20:19unbridgeable division between the saved and the damned. There was an endless battle going on between the saints
20:26and the legions of the devil. The fires had already been lit in Europe. For the Reformation was a war,
20:34and that war had not yet been won.
20:40The Puritans looked around them, but all they could see from this king was a betrayal of the godly
20:46Reformation. Peace with Catholic Spain abroad, and at home, even worse, a church ruled by bishops who
20:53were a little better than papists, bishops who berated the Puritans for having taken the Reformation
20:59too far. In the face of this cosmic battle, to stay still, to keep silent, was a sin and a
21:09crime.
21:12For the Puritans, Charles I ought to have been a custom-built king, austere, decorous and chaste.
21:19But the fact was, his religion still seemed to need Protestant mumbo-jumbo, all those signs and
21:26mysteries. Even this would have been palatable had he not wanted to foist it on everyone else,
21:33to force everyone to kneel at its shrine.
21:38The Puritans declared war against any creeping signs of Romanism in the church. Paintings and statues,
21:47crucifixes and altar rails.
21:51And it escaped nobody's notice that Charles was married to a Catholic.
22:01These men were very much in a minority, but of course, being the elect, they expected to be in a
22:07minority, the party of redemption. In fact, they glorified in the slightness of their numbers,
22:13the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army.
22:20Men like the London woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington, would be in the front line of this battle,
22:26a stormtrooper of the Reformation, ready to fight every waking hour.
22:33You may see now how Antichrist doth plot against the poor church of God, but so long as we put
22:40our
22:40trust in the Lord, let us once again take note of his great deliverances from those great and
22:46devilish blood-sucking papists.
22:50Of course, Charles was not going to lose any sleep over the Nehemiah Wallingtons of this world,
22:55but Puritanism was not just the faith of merchants and artisans.
23:03There were plenty among the gentry and the nobility too, who believed just as passionately in the word
23:09of Scripture, and for all of them it was an article of faith that nobody, neither pope nor king, would
23:16ever be allowed to flout the word of God.
23:23And Charles would never be allowed to forget it.
23:32Yes, finally, they were a minority.
23:38But it was one of Charles's most costly errors to let so many in the Protestant middle of the country
23:44come to regard him as a greater threat to their church than the Puritan militants.
23:50And for this fatal error, Charles had one man to thank, William Lord, whom he made Archbishop
23:56of Canterbury in 1633.
23:59Poor old Lord, is there anything good to be said for Lord and the principles he stood for?
24:05He's gone down as one of the most arrogant and destructive men in our history.
24:10But put yourself in his vestments, and it looks a bit different.
24:14Far from being an elitist, Lord thought it was the Puritans who were the authoritarians.
24:20Thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.
24:23Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.
24:28It was the Puritans, with their obsession with reading and preaching, their gloomy fatalism, their
24:35endless battle cries, who deprived the ordinary people of what they needed from the church.
24:40Colour, spectacle, a sight of the Saviour in the form of his cross upon the altar,
24:46the comforts of ritual, sacrament and ceremony, a fence to keep dogs off the communion tray,
24:52and most of all, the consoling possibility that sinful souls might at the end be received into Christ.
25:01What was so very wrong with that?
25:05Well, what was wrong was that Lord was not presenting his program as an option.
25:09He was presenting it as an order.
25:12Believe this, worship like this, pray like this, or take the consequences.
25:22Anyone who defied him found himself before his special tribunal.
25:28Dissidents like Prynne, Burton and Baswick became Lord's highest profile victims.
25:36They had their ears cut off.
25:44The Lord's Iron Fist went unopposed for the time being.
25:56By the mid-1630s, Charles could see no obstacle to consummating the Great Stuart Plan
26:03of harmony across the three kingdoms, whether they wanted it or not.
26:09England was under control, and thanks to the brutal tactics of his Lord Deputy in Ireland,
26:14Charles's other right-hand hard man, Thomas Wentworth, so too was Ireland.
26:27That just left Scotland, and in particular its obstinate, cantankerous Presbyterian Kirk.
26:36It had a galling and, to Charles, completely unacceptable contempt for the authority of bishops.
26:44Charles was determined to break this.
26:46Then, the whole realm could pray and worship as one.
26:52But the obsession with union, which so consumed both James and Charles,
26:57would in the end turn out to guarantee nothing but hatred and division.
27:07Charles, born in Dunfermline, was himself Scottish, so surely there could be no problem with this.
27:14Well, oh yes, there could.
27:17It had taken Charles eight whole years to even bother travelling to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation.
27:23He'd become Scotland's very first absentee king, and there would be a price to pay.
27:44Charles was completely incapable of appreciating Calvinism's call for a great moral purification.
27:51As far as he was concerned, Scotland and England were not all that different.
27:55If one kingdom had been bent to his royal will by a show of well-intentioned firmness,
28:01so would the other one.
28:03But, of course, the Scottish Reformation had been nothing like England's.
28:08South of the border, changes had happened in the church at a slow and fitful pace.
28:13In Scotland, Calvinism had struck in great electrifying bursts of charismatic conversion,
28:20backed up by preachers, teachers and ministers,
28:23and only forced into a reluctant and periodic retreat by James I, who, unlike his son, had known when to
28:31stop.
28:36So when Charles announced the introduction into Scotland of the new prayer book,
28:42he would discover just how little he understood of the kingdom of his birth.
28:49The royal council had very obligingly let it be known that the prayer book had to be introduced at the
28:55latest by Easter 1637.
28:59Then there was a printing delay, and this gave ample time for the Calvinist preachers and lords to organise exactly
29:06what they were going to do.
29:08Archbishop Lord, the king, the council, the bishops, everyone fell straight into the trap.
29:15Now, whoever thought a little thing like this would start a revolution.
29:22The British wars began here, in St Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh, on the morning of July 23rd, 1637.
29:31And the first missiles that were launched were not cannonballs, they were footstools.
29:39They were launched straight down the nave,
29:41and their targets were the dean and bishop of the cathedral.
29:45The rite reverends had just started to read from a royally authorised new prayer book.
29:51And it was this attempt to read from the liturgy which had triggered a deafening outburst of shouting and wailing,
29:59especially from the many women gathered in the church.
30:04The prayer book riots, though, were just the fuse.
30:08What those who lit it wanted was to blow up the bishops and the whole royal church establishment in Scotland.
30:18On February 28th, 1638, a national covenant was signed in a four-hour ceremony,
30:25along with sermons and psalms, exhorting the godly to be the new Israel.
30:34The next day, the covenant was brought here to the open churchyard at Greyfriars,
30:39where hordes of ordinary Scots added their signature.
30:43Copies were made and distributed the length and breadth of Scotland.
30:48For countless thousands of Scots, signing the government was just an extension of the vows they took in Kirk,
30:54banding them with God.
30:56But very rapidly, the document assumed the status of a kind of patriotic scripture,
31:01determining who and who was not a real Christian, who and who was not truly a Scot.
31:10For Charles, there was no question of negotiating.
31:14They were all rebels. They must all be punished.
31:18There was just one snag.
31:20It wasn't Charles who had the formidable army, but the Scots,
31:24veterans of the wars of religion in Europe.
31:28Facing his first really crucial test, Charles, the British Charlemagne,
31:33found he couldn't raise money and he couldn't raise men.
31:38It took one bruising skirmish for Charles to see the folly of further fighting.
31:44A truce was hastily signed.
31:48But he wouldn't back off.
31:53By now, Charles was desperate enough for men and money
31:57to do what he must have hoped he'd never have to do again, call a parliament.
32:02After 11 years of gathering dust, the House of Commons would once again be full of passionate
32:08argument and legal fury.
32:14If Charles thought that 11 years meant the old quarrels had been forgotten, he was ignoring a force new to
32:21British politics, the news.
32:23For the great political dramas of the last 20 years have been hotly consumed by a reading public,
32:30addicted to newspapers, pamphlets, woodcuts and the so-called Sixpenese separates,
32:36recording all the debates and controversies and dispatched around the shires.
32:43The 1640 parliament took up exactly where it had left off in 1629, when Charles had closed it down.
32:53It must have come as an unpleasant surprise then, when this new parliament, instead of laying
32:59imagined grievances aside, immediately began to resurrect them.
33:04This parliament lasted only three short weeks before, once again, Charles suspended it.
33:15But his list of options was getting shorter by the day, and they were all bad.
33:21He wasn't going to cave in to the Scots, and he wasn't going to reopen parliament.
33:27But there was a third way, courtesy of his Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth.
33:33Why not use an Irish Catholic army to crush the Presbyterian Scots?
33:39Grateful for his advice, Charles made Wentworth, Earl of Stratford, but hesitated.
33:45Charles knew that Protestant England was hardly likely to approve of a Catholic army
33:50attacking their brother, Scots.
33:55What followed in 1640 was a breakdown of deference of frightening magnitude.
34:03Officers were being attacked by their own men.
34:06The latest round of fighting with the Scots was a disaster.
34:11Newcastle, with its priceless coal, was captured.
34:14To get it back, to get the Scots out of England, Charles needed cash fast.
34:22He had no choice now. He would have to reopen parliament.
34:29There'd never be a better opportunity for John Pym and his fellow parliamentary leaders
34:35to reign in the King.
34:40Pym had discovered, whether he understood the word or not, the elixir of revolution.
34:47Yesterday's truism, obey the King, is tomorrow's bad joke.
34:51Yesterday's unthinkable, abolish all bishops, seems to be tomorrow's necessity.
35:00All round London were enormous seething crowds, practically laying siege to Westminster.
35:07John Pym's demands were simple and blunt.
35:10No taxes, ever, without parliaments say so.
35:14Parliaments to be elected every three years.
35:17And most decisively of all, looking right into Charles's eyes,
35:22no parliament, especially not this one, could be dissolved without its own consent.
35:28When Charles, through gritted teeth, conceded, it was the destruction of the absolute monarchy.
35:34Or was it?
35:36The King did still have one card he could play.
35:39That Catholic army that Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford, had raised in Ireland.
35:47Pym now knew he would have to annihilate Stratford if he was to defend parliament from this threat.
35:54So in the spring of 1641, Stratford was impeached.
35:59Sick and grey-haired, he proved frustratingly impossible to convict of treason.
36:04So Pym resorted to an act of attainder instead.
36:08This merely required a burden of suspicion.
36:12When Stratford had spoken of an Irish army reducing the kingdom,
36:16hadn't he meant England, argued Pym?
36:19But there was one problem.
36:21The act of attainder needed the signature of the King.
36:28Poor Charles.
36:30Memories of Buckingham must have flooded back into his mind.
36:34For a King obsessed by loyalty, how could he abandon Stratford, his most faithful ally?
36:40It was Stratford himself who spared Charles the agony of indecision.
36:45He knew that only his own death could save the King and the country from further upheaval.
36:51In a final letter written to Charles, Stratford begged the King to do what had to be done.
36:58May it please your sacred majesty.
37:00I understand that the minds of men are more and more incensed against me.
37:05And to set your majesty's conscience at liberty,
37:09I do most humbly beseech your majesty for preventing of evils that may happen by your refusal to pass the
37:16bill.
37:17Weeping, Charles signed the warrant.
37:21Stratford was led out onto Tower Green, surrounded by jeering crowds and beheaded.
37:35Charles never forgave himself for this act of betrayal.
37:40But it had never occurred to Stratford that his death would actually make things worse for Charles rather than better.
37:47And what happened next was the worst that could happen.
37:50Ireland erupted.
37:53With Stratford executed, Irish Catholics felt unprotected against Protestant reprisals.
37:59In a pre-emptive strike, they attacked first.
38:02In a pre-emptive strike, they attacked first.
38:03In a pre-emptive strike, they attacked first.
38:12Late in 1641, news of Irish killings began filtering through England, graphically illustrated
38:19by a campaign of atrocity prince.
38:22Now, bad things did happen.
38:24But the usual fantasy pictures of impaled babies tripped the wire of Anglo-Protestant paranoia.
38:35Even worse, it was rumoured that the Catholic rebels claimed to be acting on behalf of the king.
38:41The Puritan press hit the street, screaming,
38:44We're next!
38:46Charles was painfully aware how costly his dream of united Britain had become.
38:52First, the Presbyterian Scots had brought down his personal rule.
38:56Now, the mass panic triggered by the Catholic Irish threatened to finish off his power altogether.
39:04With events now spiralling out of control,
39:08Pym saw this was the moment to try and strip the king of virtually all his authority.
39:13Charles's response was to try to arrest him.
39:16But Pym and four other parliamentary leaders had been tipped off that the king was marching on
39:21Parliament with an armed guard. They waited till the last moment and slipped out of the back.
39:26Charles was left empty-handed.
39:32It was an unmitigated fiasco. The gamble had only been worthwhile so long as Charles was sure of
39:39absolute success. Exposed now, just as Pym had wanted, as a naked, abject failure,
39:47Charles appeared to be something worse than a despot. A blundering despot.
39:55Both sides were moving fast beyond any point of reconciliation.
40:00Pym made it clear that Parliament now needed to protect itself and England from the king.
40:05It set about raising an army. In July 1642,
40:11Bullscrode Whitelock thought out loud about the abyss facing the country.
40:17It is strange to note how insensibly we have slipped into this beginning of a civil war by one
40:23unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea which have brought us this far
40:29and which we scarce know how. What the issue shall be, no man alive can tell.
40:36Probably few of us here may live to see the end of it.
40:42What's truly amazing and very touching about the spring and summer of 1642 is the abundance of
40:48evidence we have about the agonies of allegiance. The real soul-searching that people went through when
40:54they were pondering the most painful and weightiest decision of their lives. Which side to join themselves
41:00too. And how earnestly and how honestly they tried to justify that decision to their families,
41:06their friends, and not least to themselves. Cruelest of all, it tore fathers away from sons.
41:15The sad history of one Buckinghamshire family says it all.
41:20The Vernies had been the very model of a loving, companionable gentry family, but they were torn
41:27apart in this crisis. Rayford sat next to his father during the great parliaments of 1640,
41:34but now he not only expressed support for the parliamentary cause, but actually swore the
41:40oath required of all members after the militia ordinance. Now oaths were very serious things in
41:47the 17th century, and taking this one split Rayfe not only from his father, but from his hot-haired
41:54younger royalist brother, Edmund, who absolutely failed to see why Rayfe should not be honoring not
42:00only his father, but the king. And yet, and yet, the Vernies did remain a family. Rayfe had made his
42:09vow to parliament, but his father felt under no less an obligation to Charles. It was a bond of
42:15personal loyalty which held, despite Edmund having little enthusiasm for what the king had done.
42:22I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they
42:28desire, so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master.
42:37I have eaten his bread, and served him near 30 years, and will not do so baser thing as to
42:45forsake him.
42:49In the third week of August 1642, Charles raised his standard. The Rubicon had been crossed. The
42:57honour of holding Charles' personal flag in the battle fell to Sir Edmund Verney. He swore only death
43:04would prize it from his hands.
43:17By the time the royalist army arrived at Edge Hill, its prospects had been transformed. It was now about
43:2320,000 strong, about 14,000 of whom took up position on the ridge in the early afternoon of October
43:3122nd.
43:32At the top of the hill were the king and his two sons, Charles the Prince of Wales and the
43:37nine-year-old
43:37James, Duke of York, along with Prince Rupert and his toy poodle boy.
43:43It was here that Charles I planted his flag.
43:55In mid-afternoon, the commander of the Parliamentary Army, the Earl of Essex, began to cannonade the
44:01royalist infantry. Balls thudded and hissed, taking a life here, a limb there. Then Prince Rupert led his
44:10cavalry forward down the hill. For the men in the Parliament lines, watching a distant trot turn into
44:17a canter and then a charge, and seeing their own muskets have no effect on the suddenly, terrifyingly
44:23hurtling horsemen, the moment of truth had arrived.
44:34War slammed into them. Big dark horses, bright, deadly steel. They panicked and broke, Rupert's
44:42horsemen following fleeing troopers all the way to the baggage train. Rupert must have thought
44:47it. This was going to be easy. But by now, the Parliamentary infantry had crawled forward,
44:53the two great phalanxes of pikemen heaving and pushing at each other amidst the musket fire,
44:59until they dropped of exhaustion. Somewhere amidst the smoke, fire and steel,
45:07was the royal standard clenched in his hand, made him an obvious target. They never even found his corpse.
45:28In the following months, the war broke down into grim, grinding local conflicts. Parliament held on to
45:35London. The King tried to nail down bases of strength in the North and South West.
45:42The South West campaign was especially savage. Towns like Exeter and Taunton changed hands.
45:49Local families were divided between brothers and cousins. Old friends became new enemies.
45:55Two such opponents, men in every other respect virtually indistinguishable,
46:00were William Waller, a parliamentary general, and Rafe Hopton, a royalist. In a lull in the fighting,
46:07Hopton wrote to Waller asking for a meeting. Waller felt he had to turn him down, but wrote back in
46:13terms
46:13which spoke of the deep sorrow he felt at their broken friendship. It's the classic lament of this terrible civil
46:21war.
46:22To my noble friend, Sir Ralph. Sir,
46:27My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person.
46:35But I must be true to the cause wherein I serve.
46:40That great God which is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad scene I go upon this
46:45service,
46:47and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy. But I look upon it as an
46:53opus
46:54domini, which is enough to silence all passion in me. We are both upon the stage and must act those
47:01parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without
47:08personal animosities whatsoever the issue be. I shall never relinquish the dear title of your
47:16most affectionated friend and faithful servant, William Waller.
47:22The scythe of mortality, always busy, never fussy, swept up all kinds and conditions of men,
47:29officers and rank and file, musketeers and troopers, camp whores and settlers, young apprentices who put
47:38on a helmet for the very first time, and hardened old mercenaries who'd grown rusty along with their
47:44cuirasses. Soldiers who had no idea where to get a pair of boots or anything to fill their bellies,
47:51peasants who simply had absolutely nothing left to give them. Drummer boys and buglers, captains and cooks.
48:02By the autumn of 1643, Parliament was utterly demoralised. Bristol had fallen to the Royalists.
48:09The King had established a court and a military government in Oxford. Many parliamentarians,
48:15weary of the poverty and slaughter, were making noises about peace.
48:20Bulstrode Whitelock wrote,
48:22Women are weary of their being robbed of children, of their chastity and their parents.
48:29Is it not time for us to be weary of these discords and to use our utmost endeavours to put
48:35an end to them?
48:40This was not what John Pym wanted to hear. Even as he was dying, tortured by cancer of the bowel,
48:48to squash a peace movement, he pulled off a last coup which would transform the war.
48:58On September 25th 1643, an alliance was struck between Parliament and the Scots, the Solemn League
49:06and Covenant. In 1637, Scotland had begun the resistance against Charles I. Seven years later,
49:14the Covenant would all but finish him off.
49:20At Marston Moor, outside York, on a wet afternoon in July 1644, the full force of the Anglo-Scots
49:28alliance hammered the Royalist army. It was the bloodiest battle of the war. The cream of Charles's
49:35army was annihilated. Among the victors was the MP for Cambridge, a cavalry officer with iron in his soul.
49:49His name was Oliver Cromwell, and he was, he thought, doing the Lord's work. Cromwell was himself an
49:57East Anglian country gentleman, but he knew that gentility was no use in this war, only effective
50:04fighting men. After Edge Hill, he had told John Hamden,
50:08I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows,
50:14than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.
50:20In the winter of 1644-45, Cromwell and a Yorkshire general, Sir Thomas Fairfax,
50:26set about to make a new kind of army, prepared to accept discipline in return for decent supplies
50:32of food, boots and shelter. And it would be an army that knew what it was fighting for.
50:40I fight for the preservation of our parliament,
50:43in the being whereof, under God, consists the glory and welfare of this kingdom.
50:57At Naseby, in June 1645, the two wings of the new model army closed in on the royalist force
51:05about half their size. At the end of the fighting, nothing was left of the royal army
51:11except the dead, left strewn across the fields.
51:20The last royalist strongholds were taken one by one. Bristol, Carlisle.
51:26At Basing in Hampshire, one of the most vicious sieges in a war full of them came to a long,
51:32drawn-out, bloody conclusion.
51:37The war was over and parliament had won. So finally, God had spoken.
51:47Surely even Charles could see that. Surely that would be an end to the bloodshed,
51:52and the country could return to reasonableness.
51:58And there were many in parliament aching for just this,
52:02a settlement that would allow Charles to keep his throne,
52:06some kind of return to what had been on the table back in 1642.
52:18Surely, after all the blunders and bloodshed,
52:21the botched coups and the futile slaughters, he would do the right thing. He would share power.
52:27But Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional king.
52:33He gagged at the idea of being reduced to a subaltern monarch, taking, not giving orders.
52:40The war might be over, for now, but for Charles, the plotting was not.
52:45For the next two years, in a bid to reverse his defeat, Charles tried to play off parliament
52:50against the army, the army against parliament, and the Scots against both.
52:59Oliver Cromwell finally realised that as long as Charles was around, he was always going to be
53:04a rallying point for the discontented, and it were bound to be a lot of them. But Cromwell was also
53:10enraged by Charles' presumption at defying the verdict of God, so clearly revealed at the battles of
53:17Master Moore and Naseby. It was evident then that King Charles had to go. Whether or not he had to
53:24die,
53:25that was another matter.
53:29A second civil war flared up, once more requiring from Cromwell all his military ruthlessness.
53:36With his annihilation of a royalist Scottish army in 1648 at Preston, Charles' final hope had gone.
53:47Any thought of conciliation with the King was now purest folly.
53:54Those MPs who persisted in the idea that Charles could be reasoned with,
54:00now had a furious and vengeful army to answer to.
54:04When Colonel Thomas Pryde used his troops to weed out any MPs suspected of going soft on Charles,
54:11the country realised there was a new power in the land.
54:17This was the soldiers show now. Britain belonged to them, and they belonged to God. They had no desire
54:24to go back to a country of princes, lords and gentlemen. They wanted Jerusalem now.
54:40And they wanted the biggest sinner of them all, the man of blood, Charles Stewart, to feel the fire of
54:46God's wrath.
54:49The final question could be addressed. What should happen to Charles?
55:02Cromwell agonised, prayed and wept, beseeched the Lord of Hosts to give him an answer.
55:08In the end, politics, not prayer, decided it. The King would have to die if the country was ever to
55:14heal.
55:15But not done away with in some dark corner. No, Charles was going to be tried in the open,
55:21and then beheaded in public.
55:24Cut his head off with the crown on it.
55:28This would be the great turning point in British history. The trial would kill one kind of Britain,
55:35and give birth to another, a republic, a kingless state of God.
55:41So for both Charles and Oliver Cromwell, the final act would become a theatre, a classroom,
55:47a debating chamber. Charles would play the classic Stewart part, that of Holy Martyr,
55:53as his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had done. Imposing, dignified, tragic. But he knew,
56:00as well as Oliver Cromwell did, that the outcome was never in doubt. The King would die. The only
56:06question was as what? Martyr or traitor? What had he learned? In the end, the answer was nothing.
56:19On January 30th, 1649, he was led out through the banqueting house, onto the scaffold erected
56:27right outside in Whitehall. The windows were all boarded up. So Rubens' great anthem to the godlike
56:34omnipotence of kings was invisible in the gloom. The light got out of it.
56:44But Charles didn't need the pictures. He had the script off by heart.
57:12So the last words out of Charles the First Mouth were the truth.
57:18With nothing left to lose for himself and everything to gain for his son, he was not
57:23about to confuse anyone about the nature of the kingdom that God had ordained. It was the same
57:30kingdom that Rubens had painted on that ceiling. The anointed sovereign, answerable only to the
57:37Almighty, laying down laws for the benefit of his subject. He offered justice and he expected
57:45obedience. That was it. Take it or leave it. It had always been about that really. And all the pious
57:53hopes of turning Charles into a parliamentary monarch were just so many castles in the air.
58:10There's some wild weather coming up here on BBC4 next. Time shift looks back over a history of
58:15British freak weather in killer storms and cruel winters in just a moment. Stay with us.
58:20With a dove.
58:27With a dove. The one often said to his mate, Where shall we our breakfast take? With a dove. The
58:43one often said to his mate, Where shall we our breakfast take? With a dove.
58:43You see, y'all laugh.
58:43Gregorул
58:43There he is.