Original subtitles

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think. It's a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of

heroism and cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies, and triumphs.

But there's more than that. For example, one of the most reliable chronicles

describes how a king of England proposed adopting Islam as the national

religion.

This episode, the first of six, includes that tale. It tells the story of the

English crown from 1066 to 1216.

From one French invader, William, to the next, Louis.

Yes, Louis.

Another surprise.

A king of England who's pretty much disappeared from history.

It's easier to say where the history of the English monarchy ends than where it

begins.

It ended on the 14th of October 1066, here at what became Battle Abbey on

Hill near Hastings.

We all know that this was where Harold was killed and replaced by William the

Conqueror, and Harold was the last Englishman to be crowned king.

From then on, the sovereign would always be from a foreign family, right down to

Queen Elizabeth II.

So a history of the kings and queens of England isn't like the history of kings

and queens anywhere else in the world.

What happened here on that October day started a completely new history, which

is why it's the one date in history that everybody knows.

1066.

The story of that day was spelled out in a strip cartoon, probably stitched for

William's brother Odo by English seamstresses.

Here's our hero's first appearance in the story.

That's William, Duke of Normandy, about 37 years old in 1064.

He's being told that Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex at the time, has been

shipwrecked on the French coast.

One of these guys is Godwinson. I think it's the chap with the handlebar

moustache. He's about six years older than William and the most powerful man

England after King Edward.

These are both pretty hard men, survivors in a very tough world.

William spent his whole life fighting for survival and was good at it. By the

time he was twenty, he'd established complete control over Normandy.

From then on, he was fighting to hang on to what he had.

He got Harold to help him in one of those battles, capturing Mont Saint

And then, apparently as the price of letting him go home, had Harold swear to

support him in becoming the next King of England.

Which, as the tapestry very clearly shows, is not what happened.

When old King Edward died, Harold, as we all know, had himself crowned instead.

Actually, to be a bit more precise, he had himself elected king.

The crown of England in those days was not inherited, but awarded.

In William's view, this had all gone very badly wrong, so he set about

it right.

The Norwegian ruler, Harold Hardrada, took a similar view.

There was an old Norwegian claim to England, which he decided to revive by

launching an invasion of his own.

Their two fleets arrived within a few days of each other, one in the north of

England, one in the south.

Both fleets were probably about the same size, about 500 ships.

King Harold rushed north and destroyed Hardrada's army. Only about 34 ships

it back to Norway.

Then he rushed south, but this time, of course.

He failed to pull it off.

We don't know for sure that the man with the arrow in his eye is Harold, but he

certainly died at the battle.

He and his axe -wielding, spear -carrying army of Danish and Anglo

noblemen were simply swept away.

In their place were the new rulers of England, Normans on horseback, and

was their master, master of the country. He owned it.

He was not an elected king.

When he went to London to be crowned on Christmas Day, the population, thinking

that was their duty now, tried to elect him.

They acclaimed him with loud shouts.

The Normans, not knowing what was going on, thought this was some kind of

uprising.

They rushed out of Westminster Abbey and burned London down.

England had become a new kind of kingdom, one which was owned.

locked, stock and barrel by its king.

The story we're telling through this series, the story of a thousand years of

English history, is the story of this alien conqueror and his successors to

throne. It's the story of how they changed England and changed with it,

eventually turning into puppet rulers, symbols of power they cannot wield.

And how in that transformation, they survived.

through tides of revolution and republicanism, so that today, while

quite the only surviving royals in Europe, they alone still lay claim to

majesty.

Now, how did that happen?

The story of William's reign is really the story of a warrior lord taking all

power into his hands.

He confiscated all the privately owned land in the country. Its new occupiers

were tenants of the king, bound to him.

People of the north of England, with their Viking capital at York, were much

more bound to Scandinavia than to Normandy.

They refused to submit.

He punished them by destroying all animals and all crops between York and

Durham. According to the chronicles, he celebrated Christmas 1070 in the ruins

of York.

The inhabitants were reduced to starvation, even cannibalism.

Sixteen years later, when all the land in England was accounted for and valued

in his doomsday survey, there were places in Northumbria that were still

worthless.

The church, too, was made Norman, and old Anglo -Saxon ways crushed.

At Glastonbury, archers were stationed inside the abbey, and orders given that

the old chants should be replaced by new ones from France.

Twenty -one monks were shot, and yet there were limits to his power.

A few thousand Normans, most of them not even understanding the language of

their new country, couldn't run the place.

They needed the English to keep everything working, and William

perfectly well.

His coronation he made an oath to uphold the laws of King Edward, to uphold good

law and renounce bad.

The old courts would continue to function, and old traditions would

respected.

This oath would become fundamental to the coronation of any king.

The question, though, would be who got to wear the crown?

When William died, bloated and exhausted at the ripe age of sixty,

His attendants stripped his body and scattered.

What mattered now was who would hold the land he'd conquered, and how.

It had all been his, and it was he who'd decided.

On his deathbed in Normandy he handed out the spoils.

He gave his eldest surviving son, Robert, his Duchy of Normandy. But it

younger son, the red -haired William, William Rufus, who the conqueror willed

should be acclaimed King of England.

And the youngest, Henry, was told he would have to be content with £5 ,000.

But Henry was his father's son.

Content with £5 ,000?

Was that likely?

The key to the plotting that followed...

was that, of course, none of the brothers was content.

Henry stirred the brew of resentment that made Robert try to take the Kingdom

England from William, and William try to take the Duchy of Normandy from Robert.

And Henry was always changing sides, weakening them both.

Eventually Robert, tiring of the whole struggle, decided it would be more

satisfying to fight Saracen than his brothers, and went off on crusade.

William was now secure.

and powerful.

And Henry changed his policy. He was now William Rufus's very best, best friend.

The Bishop of Lincoln later said that when Henry praised anyone, he was sure

be plotting that person's destruction.

It does seem as though Henry concentrated on quietly stirring up

among churchmen and barons in England, which was not hard.

as William Rufus needed their money and had little to offer in return, except to

give to some what he'd taken from others.

And besides, William Rufus wasn't their kind of chap.

He didn't marry, he had no children, and as one chronicle puts it, All things

that are loathsome to God and to earnest men were customary in this land in his

time.

And therefore he was loathsome to all his people, and abominable to God.

Which is, of course, homophobic chronicle speak for being gay.

On the 2nd of August in the year 1100, both William and Henry were hunting

separately in the New Forest.

It was the last day of William Rufus's life.

His companion Tyrell immediately fled and disappeared abroad.

William's body was abandoned where it lay.

at a spot still marked by this stone.

The next day local peasants took it in a cart to Winchester.

Henry had arrived before them.

Winchester was where the royal treasure was kept.

He demanded the treasury keys from the guards. They refused to hand them over,

saying that Robert, his elder brother, was the rightful heir.

Henry drew his sword and declared that no one could stand between him and his

father's scepter.

Resistance collapsed, and when the peasants arrived with their cart, the

of England were busy electing Henry as their king, the first elected ruler of

England since Harold Godwinson.

The Bishop of Winchester refused to give the corpse a Christian burial.

Out of respect for his royal status, William Rufus was nevertheless interred

under the cathedral tower, and when that collapsed a few years later, everyone

said, Told you so.

Henry's coronation at Westminster was an attempt to ensure his authority to

rule. He was 32 years old. His father had won the country by force of arms,

his barons backed him for rich rewards.

But why would anyone want a king now?

Alongside his sanctification by the church, He issued a charter promising

he would not overtax the church or his tenants -in -chief and that they must

treat their tenants as he treated them.

He claimed that the crown changed his nature. He was no longer an ordinary

being. As the anointed king, he held special divinely granted powers. His

was supposed to cure scrofula, swollen neck glands from tuberculosis.

Magic power, which became known as touching for the king's evil, was

by English monarchs for the next 700 years as proof of their divine

He also quite smartly understood that it was a good idea to promote new people

to positions of power.

Those who were already great barons didn't need a king, but men on the make

would support him.

By the time Robert was able to mount a challenge to Henry, It stood no chance.

He agreed to recognize Henry as King of England in exchange for a pension.

Of course, it didn't last.

Henry ended up invading Normandy in 1106 and imprisoning his brother for the

rest of his life.

This is his tomb in Gloucester Cathedral.

The question of who was entitled to succeed to the crown was still, when you

came down to it, a matter of brute force.

But Henry's victory had a profound symbolic meaning.

because it changed the status of the English crown.

Under his father, England had been a property seized and owned by the Duke of

Normandy. Now, Normandy was a property seized and owned by the King of England.

Henry was a naturally cheery person.

Just after his coronation, he married Edith, the daughter of an English woman

and of the King of Scotland, and he encouraged Normans he was promoting to

English women.

The great barons regarded this with contempt and referred to their king and

queen as Godric and Godiva, a style statement which roughly translates as

and Gladys.

As sturdy warriors, they also didn't appreciate the fact that he was literate

three languages. His other nickname, Henri Beauclerc, means Henry the Swat.

But those great barons were having their power undercut as Henry recruited his

government officers and judges from the church.

He supervised his kingdom by moving his court from one centre to another. It was

a great travelling performance, like a circus, with no permanent home.

He spent half his time in Normandy, but when he was away, the kingdom was run by

a totally reliable civil servant, Roger, the Bishop of Salisbury, who was called

the Justiciar.

the idea of government by a system rather than by a man was beginning to

shape.

He sent judges on their own tours of the country and enforced the laws harshly,

which seems to have been quite popular according to the chroniclers.

But his punishments were often based on the idea that people were guilty until

proved innocent, and there was no time to do that.

Were England's lanes really full of blinded and mutilated men muttering, Um,

fair?

You'd think so, from the sources we have. They liked a strong king.

And he managed to keep the treasury well stocked with money, which meant he

could buy loyalty when he needed to.

The key to this was his system for checking his income.

Twice a year, sheriffs and royal officials from all over England had to

their money to be counted by being shunted around in piles on a checkered

like a chessboard.

Checked. It was called the exchequer.

The system worked so well that the cabinet minister in charge of the

finances is still called the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and we still use paper

chitties called cheques.

By a combination of force and diplomacy, he controlled and to some extent

colonised Wales.

Relations with Scotland were fine. Three of his wife's brothers became kings

there. England was becoming a peaceful, stable and successful kingdom.

Henry sent his young daughter Matilda to Germany to marry the Holy Roman

Emperor, and in 1116 he held a great assembly at Salisbury where all the

nobles and bishops swore homage to his son William as his successor to the

crown.

In 1120, young William was a star, an enthusiastic warrior, a keen huntsman

the heir apparent.

He'd been in Normandy with his father fighting the King of France, and the

party was returning to England.

William and his pals were travelling in a brand new ship, the White Ship.

They were the 12th century English jet set, the millionaire knightly lads who

were heirs to most of England and Normandy.

Once they got on the ship, there was a terrific party.

Alcohol was taken, and how!

Soon it became really rowdy, the Hooray Henrys yelling at one another and

throwing off a bunch of priests who'd come to bless the voyage.

William's cousin, Stephen of Blois, had an upset stomach and he felt he needed a

bit of peace and quiet, so he decided to go ashore and take a later ship.

By the time they got to see it was already dark and the other ships were

ahead, the wind was light, William decided to catch up with the king and

the chaps to start rowing.

The master was as drunk as anyone else, so they began to speed into the dark,

fifty oars pushing this state -of -the -art longboat at a terrific lick.

That was when they sailed straight into a rock and smashed the ship open.

The rock of Fafleur was a well -known hazard to navigation.

The cries of the drowning company were heard on shore and on the king's ship,

but everyone thought the party was still in full swing.

In fact, The future of England had just been destroyed in the equivalent of a

drunken car crash.

It's said that Henry never smiled again.

You can see why.

Six years after the fatal crash, not knowing what else to do, Henry obliged

barons, nobles, and bishops of England to swear fealty to his daughter,

as his successor, just as he'd had them swear to his son.

But there was, of course, a huge difference.

No woman had ever ruled in her own right in either England or Normandy.

Her husband, the Emperor, was dead, but for strategic reasons he had Matilda

marry the son of the Count of Anjou.

This was not a family with a power base in England.

Henry's sleep was filled with nightmares of peasants and barons complaining that

he'd failed them all.

And then Henry went and died of a surfeit of lampreys.

How does that happen?

A lamprey is a parasitic fish that looks as if it belongs in a bush -tucker

trial. Henry loved him. His doctor had put him on a diet that involved not

eating lampreth, and he got a fever and died after ignoring the advice.

And the doctor said, as doctors do, I warned him.

By the time Henry died in 1135, it was all falling apart.

He was 67 years old, and he'd gone a long way towards defining the job of a

of England. But the fundamental problem, who was entitled to that job, had still

not been solved.

Matilda was in Anjou with her husband, and then up popped Stephen of Blois, who

sailed from Normandy to England and claimed the crown.

Stephen, who had been saved from drowning on the white ship by an urgent

for a lavatory, he was the son of Henry's sister, a legitimate grandson of

William the Conqueror.

He'd also been the leading baron to swear fealty to Matilda as the heir

apparent, but that was then, and this.

was now.

He was 38 years old, backed by his very tough mother, and one of his brothers

was the Bishop of Winchester, with the keys to the royal treasury.

The wife of the Count of Anjou was not a popular choice with the barons.

Stephen was a norm.

Besides, he seemed a malleable sort of chap, brave enough and high -spirited.

was also generous, courteous and affable, and would probably do as he was

which was, of course, a recipe for disaster.

According to the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle, when they saw that the king was a good

-natured and kindly man who inflicted no punishment, they committed all kinds of

terrible crimes.

All had done homage and sworn oaths of fealty, but none were kept.

Meanwhile, Matilda was enraged and, of course, had her own supporters.

England was moving rapidly to civil war.

Stephen was insecure.

He surrounded himself with people from near Blois, Flemings, which didn't go

down well with the barons.

He bought loyalty until it emptied the treasury, and then began confiscating

property so that he could pay his supporters.

By the time Matilda landed to claim her throne in 1141, Stephen was trying to

put down rebellion after rebellion.

He was a brave, even ferocious, fighter.

but his support melted away and he was captured in a battle at Lincoln.

Stephen was Matilda's prisoner.

A church council declared that he was deposed by the manifest judgment of God

and recognized Matilda as queen.

Matilda proceeded to Westminster and was all set to be crowned. And then

something went peculiarly wrong.

something that carries an extraordinarily clear message about the

the monarch of England.

All Matilda's understanding of monarchy had been learned in Germany, where she'd

been empress since she was 12 years old.

She had been popular and successful there.

After the emperor's death, when Henry I had brought her back to England, some

German princes of the empire followed her to demand her back as their

But the sovereignty she had learned was absolute power.

The emperor's will was law. The only possible higher law was the church.

That was not how it worked in England.

Even the conqueror had promised at his coronation to respect the laws of

England. But Matilda flatly refused.

She didn't need a coronation to be queen. In her view, she already was.

She behaved imperiously, which might mean magnificently in German.

but meant intolerably in English.

And when the citizens of London petitioned her for a renewal of King

laws, she not only refused to listen, but demanded a heavy tax from them.

So they threw her out.

Stephen was released from prison and resumed his battered kingship. In fact,

had a second coronation.

Matilda roamed around the Midlands and the West Country fighting for a throne

that she was entitled to, but could never have.

In 1143, just before Christmas, Stephen finally had her trapped and starving in

Oxford Castle.

But unbelievably, Matilda and three knights got away.

It had snowed, and that night, dressed entirely in white, they dropped over the

walls to the frozen water below.

They moved, silent and invisible in the fresh snow, right through Stephen's

camp.

It was another five years before Matilda gave up and returned to Normandy.

But she simply handed the torch to her son Henry, who came to England when he

was 16 to carry on the struggle.

And so the fighting went on, year after year, and the country was in effect

without law and without government.

But the Anglo -Saxon chronicle said, castles were filled with devils and evil

men.

Christ and all his saints were asleep.

Stephen naturally intended his own son Eustace to succeed him, but in 1153 both

Eustace and Stephen's wife fell ill and died.

Stephen had had enough.

At the end of the year, Stephen and Henry rode together into London.

There the king proclaimed a new foundation for the kingdom.

Henry was now his own adopted son and would be his successor as king of

Although Stephen would remain king for life, Henry would take over the

government immediately.

The next year, utterly worn out, King Stephen retired to his grave.

On the 19th of December, 1154,

There was a double coronation in Westminster Abbey.

The 21 -year -old Henry III was crowned king, and his 33 -year -old wife,

Eleanor, was crowned queen consort.

Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, knew all about being a queen.

When she was 15, orphaned and the richest damsel in France, she was

the heir to the French throne, and a few days later the pair became king and

queen of France.

The King of France was a saintly figure with perhaps a rather low sex drive.

Eleanor came from a family of lordly troubadours, whose court was dedicated

interesting love affairs.

She later said that she thought she'd married a man, but had married a monk.

She had a series of affairs, including one with Matilda's husband, Geoffrey of

Anjou. He, rather dashingly, wore a sprig of broom, Plantagenista, in his

so people called him Plantagenet.

Eventually, all the Angevins, the whole family line, wore it on their crest.

She then had an affair with Geoffrey's son, the attractive young Henry, a

bright, well -educated athlete with vitality, intelligence, freckles, and

According to a contemporary chronicler, Henry's father had warned his son of

her, saying that she'd been his lover, and she was the wife of Henry's

Henry was Duke of Normandy.

But Geoffrey died in 1151.

And in 1152, Henry got Eleanor pregnant.

Louis, who probably didn't know that detail, had their marriage annulled, and

she married her toy boy.

Of course, she did all she could to encourage his efforts to become King of

England and make her a queen again.

The coronation of 1154 must have been most satisfying for her.

He didn't make his mother's mistake of claiming to be above the law.

Instead, maintaining proper form, he issued a charter confirming all the

liberties that were enforced under his grandfather, Henry I.

The combination of his lands and Eleanor's meant that this king of

more than half of France, though as the vassal of the French king.

It would have been too much for almost anyone.

But Henry was a man of extraordinary restless energy, who travelled

round his realms and would order his court to hit the road with no notice

whatever.

He got England up and running with astonishing speed.

He had all newly built castles destroyed so that individual lords could not

stand against him, and got the law functioning again.

He organised government and ministries with the Chancellor of the Exchequer,

playing the role we would now recognize as Prime Minister.

The chap in question was the son of a London merchant.

He was Henry's closest friend and colleague.

They joked and drank together, and he lived as the greatest lord in the

Thomas Beckett.

Between them, they reformed the currency, finance, government, and began

changes in the judicial system that would lead to the system of trial by

England was beginning to develop a commercial life.

towns were growing, the population was becoming better educated.

The new system for running royal courts asked groups of local people, often

peasants, to report and decide the facts of the case.

The system that had worked for the conqueror, allowing the people to run

own country, was at the heart of Henry's way of getting everything up and

running again.

Perhaps that was why he needed a Londoner at the heart of his government.

The next stage in his reforms was to reduce the power of the church.

which had become the only functioning judicial institution during the chaos of

Stephen's wars.

Anyone accused of a crime who could read a line of Latin was deemed to be a

churchman. That made them immune from the royal court. They could only be

and punished by the church.

Of course, the church wouldn't agree to give up its privileges, so when the

Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1162, it seemed a smart idea to install Thomas

as the new Archbishop.

then he would deliver the church to Henry.

Actually, it seemed a pretty terrible idea to Matilda, who warned Henry not to

do it.

What did his mother know?

Look what a mess she'd made of things.

Eleanor was also against it, and she hadn't made a mess of anything.

She'd been a very competent regent when Henry had been abroad, and must have

seen what Henry had not seen, that Thomas Beckett's driving force was not

loyalty to Henry.

Oh, surely not. She was just jealous that Henry spent more time with Thomas

with her.

Henry was sure it was a really good idea.

Of course, it was a really bad idea.

Why did Beckett become fanatically committed to the church as soon as he

job? Why did he wear Hessian underwear with lice and lash his body?

Why did he oppose the king's plans more fiercely than any other bishop?

He ended up excommunicating the bishops of London and Salisbury and sacking the

Archbishop of York for not opposing the king.

He'd already acquired all the earthly power and wealth possible.

Now he had a bigger ambition.

He was arguing that the church must rule everyone, including the king.

This was especially dangerous as Beckett was hugely popular.

Henry was given to rages.

and the situation was bound to enrage him.

Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?

On the 29th of December, 1170, four of Henry's loyal knights did just that.

Slicing off the top of his head at the altar of his cathedral, in the words of

an eyewitness, the red of the blood mixed with the white of the brains, like

white of the lily and the red of the rose.

This was shocking.

Henry had to distance himself from Beckett's murder and win the hearts and

of his subjects.

Beckett was immediately the most popular martyr in the country.

A hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to the site of his death. He would

be made a saint as soon as possible.

The danger, of course, was that the Pope would excommunicate Henry.

and pronounce an anathema against him as the murderer of England's primate.

The population would turn against him in England, and the King of France would

seize his vast lands across the Channel.

Henry immediately fasted, went into extravagant mourning, and then did

Prostrating himself before the Canterbury altar, he was publicly lashed

monk.

It worked.

He saved his kingdom from the Pope.

Saving it from Eleanor was much more difficult.

Eleanor and Henry had drifted apart, partly because of his love affairs and

partly because she feared that Henry's adventure with Beckett threatened her

beloved Aquitaine. She had gone back there.

She set up her own court, the Court of Love, and that was where she raised her

sons as romantic warriors and plotted against him.

Henry imprisoned her there for 16 years, but her plots continued unabated.

She supported her older sons in rebellion against Henry, trying not only

ensure her control over her own land, but to take over from him.

The only one who remained loyal was John, the youngest.

In 1189, the oldest surviving son, Richard, inflicted a major defeat on his

father. Henry met Richard near the Loire to arrange peace terms, but when they

publicly embraced, Henry quietly growled, May the Lord spare me until

vengeance on you.

Back in his own chateau, Henry asked for all Richard's supporters to be read

out. The first name on the list was John's.

Henry was heartbroken.

He died in delirium a few days later.

Eleanor's imprisonment was over.

Henry had recognized Richard as his heir, and Richard intended Eleanor to

England. He had more important things to do.

Crusade.

Eleanor had been on crusade when she was young, as the wife of the King of

France, but also as the leader of her own feudal army.

And now the Saracens had reconquered Jerusalem.

Richard the Romantic, Richard the Lionheart, was a totally fearless

whose whole upbringing had been based on Eleanor's idea of chivalry.

Poet and swordsman, Christian knight and tournament hero, a handsome and dashing

leader of armies, Richard tried to live out the fantasy life of one of the

heroes of Arthurian literature from the stories told and sung in the Court of

Love.

He came to London for his coronation, but only so that he could collect the

funds to pay for his great crusade to recover Jerusalem from Saladin.

He went off on his crusade, declaring that he would sell London if he could

a buyer.

The crusade itself, the Third Crusade, was a sequence of great heroic and

actions that completely failed to conquer Jerusalem.

associated with bursts of extreme brutality.

Saladin quite rightly pointed out that while Richard might be able to get an

army into the city, if he wanted to hold on to it, he would have to spend the

rest of his life there.

The two men never met, but they fascinated and respected each other.

When Richard was ill, Saladin sent his doctor.

The final truce ensured that Christian pilgrims would be free to visit the holy

city. But that had actually been Saladin's policy before the crusade even

Richard typically decided to make the journey home in 1192 into an adventure,

travelling alone and in disguise.

That was how he got captured and ended up imprisoned by Duke Leopold of

a man he'd repeatedly insulted during the crusade.

The King of England had been found in an inn in Vienna, unconvincingly disguised

as a kitchen knave. The ransom Leopold demanded was £100 ,000, about eight

years' income to the exchequer.

Richard's recklessness was crippling for the kingdom, and eventually fatal for

him. As a storybook hero, he always seems to have expected a happy ending,

would sometimes even forget to put on armour.

That was how he got killed in the end, taking a stupid chance at an unimportant

siege in 1199.

A crossbow bolt wound became infected.

While he was dying, the man who'd loosed the shot was captured and delivered to

him, and Richard carried on behaving as though he was in a storybook, making a

great gesture of releasing the man and giving him money.

Richard had no heir.

He named his brother, the 32 -year -old John, as his successor.

Richard, aged 41, died in his mother's arms, England's hero king who detested

the country and had spent six months of his reign there.

And the man who'd killed him was re -arrested and flayed alive.

His little brother John was never meant to be king.

His father had called him John Lackland because there was originally no part of

the huge Angevin empire left for him.

And the three problems that lurked at the core of monarchy in England now

crises. How did succession work?

What was the balance between the king and the church? And what legal limits

existed on royal power, especially when it came to taxes?

To begin with, was he really Richard's proper successor?

One of his elder brothers, Geoffrey, had died leaving a son, Arthur, and there

were barons in Anjou and Maine who argued that this 13 -year -old was the

successor.

They were supported by Philip, King of France.

The only way to settle a succession dispute was by violence, so John went to

war. His men captured the boy, and he was never seen again.

It was generally believed that John drowned him, which was the wrong way to

solve the problem.

He guaranteed that Arthur would not be king, but it left a very nasty smell.

It didn't stop the king of France from keeping the war going, and by 1205 John

was driven out of most of France, including Aquitaine and even Normandy.

The issue of church power also came up again. It was John's bad luck to be

confronted by an exceptionally militant and aggressive pope, Innocent III.

Innocent maintained that kings had to submit to popes.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury died, Innocent announced that Stephen Langton,

who happened to be English, was the new Archbishop.

John refused to accept the Pope's man.

Rome wouldn't give ground, and neither would John.

In 1209, the Vatican excommunicated the King of England and his whole kingdom.

Back in England, John attempted to carry on regardless.

The Pope declared John deposed, and that anyone who even spoke to him was

excommunicated.

According to one chronicler, John decided at this point to join the enemy.

1213, he sent a delegation to the Emir of Morocco, offering to adopt Islam and

turn England into an Islamic country in return for protection.

That would have turned history upside down.

Is it true?

The Emir, according to the story, told the envoys not to be so silly.

In fact, John was reduced to total surrender.

The Pope demanded that he submit himself as a vassal of the Church and that

England should become a papal fief instead of a sovereign kingdom.

So in 1213, Stephen Langton, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, took up his

as a representative of the new overlord of England.

In that capacity, he decided to sort out the third issue, the limits of the

king's power over his subjects.

Barons were now virtually an organised political party. This is the seal of the

Barons of London.

Langton presented them with a charter issued by Henry I,

and suggested that they demand something along the same lines, but a bit

clearer.

The Magna Carta This famous document was signed in June 1215.

John and Richard had both tried to meet their costs by massive increases in

feudal dues and legal charges, and most of the Magna Carta is an effort to

reverse these.

But there are also other clauses that show that Langton and the barons thought

that laws must bind the king himself as well as everyone else.

There was a notion of proper kingship in England, and the Magna Carta tried to

spell out what that meant.

If Langton had not been an Englishman, the Magna Carta would probably have

looked very different.

And it was certainly incomprehensible to Pope Innocent.

who saw it as a baffling and immoral limitation on the absolute power of the

feudal lord of England, who was, of course, himself.

So Innocent issued a papal bull excommunicating anyone who stood by or

carry out Magna Carta, and Stephen Langton found himself suspended from his

and recalled to Rome.

And John marched through England at the head of an army composed largely of

foreign troops, crushing the barons and destroying their property.

And that's why the barons went to France and got a new king of their own, Louis,

the son of the king of France.

And so came the second French invasion of England.

in 1216.

It was about the same size as the invasion of 1066, and Louis landed

He was greeted with general enthusiasm and was hailed as King of England in a

high mass at St. Paul's Cathedral.

He set up his own government, and his army began its pursuit of John's

forces.

John was assembling an army to stage the great final battle.

and was travelling along the seashore from Lynn to Lincolnshire.

A miscalculation of the tide was all he needed.

His whole baggage train was washed away, including his treasure and the crown

jewels.

Distraught, broken, he made his way to an abbey at Swineshead, where he was

comforted with the monk's latest experiment in beer -making.

which seems to have brought on dysentery, fever, and death.

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think. It's a fine drama.

A thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of heroism and cruelty, of

mysteries, murders, tragedies, and triumphs.

But there's more than that.

This episode begins with a king of England who ruled for over a year, but

simply vanished from the record.

And it ends with a boy whose claim to the throne was based on fictions that

became historical orthodoxy.

We begin in the year 1216, in the reign of King Louis of England.

Yes, King Louis, not the most famous king of England.

At the request of the barons and with the enthusiastic support of the

of London, he'd come to England from France to take over the crown from John.

And John, struggling to fight back, had fallen ill and died.

Louis, who'd been acclaimed king at a mass in St. Paul's Cathedral, now had

throne to himself.

He had no coronation, as the bishops had been excommunicated, but rulers are

created in England by acclamation, not coronation, which is why the uncrowned

Edward VIII was a king, and Lady Jane Grey, who did have a coronation, was not

queen.

And Louis got rubbed out of the list of England's monarchs because his

acclamation was, with hindsight, withdrawn.

That was because the barons had not expected Louis to appoint his friends

France and Flanders as his chief counsellors.

They'd expected to be given much more control over what went on. And then they

thought, there's a better option.

John had a nine -year -old son, Henry.

Of course, no child had ever been king.

But there's a first time for everything, and if the king was a child and one of

the barons was regent, then the barons really would be running things.

Of course, Louis controlled London, but the child was at Corfe Castle, and they

could at least get him to the nearest abbey, Gloucester, to crown him.

Of course, they didn't have the crown, but they could use his mother's gold

neckband.

Actually, they didn't have the crown. have an archbishop available to do the

coronation. Never mind, the Bishop of Winchester was available and had the

to the treasury.

It wasn't a well -attended ceremony.

Not even all of John's executors could get there, but it would have to do.

Naturally, little Henry III was not actually exercising the powers of king,

was the job of a baron, the regent.

The chap that got the job was a 70 -year -old Earl of Pembroke, William

Marshall, a safe pair of hands if ever there was one, old faithful.

Marshall had long ago been a bold young knight in the days of Henry I, the

child's grandfather.

He'd worked his way up the greasy pole of advancement by the simple, if very

unusual, principle of loyalty to his lord and total trustworthiness.

Everyone trusted him, and now the barons expected him to get rid of Louis and

rule on behalf of little Henry.

And Louis was roundly defeated.

In the end, he agreed to go back to France and agree he'd never been king of

England at all, and all the barons and bishops who'd acclaimed him as king

agreed that they'd never done anything of the sort.

Everyone became patriotic.

For the first time since the Norman conquest, the French were being

foreigners, looting the English.

The barons all spoke French, and they had nothing in common with the Villains

their lands.

but they were beginning to feel English.

And William Marshall reissued Magna Carta, and said that all the old laws

rights of England were exactly what Henry III wanted to uphold.

William Marshall died the grand old hero of England in 1219, and Henry was given

a proper coronation at Westminster the following year.

As Henry grew up, The barons and bishops had no intention of letting him get

away from them. He learned to do as he was told, and that pretty much defined

him as a king.

What the barons and the bishops hadn't thought about was that one day he would

be listening not to them, but to his wife.

Perhaps one of them should have married him.

Instead, in 1236, he married Eleanor, a younger daughter of the Count of

Provence. He was 29, she was about 19.

and she wrapped him round her finger.

She arrived with her uncle, who immediately started running the king's

carted huge amounts of treasure off to his homeland.

Then she got another uncle, installed as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Her position became the Bishop of Durham, and large sums of money,

going to her mother, were actually funding the wars of her brother -in

Duke of Anjou.

She was inevitably

staggeringly unpopular.

And however little money the king had, he always seemed able to support her

relatives abroad, paying for their courts and their armies.

In 1263, the population of London rose in rebellion.

Their targets were Flemish bankers, Jewish financiers, and Queen Eleanor.

She was in the Tower of London, London's royal palace, and got away from the

Watergate to slip down the Thames to Windsor.

As her boat approached London Bridge, she was pelted with missiles by a crowd

shouting, Drown the witch!

She managed to get back to the safety of the tower.

The kingdom had become ungovernable, at least by this king and queen.

This was not the same country it had been in 1066.

Towns had grown, trade had grown, London had grown.

With the barons losing influence and Londoners angry, The crown itself was in

danger. England was on the edge of revolution.

Enter the Revolutionary, a Frenchman on the make, the charming, clever

younger son of a powerful and ruthless Norman lord, a chancer with style, Simon

de Montfort.

France was now ruled by King Louis' widow on behalf of their young son. She

a shrewd woman who decided that young Simon was dangerous stuff.

and forced him to escape abroad.

He'd come to England in 1231, when he was about 23, intending to recover land

his family had lost years ago.

And he was really good at it.

He became the best of friends with the impressionable Henry in no time, and

Henry's sister fell for him.

In 1238 they were married, and he was given back those lost family lands. He

Earl of Leicester.

The English were suspicious of foreigners, so Simon completely

Englishman. In 1239, Henry and Eleanor had a son. Simon sponsored the baptism.

They chose the name Edward, after the great Anglo -Saxon king, Edward the

Confessor. This French royal family had adopted English patriotism.

But as the political crisis deepened, Simon became increasingly committed to

total reform of government.

Eventually the crisis became a full -blooded civil war, and by the time the

ended in 1264, Henry and his son Edward were Simon's prisoners, and he

took over the country.

Simon now set about inventing an entirely new form of government, one

based on the deeply rooted English principle, of consent.

In 1265, he summoned a meeting of the country, a parliament at Westminster, to

endorse his government.

He summoned not only barons and bishops, but also two knights from each shire,

and most extraordinary, representatives from all the boroughs, the towns.

He said he was acting in the king's name, but the king didn't have much to

with what was going on.

In fact, Simon had established what we might see as a modern state.

There was a written constitution, a symbolic king, a powerful leading

and there was a parliament with representatives of the church, the

represented by great landowners and gentry, and of towns.

We might see it like that. They didn't. To most people at the time, this was

clearly the tyranny of Simon de Montfort.

By now, Prince Edward was a grown man, 25 years old, and it was his job to

overthrow this tyranny and restore the crown.

First, of course, he had to escape imprisonment at Hereford Castle.

The prince was allowed to exercise his horse on the common, so he wore out his

guards' horses, racing with them, and then jumped onto a fresh horse that had

been brought for the purpose, and disappeared into the distance.

What followed?

is known as the Battle of Evesham, at the end of which Simon de Montfort was

chopped up into pieces.

Henry was back on his throne, but it was Edward who was now running the country.

This tall, muscular warrior, he was called Longshanks, had the military

crush the remaining rebels and the good sense not to punish them afterwards.

He understood how to make peace.

and accepted the proposition that the king must respect legal limits on his

power and consult with the nation.

He also habitually spoke English, the first royal to do so since 1066.

Parliament made him the steward of England.

De Montfort's revolution had left its mark.

The old king died in 1272, having reigned for 56 years.

Edward's main interest in life was chivalry and warfare.

His natural costume was armour. It had been since he was a child.

When Henry died, Edward was out of the country on crusade.

He came home to be crowned with his queen, yet another Eleanor, in 1273.

The daughter of the king of Castile, She'd already borne Edward six children.

They would have ten more.

England now had something like a settled system of government. Edward confirmed

the existing charters, including Magna Carta, and was able to leave the

of government and justice to his council and judges.

His main concern was how to gather the money to conduct his military interests

without provoking more rebellions.

In 1190, the monks of Glastonbury had found graves which were believed to be

those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.

The bones had been placed in the Lady Chapel.

Now, 88 years later, King Edward carried the bones of Arthur and Queen Eleanor,

those of Guinevere.

They put the legendary remains in a magnificent tomb in the main church.

Edward presented himself as a new Arthur.

All this was part of a wider campaign to give his kingship the power of myth,

and so unite the country behind him.

This unity was going to be needed when he claimed supremacy over all Wales.

It worked.

When the Welsh princes rejected his claim, he was able to raise the money to

make an enormous military effort.

He became the first English king to totally conquer this mountainous

One of its princes, Llywelyn, was killed in battle.

His head was mounted on the Tower of London.

The other, David, was put on trial for treason before Parliament and sentenced

to be drawn, hanged, beheaded and quartered.

This was a savagery previously unknown in English law.

The English system of shires and hundreds was now extended to cover all

and the conquest was emphasised by huge, state -of -the -art royal castles, like

this one at Carnarvon.

Edward's war chest was based on a new source of royal finance.

In 1275, Parliament granted him the right to charge customs duties on wool.

See how useful it was having a Parliament, with merchants, to agree to

Nevertheless, popular rhymes suggested trouble was brewing.

The king, he wants to get our gold. The queen would like our lands to hold.

His war chest had come from Jewish moneylenders, but now they had no more

give. Never mind, the Jews could serve another purpose.

Italian bankers would provide advances on the customs duties and collect the

taxes themselves, and Edward could unite the country behind him in persecuting

the Jews.

650 years later, the Third Reich would adopt his entire programme.

First, Edward decreed that they were a threat to the country. Their movements

and activities were restricted.

To identify them easily, all Jews were obliged to wear a yellow patch in the

shape of a star.

Next, he arrested all the heads of Jewish households.

Over 300 were taken to the Tower of London and executed, while others were

murdered in their homes.

Finally, in 1290, the king banished all Jews from the country.

By now, the armoured overlord was a national hero.

When his wife, Queen Eleanor, died in the same year, worn out by childbirths,

his own grief was turned into a major display of national mourning.

Her body was ceremonially carried from Lincoln to Westminster, and a memorial

cross erected at every one of the twelve resting places.

including here at Charing in London.

Charing Cross.

It was time to enlarge the kingdom again.

In 1296 he led an army to enforce his claim to Scotland.

Edinburgh was seized, and the King of Scotland, stripped of his crown, was

imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Scottish kings were crowned enthroned on the Stone of Schoon, or Stone of

Destiny.

Edward had it moved to London and put in the coronation chair in Westminster

Abbey.

Edward appointed a trio of Englishmen to run the country.

Actually, his rule in Scotland was not noticeably harsh or unjust, but that was

beside the point. His own conjuring of the demon of nationalism was turning

against him.

Ordinary Scots began to discover a feeling of national identity.

A popular Scottish resistance movement grew, led by William Wallace, better

known nowadays, outside Scotland at least, as Braveheart.

Most of Scotland had broken free before he was defeated.

And then in 1306, rebellion began again, and Robert the Bruce was crowned King

of Scotland.

By now, Edward, the Hammer of the Scots, was old and sick.

He tried to lead an army back into Scotland.

but it became obvious he'd never get there.

A few miles north of Carlisle, on his deathbed, he gave instructions to his 23

-year -old heir, Edward, Prince of Wales.

A hundred knights were to crusade, carrying his heart. The army should

bones to defeat Scotland, and the prince was not to have anything further to do

with his very, very close friend, Piers Gaveston.

The king was dead.

Edward II.

was ready to party.

Edward was physically tall and muscular, but his similarity to his father ended

there. He had no interest in being a warlord.

His father had taken him on campaign, but the prince travelled with a pet lion

and a troop of Genoese fiddlers.

Edward I had tried to change his character by assigning him a charismatic

who was good at tournaments.

This had backfired spectacularly.

Edward and Piers Gaveston had fallen in love.

Gaveston was banished, but obviously he was now coming back.

Gaveston was an elegant, charming, artistic man, who loved showing off his

over Edward, and could still easily beat more macho men in tournaments. This was

a recipe for a short life.

Before his coronation, Edward married Isabella, the sister of the King of

France. Then Gaveston was seen wearing Isabella's wedding jewellery.

At the coronation, he showed up carrying the crown, wearing royal purple and

pearls. Some of the barons wanted to kill him on the spot.

Eventually, of course, they did kill him, here at Blacklow Hill in

having chased the King and peers round the country.

And then, Robert Bruce, renegade king of Scotland, set about completing his war

of independence.

He captured Edinburgh and besieged the last English stronghold, Stirling.

In 1314, Edward II set out to relieve the city.

The battle of Bannockburn, just outside the castle, was a total disaster for the

English.

Edward's troubles were made worse by the fact that the climate...

which had been benign for about a hundred years, took a dramatic and long

turn for the worse in 1315.

As harvests failed and cattle died, the baron said that his extravagance and

lack of direction was intolerable, so the grown -ups took over.

The Earl of Lancaster, head of the council, was now acting as king, keeping

Edward on a daily allowance of ten pounds.

But he still had friends.

He turned to Hugh Dispenser and his son.

Dispenser was the only nobleman who had supported Gaveston.

Eventually they managed to help him break free of the power of Leicester and

other great nobles, but no one had a solution to the unending run of bad

harvests, and the apparent enthusiasm of the Dispensers to enrich themselves

made Edward's rule deeply unpopular, especially...

with his queen Isabella. In 1325, she got away to France and refused to come

home unless the dispensers were thrown out.

Worse, she'd fallen passionately in love with an ally of Leicester's who was

hiding out in France, Roger Mortimer.

Isabella and Mortimer gathered an army and invaded England in September 1326.

As homophobia turned into mob rule, Isabella and Mortimer were joyously

to London.

In a few months it was all over.

The elder dispenser, almost 90 years old, was hanged without being given time

take off his armour.

The younger had his genitals cut off.

Then he was disemboweled.

The object was for Isabella and Mortimer to rule in the name of her 14 -year

-old son.

But the boy refused to accept the crown without his father's consent.

So Edward, dressed in black, was deposed in a solemn ceremony.

The steward of his household broke his staff of office.

He broke down and cried.

He was eventually moved to Barclay Castle, where he was encouraged to die

soon as possible.

He was denied sufficient food and clothing, he was prevented from

was crowned with a crown of hay and shaved with ditch water.

Isabella, generally known as the She -Wolf of France, reproved the guards for

their mild treatment.

Popular homophobia had allowed Isabella and her lover Mortimer to brutally and

illegally depose Edward II.

That didn't make them heroes for long.

Edward III, in whose name they ruled, was their prisoner.

But in 1320, when he was 18, he broke free.

They were staying in Nottingham, and he put together a plot to lead a band of

armed men into the castle through an underground passage. They seized

and Isabella.

Mortimer was hanged.

Isabella shut away in Castle Rising in Norfolk.

And England...

had a king again.

Law and proper government would be resumed under a handsome young man,

entitled to the throne, who also happened to be a fine chivalrous knight

spoke English, French, and German, and who was already married with a baby son.

What could be better than that?

How about a good war?

Edward decided on the most extraordinary and significant military campaign since

the Norman conquest.

He announced that by the laws of inheritance, he was the rightful

the throne of France.

It was rubbish. It wasn't. But he certainly meant to be. And in 1337, he

preparing his invasion.

Actually, there were two genuine reasons for this, and neither had anything to

do with the law of succession.

One was that the French were supporting the Scots, and so long as that

continued, the King of England would never be Master of Scotland.

And Northern England would be constantly threatened by raiders, looters, and

Scottish armies.

The other was that England was now a busy commercial country, selling wool to

Flemish weavers. In 1336,

Philip of France decided to take control of this trade.

He arrested all English merchants in Flanders and took away the privileges of

the Flemish towns and the craft guilds.

English merchants pointed out that they'd lost their income. The king had

his customs duties.

The kingdom had lost its foreign trade.

The coast on the far side of the Channel was vital to English security and

prosperity. Whatever the cost, it must be kept open.

The same imperative would force Britain to war against Napoleon, against the

Kaiser, against Hitler.

Edward was the first to have to face it.

His solution was to claim France and break it.

This little campaign is known to history as the Hundred Years' War.

But this war actually changed the nature of the king's job, because it required

a new kind of army.

Ever since William the Conqueror, the idea had been that in exchange for their

land holdings, lords and knights were supposed to turn up in arms and fight

the king when they were needed.

But this didn't work very well for a war overseas.

Firstly, a knight's service was only meant to be for 40 days at a time.

That doesn't work with a hundred years' war.

Secondly, many knights felt that they shouldn't be obliged to go overseas at

all, and they were probably right.

And thirdly...

They weren't necessarily fighting men anymore, so Edward needed to have a

professional army.

Knights who didn't want to serve didn't have to. They could pay a tax called

scootage that would allow Edward to hire professionals.

Mercenaries were quick to see the opportunity for plunder and ransom and

up. And freed from the need to pander to knightly good manners on the

battlefield, Edward hired thousands of effective...

deadly archers from the lower classes.

Instead of being a feudal warlord, the king was now a professional commander.

He invaded Normandy in 1346, and his professionals destroyed the old

feudal knights of France at Crecy, opening up that vital coast.

Calais held out, and when it eventually surrendered, Edward announced that it

must be punished.

The city keys must be handed over by six leading burghers, barefoot, with nooses

round their necks, to be hanged.

When they arrived, the Queen publicly fell on her knees and pleaded for the

burghers' lives, which, of course, Edward granted.

This splendid pantomime was part of the theatre of royalty, which Edward was now

developing to a magnificent art.

The life of the king was being turned into a public performance.

His court was the home of chivalry, and his lords and knights were given part in

the drama. It was a brilliant device for binding together war, taxation, and

loyalty.

The queen was as important in this as the king. She led the ladies of the

the judges of chivalric behavior, and she was the source of mercy, tempering

husband's justice.

This was a religious image. People were encouraged to show devotion to the

Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who would intercede and offer protection

against divine judgment.

Intercession was desperately needed by people who believed that God punished

them with death.

Death arrived at Weymouth in June 1348.

Black Death.

In less than a year the whole country was stricken.

No one could have understood what was happening.

Once a person was infected, large, foul -smelling swellings developed in the

groin, neck, and armpit. Death followed within two or three days.

The disease killed more than a third of the population, and by 1350, the

population of England was half that of 1315.

In the midst of the dying, the theatre of royalty grew grander.

Edward created the Order of the Garter, where two tournament teams played out an

Arthurian drama based on St George's Chapel at Windsor.

The castle was rebuilt for the show.

With the nobility bound to him by chivalric dreams, and the shires and

granting funds for the war in Parliament, the French war could still

Another decisive victory at Poitiers in 1356 brought France to the point of

disintegration.

But by now, the war couldn't be ended. The nobility and troops saw endless

vistas of plunder, while the king's only chance of income came not from his

withered population, but from rich ransoms. This war would last a hundred

By the time Edward died in 1377, 65 years old, the townsmen and peasants of

England were sick of the whole thing.

The king's oldest son, Edward the Black Prince, had been the flower of chivalry

and hugely popular, but he died a year before the king.

The successor to the throne was the black prince's ten -year -old son,

Real power, though, lay with Richard's uncle, John of Gaunt.

The war had by now turned against England. The French were ravaging the

coast. The shrunken working population demanded proper wages. They had no

interest in performing feudal duties on the land, while desperate landowners

needed more than ever to enforce them.

Gaunt's government needed money and tried to raise it from a poll tax, not

understanding that the population was far smaller than before.

When they failed to raise the money they'd expected, they tried again.

And England erupted.

Lords, nobles, bishops, get rid of them all.

Who needs them?

When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentle man?

The so -called Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

was actually an uprising of the respectable people of towns and villages

England. Its aim, at least for the rebels that captured London, was an end

lordship in church and state. Just one archbishop and a king.

Specifically not, they added, a king called John.

They detested John of Gaunt, who went into hiding.

The dramatic moment, of course, was the meeting of Richard and the rebels at

Smithfield on the 14th of June.

The rebel leader, Watt Tyler, was talking to the king when the mayor of

cut him down.

The rebels immediately drew their bows and the king, now 14 years old, rode

forward to calm them.

I will be your captain.

Come with me into the fields and you shall have all you ask.

and they dispersed as he told them.

It was an astonishing lesson in the mysterious power of kingship.

The rebels should never have trusted him, of course. Once the danger was

the ringleaders were hunted down and killed.

Villains ye are, and villains ye shall remain.

Years later, when Richard would need popular support, he would find he had

But Richard had been given a dramatic vision of himself.

He seems to have been convinced that the basis of his power lay in the special

authority of sovereignty.

He was the first English king to have portraits made.

Instead of wars, he offered tournaments accompanied by music and dancing with

the ladies of the court.

But Richard's choice of companions were not the kind of men that most barons

approved of.

And above all, Richard abandoned the war with France, leaving France in control

of Flanders.

Unpleasant references were made to Edward II, and look what happened to

He found himself up against a group of noblemen who called themselves the

Appellant, appealing to have his closest advisers removed and take over the

government, which is what happened.

Richard was effectively dethroned.

He was able to recover power in 1397. As part of his efforts to secure his

throne, he exiled Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt's son.

But Bolingbroke came back with a vengeance, and Richard found that

turned for support, it simply wasn't there.

Bolingbroke captured him, demanded his voluntary abdication, and then sat on

throne.

Richard disappeared into a prison in Pontefract Castle, where he was

Richard had no children. The line of the black prince, Edward III's eldest son,

had come to an end.

The proper heir to the throne was an eight -year -old boy called Edmund,

in Ireland, the great -grandson of King Edward's second son.

Henry's father was the third son, so Henry was certainly not heir to the

But he was a big man, with a big red beard and a big army, and he was sitting

right there in England, on the throne, not in Ireland, not eight years old, so

Parliament decided that he was very definitely fully entitled to be King of

England. Oh, yes!

Edmund spent the whole of Bolingbroke's reign as a well -maintained prisoner.

Henry was the first king to speak English as his native tongue. He was

personable, brave, and a very capable leader in battle, but without

He was clinging to power by his fingernails.

Anyone who doubted Bolingbroke's right to be king of England could expect to be

part -hanged and then have their intestines pulled out before being

His regime became ever more repressive as he became more worried.

There was an uprising in the north which he put down with real ferocity. It was

said that he personally killed 30 men in battle.

And the air hung heavy with the smoke of burning flesh as the English church

under this new regime began burning heretics.

The usurper needed to rule by fear, for the most frightened person in England

was him.

Government was taken over by his son, also called Henry, a young man who'd

up fighting on his father's behalf.

In fact, Parliament suggested that the king abdicate in his son's favour, which

he refused to do.

In 1413, the grim reaper came with a more convincing offer.

He was only 45 years old.

And the 26 -year -old Henry V was crowned in April in a snowstorm.

Henry V did all he could to get the country back onto a stable footing. He

Richard II's remains a proper burial, and of course he got back to the

business of invading France.

France was still in a state of disintegration, ruled by Charles VI, a

severe mental disturbance.

In a fit of derangement, he'd slaughtered his own attendants.

Now he believed that he was made of glass.

and about to break. He actually had iron rods stitched into his clothing.

It was easy meat, and Henry's overwhelming victory at Agincourt in

destroyed much of France's aristocracy.

The English king was now in control of Paris.

Charles, very fragile, agreed to acknowledge Henry as heir to the French

This meant disinheriting his own son, the Dauphin.

and Henry took Charles's sister, Catherine de Valois, as his bride.

What a great place to end the story.

England safe, Edward III's plan to take over France brought to fruition, a

genuinely popular king, and they all lived happily ever after.

Not. In 1422, Henry V, not yet 35 years old,

contracted dysentery.

and died.

England had a new king, Henry and Catherine's son, Henry VI.

Six weeks later, the King of France also died, and Henry VI became King of

France.

Just one problem.

His Majesty, King Henry VI, was only ten months old.

The Duke of Bedford was appointed Regent of France, and the Duke of Gloucester,

Regent of England.

And the baby's kingdoms, especially France, were in serious trouble.

The Dauphin wanted his kingdom back, and everything the English had done,

ravaging the countryside, destroying all authority and stability, could have

been calculated to create a passionate nationalism.

It was entirely natural for people to believe that Joan of Arc was on a divine

mission to drive the English out of France and give it its rightful king.

Under her inspirational leadership, the Dauphin's forces took over Orléans and

Reims, and he was crowned king of France in Reims in 1429.

Little Henry had still not been crowned king of anything.

something obviously had to be done about that so later the same year now seven

years old he had a coronation in Westminster Abbey the idea was then to

to Reims where kings of France are supposed to be crowned but that just

safe so he ended up being crowned king of France in Paris it was all a mess in

fact English forces were now fighting a losing battle the new factor in the

equation was gunpowder cannon and handguns changed the whole nature of

and Henry did not grow up to be a warrior.

A quiet, studious young man, he never felt it was his job to lead the English

forces in battle.

They were finally destroyed at Castillon in 1453.

The Hundred Years' War was over.

England was left with no possessions in France except Calais.

But Henry's problems had barely begun.

The taxes needed to fight the war and corruption among royal officials meant

country was disheartened and angry, and the issues of legitimacy that had lain

pretty dormant in England since Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne were now

coming out of the woodwork.

Richard II had been the last legitimate king of England, if there was such a

thing. He'd been succeeded by his murderer, Henry Bolingbroke, the father

Henry V, the grandfather of Henry VI.

They were all descended from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

But that wasn't the legitimate line of descent. John of Gaunt had an elder

brother, whose descendants were still alive.

The rightful King of England had not been Henry IV, but Edmund, the Earl of

March. And now that Edmund was dead, it was his nephew, Richard, Duke of York.

Edmund had carefully, and probably wisely, never made a point of making his

claim.

Henry IV and Henry V had been seriously powerful men, but Henry VI wasn't in

the same league.

His interest was not in war, but in learning. He founded Eton and King's

College, Cambridge, and he was a gentle, pious man.

There were many who believed that he was more a saint than a king.

Richard, Duke of York, now forty years old, decided that it was time for the

crown to fall into his hands.

His claim was supported by most of the barons of southern England.

The northern barons felt all this was codswallop. They had the right to choose

their king, not be passed like slaves to whoever inherited them.

And then, quite suddenly, in the summer of 1453, the king went mad.

He'd probably inherited the strain of madness in his mother's family, the

illness that had wracked Charles VI.

The true legacy of Agincourt was not the crown of France, but a recurring

disease that would afflict members of the English royal family for centuries.

He lost his memory. He lost control of his body. He lost the ability to speak

coherently or understand what was said to him.

His wife gave birth to their only son, but he knew nothing about it.

With the king incapacitated, government needed to be handed to a regent, and the

man with the backing in the south to take over the reins was Richard, Duke of

York. The inevitable and disastrous outcome was civil war, Lancaster against

York. Their badges, the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York,

history the Wars of the Roses.

To begin with, it was a war for control, not of the crown, but of the king.

Richard didn't want to be crowned while Henry was still alive, nor did he want

to kill him, but he did want to control the government and be recognised as

Henry's successor.

The king made a partial recovery, but was quite incapable of taking charge of

his own defence.

His queen made an impressive effort to do it for him.

Margaret commanded in the Battle of Wakefield in 1460.

when Richard of York was killed.

Richard's son, Edward of York, had none of his father's qualms about taking the

crown. In March 1461, Edward, without any parliamentary approval, had himself

crowned Edward IV.

Henry was still alive, a husk, and became a refugee with his queen.

The deposed royal family hid in Scotland.

Then Henry was captured and became a prisoner in London.

In 1470, an extraordinary upheaval backed by the King of France drove

from London, and Henry was rescued from prison and restored to his throne.

It's said that while Edward plotted his return from exile in Holland, Henry had

a curious interview with one of his distant relatives, a boy of fourteen,

Tudor.

After the death of his father, Henry VI's mother, Catherine de Valois, had an

affair with one of her servants, a Welshman, Owen ap Maradoth ap Tudor. It

probably King Henry.

who arranged the marriage of their son, Edmund Tudor, to Margaret Beaufort, a

great -grandchild of John of Gaunt.

Margaret became pregnant immediately.

But the Beaufort family were disbarred by ancient royal charters from ever

succeeding to the throne.

So why did she call her baby Henry?

No Beaufort had ever been called Henry.

No Tudor had ever been called Henry. It was a king's name.

It suggests that Owen had great plans for the boy, and that was obviously what

Edward of York thought.

As soon as he had Owen Tudor in his power, in 1461, he had his head chopped

His head was displayed lit up with a hundred candles.

Henry Tudor, aged four, had been taken prisoner, but now young Tudor was free,

and according to later stories was looked on as an important figure in the

of succession.

According to Shakespeare, Henry VI looked at the boy and said, Lo, surely

is he to whom both we and our adversaries shall hereafter give place.

The following year, Edward IV made his counter -strike.

King Henry's son was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and Henry VI

was captured.

A few days later, he was murdered in the Tower of London.

The Wars of the Roses were over.

The competition between England's barons for control of the kingdom had ground

to a bloody end, with most of the great families of nobles having been

slaughtered.

Henry Tudor was now head of the House of Lancaster.

He had no claim to the throne, of course, coming from the debarred

family, so Edward should not have regarded him as a threat, in theory.

Just to be on the safe side, he fled to Brittany.

But Henry Tudor would be back, and he would make sure he controlled how the

story was written.

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think.

It's a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of heroism

and cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies, and triumphs.

And all these figure in the story I'm telling now, the story of the Tudors.

Above all, though, the story of this great dynasty of rulers is a tale of

passionate love affairs, and what happens when love and high politics

The story begins with Owen Tudor, a hugely ambitious and very handsome young

man. His father was an outlaw hiding out in the Welsh hills, but Owen managed to

get employed as a servant in the household of the infant Henry VI.

Now this household was run by Henry's mother, Queen Catherine de Valois, a

sexy widow, who fell for Owen completely.

There's no record that they ever got married.

But they did have five children.

When Catherine died in 1437, Henry VI was still only 13, and the barons who

the kingdom in his name put Owen in prison.

But when Henry came of age, he brought his stepfather, Owen Tudor, back to

and gave earldoms to his stepbrothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor.

Owen ensured Edmund's marriage to a girl from Henry's family.

Edmund died very soon after the marriage, but his 13 -year -old bride,

Beaufort, was already pregnant.

Their son was born at Pembroke Castle. He was named after the king, Henry

And Owen had a grandson with a blood connection to the House of Lancaster,

family of the king.

They weren't actually the legitimate line.

Henry of Lancaster, Henry Bolingbroke, had deposed his cousin Richard II in

to become Henry IV.

The thrones of his son and grandson, Henry V and VI, rested on that shaky

foundation, which crumbled in the Wars of the Roses, when the true heirs to the

throne, the House of York, began to battle for their inheritance.

Owen Tudor stood squarely with the Henrys, the Lancastrians.

That, after all, was where he had invested all his hope.

He fought for them, and in 1461 died for them, beheaded by Yorkists in Hereford

Marketplace.

He was the last Tudor to lose his head.

But as we all know, the Tudors would take up this approach to problem

themselves, you might say, with a vengeance.

Edward of York seized the throne, Edward IV, and Owen's four -year -old

grandson, Henry Tudor, began what would be decades of living on the run or as a

refugee.

But three years later, King Edward did something that would eventually give

Henry Tudor everything Owen had wished for.

He fell in love, and that began a chain of events which altered all England's

history.

When Edward was about twenty, he was waylaid by an attractive widow of about

twenty -five who was trying to recover her late husband's property.

Edward, six foot three tall and really very good looking, wanted to help, and

became besotted.

It seems she persuaded him to secretly enter into a contract to marry her.

Her name was Eleanor Butler.

About a year later, in 1464, another attractive widow, twenty -six years old,

pulled the same stunt, and Edward did it again.

Unbelievable!

This time the lady was called Elizabeth Woodville, and this time it wasn't just

a contract to marry, it was a full marriage to a commoner.

When Elizabeth Woodville was crowned in Westminster Abbey, the whole of Europe

was scandalised.

Marriage was all about alliances of power and property.

Marrying a penniless woman for love was simply disgusting.

The negotiators trying to arrange a proper royal marriage were humiliated.

And when Edward heaped honours, wealth, and titles on Elizabeth's relatives, the

Rivers family, the nobility of England were outraged. They were, quite frankly,

getting completely above themselves.

If anyone had known about Edward's promise to marry Eleanor Butler, things

have been even worse.

But she was quietly shut up in a convent, and died in 1468.

As it was, Edward lost so much support that in 1470 he was actually driven out

of England, and Henry VI came back to the throne.

A few months later, Edward came back into London and regained the crown,

to the strong support of London merchants, to whom he owed money, and

it was said, of their wives and daughters, who really seemed to have

romantically interesting.

which, face it, Henry VI certainly wasn't, unless you fancied an elderly

scholar who'd lost his mind.

In the battles that followed, Henry's son, another Edward, was killed, and

Henry himself captured, disappeared into a prison, and was never seen again.

The whole male line of the House of Lancaster, the descendants of the sons

John of Gaunt, was now extinct.

Except for one fragile thread, Margaret Beaufort and her 15 -year -old son,

Henry Tudor.

Not that they had any claim to the crown.

Of course, the Lancaster dynasty had begun by simply usurping the throne, but

top of that, Margaret's grandfather was illegitimate. A law had been passed to

make him legitimate, but it also barred him and his descendants from the

succession. And that would probably have been that.

if it hadn't have been for Edward's little secret, which didn't emerge until

Edward himself was dead.

He was only 41 when he fell ill and died. His son, the Prince of Wales, also

called Edward, was just 12 years old.

Everyone refers to this young man as Edward V, but he was never crowned.

The dead king's will was clear.

Prince Edward would be his successor, of course, but he would be in the care of

a guardian and protector of the kingdom.

That person was Edward IV's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

We all know him as the most evil king in English history, the warped and twisted

Richard III.

Richard had been in effect King Edward's vice -regent in the north, based in the

city of York, and no one at that time said anything bad about him at all.

But the Queen thought there was someone even better to run her son's kingdom.

Her. King Edward IV had died at Westminster.

Elizabeth immediately sent her brother and other members of her household

rushing up to Ludlow, where Prince Edward was staying.

The idea was to hustle him to London and install him before Richard even knew

what was going on. Then she and her family, the Rivers, would have control

everything. Richard, of course, did find out what was going on and said he would

meet up with the party as they brought the Prince through Northampton.

OK?

OK.

Except that when he got to Northampton, he found that the Rivers didn't have the

Prince with them.

Alarmed, Richard took them prisoner and found their baggage stuffed with arms

and armour.

There was plainly an attempt being made at a coup.

Richard nipped it in the bud. He found they'd secreted the prints in Stoney

Stratford, Elizabeth's family home.

This was before blue plaques had been invented.

Richard escorted the prints to London and installed him in the Tower of

while he set about organising the coronation, and then came the bombshell.

The dead king's contract to marry Eleanor Butler had been made in front of

priest, who now decided it was time to speak.

Oops!

If Edward really had been betrothed to Eleanor, his marriage to Elizabeth

Woodville was bigamy, and the young prince couldn't be king because he was

illegitimate.

Was this true?

This man, Robert Stillington, was no ordinary priest.

Edward had promoted him and trusted him, making him a bishop and keeper of the

privy seal and then Chancellor of England.

But then Stillington became awfully friendly with King Edward's ambitious

brother, the Duke of Clarence, and Clarence could not be trusted an inch.

If Edward's children were illegitimate, Clarence would be next in line to the

throne.

Edward quickly had his brother sentenced to death and executed in private with

no chance to make a public statement.

Instead, the world was told Clarence had drowned in a butt of marmsey, a barrel

of sweet wine.

Such a sad accident.

And Stillington spent a year locked in the tower.

After his release, perhaps nervous of the power of strong drink, he kept his

mouth shut until Edward was dead. But now he spoke, and Parliament believed

With Edward's children illegitimate, and Clarence's disinherited when he was

executed, Richard was left as the proper successor.

He reluctantly accepted.

Well, he accepted.

And the Tower of London changed from the Prince of Wales' palace into his

prison. He shared it with his brother.

Neither was ever seen again.

Did Richard have them killed?

No one knows, but later the evidence was going to be shaped as far as possible

to make him guilty.

He's been said to have personally killed Henry VI and Henry's son, whose widow

he married, and done the dirty deed with Clarence and the Malmsey, quite apart

from the murder of the princes in the Tower.

The picture of Richard that's come down to us, the hunchbacked, sinister and

ruthless tyrant, is a caricature painted after he'd been deposed and

immortalised by the Tudor's greatest propagandist, William Shakespeare.

One of the buildings inside the Tower of London was even given the name the

Bloody Tower to associate it with Richard's foul murder of the princes,

they almost certainly were in a different building anyway.

He'd certainly been a popular figure in the north of England, where his brother

had charged him with healing the divisions of the War of the Roses. But

took four months for a rebellion to emerge against him.

The rival candidate was, of course, the boy across the water, now not such a

boy, Henry Tudor.

The House of York was now as extinct as the House of Lancaster. Henry Tudor was

all there was for disappointed Yorkists as well as Lancastrians.

And there were plenty of disappointed Yorkists.

Richard gave positions, power and wealth to men he trusted, whom he'd got to

know in the north of England, leaving a lot of Southerners out in the cold who

thought they could do much better under a more sympathetic figure.

And now he came.

With a force of 2 ,000 refugees and French soldiers, Owen Tudor's grandson

landed at Milford Haven in Wales on 1st August 1485.

Three weeks later, when he came to do battle at Bosworth, his force had grown

just 3 ,000 men.

Richard came to the battlefield as rightful King of England.

Before the battle began, he held a coronation ceremony, restating his right

true succession to the Crown, a right which Henry Tudor did not possess at

The Crown of England was found lying under a bush at the end of the Battle of

Bosworth. and placed on Henry Tudor's head.

And Henry understood how you rule England.

Not by winning over great nobles, they'd pretty well all been wiped out, but by

winning over public opinion.

The pen is mightier than the sword, especially when it tells the story of

happened.

Firstly, he must not be accused of killing a king. So, Richard III was not

on the day of the Battle of Bosworth. Henry Tudor dated his reign from the day

before the battle.

It was Richard who'd been fighting against a king, not Henry.

Henry was king. It was Richard who was the traitor.

Got that?

Secondly, he must deal with the question of his legitimacy as a ruler.

So he married Edward IV's daughter.

She was the legitimate line of descent from William the Conqueror, a true

Plantagenet. Their son, when they had one, would be the legitimate heir by

possible standard. Well, so long as Edward IV's daughter was legitimate, so

had to be dealt with.

All documents relating to the business of Edward's marriage to Elizabeth

Woodville being invalid were destroyed.

All documents relating to the illegitimacy of their children were

including the Act of Parliament that had spelt out why Richard should be king.

These orders were carried out so efficiently that only one copy of the

ever been found. That's how we know about it.

Other evidence may have existed, destroyed even more efficiently.

And if the children were not illegitimate, then of course Prince

the true king of England, and Richard...

was a regicide. What a villain!

Assuming, of course, that Richard had been responsible for the boy's death.

Well, he couldn't be alive, because if he were, he, and not Henry Tudor, would

be the rightful king.

There are some nasty people who suspect that if the princes in the tower were

still alive before the Battle of Bosworth, Henry would have disappeared

Richard III became the Saddam Hussein of Tudor propaganda.

Never mind the legitimacy of the war to destroy him, it did the world a favour.

Of course, the consolidation of power was not only a matter of creating

favourable propaganda.

It also involved getting rid of a few people.

Clarence, for example, the Malmsey Drowner, had a young son, the Earl of

Warwick. a nephew of both Edward IV and Richard III.

He had been barred from the succession, but so had the man now on the throne, so

there was no security in that.

He went straight into prison in the Tower of London.

But then a priest in Ireland suddenly produced a ten -year -old boy who he

was the rescued Earl.

The boy looked right, spoke right, had all the right manners.

He was solemnly crowned in Dublin Cathedral as Edward VI.

and a force of Irish supporters backed by Flemish troops then landed in the

north of England.

They were supported by the Earl of Lincoln, John de la Pole, who was also a

nephew of Edward IV and Richard III. He was their sister's son.

In fact, Richard III, who had no children, had designated John as heir to

throne.

John knew perfectly well that the child was an imposter, called Lambert Simnel,

who had been carefully trained for the project.

The rebels had obviously assumed that Henry had killed the Earl of Warwick, so

wouldn't be able to prove that Simnel was an imposter.

They were wrong.

The prisoner, still alive, was put on public display, and the rebels were

crushed. But never missing a trick, Henry forgave the child and gave him a

in the royal kitchen.

he grew up to be a royal falconer.

Another impostor appeared in 1492, this time claiming to be the younger of the

princes in the Tower, Richard, Duke of York.

His real name was Perkin Warbeck, and he stayed on the continent collecting

support from anyone who fell out with Henry.

Henry had persuaded Parliament to set up a special court to try members of the

nobility who were a threat to the Crown.

A number of Warbeck supporters suddenly found themselves arrested, tried for

treason, and facing execution.

This court was to become the notorious Court of the Star Chamber.

Perkin was a constant irritant, first trying to invade from Ireland, then

teaming up with the King of Scotland, and finally in 1497 he raised a

in Cornwall, which Henry crushed, and promising leniency persuaded Perkin to

surrender.

Perkin was imprisoned in the tower, which of course already housed

son, the Earl of Warwick.

And of course it wasn't long before evidence appeared that the pair of them

plotting a joint escape, and that was the end of both of them.

There was one other person with a claim to the throne, Henry Tudor's mother,

Margaret. In fact, whatever claim he had, she must have a better one. But no

woman had ever ruled England in her own right.

And Henry needed a son to inherit the throne.

His eldest was named Arthur.

This child of the blood royal was to be linked not just to the Plantagenets, but

to patriotic English legends.

But Arthur died in 1502, leaving his younger brother Henry as the Tudor heir.

And in 1509, when the 52 -year -old king died, Henry VIII succeeded to the

throne.

He was the perfect king, a king out of the storybooks.

He was seventeen years old, extremely well educated, extremely good looking,

with polished manners and the style and physique of an athlete.

He also had an unchallengeable claim to the crown, and to secure the succession,

Henry VIII married the woman to whom he'd been betrothed for seven years,

Catherine of Aragon, his dead brother's widow.

The Spanish worried that this was against church rules.

and so the Pope granted a dispensation.

In fact, this was all rubbish. While the Bible specifically forbids a man from

sleeping with his brother's wife, it actually insists that he must marry his

brother's widow.

Anyhow, two years later, Catherine gave birth to a son. But the infant soon

died. So did the next.

In fact, the marriage only produced one child that lived, a girl called Mary.

Henry was effectively all -powerful.

There were no great barons any more in England, and his father had left a well

-stocked treasury.

Parliament consisted, to a large extent, of men who depended, one way or

another, on royal favour, and the countryside was controlled by justices

peace who served the government.

You can see the change in the very nature of power from the home of Henry's

Chancellor.

Fifty years earlier, Edward IV's Chancellor had been a Neville, the son

Earl of Salisbury.

In those days, an Englishman's home had been his castle.

Middleton Castle, actually.

It was his father's home, and that great lord had also been Chancellor.

Independently powerful men, based in a mighty fortified palace.

But under the Tudors, the great power of the Nevilles had been broken.

Middleton Castle was in the hands of the King. When Henry VIII's Chancellor

Wolsey built himself a home, it certainly wasn't a castle.

It was this magnificent palace, Hampton Court.

Glass windows instead of arrow slits, and chimneys instead of crenellations.

one needed a fortified house under the protection of a great king.

And it was all at Henry's pleasure. If Wolsey didn't deliver what the king

wanted, he was entirely dispensable. And that, of course, is what happened.

The royal marriage was haunted by the ghost of their dead sons.

By the end of the 1520s, Catherine was in her late forties, had stopped getting

pregnant, and there was still no male heir, just a daughter, and England had

never been ruled by a woman.

Henry, determined to have a male heir, must get rid of his wife.

Then he would be free to take a younger bride and make a baby boy.

The bride in question, Anne Boleyn, was already well installed in Henry's life.

Henry, who'd already enjoyed her sister as his mistress, had wooed Anne with

enthusiasm. He married her in 1533.

Her coronation didn't seem to impress Londoners. Their entwined initials on

banners produced shouts of, Ha! Ha!

She was visibly pregnant and gave birth to a child.

Drat! Another girl!

She was named Elizabeth, and little Mary was declared illegitimate.

The legality of this marriage must be sorted out before her next baby.

That was Wolsey's job.

He had to persuade the Pope that his predecessor should never have allowed

marriage to Catherine.

Henry fancied himself as a theologian. He'd written an attack on Luther, which

became a bestseller, and the Pope had declared him a defender of the faith.

A proud boast which he stuck on the coinage, and has remained there ever

Every English monarch is fid -deaf.

So he told Wolsey exactly how the argument should be put to the Pope.

Wolsey could probably have swung it if he'd been left alone.

As it was, he failed and lost his job.

And the Pope had also failed.

So Henry, the defender of the faith, fired the Pope.

To achieve this drastic act, having himself legally declared the supreme

the Church in England, required an extraordinary shift in power.

He had to find a way of giving the nation a voice so that it could say what

wanted.

That way was through Parliament.

The Church's wealth and power was hugely unpopular. The notion of no longer

paying Church taxes to Rome was really very cheery.

But it wasn't as simple as that.

Some people believe that the Pope really did represent divine authority.

And for many others, there was a fear that the Pope might excommunicate their

customers on the continent if they continued trading with him.

With the effective help of a new chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and a new

Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, Parliament passed the necessary

By the end of 1534, the King of England had become legally the total, overall,

supreme ruler of the whole shebang.

he closed down all the monasteries and nunneries there weren't all that many

people in them less than 10 ,000 over the whole country but there may have

10 times that number dependent on them and in areas such as Lincolnshire and

Northumberland there was armed rebellion one of the rebel leaders was John

Neville from that great old family of barons but the Nevilles were no threat

the modern crown the rebellions were crushed

and monastic lands were sold off cheap to bolster the treasury, make Henry more

popular, and allow successful businessmen to turn themselves into

country gentry who would loyally support the crown.

The old struggle for power between the papacy and the monarchy had now been

decisively settled.

Beckett, the twelfth -century archbishop whose defence of church power had led

to his martyrdom, had been the most popular saint in England.

Henry ordered Beckett to be declared no saint.

to be tried and convicted of treason, and for his bones to be burned and the

dust scattered in the air.

Who's in charge now, eh?

What's more, in 1536 Catherine of Aragon died, meaning that the problem of the

ex -queen had gone away.

He and Anne Boleyn dressed in bright yellow to celebrate.

But four months later he was told that Anne had committed adultery.

Henry was surrounded by courtiers jockeying for influence, forming

factions, to do down those who might damage them.

And Anne became a victim of an organized campaign by those who felt endangered

by her faction.

Whether it was true or not, no one knows, because Henry's fury was so total

her trial and those of her supposed lovers was a travesty.

She might indeed get pregnant with a boy, but then its parentage would be in

doubt, and she might not.

She'd miscarried at least twice since Elizabeth's birth.

Without a legitimate son, it had all been for nothing.

Anne was imprisoned in the royal lodgings in the Tower of London.

Henry had extended them before their coronation, and now she was occupying

for the first time, not as his wife, but as his prisoner.

After eighteen days she was beheaded, and Henry married Jane Seymour.

England after the death of Anne Boleyn was a kingdom like no other.

Henry ruled in England as head of the church as well as king, like some pagan

priest -king.

He was the judge of heresy as well as crime. He held the keys to heaven as

as to earthly promotion. That chap in the Vatican was now just referred to as

the Bishop of Rome.

To even think the wrong thoughts in this kingdom could be treason.

That was how the new Chancellor, Thomas More, found himself imprisoned in the

bell tower of the Tower of London.

Not for what he did, or even what he said, but for thinking that the King

not be head of the Church.

He was publicly executed on Tower Hill.

Henry was terrifying, magnificent, generous, dangerous.

and in most people's eyes the best king England had seen in a very long time.

And Jane had a son, Edward.

Sadly, she died in childbirth, but the throne was safe.

His only problem was abroad, and by 1539 it did begin to look as though the

Bishop of Rome might be lining up some muscle against him.

But there were now well -established and powerful Protestant princes in Germany.

And on the fine old principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend, Henry

into their world. He got Anne of Cleves for a wife.

The defender of the faith, intellectual scourge of the Lutherans, had married

one.

Actually, neither of them was much interested in theology, or in each

Henry, now fat, with an ulcerating leg and a vicious temper, thought his twenty

-three -year -old wife was plain smelly and lacking in all the graces.

He called her a Flanders mare, and they both quickly agreed the marriage was a

terrible mistake.

Fortunately, it was soon discovered that she had a pre -contract of marriage

with someone else, and so there never had been a valid marriage to Henry.

The only casualty was Thomas Cromwell, who'd set the whole thing up and who now

went to the block.

Well, him and one of Anne's ladies -in -waiting, Catherine Howard,

Her destruction began when Moore's ending.

She was a kind of well -connected Monica Lewinsky figure, a teenager with sex on

her mind who wanted to seduce the most powerful man around.

And he fell for her and married her.

And when she carried on being sexy and had sex with other men, he flew into

another tempestuous rage and had her beheaded.

Her lover's heads were mounted on London Bridge.

Henry then decided to marry John Neville's widow, Catherine Parr.

She was extremely nervous, but had no choice.

She worked hard at trying to keep Henry's temper in check, moderating his

ferocity towards people he thought were traitors or heretics, and persuading him

to acknowledge Mary and Elizabeth as his legitimate children.

His death four years later in 1547 was obviously a huge relief.

Henry had succeeded in leaving a son, but only just.

Jane's son, Edward VI, nine years old, was a sickly child.

He was educated as a Renaissance prince, a humanist, and as a Protestant, far

more so than his father.

He was only a child, and government was in the hands of a council, but in a

world of royal tyranny, this child wielded terrifying power.

He was precocious, much too interested in theology, and not nearly interested

enough in other people.

He had a child's indifference to signing death warrants.

He died in 1553 when he was 15, having declared his successor to be Lady Jane

Grey. Uh, who?

Lady Jane Grey.

King Edward's closest advisor was a chap called John Dudley, Duke of

Northumberland. He, like everyone else, knew that the next in line to the throne

was Edward's older sister Mary, and Mary was a committed Roman Catholic, which

meant that when she came to power, John Dudley would be in serious trouble.

Well, dead, actually.

So John had been talking things over with his royal little highness, and they

cooked up this bizarre proposal.

to hand the throne to John Dudley's daughter -in -law, the 15 -year -old

Grey.

She was Edward's first cousin once removed, not exactly next in line for

throne, but Protestant.

The hereditary principle was a bit, well, a bit medieval, don't you think?

Give that girl a crown!

Jane knew absolutely nothing about what was being planned for her, and when she

found out that she was to be queen...

She fainted in shock.

England had been swindled, and knew it.

Jane came to London as Queen, but was she?

Everyone's eyes turned to Mary.

Throughout all that had happened since Henry had disowned her, Mary had very

publicly maintained her Catholic faith and the public celebration of the Mass.

She'd become a symbol of resistance to tyranny, and whenever she appeared in

public she was mobbed and cheered.

And now Mary announced that she was the proper heir to the throne, and she was

going from her home in Framlington in Surrey to be crowned in London.

The journey was a procession through villages and towns filled with cheering

crowds. She entered London to the greatest street party the city had ever

The dancing, drinking and bell ringing went on all night.

After just nine days of the first woman to rule England, Jane was placed under

arrest by her own father, who was supposed to be her chief defender.

She was imprisoned and Mary felt obliged in the end to have Jane executed.

It didn't help that her father joined a rebellion against Mary.

But by then, six months after her triumph, many people were ready to rebel

against Mary.

The defiant woman who'd stood against tyranny was now on the tyrant's throne.

The English didn't actually like the papacy, but Mary did.

The English didn't like Spain, but Mary did. She married its king, Philip II.

And the English didn't like being forced to subscribe to religious beliefs on

pain of death.

Mary had 277 people burned alive because of their religious opinions.

Bloody Mary.

Unable to have children, a bitter invalid, England's second queen died in

42 years old, the most detested ruler in all England's history. There were

celebrations almost as fervent as had greeted her arrival five years before.

Her sister Elizabeth came to sit in that terrible seat, and be crowned by the

grace of God Queen of England, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith and

supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland, even though there was not a

single yard of French soil actually ruled by England.

Calais, England's last little piece of France, had been lost just before Mary's

death. England had become an island, and its Queen would have to be an island

too.

She couldn't marry because that would create a king who would be either a

foreigner like Philip or an opportunist courtier who'd come trailing faction and

enemies in his wake. She would be both queen and king, the virgin queen ruling

from a tyrant's throne over a people whose support was essential.

Monarchy in England was a paradox, and Elizabeth's solution to the paradox was

wholly bizarre.

The Tudor monarchy had been shaped by the need to create a line of valid,

legitimate male successors.

That had not materialized, and now Elizabeth would choose to have no child

all.

How would the crown survive?

In fact, her survival through Mary's reign had depended on her being free of

association with anyone else.

The slightest hint of her involvement with other people could have made her

to be connected with plots against Mary, and would have led to her execution.

She stayed mute, giving no sign of a religious, political or emotional

attachment that might destroy her. By the time she came to the throne, the

persecutions of her predecessors had left it a stark and lonely place.

Nine bishoprics were vacant, there was only one duke left alive, and the

treasury was empty.

She had no close relatives left alive. The heir to the throne was her aunt's

granddaughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, a Roman Catholic.

No one knew whether Elizabeth was a Roman Catholic or a Protestant.

The first test came over the oath of allegiance.

Elizabeth insisted that, like her father, people must acknowledge her as

the church.

The bishops, Roman Catholics appointed by Mary, said that in that case none of

them would allow her a coronation.

Well, all except for the Bishop of Carlisle. He did the honours and the

acclamation for the new Queen was terrific, and she shouted back, God have

mercy, good people!

Elizabeth interpreted her religious role in a new way. She declared that she

didn't mind whether her subjects were Catholic or Protestant, so long as they

were loyal.

she'd survived by being very careful about what she said and did and that was

how she coped with sovereignty she dared not marry or be touched by scandal

but her every move was watched like any modern royal maybe more so to the

extent that her laundresses were bribed by ambassadors who wanted to know

whether her periods had stopped in case she was pregnant

She made herself look splendid, held magnificent pageants, and eventually

to be holding the kingdom together without the rebellions, persecutions,

massacres that had become regular features of English life.

She managed this in partnership with an immensely loyal and capable minister,

William Cecil, and constantly teasing the world with a showy flirtation with

Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley.

But the love affair she really encouraged was to have the nation adore

In poetry, paintings and theatre, she was Gloriana, the magical beauty to whom

loyalty and love were equally due, and who had no lover or husband to distract

her gaze.

The main threat facing her was the possibility of a Catholic plot to

with one of the grandchildren of Henry VIII's sister Margaret, either Mary

Stuart, Queen of Scots, or Henry Stuart, the Earl of Darnley.

both of them had a valid claim as not only was Elizabeth excommunicated she

arguably illegitimate they were carefully encouraged to manoeuvre

into helplessness Mary was the more dangerous she'd been Queen of France

her husband's death and a ruler of Scotland who had French backing would be

danger to England even without the religious issue but Mary's education had

unlike Elizabeth's She had not lived in fear of her life, but in the indulgent

French court. This was not a good preparation for life in Britain, a land

conspiracies and killings.

Darnley was a weak man in a weak position, a good -looking, unstable

What happened next looks like a cunning plan.

Elizabeth pretty much obliged the nineteen -year -old Darnley to visit the

twenty -two -year -old widow Mary, having ordered him not to marry her.

The result was totally predictable.

And Darnley was a total liability to Mary.

Dim -witted and resentful of his lack of power, he was also furiously jealous.

And when he thought her advisor Rizzio was having an affair with Mary, he

a plot that had Rizzio murdered in front of her.

She now viewed Darnley, the patsy in all this, with hatred and contempt, and was

herself complicit in the plot that murdered him.

with an explosion.

She ended up fleeing her own kingdom and throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy,

ultimately a bad place to be.

Elizabeth was half the time sure that Mary should be executed to deprive

Catholic plotters of a candidate for the throne, and half the time sure that she

should do no such thing.

Ruling queens were rarer than hen's teeth, for one to kill another really

good. She signed the death warrant, but in a state of real distress.

Mary and Darnley had a son, James, and he was now the virtually

heir to Elizabeth's throne.

She wrote to him confirming that, and apologising for what she'd done to his

mother. The very idea that it was legitimate to kill a crowned sovereign

extremely dangerous.

Elizabeth was deeply concerned with the rights and powers, the prerogatives of

the sovereign.

She was very wary of Parliament, which in her view treated every request for

taxes as a blackmail opportunity to give itself powers of government.

So she tried very hard not to ask for taxes, and her government was

parsimonious, mean as possible and then some.

She was determined to protect royal authority.

She refused to allow Parliament to refer to England as a state.

She said it sounded too much like something to do with the States General,

parliamentary body that ruled the Dutch Republic.

That Republic, born out of a rebellion against the King of Spain, was in

Elizabeth's eyes an unfortunate novelty.

It was her ally in her struggle to keep England out of Spain's clutches, but she

was nervous that its political ideas might be catching.

England. was a kingdom.

It happened to be ruled by a queen, but as she famously said, one who had the

heart and stomach of a king.

Of course, Elizabeth's greatest moment was when she managed to see off the

Spanish Armada, when Philip II, by far the most powerful ruler in the world,

assembled a vast fleet to collect an invasion army from the Low Countries and

bring England back into the Roman Catholic Church.

The English fleet, genuinely patriotic, genuinely daring, skillfully harried the

armada to prevent it finding a safe anchorage where it could make contact

the landing force.

When the Spanish decided to sail home, they were hit by strong winds and heavy

seas, that were too much for many of these Mediterranean cargo vessels.

So far as the English and the Dutch were concerned, God had blown them away.

Philip himself saw it as a baffling defeat that meant God was not on his

But Elizabeth was still not prepared to ask Parliament for the money to pay her

victorious sailors' wages.

They were not due to be paid until they came ashore, so their queen left them

rotting at anchor.

And when messengers came to court to plead for the starving men who'd saved

England, they arrived in the middle of extravagant celebrations of the victory

and were turned away.

Elizabeth died the grandest of all England's rulers in 1603.

Her successor was Mary's son, James Stuart, already ruler of Scotland.

He had inherited glory, but with it an empty treasury and an isolated kingdom.

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think.

It's a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of heroism

and cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies and triumphs.

And the story of the Stuarts is, when you think about it, the most surprising

all. It's the story of a country deciding...

that it should abolish the monarchy and become a republic.

And then, without any outside force or pressure, overthrowing the republic and

making itself a monarchy again.

That never happened anywhere else. Why did it happen here?

James became King of Scotland when his mother Mary fled to England in 1567. He

was one year old when he was crowned James VI.

He grew up learning how to steer a path between religious fanatics and the

violent Scottish nobility, and at the same time acquired a serious scholarly

education. He was very proud of that.

He pleaded for his mother's life, but accepted the fact of her execution by

English Queen Elizabeth.

Business was business, and he had no memory of Mary.

He'd been taught that she was a scarlet woman.

and she had, after all, murdered his father and taken a lover.

He was the recognised heir to the English crown, and he wasn't going to

in danger.

And so, in 1603, when Elizabeth the Virgin Queen eventually died, the oldest

monarch England had ever had, he came from Edinburgh to London for his

coronation.

He was openly bisexual.

The word in London was that Elizabeth had been a king, and now they had James

the Queen.

In Latin, of course.

By the accident of heredity, England and Scotland were now united in a single

kingdom, Britain.

Everyone had high hopes of James, especially the Roman Catholics, who

that his distaste for bossy Scottish Presbyterians would encourage him to

Elizabeth's restraints on their worship.

They were wrong about that.

So a group of well -connected Roman Catholic terrorists planned to blow up

entire political structure at the opening of Parliament in 1605.

They brought over an explosives expert from the Low Countries. He organised

placing two and a half tonnes of gunpowder in a cellar under the Palace

Westminster.

It's a sign of how secure England became that for the last 200 years, November

the 5th, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes' capture has been simply an excuse for a

fun night of pretty explosions.

Today, of course, in the shadow of 9 -11, 5 -11 has a more chilling

Al -Qaeda terrorism has tainted many people's idea of Muslims.

which perhaps makes it easier to understand how Fawkes' terrorism

people's idea of Roman Catholics.

Actually, James himself was more sympathetic to high church than to low,

the followers of Protestant sects did not want priests and bishops to do

religion on their behalf.

In the Protestant view, the godly man has his own Bible, the devil's agent is

priest with a Catholic prayer book.

James felt that people who didn't have respect for hierarchy in church would be

equally disrespectful of authority in general.

No bishop, no king was his fear.

And the authority of the king was very dear to him. He spelled out his ideology

in masks, theatrical balls, in his new banqueting house in Whitehall.

His intellectual take on the job was that he was God's deputy, and that he

by divine right as the absolute sovereign power in England.

Having been raised in Scotland, he was rather baffled by the idea of common

the notion that law was in the hearts and minds of the people, expressed

the precedence of the courts and their juries of ordinary folk.

But this was the essence of the English system.

It had been essential for the Normans to operate that way, as foreign rulers in

a land they didn't know, and it had become embedded in the fabric of English

life.

Henry VIII and Elizabeth had the position of tyrants, but their tyranny

popular consent. They had to be popular in order to rule.

James wasn't good at being popular.

He was head of a court, a place of factions and favourites, and was grand

very private way.

One example of his sense of power and duty was in his treatment of tobacco.

It had been introduced from America by Walter Raleigh, and Elizabeth had felt

rather alarmed by it. It made her feel ill.

She bet Raleigh that he couldn't weigh the smoke that came out of a pipe.

Raleigh knew how to perform.

He weighed an ounce of tobacco, smoked it, weighed the ash, and the missing

weight was the smoke.

Elizabeth laughed and paid up, saying she'd seen men turn their gold into

but this was the first time she'd seen smoke turn to gold.

James's whole approach was different.

He disliked smoking and felt it was his duty to protect his subjects.

But he was a rational man, a teacher, so he wrote a pamphlet, Counterblast to

Tobacco, explaining that it was loathsome to the eye, hateful to the

harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume

thereof, nearest resembling the horrible, stygian smoke of the pit that

bottomless.

He wanted to persuade people by the force of his argument, so he published

anonymously.

Of course, no one took any notice.

So, as the wise and kindly father of his people, he banned the growing of

tobacco in England and increased the customs duty on tobacco by 4 ,100%.

And reissued the pamphlet with his name on it.

His whole approach was based on rational thought, not an English habit.

and what he saw as the absolute authority of a king, also rather foreign

them.

And his authority was not backed by any army, and his income was too small to

run both the court and the government.

The regular royal income came from rents on lands, feudal dues, and customs

duties.

But the flood of gold and silver coming to Europe from the New World had created

inflation.

reducing the real value of that income.

Medieval government was designed for rather static farming economies and vast

estates.

Towns, run by common folk with special liberties granted in charters, had been

useful little add -ons.

But now international and intercontinental trade had blossomed.

The nobles had declined, the towns had become major financial centres.

Inflation, the growth of Protestantism, a lack of respect for traditional

authority, the emergence of assertive members of Parliament, none of this was

restricted to England.

But in England it had a slightly different flavour.

Everywhere else the ruler made the law. He was the law.

But not in England.

Kingship existed under the law.

James simply didn't understand this. He was certain that the job of king meant

being above the law.

And being James, he not only understood this was the problem, but said so as a

matter of principle.

And when the Lord Chief Justice disagreed, the Lord Chief Justice got

James was, people said, the wisest fool in Christendom.

He needed to raise taxes, but taxation was always regarded as a special event.

Taxes might be levied if there was an emergency need for cash, But the law

that this could not be done without the agreement of Parliament, which gave the

Commons the chance to present demand for him.

They expected what was called redress of grievances before granting him

supplies. And these were exactly the kind of people who tended to be

low church, with no real sense of proper deference to people better born than

themselves.

So he avoided that as much as possible.

His way of life didn't help either.

His diversions were hunting, an obsession, and pretty young men, another

obsession.

Right at the start of his reign, he took up with a pretty young Scot, who'd been

his page.

Robert Carr was given the estate of the executed Walter Raleigh, and quickly

became a Viscount and a Privy Councillor.

When Carr decided to wed the married, seventeen -year -old Countess of Ethics,

Who hated her husband, James helped to sort out the divorce.

The Countess's family, the Howards, detested Carr, but realised this was the

best way to get into favour at court.

Carr's close friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, tried to warn him off that

woman, which annoyed the Countess.

So the sweet young couple poisoned Sir Thomas, which opened the door eventually

to the Howards' enemies.

who exposed the murder plot to James, while providing him with another very

beautiful young man, George Villiers, to take Carr's place.

Carr and his wife were sentenced to death, and Villiers, whose legs were

wonderful, became the Duke of Buckingham, and the murderous couple

pardoned.

By the time King James died, aged 58 in 1625,

the King and the Puritans were set on course for a direct collision.

And his son Charles wasn't going to change direction.

The new king was 25 years old.

Gauche, with a nervous stammer, but deeply conscious of his place as God's

anointed ruler of Britain. The new father figure.

And he played the part of absolute ruler as well as he possibly could.

Of course, it was not the part that the Puritan merchants and gentry wanted

played. They refused to grant taxes without being allowed a role in

so Charles tried to manage on the sources of revenue that didn't need

parliamentary approval.

The most celebrated example was when he levied ship money.

An ancient law was unearthed obliging seaports to provide ships in times of

True, there was no war. But there were pirates, weren't there?

In 1634, Charles made his demand and told the ports they could pay cash

ship money. This engraving was published to make people proud of paying up.

And then the next year, he extended the demand to inland communities.

Otherwise, it would be unfair.

It was obvious that if he got away with this, he'd have reinvented taxation

under another name and would never need Parliament at all.

The entire nation had steam coming out of its ears.

One wealthy Buckinghamshire man, John Hamden MP, refused to pay and was hauled

into the court of Exchequer.

Hundreds of people tried to jam into the court to watch.

Of the twelve judges, seven found for the king and five for Hamden.

Since the king had thought he controlled the judiciary, this was a moral victory

for Hamden.

Things were made worse by Charles' actions as head of the church.

He regarded Puritanism as fundamentally seditious, which made many people think

he was really a closet Roman Catholic.

He wasn't.

But he was determined to impose a uniform system of worship which was

high church.

And that simply added to the anger of a growing Puritan class.

And in Scotland, it was met by direct rebellion.

Without the money to hire reliable troops, and with popular hostility in

making life positively dangerous,

Charles had to accept restrictions on his power which were to him intolerable.

In 1641 he agreed Acts of Parliament which took many powers from him,

the right to dissolve Parliament and the right to raise customs duties without

its consent.

In January 1642, In a state of confused desperation, he tried to arrest five

members of the Commons by actually turning up there with armed guards.

He failed, and faced with violent anger in the streets, he fled from London.

In November, the now inevitable civil war began.

People were called upon to choose between their king's determination to

the pretensions of Parliament and Parliament's determination to limit the

of the king.

Most people actually didn't think they wanted to get involved, but the war grew

with a murderous logic of its own and gradually became more bitter and more

inescapable.

It's now reckoned that possibly a quarter of a million people died in

starvation, of disease, as a result of the fighting, out of a population of

about five million.

That's a far higher death rate than in the First World War.

When the war ended in 1646 with the defeat of Charles' forces, an attempt

made to negotiate a settlement, but Charles was a dishonest negotiator,

using this opportunity to try and organise the conquest of England from

and Scotland.

And then, something quite new happened.

In the brief and decisive Second War, the Parliamentary Army developed a

revolutionary will of its own.

When Charles was recaptured in 1647, Parliament tried to disband its forces,

General Fairfax and his men proclaimed that they were not a mere mercenary army

and flatly refused to go home.

Their job wasn't finished.

the revolution had to be completed.

They said it had to be established that the House of Commons was the supreme

authority of England, and the king was... But at the most, the chief public

officer of this kingdom, and accountable to this house.

That was in September 1648.

The Commons said, don't be so silly.

You are exceedingly deceived, for God gives the king his authority.

The army wasn't happy with that.

So it crushed Parliament.

It occupied London, used St Paul's as the cavalry stables, and looted the

Treasury.

45 MPs were arrested, 146 were barred. The rump that remained were in effect

members chosen by the army, who would do what it wanted, which was to put

Charles on trial for treason for levying war against the Parliament and Kingdom

of England.

The Rump Parliament, as people called it, resolved that they could make laws

without the consent of the King or of the House of Lords, and then passed a

setting up a court to try the King.

Charles said that he didn't recognise the court, that someone needed to

to him what authority it possessed.

On 27 January 1649, this court condemned him to death.

Charles was taken to the banqueting house, that theatrical set built by his

father for dramatic presentations in which the scripts were all about the

of royal power.

It was no longer used for those masks.

Charles had commissioned Rubens to make paintings for the ceilings, and they

were too precious to be damaged by candle smoke.

The ideology of the performances had now been put on permanent display by

Rubens. The painting celebrated James's absolute rule, casting out war and

discord, bringing peace, harmony, order and prosperity to a grateful people.

Charles, the small, dignified, stuttering man who'd commissioned the

presided over the reality that flowed from it, was marched out through a

onto a specially constructed platform.

He wore a thick vest so that he would not shiver with cold, which might be

mistaken for terror.

And on that stage he knelt with calm dignity and his head was cut off.

Britain no longer had a king.

A week after the execution, Charles II was proclaimed king in Scotland.

But Charles I's 18 -year -old son wasn't there.

He was in the Netherlands.

He'd fled to France with a group of supporters four years earlier, and his

brief attempt to provide military help to his father in the Second Civil War

been a failure.

His object now was to find a way of recovering his father's throne.

And to hell with that stuff about being an absolute monarch.

He landed in Scotland in 1651 and was prepared to sign up to whatever was

of him, including agreeing to his father's blood guilt and his mother's

and becoming Presbyterian. If that's what it took to be proclaimed king, do

The new English Republic wasn't going to stand for this, of course. The army,

commanded by Cromwell, took over Scotland.

Charles's forces were finally defeated at Worcester.

If he'd been caught, He would probably have been killed.

The story of his escape, disguised as a Worcestershire yokel, became a famous

legend.

At one point he spent all day hiding with a companion in an oak tree while

roundheads searched for him below.

It became a celebrated story in a way that didn't bode well for the Republic.

Charles looked dashing and daring, while the roundheads looked ridiculous,

incompetent and heavy -handed.

After the execution of Charles I, England was a republic.

Look at what happened to the design of the Great Seal, the official mark on

statutes and proclamations.

Here's Charles' seal, the seal of a king.

He canters on horseback with his greyhound running alongside, and the

motto means Charles, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and

Scotland, Defender of the Faith.

After his execution, the new republic was in theory ruled by the House of

Commons, so instead of a king's seal, the great seal was the seal of the House

of Commons.

It shows the Commonwealth, a map of Britain, and on the other side are the

Commons themselves, and the motto simply says, 1651, in the third year of

freedom by God's blessing restored.

In English.

Didn't last, though, because the real power wasn't the House of Commons.

It was the army.

For a while, the army was too busy to take much notice of England.

It was occupied with the destruction of Ireland, where a large part of the

population were irredeemably loyal to Catholicism and the monarchy.

But when it finally turned round and looked at England, it found that there

still hadn't been a thoroughgoing Puritan revolution.

So, in 1653, Cromwell, the army's most powerful general, cleared the commons at

sword point and installed a new parliament, which he thought would be

capable of bringing about a revolutionary transformation of society.

His own Chamber of Righteous Puritans, the so -called nominated parliament,

turned out to be no more to his liking, and he dismissed that too, installing

himself as the Lord Protector.

And the great seal was now his own. It shows Oliver Cromwell on horseback, just

like Charles, but stepping out very stately rather than cantering with a

greyhound.

And the motto says, By the grace of God, the Republic of England, Scotland and

Ireland, and the protector Oliver, in Latin.

In what sense was this a republic?

However unwillingly, and he kept protesting his unwillingness, Cromwell

driven by his own belief in the divine right of revolution to run the country

a militarized kingdom for Puritan saints.

There were now eleven districts, each run not by the people, but by major

generals.

These military ayatollahs collected taxes, ran the courts, and controlled

morality.

Theatres were closed along with brothels and gambling dens.

Horse racing and cockfights were banned.

Everyone had to go to church, stay sober and morally upright.

Pagan festivities, like Christmas, were banned.

Mince pies were forbidden.

Oh, it must have been great.

In 1656, a newly elected parliament made it clear they wanted to return to the

old constitution.

They reopened the House of Lords and offered Cromwell the title of king.

He seriously considered it, and although he turned it down, perhaps because the

army would have turned against him, two years later, on his deathbed, he

nominated his eldest surviving son as his successor, like any other king.

Very few people cheered Lord Protector Richard Cromwell.

Who was he?

Not crowned, not acclaimed, not the leader of an army.

People called him Tumble Down Dick, and that's pretty much what happened.

Early in 1660, one of his father's commanders, General Monk, seized London

summoned a special parliament to invite Charles II to return to the throne.

If you're going to have a king, it might as well be one with the right

credentials.

Tumble Down Dick became a private citizen. He changed his name and became

lodger in Cheshunt.

Thirty years later, he wrote to his daughter that his safety was to be

quiet, and silent.

He would have made a good constitutional monarch.

But while the English may not have been quite sure what they did want, they now

knew exactly what they didn't want.

Anything run by soldiers or Puritans.

No matter what else would happen in the world, England would never again let a

military man have any political power.

And a deep and abiding suspicion had been created of anyone who looks like a

revolutionary or a religious enthusiast.

Actually, this explains a lot about English history.

Most countries were at some time in the last 300 years infected by revolutionary

fervour or ideological passion.

But England, it seems...

Has been vaccinated.

It's been pretty much immune to political feverishness.

Still is, I think.

Charles was really a very popular king. His manner was light and easy, his court

dissolute and cheerful, his sexual enthusiasms generous and very, very

unpuritan.

As those great historians Sellers and Yateman put it in 1066 and all that, not

so much a king, more a monarch.

The years since his father's execution were called the interregnum, and the

was to pretend that nothing much had really happened.

The parliamentary records for those years were torn up.

An act of parliament gave the new king control of the armed forces, and

parliament agreed to give him an inadequate annual revenue.

Ten of the people who'd been involved in the execution and trial of Charles I

were themselves put on trial, and then hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Cromwell and three other military commanders of the Parliamentary Army

put on trial. They didn't put up a very convincing defence, being dead.

Their bodies were dug up. and hung in chains at Tyburn. It was all good,

entertainment, and theatres reopened and maypoles were back in business.

Merry England had been restored.

Charles had given a written promise of pardons, arrears of army pay, and what

was called liberty of tender consciences in religious matters.

He also confirmed land purchases made during the interregnum, which helped

maintain stability, but was a bit of a blow to cavaliers who'd lost their

of their land by being on the wrong side.

In a way, the sense of a new beginning was strengthened by the destruction of

the capital by plague and fire.

Plague was a swift and grotesque disease, which had erupted frequently

but in 1665 it took a firm grip, and killed about 20 % of the city's

London was largely turned into a ghost city as the survivors fled.

The king, who'd moved to Hampton Court, gave £1 ,000 a week to London charity.

And then, London began to burn.

The king returned to the city with his brother James, the Duke of York.

to take personal charge of firefighting in the streets.

Everyone knew that the mayor had been too timid to pull down houses that might

have created firebreaks until he was directly ordered to do so by Charles. It

certainly helped the royal image, though it didn't help London much.

The old, rotting, diseased structure was purified by an inferno that simply

burned the place away as thoroughly as if it had been blasted by a nuclear

weapon, and a lot more cleanly.

And the new city that arose was a classic image of the political

the restored monarchy.

The old medieval structures had gone, but Christopher Wren's plan for a brand

new city of piazzas and arcades was rejected.

That was the sort of Renaissance princely city that existed on the

They were the stages on which state ceremonies could be impressively

by grand leaders not needed here.

Wren was allowed to build a new modern cathedral and a swathe of churches in

which altar, pulpit and congregation are positioned to be equally important, not

too Roman Catholic, not too Puritan.

But the old street plan was retained.

Everyone could rebuild their own place on their own plot, and the narrow

and little alleys of medieval London that still existed in everyone's

re -grew from the ashes.

Even now, neither German bombs nor modern developers have quite destroyed

There mustn't be another fire.

Laws would insist on flat fronts, no overhangs, more brick. But the old city

that had no overall plan, not even a basic map, reappeared with modern

improvements designed not for a new life, but for a better continuation of

old one.

Exactly.

There was a general desire to better continue things as they had once been,

rather than invent something new, or imitate something foreign.

There was one other marker in the rebuilt London that showed what kind of

country this now was.

This fine column.

It marks the site where the fire had begun. It shows the destruction of the

city. There's Charles, surrounded by liberty, genius and science, giving

directions for its restoration.

And there was originally an inscription explaining that the fire had been

deliberately begun by papists.

In order to the carrying on their horrid plot for extirpating the Protestant

religion and our English liberty, and the introducing popery and slavery.

It was nonsense.

But a French watchmaker was hanged for his part in the non -existent plot.

Robert Hubert.

He wasn't in London when it happened.

There was a pathological fear of papists.

Awkward. Charles had a pension from the King of France, given when he'd promised

to convert to Roman Catholicism.

The trick to being a king in this situation was, Charles understood very

not to say exactly what his job was.

There was a parliament, and it was beginning to form parties, one pro

one anti, but parliament didn't actually rule the country.

That was done by the king's ministers, a kind of cabinet government, referred to

as a cabal, which meant that Charles wasn't seen as entirely responsible for

things going wrong, which they quite often did.

The Earl of Rochester wrote a mock epitaph on Charles' bedchamber door.

Here lies our sovereign Lord the King, whose words no man relies on, who never

said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one.

Charles saw it next morning and said, Quite right, my words are my own, but my

acts are the acts of my ministers.

Charles died in 1685, 54 years old.

On his deathbed, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

He had no legitimate child left alive. The next in line to the throne was his

brother James, who was already a Roman Catholic.

This really wasn't going to work.

The restoration of the monarchy had obviously not been welcomed by everyone.

the South West especially, Puritan religious feeling remained strong and

suspicious, especially with a Roman Catholic king.

Charles II had an illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was a Protestant.

Rumours began to spread that he was actually legitimate, the true heir to

throne.

Monmouth came over from the Low Countries and began a rising in the

where he was proclaimed King Monmouth.

The rebellion was crushed.

James, determined to make an example of the rebels, ordered the arrest and

punishment of everyone involved.

At each centre, Dorchester, Taunton, Exeter, Bristol, Wells, people were

up for a special court known as the Bloody Assize.

punishing not just rebels, but anyone who was accused of even helping the

wounded.

Around 230 people were executed, some hanged, drawn and quartered, and about

850 were sent to labour in the West Indies for ten years, and many more, of

course, were fined and had property confiscated.

And James did not disband the army that had been formed to put down the rebels.

England had a standing army again, just as it had under Cromwell.

And he appointed Roman Catholic officers to run it.

People began to murmur.

And when the House of Lords expressed discontent, he dissolved Parliament.

And as he continued to appoint Roman Catholics to public and church offices,

Public support began to ebb away from him.

At his instigation, for instance, all the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford,

were dismissed, and the college was turned into a Catholic seminary.

James had two daughters, who were both Protestants. The elder girl, Mary, was

married to William of Orange, ruler of the Dutch, a Protestant head of state.

The heir to the throne would reverse James's whole policy.

But... Early in 1688, James's queen gave birth to a son who would be raised as a

Catholic. This was, he thought, excellent news. It made him more secure.

He was wrong.

It sealed his fate.

Well, that and the fact that he seemed to be preparing for a joint war with

Catholic France against the Protestant Dutch.

And now it became evident that the Civil War really had changed the place of the

king in England.

He ruled by permission of Parliament, and Parliament wasn't going to put up

this one.

A group of leading members of Parliament sent a secret invitation to William of

Orrin to save the country from a Catholic takeover by bringing them

assistance.

William brought over a fleet carrying a large professional army.

James tried to block it with his own fleet, but the winds were against him.

and William landed unopposed in November 1688 at Torbay.

The West Country had its own score to settle with James.

And James simply panicked.

The army wasn't behind him. Parliament wasn't. London wasn't. He was going the

same way as Tumble Down Dick.

In the middle of the night, he scurried out of Whitehall Palace by a secret

passage. He got down to Sheerness, throwing the great seal into the Thames

the way. Ha! That'll fox him!

It didn't fox anyone.

He was captured by local fishermen.

Eventually, William gave him permission to go to France.

And no one had the faintest idea what to do next.

William hadn't come to depose James, but to give military backing to Parliament

in their quarrel with him.

James had quite obviously quit, abdicated, gone, taking his son with

England, having failed to be a republic, had failed to be a monarchy.

It was a bit of a puzzler.

Perhaps William should declare himself king by right of conquest.

He didn't think so.

Parliament wanted Mary to take the crown, James's daughter, after all.

But she insisted that her husband was boss, and he didn't intend to play the

Duke of Edinburgh role, two paces behind the ruling lady.

This short, stooping, asthmatic man with bad teeth was tough and shrewd.

He was himself a grandson of Charles I, and wouldn't make a humble consort.

In the end, a deal was struck. They would both be sovereigns, Mr.

and Mrs.

King and Queen, by the invitation of Parliament.

And they had to sign up to some basic rules.

No standing army unless Parliament agreed to it. No raising of money

Parliament's approval. No royal power to lay down the law. The king and queen

couldn't appoint or punish judges.

They couldn't make war without Parliament's consent, and Parliament

who could have the crown.

And he wouldn't be a Roman Catholic.

All the questions posed by the Civil War were finally answered, and it was

called the Glorious Revolution, because in the end, the whole basis of royal

power was redefined without anyone being killed at all.

Except in Ireland, of course.

James, with French backing, decided to make a comeback through Ireland. It was,

after all, one part of Britain where a Catholic king could expect some

enthusiasm.

Protestant settlers had been brought into Ulster, and they held Londonderry

Enniskillen against the Catholic regiments.

Eventually, in 1690, there was a showdown between William's Anglo -Dutch

army and James's Franco -Irish one at the River Boyne.

James was beaten.

in a battle which has cast a grotesquely long shadow over Ulster. The annual

celebration there of the Protestant victory has never lost its 17th century

passion. The irony is that this was not a religious war at all. It was a war to

contain the ambitions of France, and the Pope was actually firmly on the side of

William of Orange.

The Vatican was more anti -French than it was anti -Protestant.

The Orange men at the Battle of the Boyne were actually fighting for the

well as King Billy.

And Billy, of course, was not exactly English.

His native tongue was Dutch.

William, a serious man, ended up spending much of his time on the

in effect, Mary did become the sovereign of England.

But at the end of 1694, she died of smallpox.

England was now in effect ruled by an oligarchy through Parliament. The King

a role, but by no means a commanding one.

Part of that role, if he saw it, was to push forward religious tolerance in a

fundamentally intolerant country.

Another part was to smash the French, who were obviously a danger to everyone

and everything.

Tolerance does have its limits.

At his death in 1702, the question of the succession had already been agreed

settled. The crown passed to Mary's sister Anne.

Anne was married, as Mary had been, to a foreign prince, but her husband, Prince

George of Denmark, was no William of Orange.

He was a lazy alcoholic, and while Anne was willing to let him be naturalized as

an Englishman and notional head of the army and navy, she was queen and he was

subject.

No married queen had ever ruled alone before Anne, and she played it very

regally. She was very keen on the ceremonial and quasi -magical position

royalty, holding ceremonies where she touched people with scrofula, swollen

glands from tuberculosis.

It was called the king's evil, and the power to cure it was supposedly the

magical sign of true royalty.

She was the last monarch to try it.

Kings had male favourites, and had female favourites.

The first and closest was Sarah Churchill, the wife of the Duke of

They called each other by pet names.

The Queen was Mrs. Freeman.

Sarah was Mrs. Morley.

Mrs. Morley's husband was England's leading military commander and the

of a stunning victory at the Battle of Blenheim that placed England in a

dominant position in Europe.

But England's Queen did not decide who to fight or when to fight or how to

fight. Politics was no longer really her business.

Even when in 1707 England and Scotland were formally and permanently united by

the Act of Union, it was not Anne's doing, but Parliament's.

Anne did, it was true, refuse to sign one Act of Parliament at around that

but it was a very minor technical issue, not a real challenge to the power of

the politicians.

Her life was spent more playing cards, chatting, being ill, and having nineteen

pregnancies.

These pregnancies were watched with fascination by an elderly lady in

Sophia, the Electress Duchess of Brunswick -Lüneburg.

She was James I's granddaughter, and because there were so few Protestants of

the blood royal left alive, she was, by act of Parliament, next in line to the

throne, if Anne died childless, and if she lived long enough.

One by one Anne's pregnancies came and went.

Fourteen miscarriages and stillbirths. Five live births. But by the time Anne

was widowed in 1708, all of them were dead.

Sophia, aged 78, now just had to outlive the 43 -year -old Anne to become

Queen of England.

Anne was a thick woman.

Sophia was tough as an old boot. She knew she could do it.

But in 1714, Sophia received an outrageous letter from Anne.

Anne had somehow got the impression that Sophia was going to secretly send her

son George to England in some kind of plot, and she told Sophia that would not

be allowed.

Sophia, now 84, was shocked, and the shock killed her, just nine weeks before

Queen Anne died.

Sophia had failed, but her son George would now be king.

In theory, a very weak constitutional monarch.

But that hardly explains why 65 years later, Englishmen launched a new war

against royal tyranny and thousands were killed.

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think.

It's a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of heroism

and cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies and triumph.

And it's also quite unlike the history of other countries' royalty. The thing

about the kings and queens of England is that they're totally different from

anywhere else, which probably explains why they're still in business, when

almost everywhere else they've either been given the chop or have stopped

regal. This programme looks at England's monarchs from the death of Queen Anne

to the accession of Victoria.

Well, Britain's monarchs, actually.

And if you look at Europe at the start of this story in 1714, you'll see just

what I mean.

A European king is an absolute ruler.

Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Philip V of Spain, Frederick William of Prussia, all

men of unlimited power.

It's not like that in Britain.

Queen Anne has died.

There are no Protestant Stuarts left.

The Protestant line to the English throne now passes through James's

granddaughter, Sophia, who had married a German prince with the title of Elector

of Hanover, and then from her to her son, George Louis, who's inherited that

antiquated title.

Into one quarter of the royal coat of arms pops the amazingly complicated

of a 54 -year -old German princeling.

and when he comes to England for his coronation, he knows perfectly well that

he's not going to be anything like those other rulers.

He will be almost powerless, so it really doesn't matter that he can't

word of English.

At the opening of Parliament, King George stood in silence while his words

read by the Lord Chamberlain.

The crown that had belonged to Normans, French Plantagenets, Welsh Tudors and

Scottish Stuarts had now passed to the German Hanoverians.

The new king's son, George Augustus, arrived from Herrenhausen to take his

in the House of Lords as Duke of Rothesay, heir to the throne.

Before leaving Germany, he proudly declared, I have not a drop of blood in

face which is not English.

Rothesay, of course, is a Scottish dukedom.

George Augustus did share one trait with his father's English subjects, a hearty

dislike of King George, and for the same reason.

Twenty years before George became King of England, something very mysterious

happened to his wife's best friend, the dashing Count Königsmark.

His wife, Princess Sophia Dorothea, had come to detest her husband, who spent

his time either engaged in endless European wars or enjoying his various

mistresses.

Koenigsmark tried to help her escape from Hanover. He failed.

The Count simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

Actually, his body was shoved under the floorboards of the princess's dressing

room.

And the princess was banished and imprisoned.

Her son, George Augustus, never forgave his father.

In fact, father -son detestation would be the defining mark of the Hanoverian

dynasty. They thrived on it.

The English weren't too keen on that sort of behaviour either. They might

been more sympathetic if they'd approved of the two mistresses that George

brought with him.

But they called them the Maypole and the Elephant, and decided they were simply

greedy Germans with their snouts in the trough.

And there were Scottish noblemen who thought that with George lacking support

England, this might be an opportunity to hand the throne back to the Stuart

family, and in particular to James II's son.

living in France and known as the Pretender.

The French thought this would be a great idea.

Louis XIV's mistress, Madame de Maintenon, even presented him with a

sung on his accession.

It had originally been written for Louis to celebrate his recovery from a

surgical procedure on his bottom.

She translated it for the man who should, she thought, be James VIII of

and, why not, James III of England.

God save the gracious king.

Long live our noble king.

God save the king.

The song turned out to be a bigger hit than the man.

Jacobite Rising of 1715 was a complete flop.

And after spending a couple of months wandering around the highlands, James

home to France.

George's throne was safe. He spent every winter in Hanover and left the

government of England to his ministers.

His own work was done by a new figure, the prime minister, a politician acting

as a king's substitute. The first man to take on this role was Robert Walpole.

Since Walpole didn't speak German, the pair of them communicated in schoolboy

Latin.

King George died a sudden death in 1727 while in Hanover.

age 67.

His son was living in Richmond, forbidden by the old man to take any

court life, or even to see his own children.

When Walpole came with the news of his father's death, George II appears to

regarded it as a wind -up. That is one big lie!

But the outcast prince was, indeed, now George II, by the grace of God, King of

Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Elector of

Duke of Brunswick -Lüneburg, and Duke of Cella.

When he'd been convinced, he came here to Leicester Square.

At the time it was Leicester House where he'd been running his own court.

And here he was attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who formally

him with his father's will.

royal wills had once been the most powerful documents in the world when

the Conqueror and Henry II died their wills established who would rule after

them George took his father's will and instead of opening it shoved it in his

pocket it was never seen again to the great disappointment of his father's

mistresses George II's wife, Queen Caroline had very firm ideas on what

happen next and her husband was quite obedient

The result was that everyone who'd been hoping for their own promotion in a

changed government was disappointed.

Walpole remained Prime Minister.

He'd promised her that she would get a personal grant of £100 ,000 a year.

Double the offer his opposition came up with, and very little actually changed

at all.

That included the traditional hostility between anyone called King George and

his son.

The son in question was now, of course, the son of George II, Prince Frederick.

According to Queen Caroline, he was...

She

would have said it in German.

George agreed with the Queen and refused to allow Frederick to marry Princess

Wilhelmina of Prussia on the entirely sensible grounds that...

Prince Frederick's view of his father was, by contrast, quite balanced and

objective.

He's an obstinate, self -indulgent, miserly Martinette with an insatiable

appetite.

Obstinate? Yes.

Self -indulgent? A fair point.

Miserly?

Well, he had slashed Frederick's allowance to make him less of a social

Martinette? Well, certainly a man of relentless and determined regular

And the sexual appetite?

We assume that it is right.

For instance, he began seriously lusting after the beautiful young wife of the

Count of Valmorden when he met her in Hanover in 1735, and he told the Queen

that, You must love Valmorden, for she loves me.

The popular view of the King was that he was a randy buffoon.

He seems to have been flattered by the jokes about his sexual efforts.

As his father had once done, Frederick ran his own alternative court, which was

far more popular than the king's. King George II didn't like that.

My God, popularity always makes me sick, but this makes me vomit.

The pair of them even patronized rival operatic outfits. The king and his

entourage went to see Handel at the Haymarket.

Handel had written George's coronation anthems. His music was grand and

glorious. altogether suitable for magnifying the greatness of a self

royal personage.

The prince and his crowd

stayed away. They went instead to the Theatre Royal in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

That was where opera was being transformed into popular musical

The biggest hit was The Beggar's Opera, a vigorous tale of the criminal classes

which lots of people said was intended as a satire on the court and Walpole's

government. When you sensual the age, be cautious and faithless, the courteous

offended should be.

If you mention vice or bribe, tits or pats to all the tribe, each cries, that

was levelled at me.

It was all very entertaining, watching royalty playing out their family

quarrels, but they were not quite reduced to the level of powerless

King George was a fighting man, like his father, head of the army, and very much

engaged in the quarrels between the rulers of continental Europe.

Walpole tried hard to keep him out of wars, but in 1739 the king got his way,

and England went to war with Spain.

This was the start of a steadily growing involvement in the power struggle

between France, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire.

Its culmination for George came in June 1743.

He found himself under attack by the French at a German village called

Dettingen. His horse bolted, but George stood in front of his troops, waved his

sword, and made a rather ponderous, but actually rather brave little speech.

Now, boys, now for the honour of England.

And so

he became the last English king to lead his troops in battle.

It was a fierce fight, and George emerged a bit of a hero.

But he didn't rule the country.

Governments and ministers came and went not because he wanted them, but because

Parliament wanted them.

In fact, George called himself a prisoner on the throne.

In 1745, he played no part in the battles of Prestonpans or Culloden,

far more important to the throne than the Battle of Dettingen.

After all...

They were battles for the throne itself.

Bonnie Prince Charlie to his supporters, Charles Casimir was 25 years old, pale,

thin, romantic and brave, and he decided that George was so unpopular it would

be a doddle to take over.

He turned up at his own expense in the Hebrides and some of the Scottish clans.

Most of them responded, but out of a combination of loyalty and desperation

rather than conviction.

But things went rather well for the rebels. They were enthusiastically

into Edinburgh and roundly defeated the government army at Prestonpans.

The news created a passion of patriotism when it reached London. The city might

have lampooned the court and sneered at it, but this was different.

That evening the king was visiting the theatre, the King's Theatre, Drury Lane,

and the orchestra struck up a tune which they'd just got hold of.

Long live our noble king.

God save the king.

The audience loved it.

None of them knew that it had been the old Pretender's music, or the King of

France's. The song had changed sides and became the national anthem.

Actually, it became everybody's anthem at one time or another.

Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Swiss, Liechtensteiners, Swedes, Danes and

Americans have all swelled with patriotic pride to exactly the same

But when God Save the King became London's big hit, it was because no one

see how the king would be saved any other way.

Marshall Wade, the best officer in the government army, said that Scotland was

lost and England would fall prey to the first comer.

Lord, grant that martial weight may by thy mighty

aid victory bring.

May his sedition hush, and like a

torrent rush, rebellious God to crush, God save

the King.

The rebels took Manchester, then Derby. London trembled, but not as much as the

Klansmen. They marched, expecting England to rise in their support and the

French to invade.

Instead, they had no support at all.

Most fundamentally, they realized that the English would never accept a Roman

Catholic king.

They'd outplanked a large English army, but it was now on their tail, and

another was coming up from London.

So, back they went.

And the clansmen were finally slaughtered in their thousands at

April 1746.

Charles hid out for months in the Scottish island, hunted through the

by troops and with a price on his head, but protected by tribal loyalties until

he finally escaped back to France.

And the clan culture of the highlands was systematically and ruthlessly

extirpated. Clans were dispersed, their leaders imprisoned or executed, plaid

and weaponry and bagpipes were banned.

The would -be Charles III made a bizarre secret return to England in 1750, where

he converted to Protestantism and expected this would encourage his

to have more hope.

They were more impressed by his degree of attachment to the bottle, not so much

the king over the water as the king under the table.

King George was in no danger now.

George also found his other great enemy removed. His son Frederick died in 1751.

He'd been hit hard in the stomach by a tennis ball, and the resulting abdominal

ulcer burst and killed him.

The new heir to the throne was a twelve -year -old child, Frederick's son,

George.

But the great problems of the kingdom were outside the king's grasp.

His country was now a great imperial trading power, with huge involvement in

India, the East Indies, North America, and the Mediterranean.

So was France.

At the same time, continental Europe was constantly boiling over into war, and

Hanover was in the middle of that.

In 1756, the great powers finally locked horns in a do -or -die struggle that

would girdle the whole world.

This would become the Seven Years' War. It was truly the First World War.

Britain fought in the name of its king, but that king now neither directed

policy nor took part in the battles.

A new world.

In fact, affairs were so far out of the king's control that when he dismissed

ministers he didn't like, they came right back again.

So far as the English were concerned, this was just how things ought to be.

Englishmen. were entitled to liberty.

The despots were on the other side, Catholic France and Austria.

Their whole life, commerce, industry, and fighting force was directed by royal

tyrants who ruled over starving and powerless peasants.

And on the other side, Protestant Britain, whose commerce was run by men

business, whose industry was directed by free tradesmen, whose army and navy

were run by heroes and manned by proud free men.

and whose court was the centre of society, not of autocratic power.

And that was how many of the British really did see it.

Of course, they were also fighting on the side of despotic Prussia, but that

a minor detail.

The general perception was that this was a war of free Britons against European

despots. Poor George died at the height of the war in 1760, and it didn't matter

at all.

His grandson, now George III, was twenty -two years old.

He had been brought up by his mother, a German princess, in her imitation of the

very deferential court of Hanover.

He learned the European idea of what a king should be, an enlightened despot

whose power was absolute and was to be used for the benefit of mankind.

This was, of course, very far from the English notion of kingship.

in which the king was the leading figure in society, but whose power was

entirely controlled by Parliament.

He immediately set to work as a bothy, quick -speaking, managerial king,

deliberately fogish.

I will have no innovations in my time. What? What?

He read widely. He was fascinated by machinery and agriculture.

He was a man delighted by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

and he was determined to restore the crown to what he saw as its proper

position, a position abandoned, in his view, by Georges I and II.

Unlike them, he had been born in England, and spoke good English, even if

grasp of grammar was ropey, and he had no old or young pretender to challenge

him.

At the opening of his first Parliament he declared, Born and educated in this

country, I glory in the name of Britain.

Parliament was controlled by one party, the Whigs, effectively an oligarchy of

rich men who ran the country by a system of bribery, patronage and nepotism.

George felt that it was his job to improve matters.

And so began the most catastrophic reign since James II.

If it hadn't been for George III's attempt to turn back the clock, the

inhabitants of New York might still be using British passports.

and the inhabitants of Los Angeles and Miami, Spanish ones.

Now there's a thought.

To break the power of the Whigs, he set about creating what was almost his own

political party, a group of MPs known as the King's Friends.

He took back the power of distributing positions and favours from the

and did it himself, so he soon built up a collection of political dependents.

His first objective was to bring an end to the war.

He didn't at all share the anti -French views of the Whig Prime Minister,

William Pitt.

It took a lot of political manipulation, but in 1763, with Pitt removed from

power, a peace treaty was signed.

By this stage, the war had actually been won. Pitt's policies had resulted in

Britain becoming the dominant colonial power in the world.

Britain was more or less undisputed ruler of North America, India, the

Caribbean, and much besides.

And George took the credit, the glory, and tried to take control.

At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the King of England ruled over

of the world than any man since Genghis Khan, an empire about five times larger

than Rome.

Of course, he wasn't in the position of an Asiatic tyrant, or even your common

or garden European despot. His control would have to be through Parliament.

His power was limited to choosing ministers, and even that wouldn't work

Parliament and the country wouldn't stomach him, as George kept finding out.

His solution was to do all he could to increase his own influence in

in effect get stuck right into political intrigues.

Since it was illegal to report parliamentary debates, people became

suspicious of what was going on.

He spent huge sums on trying to influence elections, and would even

go out canvassing. On one occasion, for instance, bustling into a draper's shop,

saying, the Queen wants a gown, wants a gown, announcing who to vote for, and

rushing out again.

And since George was closely engaged in politics, people naturally blamed him

personally when things went wrong.

When Parliament rejected a bill that would have helped the Spitalfields

the weavers marched off to find the King at Wimbledon.

Shade for the peasants' revolt, George listened to their complaints and

persuaded them to go back home.

But when they realised he wasn't going to help, they rioted and he personally

ordered out the troops. He said he would put himself at the head of the army or

do anything else to save his country.

He also had a hand in creating the notorious Stamp Act of 1765, which tried

make the English colonists in America pay a tax on paper.

This was the moment at which the whole language of politics began to change.

One Virginia colonist declared, Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell,

made George III profit from their example.

The Cromwellian revolution of the previous century had certainly been

the connection between taxation and liberty.

The issue now was that the thirteen English colonies in America had their

governments, run by their own local oligarchies, and raising their own

The idea that they could be taxed by the oligarchy in London, headed by the

king, was totally outrageous.

They would have no way to influence what was done or what they had to pay.

Colonists who supported the government were threatened by their compatriots.

Some were tarred and feathered. And by the time the Act came into effect, there

wasn't a single person who'd accepted the job of Commissioner to collect the

tax. It had to be repealed.

There was similar alarm in England, as, in his attempt to control Parliament,

George arrested his leading critic there, John Wilkes.

Mobs rioted in the name of Wilkes and Liberty and threatened the King.

Wilkes was released and it was established that there was a legal right

report and criticise what happened in Parliament.

But by 1770 he had created the political system he wanted. The political parties

had collapsed and he had a docile chief minister, Lord North, with a

parliamentary majority through whom he could run things the way he thought they

should be.

George liked running things.

Popularly known as Farmer George, he took a very close interest in modern

farming methods, developing animal breeds and new crops.

These were the same modern farming methods which, by enclosing common lands

creating large self -contained farms, were breaking up village communities all

over England and creating a new class of half -starved, landless wage labourers.

Bad harvest didn't help, nor did a collapse in trade.

The colonists in America were showing their anger by refusing to import

from Britain.

Lord North decided the best thing to do was repeal all the taxes on them except

for a symbolic tax on tea.

Three years later, he arranged another act of Parliament to try to help the

India Company sell more tea in America, and radicals in Boston retaliated with a

symbolic tea party.

at which men dressed as Native Americans dumped the tea in the harbour.

The reaction in England, stirred by the popular press, was that the colonists

must be punished.

George certainly shared that view.

Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.

Misunderstanding the strength of feeling and of organization against them, the

government tried to use too little force and triggered a full -scale rebellion.

The rebel colonists proclaimed their independence in 1776, and with the

of a large part of popular opinion in England, George was determined to fight

them and crush them.

The result, as many less warlike Englishmen had been warning, was

England. Even Lord North wanted out, but George was in charge.

The American Revolutionary War became a campaign not against unjust government

or English rule, but against the very principle of monarchic government.

George's determination to be active in government and place himself at the

of politics created a new republican movement, a language in which to attack

rule of kings.

The Peace of Versailles in 1783 forced Britain to recognize the United States

America. Six years later...

Their host at Versailles, Louis XVI of France, was himself called on by a

revolutionary crowd who carried him off and set up their own republic.

The process of destroying monarchy was underway.

Did George understand what he'd done?

He certainly fretted about the American disaster, and perhaps it was his own

sense of failure that made him display signs of mental disturbance in 1788.

talking incessantly and behaving oddly.

His doctor thought making him bleed would help.

When that failed, the Prince of Wales took over the treatment.

The Prince of Wales was 26 years old, a dashing, if rather fat, man about town,

and in the grand tradition of their Hanoverian ancestors, King George and

son hated each other.

The prince lived in the house bought for his mother, the Duke of Buckingham's

magnificent home near St James's Park.

It was still called Buckingham House.

He liked it so much he eventually built a rather dull palace round it.

When he came of age, he'd set up his home in Clarence House, taken his seat

the House of Lords, and set about being a thorn in Daddy's flesh, partly by

opposing his father's ministers, and partly by his wildly extravagant social

life. in the course of which he secretly married a glamorous widow, Mrs.

Fitzherbert, after a passionate wooing process that included theatrically

stabbing himself to safely produce as much blood as possible.

The marriage was illegal.

He wasn't allowed to wed without the king's consent.

It was also significant that the lady was a Roman Catholic.

In 1780, anti -Catholic rioters stirred up by Lord George Gordon had taken over

London for a week.

Eventually dispersed by troops on the king's orders, the Gordon riots ended

290 people dead and 25 ringleaders hanged, not, of course, Lord George.

Prinny, as his friends called him, spent his time in gambling clubs, in the

company of dandies like Bo Brummel, and put much energy into building the

bizarre and spectacular pavilion in Brighton.

That's where he was when he heard that the king was mentally ill, and he

off to Windsor to take over.

28 years old, he was going to be regent.

When the king saw his son, he physically attacked him.

He threw Prinny against a wall.

The poor boy burst into tears.

There was then a huge political battle over what powers the regent would be

allowed to have, his own bunch of politicians led by Fox on one side and

king's led by Pitt on the other.

Fox's supporters saw Pitt as a sort of fungus with as many arms as an octopus,

growing on and taking over the royal dunghill.

And the Prince of Wales brought in his own physician to treat the king or

torture him.

The royal physicians blistered the king's forehead to draw the poison out

brain, forced him to take useless drugs, ordering servants to sit on the king

when he resisted, and refused to let him have a fire in his room during the

terribly cold winter.

All this when the country was anticipating French invasion and radical

revolution, and volunteer regiments were being formed as a desperate line of

defence. Very desperate.

Finally, new physicians were brought in who gave the king gentler treatment, and

he recovered.

In 1801, before the arguments over how the regency would function had been

resolved, the king was back in charge.

But not in the way he had been.

The American defeat had been a personal disaster for him and dramatically

weakened his political position.

In an effort to reassert it, he'd installed a 24 -year -old as Prime

and Chancellor of the Exchequer, thinking that here, at least, was a

he could control.

But William Pitt's son, Pitt the Younger, was shrewd, capable, and fully

understood that George depended on him, so he held all the cards.

And it was Pitt who had to decide how to deal with the spread of revolutionary

Republican ideas from America and France into England.

The same ideas that had been voiced in America about no taxation without

representation were being heard in England, where huge new manufacturing

had grown up which had no Member of Parliament.

Three years after the French Revolution, political reform societies called

corresponding societies were founded in England.

Riots were breaking out in the Midlands, in East Anglia, in Scotland.

Attempts were made to kill the king.

He was booed and stoned in London.

And the French legislature passed a fraternal decree offering aid to all

people seeking to throw off the chains of tyranny.

The king himself was actually quite popular. He was generally seen as a kind

-hearted, slightly bufferish sort of a person, but he was still ultimately in

charge of what was going on.

And when even Pitt insisted that Catholics would have to be allowed the

rights as Protestants and permitted to stand for Parliament, George forced him

to resign.

The issue had come to the fore because of Ireland.

If England had some potential revolutionaries, how many more had

a land where an oppressed Catholic majority were ruled by imported

colonists, and an ideal staging post for a French invasion.

In 1801, Ireland was incorporated into Great Britain, creating the United

Kingdom. It was an attempt to make Ireland more secure.

The fact that at the same time the king formally abdicated his meaningless title

of King of France shows exactly where the threat was coming from.

But if Ireland was to be truly united with England, there would have to be

Catholic emancipation.

And King George wouldn't have it.

Whatever might have happened could not have been worse than what did.

Ireland still bleeds now.

The shadow of George III lies over the history of the world more darkly than

most people realize.

As with the American disaster, it seems as though one part of his mind was

determined to make him feel the full weight of his responsibility, and once

his mental state degenerated.

He made a slow recovery, enough to sack his ministers in 1805 when they tried to

lift the restrictions on Catholics becoming military officers, but he was

becoming blind and infirm, and in 1810 his mind finally collapsed.

No one's quite sure what was wrong with him, but a strain of hereditary insanity

had run through the royal family ever since Henry V's marriage to Catherine de

Valois.

Blind and deaf, suffering from abdominal pains and dementia, his body lived on,

but his reign was over.

Prinny took over at last.

By this time, European monarchy had been transformed.

The enlightened despots had fallen.

Napoleon's empire had swallowed them up, replacing them with dictators from his

own family or under his control.

Even Hanover had been overwhelmed.

The Tsar still survived, but Napoleon was about to invade Russia. Britain

virtually alone.

And in Britain, the ancient principle of the royal prerogative was now in the

fat, clammy hand of a gambling, massively indebted roly -poly dandy with

passion for show and splendour.

But the military genius of Wellington and Nelson didn't need a king to guide

so under his uninspiring, even ridiculous, leadership, Napoleon was

the decrowned heads of Europe were brushed down and put back on their

Why, the ruler of the United Kingdom even became king of Hanover.

Prinny had been against everything his father stood for, but now he was in

power, he suddenly adopted all his father's political principles,

determined opposition to letting Catholics have civil rights and to any

of Parliament.

Elections were basically a farce, with some MPs representing constituencies

almost no voters and the vast majority of people unrepresented.

The king thought this was fine.

Lots of other people didn't.

And this became a desperate issue in the years after the Napoleonic War.

There were thousands of unemployed ex -soldiers. There was an agricultural

depression made worse by the terrible summer of 1816.

And there was increasing unemployment due to the use of new machinery.

And the Prince of Wales' appetite for luxurious silverware and furniture grew

mountainous.

Graffiti appeared saying, Death or the Regent's Head.

At the end of 1816, there was a full -scale riot in London aimed at setting

radical government.

The next month, the Prince Regent's carriage was mobbed on his way to open

Parliament.

The grim apparatus of repression was revived.

The death penalty was restored for unlicensed public meetings.

Printers of seditious material were to be seized.

There was plenty of seditious material.

The Prince Regent was a laughing stock. The flood of caricatures and satires was

unstoppable.

His extravagance was spectacular.

A few years earlier, the government had agreed to clear his huge debts on

condition that he made a legal marriage.

The victim selected was his cousin, Carolina Brunswick, a charming,

and unassuming young lady who was also a bit of an exhibitionist.

He spent the wedding night drunk.

After nine months to the day, Caroline gave birth to a daughter, but by then

husband had long abandoned her.

He devoted himself to the pursuit of motherly mistresses, and treated

with a cold brutality which really defined his personal style.

He was more of a pasha than a regent, and the Brighton Pavilion made that

declaration loud and clear.

George III finally died in 1820, having notionally reigned for 60 years, the

longest reign until Victoria.

And he was 81, the longest life of any British ruler so far.

Prinny was now king.

His wife, Caroline, now decided to come to England from her exile on the

continent and take her place at her husband's coronation.

An immediate attempt was made to pass an Act of Parliament divorcing the royal

couple, but it was dangerously unpopular and had to be abandoned.

She turned up for the coronation at Westminster Abbey, but the door was

in her face.

The coronation, fabulously expensive, was performed in complete privacy.

She went away broken -hearted and died less than three weeks later. Her body

to be returned to Brunswick for burial.

The king, nervous of a riot, insisted that the coffin should not be

through the city of London, but it was seized by Londoners who staged their own

funeral procession with it and were gunned down by the houseguards at Hyde

Corner.

Afraid of being attacked and afraid of being laughed at because of his great

swollen body, From 1823, King George IV avoided being seen in public.

He even built a tunnel to allow him to get from his rooms in Brighton Pavilion

to the riding school in private.

And, of course, it was said ever since that it connected to his mistress's

house.

It became essential for the government to break the king's opposition to

especially with regard to Catholics.

but he held the power of veto. The arguments went on hour after hour, day

day, with the king becoming more enraged and more ill, until finally he broke.

By February of 1830 he was partially blind and raving, convinced that he'd

commanded a division at Waterloo and ridden a winning race at Goodwood.

And so he died, and they found fifty years of coats, boots, and pantaloons,

Countless bundles of women's love letters, of women's gloves, of locks of

many mistress's hair.

Why on earth did Britain need a king? What use was he to man or beast?

Why in heaven's name wasn't there a revolution?

The truth is no one knows.

Some historians think it was a result of Methodism becoming popular, diverting

poorer people's energy from politics into religion.

Some think it was patriotism in the age of empire, that king and country was a

slogan that helped people pull together against Napoleon.

But perhaps, given the riots, rebellions and mutinies, it was due more to the

efficiency of the police state and the forcefulness of repression.

And lurking at the back of people's minds was the distant memory of what it

been like when there had been a revolution, the grim rule of Cromwell's

generals, echoed and made more terrible by the vision of the guillotine in

France.

Always keep a hold of NERC for fear of finding something worse.

Despite George's enthusiastic sexual enterprise, he had only produced one

legitimate child, and she died in childbirth.

The heir to the throne was his brother William, who was fifty -four.

He had been sent into the Navy as a young man, where he developed into a

disciplinarian and a stickler for etiquette.

After he left, he took an actress, Mrs. Jordan, as his mistress, had lots of

illegitimate children, and was given to making tactless speeches with not much

intelligence.

He eventually had made a royal marriage to another German Protestant princess,

and Mr. King and Mrs. Queen lived at Bushy to the north of London, like a

ordinary couple.

William insisted that his coronation should only cost a tenth of his

and he was known to give people a lift in his carriage.

All this made him rather popular, but when it came to parliamentary reform, he

turned out to be as resistant as any other Hanoverian king.

By now the popular pressure for changing the voting system into something more

representative was virtually irresistible. Giving more men the vote,

for the new towns and secret ballots.

This would give the commons more power, so the House of Lords was resisting it,

and William sided with them.

By 1832 there seemed a real possibility of civil war or revolution.

It's possible that if the royal family were part of the aristocracy, as in

other country with a king, that would have happened.

But the King and Queen had their family roots in Germany, and there was no

natural alliance between them and the great aristocratic families.

William was weak and was forcefully persuaded to give way, and Britain was

started on the road to democracy.

After the Reform Bill of 1832, with no more rotten boroughs and greatly reduced

scope for electoral corruption,

It was no longer possible for the king to play politics inside Parliament to

same extent. The monarchy would now be forced back into its constitutional box,

and it was no longer sufficiently dangerous to be worth the trouble of a

revolution.

When he died in 1837, William's legitimate children were already dead.

The heir to the throne was the daughter of his brother Edward, a young girl of

18.

She would make a demure and pretty little queen who could leave the

running England to the professionals.

Couldn't she?

The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you

think. It's a fine drama, a thousand years of tales of lust and betrayal, of

heroism and cruelty, of mysteries, murders, tragedies and triumphs.

Oh, you're probably thinking, that applies to medieval kings, all right.

this programme's about the modern monarchy, from Victoria to the home life

our own dear Queen.

And there's not much of that sort of thing going on here.

Oh, really?

Keep watching.

What, you may wonder, did lust have to do with the matronly Queen Victoria?

Well, she was young once, and her husband Prince Albert gave his name to

than just a bridge, a concert hall and a memorial.

No other British royal has a body piercing named after him.

And we can't show you where the ring goes in a Prince Albert, you'll just

to guess.

Kept Victoria happy, nine pilgrims.

And this isn't only a collection of royal trivia for the tabloids.

We can reveal for the first time on television that the present Queen's

grandfather, George V, actually took over the running of the country, secret

personal rule, for a few days in 1931.

He believed it was the only way to save the country from revolution.

Most of the papers relating to this are still hidden.

How much do we really know about what goes on?

In 1867, Walter Badger wrote a book on the British Constitution which said that

it had two parts, the efficient part and the dignified part.

The dignified part was headed by the Queen. It was a piece of theatre whose

purpose was to make people feel loyalty.

The actual power was entirely held by the efficient part, which he said was a

secret committee called the Cabinet.

Everyone believed Baggio's book. The government encouraged people to believe

So did the royal family, then and now.

Well, they would, wouldn't they?

The truth has been rather different.

Obviously, when the 18 -year -old Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she

wasn't in much of a position to try to run the country.

She'd had a rather odd upbringing.

Her father had been a brother of George IV and William IV.

but he died when she was a baby.

Her mother was a straight -laced German princess who was determined that her

daughter should not be part of the disreputable life of the court, or

as her mother thought possible, by one of her terrible uncles who wanted the

throne himself.

She was brought up in isolation in Kensington Palace, which in those days

rather cut off from London.

Her main interest on becoming queen was to finally cut free of her mother and

supervisor and move out of her mother's bedroom.

And when she was nineteen she fell hopelessly, utterly in love with her

cousin, the twenty -year -old younger son of the Duke of Saxe -Coburg -Gotha.

He's excessively handsome, such beautiful eyes.

My heart is quite going.

He certainly tried hard to look good. That notorious ring -piercing, if it did

exist, no one can be quite sure, was attached to a chain to assist in

the line of his breeches.

They married in 1840.

She wasn't hugely popular at the time.

Headstrong, willful.

She actually blocked a change of government because it would have upset

domestic arrangements.

The Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne had given her the wives and daughters of his

own supporters as the ladies of her bedchamber.

When his Whig government fell and Robert Peel came to power, Peel insisted that

the Queen should replace at least some of the ladies so that the court wasn't a

complete one -party state.

Victoria refused.

Peel felt forced to resign, and Melbourne came briefly back to power.

People didn't like what she was doing. They didn't like her.

and they didn't like the stiff German, Prince Albert.

Peel came back to power and refused to grant him much more than half the

allowance Victoria demanded, saying that people were very hard up, which they

were.

The position of the throne seemed pretty shaky. It didn't seem likely that this

would become the most secure and richest monarchy in the world.

How did that happen?

When Victoria came to the throne, All she had as her own was the revenue of

Duchy of Lancaster, £27 ,000 a year.

The Sunday Times rich list for 1990 showed Elizabeth II as being worth £6 .7

billion.

That's nearly £10 billion in today's money. The richest person in the land by

huge margin.

It's true that the latest rich list shows her being worth a mere £250

Has she lost 97 % of her money on the horses?

Did she give it all away to charity?

No. The latest figure is a guess, based on an instruction to the Sunday Times

not to count anything she holds on trust for the nation.

Obviously, she can't sell the crown jewels and pocket the proceeds, but

actually, most rich people hold much of their wealth in trust, yet it's still

treated as theirs, because they have the use of it.

The royal move into profit began when Albert took charge of the royal

He wasn't allowed to be king. There was deep suspicion of him.

But Victoria let him manage her affairs, and he did an astonishing job of it.

The royal household was an incredible Gothic antique.

To clean a window in Buckingham Palace was a job for the Lord Chamberlain's

staff. Unless it was a kitchen or scullery window, then they had to call

Lord Steward.

and neither could touch the outside of the glass which was looked after by the

Office of Woods and Forests.

Laying a fire was the Lord Steward's job, but lighting it, the Lord

Chamberlain's, as their staff were not on good terms, the Queen froze.

Other palace staff were paid for jobs whose very purpose and even existence

been forgotten.

Enter Albert with boiling water and a hatchet. He sorted that lot out and cut

Victoria's costs dramatically.

He had a huge capacity for work and organization, so when he came up with

idea for a great exhibition of the world's arts and industry, no one should

doubted that he could make it happen.

Of course, they did doubt it.

They had no confidence in the exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace, a giant

greenhouse erected by a gardener. And when they realized that thousands would

congregate there, they thought that it would be a rallying point for

revolutionaries.

The opening of the Great Exhibition on May 1, 1851, was a thrilling day for the

nation and for Victoria.

The royal couple began to be viewed with some enthusiasm, and it was quite

understandable that the next year an eccentric miser should leave the Queen

a million pounds in his will.

Albert's influence in government rose visibly, which of course soon put an end

to his popularity.

By 1854 it was generally believed that Albert the Foreigner was a traitor in

league with Russia, forcing loyal ministers out of office.

Crowds gathered round the tower under the impression that Albert and Victoria

had been arrested for treason.

That frenzy died down, but at the back of it were two things that were going to

be permanent problems.

One was that the queen and her consort must have some role in running the

country, but that couldn't be squared with any kind of representative

government. And the other was that people were realizing that the monarch

making a profit, and they didn't like it. The solution was to conceal what was

really happening under a cloak of secrecy, and that cloak is still in

When I was researching a book on the most sensitive part of this story, I

to see some papers that should have been released by the Ministry of Defence.

The then Navy Minister, David Owen, read the file and released it, but the

crucial documents weren't there.

He suggested they would have been treated as the private property of the

and kept in the Royal Archive.

Private. I wasn't allowed in.

Albert's own role was pretty secret. He was in reality acting as King of

England, but that was behind the scenes.

The title he was eventually given in 1857 was just Prince Consort.

When Albert died, Victoria uttered a terrible shriek. She never recovered.

She retired to Scotland and went into what seemed to be everlasting mourning.

She and Albert had built a number of retreats for themselves, Osborne on the

Isle of Wight, Sandringham in Norfolk, and her favourite, Balmoral.

Here she hid for months at a time with the faithful Highland retainer, John

Brown. He was allowed enough familiarity for the Queen to be widely referred to

as Mrs Brown.

Victoria herself could see no reason to take part in public ceremonies like the

opening of Parliament.

She thought that her hidden role as the head of her government, was enough.

But that, of course, led many people to wonder why they had to pay for her

upkeep at all.

She received, as she had done from the start of her reign, £385 ,000 a year

the government.

It was more than she needed.

Her court was nowhere near as expensive as, for instance, George IV's had been.

And without her being visible, many people could see no point in her having

money.

By the 1870s, there was a strong Republican movement expressing itself in

newspapers, large public meetings, and in Parliament.

The nature of the country was changing dramatically.

New industrial cities were darkening the landscape with smoke and soot.

A new kind of society was formed, a society of factory workers and low -paid

artisans, of builders and miners and metal workers.

These were people outside the political world.

with no natural attachments to traditional political structures.

And there were a lot of them.

The anti -royalist head of steam built up every time Parliament was asked for

extra grants to Victoria's children when they came of age or married.

But in fact, it was very probably these children who saved her throne.

No British statesman wanted to see the royal family given its marching orders

when their marriages offered such a useful backdoor into the chancelleries

Europe.

Victoria's eldest daughter was married to the heir to the Kaiser of the new

German Empire, and was a strong and useful influence on her husband, and a

in Bismarck's flesh.

The heir to the British throne, Albert Edward, had married Alexandra, daughter

of the King of Denmark.

and sister of the King of Greece.

The Greek crown had actually been offered to another of Victoria's sons,

The Greeks had sacked their own king and held a national vote on who should get

the throne.

Ninety -five percent of them voted for Alfred, who was at the time an eighteen

-year -old midshipman in the Royal Navy.

The government made him turn it down because they had promised to keep their

hands off Greece. Never mind.

It went as a sort of hand -me -down to the son of England's good friend, the

King of Denmark. And in 1874, Alfred married the daughter of Tsar Alexander

which was jolly useful given the Anglo -Russian competition on the edges of

India.

These were marriages that would produce many, many well -distributed children.

By the time Victoria died in 1901, she had over 90 living descendants.

It was a full -time job just getting them birthday presents.

The rulers of Germany, Greece, Romania, Norway, Russia, Yugoslavia, Spain and

Sweden would all trace their descent from this stout little lady.

There was a downside to all this royal intermarriage. Victoria was a carrier of

haemophilia, the condition that prevents blood from clotting, and the Spanish,

Prussian and Russian royal families were consequently affected by it.

But even if the British government had known about that, they wouldn't have

many tears over it.

As a system for exercising influence abroad, the monarchy was well worth the

money. It also ought to have the advantage at home of inducing people to

loyal to their country even if they detested its government, which was

very useful if you ran that government.

But to sell monarchy to the British public, that monarchy needed rebranding.

Enter, in 1867, a new Tory Prime Minister, Mr Disraeli, just the man to

He flattered, flirted and lured Victoria out of mourning and back to public

life, creating her Empress of India, turning her into the Queen Empress.

Britain was now a world power with an international trade that dwarfed all

others. Its navy dominated the oceans.

and its empire expanded on the simple principle that trade follows the flag,

if the Union Jack is flying in each remote corner of the globe, then other

aren't.

The problem was for a small country with a very small army to rule ever more of

the Earth's surface.

That rule couldn't be maintained by force. It required the consent of the

governed. And the grand theatricality of Disraeli's Victorian imperialism

invited people throughout the empire to take pride in being subjects not of a

bunch of industrialists and politicians, but of a prim and matronly great

sovereign.

Victoria became the logo of the British Empire. Her portrait spread all over the

world, thanks especially to the introduction of postage stamps.

Her statue would appear in virtually every ambitious town and city of the

British Empire.

And where there was no statue, there would certainly be a Victoria Street, or

Victoria Park, or Victoria something.

The whole process came to a glorious climax in her Golden Jubilee of 1887.

The great processions in London of representatives of... Her dominions were

followed by an eruption of ugly public halls, clock towers, fountains and

statues, disfiguring public spaces over about a quarter of the planet.

By the time Victoria died, hardly anyone even remembered that her throne had

once seemed endangered.

And she'd reigned so long, 64 years, that hardly anyone could even remember

other sovereign.

Her death in 1901, 22 days into the new century, seemed portentous. She'd become

synonymous with Britain and its empire, and now Britons would leave the

nineteenth century without the security of the Great Mother Hen.

Victoria would cast a long shadow.

Elizabeth II, coming to the throne 51 years later, would be the first of her

successors who had no personal memory of her.

Her oldest son, Albert Edward, the new King Edward VII, was already 59 years

old.

The funeral of the Queen Empress and Edward's coronation involved a huge

invention of traditions and ceremonies.

And in this atmosphere it's not surprising that Edward was granted an

allowance even greater than Victoria's. A few voices said that it was

unnecessary for the king to have as big an income as Andrew Carnegie, the Bill

Gates of his day, but no one took much notice.

Edward had been given a miserable and oppressive childhood.

Victoria had measured him by the impossible yardstick of her hero

the perfect man, his father.

Naturally, young Bertie had rebelled.

Of course, his first visit to a prostitute shocked his parents deeply.

It happened to be followed by Albert's fatal illness, which Victoria had

inevitably blamed on her wicked son.

She had arranged his marriage shortly afterwards in the hope that domestic

discipline would rein him in.

Princess Alex of Denmark was beautiful, but she was also deaf and dull company.

With nothing much else to do, Bertie had become the living epitome of the life

of the Belle Epoque, a life of champagne drinking, cigar smoking, horse racing,

gambling and entertaining showgirls and pretty married ladies.

He was naturally drawn to the company of outsiders, not just shady characters,

but Jews and Catholics, bankers and foreigners, and he was outspokenly

by the casual racism of the Empire.

Because a man has a black face.

and a different religion than our own. There is no reason why he should be

treated as a brute.

He sat on a commission on working -class housing, and even invited a member of

the working class to stay at Sandringham.

Admittedly, the man in question was an MP, and a fellow member of the

commission, and he had to eat in his bedroom because he didn't have the right

clothes to come down to dinner.

But still... By the time Edward came to the throne, He was a big, fat old

man with a social conscience and a comforting mistress, Alice Keppel, who

understood him perfectly.

Edward saw himself as something like a nursery rhyme monarch, magnificent and

jolly, caring and helpful.

In 1903, completely ignoring his government, he went to France and

negotiations for a treaty that would become the Entente Cordiale, isolating

Germany. He detested his nephew, the Kaiser.

He persuaded the press and then the government to back a treaty which

that if Germany attacked France, Britain would go to war.

So that's what happened in 1914.

He determinedly resisted any increase in democracy in Britain and was a firm

opponent of votes for women.

The crunch over his reactionary views came when Lloyd George planned to

introduce old -age pensions in 1909.

To raise the cash, there would have to be new taxes on income.

The Tory majority in the House of Lords voted down what was called the People's

Budget, and when the Liberal government drew up legislation to take that power

away from the Lords, they voted that down too, obviously.

So the Prime Minister told the King he needed to create about 250 new peers to

swing the vote.

Edward was not enthusiastic.

Would he actually defy the government?

In May 1910, in the middle of the battle, he died.

In 1910, Edward's 44 -year -old son George inherited the throne.

He was the late king's second son.

He'd worked as a commander in the navy, to which he was deeply attached.

But in 1892, his elder brother Clarence had died, and he'd unexpectedly become

heir.

To step into his brother's shoes, he'd left his job and married the woman who'd

been betrothed to Clarence, a relative called Princess Mary of Teck.

He now inherited a fortune worth around 140 million in today's prices.

and a political crisis.

As part of the deal with the government to pass the budget and cut the powers of

the House of Lords, it was agreed that the Crown could stop paying any income

tax. In return, the King would pay for his own trips abroad.

The new constitutional deal drew the teeth of the House of Lords.

Whatever the elected government in the Commons decided to do, it now could do.

The only possible break on its power was now the king. And the question was, of

course, whether he would ever exercise it.

And what would happen if he tried?

At first, the crown was too weak to try. When war began with Germany in 1914,

George was seen, naturally enough, as a German, which he was.

He kept a bit quiet about his courtesy titles of Field Marshal General of the

Prussian Army and Admiral of the Imperial German Navy.

To make himself seem more British and therefore more secure, in July 1917

felt forced to change his family name from Saxe -Coburg -Gotha to Windsor and

stop being a German Prince and Duke of Saxony.

Revolution was a real danger.

Cousin Nicky, the Tsar of Russia, was deposed in February 1917.

The new Russian government asked Britain to give him asylum, and Lloyd George

agreed to it.

But King George was terrified of being associated with a man now labelled

by revolutionaries, so he forced the government to withdraw the offer.

The Bolsheviks took over Russia in October, and Nicholas and his family

slaughtered.

To protect the king's reputation, it was put about that Lloyd George had refused

to rescue them, despite the king's pleading.

Then in November 1918, a German revolution forced the Kaiser, Cousin

abdicate, and Germany gave up the war.

The whole political landscape had been transformed.

There had been six emperors when George was crowned. By 1925, he was the only

one left.

and his world was not exactly safe.

Most of the southern Irish were committed Republicans.

Attempts to hold that country by force were disastrous, and in 1922 the Irish

Free State had come into being.

King George had lost a considerable chunk of his kingdom.

The wealth of the royal family continued to grow, due largely to Queen Mary's

enthusiasm for collecting valuable trinkets at special prices.

The Romanovs hadn't been allowed to join the British royals, but a substantial

chunk of their jewellery did.

People began hiding their treasures if the Queen was coming to call, as she

would hint strongly that she expected to be given them, and sometimes take them

anyway, so that embarrassed aides had to quietly return them later.

In 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became Britain's first Labour Prime Minister.

The old political establishment had been given a kicking.

No one knew where this might lead.

And then came the Wall Street crash of 1929 and financial disaster.

The government needed huge loans, which were conditional on cuts in unemployment

benefit and the pay of public servants and the armed forces.

The Labour cabinet wouldn't do it, and Macdonald went to the King to resign.

George was pretty sure this was a decisive moment.

If these harsh policies were forced through by conservatives, class war

probably break out. Everything, including himself, might very well be

away.

So he refused to accept the resignation.

He persuaded Ramsay MacDonald that it was his patriotic duty to stay on as the

leader of a new coalition government to force through the cuts. That way, they

were more likely to be accepted.

This was an extraordinary exercise of royal power, and it wasn't over yet.

When the cuts were announced in September 1931, the entire Atlantic

on strike.

This was the most powerful military force in the world, and it was gathered

Invergoorne. There was total panic in the Admiralty.

Mutiny! The intelligence services warned that it was a communist plot, and that

the sailors were going to march to London, rallying all the disaffected,

including the police, on the way.

The financial markets went into a tailspin, and the Bank of England was

to stop exchanging pounds for gold, going off the gold standard.

The Admiralty drew up plans to bombard the mutinous fleet from the land and

its own ships.

And the King decided he had to save the Navy and the country. He knew sailors,

they weren't revolutionaries, they just needed to be spoken to in the right way.

In complete secrecy, he took control, appointing a retired Admiral to deal

the situation.

Admiral John Kelly was not appointed by the government or the Admiralty and was

instructed not to report to them.

but directly to King George.

He offered the sailors a deal.

If they sailed back to their home ports, the king would see to it that their

grievances were taken seriously and they would not be punished.

It was a sensible approach, and it worked.

But all evidence of the king's role and Kelly's appointment was hidden.

We're not supposed to know what power royalty can wield.

Of course, the bit about mutineers not being punished... was a lie.

Once the danger was passed, the leaders were identified and quietly removed.

The following year, 1932, King George gave the first Christmas radio message.

He was now a presence in homes throughout his empire.

The empire had changed its form, of course, and in 1931 the Dominions, the

bits of the empire, Canada, Australia and so on, had become legally

of Westminster.

They were the Commonwealth.

and the sovereign was its institutional core.

As part of his program to make the monarchy seem British, and so he hoped

secure, he decreed that his children need not marry partners of royal

This would indeed transform the position of the monarchy, but not in the way he

expected.

In 1936, when George was 70 and dying, His doctor, Lord Dawson, decided to

ensure that the death would not be reported first in the vulgar evening

You've heard of Lord Dawson of Penn.

He's killed any number of men, and that's why we sing, Oh God, save the

from Bertrand, Lord Dawson of Penn.

Lord Dawson met the Times' deadline by giving the King a fatal injection called

a whiz -bang.

George was told he would soon be convalescing in Bognor. His last words

Bugger Bognor.

The Times was told he'd said, How is the Empire?

His successor, his son Edward, was thirty -eight, the poorly educated child

rather dysfunctional parents.

The Queen had been completely distant, and King George famously said, My father

was frightened of his father, I was frightened of my father, and I'm damn

going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.

Edward had escaped by travelling widely, and as the world's most eligible

bachelor enjoyed affairs with a number of married women, culminating in the

of his life, the twice -married, elegant American, Wallis Simpson.

At the time of Edward's succession, the affair was in full swing, and her

husband had resigned himself to a divorce.

The British press completely censored the whole subject, while the rest of the

world was fascinated by it.

Edward insisted that he was going to marry Wallis and make her queen.

The Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury said the country wouldn't

stand for it.

Were they right?

Probably not.

Edward was actually pretty popular.

He wanted to go on the radio and appeal to the nation, but he wasn't allowed to

do that. He was told it would be unconstitutional.

Without a written document, the Constitution is what the government can

with.

They had their reasons.

These went beyond the court gossip that Wallace was said to be a lesbian or a

man engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with Edward.

The crucial issue wasn't even that the head of the church shouldn't marry a

divorcee, or that secret investigators had reported that Wallace Simpson had

other lovers, a car salesman and an Irish peer.

The real reason only came to light in 2002.

Secret documents show that the FBI told the British government that Wallace had

another lover, the German ambassador von Ribbentrop.

In fact, the FBI said she was a Nazi agent.

That was why the government insisted Edward must give her up to keep the

Edward chose love rather than the crown. He abdicated and took Mrs. Simpson to

live in France.

The coronation went ahead, but with his brother Albert sitting on the throne.

Albert was crowned as King George VI.

He was 18 months younger than Edward and completely lacked his brother's social

grace. He stammered, he was shy, but at least he was safely married to Elizabeth

Bowes -Lyon, the daughter of a minor Scottish aristocrat, the first royal to

legally marry a commoner since Henry VIII.

George VI and Queen Elizabeth, that's the woman we remember as Elizabeth the

Queen Mother, refused to allow themselves any doubt as to the outcome

Second World War.

When Buckingham Palace was bombed, the Queen said she was glad.

It meant she could look the East End in the face.

At least it meant the royal couple wouldn't be booed anymore when they

other people's bombed -out homes.

Actually, while they spent their days in London, they retreated for the night to

Windsor, which was considerably safer. Nevertheless, they did have one really

narrow escape.

As the war went on, the royal couple became more and more identified with

Churchill as the spirit of Britain, dogged in their determination to see

defeated. When the victory celebrations came in 1945, it seemed natural that

they should revolve around Buckingham Palace.

By the time of his premature death from smoking in 1952, this shy country

gentleman and his queen had gone a very long way to restoring the monarchy to

its central place in British life.

It had vanished virtually everywhere else.

There had been sixteen monarchies on the continent of Europe when Victoria died.

Now there was only Sweden.

Monarchs were restored to Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark.

but as a pale shadow of the old European royalty.

The new queen, the twenty -five -year -old Elizabeth II, seemed to be a fairy

-tale remnant of a lost world of glamour.

Her coronation was a celebration of pageantry itself,

In a country that was a vast bomb site, four houses out of ten had been damaged

or destroyed.

It was even shown on the new medium of television, though the Archbishop of

Canterbury feared men would watch in pubs without removing their hat.

By her side in the coronation coach rode her husband.

Like Albert, he would never be crowned.

Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was from the Greek and Danish royal house of

Schleswig -Holstein -Sondenburg -Luxburg.

He had no surname.

He was given the name of one of the branches of Elizabeth's family,

There was no question of the Queen becoming a modest suburban sovereign

restored European royals.

George's widow was sure her daughter should be regal and grand.

Royalty required flunkies and castles and palaces and golden coaches.

She herself made do with six cars, three chauffeurs, five chefs, two pages,

three footmen, two dressers, and thirty secretaries, maids, treasurers, and

housekeepers. And she was absolutely dead set against royalty -paying tax.

For a long time this was met with an extraordinary degree of complicity from

governments of the day.

In 1947, when Labour came to power, amid all the nationalisations and the class

war declarations of We are the masters now, had come an agreement that the

government would take over the cost of running Buckingham Palace.

Now the Conservatives said the government would take over the cost of

Train and royal visits abroad.

and freed the Queen from paying tax on property, apart from rates on

and Balmoral.

In Edward Heath's time as Prime Minister, it was officially stated for

time that the Queen pays no tax.

In 1973, she was exempted from the new Companies Bill that could force

shareholders to identify themselves even if they hid behind the names of

nominees.

Her shares are hidden in a company called the Bank of England Nominees,

can only be used by heads of state, and is uniquely exempt from disclosure laws.

And in 1965, when a Labour government introduced capital gains tax, they

declared that the Queen is exempt.

Under these arrangements, immense and unknowable riches were built up. She

for example, six...

Hundred works by Leonardo da Vinci.

We're told these riches are not really hers, because she's not free to sell

them. But most of the royal collection is never publicly displayed.

Why?

Whose interest is being served?

It obviously means the monarchy can put on a heck of a show that goes far beyond

their demand on the public purse, and they don't need to run the risk of

us to fund the whole thing from taxes.

We each contribute 61 pence a year at the last count. That money, just over

million, is not enough to put on the grand regal show which the British

seems to be about.

Certainly, for a very long time, it was simply not permitted to suggest that the

monarchy should be anything less than grand.

In 1957, Lord Altrincham wrote an article arguing for a modernised

He called the court complacent and out of touch, said the Queen was a priggish

schoolgirl, and said that the monarchy should not be, as it was, intimately

associated with the upper classes.

Wow! The Duke of Argyll said that he should be hanged, drawn and quartered,

the BBC immediately dropped him from any questions.

In fact, Altrincham had got it wrong.

Lavish splendour was just what most of the public wanted from their monarchy.

They would have despised a queen on a bicycle. They wanted to be deferential.

They probably still do.

And there were 20 more years of this kind of thing to come.

In 1977, the year of the Queen's Jubilee, the Sex Pistols anthem, God

Queen and Her Fascist Regime, was banned from being broadcast, even when it

outsold all other records.

The puzzle becomes even more intriguing when you look at the apparently

shrinking role of the crown in public affairs.

The imperial title had already disappeared in the days of George VI,

and Pakistan became independent.

The empire became the Commonwealth, and of the 58 past and present members of

that vague organisation, only 16 have Elizabeth as their head of state. And

falling...

Why did it matter so much to protect and sustain royalty?

Partly, perhaps, it's more to do with the Queen herself than the institution

monarchy. Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II, the rule of elderly

seems to be particularly proper to the English.

And it may provide important social glue.

As the population of Britain became more heterogeneous, with substantial

immigration from Commonwealth countries by people who feel excluded from

political life, and often from the legitimate economy, perhaps there was a

that the Queen would be a focus of patriotic attachment. After all, she's

linchpin of the Commonwealth, its graciously enthusiastic figurehead.

And promoting the image of a glamorous and golden royalty above and outside

politics that is synonymous with Britain may be a very useful way of creating

legitimacy for a state that might otherwise look rather shabby.

The last great moment of this ceremonial royal progress through history came on

July 29th, 1981.

the wedding of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and Lady Diana Spencer.

Over 700 million people watched the 20 -year -old princess descend from a glass

coach to marry her 32 -year -old prince.

The wedding had been arranged by the Queen Mother and Diana's grandmother.

Each of them felt, for their own reasons, that it was the best

possible.

It turned out Charles was having an affair with a married woman, Mrs.

Parker Bowles, Alice Keppel's great -granddaughter.

Diana said that on the honeymoon he was more interested in reading eight books

by Laurence van der Post than in her, and he wore Charles Camilla cufflinks,

when she became distressed she felt strongly that the royal family turned

against her.

In 1992 it all blew apart in what the Queen called her Annus Horribilis.

Her second son, Andrew, separated from his wife, Sarah Ferguson, who was

pictured topless being kissed by her financial advisor.

Her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips.

Charles and Diana split up, with spectacular accusations being made in

and on television.

And Windsor Castle caught fire.

That was when the ground really began to shift.

At least, when it was explained that the £40 million repair bill would be paid

by the public, there was a huge collective breath of, No, it won't.

And so the Queen decided it would be much the wisest thing to offer to pay 70

of the cost. She opened up some of her homes to the public to raise the cash.

There was still astonishingly little direct criticism of the Queen.

In an age when television and the press have the power to pull down anyone, the

Queen and her mother were treated with respect, even devotion.

But the rest of the royal family had become fair game and were subjected to a

ferocious assault of public humiliation.

Why did we support the royal family and all their wealth?

Why were we giving them all this money?

The press pack was baying at their heels.

That's when the Queen agreed that she should voluntarily start paying income

and refund the parliamentary allowances received by other members of the royal

family.

But things didn't get any better, and the Queen herself began to be criticised

in 1997 when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris.

We all remember the shock and horror and the debate about the lack of public

reaction by the senior members of the royal family.

there was a widespread feeling that at that moment they were not in fact part

the nation.

Was the program started by George V of integrating the monarchy into the life

the nation coming unraveled?

Instead of the monarch playing the role of warning and advising the prime

minister, which is supposed to be her constitutional role, the prime minister

warned and advised the sovereign to take public action. She had to be seen to

grieve. or the monarchy itself might be in danger.

And now we wait to see what happens next.

The heir to the throne and his mistress are forever tainted with the image of

the princess that was publicly destroyed.

The queen is an old lady, with a reign that begins to rival Victoria's in

length. Can anyone be certain that the country would accept her son as king?

There's always been a bargain at the heart of monarchy in this country.

The monarch has always been dependent on the people.

That bargain has been the key to survival.

It began when William the Conqueror realised that he and his friends

actually run a country where they didn't speak the language or know the laws,

traditions or even the geography.

It was restated in a series of crises in which monarchs who tried to rule

without consent were simply dumped.

Matilda, Jane Grey, Richard Cromwell, James II.

And to give that consent, people need to feel that the sovereign is entitled to

be there and respects laws even though no court can enforce them.

Laws which today probably include having to pay tax.

Partly, of course, the institution is sustained by the character of the Queen

herself. Faced with enormous pressures and a job from which there is no

possibility of rest, she has retained a calm resilience and exquisite

constitutional carefulness which guarantees her a respectful place in

Then what?

The British monarchy is certainly a great addition to the gaiety of nations.

Partly as a soap opera, partly as a walking, talking anachronism that makes

other heads of state visibly uneasy.

But it does come at a price.

And whether the price is too high for the continued survival of this most

extraordinary form of government, well, that, of course, will be the surprise

ending.