Kings & Queens of England Episode 4 Stuarts

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The story of the kings and queens of England is more surprising than you might 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. The story of the Stuarts is, when you
think about it, the most surprising of 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 the 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 put that 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 thought
that his distaste for bossy Scottish Presbyterians would encourage him to lift Elizabeth's
restraints on their worship. They were wrong about that.

So, a group of well-connected Roman Catholic terrorists planned to blow up the 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 of Westminster.

It's a sign of how secure England became, that for the last 200 years, November 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 resonance.
Al-Qaeda terrorism has tainted many people's idea of Muslims, which perhaps makes it
easier to understand how Fawkes' terrorism affected people's idea of Roman Catholics.

Actually, James himself was more sympathetic to high church than to low, because 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 a
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 ruled by divine
right as the absolute sovereign power in England. Having been raised in Scotland, he
was rather baffled by the idea of common law, the notion that law was in the hearts and
minds of the people, expressed through 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 required 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 in a 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 smoke, 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
nose, 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 is bottomless.

He wanted to persuade people by the force of his argument, so he published it

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 to 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 the sack. James
Waugh's 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 said that
this could not be done without the agreement of Parliament, which gave the Commons
the chance to present demands to 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 Puritans, 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 17-year-old
Countess of Essex, 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 filthy base 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 were pardoned. James
wasn't exactly a Puritan's role model. 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 government, 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 war. 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 instead.

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 Hampden 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 12 judges, 7 found for the king and 5 for Hampden.

Since the king had thought he controlled the judiciary, this was a moral victory for
Hampden. 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
decidedly high church. And that simply added to the anger of a growing Puritan class.

In Scotland, it was met by direct rebellion. Without the money to hire reliable troops, and
with popular hostility in London 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, including 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 5 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 break the
pretensions of Parliament and Parliament's determination to limit the power 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 battle, of starvation,
of disease, as a result of the fighting, out of a population of about 5 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 was made to negotiate a settlement, but Charles
was a dishonest negotiator, simply using this opportunity to try and organise the
conquest of England from Ireland 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, but 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, the 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 law setting up a court to try the King. Charles said that he didn't
recognize the court, that someone needed to explain to him what authority it possessed.

On the 27th of 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 glory 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 paintings celebrated James' 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 work and presided over the reality that flowed
from it, was marched out through a window 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 one brief
attempt to provide military help to his father in the Second Civil War had 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 asked of
him, including agreeing to his father's blood guilt and his mother's idolatry and becoming
Presbyterian. If that's what it took to be proclaimed King, do it. The new English Republic
wasn't going to stand for this, of course.

The army, commanded by Cromwell, took over Scotland. Charles' 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 the
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. Throughout his six weeks' flight, he remained cheery, polite and very
resourceful, ending up in the George Inn at Brighton. It's interesting that none of the
three or four dozen people who recognised him were moved to betray him, either by the
potential death penalty they faced or the £1,000 reward they could collect.
He got away to France, then to Germany and Brussels, living in a kind of limbo, short of
money and with no coherent plan of return. So how did he do it? 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 Latin 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 thorough going 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 more 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 was driven by his own belief in the divine right of revolution to
run the country as a militarised 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 public 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 and 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 a lodger
in Cheshunt. Thirty years later, he wrote to his daughter that his safety was to be retired,
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 fervor
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 Sellars and Yeatman 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 idea 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 were also put on trial.

They didn't put up a very convincing defense, being dead. Their bodies were dug up and
hung in chains at Tyburn. It was all good popular 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 wealth 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 before but in 1665 it took a firm grip and killed about 20% of the city's
population. London was largely turned into a ghost city as the survivors fled.

The king who'd moved to Hampton Court gave a thousand pounds 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
fire breaks 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
disease 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 settlement of 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 continent. They were the stages on which state ceremonies could be
impressively performed 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 streets and little
alleys of medieval London that still existed in everyone's memories re-grew from the
ashes. Even now neither German...

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