All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.09of15.Revolutions.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

On January 30th, 1649,
the English killed their king.

It had happened before -

all those Edwards and Richards
done in by their subjects.

But this was different.

The British monarchy itself
had been exterminated.

Now there was just the people
and its parliament,

the keepers of the liberties of England.

What use was freedom
when you were frightened?

What the people really wanted to know
was - who would keep them safe?

Who'd stop the soldiers
burning and pillaging,

allow people to sleep quietly
in their beds?

Who'd protect them from the wars
of religion and politics

which seemed to go on and on and on?

Would it be parliament or would it be
a great general like Oliver Cromwell?

"It doesn't matter," said hard-headed
philosopher Thomas Hobbes,

a royalist who'd come back
to Cromwell's England.

"What the country needs
is a strong ruler

"who embodies ALL the people.

"Whatever or whoever
can save the country from anarchy,

"whatever can save you from yourselves.

"Never mind
about what's right or wrong.

"Put yourself in the hands
of the power that protects,

"the all-powerful Leviathan."

If that's Oliver Cromwell,
then so be it.

It's the reasonable thing to do.

The Scots, the English and the Irish
were not about to be reasonable.

They were much too busy
being righteous.

Over the next half century, righteousness
would kill a lot of the British.

At the end, reason would appear,
but not before a lot of tears had been shed.

Tears of rapture and tears of grief.

Not everyone was lying awake at night
biting their nails about the plight

of kingless Britain.

For many, this was the dawn
of a new age.

No one had foreseen this
during the civil wars,

but in giving them victory,
the Almighty had shown them

that Albion must be turned into Jerusalem.

He had lain the Stuart kings
in the dust.

The only king to follow now
was King Jesus,

and the only true government
that of his saints.

Let them sing aloud,

let the high praise of God
be in their mouth

and a two-edged sword in their hand!

The kingdom of God was at hand,
the most blessed revolution of all.

No one was more convinced of this than
Albion's holy warrior - Oliver Cromwell.

Religion was not at first
the thing contended for,

but God brought it to that issue

and at last it proved
that which was most dear to us.

Cromwell called himself "a seeker",

and what he sought all his life was God's
destiny for himself and for his country.

At first, he'd been innocent
of the Lord's design.

For years, he'd led the life of an obscure
East Anglian country gentleman.

As Cromwell began
to make his way in the world,

some sort of crisis happened
to his modest fortune.

But what the world might have seen
as misfortune

was, through the cunning
of the Almighty, his saving grace.

He underwent
some kind of religious conversion.

The vanities were stripped away
so he might be opened to the light.

Oh, I lived in
and loved darkness and hated the light!

This is true. I hated Godliness,
yet God had mercy on me.

Oh, the riches of His mercy!

The sense that God
had some special service for him

made a new man of Cromwell.

He knew where he was going.
He knew what had to be done.

He must tear the sword out of the hands
of the untrustworthy, Papist-loving king.

He went to war as a complete novice
with no military experience.

His sense of divine appointment
was his armour.

It made him supremely confident,
cool under fire,

but never reckless.

An aura of invincibility
began to cling to him.

He became the driving force
of the Godly Revolution.

When the vanquished king
defied God's judgement,

his blood was needed
to expiate the crime.

But it became obvious
that doing away with the monarch

was no guarantee
of doing away with the monarchy.

For if Charles couldn't be among
his subjects in person, his proxy could.

The Greek word 'icon' means
both an image and a copy.

The "Eikon Basilike",
the spitting image of the king,

appeared within a week of his execution.

It was an instant bestseller,
going through 35 editions in a year,

and it made Charles
an imperishable martyr...

...a latter-day Christ
sacrificed for the sins of his people.

Like Christ, Charles would be resurrected
wearing his heavenly crown

and made flesh
in the person of his son, Charles II,

awaiting the call from exile in France.

The poet John Milton, a champion
of the parliamentary Commonwealth,

was hired to attack the cult of the king
martyr as so much wicked idolatry,

to persuade the fearful and gullible
they didn't need a Charles I.

In fact, they didn't need
any Stuart monarch.

"Look," he wanted to say,
"just stop worrying about the dead king.

"You're the sovereign now. Come to think
of it, you've always been the sovereign.

"Kings have been yours to hire or fire."

But when Cromwell and Milton
told the people

that it was time for them
to govern themselves,

they didn't, of course,
mean to be taken literally.

What? Every jumped-up weaver
or ploughman

with some sixpenny book-learning
appointing himself the magistrate

of Mucking-on-the-Wold,
granting himself the vote?

Heaven forbid! That way lay chaos.

No, the people should put
the government

into the hands of the kind of men
God saw fittest to exercise it -

incorruptible men
of substance and piety.

"Oh, I see," said free-born
John Lilburne, the Leveller,

an ex-army officer
who wanted to level the distance

between the mighty and the humble,
the rich and the poor.

"The same kind of people
who got us into this mess."

We've all known a John Lilburne,
some of us have even been John Lilburne.

First at the barricades,
first to be arrested, won't shut up!

But love him or hate him,
you know he won't go away.

To Cromwell, he was a pain in the neck,

a dangerous loudmouth, capable of
wrecking discipline in the army.

Lilburne, for his part,
detested the new regime.

All you intended when you set us fighting
was to unhorse our old riders and tyrants

so that you might get up
and ride in their stead.

The soldiers read Freeborn John
and believed they should have a vote.

Give them an inch and they take a mile
and, pretty soon, they'd start believing

their officers were the tyrants Lilburne
and the Levellers said they were.

They had to be stopped.

An army was not, repeat not,
a commune.

I tell you, you have no other way
to deal with these men,

but to break them or they will break you.

Yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood
and treasure shed and spent

in this kingdom
upon your heads and shoulders

and frustrate and make void

all that work that with so many years'
industry, toil and pains you have done.

I tell you again, you are necessitated
to break them.

Off to the Tower went the Leveller leaders
like so many traitors.

Then something astounding happened.

A petitioning campaign
to demand the Levellers' release

was mobilised in London
by Leveller women.

For the Puritans, the cardinal virtues
of women were silence and meekness.

But these women were shameless,
obstinate, loud-mouthed,

and, it has to admitted, brave.

Leveller women had always been
involved in the movement's campaigns.

Elizabeth Lilburne had been politicised
through her efforts to spring her husband

from one prison or another.

Mary Overton had been brutally punished

for printing and distributing
her husband's tracts.

Tied to a cart and dragged
through London's streets

with her six-month-old baby,
pelted and abused like a common whore.

But the most impassioned and articulate
of the sisters was Katherine Chidley.

She started as a charismatic preacher
and turned to politics

in an attempt to make
the Commonwealth understand

the particular sufferings of her sex.

We have an equal share and interest
with men in the Commonwealth,

and it cannot be laid waste.

Considering that poverty,
misery and famine,

like a mighty torrent,
is breaking in upon us

and we are not able to see our children
hang upon us and cry out for bread

and not have wherewithal to feed them,
we had rather die than see that day!

This was not what Oliver Cromwell
had expected from Jerusalem.

It got worse.

In May 1649,
some hundreds of soldiers mutinied

and tried to combine forces
in Oxfordshire.

Cromwell rode hell for leather -
50 miles in a day -

and caught them
in the middle of the night at Burford.

One of the prisoners, Anthony Sedley,
locked in the church,

expecting the worst,
carved his name into the font.

The next morning, three of his comrades
were led into the churchyard and shot.

Then Oliver went off to get
an honorary degree in law from Oxford.

He made sure that the mutinous soldiers
were shipped off to a place

where they could vent their frustration
on someone else.

"Angry, are we?" was his line.

"Want to know who's to blame
for prolonging the civil wars?"

Say hello to the Antichrist
across the Irish Sea.

The target of Cromwell's
march through blood

was an army of royalists holding out
in Ireland in the name of the king's son.

It was as much Protestant as Catholic,

but in his conviction
they were the legions of the Devil,

Cromwell was not about
to make nice distinctions.

At Drogheda, on the main road
between Dublin and Ulster,

he made it only too clear
what he had in mind.

There's no point side-stepping
this horror, is there?

This was Cromwell's war crime,

an atrocity so hideous, it's contaminated
Anglo-Irish history ever since.

We need to get right
just what this atrocity was.

What it wasn't was the indiscriminate
butchery of women and children.

No eye-witnesses ever claimed
to have seen any such thing.

But what Cromwell did order,
unhesitatingly and without any mercy,

was, in any case,
an act of unspeakable murder.

At least 3,000 royalist soldiers
were butchered at Drogheda...

...the vast majority after they had
surrendered and disarmed.

At St Peter's Church,
Cromwell had his soldiers burn the pews

beneath the steeple
to smoke out the defenders,

who were incinerated in the flames.

The General saw no need
to hang his head about the massacre.

We are come to break
the power of lawless rebels

who, having cast off the authority
of England,

live as enemies to human society, whose
principles are to destroy and subjugate

all men not complying with them.

We come by the assistance of God

to hold forth and maintain the lustre
and glory of English liberty

in a nation where we have
an undoubted right to it.

This is absolutely authentic
Oliver Cromwell

and today it makes for unbearable reading.

No, it's not the confession
of a genocidal lunatic.

It IS the confession of a narrow-minded,
pig-headed Protestant bigot

and English imperialist,
and that surely is bad enough.

Cromwell treated Ireland like
the primitive colony he thought it was,

moving the native Irish off their farms
and using the land to pay his soldiers.

Before he could finish his pacification,
if that's what he thought it was,

another piece of unquiet Britain
rose up to mock him.

For the Scots had invited the 20-year-old
Charles II to come and be their king

and went to war on his behalf.

Cromwell lured them into England
in the summer of 1651.

The Scottish army found itself caught
between two massively bigger forces.

At the Battle of Worcester,
on the 3rd September,

it went down to a ruinous
and irreversible defeat.

Charles went on the run,
hidden by royalist sympathisers

until he could get smuggled out
of the country.

(TRUMPET FANFARE)

So when Oliver Cromwell returned
to London in the autumn of 1651,

it was as an English Caesar,
the like of whom had not been seen

since the days of Edward I.

If Cromwell was God's Englishman,

it was because he felt in his marrow
that England was God's true promised land

and the best thing for Britain was
that it become as English as possible.

The Stuart dream
of the united Britain, of course,

had been what had started
the civil wars.

Now Cromwell had ended them
by making that dream a reality.

Not as a united kingdom,
but as a united republic of Great Britain.

But what kind of republic
was it supposed to be?

Cromwell knew the county was exhausted

from almost 15 years of war.

It was time, as he said,
"to heal and settle".

But this didn't mean business as usual.

Surely God didn't mean for so much blood
and treasure to have been spilled

only so that ungodly lawyers
and money brokers could get richer?

That seemed to be the way things
were going under the parliament -

the keeper of the liberties of England,
as it styled itself.

It still sat as it had when its members
were purged by the army

to allow the king's trial to proceed,

ridiculed by its enemies as the "Rump".

To Cromwell,
the Rump was a monstrosity,

a bastion of selfishness and greed,

more like Sodom than Jerusalem.

Worst of all, it showed no signs at all
of wanting ever to close down.

When it designed a bill
to replace old members

and keep itself going indefinitely,
this was the last straw.

On April 20th, 1653,

Cromwell marched down to Westminster
in the company of a troop of musketeers.

Moses was descending
from the mountain

and he was not a happy prophet!

At first, it seemed as though the Member
for Cambridge might behave himself.

Cromwell sat in his usual seat,
he doffed his hat,

he asked the Speaker respectfully
if he might address the House.

He even commended the Rump
for its care of the public good,

but as he warmed to his task,
niceties were tossed aside

and he began to berate
the astounded members

for their indifference
to justice and to piety.

"I expect you think this is not
parliamentary language," he said.

"Well, I confess, it is not,

"and neither are you to expect
any such from me."

The hat went back on,
always a very bad sign.

Cromwell marched
up and down the chamber,

shouting that the Lord had done
with them

and had chosen instruments
more worthy of their calling.

Some poor soul tried to stop him
in full spate,

but Cromwell was
in exterminating angel mode

and brushed him aside contemptuously.

"You are no parliament!" he bellowed,
"I say, you are no parliament!"

With that, he called in the musketeers.

The boots entered heavily, noisily.

Parliament was shut down.

This was a depressingly
modern moment,

a classic coup d'etat, in fact.

At this point, Cromwell crossed the line
from bullying to outright dictatorship.

In so doing, he undid at a stroke

the entire point of the war
he himself had fought

against the king's
unparliamentary conduct.

Cromwell liked to claim he was striking
a blow against "ambition" and "avarice",

but what he really wounded,
and fatally,

was the Commonwealth itself.

This is the point at which Cromwell
could've seized power,

and everyone expected him to.

But Cromwell wasn't working for himself,
he was working for God.

In parliament's place,
he'd set up an assembly of men

hand-picked for their piety.

It would be an assembly of saints,
and his language was very different

as he exhorted them
to go about their business.

Love all the sheep,
love the lambs. Love all.

Tender all.

But mystical rapture and politics don't
go well together. At least, not in Britain.

In a few months,
the unworkable assembly collapsed,

its leaders begging Cromwell
to put it out of its misery.

He duly obliged.

Now there seemed no alternative
but to take the crown -

to become Oliver I.

This was still a step too far
for a man God had told

to punish the haughtiness of kings.

So instead he chose to become
a Lord Protector.

That had a good ring to it.
Authority, but not tyranny.

He was king in all but name,

but a constitutional sovereign,

ruling with a council
and a newly-elected parliament.

His great hope was for a settling,

but the truth was that the Protector
himself was anything but settled

about the direction
he should take the country.

Should Britain be righteous
or reasonable?

It was a civil war he fought
over and over again in his own head.

Squire Cromwell could see the virtues
of a reasonable state of affairs.

Given a breathing space,
the old world of counties

was coming ever so cautiously
back to life.

Magistrates were sitting at courts,

gentlemen riding to hounds,
war-damaged houses being repaired,

children being married off,
friends and neighbours asked to dinner.

And when some of those gentlemen were
elected to the Protectorate parliaments,

the old connections between
Westminster and the counties,

the secret of English government,
were, at last, being put back together.

But the righteous side
of Cromwell fretted

that this return to an older way
of doing things was too successful.

It was not so much healing as backsliding.
Royalism by the back door.

So in 1655,
Cromwell turned his mastiffs loose.

The Major Generals.

They took righteousness
out into the shires -

the Protestant Taliban on horseback.

"Muffle the bell-ringers,
snoop on the ale-houses,

"lock up the fornicators...
cancel Christmas!"

John Evelyn, ardent royalist
and gentleman of letters,

who grudgingly endured the Leviathan
of the Cromwellian state,

was one of countless people who were
on the short end of the generals' bullying.

I went with my wife to London
to celebrate Christmas Day,

Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter Chapel.

As he gave us the Holy Sacrament,
the chapel was surrounded by soldiers...

... all the communicants and assembly
surprised and kept prisoner by them,

some in the house, others carried away!

It was a public relations disaster
for the Protectorate.

The prudent Cromwell
reasserted himself over the pious

and he got rid of the Major Generals
in a hurry!

There were some places
where the two instincts worked together,

and changed Britain as a result,
and this is one of them -

the Synagogue of Bevis Marks
in London.

Historians sometimes complain
that it's difficult to find hard evidence

of any good that came out
of the Protectorate.

Well, this is
hard enough evidence for me.

For it was on these unforgiving
backless oak benches

that the first Jews to be admitted since
the expulsion 360-odd years before

parked their behinds.

Under the Protectorate, Jews were allowed
finally to worship openly and to live openly

in what became a little piece
of early multi-cultural London.

It's Oliver Cromwell we have to thank

for opening a new chapter
of Anglo-Jewish history - my history.

(JEWISH RELIGIOUS SONG)

His Apocalyptic timetable told him
that the conversion of the Jews

would herald
the coming of the last days.

His business sense told him that,

through their network
in the Dutch and Spanish trading world,

the Jews could be a priceless source
of commercial and military intelligence.

Piety and pragmatism,
those twin qualities,

so often at odds
inside Cromwell's personality,

this time came together to make him,
as far as the Jews were concerned,

a true Lord Protector.

But not king.

In the end, and so unlike the king
he had destroyed,

Cromwell could never shake off
his sense of unworthiness.

It was what saved him and Britain
from a true dictatorship.

Oliver Cromwell believed
he worked for God.

Real dictators think they are God.

It was those men
who fancied themselves little gods -

Charles I or the republican oligarchs -

who most aroused Cromwell's contempt.

Simplicity was a word
he used all the time about himself

and it was the highest
of moral compliments.

But to prolong the Protectorate,
he needed to be more of a Leviathan

than he could ever stomach.

That is both his exoneration
and his failure.

It's one of the most extraordinary ironies
of British history

that Cromwell's Protectorate, demonised
by both royalists and republicans alike,

ultimately formed the blueprint
for our constitutional monarchy -

a chief executive
who chose his government,

but who were both answerable
to a regularly elected parliament.

But Cromwell himself would not live
to see this happen.

On September 3rd, 1658,
the anniversary of the Battle of Worcester,

Cromwell died while an immense
black tempest was raging over England,

ripping out trees and sending belfries
crashing to the ground.

It was, the old wives said,

the Devil coming for his soul.

What Oliver Cromwell left behind was not
a workable political system, but a vision.

He may have been an angry, ruthless,
overbearing man,

perhaps even a manic depressive,

but that vision was something
of startling sweetness -

a sighting of Jerusalem,

a place where everyone would be free
to receive Christ in their own way,

provided that they did not disturb
the peace and conscience

of anybody else.

After all his marches and slaughters
and fits of table-pounding red-faced fury,

what, it turned out,
Oliver Cromwell wanted for everyone

was a quiet life.

But Catholics were excluded
from this vision

because for Cromwell, as for the country
at large, Catholicism meant tyranny.

The Protector may have left the country
safe from despots, but not from anarchy.

After his death,
it returned with a vengeance,

power swinging between soldiers
and politicians,

sleepless nights and nagging questions
from ten years before.

Who'll keep us safe? Who do we obey?

Where do we find a sovereign
to protect us?

It took another hard-headed soldier
to see the only way to restore order.

General George Monck had been
a royalist in the Civil War

and a Cromwellian when it seemed that
only the Protector could keep the peace.

He realised that,
with the Lord Protector gone,

there was only one person
who could take his place.

That was a new king.

The irony about the restoration
of Charles II

was he came to the throne not because
England needed a successor to Charles I.

He came to the throne because England
needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There was universal rejoicing,
bonfires and feasting.

The chaos brought
by Cromwell's death was ending.

This new Charles seemed just
what everyone had hoped for -

a model of sweet reason.

That, at any rate,
is what Samuel Pepys thought.

Pepys was a pure product
of Cromwell's England.

He was present when the new king
boarded his flagship home.

En route, the tall, dark-haired man
strode up and down the quarterdeck

telling the story of his escape
after the Battle of Worcester.

Here was a king full of charisma.

He had magic.

(CROWDS CHEERING)

But would his reason survive
the emotions stirred by his return?

The diarist John Evelyn recorded,
with unrepentant royalism

burning in his breast:

This day came in
His Majesty to London

after a sad and long exile,

with a triumph of above 20,000 horse
and foot brandishing their swords

and shouting with inexpressible joy,

the way strewn with flowers,
the bells ringing.

I stood in the Strand and beheld it
and blessed God.

And all this without one drop of blood

and by that very army
which had rebelled against him.

The king was crowned at Westminster
on the 23rd April, 1661.

His reign was backdated to the day
after his father had been beheaded.

But even before the king was crowned,
there were those with long memories

looking for revenge.

On January 30th, 1661,

exactly 12 years after Charles I's
severed head dropped into the straw,

the remains of Cromwell and the regicides
were dragged from their tombs

and hanged from the gallows at Tyburn
before being buried in a deep pit.

Over the next months,
eleven other king-killers

were hanged, drawn and quartered.

The old Cromwellians watched all this
in tactful, furtive silence.

They wondered just how reasonable
this new regime might actually be.

Killing the killjoys, though,
Charles knew,

would not damage his popularity.

Given a free vote, the people would,
especially after the Major Generals,

vote for pleasure over piety.

(FEMALE SINGER)
# Lavender's green, diddle-diddle... #

And leading the dance, of course,
was Charles himself,

constitutionally incapable
of being so churlish

as to spurn any woman generous enough
to invite him into her bed.

They all did.

This was the golden age of ogling.

If Puritan England
had been governed by the ear,

wide open to receive the word of God,
the Restoration restored

the sovereignty of the eye.

Its ruling passion was "scopophilia",
the addiction of the gaze,

whether eyeballing an outrageous wig,
a plunging neckline,

a louse caught in the lens
of a microscope

or the constellations of the stars.

# Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle

# Lavender's green... #

Charles's boyish enthusiasm
for optical instruments

suggested he might turn out to be
a new kind of Stuart,

whose vision dwelled
not in cloudy realms of absolutism,

but which was precisely focused,

concerned to observe reality -
political as well as physical.

He might, in fact, turn out to be that most
unlikely thing - a reasonable Stuart king.

This was the Stuart for whom the
physical world was his alpha and omega,

who was earthy in his realism.

All too earthy, some thought,
as they looked down in disgust

at a theatre of indolence, punctuated by
debauchery, that had become the court.

They were not so worldly,
not so rational,

as to be free of the fear that some day
there would be a reckoning.

Some day soon, as it turned out.

In the summer of 1664, a comet
appeared in the skies over England.

Its sallow tail could be seen
with unprecedented clarity

through the lens of the new telescopes
owned, among others, by the king.

But what most people saw
was disaster in the offing.

They had all read their almanacs.

They knew that the Apocalypse would
be heralded by pestilence, fire and war.

A year later, thousands of bodies
killed by bubonic plague

were being tossed each week
into the great pit of Aldgate

and there was nothing science
could do about it,

except count the dead
with the care demanded

by modern statistics.

(MAN) # My part of death

# No one so true

# Did share it

# Come away

# Come away...

#... Death #

One-sixth of London's population
perished.

The infection ebbed
with the onset of autumn,

but the trepidation hung around

for the number of the Beast was 666.

And sure enough,
up from the smoky regions of Hell,

in the first week of September, 1666,

came the diabolical fire.

In the early hours
of Sunday September 2nd,

the Lord Mayor of London was woken

to be told that a fire had started
in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane.

His response was
"Pish! A woman might piss it out!"

As he snored on, the flames reached
the warehouses flanking the Thames

between the Tower and London Bridge,
brimful of tallow, pitch and brandy.

A monstrous fireball came roaring
and sucking out of the narrow streets,

feeding on overhanging bays and gables.

In another hour, 200 to 300 houses
had been swallowed by the flames.

John Evelyn, who'd said for years

that overcrowded London
was a disaster waiting to happen,

took no joy
in the fulfilment of his prophecy.

Oh, the miserable
and calamitous spectacle.

God grant mine eyes
that I never behold it again,

who now saw 10,000 houses
all in one flame.

The noise and crackle and thunder
of the impetuous flames.

The shriek of women and children,
the hurry of people,

the fall of towers, houses and churches
like a hideous storm.

London was... but is no more.

When the rain started,
a week after the outbreak of the fire,

allowing an early stocktaking,

the scale of the devastation
horrified even the pessimists.

13,200 houses had been destroyed,

along with some of the most famous
buildings of the city.

St Paul's Cathedral was in ruins.

The new Leviathan, it seemed,
had no fire insurance.

Still, there were those
who were determined

that London would rise
as a phoenix from its ashes

and, like the reborn, rebuilt Rome,
astonish the world.

This had long been on the mind
of Christopher Wren,

mathematician, architect
and brilliant prodigy

of the Royal Society.

So when Roman antiquities
were found in the debris

around St Paul's, one of them a tablet
bearing the Latin inscription

"Resurgam" - I shall arise,
Wren took the message to heart.

London had once been
a great Roman city

and now would outdo the ancients,

with great piazzas, broad avenues,

calculated to afford
geometrically satisfying vistas

and up to fifty new churches.

And at its heart would be
a new St Paul's,

a cathedral the like of which had
never been seen in northern Europe.

He built a giant wooden model
to show the king and clergy

just what they would be getting.

How could they not be awestruck
by the huge dome

that used the same technology
as a microscope

to flood the interior with light?

But there was a problem.

Wren had designed his cathedral
as a Greek cross,

sacrificing the traditional floor plan
of a Protestant church

in favour of perfect acoustics
and light.

You can almost hear the mystified,
angry complaints of the reverends.

"Where exactly is the choir
supposed to go?

"How do we process up a nave
which isn't there?"

Mostly they said, "Call us old-fashioned,

"but this looks suspiciously to us
like a Catholic basilica.

"We'll be damned

"if we're going to let St Paul's
turn into St Peter's."

When the king told him
to go back to the drawing board,

Wren's normally very dry eyes
are said to have filled with tears.

He would have his chance
to build his dome,

but only when it was joined
to a long nave,

something resembling
a traditional church.

The irony was,
for all his Roman enthusiasm,

Wren believed he was building
a truly Protestant church...

but his timing was terrible.

Ever since the Reformation, Britain
had been victim to anti-Catholic fear

and, once again, in Charles's reign,
it erupted.

Not all of it was misplaced.

Charles was suspected of having secret
Catholics in his government, and so he did.

He was also suspected
of making secret treaties

with the militantly Catholic
Louis XIV of France.

And so he had.

But there was worse... much worse.

The king's own brother, James,
Duke of York,

had actually converted
to the Roman Church

and he made no secret of it.

With no children born to the king,
the first Catholic ruler since Bloody Mary

was an imminent prospect.

There was shivering in the shires.

A century before, Queen Elizabeth
had been threatened

with Catholic assassination plots.

The Jesuit lurking in the shadows was
a permanent fixture in popular nightmare.

When an ex-Jesuit called Titus Oates

concocted a pack of lies
about a plot to murder the king,

invite a French invasion and create
a Catholic state under James,

he tripped the Guy Fawkes alert.

And when the magistrate
investigating the charges

was found mysteriously murdered
on Primrose Hill, it seemed obvious

that Oates knew what he was talking about.

It set the jittery country

right over the edge.

Anti-Catholic violence swept the country.

Riots, burnings, lynch mobs,
kangaroo courts.

For some politicians,
the ugly mood of the country

was a golden opportunity
to press their favourite cause.

James, Duke of York, should never
be allowed to sit on the throne.

He had to be excluded.

Anything to stop the cycle of
religious wars from breaking out again.

It was an extraordinary crisis
in the history of the British monarchy.

At stake were not only the lives
of hundreds of those victimised

by all the lies and hysteria,

but the fate of the polity itself.

Because to concede exclusion was
to accept parliament had the right

to judge who was fit or unfit
to occupy the throne.

And that was a concession Charles II
was absolutely not about to make.

Charles met the most serious
crisis of his reign

with his most powerful weapon -
reason. He offered a compromise.

His brother would be allowed to succeed
if he agreed to be a private Catholic

and not to lay a finger
on the Church of England.

Riding the wave of paranoia,

the newly elected parliament
summoned to Oxford turned him down.

They assumed that memory
was on their side,

that Charles would remember the fate of
his stubborn father, who'd triggered a war

when he too had been suspected
of being soft on Catholicism.

But historical memory
is a double-edged sword.

(TRUMPET FANFARE)

When the Commons met
in the Great Hall of Christchurch

to hear what they thought would be
the royal capitulation,

they found themselves instead
confronted by a Leviathan in ermine.

"This is the king's will," he said.

"Take it or leave it."

It was a breathtaking gamble.

Backed up by the House of Lords, Charles
had left the exclusionists in the Commons

no alternative but to go to war.

He was betting that the memory
of the last round

would be a deterrent. He was right.

The tombs of the dead from Edgehill,
Marston Moor and Worcester

were still being carved.

That war began as a parliamentary protest

and ended in Puritan crusade.

Who wanted that back?
Not the exclusionists.

They blinked first.

James did get the keys to the kingdom
when his brother died in 1685,

and he inherited a new parliament
with a massively royalist majority,

along with widespread public sympathy.

Within three years, though,
he had squandered it all.

James never had any intention
of hiding his faith.

His Catholicism
wasn't just a private comfort

to be celebrated
away from the public gaze.

No, James was going to be
a visible Catholic king...

but he was playing a dangerous game.

When James tried to reverse
anti-Catholic laws,

pillars of the establishment - the country
gentry and the Church - were horrified.

When the bishops complained,
the king declared,

"I shall find a way
to do my business without you."

The protesting bishops
were locked up in the Tower.

James's timing was disastrous.

For he was doing all this
when Louis XIV,

the militantly Catholic King of France,
was threatening Europe.

By January, 1688,

James had managed
to alienate all his natural allies

and turn himself into a more dangerous
version of his father, Charles I.

He was even filling the officer ranks
of the army with Irish Catholics.

The only consolation was that, at 52,
he had no son.

Next in line to the throne was
his daughter Mary, a staunch Protestant,

who'd married the Dutch prince,
William of Orange,

hero of the resistance to Louis XIV.

On June 10th, 1688, all this changed.

James's wife, Mary of Modena,
gave birth to a boy,

who was duly baptised with Roman rites.

Now, not only was the king Catholic,

so was his dynasty.

What could be done?
Well, something quite extraordinary.

Seven leading statesmen
sent a message to Holland

with an explosive request.

"Prince William," they asked,
"would you mind invading Britain

"and saving us from a Catholic king?"

William of Orange wanted to save
his country from Catholic despots,

but the country he had in mind -
first, foremost and always -

was the Dutch Republic.

English politics were always a sideshow
for William to the main event.

That was the great European war
against Louis XIV.

What choice did he have?
There would be British troops in that war.

To ensure they'd be fighting for him,
not against him,

100 years after the Spanish Armada
had failed to do the very same thing,

William set out to conquer Britain.

He was nothing if not thorough.

60,000 copies of William's manifesto

blanketed England in an effort to present
the planned invasion as a response

to a spontaneous uprising
against the Catholic tyrant.

It was so persuasive that he succeeded

in making James
seem the foreigner in his own land

and the Dutchman the true Brit.

The fate of the Armada
was a sobering thought,

so his Dutch invasion force
made the Spanish one seem puny.

This time there were 600 vessels

and up to 20,000 troops.

(WOMAN) # Lero, lero, lilli burlero

# Lilli burlero, bullen a la

# Lero, lero, lilli burlero

# Lilli burlero, bullen a la #

He landed at Torbay
on November 5th - Guy Fawkes Day.

Obviously, God was a Protestant!

When he realised that this Protestant
invasion was really going to oust him,

James' courage failed him.

His resolution in meltdown, his nights
haunted by the ghost of his daddy,

he fled the kingdom.

William claimed that he'd come
just to restore English liberties,

but now he had Dutch soldiers
in the streets,

and if he decided to be king after all,
who was going to say otherwise?

In February 1689, William of Orange
and Mary Stuart

were proclaimed
King and Queen of England.

But during the ceremony,
something profoundly novel happened.

A Declaration of Rights was read out

listing the conditions
under which the new monarchs

would be allowed to sit on the throne.

Parliament had changed
the job description of the ruler.

It turned out that the country
did not need Leviathan.

It wanted a chairman of the board,
and Dutch William fitted that role to a tee.

William III would fight his wars
by asking, not demanding funds

from the elected representatives
of the people.

Ruling together with parliament,

his government looked remarkably like
a reasonable version

of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate.

History has called this
a "Glorious Revolution".

It was probably neither,

but afterwards, the British monarchy
would never be the same again.

But the old monarchy had
one last desperate play to make.

In March, 1689, James landed in Ireland

with 20,000 French troops.

The Catholic Irish flocked to their king.

Like the English, they'd become pawns
in someone else's chess game.

Outside Drogheda,
two armies, two worlds,

faced each other across the River Boyne.

One belonged to the old world
of faith and fervour,

the other,
Dutch and German professionals,

were part of a modern war machine.

No prizes for guessing who won.

Nobody.

(MAN) It is the patriotic duty
of Irish men and Irish women

to engage in that legitimate
armed struggle.

We will never surrender!

Never, never, never, never!
(PEOPLE CHEERING)

(NEWSPEAKER) I appeal to Unionists
to engage fully

in the search for a lasting peace.

I, too, am an Ulsterman

and we don't need the British ministers
to rule us...