All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.10of15.Britannia.Incorporated.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

In the Britain of King William III,
turning up late could get you killed.

State business was meant
to run like clockwork.

Time was money. Money was power.

In the Highlands of Scotland, though, the
timeless tradition of the clans still ruled.

To William's annoyance, some clans
remained obstinately loyal

to his predecessor, James II,
the Stuart king driven out in 1688.

Even worse, those Jacobites had won
a short-lived victory over William's troops

at the Battle of Killiecrankie.

William's right-hand man in Scotland,
the Lord Advocate,

believed it was high time
to teach the clans a lesson in loyalty.

The chiefs were given a deadline to pledge
an oath of allegiance - January 1st, 1692.

Acknowledge William
as your lawful king.

Those who make the pledge will be
rewarded, those who don't, punished.

The Chief of the MacDonald clan
of Glencoe missed his appointment

by five days.

At dawn on February 13th, 1692,

Williamite troops from the Argyle Regiment,
already quartered in Glencoe,

were ordered to carry out a massacre.

They butchered 38 of the clan

and the rest of the village -
old men, women and children,

some half-naked -
fled into a raging snow storm

where many of them died.

In London and Edinburgh,
news of the massacre at Glencoe

was greeted
with pious professions of shock,

especially, of course, from those who'd
had the responsibility of organising it.

An enquiry was held
but, needless to say, it was a sham.

If the intention had been
to cow the Jacobites into submission,

it had all gone horribly wrong.

The massacre was a public relations
disaster for William's government.

The Scottish parliament voted it
an act of murder.

How could victim and perpetrator
ever be reconciled now?

How could Scotland,
stricken with poverty,

with its national pride deeply wounded,

ever come together
with its rich and ruthless neighbour?

But come together they did,
and the two countries,

for centuries divided
by politics and religion,

would make a future together
based on profit and interest.

What began as a hostile merger
would end as a full partnership

in the most powerful going concern
in the world - Britannia Incorporated.

It was one of the most astonishing
transformations in European history

and this is how it happened.

(FANFARE)

In England, the 1690s were the years
when the victors of 1688

congratulated themselves
on a "Glorious Revolution".

In Scotland,
there'd be years of purgatory.

After the massacre at Glencoe
came famine and pestilence.

For several summers in a row,
the sun refused to appear.

Torrential rains poured down.

Cattle and sheep became diseased
with foot rot.

Fields of barley and oats
turned into mildewed slurry.

The Jacobite clergy
said this was God's wrath

for turfing out the rightful king.

In all this darkness,
there were some who saw the light,

a light that was going to shine
hot and strong on Scotland.

A plan that would transform the country
from impotence and destitution

into riches and power
beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

It would make Scotland - or its colonial
trading post, New Caledonia -

the hub of the universe.

And where was that to be?
Well, of course, in Panama.

A group of merchants and bankers,
including William Paterson,

Scottish founder of the Bank of England,

had the idea of creating
a Scottish trading post

on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama.

At first sight, the idea sounds
like the purest lunacy,

but look at the map of world trade
and it becomes visionary.

A major obstacle to east-west trade

was the long, dangerous, and ruinously
expensive journey round Cape Horn.

A trade route that cut through Panama
was an obvious boon.

At Darien, the distance between
the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

was only 40 miles.

Goods could be carried across the narrow
strip of land to waiting merchant ships.

The trading economy of the world
would be revolutionised

and Scotland would run it.

The Darien scheme instantly captured
the imagination of the Scottish people.

Men and women
from all over Scotland

queued up to invest in the venture.

When the first fleet sailed from the Firth
of Forth in July 1698, flying the Saltire

and the extraordinary company flag
of Indians, llamas,

towered elephants
and the beaming rising sun,

it was carrying more than the 1,200 people
selected to be the lucky colonists.

It was carrying the hopes
of an entire nation.

But the only information the Company
of Scotland had about Darien

was from a pirate surgeon
called Lionel Wafer,

who claimed
he knew the Caribbean very well

and had convinced them
the place was paradise.

The climate was mild, he said,
the soil fertile

and the natives friendly.

They were also vain, spending much
of the day combing their long hair

so, naturally, the ship's cargo
included combs - thousands of them.

The rest of the cargo says something
about the conditions

they were expecting to encounter.

Crate-loads of catechisms and Bibles
for converting the pagans.

1,400 hats,
an even greater supply of wigs.

The Darienites were expecting
to live like lairds of the lagoon!

But before the ship
got anywhere near Darien,

the dream had turned into a nightmare.

Forty crew and passengers died
on the long voyage,

and when they found
their golden island, it was, of course,

a mosquito-infested swamp.

The natives did not, it seemed,
want their combs or anything else.

In a sweltering, rainy jungle,

all the colonists' efforts
went into lugging cannon

into a primitive stockade
bravely christened Fort St Andrew.

They were dying now
of disease and hunger

at a rate of ten a day,
and their supplies ran with maggots.

And there was no outside help.

Tropical New Caledonia was a direct
threat to the English trading empire

and the government in Westminster
was determined it should fail.

A law was passed making it illegal

for any Englishman
to invest in the scheme

or give assistance
to the desperate Darienites.

When a second
Scottish expedition arrived

at New Edinburgh, all they found
were hundreds of graves.

Back home, when the full extent
of the disaster sunk in,

the fate of the Darien expeditions
became a national trauma.

They consumed a full third
of Scotland's liquid capital,

but the most serious casualty
of the fiasco

had been the last, best hope
of a national rebirth -

Scotland going it alone.

That hope died
in the malarial swamps of Darien.

Many laid the failure of Darien
squarely at England's door

for its deliberate sabotage
of the scheme.

A wave of Anglophobia swept the country

startling the men
who ran things in Westminster.

They became more worried
when it looked likely that Queen Anne,

who had succeeded William in 1702,

would die childless.

A crisis over the succession loomed.

For the defenders
of the revolution of 1688,

whoever succeeded her
simply had to be Protestant.

In Scotland,
after the humiliation of Darien,

many Scots favoured Anne's half-brother,
the Catholic James Edward Stuart,

who was living in exile
with England's old enemy - France.

Westminster could not tolerate
these kinds of threats

from its own back yard.

It had to take away Scotland's independence
and insist on full political union.

The creation of a single British state
under a single parliament

was now a matter of immediate urgency.

(SHOUTING AND DRUMS BEATING)

The politicians knew they needed
a sweetener to make the Union

more palatable... and this is it.

In this chest was deposited
The Equivalent,

the exact amount
lost in the Darien adventure,

all �398,000 of it.

You can almost hear the advocates
of union saying, as they beamed broadly,

"Now, this is what union means.

"You seem to be
a little hard pressed for funds.

"Well, now Scotland's debts
will be Britain's.

"Sink or swim, we shall do it together."

The Equivalent money, along with
favourable trade concessions,

was the carrot dangled before
members of the Scottish parliament.

By now, there were many
who were already looking south,

saw reality, smelled the profits.

But behind the carrot,
of course, lay the stick.

Westminster threatened
to block Scottish exports to England

unless Scotland entered
union negotiations.

The writing was on the wall.

Distraught, Lord Belhaven delivered
a lament over the funeral pyre

of Scottish independence.

I see our mother Caledonia,

like Caesar sitting in the midst
of the Senate,

attending the final blow
and breathing out her last.

We are an obscure, poor people,
though formerly of better account,

removed to a remote corner
of the world

without name and without alliances.

In 1707, the deed was done.

A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.

It took just ten weeks
to go through the Scottish parliament,

six through Westminster.

Scotland and England
were now joined at the hip.

What kind of nation
was this Great Britain?

To answer that, all you needed to do was
to go to the new Royal Naval Hospital,

a palatial retirement home
for pensioned-off servicemen,

in Greenwich.

It was a triumphal statement
of how Britain saw its place in the world

in the early 18th century.

On the ceiling,
painted by Sir James Thornhill,

a jubilant allegory celebrates the reign
of William of Orange and his wife Mary.

Thornhill's design is a shameless steal
from the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles,

but the artistic larceny is,
of course, making a point.

Here, Apollo the sun god shines not
on the Catholic Sun King, Louis XIV,

but on the British monarchs.

Over there, in France -
despotism and popery.

Over here, thanks to William -
liberty and Protestantism.

Over there - the curses of serfdom,
misery and superstition.

Over here -
the blessings of navigation, trade

and science.

But, of course, you don't go to ceiling
paintings for the unvarnished truth.

The truth was that we had been at war
for almost 25 years,

give or take a few intermissions.

And during that time, Britain had been
transformed by the experience.

It was no longer a case of gallant little
England defending the sceptr'd isle

against the serried ranks of despots.

Now, we sat at the heart
of the greatest war machine in the world.

That machine couldn't work
without the lubrication of money,

so along came a national debt
needed to pay for it all.

And this debt needed servicing,
so enter the armies of money men -

accountants, tax assessors,
Customs and Excise officers.

Buried inside all the crowing
propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling,

there was one crucial nugget of truth.

Louis XIV could demand money
for his wars,

William III had to ask for it.

Almost everywhere else in Europe,

the more military the state,
the stronger the king, except in Britain.

Here parliament, not the monarchy,
signed the cheques.

The longer the war went on, the stronger
parliament became, as the purse it had

grew bigger and bigger.

What's more, the kind of politics
raging in Britain,

we can recognise as distinctly modern.

Two parties - the Whigs and Tories -
diametrically opposed, not just about

the policies of the day, but about the
entire political character of the nation

and the upheaval of 1688
that had created it.

Whigs and Tories were not two parties
who, when the barracking was done,

could meet up for a drink
and a bawdy joke.

They went to different taverns,
coffee houses and clubs.

They were two armed camps.

And the artillery barrages that flew
between them were often red hot.

250,000 votes
were at stake in elections,

more than 20%
of the adult male population.

And nothing was spared to grab them -
money, drink, libels, gangs of toughs.

This was all-out war at the hustings.

(SHOUTING AND SCREAMING)

Tories accused the Whigs of being
fanatics, the dregs of the populace,

atheists, Commonwealth men.

Whigs accused Tories of being willing
tools of the Jesuits and the French.

Since the Revolution said there should be
an election every three years,

this guaranteed
an awful lot of politics.

The political temperature
reached fever pitch

in 1714 when Queen Anne died
with no heir.

To make sure of a Protestant successor,

no fewer than 57 individuals with
blood ties to Anne were passed over

to arrive at the next King of England -

an uncharismatic, middle-aged man
who didn't speak English.

George, Elector of Hanover,
now King George I of Great Britain.

The Whigs backed his arrival in Britain

and were rewarded when the new king
appointed a Whig government.

In response, the Tories ridiculed
the new king as a lecherous dolt.

His coronation was greeted
with rioting in twenty towns.

(SKIRL OF BAGPIPES)

But by far the most serious trouble
now came from across the border.

The Union failed to dampen enthusiasm
in Scotland for the Jacobite cause.

In fact, quite the opposite.

The promise of trade and abundance
had failed to cross the Firth of Forth,

and all of Scotland was suffering
from high taxes

imposed by Westminster.

The Jacobite leader, the Earl of Mar,
buoyed up by promises of support

from English Tories and Jacobites,

declared James the rightful king
at Braemar

and proceeded to raise an army.

The Jacobite slogan of "King James
and no Union" meant support

from both the Highlands
and Lowlands came swiftly.

10,000 men joined the rebellion.

When news came through
of a Jacobite rising in Lancashire,

the government knew
it was in serious trouble.

But the Earl of Mar set new records
for military ineptness.

After the Battle of Sheriffmuir,
which ended in a draw,

and with his troops outnumbering
the Hanoverian army,

Mar moved energetically into retreat!

By the time James Edward Stuart
landed at Peterhead on December 22nd,

it was all over.

The Hanoverian dynasty remained,

but the Jacobite rising was yet another
demonstration of just how unstable

the new political order was.

After this stormy start to the 18th century,

if anyone would've predicted it would be
followed by decades of calm,

they would've been thought
an absurd optimist,

yet that's exactly what happened.

It came about through the efforts not
of a king, a religious leader, or a general,

but a political manager of uncanny genius.

He'd been, like his father and grandfather
before him, a Norfolk squire and an MP.

He'd moved smoothly through
the big-money jobs - Paymaster-General,

Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He'd come to dominate British political life
for a quarter of a century.

He was... Robert Walpole.

Although he never actually had the title,

Walpole was, in effect,
Britain's first Prime Minister

and, under his leadership, the British
economy boomed as never before.

Walpole's appeal
was to shameless self-interest.

From the pursuit of it, he believed,
would come the country's greater good.

"Which do you prefer?" he might've said.

"A battle over principles
and religious convictions?"

That was only going to lead to war,
turmoil and poverty.

"Or would you rather have what I offer you?
Peace, political stability and low taxes."

What today we'd call
"a healthy business environment".

From the beginning, Walpole,
nicknamed "Cock Robin", had made a bet

that the politics of the future
would be about portfolio management

rather than religious passion
or legal debate.

In 1712, he'd been sent to prison
for embezzlement

and the experience gave him
a painful lesson

in how tightly intertwined
were political and financial fortunes.

But perhaps his greatest asset

was his unerring grip
on the psychology of loyalty.

Walpole made a point of taking

every new Whig member of the House
out to dinner.

Tete-a-tete. And there, with a glass
of his best claret in your fat little hand,

and a haunch of mutton
juicily oozing on the trencher

and Cock Robin's glittering eyes

twinkling amiably at you, assuring you that
the life of the party, the state of the nation,

depended on you, the new member
from Little Mucking-on-the-Wold.

How could you not express undying
devotion and loyalty to his interest?

Walpole sat at the controlling centre
of a vast empire of patronage.

The jobs at his disposal conferred
honour as well as cash on the holder

and they were dangled on a string
by the great political puppeteer.

In retrospect, we can see that Walpole
built Britain's, in fact the world's,

first modern party political machine.

He had placemen in parliament
primed to vote as he directed.

He had George I and then George II

eating out of the palm of his hand.

And in case anyone was tempted
to flirt with the opposition,

he had the kind of information that could
make life really difficult for them.

In short, Walpole had the goods.

The goods, in fact,
in every sense of the word.

As well as looking after the country's interest,

Walpole made sure
he looked after his own.

Just how much of a fortune he made
for himself is spectacularly on view

here at his country house in Norfolk,
Houghton Hall.

Houghton was the Whig Xanadu,
the last word in opulence.

Anything that riches could buy,
Walpole bought.

Marble, mahogany, figured damask,

shimmering silks and satins,
classical sculpture,

glorious Renaissance and Baroque art,

all shipped to his East Anglian
pleasure dome.

But Houghton was not just about living the
good life, much as its master revelled in it,

it was also a statement of grandeur
meant to stun sceptics

into recognising
that only someone truly in command

of the nation's fortunes
could possibly afford something like this.

King George may have had the throne,
but Cock Robin had the palace.

There's no doubt that Walpole's appeal
to self-interest was infectious.

With the glittering prizes dangled
before their noses,

the governing class of the country -
180 peers and 1,500 country gentry -

lined up to trade in party passion
for Palladian houses.

They stopped shouting
and started building.

And what they built was designed
to insulate them from the grubbiness

of the real world -
and Robert Walpole showed them the way.

This stone column marks the spot
where the village of Houghton stood.

It had been here for centuries,
but now it was just an inconvenience.

It was too close to Walpole's house
and it definitely spoiled the view,

so he simply had it demolished
and moved down the road.

Of course, they could tell themselves,
and they did,

that their houses and parks were not just
monuments to wealthy self-indulgence.

They were also a testimony
to the greatness and glory of the nation.

Stephen Switzer, one of the leading
landscape architects of the day,

certainly saw this as his duty.

Magnificent gardens, statues
and waterworks complete the grandeur.

It is then that we may hope to excel
the gardens of the French

and make that great nation give way
to the superior beauties of our gardens,

as her late prince has
to the invincible force of British arms.

This was the kind of battle the rich
and powerful in Hanoverian Britain

really liked to fight - war by gardening.

Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the great
18th-century landscape gardens.

Taking inspiration
from ancient Roman villas,

aristocrats like Sir Henry Hall,
who built Stourhead,

even thought of their parks
as a kind of public education

and encouraged locals to pay a visit,
provided they stuck rigidly

to the designated tour route.

That route would not just meander
between ponds and trees,

but towards classical buildings

designed to kindle feelings of virtue
and patriotism in their breast.

But sharing
all this pastoral graciousness

only went so far.

For the ruling class,
their land was now a money pump.

Big profit-yielding farms
replaced strip farming,

and smallholders
were turfed off their land.

Too bad. Landowners needed all the money
they could get to keep up appearances,

not just in the country, but in the town,
and above all in the place

which was the biggest, brashest,
fastest-growing city in Europe - London.

Here, the winners and losers
of Walpole's Britain jostled side by side.

700,000 of them.

One in ten Englishmen.

Foreign visitors were astounded
at the noise,

the hectic throngs packing the streets,
the tireless hucksterism,

the glittering greediness of it all.

The modern morality tales of painter
and engraver William Hogarth

are peopled by innocents
arriving dewy-fresh from the country...

...surrendering to the temptations
of the city

and falling hopelessly into a deep, dark,
sink of iniquity and disease.

But however much moralists frowned on
the new consumerism gripping the city,

economic realists knew
it was the way forward.

(WOMAN) # Come buy
my greens and flowers fine

# Your houses to adorn #

There had been other great emporium
cities in Europe, but nothing like this.

London had invented serious shopping

and it had something
like 20,000 shops to prove it.

Its shops would lure the customer to buy
something they'd never thought of acquiring.

Novelty items like oriental goldfish,

which became an aristocratic marvel.

Caged canaries, finches and parrots.

Unheard-of luxuries
became commonplace,

priced to appeal to the middle class.

China from Holland
from which to sip your tea.

Exotic fruits like pomegranates
and pineapples.

The first commercially available
condoms.

Lambskin for the rich, linen soaked
in brine for the not-so-rich.

London's consumer culture
was Mephistopheles winking an eye,

crooking a finger, and proffering credit.

But terrible things could happen to those
who ran out of credit and ran out of time.

A debt of just �2 would get you
locked up in a debtor's prison.

The prison, like almost everything else in
greedy, managerial, Hanoverian Britain,

was a business - a matter
of pounds, shillings and pence.

�5,000 was the price
one John Huggins paid

for the wardenship of the Fleet Prison,

the equivalent of
half-a-million pounds today.

The way he could recoup his investment
was to charge inmates for their stay.

The hotel from hell, including, of course,
the rent for their shackles.

A fiver would get you your own cell,

a few shillings more,
something approximating food.

Less than that, you took your chance
in the packed common prison,

sleeping on the floor,
no air, no sanitation...

...and smallpox waiting to get you.

"Who are the real criminals?" was
the cry on the streets, in coffee houses,

and in the newspapers of London.

Everywhere you looked, the line between
the law enforcers and the law breakers

seemed arbitrary.

In 1725, the Lord Chancellor
was convicted of embezzling �80,000.

People had had enough.

In the 1730s, satires and essays
and poems and pictures

documented a rising wave of revulsion

at the world Walpole
had brought into being.

A sense that beneath all the platitudes
about peace and stability

lay squalor and corruption.

A walk through London, for example,
was a walk over prostrate bodies,

big and little.

Infants, whose mothers were unable,
or sometimes unwilling, to raise them,

were abandoned on the streets.

But there came a point
when someone was tired enough

of stepping over half-dead babies
found in the gutter

to do something about it.

That someone was a 53-year-old
retired merchant sea captain

called Thomas Coram.

Coram had made his fortune
in Massachusetts

from the Transatlantic timber trade.

All he wanted was to have
a quiet life in Rotherhithe

where he could smell
the Thames and the sea.

But the sight of all those tiny abandoned
corpses wouldn't leave him in peace.

Worse, he knew that the mortality rate
for infants born in the workhouse

and sent out to wet nurse
was close to 100%.

(BABIES CRYING)

So Thomas Coram determined
to tap some of that new-found wealth

to create a foundling hospital,

a place where babies could be deposited,
legitimate or illegitimate,

and would be given
a decent chance of survival.

For nearly 20 years, he made himself
a nuisance to his friends,

petitioning the king and everyone else
until the funds got raised.

In 1741, the hospital opened its doors
to its first children.

Not surprisingly,
it couldn't cope with demand.

To decide which children
could and couldn't get places,

there was a heartbreaking lucky dip.

Mothers lined up
to draw wooden balls out of a bag.

A white ball, and your baby was in.
A red ball, you were on the reserve list.

A black ball...
Well, you were back on the streets.

Inside this cabinet
are some of the saddest things

left to us by the 18th century.

These are the keepsake tokens given
to their babies by desperate mothers

just at the point when they'd leave them
to the tender mercies

of the Foundling Hospital.

There's a whole world
of sorrow and love

in this extraordinary cabinet.

It speaks not just of the destitute.

Some of the pieces, like this beautiful
mother-of-pearl heart

with the initials,
presumably of the baby,

suggest that some of these mothers
were quite well-to-do.

But in many other cases,
the pieces speak of real hardship.

They were just the things the mothers
happened to have on them

when they had to get rid of the children.

Some of these mothers had nothing
at the last minute

to offer their little babies except a nut -
a nut meant to be worn as a pendant.

There's a little hole where the string
was supposed to be strung through.

Sometimes things that had a little work
on them - like this beautiful sewn heart.

Or, most desperate of all perhaps,

just this flimsy little piece of ribbon.

Imagine a mother saying goodbye
for the last time to her baby

just taking a bit of ribbon
from her hair or her wrist

and giving it, as she hoped,
to her child.

Now, if this wasn't heartbreak enough,
it only gets worse when you know

that none of these things
ever found their way to the children.

(BABY CRIES)

The Foundling Hospital couldn't hope
to work miracles overnight.

Nearly half the babies died
in the first year,

but that was a huge improvement
over the usual figures.

This was the middle-class parish at work -

well off, busily charitable

and as much interested
in virtue as in wit.

There had been philanthropy before, but
this was the first time that businessmen

came together with high-profile artists,
writers and sculptors

in a campaign of conscience
to attack a hideous evil

in what was supposed to be
a Christian modern metropolis.

The charges of the hospital would be
employed in the service of the nation.

In the Navy if they were boys
or in domestic service if they were girls.

The Foundling Hospital
was philanthropy with a purpose.

Its charges would be
model Britons of the future,

not gin-soaked, syphilitic rakes.

They were going to be sober,
educated, industrious, God-fearing

and, above all, patriotic.

# Rule, Britannia... #

This was Britannia's time.

# Britons never will be slaves

(CHOIR) # Rule, Britannia

# Britannia rule the waves

# Britons never will be slaves #

The lyrics for this chest-thumping song
were written by two Scots

for a play about Alfred the Great,
and they were sung

by merchants and businessmen
who saw Britain's future lay

with the blue water empire of trade.

But someone was in the way
of this prosperous future -

and that someone was Robert Walpole.

Merchants felt Walpole and his cronies
cared too much about land

and not enough about business.

So they were not amused
when Walpole raised taxes

on things that made money for them -
beer and coal -

while making damn sure
to keep the land tax low.

What would be the only thing that could
raise those land taxes? War, of course.

So no wonder Walpole, unforgivably,
pussyfooted around the Spanish

when they presumed
to interfere with our ships.

When he signed a treaty with Spain
that was seen as an unpatriotic sell-out,

the merchants
were even more incensed.

Walpole's effigy was burned in the streets
by crowds roaring for his political head.

Walpole's allies and time-servers
in parliament

were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

His political enemies closed in
gleefully for the kill.

To deprive them of the satisfaction,
Walpole walked, a broken man,

back to his wine
and his dogs at Houghton.

It was the end of an era.

Now the gung-ho patriots could have
their get-rich war,

and they must have thought
it would be a breeze.

Britain could fight abroad
because it was so united at home.

But in 1745, that unity

would prove a bitter illusion.

The Jacobite cause had refused to die,

especially amongst the clans
of north-west Scotland,

where it fed off
continued opposition to the Union.

What the Jacobites needed
was a figurehead

and, in 1745, they got one,

a leader many saw as a model
of virile fearlessness.

The son of James Edward Stuart,

the man known to us and to posterity
as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The fact the Prince's full name

was Charles Edward Louis Casimir
Silvester Severino Maria Stuart

should tell us that the Prince was less

the incarnation
of the old Scotland of the clans

and much more a fully-fledged graduate
of the pan-European

Italo-Polish-Franco-Irish-Catholic
international community.

But still, he was a Stuart,

and that blood certainly mattered
to the Prince himself

who, at 24, sailed from France to Scotland
to win back the throne for his father.

On the 19th August, 1745,
Prince Charles Edward Stuart

stood here at Glenfinnan,
watched his family standard being raised,

and told the assembled clansmen
he'd come to make Scotland happy.

That would've been news to some
of the crofters who'd been threatened

with having their cottages burned
unless they joined the Jacobites.

But the sight of Bonnie Prince Charlie -
and compared to George II

and to his own embittered, ageing father,
he certainly was bonny -

standing here in the glen at the head
of Loch Shiel in his tartan plaid

did seem to promise, if only
for a moment, a new Scottish future.

Or, at the very least, the end
of the miserable captivity of the Union.

But happiness? Well, that was going
to prove a lot harder to come by.

The structure of clan society meant that
support for the prince gathered quickly.

In England, families were becoming
a kind of business.

In the Highlands of Scotland, kinship
was much more a matter of blood.

Clan loyalty was built around the idea,
even when it was a mythical idea,

of a common ancestor.

The grandest landlords in the Highlands,
like their Lowlands counterparts,

were becoming connoisseurs
of fine claret and chamber music.

But the local laird had a lot
in common with his crofters.

They both spoke Gaelic,
they wore tartan plaid and sporran,

and they ensured they had broadswords
and daggers ready when the chieftain called.

Buoyed by the prince's claim
that the French were behind them

and planned an imminent invasion,

Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army
moved swiftly,

catching the inadequate
Hanoverian forces in Scotland

completely unprepared.

But when the prince finally took
what was the big prize, Edinburgh,

he hadn't won over
the whole of Scotland.

The Lowlands were overwhelmingly
loyal to King George.

It's quite possible that more Scots
fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie

than for him.

Nonetheless, it seemed that the prince
couldn't put a foot wrong.

When his army faced the Hanoverians
at the Battle of Prestonpans,

they won a resounding victory.

At Holyroodhouse, debate raged
as to what to do next.

The Highland chiefs,
sceptical of finding support in England,

advised Charles to make the Stuarts
masters of the north,

but to go no further.

But for Charles, nothing less
than a conquest of England would do

and he won the day by a single vote.

The Jacobites were on their way south.

In rapid succession, Carlisle,
Lancaster, Preston and Manchester

all fell to the prince's army without
a shot being fired in their defence.

With the Jacobites approaching Derby
at the beginning of December

and the bulk of His Majesty's forces
fighting in Europe,

there was close to pandemonium
in London and the south.

There was a run on the Bank of England
and all the shops in London closed.

The few soldiers left to protect
the capital were not,

shall we say, of the kind of calibre
to inspire much confidence.

But just as in 1715, it could be said
the Jacobites defeated themselves.

They didn't do it on the field of battle,
but in this room at Exeter House in Derby,

on December 5th, 1745.

The prince and his chiefs argued bitterly
whether to go forward or retreat.

"London is just 130 miles away,"
said the prince.

"Move on the capital
and the French will come.

"Besides, we've got precious little time.

"The Redcoats will be back
from Europe soon."

"No," said Lord George Murray,
joint commander of the prince's army.

"I no longer believe
the French are coming.

"It's time to cut our losses.
It's time to go home."

This time, the prince lost the vote
by a substantial margin.

The Jacobites turned about
and headed north,

beginning the long tramp
back to Scotland

through dreadful winter weather, pursued
by the newly-returned British regiments.

Their retreat turned into a nightmare.

It's hard to know
which was more murderous -

the snows of December and January
or the vengeful, pursuing troops

of George II's son,
the Duke of Cumberland.

Cumberland gave a taste
of what he was capable of at Carlisle.

The garrison had been captured
by Jacobites on their march south,

but they were unable to hold out
against Cumberland's advance.

Into this tiny space were crammed
hundreds of Jacobite soldiers,

locked up without any air
or any water.

What they did have
were these shiny stones.

Smooth, damp, slimy -
a terrible memento of their distress.

To this day,
they're called "licking stones"

because the prisoners were brought
to such horrible extremities

that they were forced and reduced

to sliding their tongues
in these cavities

to try and collect the pathetic amount
of moisture gathered on the rock.

This really was Hanoverian Britain's
Black Hole of Calcutta.

By the time winter turned into spring
in the Highlands,

it was unmistakably clear that,
whatever its temporary successes,

the Jacobite war was lost.

With every passing week, the Hanoverian
advantage in men, money and guns told.

The armies eventually faced each other
at Culloden, near Inverness.

Cumberland's force was only
a third as big again as the prince's,

but it was lethally better equipped.

A new verse of the National Anthem
proved to be prophetic

as the big guns began to fire.

(WOMAN SINGS)

Just an hour after the firing had started,

there were 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders
lying slaughtered.

Only 50 of the Hanoverians
had perished.

It was perhaps better to be
one of those felled by Hanoverian guns.

It spared you the sight of British soldiers
coming at you, while you lay wounded,

to finish you off
with their newfangled bayonets.

As one Hanoverian officer noted:

Our men, killing the enemy,
dabbling their feet in blood

and splashing it about one another,

look like so many butchers
rather than Christian soldiers.

Charles Edward survived the battle
and gave the order:

Every man for himself.

He went on the run until it was safe
to be shipped back to France.

In England,
the victory was riotously celebrated.

Effigies of Bonnie Prince Charlie
were burned at the stake.

Many Scots, too, were pleased
to see the end of the Jacobite threat,

delighted the prince had gone.

But in the heartland of his support,
north-west Scotland,

Charles Edward left behind
a population prostrate

before the avenging army
of the Duke of Cumberland,

determined to break
the Jacobite clans for ever.

Villages were burned to the ground,
captured men hanged or shot.

Cattle were stolen,
thousands driven from their homes.

Even the wearing
of Highland dress was banned,

in an effort to strip the clans not just of
their possessions, but of their identity.

The hopes and dreams of the Jacobites
had to live in the secret world of things,

things that could be hidden
or disguised -

a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair

or the mysterious emblems
engraved on wine glasses.

Take a look at this board.

At first sight, it seems
an indecipherable smudge of paint.

But if you look at it the right way -
reflected against

the silvered mirror of a cylinder,

it turns into The Lost Love,
the boy born to be king,

the saviour across the water.

Unhappily for the keepers
of the Jacobite flame,

Charles Edward in exile
went rapidly downhill.

Too many mistresses,
far too much drink, years of indolence,

made him prematurely decrepit.

(WOMAN) # Will ye no' come back again? #

But the romantic myth of the prince

would survive the wreckage
of his real history.

It would live in the poems
and popular ballads,

where he would always be
the dashing, charismatic boy prince.

# Will ye no' come back again? #

But Jacobitism as a political force
was spent.

In the decades following Culloden,

a transformation
would take place in Scotland.

The Jacobite warriors
who'd been unable to break Britannia

were given an alternative to returning
to their old obsessions of clan loyalty -

join the future,
join the army of the British Empire.

Many thousands took the offer.

Instead of being the perennial victims
of that empire, they now colonised it.

In the cities, too,
a new Scotland was being born.

In just 20 years or so after Culloden,

it became common to refer to Edinburgh
and Glasgow as hotbeds of genius.

The collapse of the backward-looking
cult of honour made room

for the flowering of
the forward-looking cult of modernity.

In the academies, drawing rooms
and reading clubs of Scottish cities,

hopeless dreams
were replaced by the appetite

for hard facts and hard cash.

The first British theory of progress was
sketched out by Scottish philosophers

like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.

They looked at their own country's tragedy

and saw in its history the entire arc
of human social evolution,

from hunting and gathering societies

to settled farmers and, finally,
to true civilisation -

the world of commerce,
science and industry,

the world of the towns.

It was another Scot, Robert Adam,

who became the first British king
of architectural style.

Less than 20 years after Bonnie Prince
Charlie had retreated from Derby,

a different Scottish conqueror
came to Derbyshire and, this time,

he was invincible.

At Kedleston Hall,
Robert Adam built in a new style

for a new kind of aristocrat.

Its owner, the first Lord Scarsdale,
was a true new Briton -

rich, not just from land,
but from the coal mines of Derbyshire.

What he wanted was a house
that would not overpower the visitor

with vulgar displays
of swaggering wealth,

but somewhere that would speak
of Roman grandeur,

of noble classical austerity,
of loftiness of mind, of purity of taste,

a palace of contemplation,
a temple of virtue.

Could the accumulation of private riches
be a force for general happiness?

The Scot who made the deepest mark on
the future of Britain certainly thought so.

In 1746, while the last survivors
of Cumberland's butchery

were being hunted down,
Adam Smith, son of a customs officer,

had an exhilarating vision of the future.

That vision was based on
Smith's rejection of guilt and sin.

But it would his revolutionary book,
"The Wealth of Nations",

which would mark Scotland's farewell
to sentimental self-destruction.

Upbeat and optimistic
about the happiness of material life,

Smith laid out,
as a matter of scientific fact,

mankind's natural drive
to self-betterment.

Allowed to follow their natural urges,

men would create, without even
willing it, a better world.

Richer, freer, more educated.

The best thing government could do
was get out of the way

and allow the "invisible hand
of the market" to do its work.

The economic world
was like a watch, he wrote,

its springs and wheels
all admirably adjusted

to the ends for which it was made.

So, too, the countless movements
of men would perfectly interact

for the purposes
for which God had made them.

That purpose was progress, and it was
one of history's sweetest ironies

that it had fallen to Scotland -
poor, bloodied, mutilated Scotland -

to show Britannia the way ahead.

If you want to see the future,

forget the pompous monuments
of England's past.

Come north instead to the new towns
of Glasgow and Edinburgh

and see the future of Britain.

The future, perhaps, of the world.