All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.12of15.Forces.of.Nature.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

For thousands of years, the mountains, lakes
and forests of Britain have been just geography.

But in the late 1700s,

they became something much more -
the face of our nation.

Our countryside became our country.

When homesick travellers
thought fondly of Britain,

they thought of their landscape.

Most of us still do.

And it was, for the first time,
a landscape of all the British nations -

the wild places of Wales and Scotland,

as well as the peaks of Northern England,
rediscovered, relished, mapped.

For centuries, going to the country
had meant, for the gentry,

a stroll through a manicured estate,

an Arcadia as drowsy with sunshine
as an Italian afternoon.

But in the second half
of the 18th century,

there was a change in the weather.

More adventurous Britons
had had enough of make-believe sunshine.

They wanted the real thing,
and they were prepared to go to places

where no one in their right mind
a generation before would have set foot.

But those who clambered up the crags
weren't just out for thrills.

In the wild places, they thought,
might have survived the kind of Britons

who'd stayed miraculously untouched
by the evils of town life,

its corrupt politics and diseased bodies.

If we could somehow learn
from their childlike innocence,

we could become like them
and recapture what it meant to be free,

to be a natural-born Briton.

Nature, in the last decades
of the 18th century,

came to mean something far more
important than gardening or hiking.

A love of nature became code
for a crusade, a revolution even.

And this time, the crusaders
weren't going to be in chain mail.

They would be poets, painters,
hack journalists,

men and women who sensed
a great change coming

and were rushing to embrace it.

What they saw coming
was dark and dirty weather.

Britain was about to be hit
by a political cyclone -

a revolution in France,
just over the Channel.

The boldest poets and pamphleteers

longed for the storm to strike here, too.

More anxious souls were afraid
that where there was lightning

there would also be fire and destruction.

In the end,
Britain would weather the storm.

But as the Duke of Wellington
once famously put it,

it was "the nearest-run thing
you ever saw."

Just how near-run? Wait and see.

The journey to the guillotine
and a world war

would start with the dreams
of a philosopher.

But not any old philosopher.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who was buried just outside Paris,

reshaped the mental habits
of an entire generation,

turning them from creatures of thought
to creatures of feeling.

Before Rousseau, the highest compliment
was that someone was reasonable.

After Rousseau, the compliment became,
"Il a de l'ame" - he has soul.

And the British couldn't get enough of it.

In the spring of 1766,

Rousseau, on the run from enemies,

real and imagined,

pitched up in Staffordshire.

Richard Davenport moved out
of his country house in Wooton,

so that the great man could have
a comfortable asylum

in which to commune
with nature to his heart's content.

Rousseau could have expected
a warm welcome.

His two most famous books,

"Emile" - a manual on natural education,
thinly disguised as a novel -

and - the weepier the age -
"The New Heloise",

featuring forbidden love
between tutor and pupil,

were smash hits among
the sobbing and sighing classes.

At a distance,
Rousseau may have been popular.

But close up, he was a paranoid.

In Derbyshire, he was convinced
the servants were putting cinders in his soup.

In 1768, after more imagined slights,

he left England.

But his ideas stayed

and put down deep roots
among the book-crazy gentry.

Men like Brooke Boothby,
a Derbyshire neighbour

who was painted by Joseph Wright

as a man of feeling,
in tune with the rhythms of nature.

What appealed to men and women
of feeling in the English provinces

was Rousseau's belief that urbanity,
the graces of city life,

were symptoms of everything rotten
about the old world,

the cosmetic mask behind which
lurked the poxy disfigurement

of a deceitful, vicious,
terminally-diseased culture.

The antidote
was to scrub away the mask

and restore grown men and women

to their true nature,
the simplicity of a child.

Childhood was where
Rousseau's revolution began.

If it was to be properly preserved,

the true nature of children had to be
nourished, literally, from the breast.

Since babies took their moral
as well as their physical sustenance

from their mother's milk,
it had better be their own mother's milk.

Professional wet nurses might
contaminate them with vice and disease.

So the virtuous, wholesomely patriotic life

began at the nursing nipple.

Another lesson from Rousseau -

forget about book-learning.

Cramming little heads with facts and
figures damaged their animal high spirits,

their instinct for freedom.

Get 'em outside. Let 'em romp.

But in an age of high infant mortality,

making a heavy emotional investment
in your children

could rebound on you.

As a disciple of Rousseau,
Brooke Boothby discovered

when his daughter Penelope
died at age five

that romantic feeling could be as intense
in sorrow as it had been in happiness.

The poignant memorial speaks
of the terror of loss,

of joy glimpsed, felt, experienced,

and then cruelly destroyed.

That was the romantic vision
of Britain, too - a paradise in peril.

When men of feeling got off their high
horses and left their fantasy parks,

what they saw was the ugly reality
of the countryside.

With the explosion in population,
many thousands left the land

and became dependent on the machines
of the new industrial revolution.

Poets like Oliver Goldsmith

were oppressed by a vision
of deserted villages.

Sweet, smiling village,

Loveliest of the lawn,

Thy sports are fled
and all thy charms withdrawn, :

Amidst thy bowers,
the tyrant's hand is seen,

And desolation saddens all thy green:

One only master grasps
the whole domain,

and half a tillage stints
thy smiling plain, :

Ill fairs the land,

to hastening ills a prey,

where wealth accumulates,
and men decay.

In 1769, the year that Oliver Goldsmith
was writing his poem,

a military officer with a social conscience,
Philip Thicknesse,

published a horrifying account
of four persons starved to death

in a poorhouse at Datchworth.

To most complacent Britons,

this was supposed to happen
in rat-infested corners of the continent,

not in Hertfordshire.

For those who had eyes
to see beyond their parklands,

there were two painful questions about
the real state of the British countryside.

What was to be done and who was
to blame? Was the Church responsible?

Had the Church grown too fat,
too respectable,

too indifferent to its duties
to the unfortunate?

Or was it a matter for
the absentee land-owning gentry,

whose estates were being run
by hard-nosed men

with an eye to bottom-line profit?

Or was it wrong to think in terms
of what had once been?

Was that just applying whitewash

to a building that was
rotten from top to bottom?

Was the answer not charity, but politics?

Thomas Bewick certainly thought so.

As a child outside Newcastle,

he didn't need Rousseau to tell him
about the freedom of fresh air.

Bewick had played truant from school

and instead of filling his slate
with knowledge,

he'd filled it compulsively with drawings,

finding his way instinctively
towards his vocation

as the first great illustrator
of British natural history.

What's more, Bewick's pictures
weren't just meant for a gentleman's library.

Ordinary people wanted a little book

packed with images of the birds
and animals of the British Isles.

But Bewick was looking
at something else, too.

Snuggled between the plover
and a waxwing

was a portrait of his world,

rain-soaked Northumberland,
a tough, dark, gritty place,

a world in a lot of pain.

In his churchyards, dogs snarl.

By his roadsides,
poor bastards break rocks.

In his garrets,
blind old paupers slurp soup.

All this made Thomas Bewick very angry.

All this made Thomas Bewick a radical.

In Newcastle, he mixed in debating clubs

with men like himself - educated artisans,
tradesmen and professionals -

passionate in their devotion to liberty.

It is by the good conduct
and consequent character

of the great mass of the people

that a nation is exalted.

And what fired Bewick's radicalism
wasn't just anger.

It was an emotion new to politics -
sympathy,

an overwhelming feeling for
the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering;

a recognition that deep down,

we are all bonded
by our shared human nature.

It was a call to action
echoed in pulpits up and down the country.

How could you feel others' suffering

and not want to do all in your power
to remedy it?

For the first time,
there was a politics of suffering,

one that could no longer turn a blind eye

to the plight of children,
the aged, the sick and the poor.

Yet bigwigs did turn a blind eye.

They believed that
the Glorious Revolution of 1688

had sent James II
and his Catholic despotism packing,

and had created a land of the free.

In 1788, with a 100th anniversary
upon them,

how tempting it was to continue
patting themselves on the back

as being the most enlightened country
in the world.

But for Bewick and his friends,
there was nothing to be complacent about.

The real problem of the Glorious Revolution,
the radicals argued,

was its hijacking by scoundrels

who'd perverted it to satisfy
their own greed and ambition.

They packed parliament with sycophants
and sold their vote to pay their tailor's bill.

The forgotten lesson of 1688 was that
the people were entitled to resist,

entitled to change government,

entitled to a sovereign that understood
the reality of a limited monarchy.

If the memory of that first revolution
was to mean anything,

a second revolution, of justice,
would have to make good on its promise.

Then, in Paris on July 14, 1789,

the world would learn just how limited
a monarchy could be.

The Bastille fell
and nothing was the same again.

Though the fortress had just eight prisoners,

its eight grim towers
and cannon pointing into the city

had become an emblem
of everything detestable

about the old absolute monarchy.

In Bewick's world, toasts were drunk

to the dawn on a new age of real liberty

and the fall of despots.

And it was noticed
that it had been ordinary people,

armed with muskets and slogans,
who had stormed the citadel.

The inspiring moral was that the people,
if pushed too far,

could and would take back their rights.

Monarchy would be demolished.

So when Dr Richard Price,
from his Unitarian pulpit in London,

congratulated King George III
for recovering his sanity,

he had the cheek to warn him that
unless he came to his political senses,

he too would go the way of Louis XVI.

May you be led to such a sense
of the nature of your situation

to consider yourself
more properly the servant

than the sovereign of the people.

To the young, dressing down a king
in the name of liberty

was a heady pleasure.

William Wordsworth had been born
in the Lake District,

across the Pennines from Bewick.

He, too, had grown up
in love with nature.

Now that love would extend
to all of downtrodden humanity.

In 1790, on the first anniversary
of the fall of the Bastille,

at the age of 19,
Wordsworth found himself in France.

What he saw there, he described as,
"Human nature, seeming born again."

Unhoused beneath the evening star,
we saw dances of liberty.

And in late hours of darkness,

dances in the open air.

We rose at signal given
and formed a ring

and hand in hand,
danced round and round the board.

All hearts were open. Every tongue
was loud with amity and glee.

We bore a name honoured in France -

the name of Englishmen -

and, hospitably, they did give us hail

as their forerunners in a glorious cause.

But not everyone felt this blissful.

Edmund Burke, the eloquent Irish MP

who'd been a friend of the Americans,

now had a change of heart
about revolution.

He, too, had lifted a glass
to toast the dawn of liberty

in July 1789.

But when the lynching started,

Burke decided the revolution was,
above all, an act of violence,

and he denounced it in his vitriolic
"Reflections on the French Revolution".

Amidst assassination, massacre
and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated,

they are forming plans
for the "good order" of future society.

They act amidst the tumultuous cries

of a mixed mob of ferocious
men and women lost to shame.

It's hard to know which hurt more -
the fact that Burke's savage denunciation

came from a friend of liberty and reform,

or that it flung back at the radicals

some of the mushier platitudes
about nature.

They had assumed that nature
filled you with the love of mankind,

that nature was fraternal,
was cosmopolitan.

"Rubbish!" said Burke.
"Nature is rooted in place.

"It teaches you to love your birthplace,

"your language, your customs,
your habits.

"Nature is a patriot."

What Burke hated most of all

was the naivety
of well-meaning Whig politicians,

like his friend Charles James Fox,

putting a few slogans
into the heads of people

not educated enough to understand
what they were wrecking.

"Democracy? Mob-ocracy, more like!"
Said Burke.

Heads stuck on pikes,

the law of the lynch mob,

we don't want that here.

But for one unrepentant enthusiast,
this was a travesty.

Tom Paine,
whose book "Common Sense"

had supported the American Revolution,

now took on Edmund Burke.

In 1791,

he published his counterblast,
"The Rights of Man".

It was a brilliantly-calculated reply.

Burke had used flowery language

to describe the mob's ungallant assault
on the Queen of France.

So Paine, in contrast,

used the earthy, direct street talk
of ordinary people,

the kind of people Burke referred to
as the "swinish multitude".

And what Paine's message was

was that nature fought
on the side of liberty.

At our birth, he said,
we had natural rights

which no government, no sovereign,
could violate and expect to survive.

When Paine shouted, people listened.

He sold 40,000 copies
of "The Rights of Man" in a few months,

and those who bought them
were new to politics,

men like Bewick,
men with grievances to air.

As they became more vocal and visible,

the forces of order,
the party of Church and King,

began to get distinctly nervous.

Prime Minister William Pitt,
in his thirties,

once hailed as a friend of reform,
was now in the conservative camp.

He looked on at events in France
with growing horror and disgust.

It was time to batten down the hatches,
mobilise the militia,

beat the patriotic drum,

and make sure the likes of Tom Paine

were gagged before they made mischief.

Houses were burned,

conspicuous democrats roughed up.

Tom Paine just got out
in the nick of time.

He was tried in proxy for treason.

Those who stayed loyal to Paine

came together in solidarity and defiance.

One place where dangerous thoughts
were positively welcome

was 72 St Paul's Churchyard,

where Joseph Johnson, the bachelor
Liverpudlian printer and publisher,

acted as kindly uncle to all those
he fondly called his "ruffian gang".

On any given Sunday,

you'd find a mix of painters
like William Blake,

agitators for parliamentary reform,

celebrity democrats like Tom Paine.

And you'd find women -
articulate, intelligent and impassioned.

And among those women,
the most striking of all

was Mary Wollstonecraft.

She was the spirit of the time.

Mary Wollstonecraft was
a one-woman revolution.

Living a hand-to-mouth existence
as a writer,

given a roof over her head by Johnson,
Mary burst into print

in outrage at Burke's reflections.

While she was doing it, she noticed that
the rights of men weren't worth much

if they excluded
the other half of human society.

So she produced her own amended version,

"A Vindication of the Rights of Women".

If nature was to be held up
as the handmaid of liberty and equality,

we'd better think
about the natural state of women.

The reason, she said,

why women were so slighted

was that from the time
they were little girls

their entire being was designed
with the sole and sovereign aim

of pleasing men.

She had no time for Rousseau's idea

that women, by their very nature,

could only be wives and mothers.

There was nothing she could see
in her nature

which disqualified her
from being a true citizen.

For daring to say these things,
Mary was abused as "unnatural".

Horace Walpole, the essayist,
called her "a hyena in petticoats".

Like Wordsworth before her,

Wollstonecraft hoped
that in the new French Republic

she'd find like-minded souls
with whom to share her radical views.

But what she landed in was the jumpy,
paranoid dictatorship of the Jacobins.

Rousseau's face and his books
were everywhere.

Slavishly obedient to his dogma,

French women who meddled in politics
were told to shut up

and nurse their babies for the fatherland.

Those who didn't, who dared organise
their own political clubs,

were beaten up on the streets.

In August 1792,
the monarchy had been overthrown,

and a revolutionary republic
created in its place.

A month later, when Prussian and
Austrian armies invaded from the east,

the paranoia became bloody.

1,400 men and women
held in Paris prisons

were demonised as a fifth column
and butchered in cold blood.

In the 21st century, we reckon we know
about the split personality of revolutions,

the transformation
from the smiling face of liberty

to the ugly reality
of a terror and a police state.

But in the 18th century, no one was
reading "A Rough Guide to Revolution",

especially not
its most passionate enthusiast,

who'd witnessed first hand the days
of flowers and freedom and fraternity,

and for whom the slogan of liberty
and equality was a natural partnership.

To begin with, Mary shared
the company and the optimism

of expatriate Americans, Irish,
English and Scots,

who met at White's Hotel in Paris.

In the first flush of revolutionary bliss,

a little spilt blood wasn't going to spoil
the rapture of freedom. Mary herself wrote:

Children of any growth will do mischief
when they meddle with edged tools.

But then, as the despotism of the Crown

was replaced by the despotism
of a police state,

doubts began to creep in.

Just a few weeks after she arrived,
Mary saw Louis XVI going to his trial.

Unaccountably, she found herself
weeping at the dignity of his composure.

It wasn't at all what she'd expected.

Ironically, even the foremost spokesman

for radical politics came under suspicion.

In the summer of 1793, Tom Paine went
from being a local hero to a pariah.

He'd blotted his copybook earlier,

during the debates
over the sentencing of Louis XVI.

Paine was the most famous
anti-monarchist,

but he'd argued very bravely
and very recklessly

that since Louis was now an irrelevance,
why sentence him to death?

He'd also said that a really free republic

owed it even to its worst enemies

to protect them against oppression.

This not only made him unpopular,
but dangerously undesirable.

In the summer,
the chickens came home to roost.

Paine was arrested and locked up
in the Luxembourg Prison over there.

He was saved from the guillotine
only by an absolutely fantastic accident.

When somebody was about
to get the chop,

someone came round
and marked a cross

on the door of their cell.

In Paine's particular case,

the doors happen to have been open,
so that the cross was made

on the inside of the door.

When the doors shut,
that cross was invisible.

Paine escaped his date
with the "National Razor"

by a freak of fate.

As the arrests and executions
started to speed up,

Mary's natural exuberance began to cool.

She sat in her room,

scared and despondent,
writing to Joseph Johnson.

I have seen eyes glare through
a glass door opposite me.

And bloody hands shook at me.

"I wish I had even kept the cat with me,
as I want to see something alive.

Death in so many frightful shapes

has taken hold of my fancy.

I'm going to bed,
and for the first time in my life,

I cannot put out the candle.

By the spring of 1793,

the war between Britain and France
had changed everything.

Instead of being treated as guests,

the expatriates were suspected
of being a fifth column,

compromised by friendship
with French politicians,

guillotined as traitors to the republic.

Mary must have felt
it would be her turn any day.

Salvation appeared
in the good-looking shape

of an American businessman
and property speculator, Gilbert Imlay.

He registered her as his American wife

and thus free from the taint
of being one of the enemies of France.

Nursing their baby in a quiet garden
on the outskirts of Paris,

Mary the feminist had been saved
from the revolution by motherhood.

But it was not to be a happy ending.

As Mary became more devoted,

Imlay's business trips
became mysteriously prolonged.

When she followed him
as far as London,

she found a new mistress.

On a rainy night in October 1795,
she walked around Putney long enough

to make sure her best dress
was heavily saturated.

Then she jumped off the bridge
into the Thames,

leaving a note for Imlay.

"Let my wrongs sleep with me."

But she was not to be allowed
her poetic suicide.

A boatman pulled her out.

She was 37 and she seemed
to have lost everything except her child -

her faith in revolution and the people,

her belief in the possibilities
of an independent woman's life.

The goodness of nature
must have seemed a cruel joke.

Months later, she seemed to get
a second chance at happiness

in the unlikely form of William Godwin,

a philosopher she'd met once before
at Joseph Johnson's.

Godwin was notorious
for his rejection of romance,

as well as marriage and private property.

But Mary's fire burned bright enough
to melt his icy principles.

Though they'd agreed not to cohabit,

the sworn enemy
of matrimony and a feminist

were wedded at St Pancras Church.

And as her months of pregnancy passed,

the two found themselves
relaxing into conjugal cosiness,

to the point where Godwin
was prepared, at least privately,

to admit the force of emotion
as well as thought.

Which is what made the end
so unbearable.

When the time for her labour came,
Mary called a midwife.

But after the baby was born, another girl,

the placenta remained firmly lodged
at the top of the birth canal.

Now, obstetric opinion at the time

held that unless the placenta
was promptly expelled,

there was a lethal danger of infection.

So a doctor from Westminster Hospital
was summoned,

and he stuck his hand up Mary
and pulled.

The placenta came away in pieces

as Mary lay in agony, haemorrhaging.

She had been through so many terrors,
so many ordeals, come so close to death,

and somehow managed to survive.

This time, with so much to live for,
there would be no escape.

She died a week later of septicaemia.

Godwin wrote to a friend,

My wife is now dead.

I firmly believe there does not exist
her equal in the world.

I know from experience we were formed
to make each other happy.

I have not the least expectation
that I can now ever know happiness again.

She is rightly remembered as
the founder of modern feminism,

for making a statement,
remarkable for its bravery and clarity,

that women's nature
was not to be confused with their biology.

But nature, biology, had killed her.

Beyond her deathbed,

the struggle between
liberty and repression raged on,

stopping for no one.

Meeting with radicals
could now get you into serious trouble.

Habeas corpus had been suspended,
printing presses were being smashed,

the doors of freedom
were slamming shut.

And no wonder, for the stakes
were as high as they could get.

Republican France was on the march,

and Britain was vulnerable
where it had always been - in Ireland.

Irish republicans were among
the friends of revolution at White's Hotel.

They had dreamed of an uprising
against the English.

But for the dreams to come true,

an insurrection had to coincide
with a French invasion.

The French did come but they came
too late and on the wrong coast.

By the time they got to Killala Bay
in the west in the summer of 1798,

the rebellion of the united Irishmen
in the east had been crushed

by a British Army at Vinegar Hill.

Stranded in the wilds of County Mayo,
a long, long way from Dublin,

their only Irish help came from a troop
of peasants, schoolmasters and priests.

All the bloody games
we know so well started here -

masked men arriving at midnight,
the stockpiling of arms,

the mercilessness shown towards
anyone even faintly suspected

of collaborating with the English.

Hit-and-run slaughter was not a strategy.

The invasion stalled
and went into retreat.

Finally, the French capitulated.

Wolfe Tone,
the Protestant Irish Republican leader

who'd come with them,
was tried for treason,

but committed suicide in prison
before he could be hanged.

At least 30,000 Irish men and women
died in 1798,

another of the tragedies
that scarred the country,

but one which
would be remembered indelibly,

though not accurately,

as a war of the Protestant English
against the Catholic Irish.

For Pitt and the Westminster politicians,

it had been a close call -
the enemy at the gates in Ireland,

another huge French army
camped on the Channel coast.

A time for sweaty palms.

And a time for all radicals
to ask themselves difficult questions.

How could you remain a cheerleader for
revolution knowing now what you knew,

having seen the dreams
turn to violence and bloodshed?

William Wordsworth had been
as fervent as anyone

in the early days of revolutionary hope.

Now those hopes were turning to doubts.

By 1798, with the fate of Britain
hanging in the balance,

he was renting a house in Somerset
close to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft,

Wordsworth had lost his heart
in revolutionary France.

But his lover and the mother
of his children had been a royalist.

Late in 1792, with war impending,

he had to decide between staying,
at peril to his life,

or returning to England.

He chose the latter path.

Being a friend of the people now
required him to be an enemy of France.

Why? Because France, in the shape
of Napoleon, had abandoned liberty,

and turned into nothing more
than your common-or-garden tyrant,

bent on forcing Britain to its knees.

Wordsworth's other great love affair,
with nature, was as strong as ever,

only now nature made him think
not of revolution, but of home.

Sadder and wiser as he now was,
could he preserve his old fire?

The solution was
to abandon political dogma for poetry.

Hope lay not in the blood spilled in Paris,

but in the moral example
of country people

whose lives were lived
in simplicity and decency,

close to English nature.

The work of poetry now

was to make audible the voices

of the wounded and the destitute.

She had a tall man's height, or more
No bonnet screened her from the heat

A long, drab-coloured coat she wore -

A mantle, reaching to her feet

Before me begging did she stand

Pouring out sorrows like the sea

Grief after grief.

On English land,
such woes I knew could never be.

Nature did still have
the power to transform lives,

but not through
any kind of political agenda.

A vote would never make one happy.

A snowdrop in February,
or a mother's love for her newborn, might.

He returned to his roots
in the Lake District,

made his home at Grassmere.

Nature meant something different now
to Wordsworth and Coleridge.

It no longer connected them with
the wider world. It detached them from it.

When they talked about liberty,
they no longer meant solidarity.

They meant solitude.

Up in the Lakes,
the new affection for home

might be as innocent
as a summer picnic.

But on the frontline of the war,

native loyalty meant something
far more belligerent.

Nature had been recruited
for patriotic propaganda.

Each time invasion threatened,
this inward, insular sense of Britishness

became more emotionally charged.

Anyone faintly suspected of radical
sympathies was branded a collaborator.

The country had never been
so massively mobilised.

Not just an immense army and navy,

but a volunteer militia of 75,000.

And in 1803, in case of invasion,

another 300,000, ready to spring to arms

to defend hearth and home
against the godless French.

When Napoleon turned history teacher,
putting on a show of the Bayeux Tapestry

to remind the British that
former conquests could be repeated,

what he got in response was a rude noise
from the back of the class.

What's more,

William Pitt was not about to go down
with an arrow in his eye.

His war government
mobilised on a scale never seen before.

When the king reviewed
27,000 volunteers in Hyde Park

in October 1803,

half a million of his subjects
cheered him on.

This was Edmund Burke's
loyalist dream come true,

the territorial urge
to defend hearth and home

vindicated as
the most natural passion of all.

Wordsworth now added his voice

to those who thought nature
was not the cradle of democracy,

but the shrine of patriotism.

Save this honoured land from every lord

But British reason and the British sword.

Burke's nostalgia for a Merrie England,

still hanging on deep
in the English countryside,

spawned an extraordinary boom
in everything historical.

Suits of armour were taken out of barns,
polished up and set in entrance halls

to trumpet the patriotic pride
of the gentry.

For more than a decade,
the war roared on,

as Britain confronted Napoleon's empire.

Epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal,
a world conflict from India to the Caribbean,

with spectacular naval victories
like Trafalgar.

During these roller-coaster years,

the country's woes were muffled.

Patriotic propaganda drowned out
any voices of complaint.

The symphony of cannon and drum
reached its climax

on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo.

Surveying the carnage the day after,

Wellington famously said that
the next worst thing to a battle lost

is a battle won.

He didn't know how prophetic
his words would be.

Instead of tasting the fruits of victory,

the poor and the unemployed
were looking for anything to eat.

The economy of post-war Britain

had fallen into the most terrible slump
in living memory.

Even before victory, Napoleon's success
at sealing off European markets,

together with a war
against the United States in 1812,

had destroyed demand
for British manufactures.

Tens of thousands
of weavers and spinners were laid off

or had their wages cut.

Then hundreds of thousands more -
demobbed soldiers,

munitions workers, makers of uniforms,

were thrown to the workhouse.

Misery spilled into violence.

Machines were smashed
in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

While multitudes lost their jobs,
the guardians of nature got them.

With the crisis at its worst,

Wordsworth applied for and got a post
as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.

Come election time, in gratitude,

he campaigned for the local
earl's candidate against a radical.

He was the government's
most obedient servant now.

Those who had sat at his feet
years earlier,

when he'd seemed to be the first
true poet of the people, were horrified.

There would be other heroes now,

heroes for unpoetical times.

William Cobbett, for example.

You'd never confuse William Cobbett
with a poet.

He'd run away from his father's farm
at the age of 14,

and he mostly educated himself.

But that was why
the kind of language he favoured -

earthy, coarse, direct and belligerent,
the language of the pub and barnyard -

was such journalistic dynamite.

The labourers seem miserably poor.

Their dwellings are little better
than pig beds,

and their looks indicate that their food
is not nearly equal to that of a pig.

Their wretched hovels are stuck upon
bits of ground on the side of the road

where the space has been wider
than the road demanded.

His tuppenny trash,
"The Weekly Political Register",

was a one-man revolution in journalism,

belching outrage
in 50,000 copies a week.

There's no doubt
that until Cobbett came along

no one had ever got to the ordinary people,

robbed of their birthright
by social parasites,

and turned them into political animals.

Cobbett was capable of mobilising an army
of hundreds of thousands of petitioners,

enough to make
the government nervous

and start muttering
about a new peasants' revolt.

But at the critical moment,
where was he?

In America, arranging to ship home
the bones of Tom Paine.

But Cobbett's army, the foot soldiers
of democracy, didn't need holy relics.

They needed a leader.
What they got instead was a disaster.

They hadn't been looking for it.

The mass meeting
that was called in August 1819

in St Peter's Field in Manchester
was, its organisers insisted, to be orderly,

even nostalgic, demanding only
that the rights of free-born Britons -

habeas corpus, free press, the right
to honest representation - be restored.

It would be a festival for liberty.

The men of order in London and the
magistrates in Lancashire saw it differently.

Manchester, with its out-of-work
cotton spinners

and its over-educated rabble-rousers,

was a den of conspiracy.

It needed a lesson
before revolution took root.

The jittery Manchester yeomanry
was happy to oblige,

cutting a way through the crowds

to arrest the soapbox orator, Henry Hunt.

A small girl was trampled to death

under their horses' hooves.

The field turned into bloody chaos,

the enraged crowd
surrounding the yeomanry,

mounted troops coming to extricate them,
slicing their way through the bodies.

Eleven were killed,

hundreds more badly wounded.

At least a hundred of the injured
were women and small children.

This is the way an eye witness,

the artisan Samuel Bamford,

recalled it.

In ten minutes, the field was an open
and almost deserted space.

The hustings remained, with a few
broken and hued flag staves erect,

and a torn and gashed
banner or two drooping,

whilst over the whole field was strewed
caps, bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes,

trampled, torn and bloody.

The yeomanry had dismounted.
Some were easing their horses'girths

and some were wiping their sabres.

Peterloo struck old-time radicals

like Thomas Bewick
with nauseated horror.

"Unnatural" was the word
which rang through the denunciations.

The wicked men
who'd done such a thing

had forfeited for ever
the right to be thought of

as the natural governing class of Britain.

They have sinned themselves
out of all shame.

This phalanx have kept their ground,
and will do so, till, it is feared,

violence from an enraged people
breaks them up

or perhaps, till the growing opinions
against such a crooked order

of conducting the affairs
of this great nation

becomes apparent
to an immense majority.

Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo

by throwing themselves
into campaigns of practical action,

crusades which they embarked on
with religious fervour.

Those who laboured for change

did so now not only
in secret political clubs,

but in the light of churches and chapels.

Their targets were unnatural institutions -

the monopoly of the Church of England,
the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland,

in the manufacturing towns,
a hue and cry to have their own MPs.

Unless these things were done,
a revolution, they said,

would be more, not less likely.

In 1830, a new revolution in France and
a wave of violence in the English countryside

meant the votes for change
could not be postponed.

The Whigs took office
for the first time since before 1789

as the champions of reform
without revolution.

The Parliamentary Reform Act
they passed in 1832

made good on their word.

But the English counties
weren't the only place

where something had to be done
to avert bloodshed.

In Surinam, Guiana and Jamaica,
pushed to the edge by hope and desperation,

there had been slave rebellions
put down with a ferocity

which made Peterloo look like a picnic.

(SOLO BARITONE) # Steal away

# Steal away

# Steal away

# To Jesus... #

The Romantics' message -
we are all brothers and sisters,

we all share, praise be to God,
the same nature -

could also be embraced
not as a cry for retribution,

a call to the barricades, but as
the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade.

Abolitionism healed old wounds.

It brought together Thomas Bewick
and William Wordsworth

under the same great tent
of righteousness.

The organisers of the campaign used
the weaponry of the age of good causes -

the revival meeting,
complete with hymns,

the propaganda tour
and the travelling exhibition.

Models of slave ships.

Chests full of the merchandise
that might be traded instead of slaves.

# My Lord, he calls me

# He calls me by the thunder... #

In 1834, Britain abolished slavery,
and at a time, contrary to some legends,

when the market for its products
was becoming more, not less, lucrative.

It was the first great 19th-century victory

for the party of humanity.

So was the place where
Britain's regeneration would happen

not, as Wordsworth had imagined,
in the country,

but in chapels, churches and town halls?

He had supposed that our redemption
depended on escaping from cities,

that the best of human nature
withered and perished

when a hedgerow turned into a street.

Perhaps it was the end of his dream

of a return to the childlike innocence
of uncorrupted nature.

But that dream never had a chance
of becoming real,

not in a Britain powering its way
to industrial modernity.

What Wordsworth had wanted
was that nature, the British countryside,

should be the negation of the town.

Instead, it had somehow
become its accomplice.

Instead of needing to get deep
into the enfolding heart of the country,

those who could never have
made the trip

could now find nature
literally in their own backyard.

In allotments given to them
by the railway company,

the echo of the old strips
they'd lost to enclosures.

In gardens attached to terraced houses,

which stood in
for the cottage lot they'd left behind.

For the first time, a park meant not
the private estate of some aristocrat,

but a public place in a town,
without barriers of class or property,

laid out, like here in Birkenhead
in the 1840s,

with ponds and rambles and lawns,

a place where parents
would bring children

to give them something
of the pleasures of nature.

It was not, I suppose, sublime.

But neither was it at all ridiculous.