Original subtitles

♪ Gather ye rosebuds while ye may ♪

♪ Old Time is still a flying ♪

♪ Tomorrow we'll be dying ♪

In 1642,

a terrible civil war broke out in England.

Brother attacked brother, friend betrayed friend,

the nation was torn in two.

To ensure this dark moment was never forgotten,

Britain needed an artist to step forward

and witness her turmoil.

♪ For having once but lost ♪

Fortunately, such a man was found.

♪ May forever tarry ♪

History doesn't often feel graspable, does it?

Touchable, under your nose.

It's usually something that takes place far away,

out there, in the past.

You can read about it in books,

you can learn about it from David Starkey on the telly,

but where it really counts, in here,

you can't really feel it.

Unless, that is, something or somebody

manages to bring it back to life for us.

Make it tangible, give it flesh.

There's only one way that can be done, with art.

It's what art's really good at,

capturing the moment, taking you there.

If an artist is eloquent enough and talented enough,

then even an event as chaotic and unruly

as the English Civil War can be brought back to life

and felt again.

This is a film about a lost genius of English art.

A painter of deep and real talent,

who was there and who put a face

to a particularly traumatic moment in our history.

His name was William Dobson.

He's the one in the middle, the handsome one

with the Cavalier ringlets,

and that contemplative stare.

Dobson was the first truly great, British painter.

Our first native genius.

If you've never heard of him before,

don't beat yourself up about it, most people haven't.

History isn't always fair to its heroes,

and William Dobson was certainly one of those.

Dobson had an exciting life to go with his exciting talent.

It was short and fateful,

because these were not relaxing times.

Dobson was born in London in 1611

and baptized in this fine city church,

St. Andrew's Holborn, on March the fourth.

The register of his birth has survived.

It's one of just half a dozen documents

of the times that bear his name.

We know that his father, also called William Dobson,

was prosperous, a gentleman it says here.

But he frittered away the family fortunes

on what his contemporaries called licentious living.

Dobson Sr. it seems, wasted his estate on women.

Do you know what they say about the sins of the father?

How they're visited again upon the son?

Well that certainly seems to have been true in this case.

Our William Dobson, the first great English painter,

would also gain a reputation for loose living.

We don't know exactly what went wrong

with the Dobson family fortunes, but something did.

And in around 1625, Dobson Jr. was forced

to start making his own living.

So he decided to become something rather ungentlemanly,

and un-English, he decided to become a painter.

Mind you, William Dobson could not have picked

a better time to become an artist,

because there hasn't been a better time.

The English king, Charles I,

was an unusually cultured monarch.

Charles loved art with a passion

that England had never seen before in a king.

Look how superbly he rides into history

in this fine, Van Dyck that now hangs in Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace hadn't even been built in Dobson's time.

And the King didn't think much

of this place either, Windsor Castle.

He allowed it to fall into ruin.

Instead, the King preferred to reside

in another of his sumptuous palaces,

one which isn't even there anymore,

at Whitehall in London.

Whitehall Palace was the largest palace in Europe.

Located roughly where 10 Downing Street is today,

it burnt down in 1698.

Bigger than the Vatican, bigger than Versailles,

it stretched all the way down to the river.

Whitehall was gigantic.

It had 1,500 rooms, yes 1,500.

And the plushest of them were filled to the rafters

with great art.

If you think Windsor Castle looks impressive today,

you should've seen Whitehall Palace in around 1630

when William Dobson must first have encountered it.

All these Mantegnas were in Charles' collection,

nine of them.

The first Rembrandt ever to leave Holland

hung in Whitehall in the Longest Gallery.

And naughty Veroneses displaying

such un-English nudity.

And this famous Leonardo now so popular

in the Louvre in Paris.

Then there were all these Raphaels,

showing the gospels of the apostles,

the finest cycle of Renaissance art ever to leave Italy.

What an education a young painter starting out

on the road of art would've received in here

just by wandering about and looking.

Dobson must've done more than that.

Somehow he got the opportunity

to study the Royal Collection in depth

and he studied it so fiercely

that he ended up as good as this.

This is such a revolutionary image.

You have to remember that Charles believed

in the divine right of kings.

That he'd been put on Earth by God

to command the English and educate them.

Charles lavished all this money on art

because he thought it was his divine duty to do so.

It's what God wanted him to do whatever the cost.

But Dobson didn't paint a divine monarch.

That wasn't his way.

Dobson gives us a small and troubled man,

so nervous, so unsure.

These are sensitive insights,

and they're completely new in British art.

The question is, how did William Dobson

get to be this good?

Not knowing the exact details of Dobson's apprenticeship

is very annoying.

I've stomped through the stately homes of Britain

but the information just isn't there.

You'd have thought an artist of William Dobson's importance,

a man who changed British art,

would've had everything about him noted down.

But these are turbulent times he was living through,

and when history swallowed up William Dobson,

it swallowed up his past as well.

One exciting story about him

is that he worked for the Royal Tapestry Works,

at Mortlake in London and was somehow involved

with the design of these stunning hangings.

Another story about Dobson doing the rounds

is that he was actually a pupil of Van Dyck,

the King's official painter,

who came over to London from Antwerp in 1632

and who proceeded to lord it over Charles' great Golden Age.

Van Dyck was the King's flatterer-in-chief,

the official improver of the royal image.

This is his portrait of Charles' detested queen,

Henrietta Maria, a Catholic from France.

Whose teeth, according to the Venetian ambassador,

stuck out like the guns on a battleship.

But that was in real life, not in Van Dyck's

portrayals of her.

But if Dobson really was Van Dyck's pupil,

he was headstrong enough to see things very differently

and become his own man.

For one thing, Dobson could not, or would not, flatter.

He just couldn't do it.

Instead, his art makes a beeline

for character and truth, for plainness, bluffness,

and even ugliness.

Telling it like it is is a uniquely British talent.

And to show it off properly,

you need a uniquely British situation.

So having finally found an artist

who could paint with the best,

the fates decided to test him mightily

by dumping him in the middle

of some of the most traumatic events in British history.

There are many complicated reasons why in 1642

a savage civil war broke out in England.

Why Parliament took on the King,

Royalist took on Roundhead,

and Cavalier took on Puritain.

♪ In 1642 I knew what I had to do ♪

♪ Leave my home and family, too ♪

♪ And fight for good, Old Charlie ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

Charles had become a deeply irritating monarch.

People didn't like his Catholic wife,

they didn't like his foreign policy,

his taxes were unpopular,

they really didn't like that immodest claim of his

to be God's representative on Earth.

But perhaps what galled them most

was his extravagant appetite for art

and the huge amounts of money that had been spent on it.

♪ Many men died to uphold the law ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

Art was an affront to Puritan thinking.

The second commandment actually bans the making of it.

Thou shalt not make any graven image, it says,

of anything that is on Earth or on the sea below.

So for the Puritans on Parliament's side,

art wasn't just immodest and popish,

it was actually sinful.

♪ Well I thank God I'm still alive ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

The most notorious

of all the Puritan art-haters,

William Prynne, published a 1,000 page book on the subject

in which he stamped on dance, theater, painting,

and men with long hair.

"The gates of heaven", spat Prynne, "will always be closed

"to the Morris dancers."

♪ But I had gone he's come too late ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

The extravagant years of Charles I,

had found a magnificent witness in Van Dyck.

How effortlessly he seemed to capture

the elegance and swagger of Charles' court.

♪ But we'll fight on for Charlie ♪

Van Dyck was the perfect painter

to record Charles' Golden Age,

the days of elegance and extravagance.

But when the civil war broke out,

somebody up there realized he was no longer

the right artist for the job.

And with a sense of symmetry that's almost scary,

in December 1641 just a few weeks

before the civil war broke out,

the fates arrange for Van Dyck to die

and for a vacancy suddenly to appear for the King's painter.

Dobson took over Van Dyck's job,

and became Charles I's sergeant painter.

It should've been a cushy job, a job for life,

painting royalty for royal wages.

But history had other plans.

♪ Round heads they were after me ♪

♪ But we were on a winning spree ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-lay ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

The first pitch battle of the civil war

was fought here at Edgehill

on the 23rd of October 1642, a Sunday.

The King's forces were gathered up here on Edgehill itself

so they had the advantage from the start.

The cavalry, commanded by the King's dashing nephew,

Prince Rupert, charged down on the Parliamentarians.

Coming in from over there, the southwest,

and sent them scattering.

But the Parliamentarians fought back

and the battle was to splatter on all day long

ending uncertainly with a small advantage, perhaps,

to the Royalists.

Charles' eldest son, the Prince of Wales,

the future Charles II was at Edgehill with his father.

He was just 12 years old and he watched

the opening cavalry charges with a schoolboy's excitement.

The Prince narrowly escaped death

when an enemy cannon ball just missed him.

And he was nearly captured as well

in a frenzied, Parliamentarian counter-attack.

Afterwards, to commemorate the Royalist successes

at Edgehill, and the presence there of the Prince of Wales,

the King commissioned a portrait of his son

from his new, official painter.

The Englishman, born and bred, into whose hands

the fates had unexpectedly thrust the English Civil War.

This is Dobson's first, great, war painting,

and look at the explosion in him of color,

confidence, bravado, a new mood has entered Baroque art

and it's unmistakably an English mood.

Direct, four-square, in your face.

Young Charles stands commandingly

at the front of the battle,

as Edgehill rages behind him.

His page holds up his helmet,

and the king-to-be fixes us with a forceful stare.

But this isn't just a portrait,

it's a picture loaded with symbolic meaning,

packed with it.

In the end, it's not even a picture about war, really,

but a superb slab of Royalist propaganda about peace.

The Prince of Wales, the future Charles II,

represents England's best hopes for the future,

the nation's salvation.

See down here, the madly grimacing fury,

with all the snakes in her hair,

she represents the strife and chaos in the land.

But look how firmly Charles commands her to stay.

He's like a man ordering a dog to sit.

gathered over England,

a break in the clouds has appeared.

The storm is abating, peace is at hand.

It's a great painting, but a lousy prediction.

Parliament was in control of London,

so the King needed a new base.

He chose Oxford.

It is excellently located, easy to guard,

and all those rich colleges could he handily transformed

into makeshift palaces.

So for the next four years of the war,

this was to be home for the King and his court,

including the new royal painter, William Dobson.

Dobson's job was to paint the King

and all the other court-worthies who turned up in Oxford.

He was, if you like, artist in residence

to the Royalist cause.

He painted the King's diplomats,

come hither to serve their monarch.

The haughty administrators, working in the King's

ramshackle new court.

A ship's captain who'd lost his boat.

A musician who'd lost his joy.

Poets, princes, and family supporters.

But above all, Dobson painted the soldiers

coming in from battle, the Royalist heroes,

the fighters, the Cavaliers.

Is this a picture that means something special to you?

This is one of the portraits

that I remember from childhood.

I mean, for the very un-artistic reason

that the man in it has a very long neck.

And I remember being intrigued as a child

by was that real or was that artistic license?

It's one of the earliest memories that I have

from the collection here

is this portrait of Colonel Russell.

And when you began finding out

about who Colonel Russell was,

what sort of image did you create of him?

Well I think the portrait shows a man

who looks rather, sort of self-important

and without any form of humor.

But when you read about him and learn what he did,

he was involved really in the vanguard

of the great years of the Royalist cause.

And he was a hero of that cause.

And a great man in his own right.

And he was in charge of one of the crack regiments

of infantry that the Royalists had.

So the more I delved into him,

the more I realized that this wasn't just

a courtier having his portrait painted

in a sort of battle pose,

but actually a genuine soldier

who probably saw some pretty tough action.

That's right, you get such a sense of glamour, don't you,

from these Cavalier portraits of Dobson's?

And we forget, don't we, looking at these handsome men

with their ringlets and that sort of swaggering air

that really what tough times they had to go through.

Well it was a really brutal time, the Civil War,

and you can glamorize it as much as you want,

but it was really the fighting was vicious.

And in fact, Russell's regiment,

when they went hand-to-hand in one fight

they were fighting with each other's muskets

and staving each other's heads in.

It wasn't lots of fancy cavalry charges et cetera,

it was brutal, visceral fighting.

And I think you can see in Colonel Russell's face

a sort of battle-hardened weariness already.

And that's a lot for a painter to suggest.

You sound to me like someone who shares my admiration

for the often forgotten, unfairly so, William Dobson.

I am a great fan of Dobson,

and I think that he's very underrated

and sadly I'd have thought his name

has almost no recognition around Britain today.

But British people should know

that he's the best painter that this country

had produced up until that point.

The King lived here at Christ Church,

Oxford's poshest college.

- Good morning. - Good morning.

And he brought with him the House of Commons,

which met over there in the Great Hall.

The Queen was here at Merton College.

She took over all these rooms here,

and they're now called the Queen's Rooms.

Dobson, meanwhile, had to make due

with lodgings in the town.

But we know is that he lived off the high street

up against St. Mary's Church.

So that's somewhere around here.

Dispersed pleasantly about Oxford

the strangers, as the King and his court were called,

tried at first to pretend that all was well in the land.

In modern parlance, they were in denial.

And this chap in particular, Endymion Porter,

seemed determined to prove

that nothing of significance had changed.

Porter was a pampered courtier, a royal favorite.

Before the civil war, he'd been one

of the King's main art buyers.

A friend of artists and poets.

There's a fine portrait of him in the Prado by Van Dyck.

In which the suave Porter and Van Dyck himself

buddy up together in an elegant oval.

Porter saw himself as the King's Misenus,

a fixer and tastemaker.

He's the embodiment of the smarmy, royal lickspittle

clinging to the King's side like a barnacle

to a ship's hull.

When he wasn't collecting art or writing egregious plays,

Porter loved to hunt.

And when Dobson came to paint him in Oxford,

it wasn't as a soldier, or a dashing Cavalier,

but as an English squire out hunting

as if nothing had happened.

Those people who admire William Dobson,

and there aren't nearly enough of them,

will generally tell you

that this is his finest painting, Dobson's masterpiece.

And it's definitely one of them.

Porter stands there with his musket

while his page brings him the hare he's just shot.

His loyal gun dog looks up adoringly.

And to show what a fine patron of the arts Porter was,

Dobson has placed a bust of Apollo,

the God of the arts, at his shoulder.

If you examine the symbolic figures on which he leans,

you'll find embodiments of painting,

and sculpture, and poetry.

So all this stuff down here,

this busy collection of symbols,

has been put there to tell us

what a cultured fellow Porter was.

To advertise his great love of the arts.

And all that is fascinating of course,

but what I find even more interesting

about this picture is what it tells us

about the way Dobson actually painted.

The character of his art.

Since Van Dyck painted Porter as well,

we're in a position here to make a telling comparison.

Van Dyck makes Porter thin and elegant,

he brings out the greyhound in him.

Dobson, meanwhile, puts a stone or so onto him,

maybe even a couple of stone.

He notices something English, and beefy,

and robust about Porter.

Dobson nearly always used a square canvas.

And most of his sitters were painted from the knees up.

From about here, which makes them look chunky

and solid, like me.

Van Dyck, on the other hand, was the master

of the elegant full-length.

He preferred elongated canvases

that made you look finer and taller.

So the Van Dyck approach is back here.

But the Dobson approach is here.

Dobson's fine portrayal of Endymion Porter

gives British art its first country gent,

red-faced and solid.

But the leisurely, rural mood he captures here

couldn't and wouldn't last.

Back at the front line of the civil war,

reality had returned from the hunt.

And Oxford was too busy with its war effort

to pretend that nothing had changed.

All Soul's was where the arsenal was,

where they kept the muskets, and pistols, and pikes.

New College was the magazine,

where they stored the gunpowder.

And all the brass cooking vessels

belonging to the townsfolk

were melted down and used as bullets

Armies need uniforms, so the schools of astronomy

and music were taken over by tailors

busily sewing buff coats and tunics.

And in the School of Logic, they stored the horse fodder

for the cavalry.

As Oxford gave its all for the Royalist cause.

Someone once said the weak only repent.

Meaning only weak people say sorry.

Do you know who said that?

It was Byron, Lord Byron the poet.

Now Byron was actually the sixth Baron Byron,

so he would've known something

about a notorious ancestor of his.

The first Baron Byron, John Byron.

The man they called Bloody Byron.

Byron was one of Charles' most loyal supporters.

He fought bravely for the King at Edgehill,

Marston Moor, Nantwich, and here, too,

at Burford on the first of January 1643.

Byron was in command of a small, Royalist garrison

of 14 men when 2,000 Parliamentarians from Cirencester

launched a surprise attack.

The 14 Royalists defended the town fiercely

and beat back the 2,000 rebels.

At the height of the battle, Byron was hit

in the face with a halberd.

He was almost knocked off his horse,

but he survived.

And a few months later, the King made him a baron,

and Dobson commemorated this honor

and the great defense of Burford

with a supreme piece of English, Baroque portraiture.

We're in the presence of such a haughty warrior.

A black page brings him his horse.

While Byron himself points to the background

where the scene of his bravery at Burford is reenacted.

Those big, twisty columns that Byron's standing in front of

are called Solomonic columns.

Because people believed that these were the kinds

of columns that stood in front

of the great Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

They were popularized in England by Raphael

in those superb tapestry designs in the Royal Collection.

And they were favored too here in Oxford

in the porch of St. Mary's Church

next to where Dobson was living.

These Solomonic columns had a big symbolic meaning.

They embodied Solomon's famous wisdom

and steadfastness, which is why Dobson

put them in the backgrounds of several

of his best pictures.

To represent the wisdom and steadfastness

of the King's men.

The Parliamentarians didn't like them, though.

They were too popish.

And see those bullet holes up there

in the statue of the Virgin and Child?

Those were made by Cromwell's soldiers,

shooting at this popish porch.

The Parliamentarians didn't like Byron either.

In fact, they hated him with a rare vigor.

They called him the Bloody Braggadocio,

the braggart with blood on his hands.

He was notoriously arrogant and cruel,

and Dobson captures that, doesn't he?

I have an instinctive fondness

for most of Dobson's Cavaliers,

but not for this man.

He's too proud and showy,

standing there like a Roman emperor.

Dobson's pictures tell us so much

about the people who were here.

He really brings them to life.

But what about Dobson himself?

What was he like?

And what sort of life did he lead?

Very little information has survived.

We know that he came here with his entire family

because the church records here at the Magdelen Church,

show that his little daughter, Judith, died here in 1644.

A year later, his father-in-law died,

presumably from one of the many plagues

they had here at the time, usually typhoid,

caused by the camped and squalid living conditions.

We know when he got married,

because the wedding records have survived.

And we also know what his wife looked like,

because he painted her.

Her name was also Judith, and she's exactly

the kind of woman I imagine him falling for.

Bold, brassy, and magnificently bosomy.

Judith Dobson would look good in a tavern, wouldn't she?

She's the first such wench in British art.

And her descendants are still pulling pints today

in the Rover's Return and the Queen Vic.

Dobson himself had what they call an irregular lifestyle.

He was certainly bad with money,

probably liked to drink,

and seemed to have enjoyed some bad company.

As for his looks, well there we don't need to speculate.

Because he's left us a dramatic

and swaggering self-portrait.

I think it's my favorite self-portrait

in the whole of British art.

It hangs at Alnwick Castle in far off Northumberland.

Surrounded by great Van Dycks and dramatic Canalettos.

But when I come to Alnwick, what I head for is this.

Before Dobson appeared, British painters

didn't generally do self-portraits.

Their task was to paint others not themselves.

And they certainly didn't consider themselves

to be artistic heroes, that would've seemed un-English,

immodest, and perhaps even a touch popish.

But not to William Dobson.

See those cascading ringlets, that unwavering gaze,

with it's delightfully British soupçon of nervousness?

He rates himself doesn't he?

And strikes me as the type of chap

who checks himself in the mirror.

this is the first truly cocky, British self-portrait.

The first attempt by a British painter

to make himself the hero of his own art.

But, as you can see, there are two others in the picture.

So who are they?

And what are they here for?

The fellow on the left, Mr. Chubby-in-satin,

is Nicholas Lanier, Charles I's musical supremo.

The first Master of the King's Music.

Hear that tune playing around me, that's by Lanier.

He was a skilled composer and musician,

and also a collector and an art dealer.

It was Lanier who pioneered the collecting

of Renaissance drawings in Britain.

Which is why Dobson has stuck a drawing

of Venus in his hand and given him a bust of Apollo,

the God of art, to lean on.

The other fellow, the thin one,

is Sir Charles Cotterell, who was Master of Ceremonies

for the King in Oxford.

A friend and supporter of Dobson's.

So why has Dobson put the three of them in this picture?

And huddled them up like this?

The answer lies in this sumptuous painting

by Veronese that's now in the Frick Collection in New York.

But which once hung in Britain in the palace

of the Earl of Arundel,

where Dobson must have seen it.

The Veronese depicts a popular Baroque subject,

the choice of Hercules.

Hercules, that's him in the middle,

has been forced to choose between two, symbolic women,

representing Pleasure on the left

and Virtue on the right.

He goes for Virtue, as you'd expect Hercules to choose.

So Dobson has adapted Veronese's pose,

swapped the women for men,

and turned it into this supremely cocky piece

of self-promotion.

There he is in the middle, the hero, the Hercules of Oxford.

Loyal to his King, loyal to his country,

and choosing Virtue, represented

by the lean Sir Charles Cotterell in black

over Pleasure, represented by the plump Nicholas Lanier,

with his double chin and his rich and expensive satin suit.

Of course this isn't a real quarrel we're watching.

It's all symbolic.

The three temporary Oxfordians

are pals in it together, acting out

a crucial civil war choice,

in which virtue triumphs over vice.

As it must also triumph in the nation at large.

And will you look at William Dobson,

at the center of all this attention?

Isn't he just loving it?

♪ The glorious lamb of Heaven the Son ♪

Music played a crucial role in the Oxford court.

The civil war was tearing England apart,

but the band played on.

The court was full of it, chamber music, psalms, masques.

The Puritans may not have approved,

but Charles adored English music

and was famed for encouraging the writing

and playing of it.

♪ And smiles today ♪

♪ Tomorrow we'll be dying ♪

So when the court came to Oxford,

the royal music came with it,

and did what it could to raise everyone's spirits.

We have very little information

about who was in Oxford playing what,

which is why a particularly mysterious Oxford painting

by Dobson has remained one of the biggest puzzles

in his career.

♪ Then be not coy ♪

It now hangs

at the Fair Ends Art Gallery in Hole

and is called, oh so unhelpfully, the Unknown Musician.

♪ For having once but lost your prime ♪

See the symbolic embodiments of music

gathered in typical Dobson fashion

at the back of the picture.

A singing goddess, and if you look carefully,

the fragmentary remains of a shadowy lute player.

Who is this dark and sober figure in black?

This particularly mysterious, musical Cavalier?

The answer began winking at me serval years ago

back in 2002, when a hitherto obscure English composer,

called William Lawes,

was plucked out of the ether and dangled

tantalizingly before us.

2002 was the 400th anniversary of Lawes' birth.

Records were issued, articles written,

and portraits dug up.

Including this one of the very young William Lawes,

that's been in the Music School at Oxford

since the 17th century.

William Lawes and his more famous older brother

Henry Lawes spent almost all of their careers

working for Charles I as court musicians and composers.

Young William Lawes, a lute player,

was a particular favorite of the King's.

And I'm now pretty certain that

the Unknown Musician in Hole is a portrait of him

when he wasn't so young anymore.

♪ Gather ye rosebuds while ye may ♪

♪ Old Time is still a flying ♪

Some of Lawes' finest music was written for the church.

And this sad, English tune, Gather Ye Rosebuds,

is his most famous lyrical setting.

It's soppy, I know, but heartbreakingly lovely.

William Lawes fought for the King on the battlefield

as well as in his songbook.

And in 1645, just a few months after this was painted,

he was killed at Chester,

upholding the Royalist cause.

The King was devastated and was said to have mourned him

so fiercely when he died.

He called William Lawes the father of music.

So for me, the clearest evidence that this is William Lawes

is the mysterious bust on which he rests a caring hand.

Do you recognize him?

It's the King himself, Charles.

Likely disguised as a classical God.

Seen from the side, and crowned with laurel.

A particularly loyal musician

is swearing his allegiance

to a particularly musical monarch.

In a painting which, like so much of Dobson's Oxford work,

brings an unexpectedly personal touch

to this huge, historic moment.

Fortune is a fickle friend as the Royalists in Oxford

were now discovering.

In the Cavalier skies, storms were gathering.

Over there on that horizon is where

the Battle of Naseby was fought on June the 14th 1645.

Naseby was a disaster for the Royalists.

Outnumbered, out-fought, they were comprehensively routed.

1,000 killed, 5,000 captured.

In just three hours of fierce, morning combat,

the hopes of the Cavaliers were crushed.

For Dobson, too, the endgame was at hand.

You can actually see his art changing,

its mood darkening.

The canvases growing smaller, scratchier, gloomier.

The usual interpretation of this change in his art

is that it was part of a more monumental failure.

The Royalist cause was falling apart,

and so was Dobson.

But I prefer to see it as something

more impressive than that.

As proof of his sensitivity, this unique relationship he had

with the times that spawned him.

Dobson was as sensitive to failure

as he was to triumph.

This is Rockingham Castle in Leicestershire.

They have two Dobsons here, and they're both late works.

They're not always on show.

- Basil. - Hello.

But I know the archivist, Basil Morgan.

And he's always welcoming.

- Take me to those Dobsons. - This way.

So where are we exactly in the house now?

I found that quite confusing getting around it.

Well the actual Dobsons are in the Salving Wing,

put on in the mid-19th century.

And there it is.

One of the last Dobsons painted.

His celebrated portrait of Lewis Watson,

First Lord Rockingham.

Now what can you tell us about Lewis Watson, Basil?

Well he'd been a courtier under James I and Charles I

in his younger days.

And when the civil war came up in 1642,

he was very lukewarm as far as Royalism was concerned.

So he wasn't a fervent Royalist?

He wasn't an active Royalist, no.

And in 1643, the castle was taken

by the local Parliamentarian commander.

What is more, the King who thought he'd been feeble

about defending Rockingham,

carted him off to Oxford where he had to plead his case

for a couple of years to be let off punishment basically.

So this castle, Rockingham Castle,

was taken over by the Parliamentarians

during the civil war? - In 1643, yes.

And Watson himself, he was here

at that time, or? - He was, no,

he was in prison, he was captured

by the Royalists funnily enough,

who thought he'd been feeble about letting this place go.

So of course you're very lucky here

because not only do you have this superb

late portrait by Dobson,

but you have another one as well.

You have the picture of his wife.

- Absolutely. - Of Lewis Watson's wife.

Yes.

What can you tell us about her?

Well she's a manners

from the Belvoir Castle family.

The family tradition in Parliamentarian--

So she came from a Parliamentarian family?

She came from a Parliamentarian family.

So, one of the charges against him

was she had actually led Lord Gray in by the hand

when the castle was captured by Parliament.

- So to get this right, you're saying

that when the Parliamentarians surrounded the castle,

not only did the Watsons not put up a fight,

but that Lady Watson actually led them in by the hand?

- [Basil] That was the charge, yes.

- Dobson's final paintings at Oxford

are such sad, and quiet things.

So small, and almost see-through.

The fact is, he was running out of materials.

By the summer of 1645, Parliament's forces

were closing in on the city.

And everything was in short supply, no paints, no canvas.

The mood in Oxford had grown gloomier, too.

Even the most stubborn Royalist was having to accept

they were losing the war.

This forlorn portrait of the King,

was painted round about now.

The royal confidence has drained away

and the spirit of the times, as always with Dobson,

seems to guide the painter's hand.

They lasted the winter, but only just.

And after months of hesitation,

the King finally sneaked out of Oxford

in the small hours of April the 27th 1646,

disguised as a servant.

A few weeks later, the city fell to the Parliamentarians.

And those Royalist supporters who remained,

among them William Dobson,

slipped discreetly out of Oxford and returned home.

Dobson arrived back in London in the summer of 1646.

And he seems to have made some sort of attempt

to continue with his career,

because his name appears in the records

of the painter-stainer's company, the Artist's Guild.

But there was no point, really,

because three months later he was dead.

Don't ask me how or why, no one knows.

There's no description, no evidence,

just the bare facts of his passing

supplied curtly in the parish records, October 28, 1646.

Before he died, Dobson was imprisoned for debt.

And according to a brief note from his first biographer,

he died very poor at his house in St. Martin's Lane

just over there.

He was aged just 36.

They buried him here in his local church,

St. Martin in the Fields.

Although inside there's no record of him.

They're rather chuffed though that Nell Gwyn,

Charles II's notorious mistress, is buried here,

and that famous maker of English chairs,

Thomas Chippendale, but of William Dobson,

the man who put a face to the English Civil War,

there's nothing.

Which can't be right.

A century before Hogarth, England had a painter

who painted like an Englishman.

Robust, earthy, in your face.

Destiny singled him out and dumped him in the middle

of the most tumultuous events in British history.

He was there, he saw it, he recorded it.

In its tragic way, it's the perfect career.

There should be monuments to William Dobson

out there in Trafalgar Square.

His face should be on our bank notes,

his name on all our lips.

Instead there's just me wandering about

in this empty church banging on about him.

♪ In 1642 I knew what I had to do ♪

But hang on, that's wrong.

Of course there's more than that.

Out there, scattered about the land,

perhaps in a great house near you,

there's a handful of the finest paintings

that any British artist has ever produced.

♪ In 1643 those round heads they were after me ♪

♪ But we were on a winning spree ♪

So go on, find one, admire it, love it,

and show you care.

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-Lay ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪

♪ In 1644 we fought a battle at Martson Moor ♪

♪ Many men died to uphold the law ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie, hey ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-Lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-Lay ♪

♪ Tour-a-lour-a-lour-a-Lay ♪

♪ Fighting for Old Charlie ♪