Britannia Incorporated A History of Britain by Simon Schama


Britannia Incorporated

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

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The business of state was meant to run like clockwork. Time was money. Money was power.

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

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To William's annoyance, some of those clans remained obstinately loyal

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

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Even worse, those Jacobites had won a short-lived victory over William's men at the Battle of Killiecrankie.

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

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

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

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"Acknowledge William as your lawful king. Those who make the pledge will be rewarded.

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"Those who don't, punished."

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The Chief of the Macdonald clan of Glencoe missed his appointment by five days.

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At dawn on February 13th 1692,

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

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were ordered to carry out a massacre.

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They butchered 38 of the clan, and the rest of the village - old men, women and children, some half-naked -

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fled into a raging snowstorm where many of them died.

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In London and Edinburgh, news of the massacre at Glencoe was greeted with pious professions of shock,

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especially, of course, from those who'd been responsible for organising it. An enquiry was held.

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Needless to say, it was a sham.

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And if the intention had been to cow the Jacobites into submission, it had all gone horribly wrong.

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

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The Scottish Parliament voted it an act of murder.

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How could victim and perpetrator ever be reconciled now?

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How could Scotland, stricken with poverty, with its national pride deeply wounded,

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ever come together with its rich and ruthless neighbour? But come together they did.

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The two countries which had for centuries been divided by politics and religion

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would make a future together based on profit and interest.

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What began as a hostile merger would end as a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world,

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Britannia Incorporated. It was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history,

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and this is how it happened...

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In England, the 1690s were the years

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when the victors of 1688 congratulated themselves on a Glorious Revolution.

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In Scotland, they were years of purgatory.

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After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.

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For several summers in a row, the sun refused to appear. Torrential rains poured down.

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Cattle and sheep became diseased with foot rot. Fields of barley and oats turned into mildewed slurry.

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The Jacobite clergy said THIS was God's wrath for turfing out the rightful king.

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

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

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A plan that would transform the country from impotence and destitution

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into riches and power beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

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It would make Scotland, or its colonial trading post, New Caledonia, the hub of the universe.

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And where was that to be?

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Well, of course, in Panama.

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A group of merchants and bankers,

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including William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England,

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had the idea of creating a Scottish trading post on the Isthumus of Darien in Panama.

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

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But take a look at the map of world trade, and it becomes visionary.

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A major obstacle to East-West trade was the long, dangerous and ruinously expensive journey round Cape Horn.

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

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At Darien, the distance between the Pacific and the Atlantic was only 40 miles.

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

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The trading economy of the world would be revolutionised, and Scotland would run it.

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

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Men and women from all walks of life, and from all over Scotland, queued up to invest in the venture.

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So, when the first fleet sailed from the Firth of Forth,

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in July 1698, flying the saltire, and the extraordinary company flag

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of Indians, llamas, elephants and the rising sun,

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

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It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.

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But the only information the Company of Scotland had about Darien was from a pirate surgeon called Lionel Wafer,

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who claimed he knew the Caribbean like the back of his hand.

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The climate was mild, he said, the soil fertile and the natives friendly.

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

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

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And the rest of the ship's cargo says something about the conditions they were expecting to encounter.

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Crate-loads of catechisms and Bibles for converting the pagans. 1,400 hats. An even greater supply of wigs.

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

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But before the ship got anywhere near Darien, the dream had turned into a nightmare.

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40 crew and passengers died on the long voyage.

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And when they found their golden island,

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it was, of course, a mosquito-infested swamp.

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

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In a sweltering, rainy jungle, all the colonists' efforts went into lugging cannon

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into a primitive stockade, bravely christened Fort St Andrew.

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They were dying now, of disease and hunger, at a rate of ten a day.

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And their supplies ran with maggots.

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And there was no outside help.

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

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and the Government in Westminster was determined it should fail.

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A law was passed making it illegal for any Englishman to invest in the scheme

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or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.

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When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh,

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all they found were hundreds of graves.

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

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the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.

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

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But the most serious casualty of the fiasco had been the last, best hope of a national rebirth,

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Scotland going it alone. That hope died in the malarial swamps of Darien.

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Many laid the failure of Darien squarely at England's door, for its deliberate sabotage of the scheme.

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A wave of Anglophobia swept the country, startling the men who ran things in Westminster.

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They became even more worried when it looked likely that Queen Anne, who had succeeded William in 1702,

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would die childless. A crisis over the succession loomed.

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For the defenders of the revolution of 1688, whoever succeeded her simply had to be Protestant.

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In Scotland, however, after the humiliation of Darien,

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

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

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Westminster could not tolerate these threats from its own back yard.

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

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The creation of a single British state, under a single parliament, was now a matter of urgency.

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The Westminster politicians knew they needed a sweetener to make the union more palatable.

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And THIS is it.

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In this chest was deposited the exact amount that had been lost in the Darien adventure,

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all £398,000 of it.

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

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"THIS is what union means. You seem to be a little hard-pressed for funds, my dear fellows.

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"Well, now Scotland's debts will be Britain's. Sink or swim, we shall do it together."

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The equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions,

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was the carrot dangled before members of the Scottish Parliament.

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And, by now, there were many who were already looking south, saw reality, smelt the profits.

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

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Westminster threatened to block Scottish exports to England unless Scotland entered union negotiations.

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The writing was on the wall.

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Distraught, Lord Belhaven delivered a lament over the funeral pyre of Scottish independence.

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I see our ancient mother, Caledonia, like Caesar sitting in the midst of the Senate,

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attending the final blow and breathing out her last.

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We are an obscure, poor people,

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though formerly of better account,

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removed to a remote corner of the world, without name and without alliances.

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In 1707, the deed was done. A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.

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It took just ten weeks to go through the Scottish Parliament, six through Westminster.

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Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.

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What kind of nation was this "Great Britain"?

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To answer that question,

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all you needed to do was to go along to the new Royal Naval hospital,

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a palatial retirement home for pensioned-off servicemen, in Greenwich.

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

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in the early 18th century.

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On the ceiling, painted by Sir James Thornhill,

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

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

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

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

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but on the British monarchs.

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Over there in France, despotism and popery.

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Over here, thanks to William, liberty and Protestantism.

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

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Over here, the blessings of navigation, trade and science.

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

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The truth was that we had been at war for almost 25 years, give or take a few intermissions.

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During that time, Britain had been completely transformed by the experience.

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It was no longer a case of gallant little England defending the sceptred isle

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against the serried ranks of despots.

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

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

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

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

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accountants, tax assessors, customs and excise officers.

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Buried inside all the crowing propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling,

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there was one crucial nugget of truth.

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Louis XIV could DEMAND money for his wars. William III had to ASK for it.

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Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king.

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Except in Britain. Here it was Parliament, not the Monarchy, who signed the cheques.

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The longer the war went on, the stronger Parliament became, as the purse on which it sat grew bigger.

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What's more, the kind of politics raging in Britain we can now recognise as distinctly modern.

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

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but about the entire political character of the nation

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and the upheaval of 1688 that had created it.

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The Whigs and Tories were not just two parties who, when the barracking was done, could meet up for a drink.

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They went to different taverns, different coffee houses, different clubs. They were two armed camps.

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The artillery barrages that flew between them were often red hot.

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A quarter of a million votes were at stake in elections, more than 20% of the adult male population,

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

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This was all-out war at the hustings.

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Tories accused the Whigs of being fanatics, the dregs of the populace, atheists, Commonwealth men.

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

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

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this guaranteed an awful lot of politics.

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The political temperature reached fever pitch in 1714,

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when Queen Anne died with no heir. To make sure of a Protestant successor,

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

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to arrive at the next King of England,

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

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

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It was the Whigs who backed his arrival in Britain

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and were rewarded when the new King appointed a Whig Government.

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

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His coronation was greeted with rioting in 20 towns.

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

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

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

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and all of Scotland was suffering from high taxes imposed by Westminster.

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The Jacobite leader, the Earl of Mar, buoyed up by promises of support from English Tories and Jacobites,

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declared James the rightful King, at Braemar,

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and proceeded to raise an army.

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The Jacobite slogan of "King James and no Union"

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meant support from both the Highlands and Lowlands came swiftly.

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10,000 men joined the Rebellion.

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And when news came through of a Jacobite rising in Lancashire,

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the Government knew it was in serious trouble.

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

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

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and with his troops still outnumbering the Hanoverian army, Mar retreated.

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By the time James Edward Stuart landed at Peterhead on December 22nd, it was all over.

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The Hanoverian dynasty remained.

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But the Jacobite Rising was yet another demonstration of how unstable the new political order was.

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After this stormy start to the 18th century,

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

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they would've been thought an absurd optimist. Yet that's what happened.

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And it came about through the efforts, not of a king, a religious leader or even a general,

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but a political manager of uncanny genius.

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

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

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and he'd dominate British political life for a quarter of a century.

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He was Robert Walpole.

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Although he never actually had the title, Walpole was in effect Britain's first Prime Minister.

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Under his leadership, the British economy boomed as never before.

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Walpole's appeal was to shameless self-interest.

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

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"Which would you prefer," he might have said, "a battle over principles and religious convictions?"

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

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-"Or would you rather have what

-I

-can offer you - peace, political stability and low taxes?"

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What today we'd call a healthy business environment.

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Walpole, nicknamed Cock Robin,

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had made a bet that the politics of the future would be about portfolio management

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rather than religious passion or legal debate.

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

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and the experience had been a painful lesson in how intertwined were political and financial fortunes.

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But perhaps his greatest asset was his unerring grip on the psychology of loyalty.

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Walpole made a point of taking every new Whig member of the House of Commons out to dinner...

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

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and a haunch of mutton juicily oozing on the trencher,

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and Cock Robin's eyes twinkling amiably at you,

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assuring you that the life of the party, the state of the nation depended on YOU,

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how could you NOT express undying devotion and loyalty to his interest?

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

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

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

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In retrospect, we can see that Walpole built

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Britain's, in fact, the world's first modern party-political machine.

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He had placemen in Parliament primed to vote as HE directed.

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He had George I, and then George II, eating out of the palm of his hand.

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

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

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In short, Walpole had the goods.

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

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For, as well as looking after the country's interest,

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Walpole looked after his own.

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Just how much of a fortune he made for himself is spectacularly on view here at his country house in Norfolk,

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Houghton Hall.

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

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Anything that riches could buy, Walpole bought.

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Marble, mahogany, figured damask, shimmering silks and satins,

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classical sculpture, glorious Renaissance and Baroque art,

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all shipped to his East Anglian pleasure dome.

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

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it was also a statement of grandeur meant to stun sceptics

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into recognising that only someone truly in command of the nation's fortunes could afford all this.

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

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

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With glittering prizes dangled before their noses, the governing class,

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just 180 peers and 1,500 country gentry, lined up to trade in party passion for Palladian houses.

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They stopped shouting and started building.

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And what they built was designed to insulate them from the grubbiness of the real world.

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And Robert Walpole showed them the way.

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

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

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It was much too close to Walpole's great house and it spoiled the view.

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So he had it demolished and moved down the road.

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

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

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

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Stephen Switzer, one of the leading landscape architects of the day, certainly saw this as his duty.

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Magnificent gardens, statues and waterworks complete the grandeur of the British nation.

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

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

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

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Well, this was the kind of battle the rich and powerful in Hanoverian Britain really liked to fight -

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war by gardening.

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

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Taking their inspiration from the villas of ancient Rome,

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aristocrats, like Sir Henry Hall who built Stourhead, thought of their parks as a kind of public education

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and encouraged the locals to pay a visit, provided they stuck rigidly to the designated tour route.

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That route would not just meander between ponds and trees, but towards little classical buildings

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

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But sharing all this pastoral graciousness only went so far.

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

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Big, profit-yielding farms replaced strip farming. Smallholders were turfed off their land. Too bad!

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

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not just in the country, but in the town

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and above all in the biggest, brashest, fastest-growing city in Europe - London.

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

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700,000 of them - one in ten Englishmen.

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Foreign visitors were astounded at the noise, the hectic throngs packing the streets,

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the tireless hucksterism, the glittering greediness.

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The modern morality tales of the painter and engraver William Hogarth

0:29:110:29:16

are peopled by innocents arriving dewy-fresh from the country

0:29:160:29:22

surrendering to the temptations of the city

0:29:220:29:27

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

0:29:270:29:32

But however much moralists frowned on the new consumerism that had gripped the city,

0:29:340:29:41

economic realists knew it was the way forward.

0:29:410:29:45

# Come buy my greens and flowers fine

0:29:450:29:49

# Your houses to adorn... #

0:29:490:29:52

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

0:29:520:29:58

London had invented serious shopping and it had something like 20,000 shops to prove it.

0:29:580:30:05

London shops would lure customers to buy something they'd never thought of acquiring,

0:30:050:30:11

novelty items like Oriental goldfish which became an aristocratic marvel.

0:30:110:30:16

Caged canaries, finches and parrots.

0:30:160:30:20

Unheard-of luxuries became commonplace, priced to appeal to the middle class.

0:30:210:30:28

China from Holland from which to sip your tea,

0:30:280:30:32

exotic fruits, like pomegranates and pineapples.

0:30:320:30:36

The first commercially available condoms - lambskin for the rich,

0:30:360:30:41

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

0:30:410:30:46

London's consumer culture was Mephistopheles winking an eye and proffering credit.

0:30:460:30:53

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

0:30:540:31:01

A debt of just £2 would get you locked up in a debtors' prison.

0:31:040:31:09

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

0:31:090:31:16

a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.

0:31:160:31:21

£5,000 was the price one John Huggins paid for the wardenship of the Fleet prison,

0:31:210:31:27

the equivalent of £½ million today. The way he could recoup his investment

0:31:270:31:33

was to charge the inmates for their stay, the hotel from hell, including the rent for their shackles.

0:31:330:31:40

A fiver would get you your own cell.

0:31:400:31:43

A few shillings more, something approximating food.

0:31:430:31:47

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

0:31:470:31:52

sleeping on the floor, no air, no sanitation

0:31:520:31:56

and smallpox waiting to get you.

0:31:560:31:59

"Who are the real criminals" was the cry on the streets and in the newspapers of London.

0:32:040:32:10

Everywhere you looked, the line between the law enforcers and the law breakers seemed arbitrary.

0:32:100:32:18

In 1725, the Lord Chancellor was convicted of embezzling £80,000. People had had enough.

0:32:180:32:25

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

0:32:260:32:32

documented a rising wave of revulsion at the world Walpole had brought into being,

0:32:320:32:38

a sense that beneath all the platitudes about peace and stability lay squalor and corruption.

0:32:400:32:48

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

0:32:500:32:56

big and little.

0:32:560:32:58

Infants whose mothers were unable, or sometimes unwilling, to raise them were abandoned on the streets.

0:32:580:33:05

But there came a point when someone was tired enough of stepping over half-dead babies found in the gutter

0:33:090:33:17

to do something about it.

0:33:170:33:20

That someone was a 53-year-old retired merchant sea captain called Thomas Coram.

0:33:220:33:29

Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts from the transatlantic timber trade.

0:33:290:33:36

All he wanted was to settle down into a quiet life in Rotherhithe where he could smell the Thames and the sea.

0:33:360:33:44

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

0:33:440:33:50

Worse, he knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the workhouse and sent to a wet nurse

0:33:500:33:57

was close to 100%.

0:33:570:33:59

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

0:33:590:34:04

to create a foundling hospital, where babies could be deposited, legitimate or illegitimate,

0:34:040:34:11

and would be given a decent chance of survival. For nearly 20 years,

0:34:110:34:16

he made himself a nuisance to his friends, petitioning the King and everyone else, to raise the funds.

0:34:160:34:24

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

0:34:240:34:29

Not surprisingly, it couldn't cope with the demand.

0:34:290:34:34

To decide which children could get places, there was a lucky dip.

0:34:340:34:38

Mothers drew balls out of a bag. A white ball and your baby was in.

0:34:380:34:43

A red ball, you were on the reserve list.

0:34:430:34:47

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

0:34:470:34:52

Inside this cabinet are some of the saddest things left to us by the 18th century.

0:34:520:34:59

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

0:34:590:35:04

just at the point when they were going to leave them to the tender mercies of the foundling hospital.

0:35:040:35:11

There's a whole world of sorrow and love in this extraordinary cabinet.

0:35:110:35:17

It speaks not just of the very destitute. Some of the pieces,

0:35:170:35:22

like this mother-of-pearl heart, with the initials, presumably of the baby, on it,

0:35:220:35:28

suggest that some of the mothers were well-to-do.

0:35:280:35:32

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

0:35:320:35:37

They were just things the mothers happened to have on them when they were leaving the children.

0:35:370:35:44

Some of the mothers had nothing to offer their little babies except...a nut.

0:35:440:35:50

A nut which was meant to be worn as a pendant.

0:35:500:35:54

There's a little hole for the string.

0:35:540:35:57

Sometimes things which had a little work on them, like this beautiful sewn heart.

0:35:570:36:04

Or most desperate of all, perhaps,

0:36:040:36:07

just this flimsy piece of ribbon.

0:36:070:36:10

You can imagine a mother on the point of saying goodbye for the last time to her baby

0:36:100:36:16

just taking a piece of ribbon from her hair and giving it to her child.

0:36:160:36:21

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

0:36:210:36:26

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

0:36:260:36:32

And, of course, the foundling hospital couldn't hope to work miracles overnight.

0:36:320:36:39

Nearly half the babies died in the first year.

0:36:390:36:43

But that was a huge improvement over the usual figures.

0:36:430:36:48

This was the middle-class parish at work.

0:36:480:36:51

Well-off, busily charitable and as much interested in virtue as in wit.

0:36:510:36:56

There'd been philanthropy before, of course,

0:36:560:37:00

but this was the first time that businessmen came together with artists, writers and sculptors

0:37:000:37:07

in a campaign of conscience to attack a hideous evil in what was SUPPOSED to be a Christian modern metropolis.

0:37:070:37:16

The charges of the hospital, if they survived, would be employed in the service of the nation -

0:37:170:37:25

most likely in the Navy, if they were boys, or in domestic service, if they were girls.

0:37:250:37:31

The foundling hospital was philanthropy with a purpose.

0:37:310:37:36

Its charges would be model Britons of the future,

0:37:380:37:42

not gin-soaked, syphilitic rakes.

0:37:420:37:45

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

0:37:450:37:50

and, above all, patriotic.

0:37:500:37:53

# Rule Britannia... #

0:37:530:37:55

This was Britannia's time.

0:37:550:37:59

# Britons never, never, never will be slaves

0:37:590:38:05

# Rule Britannia

0:38:050:38:08

# Britannia rule the waves

0:38:080:38:11

# Britons never, never, never will be slaves. #

0:38:110:38:17

The lyrics for this chest-thumping new song were written by two Scots for a play about Alfred the Great.

0:38:170:38:24

They were sung lustily by the merchants and businessmen

0:38:240:38:30

who saw Britain's future lay with the blue-water empire of trade.

0:38:300:38:35

But someone was in the way of this prosperous future.

0:38:350:38:40

That someone was Robert Walpole. As far as the merchants were concerned,

0:38:400:38:45

Walpole and his cronies cared too much about land and not enough about business.

0:38:450:38:52

So they were not amused

0:38:520:38:54

when Walpole raised the taxes on the kinds of things that made money for them - beer and coal,

0:38:540:39:00

while making damn sure to keep the land tax low.

0:39:000:39:05

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

0:39:050:39:11

So, no wonder Walpole, unforgivably, pussyfooted around the Spanish

0:39:110:39:17

when they presumed to interfere with OUR ships.

0:39:170:39:21

When he signed a treaty with Spain that was seen as an unpatriotic sellout,

0:39:220:39:28

the merchants were even more incensed.

0:39:280:39:33

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

0:39:340:39:40

Walpole's allies and timeservers in Parliament were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

0:39:400:39:47

His political enemies closed in gleefully for the kill.

0:39:470:39:52

To deprive them of the satisfaction, Walpole walked, a broken man, back to his wine and his dogs at Houghton.

0:39:520:40:00

It was the end of an era.

0:40:020:40:05

Now the gung-ho patriots could have their get-rich war. And they must have thought it would be a breeze.

0:40:090:40:18

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

0:40:210:40:26

But in 1745,

0:40:260:40:28

that unity would prove a bitter illusion.

0:40:280:40:33

The Jacobite cause had refused to die, especially among the clans of northwest Scotland,

0:40:480:40:55

where it fed off continued opposition to the Union.

0:40:550:41:00

What the Jacobites needed was a figurehead. In 1745, they got one.

0:41:000:41:04

A leader many saw as a model of virile fearlessness -

0:41:040:41:09

the son of James Edward Stuart,

0:41:090:41:12

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

0:41:120:41:16

The fact that the Prince's full name was Charles Edward Louis Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart

0:41:160:41:25

should tell us that the Prince was less the incarnation of the old Scotland of the clans

0:41:250:41:31

and much more a graduate

0:41:310:41:34

of the pan-European, Italo-Polish, Franco-Irish, Catholic international community.

0:41:340:41:41

But still, he was a Stuart. And that blood certainly mattered to the Prince himself

0:41:410:41:47

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

0:41:470:41:55

On 19th August 1745,

0:41:550:41:58

Prince Charles Edward Stuart stood here at Glenfinnan, watched his family standard being raised

0:41:580:42:05

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

0:42:050:42:11

That would have been news to crofters

0:42:110:42:13

who'd been threatened with having their cottages burned unless they joined the Jacobite army.

0:42:130:42:21

But the sight of Bonnie Prince Charlie - and compared to George II and to his own embittered father,

0:42:210:42:29

he certainly was bonnie -

0:42:290:42:31

standing here at the head of Loch Shiel in his tartan did seem to promise a new Scottish future,

0:42:310:42:39

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

0:42:390:42:44

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

0:42:440:42:49

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

0:42:490:42:55

In England, families were more and more becoming a kind of business.

0:42:550:42:59

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

0:42:590:43:05

Clan loyalty was built around the idea, even when it was a mythical idea, of a common ancestor.

0:43:050:43:12

Now, the grandest landlords in the Highlands, just like their Lowland counterparts,

0:43:120:43:18

were becoming connoisseurs of fine claret and chamber music.

0:43:180:43:22

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

0:43:220:43:27

They both spoke Gaelic and made sure they'd have broadsword and daggers at the ready when the chief called.

0:43:270:43:35

Buoyed by the Prince's claim that the French were behind the Rebellion and planned an imminent invasion,

0:43:420:43:50

Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army moved swiftly,

0:43:500:43:54

capturing the woefully inadequate Hanoverian forces in Scotland.

0:43:540:43:59

But when the Prince finally took what was the big prize - Edinburgh - he hadn't won over all of Scotland.

0:43:590:44:06

The Lowlands were overwhelmingly loyal to King George.

0:44:060:44:10

It's possible that more Scots fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie than for him.

0:44:100:44:17

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

0:44:170:44:22

And when his army faced the Hanoverians at the Battle of Prestonpans,

0:44:220:44:28

they won a resounding victory.

0:44:280:44:30

At Holyrood House, debate raged as to what to do next.

0:44:350:44:39

The Highland chiefs, sceptical of finding support in England,

0:44:390:44:44

advised Charles to make the Stuarts masters of the north, but to go no further.

0:44:440:44:50

But for Charles, nothing less than a conquest of England would do. He won the day by a single vote.

0:44:500:44:58

The Jacobites were on their way south.

0:44:580:45:02

In rapid succession, Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester

0:45:020:45:07

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

0:45:070:45:12

With the Jacobites approaching Derby at the beginning of December,

0:45:120:45:16

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

0:45:160:45:21

there was something close to pandemonium in London.

0:45:210:45:25

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

0:45:250:45:31

The handful of soldiers left to protect the capital were not of the calibre to inspire much confidence.

0:45:310:45:38

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

0:45:380:45:44

And they didn't do it on the field of battle, but in this room at Exeter House in Derby on December 5th 1745.

0:45:440:45:52

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

0:45:540:46:00

"London is just 130 miles away," said the Prince. "Move on the capital and the French will come.

0:46:000:46:08

"Besides, we've got precious little time. The Redcoats will be back from Europe soon."

0:46:080:46:14

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

0:46:140:46:19

"I no longer believe the French are coming. It's time to cut our losses. It's time to go home."

0:46:190:46:26

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

0:46:270:46:32

The Jacobites turned about and headed north,

0:46:320:46:37

beginning the long tramp back to Scotland through dreadful winter weather,

0:46:370:46:42

pursued by those newly-returned British regiments. Their retreat turned into a nightmare.

0:46:420:46:50

It was hard to know which was more murderous - the snows of winter

0:46:500:46:55

or the vengeful pursuing troops of George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland.

0:46:550:47:01

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

0:47:030:47:08

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

0:47:080:47:13

but they were unable to hold out against Cumberland.

0:47:130:47:18

Into this tiny space were crammed hundreds of Jacobite soldiers,

0:47:220:47:27

locked up without any air or any water.

0:47:270:47:31

What they DID have were these shiny stones,

0:47:320:47:37

smooth, damp, slimy.

0:47:370:47:40

A terrible memento of their distress.

0:47:400:47:42

To this day, they're called Licking Stones,

0:47:420:47:47

because the prisoners were brought to such horrible extremity

0:47:470:47:52

that they were forced and reduced to sliding their tongues in these cavities

0:47:520:47:58

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

0:47:580:48:04

This really was Hanoverian Britain's black hole of Calcutta.

0:48:040:48:09

By the time that winter turned into spring in the Highlands,

0:48:150:48:20

it was unmistakably clear that the Jacobite war was lost.

0:48:200:48:25

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

0:48:250:48:33

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

0:48:340:48:40

Cumberland's force was only a third as big again as the Prince's, but it was lethally better equipped.

0:48:400:48:47

A new verse of the national anthem proved to be prophetic, as the big guns began to fire.

0:48:470:48:54

Just an hour after the firing had started,

0:49:460:49:50

there were 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders lying slaughtered. Only 50 of the Hanoverians had perished.

0:49:500:49:58

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

0:49:580:50:03

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

0:50:030:50:09

to finish you off with their new-fangled bayonets.

0:50:090:50:14

-As one Hanoverian officer noted,

-"Our men, dabbling their feet in blood and splashing it about,

0:50:140:50:21

"look like so many butchers, rather than Christian soldiers."

0:50:210:50:26

Charles Edward survived the battle and gave the order "Every man for himself".

0:50:270:50:33

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

0:50:330:50:39

In England, the victory was riotously celebrated. Effigies of Bonnie Prince Charlie were burned.

0:50:390:50:47

But many in Scotland, too, were pleased to see the end of the Jacobite threat,

0:50:470:50:53

delighted the Prince had gone.

0:50:530:50:56

But in the heartland of his support in northwest Scotland,

0:50:560:51:00

Charles left behind a population prostrate before the avenging army of the Duke of Cumberland,

0:51:000:51:07

determined to break the Jacobite clans for ever.

0:51:070:51:12

Villages were burned to the ground,

0:51:170:51:20

captured men hanged or shot,

0:51:200:51:23

cattle were stolen, thousands driven from their homes.

0:51:230:51:28

Even the wearing of Highland dress was banned,

0:51:280:51:32

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

0:51:320:51:38

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

0:51:430:51:49

things that could be hidden or disguised.

0:51:490:51:53

A lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair or the mysterious emblems engraved on wine glasses.

0:51:530:52:00

At first sight, this board seems like an indecipherable smudge of paint.

0:52:000:52:05

But if you look at it the right way, reflected against the cylinder,

0:52:050:52:10

it turns into the lost love, the boy born to be king,

0:52:100:52:15

the saviour across the water.

0:52:150:52:17

Unhappily for the keepers of the Jacobite flame,

0:52:200:52:24

Charles Edward in exile went rapidly downhill. Too many mistresses,

0:52:240:52:29

far too much drink, years of indolence made him prematurely decrepit.

0:52:290:52:35

# Will ye no' come back again...? #

0:52:370:52:43

But the romantic myth of Bonnie Prince Charlie would survive the wreckage of his REAL history.

0:52:430:52:50

It would live in the poems and popular ballads,

0:52:500:52:55

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

0:52:550:53:00

# Will ye no' come back again? #

0:53:000:53:08

But Jacobitism as a political force WAS spent.

0:53:100:53:14

In the decades following Culloden, a transformation would take place in Scotland.

0:53:140:53:21

The Jacobite warriors who'd been unable to break Britannia

0:53:210:53:25

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

0:53:250:53:31

"Join the future. Join the army of the British Empire."

0:53:310:53:36

Many thousands took the offer.

0:53:360:53:39

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

0:53:390:53:45

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

0:53:450:53:49

Just 20 years after Culloden,

0:53:490:53:52

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

0:53:520:53:58

The collapse of the backward-looking cult of honour had made room for the forward-looking cult of modernity.

0:53:580:54:06

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

0:54:060:54:12

hopeless dreams were replaced by the appetite for hard facts and hard cash.

0:54:120:54:18

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

0:54:180:54:25

like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.

0:54:250:54:27

They looked at the tragedy of their own country

0:54:270:54:32

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

0:54:320:54:37

from hunting and gathering societies, to settled farmers

0:54:370:54:41

and finally to true civilisation - the world of commerce, science and industry, the world of the towns.

0:54:410:54:48

It was another Scot, Robert Adam,

0:54:530:54:56

who became the first British king of architectural style.

0:54:560:55:01

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

0:55:010:55:07

a different kind of Scottish conqueror came back to Derbyshire and, this time, he was invincible.

0:55:070:55:14

At Kedleston Hall, Robert Adam built in a new style, for a new kind of aristocrat.

0:55:210:55:28

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

0:55:280:55:32

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

0:55:320:55:37

What he wanted was a house that would not overpower the visitor with vulgar displays of swaggering wealth,

0:55:380:55:46

but somewhere that would speak instead of Roman grandeur, of noble, classical austerity,

0:55:460:55:52

of loftiness of mind, of purity of taste, a palace of contemplation,

0:55:520:55:57

a temple of virtue.

0:55:570:55:59

Couldn't the accumulation of private riches

0:56:010:56:06

somehow be a force for general happiness?

0:56:060:56:10

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

0:56:110:56:18

In 1746, while the last survivors of Cumberland's butchery were being hunted down,

0:56:180:56:24

Adam Smith, the son of a customs officer, had an exhilarating vision of the future.

0:56:240:56:30

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

0:56:300:56:35

But it would be his revolutionary book, the Wealth of Nations,

0:56:350:56:40

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

0:56:400:56:44

Optimistic about the happiness of material life,

0:56:440:56:49

Smith laid out as a matter of scientific fact mankind's natural drive to self-betterment.

0:56:490:56:55

Allowed to follow their natural urges, men would create, without even willing it, a better world,

0:56:550:57:02

richer, freer, more educated. The best thing that government could do

0:57:020:57:07

was to allow the invisible hand of the market to do its work.

0:57:070:57:12

The economic world was like a watch, he wrote.

0:57:140:57:18

Its springs and wheels all admirably adjusted to the ends for which it was made.

0:57:180:57:24

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

0:57:240:57:29

for the purposes for which God had made them. That purpose was progress.

0:57:290:57:35

And it was one of history's sweetest ironies that it had fallen to poor, bloodied, mutilated Scotland

0:57:350:57:43

to show Britannia the way ahead.

0:57:430:57:45

So, if you want to see the future, forget the pompous monuments of England's past.

0:57:450:57:52

Come north, instead, to the new towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh and see the future of Britain.

0:57:520:57:59

The future, perhaps, of the world.

0:57:590:58:02

Subtitles by Audrey Flynn BBC Scotland 2001

0:58:110:58:15

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