Britannia Incorporated A History of Britain by Simon Schama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Those who don't, punished."

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

At dawn on February 13th 1692,

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

were ordered to carry out a massacre.

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

fled into a raging snowstorm where many of them died.

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

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

Needless to say, it was a sham.

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

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

The Scottish Parliament voted it an act of murder.

How could victim and perpetrator ever be reconciled now?

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

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

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

would make a future together based on profit and interest.

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

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

and this is how it happened...

In England, the 1690s were the years

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

In Scotland, they were years of purgatory.

After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.

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

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

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

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

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

A plan that would transform the country from impotence and destitution

into riches and power beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

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

And where was that to be?

Well, of course, in Panama.

A group of merchants and bankers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of Indians, llamas, elephants and the rising sun,

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

It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

40 crew and passengers died on the long voyage.

And when they found their golden island,

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

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

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

into a primitive stockade, bravely christened Fort St Andrew.

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

And their supplies ran with maggots.

And there was no outside help.

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

and the Government in Westminster was determined it should fail.

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

or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.

When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh,

all they found were hundreds of graves.

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

the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

would die childless. A crisis over the succession loomed.

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

In Scotland, however, after the humiliation of Darien,

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

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

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

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

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

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

And THIS is it.

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

all £398,000 of it.

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

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

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

The equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions,

was the carrot dangled before members of the Scottish Parliament.

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

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

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

The writing was on the wall.

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

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

attending the final blow and breathing out her last.

We are an obscure, poor people,

though formerly of better account,

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

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

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

Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.

What kind of nation was this "Great Britain"?

To answer that question,

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

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

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

in the early 18th century.

On the ceiling, painted by Sir James Thornhill,

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

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

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

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

but on the British monarchs.

Over there in France, despotism and popery.

Over here, thanks to William, liberty and Protestantism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

against the serried ranks of despots.

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

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

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

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

accountants, tax assessors, customs and excise officers.

Buried inside all the crowing propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling,

there was one crucial nugget of truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but about the entire political character of the nation

and the upheaval of 1688 that had created it.

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

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

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

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

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

This was all-out war at the hustings.

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

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

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

this guaranteed an awful lot of politics.

The political temperature reached fever pitch in 1714,

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

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

to arrive at the next King of England,

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

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

It was the Whigs who backed his arrival in Britain

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

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

His coronation was greeted with rioting in 20 towns.

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

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

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

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

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

declared James the rightful King, at Braemar,

and proceeded to raise an army.

The Jacobite slogan of "King James and no Union"

meant support from both the Highlands and Lowlands came swiftly.

10,000 men joined the Rebellion.

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

the Government knew it was in serious trouble.

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

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

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

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

The Hanoverian dynasty remained.

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

After this stormy start to the 18th century,

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

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

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

but a political manager of uncanny genius.

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

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

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

He was Robert Walpole.

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

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

Walpole's appeal was to shameless self-interest.

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

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

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

-"Or would you rather have what

-I

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

What today we'd call a healthy business environment.

Walpole, nicknamed Cock Robin,

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

rather than religious passion or legal debate.

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

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

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

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

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

and a haunch of mutton juicily oozing on the trencher,

and Cock Robin's eyes twinkling amiably at you,

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

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

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

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

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

In retrospect, we can see that Walpole built

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

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

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

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

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

In short, Walpole had the goods.

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

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

Walpole looked after his own.

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

Houghton Hall.

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

Anything that riches could buy, Walpole bought.

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

classical sculpture, glorious Renaissance and Baroque art,

all shipped to his East Anglian pleasure dome.

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

it was also a statement of grandeur meant to stun sceptics

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

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

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

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

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

They stopped shouting and started building.

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

And Robert Walpole showed them the way.

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

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

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

So he had it demolished and moved down the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

war by gardening.

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

Taking their inspiration from the villas of ancient Rome,

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

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

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

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

But sharing all this pastoral graciousness only went so far.

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

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

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

not just in the country, but in the town

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

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

700,000 of them - one in ten Englishmen.

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

the tireless hucksterism, the glittering greediness.

The modern morality tales of the painter and engraver William Hogarth

are peopled by innocents arriving dewy-fresh from the country

surrendering to the temptations of the city

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

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

economic realists knew it was the way forward.

# Come buy my greens and flowers fine

# Your houses to adorn... #

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

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

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

novelty items like Oriental goldfish which became an aristocratic marvel.

Caged canaries, finches and parrots.

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

China from Holland from which to sip your tea,

exotic fruits, like pomegranates and pineapples.

The first commercially available condoms - lambskin for the rich,

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

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

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

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

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

a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.

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

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

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

A fiver would get you your own cell.

A few shillings more, something approximating food.

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

sleeping on the floor, no air, no sanitation

and smallpox waiting to get you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

big and little.

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

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

to do something about it.

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

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

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

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

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

was close to 100%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A red ball, you were on the reserve list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a little hole for the string.

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

Or most desperate of all, perhaps,

just this flimsy piece of ribbon.

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly half the babies died in the first year.

But that was a huge improvement over the usual figures.

This was the middle-class parish at work.

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

There'd been philanthropy before, of course,

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

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

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

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

The foundling hospital was philanthropy with a purpose.

Its charges would be model Britons of the future,

not gin-soaked, syphilitic rakes.

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

and, above all, patriotic.

# Rule Britannia... #

This was Britannia's time.

# Britons never, never, never will be slaves

# Rule Britannia

# Britannia rule the waves

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

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

They were sung lustily by the merchants and businessmen

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

But someone was in the way of this prosperous future.

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

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

So they were not amused

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

while making damn sure to keep the land tax low.

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

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

when they presumed to interfere with OUR ships.

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

the merchants were even more incensed.

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

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

His political enemies closed in gleefully for the kill.

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

It was the end of an era.

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

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

But in 1745,

that unity would prove a bitter illusion.

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

where it fed off continued opposition to the Union.

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

A leader many saw as a model of virile fearlessness -

the son of James Edward Stuart,

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

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

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

and much more a graduate

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

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

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

On 19th August 1745,

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

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

That would have been news to crofters

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

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

he certainly was bonnie -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

were becoming connoisseurs of fine claret and chamber music.

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

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

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

Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army moved swiftly,

capturing the woefully inadequate Hanoverian forces in Scotland.

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

The Lowlands were overwhelmingly loyal to King George.

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

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

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

they won a resounding victory.

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

The Highland chiefs, sceptical of finding support in England,

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

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

The Jacobites were on their way south.

In rapid succession, Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester

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

With the Jacobites approaching Derby at the beginning of December,

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

there was something close to pandemonium in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jacobites turned about and headed north,

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

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

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

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

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

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

but they were unable to hold out against Cumberland.

Into this tiny space were crammed hundreds of Jacobite soldiers,

locked up without any air or any water.

What they DID have were these shiny stones,

smooth, damp, slimy.

A terrible memento of their distress.

To this day, they're called Licking Stones,

because the prisoners were brought to such horrible extremity

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

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

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

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

it was unmistakably clear that the Jacobite war was lost.

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

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

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

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

Just an hour after the firing had started,

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

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

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

to finish you off with their new-fangled bayonets.

-As one Hanoverian officer noted,

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

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

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

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

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

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

delighted the Prince had gone.

But in the heartland of his support in northwest Scotland,

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

determined to break the Jacobite clans for ever.

Villages were burned to the ground,

captured men hanged or shot,

cattle were stolen, thousands driven from their homes.

Even the wearing of Highland dress was banned,

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

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

things that could be hidden or disguised.

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

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

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

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

the saviour across the water.

Unhappily for the keepers of the Jacobite flame,

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

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

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

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

It would live in the poems and popular ballads,

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

# Will ye no' come back again? #

But Jacobitism as a political force WAS spent.

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

The Jacobite warriors who'd been unable to break Britannia

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

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

Many thousands took the offer.

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

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

Just 20 years after Culloden,

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

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

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

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

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

like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.

They looked at the tragedy of their own country

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

from hunting and gathering societies, to settled farmers

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

It was another Scot, Robert Adam,

who became the first British king of architectural style.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a temple of virtue.

Couldn't the accumulation of private riches

somehow be a force for general happiness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimistic about the happiness of material life,

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

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

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

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

The economic world was like a watch, he wrote.

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

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

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

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

to show Britannia the way ahead.

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

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

The future, perhaps, of the world.

Subtitles by Audrey Flynn BBC Scotland 2001