Tudors to Stuarts: From Gods to Men Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History

For centuries, kings and queens have been set apart

from the rest of us, depicted as God-like giants

or virile warriors or fertile mothers of the nation.

But if you strip away the regal facade

the reality's very different.

We've had mad monarchs and bad ones

and sexually inadequate kings

and infertile queens.

In this series, I'm going to reintroduce you

to our monarchs as human beings, people rather like you and me.

I'm going to investigate their medical problems,

study their doctors' reports, read their private letters

and examine their most intimate possessions.

I'm going to reveal the chinks in the royal armour,

because I believe, ironically, that the lives of these kings and queens,

the survival of the monarchy, the fortunes of the nation

have been determined not so much by their strengths,

but their weaknesses.

In this first episode, I'm looking at the medical histories

of the Tudors and the Stuarts, and that's cos I believe

that these intimate details can often explain the moments that came

to define their reigns - royal wives beheaded and divorced,

Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other,

a country embroiled in civil war.

Many of these monarchs had deeply personal flaws of biology and

psychology, but I'm going to explain how the monarchy withstood them all.

Our story starts in 1509,

when perhaps the greatest king of them all came to the throne.

Henry VIII seemed to have all of God's gifts.

He was charismatic and clever and commanding.

When he became king, one of his new subjects wrote,

"All the world here is rejoicing in the possession

"of so great a prince."

Henry was the perfect product of the hereditary system.

His inheritance gave him great power,

but it also placed him under intolerable pressure because,

to continue the Tudor dynasty, he had to produce an heir,

a successor who would be just as perfect and potent as Henry was.

In Holbein's most celebrated portrait of Henry VIII,

the monarch's shown as both human and divine.

He's a man in his prime.

He's enormous, but at the same time he's more than a man.

He's a little like a god, all-powerful and untouchable.

And, with the fate of the realm resting on this royal flesh,

nothing could be left to chance.

A horde of doctors ministered to the king.

There was no royal body part too intimate or body fluid

too unsavoury to evade their professional attention.

One of the items unearthed here, at Hampton Court Palace, shows

how Henry was under intense scrutiny.

That's rather nice.

And this is my favourite object practically in the whole

of the collection.

Wow.

That is what the Tudors called a piss pot - not my word, theirs -

and this particular one was excavated in the privy garden,

just outside Henry VIII's private apartment.

And the brilliant thing about it is that the archaeologists

who analysed it in there, when their report came back, it was great.

It said, "Contains traces of genuine Tudor piss," still in there.

We do know that Henry VIII used, not this one, but a piss pot like this,

and his doctors closely analysed what it contained, didn't they?

They would have actually decanted it out of the piss pot into what

they would call a urinal or a jordan

and then held it up to the light, and the badge of a physician is

really the urinal, because in every illumination they're always

being shown at the bedside holding up the glass to the light.

Henry's pretty closely monitored, isn't he?

We hear that every time he goes to make water, as they call it,

he's accompanied by one of the gentlemen of the bed chamber.

He must have been under constant surveillance.

Inevitably, in such a close-knit community as this,

with everybody standing around, it was very difficult to hide anything,

so if the king wasn't well or there was something

changed in the way his urine looked, then it was likely to get out.

And that is...you know, it's potentially a political problem,

isn't it? Because if he's sick, he could die, there could be war.

If the king was not right, if there was something wrong with

the king, then there was something wrong with the kingdom,

so there was this very straightforward equation between

the health of the king in a personal monarchy and the state of the realm.

And there was one part of the royal anatomy that

mattered above all others.

It's no coincidence that, when you come face to face with Henry,

it's not his gaze that captures your eye, but his codpiece.

This was the true seat of royal power, and the king knew it,

but he also knew how uncertain his position was.

Henry was just the second king of the Tudor line,

a dynasty scarcely a quarter of a century old.

In 1485, the last Plantagenet king, Richard III,

had been defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry's father,

Henry VII, who'd seized the Crown.

On inheriting the throne,

Henry VIII married the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon.

But after more than a decade together and six pregnancies

they had only one surviving child, a daughter, Princess Mary.

The queen was almost 40 and all hope of a son and heir

to continue this fledgling royal line was fading fast.

Clearly, there's quite a lot of speculation about Henry's health

and a lot of it must have centred on this issue

of the succession.

"When is he going to give us a boy, an heir, a prince?"

Yes, I think that's right, and we're very much aware that Henry

himself is thinking about this a lot. And the gossip around the court

often had to do with the fact that the king was perhaps

not as great a sexual athlete as he would have wished.

The notebook of the royal physician, John Argentine,

includes a treatment for Henry's suspected shortcoming.

Under the heading "coitus" - sex -

he gives particular remedies for,

as it were, the problem of not being able to get it up or the problem

of not being able to have powerful enough generative sperm.

One of which is made up of goats' testicles mixed with marjoram and

formed into an apple and then eaten. And he says, "Well, that works very

"well, but you might also add bulls' testicles to the mix as well."

The goat being a famously lusty animal,

so you can see how it might work.

I suppose it looks to us like the Tudor dynasty was inevitable -

there were loads of Tudors - but at this stage

it was only the second generation.

To Henry, it must have looked pretty fragile.

You can sense that the king is becoming increasingly concerned

and worried and starting to look for ways out of this situation.

The hereditary system seemed to have failed both king and country.

Inadequacies in the royal bedchamber would now force Henry

to do the unthinkable...

and consider changing his religion.

Henry broke with Rome and dissolved the monasteries

and created the Church of England,

all to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in order to marry

the younger, prettier Anne Boleyn,

who might, just might, give him a son.

On the one hand, Henry's divorce was a matter of high state

and international diplomacy.

On the other, though,

it was an intensely personal story about a man who was absolutely

desperate for a son and a woman who was too old to give him one.

But Henry's new wife, Anne Boleyn, did not bear him a son.

Instead, she had another daughter, Princess Elizabeth,

and this failure would ultimately cost her her life.

It was Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, who finally gave him a son.

Prince Edward was born in 1537,

28 years after Henry had come to the throne.

After a divorce, a religious schism and a beheading,

the king had paid an extraordinarily high price for his heir.

And there's a very touching moment when finally a boy is born,

Edward is born.

The king takes him and he cries that finally he's got a male heir.

Yeah, and it's a very human moment.

And I think it's at moments like that when you think, "Actually,

"this role is extraordinarily privileged on the one hand

"and can be extraordinarily painful and troubled on the other hand."

It's a moment that shows you

the pressure for the line of succession there has been,

a moment intensely emotional,

actually, for him. The sheer weight of relief that he would have felt

as he held Edward in his hands... And it's easy to misinterpret him

as tyrannical, running through these various marriages without

any feeling, but in fact what we have here is a man who's been

quite desperate to actually fulfil what has been expected of him.

Are you saying that we should feel a bit of pity

for the man who's seen as the English Stalin?

We have to get beneath the iconic images

and we have to say to ourselves, "Yes, on the one hand,

"he's a king, he's pragmatic, he's political, he's state-focused."

Of course he is, that's his role.

But on the other hand, there is a human being here who feels,

who's troubled, who is under pressure,

who's got to make his contribution in his lifetime in particular ways,

and the most important way is to ensure that line of succession.

Henry would die convinced that he'd finally secured his dynasty

and certain that the country's religious traumas were worth it

to have won the son and heir that he left behind.

Like his father, Edward VI seemed the model monarch -

he was vigorous, intelligent and, most importantly, male.

But when he succeeded Henry on the 28th of January, 1547,

Edward was but a boy.

On the eve of his coronation, the young prince led

a procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey.

The streets are lined with spectators,

people hang tapestries out of the windows of their houses

and there's a great cavalcade of noblemen on horseback.

The Privy Council are there, the trumpeters are there.

But when they reach Old St Paul's Church,

the whole procession comes to a stop.

People start saying, "What's going on? Why have we stopped here?"

What had happened was that the king himself had stopped the show.

He'd had his eye caught by an acrobat.

He watched his performance on the tightrope,

he was laughing his head off, enjoying it.

He was, after all, only nine years old.

It was a really charming and amusing moment,

full of hope for the future, but there was a dark side to it.

People did remember the Old Testament saying,

"Woe upon thee, O land, when thy king is a child."

The first test of the new king's reign would be his faith.

England had broken with Rome just 13 years earlier and, in the

hands of a child, its religious future looked deeply uncertain.

Edward wasn't yet considered old enough to rule in his own right

and his youth left him dangerously vulnerable

to manipulation by his leading courtiers.

What happens when Henry dies, then?

There's this power vacuum with a nine-year-old on the throne.

Well, almost immediately the reign is thrown into turmoil

because someone needs to take charge and there's a battle between

whether it should be a council, a minority council,

as there had been in sort of previous generations

when a child inherited the throne, or whether there should be

a single person, a protector,

who was actually going to look after the king.

And actually the idea of this protector wins out

and it becomes Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Edward's uncle.

Somerset became the sort of de facto king with that authority

while Edward was that young.

While Somerset ruled in his place,

Edward was educated to be a thoroughly modern monarch.

The training for a king in the medieval period was very much

how fast could you ride, how...

could you fight well enough so that you'd actually be able to take on

sort of enemies in a battlefield. When you get to the Tudor period,

someone like Edward ends up being the most educated king

of a generation, and it's his love of Latin, literature, the sort

of Protestant faith that actually sort of drives forward an entirely

new kingship based on intellect rather than physical strength.

Can you tell me how Edward begins to mature, then?

What are the steps that he takes to begin to assert his authority?

At the beginning of Edward's reign,

Edward's still a bit too young to understand properly what's going on,

but within two years he's caught up pretty fast and you sort of get

that sense that this is a king very much on the cusp of maturity and

he's already beginning to challenge the authority of his protector.

One unique document lays bare the young king's hardening

political judgment.

We actually know what Edward was thinking and feeling

because he's the first king that we know about to have kept a diary.

It's amazing - it's here at the British Library.

And one thing it covers is his whole relationship

with his uncle, Protector Somerset.

We pick up the story in 1549,

when things are beginning to sour for Somerset.

By the age of 12,

Edward's youth no longer seemed an obstacle to his authority.

He'd become convinced that his Uncle Somerset

was abusing his position and must be deposed.

Edward summarises the charges here -

"Ambition, vainglory,

"entering into rash wars as Protector,

"enriching himself of my treasure

"and following his own opinion."

Just a couple of years later, Edward himself

signs the death warrant for his uncle's execution.

And in this diary entry here, it's...

it's amazing, really.

It just reads as follows, "The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off

"upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning."

That's it. That's really cold, isn't it?

And it's from this point onwards that observers said the young king

is now to be feared.

In just three years, the little boy who'd brought his coronation

procession to a halt to watch an acrobat had been transformed

into a king terrifyingly fit to rule.

Edward's ruthless treatment of his uncle showed fanatical zeal

and so did the way he now set about securing

England's Protestant future.

Edward himself is the embodiment of the Reformation.

It was for Edward that actually Henry went through this whole

process of changing the church.

Edward is the first king who is the king

and the head of the Church of England.

It was in Edward's reign that sort of stained glass was

ripped out of the churches, saints' images were smashed,

altars had to be changed that were the very fabric

of the medieval Catholic church, fundamentally shifted.

How does it affect his relationship with his half-sister, Mary?

It's one of these fascinating sort of psycho-dramas, really,

the Tudor family, that you've got all these sort of half-brothers

and sisters, Mary obviously being brought up a devout Catholic,

Edward being completely on the opposite side of the scale

and then becoming ever more Protestant.

Despite their differences, Edward and Mary were surprisingly close.

She was his godmother and walked with him

in his christening procession here at Hampton Court Palace.

As a little boy, Edward was sent to live down the river,

at the Palace of Richmond, and Mary used to pay him visits by boat.

But Edward would always place his faith over his family.

At Christmas 1550, the two siblings had a family reunion.

Christmases often go wrong, and this one did, too.

The problem had been Mary's household.

It was stuffed full of Catholics.

She'd been hearing Mass up to four times a week

and she hadn't bothered to keep it quiet.

Edward challenged her on this.

They argued so badly that both of them ended up in tears.

They made it up at the Christmas reunion, but a month later

he wrote her an uncompromising letter.

"You're breaking the law," he said, "you must correct your behaviour."

And he added these very ominous words,

"I have natural affection for you, do not seek to diminish it."

Edward was convinced that the success of his reign would

rest not on his biology, but his theology.

Yet in January 1553 the teenage king fell ill with a fever

that was probably tuberculosis.

Edward realised he was dying

and would never have the chance to produce a Protestant heir.

Zealous to the last,

he put his faith before the hereditary principle.

He decided the Crown shouldn't pass to the Catholic Mary,

who was next in line to the throne,

but instead to his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey.

Edward died in 1553, aged just 15,

and Jane succeeded him to the throne.

But, notoriously, her reign lasted just nine days.

That was because Mary acted decisively and brilliantly.

She escaped to her estate in East Anglia,

she gathered Catholic loyalists around her at Framlingham Castle

and from there they marched on London.

Despite the fact that she was female,

Mary was the only person in the 16th century

successfully to lead a rebellion and seize the throne.

Many people still doubted, though, whether she really was fit to rule.

Her half-brother Edward's problem had been his youth,

Mary's problem was worse - she was a Catholic and a woman.

Mary's opponents said she had to get approval from Parliament

before becoming queen.

If she'd agreed, Parliament would effectively have chosen the monarch.

But Mary stood her ground.

As England's first reigning female monarch,

Mary was in a unique position.

Just as the Crown had adapted to Edward's youth,

so it now had to adjust to her sex.

At her coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey,

she was given two sceptres and crowned as both king and queen.

Mary was driven by an ambition born 20 years earlier.

At 17, she'd been sent to live at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

From here, the miserable teenager watched as her father Henry VIII'S

divorce from her mother, Catherine of Aragon, unfolded.

As queen, she was determined to right the wrongs

endured by Catherine, by restoring England to the Catholic faith.

Do you think that Mary's future fanatical Catholicism is something

to do with her favouring her mother and seeing her badly treated?

Yes. I mean, her devotion to the Catholic faith,

and she was very pious, was certainly reinforced

by what happened to her mother.

But we should also remember that she had grown up within that faith

and she wasn't a young girl and she'd been educated in that

and she'd been educated to be a virtuous, pious Catholic princess.

And it's like asking someone to stop believing something

they've believed all their lives, and she wasn't going to let that go.

And I'm sure that there is something very defiant in Mary

and I think what she saw happening made her even more determined

to hold onto what she believed.

It was a matter of conscience for her.

She had the personality of a martyr,

someone willing to die for their faith, didn't she?

Yes, she did. And throughout all the troubles,

when she was out of favour or under...

when Henry was alive and then when she was really

struggling under Edward, she said she would rather die than submit.

And Mary knew that her spiritual mission

depended on the fruit of her royal womb.

She chose Prince Philip, son of the King of Spain, as her consort

and, even more importantly,

as the prospective father to her Catholic heir.

She said, "I would rather die a virgin,

"but I recognise that I need to produce an heir for my country,

"and this is my choice," and she felt that she...

that actually God had inspired her to choose Philip.

I think she says,

"It's not for fleshly considerations that I do this.

"I'm doing it for the good of the country."

That was presumably her belief.

It was in many ways a very sensible match,

but he was Spanish and it wasn't popular in England,

and it wasn't popular cos people worried about what would happen

if she died.

Would that mean that England was then under Spain?

Could Philip take her away from England as his wife?

Would that mean there would be an absent queen?

There are many reasons to be worried about it.

A delegation came from Parliament to Mary

and begged her to reconsider, to marry an Englishman instead.

But she refused. The opposition then turned violent, rebellion broke out.

Rebel troops reached the very edge of the city by the river

and Mary's courtiers were begging her to flee to save her life.

Again, she defied them, she refused.

She stood her ground and the rebellion was crushed.

In the uneasy days following Mary's victory over the rebels,

Parliament met to discuss

whether they were going to approve her marriage to Philip.

This had never happened when a king had wanted to get married -

he just did it - but Parliament were clearly worried that Philip,

as a man, would take over some of Mary's powers.

They did force the Spanish to make some concessions.

For a start, if Mary were to die, the next king or queen would be

her children with Philip, not Philip himself,

and also they agreed that

England would not get involved in the wars between Spain and France.

But here's the really interesting thing - in order to further protect

the powers of the crown, Parliament passed an act

saying that a queen was just as powerful as a king.

Philip and Mary were finally married here at Winchester Cathedral

with 3,000 people present.

When they were placed in their two chairs,

Mary was on the right, in the position of a king,

and Philip, on the left, was very clearly just the consort.

Mary was more powerful than any previous queen,

but the demands on her royal body were just the same as ever.

It was now Mary's duty as the monarch, as a Catholic,

even as a woman, to reproduce.

But time was against her. She was 38 years old.

Only three months, though, after her wedding, Mary felt something

move inside her and her doctors confirmed it - she was pregnant.

According to royal etiquette, Mary now withdrew from public life

and she locked herself away in her private chambers at Hampton Court.

Tudor childbirth was an all-female affair.

During her confinement,

Mary would have been attended by the most important ladies of her court

and her midwives, while her male doctors were kept at arm's length.

It seems to me that Mary's doctors were in a bit of a bind,

because they weren't physically examining this woman.

She was telling them that she was pregnant. What could they do?

They could only believe her.

They would only be able to go on the information that she gave them

or that the midwife who examined her gave them

or the observations they themselves made of her body because, of course,

even if they didn't necessarily touch her, they would have

been observing her and looking at the shape of her belly, for example,

to see if that conformed to what a pregnant belly might look like.

Now, everyone in this scenario -

Mary, her midwives and the doctors -

they all really want her to be pregnant, don't they?

They're looking for the evidence.

Oh, absolutely. Everybody wants her to be pregnant.

She desperately wants to be pregnant.

It's so important to produce an heir that...just huge, huge pressure.

What was the contemporary state of knowledge about pregnancy?

Well, it was just starting to be published in the vernacular

and this particular book here, called The Birth Of Mankind,

written by a German physician, Eucharius Rosslin,

and translated into English in 1540,

so for Mary this would have been the up-to-date information to hand

in English about getting pregnant, what to expect during pregnancy,

what to expect during labour, how to take care of yourself, et cetera.

These anatomical drawings look quite accurate to me.

Is that one an enormous penis?

Well, it certainly looks like one,

but in fact that's a drawing of the female private parts.

The understanding of women's bodies was that they were imperfect men -

women had less heat than men,

so their genitals were inside them instead of on the outside.

So, effectively, it would be a penis turned inwards.

This is utterly, utterly wrong, this idea that the vagina and womb

are inversions of the penis.

Poor old Queen Mary, she didn't really have a chance

of understanding what was going on with her reproductive system.

Well, except that's us looking back

with the benefit of modern knowledge and hindsight.

Within their medical system, which was based on the classical

humoral model of the body, this made perfect sense,

it was perfectly logical.

A pregnant queen presented the country with a novel problem -

her confinement removed Mary from the daily

cut and thrust of political life.

But her condition didn't distract the queen from her ambitious

programme of religious reform.

She persecuted Protestants with such vigour that it's tainted

her reputation ever since.

Nearly 457 years ago, a man was brought here to Smithfield

to be burnt at the stake as a heretic.

His name was John Rogers,

he was a canon of St Paul's and a leading Protestant churchman.

A huge crowd had gathered to watch him being burnt.

He was offered a last chance to recant, to say, "Yes, I give in,

"I am a Catholic," but he refused and the crowd were on his side.

As the flames rose up to consume him, some of them wept.

Others of them prayed to God to give him strength to bear the pain

and not to recant.

Over the next few days, other leading Protestant churchmen

were burnt, and the legend of Bloody Mary was born.

There had, of course, been religious persecution under previous monarchs,

but it was the unprecedented scale of the burnings -

300 in the next four years - that angered Mary's subjects.

But the pregnant queen ignored their outrage and distress,

sure in the knowledge that she was carrying a Catholic heir.

Witnesses to the royal birth were summoned and wet nurses

and the swaddling clothes of the unborn baby were laid out.

A few weeks before the baby was due, Mary showed herself at the window

of her bedchamber so the court could all see her great belly.

She also signed pre-prepared letters announcing the birth of her heir.

And one addressed to the Pope very confidently proclaimed

the happy delivery of a prince.

Mary believed that this baby would secure the Tudor succession

and the future of the Catholic faith in England.

The religious fate of the queen's three million subjects

depended on this child.

But, after nine months,

there was still no sign of Mary's son and heir.

It must have been a horrible feeling,

-when people started to doubt.

-Mmm.

-They would have started to think,

"Hang on, this has gone on for too long.

"There's something not right here."

Yes, absolutely, and she would be scrutinised

very closely for the shape of her belly, for example,

and whether the roundness was descending to indicate

that the child was moving down,

so it would have been a very anxious time.

A lot of modern historians talk quite glibly about this condition

as a phantom pregnancy, it was all in the mind, and this seems to me

to be unfair, cos it fits in too neatly with this long-standing view

that Mary was Bloody Mary, Broody Mary, Mad Mary, Evil Mary.

Oh, it's very much an interpretation based on modern psychological

knowledge but, of course, that's not how it would have been thought

about at the time.

At the time, it would very much have been something physical

that was wrong with her body.

What do you think may really have been going on, then?

Certainly, we've got a queen who's got a big belly,

that much is absolutely certain,

and she believes that she's pregnant,

but there's never a baby.

What are the possible causes of the situation?

It could have been a tumour, it could have been a swelling,

either of air or of water, or it could have been what

they would've called a mole or a false conception,

which was just a kind of mass of tissue

that was not a fully formed foetus.

There must have been this really terrible moment of humiliation

as confidence began to ebb away for everybody round her, Mary herself.

They must have realised at some point that she wasn't pregnant.

Utterly humiliating, at the end of the day, for there to be no baby.

At this time, the queen's health is very much the health of the nation.

What does this business of the pregnancy mean

for national politics?

Her body is very much the body of the nation,

and there's clearly something wrong with it.

There is a false conception of some sort here that indicates

some kind of misalliance there between husband and wife.

There's a mismatch between them.

So the queen wasn't pregnant.

Even more tragically, what she'd felt and believed to be a child

was probably the cancer that would kill her.

Three years later, Mary was on her deathbed.

Her religious vision had been thwarted by the failure

of her reproductive organs.

And her dream of returning England to Catholicism would die with her.

Unlike her brother Edward,

Mary refused to change the succession on religious grounds.

She left her crown to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth.

I like to believe that Elizabeth had learned from her sister's mistakes.

She never married. She never had children.

She reinvented herself as this Virgin Queen.

Elizabeth was quite explicit about it.

She said, "I've already joined myself in marriage to a husband,

"namely the Kingdom of England."

By refusing to share her power,

Elizabeth proved herself entirely fit to rule.

But Elizabeth's extraordinary success has eclipsed

her sister's own achievements.

Mary's tenacity and her formidable courage have been overlooked.

This...

is where Mary is buried,

although you'd hardly know it at first sight.

Her sister, Elizabeth, was later moved in to the same vault

and this monument was erected.

Technically, it's to both of them,

but it's all about Elizabeth the great queen.

In the inscription, it's Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth

and her sister Mary.

Mary's one of history's losers.

Her persecutions, the Catholicism mean that even today

she's one of our least popular monarchs.

That's why we have on the top here Elizabeth's body and Mary is absent.

Elizabeth refused to put her body to the same test as her sister Mary,

and, by sidestepping the royal duty to bear a successor,

she made herself into the most impressive of all the Tudors.

The Tudor dynasty, above all others,

symbolises the permanence of the English crown.

But actually they faced a quite astonishing series

of biological challenges.

Almost every passage of the Crown from one Tudor to the next

was fraught with difficulty.

Elizabeth was the last of her line.

After her death, it fell to the new Stuart dynasty to bridge

the gulf between being at once semi-divine and horribly human.

In 1603, King James VI of Scotland was crowned James I of England.

His coronation was supposed to make the transfer of power look

smooth and inevitable.

It was God's will.

But in fact the placing of the Scottish king on the English throne

had been the result of two years of secret political negotiation.

It marked the beginning of a new royal dynasty - the Stuarts.

Like his Tudor predecessors,

James was convinced of his God-given right to rule.

And yet he also seems to have been blessed

with enormous political acumen.

He'd need it to govern a nation which was riven

by religious conflict.

Can you tell me a bit about James' training and track record as a king?

I'm a great fan of James.

I think he was probably the cleverest monarch in English history,

but he also came with a very good track record.

He'd been a very good king of Scotland

and he was coming to a country which was far wealthier than Scotland,

so I think it must have seemed like Christmas in 1603.

He'd suddenly got all these resources

and he was determined to do well but also to have a good time.

It seems to me, on one hand, James really does believe

in the divine right of kings.

He thinks that he is in charge.

At the same time, he's really, really pragmatic.

I think it's very interesting, for instance,

that in 1605 there was the great Gunpowder Plot,

Catholic plot against the throne, and what was James' reaction?

Once the plotters had been executed,

he gave out baronetcies to Catholics to keep them on side.

I mean, that's the move of a statesman.

He doesn't want revenge from the situation, he wants a nation united.

The new Stuart dynasty also promised the country something

it hadn't had in almost a century - a secure succession.

So this is the first picture of Henry, Prince of Wales, is it?

Yes, this is the first one we know about, anyway,

and I think you can see by the way he's dressed

what an important child he was considered to be.

So James is extraordinarily...

he's done something that Henry and Edward and Mary

and Elizabeth have all failed to do, hasn't he?

Well, he's produced an heir, and sort of first time round,

if you like, and I think there's great excitement

and anticipation as a result of that.

So when they become... when they come down to England,

it's like there's a ready-made royal family, isn't there?

Yes, and I think, you know, in sort of popular memory, there hadn't

ever been a functional family, a royal family, in that kind of way.

There was, as you say, an heir, there was also a spare -

Charles, Prince Charles -

there was a daughter who could be advantageously married off

and Queen Anne was still producing children, so it felt as though

there was great hope and security for the future of the English throne.

James appointed capable courtiers to run his government.

He negotiated peace with Spain

and he started to heal some of the religious divisions in the country.

He didn't want to be a warrior king,

he wanted to be remembered instead as a Rex Pacificus, a king of peace.

But this very promising king was also human.

At a time when homosexual acts were a capital offence,

he was known to be attracted to his male courtiers.

Quite early on, it became clear that what was important to James

was relationships with good-looking, witty young men.

With other monarchs, it was good-looking, witty, young women,

but very much men for James.

At the court of Henry VIII, if you want to get on,

you get your young cousin to be a maid of honour, don't you?

But now, at James' court,

you get a male young cousin to be a cup bearer or something like that.

Yes.

It's a male favourite, and that actually does make a difference

because female favourites are women

and that means that they're not important.

Women are not important politically,

but men are and therefore they are rivals for power

with other men who are politicians.

I think that's why male favourites were particularly resented.

James was intent on enjoying the perks of his position,

but the sexual licence and debauchery of his court

weren't to everybody's taste.

I get the sense that Henry was a bit disapproving of all the parties,

the drinking.

Everything that Henry did seems to have really corresponded with

the sort of most moral, upright way of behaving and, for example,

we know he had a swear box in his own court that people had

to put money into, so he does come across as having been very,

very sort of virtuous, really.

The 18-year-old Prince of Wales was known for his intelligence,

his gregariousness and his athleticism.

He seemed to be the perfect king in waiting.

But, in 1612,

in the middle of preparations for his sister's wedding,

Henry suddenly fell ill with typhoid fever.

The family come to his bedside and there's a very touching

story about Prince Charles, his younger brother, who was 12

at the time, sending for the little bronze horse which was in Henry's

collection and was at Richmond Palace. And, according to the story,

Charles sent for the horse and then gave it to Henry on his deathbed,

handed it to his brother as he was lying on his deathbed, presumably

thinking that in some way it would comfort him, which is very touching.

He was lying in bed for about two weeks and he gradually weakens

and weakens and then dies.

Henry's death traumatised the country and his family.

His little brother Charles led the funeral procession,

as the king was too distraught to take part.

Henry's memorial service was bigger than Queen Elizabeth's

and his body lay in state for over a month.

The person who felt the loss of Prince Henry most deeply

was his father.

In the middle of an important diplomatic summit,

the king burst out crying.

"Henry is dead," he said. "Henry is dead."

The tragedy left James emotionally vulnerable...

..and ever more open to manipulation at court.

On a tour of his realm after Henry's death,

the 47-year-old king

spotted a dashing young man more than 20 years his junior.

He would become James' new favourite and the love of his life.

One young man in particular was here when the king came to stay.

His name was George Villiers.

He was there for a reason,

and the reason was that he was good-looking, charming,

beautiful legs and clearly a great dancer,

and that's exactly what might appeal to James.

One of the people putting George Villiers forward to be

the next boyfriend of the king was the Archbishop of Canterbury,

George Abbott, who really resented the way that the previous favourite,

Robert Carr, had skewed England's foreign policy away from what

the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted.

And so George Abbott, furious at that, pushed George Villiers forward

as an instrument of foreign policy.

James showered Villiers with titles and eventually made him

Duke of Buckingham.

And he took great care to ensure that his favourite was always

close at hand.

This is a very unusual piece of palace design.

It's blocked now, but this was a doorway that led

straight from the king's own bedchamber

into a private little suite.

Over there was the king's closet,

over there was the Duke of Buckingham's closet.

It was just for their own use.

It's their relationship set in stone.

James made Buckingham a gentleman of the bedchamber,

a position that gave him unique access to the royal body.

What's the importance of this institution called the Bedchamber?

The Bedchamber, it's not a room, of course.

It's a suite of rooms, it's an institution.

And what it is is the monarch's private life, in effect,

and the importance of that politically

is that you see the monarch at intimate times -

last thing at night, first thing in the morning.

And it doesn't in a sense matter what happens at midday

among the executive people of the realm, the Privy Councillors,

because, whatever they decide,

someone can whisper something in the king's ear just

before he goes to sleep or gets him in the morning as he's getting up.

Now, that's a really important aspect of early modern politics.

A series of passionate letters revealed the extraordinary hold

Buckingham had over the king.

James' wisdom and astuteness had always been his greatest

strengths as monarch, but now his judgment seemed to have gone astray.

This one on the top shows you the level of emotion

in this relationship.

This is from James to Buckingham, who has left to go to Spain,

so he's going to be away for a very long time,

and look how it starts -

"My only sweet and dear child,

"I am now so miserable a coward, as I do nothing but weep and mourn,

"for I protest to God. I rode this afternoon a great way

"in the park without speaking to anybody

"and the tears trickling down my cheeks."

I mean, this is not a political relationship.

And nobody knows what it means to have a homosexual relationship.

-No.

-Such a thing doesn't really yet exist.

No, there's no word homosexuality.

There's a word sodomy, which doesn't actually just apply to same-sex

relationships, it's any sort of sexual relationship

-which is disordered, which isn't in the system, so to speak.

-Yeah.

And, if so, that means that you can place your relationship

in all sorts of different places.

It can be father-son or it can be equal or it can be slave to lord.

And it can change. And it's clearly what Buckingham is so good at,

is changing it, and that, I think, is the genius of the man.

He clearly is not a fool.

He's not just a lover, he's also a child

and sometimes he's a father and he's also a best friend.

Exactly. Exactly.

In this one, he's recollecting what seems to have been their very

earliest sexual encounter.

Yes, he's pretty explicit, really.

Buckingham says here, "I shall never forget at Farnham,

"where the bed's head could not be found between

"the master and his dog."

He signs himself off as "Your Majesty's most humble slave

"and dog."

What are the risks of this kind of behaviour for James?

Well, it weakened him politically when he was weak.

Whenever the monarch has done something wrong or foreign policy

has gone wrong, then this is just a weapon at the disposal

of those who want to attack him. And so when James was...

pursuing a peaceful foreign policy...

Not going in support of the poor little beleaguered Protestant

states of Europe, for example?

Yeah, then you can use this as a weapon, saying,

"Look, it's not manly to pursue this policy of peace.

"A real man would go out there and bash the Catholics."

Six years into their relationship, James was making little effort

to be discreet about his affair with Buckingham.

In London in the 1620s, there lived a lawyer called Sir Simonds d'Ewes.

He was a member here at the Middle Temple.

This is his diary and it records all the gossip,

the talk of the town, and quite a lot of it was about the king himself

and the Duke of Buckingham.

When Buckingham got up to dance with his own wife,

the king was jealous and he shouted out,

"By God, George, I love you dearly."

Then they were at the chapel.

Buckingham was walking along with another man,

carelessly talking to him.

Again, the king was jealous.

As soon as Buckingham was free,

"he fell upon his neck without any more words".

Sir Simonds d'Ewes was in quite a privileged position.

He was a member of an inner court, his friends had been at court, but

even out on the streets people were reading these anonymous pamphlets.

This one was written by somebody who called himself Tom Tell Truth

and again it's full of biting gossip about the king.

It says that the king here is like a "Grand Signor in his seraglio."

That's like saying he's a top Turk with a harem.

And all the Lords at court are his eunuchs,

"acquainted with his secret sins."

Well, now the man on the street knows about the secret sins, too.

Despite his sexual indiscretions,

James would be judged as a king very much fit to rule.

When he died in 1625, the monarchy was a popular

and stable institution.

For the first time in 80 years,

the Crown would now pass seamlessly from father to son.

As a child, Charles had trouble walking,

and I believe that one of the objects

in the Museum Of London store can help shed some light

on the effect this physical problem had on his character.

What I want to show you is in here.

Have a look at them and see what you make of them.

When Charles was three and a half, he was given his own household

and his own governess, Lady Carey, and she seems to have paid

particular attention to this problem that he had with his legs.

We know that he had rickets and there are hints that

Lady Carey got him what you'd call orthopaedic boots, I suppose, today.

These child's boots are traditionally associated with

Charles I, and you can see that they've got really odd metal heels

and sort of little supports here, so the suggestion is that this

is what helped him to stand upright, and this was a real concern.

When he was made Duke of York, they were so worried

that he wouldn't be able to stand for the whole ceremony

that a courtier was positioned each side to catch him if he fell down.

Now, this is clearly a little boy who's suffering from

physical weakness, and I don't know if it's reading too much into this

to suggest that later on he would overcompensate.

Charles grew up in the shadow of his father's flamboyant young favourites

and his charismatic elder brother Henry.

It left him with a sense of inferiority

that was to haunt him even as king.

So we've got this king who's an introvert, he's sensitive,

he's a bit of a swot.

Is this to do with his childhood?

I think ultimately, yes, a lot of it goes back to his early upbringing.

Um... I mean,

he doesn't have a very satisfactory relationship

with his parents - they tend to sort of neglect him -

and, of course, his father has a series of very obvious

homosexual relationships with various royal favourites,

which I think are constantly being thrust in Charles' face.

He has an anxiety about his sense of sort of masculinity,

amongst other things, and his sense of sort of personal potency.

How did Charles feel about first being the spare,

-but then he becomes the heir?

-He doesn't seem to have had

a satisfactory relationship with his elder brother,

who seems to have bullied him.

He tends to be pushed into the background

and doesn't have a great deal of sort of self-confidence.

He has a stammer, which he himself is very conscious of, and he's very

sensitive to any...what he can regard as a slight or humiliation,

anything that affects his personal honour

and undermines his personal honour.

And I think that stays with him throughout his life, really.

In spite of his physical weaknesses and psychological insecurities,

Charles was utterly convinced that he was, quite literally,

God's representative on Earth.

Charles I absolutely believed that he was accountable only to God.

But, unlike his clever and subtle father,

he didn't have the skills to persuade other people of this.

He had to fall back on stubbornly insisting upon his divine right.

Right from the start of his reign, he made unpopular decisions,

and particularly dangerous amongst them

was his choice of his closest advisor.

It was his father's great love, the Duke of Buckingham.

I mean, I think it's very different from his father's relationship

with Buckingham.

I don't think there's any element of a sexual relationship there.

I think it's much more a matter of Charles looking on Buckingham

as the elder brother that he wasn't able to relate to, so he looks

to Buckingham for worldly wisdom and guidance and advice

and does become very dependant on him.

And it's clear that, in the early years

of his marriage with Henrietta Maria,

Buckingham very much comes between them

and the queen can't stand Buckingham, she doesn't trust him.

Charles does.

Buckingham undermined the king's personal relationships

and his political ones.

In 1625, he took charge of an expedition to capture

Cadiz from the Spanish.

The mission was a disaster

and Parliament demanded Buckingham be dismissed from office.

But this challenge to the king's absolute authority

infuriated Charles.

He backed his friend and dismissed Parliament instead.

Buckingham was the most hated man in England.

In 1628, he went down to Portsmouth to organise

an attack on the French, when he was assassinated.

He was stabbed to death in a pub by a disgruntled army officer.

Charles now, amazingly, decided to bury Buckingham

here at Westminster Abbey, amongst all the kings and queens.

The funeral had to be very low-key because of the danger of protest,

and this is another example of Charles ignoring popular opinion.

The murder of his closest friend was devastating for Charles,

yet it did offer benefits for another royal partnership

that had not begun well.

It's interesting that, after Buckingham's death,

Henrietta Maria goes out of her way to console Charles

and recognised that...you know, what a loss Buckingham had been for him.

And, from that point, they develop a very close relationship indeed.

She starts bearing children not very long after Buckingham's death

and the marriage is a great success.

Charles certainly feels that he's fulfilled the role of a monarch,

the first duty of a monarch,

in providing for the succession by producing all these children.

The queen took Buckingham's place as her husband's chief advisor,

but her influence did nothing to improve his prickly

relationship with Parliament.

She's been described as a sort of Lady Macbeth figure

in Charles' life in 1641 and 1642, constantly sort of pushing him on

to act more resolutely and strike down his enemies

in a fairly dramatic way, through a sort of coup against them.

After ruling for ten years without Parliament,

the king had run out of money.

He was forced to recall it.

With his wife spurring him on, though,

he was in no mood to compromise with a body that seemed

intent on challenging his royal prerogative.

On this very spot in the Palace of Westminster

used to stand the building where Parliament met in the 17th century.

And on the 4th of January 1642 an epic confrontation took place here.

Charles I himself arrived in the building down there

with a gang of soldiers and he was looking for five leading MPs.

He felt that they'd committed treason. He wanted to arrest them.

At this end of the room stood the Speaker of the House of Commons

and he would refuse to tell the king where the MPs had gone.

He was effectively saying, "You're not in charge here, Charles.

"My first loyalty is to the House of Commons."

The king was humiliated.

He had to leave without the MPs

and the mistake he had made was to personalise the situation.

He'd come himself.

Nobody could say, "This is the king's evil advisors,"

it was clearly Charles.

From this point, civil war was inevitable

and broke out months later.

After almost seven years of bitter fighting, the king's forces were

defeated and Charles was brought to trial, accused of high treason.

The king was adamant that, as a ruler appointed by God,

he was not accountable to any temporal power.

But the court refused to accept this.

They insisted that the king's authority was limited

and that he must answer to the laws of the land.

Charles was found guilty

and a week later he prepared himself for the scaffold.

What I'm going to show you now is a very, very unique object.

It's probably... would you help me get it out?

It's probably one of the most precious,

if not the most precious object in the Museum of London.

And it is about 400 years old.

On the very last morning of his life,

Charles I got dressed with special care.

We know that he put on two shirts

and this is believed to be one of them.

He was about to step out onto the scaffold in the cold January air

and he didn't want the crowd, the rabble, to see him shivering.

If you think back to the little boy with the wobbly legs,

he used his special boots to help him stand up straight,

to appear to be worthy of his high position.

As it was with the boy, so it was with the man.

Even at the very end of his life,

Charles I is anxious to appear in control, a true king, fit to rule.

As king, Henry VIII had been all-powerful and untouchable,

God's representative on Earth.

But just a century later the monarch had become all too mortal.

The enemies of King Charles I described him

as "that man of blood",

and they demonstrated their belief that he was only a man

by executing him.

And yet those responsible for bringing Charles down

weren't necessarily opposed to the institution of monarchy itself.

Their problem was that this particular monarch was not fit to rule,

and the only way of removing him from office was to kill him.

The monarchy would be restored just 11 years later,

but it had been powerfully demonstrated

that kings and queens were only human.

It was clear what could happen to a monarch considered unfit to rule.

The will of the people could never again be taken for granted.

There'd be no more gods, only men.

Next time, I'll discover how the Crown recovered

from the killing of a king.

And how our Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs coped with now being

answerable to their people and Parliament.

The mental and physical failures of the royal family became

more important than ever as their subjects exploited them,

to devastating effect.

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