A King Without A Crown The Stuarts

Between 1603 and 1714, the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland

were ruled by a royal family that, more than any other,

shaped modern Britain.

You've heard of them, even if you think you haven't.

You've heard of Charles I, the king that got his head cut off,

and you've heard of Charles II, the Merry Monarch.

And you've heard of the man that they both fought against,

Oliver Cromwell, and of course you've heard of Roundheads

and Cavaliers.

Over the last 350 years, we've repackaged the wars of the 1640s

and '50s as a jolly piece of British pageantry...

The Civil Wars!

Bring a picnic and a tartan blanket and pass a pleasant afternoon.

The truth is less attractive.

GUN FIRES

Because the wars that raged in England, Scotland

and Ireland in the 1640s and '50s

were like the wars in what used to be Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Driven by religious hatred, religious misunderstanding,

religious violence.

GUNS FIRING

"I will make them one nation," said James VI and I,

when he became King of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1603.

But under his descendants, the three kingdoms fell into an abyss.

Mass graves, massacre, murder,

atrocity, plunder, rape.

That was the reality of civil war.

It was a century of struggle marked by religious divisions,

revolution and conflicting visions of what Britain would be.

A struggle which has echoes today.

They are the first family of Great Britain.

They are the Stuarts.

This is the story of a story we told ourselves.

A story we told ourselves to help three different kingdoms

sleep at night, beneath a single flag.

For hundreds of years, the wars of the three kingdoms

of England, Scotland and Ireland

were known as the English Civil Wars.

By the nineteenth century,

when the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in carefully medieval style,

the story seemed set in stone.

Here was a mythic vision,

in which Crown and Parliament struggle.

Parliament asserts its rights and comes to dominate.

The monarch becomes a mere figurehead.

It's a story in which this is the cradle of democracy.

Here is the Mother of Parliaments.

People come from far and wide to see it.

And to hear that same story.

We're standing outside the Houses of Parliament, seat of the

UK government. If I can get you to just look across the road,

you'll see a bust of Charles I.

And it's very ironic that Charles Stuart, King Charles I,

is on that church,

facing in front of Westminster Hall, his nemesis, if you like,

Oliver Cromwell, the great Puritan.

Deeply religious, hated the monarchy,

hated what they stood for, wanted to get rid of the monarchy completely.

And of course Charles I,

believing firmly in the divine right of kings. Nobody should argue with

him, nobody should actually question him, what he said went, he was

the ruler. And at the end of the day, only one would reign supreme.

That's the story Westminster tells us.

In stone and steel and lead.

King against Parliament.

Monarchy versus democracy.

But, for the last 30 years, some historians like myself

have been trying to change the way we tell this story.

To us, Cromwell looks anything but democratic.

And then there's this tendency to call it the "English Civil War".

Civil wars, yes, but those wars took place in all three Stuart kingdoms.

They didn't even begin in England. They started in Scotland.

And that first Scottish war was as much about religion as it was about

politics, in an age when politics and religion were fatally entwined.

In 1625, Charles had inherited three very different

kingdoms from his father, James.

Ireland was Catholic, apart from the Protestants that James had

planted on Catholic lands around Derry.

England was Anglican, although many, known as Puritans,

felt that the Anglican Church wasn't Protestant enough.

Like those English Puritans, Scotland's Presbyterians

distrusted bells, smells, bishops and priests.

The simple word of God was what they wanted.

Three profoundly different populations.

One profoundly stubborn king...

who had dissolved England's Parliament

in 1629 for its disobedience and ruled without it ever since...

..who cheerfully contemplated using

troops from one of his kingdoms to suppress rebellion in another.

Who had been trying, too, since the middle of the 1630s,

to turn Scotland's Presbyterians into Anglicans.

Why?

It was the fact that Charles was the head of the Anglican Church.

Its supreme governor, like every English monarch

since Henry VIII, like the Queen is today.

It was the fact that the Anglican Church had to do

what the monarch told it.

And Charles liked that very much indeed.

Have mercy upon the holy church and so rule the heart of thy

chosen servant Elizabeth, our Queen and governor. That she,

knowing whose minister she is,

may above all things seek thy honour and glory.

And that we and all her subjects duly considering whose

authority she hath...

..may faithfully serve, honour and humbly obey her.

If Scotland became Anglican, Charles would be head of both church

and state in two of his three kingdoms.

One step closer to a dream he'd shared with his dead father.

The dream that his three kingdoms would be one.

"A union of hearts and minds."

But it was just a dream.

For Presbyterians, a king was only a political figure.

Spiritual power belonged to God.

To a Presbyterian, an Anglican cathedral like Worcester

was an empty, meaningless shrine to merely human power.

In their National Covenant, Scotland's Presbyterians

framed their answer.

It was a contract with God.

The majority of Scots signed it in person.

There was no room for a middleman, king or not,

and this was the first spark,

the first open conflict in this supposedly English story.

The Scots rioted, rebelled and declared war on Charles.

They occupied the north-east of England

and in 1640 sent Charles the bill.

£850 a day, to cover their costs.

Only his English Parliament could vote the taxes needed

to pay that sort of money.

Charles recalled it.

It was as disobedient as ever.

Charles found Parliament full of men whose political

and religious preferences were alarmingly close to

those of Scotland's Presbyterians.

Puritan pedants with picky principles.

Ponderous individuals like John Pym,

with his record-breakingly long speeches, insisting that Parliament

refuse all money to the King until he stopped abusing his power.

And John Hampden, who said much less than Pym

and probably for that reason alone said it better.

Those Parliamentary Puritans sat for day after day,

knocking corners off the royal prerogative. Your Majesty cannot

this, Your Majesty must not that...

It was Charles's personal hell.

But it soon became clear that this was only hell's first circle.

Because Ireland's Catholics,

impressed by Scotland's successful rebellion,

had seen at last that neither king nor Parliament

would remove the Protestants planted by King James.

In November 1641, in the Irish town of Newry,

a proclamation was read before the townsfolk.

A proclamation purporting to be from Charles himself,

ordering his faithful Catholic subjects to seize

"All the forts, castles and places of strength and defence

"in Ireland and also to arrest and seize the goods, estates and persons

"of all the English Protestants within the said kingdom."

It was just enough to make this document plausible.

It purported to come from Scotland,

which was where Charles was negotiating with the Scots.

It also bore his Scottish great seal.

It came from a king who'd long used the idea,

or at least kept the idea in his mind, of using Irish Catholic

troops to suppress his English and Scottish political enemies.

And Charles himself didn't deny it.

Could it? Could this document be genuine?

With hindsight, no, it couldn't. It's a poor fit for a king

we know was more interested in promoting the Anglican Church.

But in Ireland, in 1641, it was more than credible enough to work.

Thinking they were doing the King's bidding,

Catholics rose in rebellion and Protestant blood began to spill.

The most reliable witness to this particular incident is

William Clark. Further, he said that he was,

by the said rebels, imprisoned for the space of nine days,

with at least 100 men, women and children.

During which time, many of them were sorry tortured,

strangling and half hanging.

And many others, many other cruelties.

After which time of imprisonment, he, with the hundred men,

women and children, or thereabouts, were, by the said rebels

and their compatriots, driven like hogs about six miles to

a river called The Ban and with their pikes, and swords,

and other weapons, thrust them down headlong into the said river,

and immediately there perished.

SCREAMING

BOMBS FIRE

And what sort of justifications do these deponents say

the rebels were invoking?

They contended from the outset that their actions were

approved of in advance by the King. Now, such statements were

seized upon by the Parliamentarians in England, subsequently,

to say there is quite a clear evidence that the King was

deeply involved in the actions which were responsible for the slaughter

of all of these Protestants in Ireland.

And therefore, this is one

of the factors which further erodes the credibility of Charles I

as a monarch for a Protestant people, ruling over three kingdoms.

It's estimated 4,000 Protestants at most were killed.

But in Westminster, it was rumoured that the death toll was 200,000.

Pamphlets were produced. The illustrations were graphic,

but they were illustrations that printers already had to hand,

showing atrocities from previous conflicts on Continental Europe.

Everything was inaccurate and inflated.

Weeks after the rebellion had begun, Charles denied any

hand in the Newry proclamation, and decried the violence perpetrated.

But it was far too late.

The Irish Rebellion created a fatal vortex of fear,

mistrust and paranoia.

At Westminster, John Pym was in no doubt who

he blamed for this latest popish plot - the King.

One of those Puritans who now saw Charles as a man

with Protestant blood on his hands was new to Parliament.

A gentleman farmer from near Cambridge. A backbencher.

Not quite a nobody - Oliver Cromwell.

The rumours spread further -

settled on the King's Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. Some MPs

believed she had undue influence, wanted to arrest her.

Charles responded with an equally explosive series

of counter accusations, insisting that Pym, Hampden

and their associates were guilty of high treason, which, if proven,

carried a certain sentence of death.

The King's next move was both a fatal mistake

and a fundamental element in the legend.

Here was the error that made the English Civil War inevitable.

It's preserved in the rebuilt Houses of Parliament in a painting.

Charles plays the pantomime villain.

Entering Parliament with armed guards to arrest five members,

Pym and Hampden among them. But the men had already fled.

The Speaker denies all knowledge of their whereabouts.

It's become part of the ritual of British democracy.

We re-enact it annually - not as it happened,

but as it should have happened.

At the State Opening of Parliament,

Black Rod approaches the doors of the Commons as an emissary

of the King and the door is rudely slammed in his face.

The King's trespass prevented -

Parliament's independence re-asserted.

What do you think foreign visitors - I mean, presumably you

obviously show around a lot of foreign visitors or

schoolchildren - I wonder what they make of what looks like quite

a rude gesture, erm, obviously being the highlight of your

ceremonial role. How do you explain that when it seems...?

Oh, I think it's easy to explain. It's, it's...

It's like the whole business

of the State Opening of Parliament is theatre,

and the State Opening of Parliament is one of the great ceremonies

of our country and it plays a role in our national life as a reminder

of the historical legacy which we have, and to the pageantry.

And do you feel that you now subsume your personality within Black Rod?

Well, I think I'm just a speck in the history of, erm...

I'm the 59th or the 60th Black Rod,

we're not quite sure. Everybody here calls me Black Rod -

I mean, I'm sure that there are plenty of peers who have

no idea what my name is... Hardly ever is my name used itself.

Even my wife sometimes calls me Black Rod when she wants me to listen.

The ritual is tidy - once a year, it gently restates the myth

that this was an English affair - a fatal breakdown

in the relations between an English king and an English Parliament.

And in that painted Parliamentary corridor,

we find the next step too.

Here was Charles,

raising his standard near Nottingham Castle in August 1642.

Here was the beginning of the English Civil War.

But the wars were already three years old.

There had been bloodshed and battles in Scotland and Ireland.

Standard histories have always described

what happened on Sunday the 23rd of October, 1642,

as the first major battle of the English Civil War.

Yet England was the last, not the first, of the three Stuart kingdoms

in which the war of words became war, pure and simple.

Edgehill, where the English war finally began,

is an intensely English place.

There was never fighting here.

That's what the architecture tells us.

No bloodshed.

Just beer. And vicars.

But these streets would have seen troops,

cavalry...

conflict...

in the fields all around for ten square kilometres.

Dogged fighting.

Inexperienced troops.

Roughly 1,000 deaths, roughly 3,000 casualties.

Both sides claimed victory, but neither side had won.

The war would not be short.

At its peak, there were 210,000 men bearing arms in all three kingdoms.

One in five adult males would fight,

one in 20 would die.

GUNSHOT

It was not simply a matter of King versus Parliament.

It was not one war, there was war

within as well as between the kingdoms.

And in all three kingdoms, a fatal mix of politics and religion.

Catholics, Puritans, Anglicans.

All were lost in a violent world of mutual misunderstanding.

BANG

And so, these civil wars were anything BUT civilised.

Civil wars never are, no matter when or where.

This seems particularly clear to Fergal Keane,

who has reported from civil wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Fergal, one of the things I've heard you talk about is

- when you've talked about different war zones -

sometimes an awful sense of familiarity

when you see one civil war in a different context.

The thing that's struck me so often, whether I was covering

wars in the Balkans or in Rwanda, was this notion, this notion that

if you didn't kill your neighbour first, he was going to kill you.

Two hugely important things happen in this period,

and they echo to the present day,

you can see it again and again in modern history,

and that is, first of all, people justify what they do by saying,

"It is sanctioned by God."

And they also justify it by referring

to the atrocities that have been committed against them,

and they do this in the 1640s

by resorting to the mass media of the time.

I think this period is the most crucial.

It is the crucible in which people's ideas of each other

in these islands are formed - all of the mistrust, all of the fear,

the bloodshed. It really begins with a vengeance in this period.

And there's something particularly grotesque or atrocious,

literally atrocious, about the kinds of incidents of violence

in civil war that you've noticed?

There's a terrible intimacy about the killing,

when people set about their neighbours,

people that they have grown up alongside, people who until

that moment may have trusted them,

and suddenly find that they open the door and the neighbour

comes through to kill, to rape your daughters.

And this echoes right through to 1991 in the former Yugoslavia,

to 1994 in Rwanda.

It is this notion that Seamus Heaney

so wonderfully described - "These neighbourly murders".

There's a dehumanisation process somehow, that you almost forget,

or you can't see people as you knew them before,

that they have to assume a different kind of quality, is that...?

One of the things that happens when a climate of violence is present,

is that all kinds of violence become possible,

the worst elements in society very frequently come to the fore.

And as they kill, and as they rape and as they pillage, others,

who would never have thought under normal circumstances to become

involved, are drawn into it.

By the autumn of 1648, Ireland was a bloody wasteland,

with Protestants and Catholics at each other's throats.

Scotland was given over wholly to religious extremes.

And the King was defeated -

imprisoned far from London, here, at our next tourist destination -

Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

In London, Parliament was split between those who

believed that the King could be persuaded to sign a treaty

that met all of Parliament's needs and those who did not.

Hardline Puritans made of sterner stuff,

who thought Charles couldn't be trusted to take part in any honest

and binding negotiations.

Who saw him as a knot too complicated to untie.

A problem best solved by something sharp and something final.

By the autumn of 1648,

when negotiations with the captured king began,

war had become a thoroughly professional business.

Parliament had secured its victory through the ruthless

efficiency of the New Model Army.

Its soldiers were skilled in theological debate,

but their most pointed arguments were pike and musket.

One of its leaders was Oliver Cromwell -

no longer an obscure backbencher -

who believed his victories were signs that God was on his side.

An MP as well as a military leader -

an example of something new, not altogether attractive,

in British politics.

A Parliamentary faction with military teeth.

And it was this hardline minority that thought

these negotiations were worthless, pointless, doomed.

Charles, they insisted, was still the same Charles -

unchanged after six years of defeat and disappointment.

As committed as he'd ever been to defending his divine right to rule,

his vision of the Anglican Church,

and to continuing the war until he had secured victory.

Charles was tired, the years of war had aged him.

But fatigue aside, Cromwell and his generals were quite correct -

Charles hadn't changed at all.

Whilst imprisoned here at Carisbrooke Castle,

before the negotiations had begun, Charles had tried

and failed to escape.

A group of royalists had gathered outside with horses,

and Charles was meant to climb through the window

and join them, but he'd got stuck.

There were several other escape attempts, each more farcical

and desperate than the last, and all failures.

And all the while, at the negotiations, Charles was

making meaningless concessions to Parliament's representatives.

Hoping for rescue, playing for time, but time had now run out.

On the 6th of December 1648,

MPs were met by soldiers of the New Model Army

with a list of 180 members who were to be excluded

for supporting the King.

Parliament's 470 members was reduced to around 300.

The trial of the King began on the 20th of January 1649,

in Westminster Hall.

The King's accusers compared him to classical tyrants -

Caligula, the Emperor Nero.

They called him "a man of blood".

Charles was bemused.

His only defence, repeated time and time again,

was that his accusers had no right to try him at all.

Constitutionally, Charles was absolutely right,

but legal theory couldn't trump political reality.

The truth was this - his father had left Charles three kingdoms

that were already very different to each other.

And it was Charles's actions as king that had destabilised those

different kingdoms so much that civil war had erupted

and that was why he was here, now.

On the 27th of January, they sentenced him to death.

MOURNFUL SINGING

The heart of the legend -

what we did to the King at the Banqueting House.

Now, it was the 30th of January and it was a very cold day,

so Charles I wore two shirts that day

so that he wouldn't shiver, and the people think

he was afraid to die.

He came out of a first-floor window

on to a specially erected scaffold

that was made here.

Now, Whitehall was full of thousands of people

who'd turned out to watch the execution.

Charles insisted that the headsman wait for his signal,

so, when the headsman struck, it was at the King's command.

His last command.

And with one blow of the axe, his head was chopped off.

And the crowd surged forward,

and many of them dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood that

was dripping from the platform, because they wanted a memento.

And if you look across the road at Horse Guards

just across there on the clock,

you will see, at two o'clock, there is a black spot, and that

black spot is there to represent the time of the execution.

The time that we executed our monarch.

This was the one and only time we executed a king for treason.

But who do we mean by "we"? What had REALLY happened here?

I'm in the Parliamentary archives at Westminster, looking at the

death warrant for King Charles I, and it's an extraordinary,

very evocative document. You see prominent signatures

like that of Cromwell, but what really strikes you is the few number

of signatures authorising this extraordinary act.

Just two months earlier, the House of Commons had been made

up of about 300 MPs, but now there were only about 80

that dared to attend its proceedings.

Only 59 signed the death warrant.

So there were only 59 men who were willing, or could be persuaded,

or perhaps even forced to sign this warrant to kill their king.

And whose king was it?

These 59 men represented what was left of the English Parliament.

But the king whose head they had cut off had worn three crowns,

only one of which was English.

News of the King's execution took several days to reach his son,

Charles, in Holland.

Charles was only 18, but already famous for his composure.

When his courtiers broke the news, they did so simply

by addressing him as "Your Majesty".

Charles's composure collapsed.

He burst into tears.

But was he "Your Majesty"? Was he a king?

Not in England.

On the day of the regicide, Parliament had passed a law

preventing anyone from succeeding to the throne.

The King was replaced by a committee,

of which Oliver Cromwell was a leading member.

But just days after Charles's death,

the Scottish Parliament overrode the English,

declaring his son "King of Britain, France

"and Ireland by the providence of God."

And Ireland's Catholics also proclaimed their loyalty

to Charles II and the House of Stuart...

..which Oliver Cromwell could not permit.

Cromwell's Irish campaign of 1649 to '50

was fuelled by delusion -

the belief that the rebellion of 1641 had taken

hundreds of thousands of Protestant lives.

The massacres of Drogheda and Wexford became legend.

I'm used to thinking of Cromwell as a figure from our past,

but in Belfast, where taxi tours of murals from both sides

of the Troubles have recently become possible,

he feels more present tense.

He's still an icon for the Protestant, Loyalist community.

Well, here we are, we're in East Belfast and we have a number of

murals here reflecting the British Protestant culture here in the North.

And over here on the right-hand side, we have a mural in memory

of Oliver Cromwell.

Seen as a hero, as a defender of the Protestant faith

and the Protestant way of life.

And today, still very relevant to that mindset

and that political, ideological thought.

Elsewhere in Belfast, around the Shankill Road, murals of Cromwell

have been removed in the years since the Good Friday Agreement.

We're just going to take a left into this street here,

and, as you can see, the kerbs are painted red, white and blue,

and this is to do with their Britishness.

There's a lot of flags as well as murals, yeah.

This is to do with their identity, their culture,

and their political expression.

Just here on the right-hand side...

..we have a mural which, which actually USED to be here,

of Oliver Cromwell, but it was taken away

as part of the regeneration of minds and attitudes towards

symbolism here - what was seen as a negative symbol,

from the Catholic perspective,

and they've replaced it with this here image.

-So it says, "Remember, respect, resolution."

-Yeah.

So, you've got a picture there, Brendan...

I have a picture here, yeah, and this is actually

a picture of the original mural.

And, as you can see, it's a painting of Cromwell's

armies involved in conflict and killing, stuff like that.

There's actually a script in the corner here,

and it's actually highlighting

that "Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power.

"Therefore I am led to believe there will be no peace

"in Ireland until the Catholic Church is basically eradicated," you see?

So, it's more of a prophecy,

as well as just a particular historical event?

Exactly. It's inflaming the situation, you see?

The Catholics will see Oliver as a man who,

who butchered County Wexford and Drogheda,

and marched his soldiers through the towns and villages of Ireland

during the conquest to suppress the Irish, you see?

Where to the Protestant people, he was seen as a man who militarily

paved the way for the plantation of the Protestants in Ireland, you see?

So one man's meat is another man's poison, so to speak.

By May of 1650, there was no significant Irish resistance left.

But the Scots still clung to their Stuart king.

Charles arrived in Scotland in June -

he'd come to collect a Scottish crown, and an army.

The Scots forced him

to sign their National Covenant before he'd even landed.

Then they brought him here, to Falkland Palace in Fife,

where they lectured him at length on his duties as a covenanted king.

But it was all for nothing. Cromwell came north

and thrashed a much larger Scottish army at the Battle of Dunbar.

And then Charles tried what he'd really rested his hopes on

all along - he marched an army of 12,000 soldiers south into England,

hoping that royalists would rise in their thousands to support him.

But they didn't.

On the 3rd of September 1651, Charles's 12,000 troops

faced 28,000 Parliamentarians at the Battle of Worcester.

Charles watched the first part of the battle from the tower

of Worcester Cathedral...

..then joined his men to fight shoulder-to-shoulder,

as the battle ran through Worcester's streets.

'As Yugoslavia's army moves to crush Slovenia's democratic

'bid for independence, should the rest of Europe stand aside?'

The fighting was hand-to-hand, and house-to-house,

but Charles's defeat was utter.

First, he was forced back to his lodging house,

and then he escaped, with some of his cavalry, and fled north.

Charles took refuge in a forest - he hid in a large oak tree.

He heard the soldiers of Cromwell's army

thrashing about in the undergrowth, looking for him.

One casual glance upwards would have revealed his presence...

..but no-one looked up.

Charles fled the country.

He would live in exile for the next nine years -

a hand-to-mouth existence,

pursued from place to place by Cromwell's foreign policy.

September of 1654 found him here, in Germany.

In the cathedral city of Aachen, with his sister Mary.

It was a spa town.

They took the waters.

And in the cathedral, they were shown the relics of Charlemagne -

Charles the Great,

dead more than 800 years by the time of Charles's visit.

A figure of seismic historical importance,

Charlemagne's dominions had stretched through France,

parts of modern Germany and northern Italy.

You have to wonder what went through Charles's mind as he inspected

the remains of his famous namesake.

Would he ever regain his rightful thrones? And if he DID regain

his rightful thrones, would he be remembered with this much reverence?

Mary politely kissed the skeleton's skull.

Charles kissed the skeleton's sword, and then -

he couldn't resist it - he measured it.

He was an unemployed king.

There was only one job he was fit for - and Oliver Cromwell had it.

In his letters, you find money worries,

occasional flurries of activity.

In October, Charles wrote several letters on the same subject.

His mother had neglected to tell him

that his younger brother Henry was about to convert to Catholicism.

So, Charles wrote to his mother asking, what was she thinking of?

He also wrote to his younger brother James in Paris,

telling him to put a stop to it.

And he also wrote to young Henry himself.

"Remember the last words of your dead father, which were to be

"constant to your religion, and never to be shaken in it."

He had to behave as though there was a chance of restoration -

and a king with a Catholic brother would not be restored.

But the chances of restoration seemed slimmer than ever.

In London, Cromwell now held the title of Lord Protector.

He seemed more kinglike day by day.

His family too seemed more and more royal.

In 1654, when his mother Elizabeth died,

he had her buried in Westminster Abbey,

whose bells you can hear now in the background.

His mother, when she died in 1654, was given a state funeral.

Just like a queen!

Just like our own Queen Mother when she had her

funeral in Westminster Abbey - the same kind of ceremony,

the same kind of pomp.

And this disgusted people, because they started

to think, you know, hang on, this isn't what we fought for,

this isn't what we wanted.

At one point when he was, uh...

I was trying to think of the right word, it's not crowned,

but I so want to say crowned!

When he became Lord Protector, he wore a robe, he carried a sceptre,

you know, everything you think of that a monarch would have.

And so that old story of King versus Parliament,

of the roots of democracy, runs aground.

No democrat, Cromwell dissolved Parliament as often as he called it,

like his predecessor.

He became remarkably like a Stuart - not so much a revolution,

more a head transplant.

King in all but name, as Lord Protector, Cromwell made

the great Stuart dream of union a reality,

creating the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland,

a union of bloody conquest and occupation.

And here was its flag - England's St George's Cross,

quartered with Scotland's cross of Saint Andrew, and the Irish Harp.

And at the centre, a white lion on a black shield -

the arms of Oliver Cromwell.

In 1657, Parliament granted Cromwell the right to

nominate his son as successor,

and when he died in September 1658,

his eldest son Richard did indeed inherit.

"Tumbledown Dick", they called him.

"Queen Richard". He was anything but a chip off the old block.

In May of the following year, Parliament forced his resignation.

And then there was nothing. No Lord Protector,

just a headless House of Commons.

And a king, in another country.

Charles was in the Netherlands, itching for his throne.

But the matter was delicate.

Help came from the least likely direction -

a man called General Monck,

who had been the leader of Parliament's armies in Scotland.

Now, he had managed to exploit

the vacuum following Tumbledown Dick's departure,

securing something close to Cromwell's control over Parliament.

But he had no intention of making that position permanent.

The hole in the constitution was king-shaped,

and for Monck, only a king could fill it.

On 4 April 1660, Charles issued a document that would become known

as the Declaration of Breda.

A careful document, written to Monck's prescription.

It invited Parliament to consider Charles's gracious offer to return.

And Parliament, after a decade of increasingly kingly

Lord Protectors, said yes.

And so, on 29 May 1660,

Charles sat here in the Banqueting House

at a grand celebration for the return of the King.

Beneath the hymn to divine-right monarchy

that Peter Paul Rubens had painted for Charles I.

Beneath these visions of his grandfather, James,

as a kind of demigod.

The date had been carefully chosen.

It was Charles's 30th birthday,

to be known hereafter as Oak Apple Day,

in memory of that day in an oak tree.

It was political theatre, and Charles understood it perfectly.

He played the king. He was gracious. Urbane. Witty.

The wit was a little edgy, but it had to be.

Dry as dust, he observed, "If I'd known how well

"I'd be received, I'd not have stayed so long away."

It was a time for laughter and forgetting.

The English Parliament passed an act pardoning everything

done in the name of either Crown or Parliament between 1637 and 1660.

This was the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.

It freed everyone of legal responsibility.

It imposed amnesia.

Scotland's Parliament took similar steps.

But Ireland was more difficult.

In Scotland and England, as many as a quarter of a million people

had lost their lives to the civil wars.

To famine and disease, as well as cannon, pike and musket.

In Ireland, the number of deaths has been furiously debated

for over 300 years, but there's no doubt that Ireland saw

the worst atrocities,

that it was in Ireland where most lives were lost,

that the majority of those lost lives were Catholic lives.

Restoration left Ireland with open wounds,

unresolved battles between Catholic and Protestant.

In Ireland, there was simply too much history to deny.

There still is. Those walls and terrace ends are daubed in it.

Charles II's revenge for his father's death

was surgically precise.

Ten men involved in the regicide were executed.

And on 30 January 1661, four men died a second death.

Cromwell and three others were exhumed, sentenced,

and here, where the famous Tyburn Tree once stood,

the tree of execution,

they were hung by their necks and decapitated.

Cromwell's head was stuck on a spike above Westminster Hall,

and that was the King's revenge complete.

The head was blown down in a storm 25 years later,

exhibited in freak shows in the 18th and 19th centuries,

gawped at, shown to school children.

In 1957, it was donated to the Cambridge College

where he'd studied, Sidney Sussex.

It was then taken by the Master,

three senior fellows at the time and the people who donated the head,

and it was buried somewhere close to here, in the college chapel.

So, when you say close to here, it suggests you don't quite know where.

At the moment I don't, I'm the acting Master.

I'll shortly become the Master proper,

and at that point I'll be given the secret

as to where the head is buried,

and I'll become one of the three people with that knowledge.

So why the secrecy?

Well, even after all these years it's obvious that Cromwell still

inspires many passions, both for and against,

and the worry is that maybe some people will come up

and try and dig him up, and that's something we want to avoid.

Today, Cromwell is scar tissue.

Celebrated, secretly buried.

It's in the figure of Cromwell, most of all,

that the ragged edges of this British story grind together.

So, here we are at the end of our tour,

standing outside Westminster Abbey,

and this is where, on 23 April 1661,

King Charles II came for his coronation, St George's Day 1661.

Coronations do take a while to organise,

but this one had some particular problems,

because we had no Crown Jewels.

The old set had been destroyed on Cromwell's orders,

and you can't have a coronation without having a crown

to put on the King's head, so a new set of Crown Jewels had to be made,

and in 1661 they were made,

at a cost of 21,978 pounds

11 shillings and nine pence,

which is roughly the equivalent today

to about 2.5 to 3 million pounds.

Which is pretty good value for money if you think that even today

we still use those Crown Jewels,

and they were last used 60 years ago to crown Elizabeth II,

in her coronation in this abbey in 1953.

So we've come to the end of our tour.

Thank you very much, enjoy your day!

As Charles II took his place on the throne,

the seams of history seemed to close.

It was as though his father had died the day before.

The choir sang, the people cheered

and Charles made himself comfortable.

Fragments of the past began quietly to reappear.

Statues lost for over a decade, the holy ghost of the decapitated king.

In 1660, Charles used his powers as head of the Church

to declare his father a martyr and a saint.

The only saint ever created for the Anglican Church,

whose cult came complete with a book,

the Eikon Basilike - the Image of the King,

lavishly illustrated.

You're the curate of the Society of King Charles the Martyr...

-Chaplain.

-Sorry, chaplain. You're the chaplain...

-It's become I'm so young!

-Yes, exactly! Erm...

The chaplain of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.

Can you tell us a little bit about that society?

Yes, the society was founded in 1894, really to revive interest

and encourage interest in the life of the Church of England's only saint,

and we have branches in America and Australia and throughout Britain,

erm, and our main event is the 30th of January,

the day of the King's martyrdom,

and we have a High Mass at the place of the martyrdom,

Whitehall, at which the relics of the King are placed on the altar.

We have a fringe from a glove he was wearing,

we have a part of his coffin,

part of the pall, the cloth that covered his coffin.

We have a square of the shirt that he wore,

and, er, our primary relic is a piece of his beard,

and it's a splendid and very moving and poignant occasion.

The father had become a holy spirit.

The son was anything but.

He made his body into a sort of public spectacle.

He played tennis - real tennis.

The older version with the enclosed court,

in which the ball could be bounced off the upper walls.

It was a performance as much as a pleasure.

He sweated for his subjects,

who were allowed to come and watch his daily games,

if they were up early enough.

Charles usually liked to play at five in the morning.

This king was fit, that was the point.

Fit to rule, fit for every royal duty -

but not, like his father, fatally lacking in irony.

Charles was a heart-throb, who sprawled across his early

official portraits and broadcast a different sort of royalty,

a crown not worn at all, or worn lightly, confidently,

even cynically, as just one of several costumes he might have worn.

At St James's Palace,

Charles established a court of sexual opportunity.

Acquired the nickname Old Rowley,

after one of his best breeding stallions.

He kept multiple mistresses, and held meetings with diplomats

and ministers in his lovers' bedrooms.

Which were conveniently placed.

Nell Gwyn's were 30 seconds' brisk walk in that direction.

Nell was only the most famous of Charles's myriad mistresses.

He had 14 acknowledged bastards.

It was the stuff of pamphlets, plays, caricatures.

This was royalty as entertainment, as gossip, as a distraction.

But there was method to this madness,

and a message conveyed by this merry monarch.

This was a king whose royal body was apparently apolitical,

a king interested less in authority than in games of all and every sort.

So why resist a king

who didn't seem to be interested in oppressing anyone?

Whilst off-duty, Charles fathered children at a furious rate.

But on official business in the royal bed,

with his Catholic wife Catherine of Braganza,

King Charles II proved unable to father a legitimate heir at all.

That Catholic wife of his worried people,

and his publicly smutty court.

In 1665, plague spread through London's streets.

People feared the following year, 1666, would bring apocalypse.

Had the King's bad conduct called down divine retribution?

When fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane,

and when it spread, and threatened to consume the entire capital,

it seemed the answer was yes.

But King Charles II turned this apparently providential punishment

into a public-relations coup. With his brother James,

he personally organised bucket brigades, waded in drains

and promised generous rewards to all who helped to fight the fire.

He put his own royal body on the line,

risked his own life alongside his subjects,

and when the fires were out, why, he was the fire-fighting king,

as he and his brother cemented their reputations

for tremendous personal courage.

And all around them, the lines of a new London

rose from the ashes - stately, harmonious,

the very emblem of a kingdom that had made peace with,

or forgotten, its past.

The final proof, it seemed, that Charles was not like his father.

He put out fires instead of starting them.

But behind the fine stuccos and veneers,

the cracks were all still there.

Thanks to Charles I, these three kingdoms

were more deeply divided by religion than ever,

and Charles II would do nothing to heal those wounds.

His only guiding principle was to keep the throne.

And what about his fire-fighting partner?

What about James, Duke of York?

In 1666, James was next in line to the throne.

He always would be - Charles never did produce a legitimate heir.

James was destined to inherit the three crowns,

but three years after helping to put out the Great Fire of London

he started another, and set it smouldering,

by secretly converting to the Catholic faith.

The final dramatic act of the Stuart century saw the royal family

fatally divided by religion.

Brother against brother, and two daughters at war with their father.

These struggles, and the lack of a Protestant heir,

would end Stuart rule,

and almost by accident cause the creation of Great Britain.