A Family at War The Stuarts

The birth of a royal heir is always a historic moment.

One day William and Kate's son will be king.

A couple of miles across London and 300 years earlier

the birth of another royal baby would change history.

He was a Stuart.

Prince James was son to King James II of England

and VII of Scotland.

Thanks a lot, thank you.

James and his queen faced just as much speculation and interest as

today's royal family.

But in June 1688 there wasn't much rejoicing.

King James was a Catholic, and now he had a Catholic heir.

Rumours spread among his Protestant subjects that the pregnancy

had been a fake, and this baby had been smuggled into the royal

bed-chamber in a warming pan.

Six months later his father had lost the crown,

and fled for his life to France.

# And down will come baby

# Cradle and all. #

The final, dramatic act of the Stuart century saw

the royal family fatally divided by religion - brother head-to-head

against brother, and two daughters facing their father in open war.

By the early 18th century these bitter conflicts

and the absence of a Protestant heir

would lead to the end of Stuart rule and, extraordinarily,

the almost incidental creation of Great Britain.

This was a century of struggle marked by religious divisions,

bloody revolution and conflicting visions of what Britain would be.

A struggle that has echoes today.

This is Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory Greenwich,

built for Charles II by Christopher Wren.

It's a handsome building and might seem like a gorgeous jeu d'esprit

for an intellectually curious king.

An octagonal observatory to study the stars

but it couldn't be more practical.

Mastery of the heavens led to mastery of navigation.

And mastery of navigation led to mastery of the seas.

King Charles' merchant ships brought him wealth

and his navy kept his three kingdoms safe - at least that was the theory.

For the last two decades, England had been fighting the Dutch

over trade routes, spheres of influence and money.

In 1667, in an audacious and daring move, a Dutch war fleet

brought the fight onto Charles II's doorstep.

It sailed into the mouth of the Thames,

down the Medway to the Royal Dockyards at Chatham.

The English navy engaged the Dutch in battle, but the Dutch

broke through the massive iron chain stretched across the river

here to protect the English fleet.

Several warships were destroyed,

and as a final humiliation, the Dutch captured the flagship

The Royal Charles and towed it home to the Netherlands as booty.

Many wealthy Londoners fled the city, believing that Charles

was about to lose his throne to a Dutch invasion.

It was a devastating defeat.

If the King's navy couldn't even secure its own flagship, what

hope was there for the security of Charles' three kingdoms?

And it was also a personal blow for Charles,

whose stinginess in paying for the navy was contrasted

with his lush extravagance in more decadent areas of court life.

Only seven years after his Restoration, serious questions

were now being asked about Charles' competence as king.

Charles had lived through exile and his own father's execution.

He knew from bitter personal experience how bad things

could get if the King went head-to-head

with a hostile Parliament.

He understood that if anything was going to topple him

it would be religion.

He walked a tightrope between the anti-Catholicism

of his Parliament and his own more tolerant attitude.

The King needed an ally against the Dutch.

For Charles, there was only one natural choice - France.

France was the European superpower and its mighty king,

Louis XIV, was Charles' cousin.

So Charles began a diplomatic dance with France.

But he was playing with fire.

The King was head of the Church of England.

Many of his subjects would be horrified by the idea

of an alliance with Catholic France.

Charles knew that a public alliance between England

and France was unthinkable

but some sort of private deal, that was a different matter.

To help with the negotiations, Charles turned to

one of his most trusted ministers, Lord Clifford.

There's a portrait of Thomas, First Lord Clifford

and I'm number 14.

And if you look around this side you see his boss, his king, Charles II.

And this is a fascinating box for the First Lord Clifford to

carry really secret documents in.

When he was travelling around in his coach, whether it be in London

or whether coming back to his home in Devon, he would be able to screw

this into the base of the coach, so there's no question of anybody

being able to just quickly slide it out, "thank you very much indeed".

Why did this need to be so secure, this box?

Well, that is for the Secret Treaty of Dover.

The 1670 Treaty of Dover was political dynamite.

By the treaty, Louis XIV agreed to pay Charles a large sum of money

in return for England joining France in another war against the Dutch.

And Louis promised another £200,000 if Charles publicly converted

to Catholicism.

What would have been the reaction in 1670

if people had found out about this treaty?

The reaction of Parliament to that, as well as the nation,

it would have been regarded as treachery to the greatest degree,

and I think that was something, of course,

that Charles couldn't afford.

Across the three kingdoms there was huge paranoia

about the Catholic threat.

The closest contemporary parallel might be Western anxiety

about Islamic extremism.

This fear ran deep and strong through the century.

And for good reason.

82 years earlier a Catholic power had tried

to invade England with the Spanish Armada.

65 years before, Catholic terrorists had tried to blow up

Parliament with the Gunpowder Plot.

Four years before, most Londoners wrongly believed Catholic

arsonists had been responsible for the Great Fire of London.

Charles had little time for this intolerance.

After all, his own mother,

his wife and his brother, James, were Catholic,

but he knew his own conversion was politically impossible.

What Louis really wanted from Charles, what

he was really paying for, wasn't Charles' conversion to

Catholicism, it was Charles' military support.

So without consulting Parliament Charles did what he'd agreed

to do in the Secret Treaty of Dover.

He declared war on the Dutch in alliance with Louis XIV.

England was now fighting a European war on the side of Catholic France.

By now, Charles had been married to the Catholic Catherine

of Braganza for ten years without having had any children.

Poor Catherine.

The personal sadness of infertility was only made worse by her

husband's repeated success in siring healthy bastards with other women.

At least a dozen of them.

Throughout his reign, Charles had a series of Catholic mistresses.

He knew how anxious this made people,

but he didn't keep them hidden, far from it.

This is Barbara Villiers, who was

his main mistress in the first part of his reign and she bore him

probably five children, possibly six children.

And she's shown here as

the Virgin Mary, and her son by the King is shown with her as Christ.

In some ways, it could be seen as a really bad taste joke.

If Catherine had seen this picture, which presumably

she would've done in some form, it must've been particularly

galling because there's her rival celebrating her own children

by the King and the Queen, of course, unable to have children.

And also to see Barbara Villiers, who was also one of her

ladies of the bed chamber, so Barbara

and Catherine were together a lot of the time.

To see her painted as the Virgin

and Child must have been the most outrageously offensive thing.

Members of Parliament wanted to make it clear

to their monarch that there were firm limits on Catholicism.

So in 1673 they passed the Test Act.

And because Charles needed them to give him

more money for the Dutch wars, which weren't going as well as he'd

hoped, he reluctantly agreed to sign it.

The Test Act was aimed squarely at James,

Charles' Catholic younger brother.

# The Lord be with you

# And with your spirit lift up your hearts. #

Anyone who wanted to hold public office had to deny

transubstantiation -

that the communion bread and wine turns into the body

and blood of Christ.

A key tenet of the Catholic faith.

In other words, you couldn't hold a government job and be a Catholic.

The English Parliament had drawn a line in the sand.

So James stepped over it.

James, Duke of York,

and heir presumptive to the three kingdoms of England Scotland

and Ireland resigned his post of Lord High Admiral.

The man next in line to be king had been barred from holding office

by the English Parliament because of his Catholicism.

I think Charles' personal attitude to religion was

like his attitude to many things - fairly relaxed.

But he understood how anxious having a Catholic heir

made his Protestant subjects.

So he made sure that James' two daughters, Mary

and Anne, were brought up as Anglicans.

After James, the Stuart line would be Protestant once again.

In the 17th century, there was no such thing as a royal love match.

Marriages were strategic, they had to be.

The Anglo-French invasion of the Netherlands had failed.

Charles made peace with the Dutch and to seal the deal he married

off James' eldest daughter Mary to her Dutch cousin, William of Orange.

William was the man who had stopped Louis XIV from taking over

the Netherlands.

William was a force to be reckoned with.

Charles had made a brilliant move.

Mary's marriage was a new alliance with an old enemy.

Mary was 15.

Her cousin, William, was 12 years older than her but four

and a half inches shorter, physically unattractive,

and with a distinct lack of personal charm.

When the engagement was arranged, Mary cried non-stop for a day

and a night, but tears made no difference.

Although news of the match was greeted with

anxiety in the Netherlands -

on account of the Catholicism of Mary's father and the immoral

lifestyle of her uncle Charles II -

in Britain the match was hugely popular.

It seemed to confirm that Charles wasn't bent on Catholicism.

But paranoia about the Catholic threat didn't go away.

A year later, a failed schoolmaster called Titus Oates came

forward to the authorities with an extraordinary tale.

A Catholic plot to take over the three kingdoms -

illustrated here in this pack of contemporary playing cards.

Titus said he was a Catholic double agent.

He said Jesuit priests disguised as Presbyterian ministers were

heading to Scotland to stir up rebellion.

He said Charles would be assassinated,

and then the Catholics would set fire to London.

Titus Oates was a fantasist, with a personal grudge against Catholics,

who he blamed for everything that had gone wrong in his life.

Oates appeared before the Privy Council for interrogation.

The King himself came to question him.

Charles doubted Oates' increasingly elaborate

and inconsistent story, but he couldn't dismiss it entirely.

Oates had claimed that James'

personal secretary was one of the plotters.

Charles couldn't risk being suspected of a cover-up

if his brother was somehow involved.

We believe a story, however flimsy, if it fits with our deepest fears.

The Popish Plot fuelled an explosion of anti-Catholicism.

The Pope was burned in effigy in London, Oxford, Salisbury

and Edinburgh.

Memories of Catholic crimes were revived to stoke the flames.

Every November 5th we still remember a failed Catholic

terrorist attack earlier in the century.

Parliament continued to investigate the twists and turns of Titus Oates'

conspiracy theory.

At one point Oates even implicated Queen Catherine

but this was too much for Charles, who put him under house arrest.

Oates quickly withdrew the accusation.

But he stuck firm to the rest of his tale.

And the Popish Plot quickly became the pretext for the real

political business of trying to prevent

the Catholic James from becoming King when his brother died.

James' opponents needed an alternative candidate.

And they had one.

This is James Duke of Monmouth the eldest of Charles'

extensive brood of illegitimate children.

He's shown here fighting for his father in the Netherlands.

A military prowess aside, Monmouth was everything that his uncle

James wasn't.

Charismatic, popular and Protestant.

Mobs of Monmouth supporters built huge bonfires on the London

streets, chanting "No Popish successor, no York,

"a Monmouth! A Monmouth!"

Charles called a new Parliament here in Oxford in 1681 to get

away from the turmoil of London.

Divisions in Parliament were hardening into two factions,

the beginnings of our modern political parties.

Tories, who championed the established Church,

and the power of the Monarchy, and Whigs who wanted greater

toleration of non-conformists and parliamentary checks on royal power.

The Whig party was still pushing to exclude

James from the succession, but Charles had had enough.

After just one week, he hid the robes of state in a sedan chair

and tucked the crown between his legs.

As MPs settled down for more rounds of acrimonious debate, Charles

whipped out the robes and crown and caught his opponents off guard.

He dissolved the Parliament, quickly left Oxford -

and never called another English Parliament again.

Charles wanted to remove his brother from the tension in England

so he packed James off to run Scotland.

James used to come here to Leith to play golf and escape

the stresses of government. You might expect him to have found

Scotland a pretty inhospitable place, it was a country riven

by divisions between the established Church and dissenting Presbyterians.

But actually he did a pretty good job here.

That's partly because the Scots were predisposed to like him.

The Stuarts were after all a Scottish dynasty,

and James was here, on the spot,

not ruling Scotland by remote control from London.

Under James' presidency the Edinburgh Parliament here

passed a Succession Act.

It guaranteed that James would be the next King of Scotland.

So if England didn't make James king

when Charles died, the union of the three crowns would be over.

But there were some who wanted to make sure that

James would never be king.

In June 1683, Charles and James were enjoying the races at Newmarket.

Meanwhile a group of conspirators gathered at Rye House,

on the King's road home to London, and plotted an ambush.

They would assassinate James and Charles,

and make the Duke of Monmouth king.

But Charles left the races early, and the plot was discovered.

It's not clear if Monmouth himself was involved in the plot,

but he was indicted for treason and fled to the Netherlands.

I think Charles' life can be seen as a series of lucky escapes.

From the oak tree where he hid from Cromwell's troops, to the

Rye House plot 33 years later,

Charles outwitted his opponents and outran his killers.

He always knew the glue that held his kingdoms together was

Protestantism.

Charles never underestimated the political dimensions of religious

faith, and he understood exactly how much he could get away with.

In February 1685, Charles lay dying in his bed.

On his last evening, James arranged for a Catholic priest to be

smuggled in.

Charles, Head of the Church of England, confessed his sins

and took Communion.

James had brought his brother to the Catholic faith.

Now he was nearly their king,

could he persuade his new subjects to do likewise?

In April 1685, on St George's Day,

King James II was crowned here in Westminster Abbey.

In Scotland he became King James VII

though he didn't return north for a separate coronation.

But the three kingdoms now had a Catholic monarch.

And at first, it didn't seem as bad as some had feared.

James gave a conciliatory speech to the Privy Council.

He promised he would, "Preserve this government both in Church

"and State as is now by law established."

Parliament quickly published the speech

and intended to hold him to it.

James was in his 50s with

no surviving children by his second wife.

So his heir remained his elder daughter Mary from his first

marriage. She was a good protestant herself,

and married to another good protestant William of Orange.

So having a Catholic monarch looked as

though it would just be a temporary blip.

At the time of Charles' death the Duke of Monmouth was staying

with William and Mary here in The Hague.

Mary and Monmouth liked each other and used to go ice-skating together.

But her father, the new King James, asked William to arrest Monmouth.

William didn't oblige. James was right to be worried about Monmouth.

In June he sailed to England to try and take his uncle's crown by force.

Monmouth landed on the Dorset coast with only three ships

and 83 men.

Monmouth was relying on a massive popular uprising

against James, but by the time he faced James' royal troops

at Sedgemoor in Somerset, he'd only raised an army of 3,000 men.

He was out-numbered,

out-manoveured,

and out-gunned.

Although he had always been a hugely popular figure,

when push came to shove, the country showed it wasn't prepared to

revisit the trauma of civil war.

Military defeat brought immediate retribution.

Monmouth himself escaped,

but was captured and executed in London nine days after

the rebellion.

Here in Somerset, the aftermath was gruesome and bloody.

500 rebels, many of them wounded, were rounded up

and held in this church.

Then the notorious Judge Jeffreys was dispatched to preside

over what became known as the Bloody Assizes

where nearly 1,300 men were tried in just 9 days.

Many rebels were executed in their local villages

and their bodies hung in the streets as a clear deterrent to

anyone even thinking about challenging James' right to be king.

The King may have eliminated Monmouth and crushed the rebellion.

But the main threat to James was James himself.

James began pushing his three kingdoms towards the Catholic faith.

Ireland had remained stubbornly resistant to the

Protestant reformation, so it was a natural place to start.

The man he chose to do the job was a trusted deputy,

the Earl of Tyrconnell.

Here in Dublin, Tyrconnell launched a determined attempt to

restore Catholic dominance and to reverse the land losses

suffered by Catholics during the Civil Wars.

He radically reconstructed the Irish army, purging Protestants

and recruiting Catholics until around two thirds of the rank

and file and 40% of the officers were Catholic.

And it wasn't just the army. Tyrconnell also packed

Catholics into the judiciary, local government and civil service.

For many in England, James's Catholicisation of Ireland

seemed like a grim warning of what was to come.

Unlike his brother, James had no charm and no subtlety.

He alienated Whigs and Tories alike, sacking many of those who

spoke out against him, including the Bishop of London.

James turned the Stuart Monarchy into the enemy

of its Protestant subjects.

As James' Catholicisation drive intensified, James' opponents

increasingly looked to his heir Mary and William for support.

Delegations of English politicians even held top-secret talks with

William to sound out his willingness to get involved in English politics.

And, at the same time,

the Netherlands became home to growing numbers of Scottish

and English opponents of James' regime forced into exile.

Since the 7th century, St Winefride's Well in North Wales

has been a place of pilgrimage.

In 1687, James came to bathe in the holy waters here

because he needed a personal miracle.

He wanted a son.

Later that year, James' queen fell pregnant.

To James, this was a clear sign God was on his side.

But to his subjects, their worst fears were being realised.

The birth of a son might mean a continuing Catholic monarchy

James' protestant daughter Anne wrote to tell her sister

Mary that the queen's "great belly is a little suspicious.

"I believe when she is brought to bed,

"nobody will be convinced it is her child, except it prove a daughter."

The rumours spread.

People talk about intrusion into the private lives of the royal family

as though it's a modern phenomenon. They couldn't be more wrong.

Back in 1688, King James made the queen give birth in this

bed in front of more than 40 witnesses.

James wasn't being an exhibitionist.

He knew how crucial it was that

if this baby was a boy everyone would have seen the birth and

know it was his real, legitimate son and next-in-line to the throne.

The baby was born. It was healthy.

And it was a boy. James' prayers were answered.

But you should be careful what you wish for.

20 days after baby James was born, William of Orange

received a letter from seven of the most important men in England -

five Whigs and two Tories including the sacked Bishop of London.

The letter said that James' subjects were "dissatisfied with the

"present conduct of the government", that the "religion, liberties

and properties" of Protestants had been "greatly invaded" under James

and that "not one in a thousand believe the baby to be the queen's."

William was also told they would support his wife Mary's claim to the

throne...were he to invade England with sufficient military force.

William was an instinctively cautious man.

He didn't want to repeat the mistakes that Monmouth had made

and turn up with just a handful of soldiers.

Instead he put together a huge expeditionary force

of 460 warships, 5,000 horse and 15,000 men.

It was a dangerous business. The autumn seas were stormy.

Who knows what reception he'd receive on landing.

Before he departed, William told his wife Mary that

if he was killed, she should marry again.

He set off on October 19th but the wind blew him back into port.

James saw this as a sign of divine providence.

"I see God Almighty continues his Protection to me," he wrote,

"by bringing the wind westerly."

Two weeks later William tried again.

This time the wind was easterly. A Protestant wind.

You can just imagine the farmers and fishermen here looking out to

sea and seeing that huge fleet approaching the shore.

Around 460 warships under sail - it must have been a terrifying sight.

And there was no force to stop them.

The easterly Protestant winds blowing William's ships

towards Devon were also keeping the English navy firmly in harbour.

History has rewritten William's landing in England.

His takeover of the three kingdoms is known as the Glorious Revolution.

There's even a statue to him here in Brixham.

The English are fond of claiming that they haven't been invaded since

William the Conqueror in 1066 but there's no other word for it.

This was the last successful military invasion

of the British Isles.

Today Salisbury Plain is used for military exercises.

In 1688 King James rode out at the head of his army to

confront his son-in-law here.

James had numerical superiority, he had the home advantage.

He'd spent his early years in France as a highly successful

professional soldier.

This should have been his moment of triumph.

He stayed under the shadow of the massive Anglican

cathedral in the Bishop of Salisbury's Palace.

James arrives here, at Salisbury, the idea being that he

could now act as a rallying point for his officers.

What he didn't realise, and was going to become pretty obvious

during the next few days,

is that most of his officers were intent on changing sides to William.

James, that night, came into this chapel to pray...

and at that moment had his nosebleed.

His nose began to pour, it went on and on.

James' nosebleed means that he can't go to Warminster to

review his troops that are there and rally them against William,

which could have possibly have led to a marvellous full-scale battle.

And that would have been rather interesting as James' army

outnumbered William's by at least two to one.

But as things panned out everything dropped into William's lap

and it all worked perfectly.

James had what in modern terms we'd probably call a nervous breakdown.

There was no confrontation and no battle.

The only blood shed in Salisbury flowed from James' nose.

William's chaplain and a later Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet,

put it rather well. James' "whole strength, like a spider's web,

"was so irrevocably broken with a touch, that he was never able to

"retrieve what for want of judgment and heart he threw up in a day."

You can't help feeling sorry for James - his father had been

deposed and executed. He must have feared for his own neck.

He threw the Great Seal of England into the River Thames, hoping

to make government impossible, and fled for France.

Now William announced to Parliament's leaders that he

would not rule through Mary.

If he was not made king he would "go back to Holland

"and meddle no more in their affairs."

Just over 20 years previously, the Dutch Navy had terrified

the country by sailing into the Royal Dockyards at Chatham

and towing away the Royal flagship.

Now William of Orange had marched into London with 15,000 Dutch troops

and demanded the Crown itself.

Parliament had to agree but tried to limit his power.

The Declaration of Rights

laid down rules for freedom of speech, called for regular elections

and the right to petition the monarch without fear of retribution.

It still underpins English law.

The Declaration of Rights was basically a job description

for future English monarchs.

How seriously did William and Mary take it?

Well, it was read aloud to them

when Parliament formally offered them the crown,

meaning William tacitly agreed to the limits it put on his power.

William was used to negotiating with Parliament.

He was never king of the Netherlands,

he was a Stathoulder, an appointed position.

Being Stathoulder

didn't give you the power to tell anyone what to do.

The sovereign power, in the Netherlands, were the various

representative assemblies of the different provinces.

And in order to get anything done in the Netherlands, William had

to negotiate with those representative assemblies.

So he was somebody who was actually quite skilled in dealing with

Parliament-like bodies.

I think that really gives him

a conception of what it is to be a ruler

and how to be a successful ruler, very different from the earlier

Stuarts who were perhaps more concerned to preserve the majesty

of kingship to preserve their power, their prerogatives, didn't

have this tradition, this experience of negotiating, compromising,

realising what it was to work with representatives of your people.

-So what were William's motivations in coming to England?

-Well, I think

to understand William you have to realise he's got three priorities.

The first is to defeat Louis XIV.

The second is to defeat Louis XIV.

And the third is to preserve his own power and grandeur,

and that of the Stuart monarchy when he gets hold of it, but only in

so far as that's compatible with defeating Louis XIV.

So I think he really wanted to come to England in order to mobilise the

resources of this country in his great struggle with the French king.

So ironically the shift towards a more powerful English

Parliament under William was just an accidental by-product

of a pan-European struggle between the Netherlands and France.

Louis XIV was hosting the exiled James in France.

How glorious Versailles must have seemed after chilly,

miserable, Protestant England.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was everything James aspired to be.

An absolute monarch, a Catholic, a success.

By 1688, Louis had been on his throne for 45 years.

Poor James hadn't even managed four.

Louis was determined that James would be king again.

Not from motives of personal fondness or concerns

about England's well-being, but because of European power politics.

On the giant international chessboard,

William's daring seizure of England had given the Dutch, Louis'

greatest enemy, a huge strategic advantage.

Louis needed James to retrieve his thrones

so he stiffened James' resolve, put up the finance

and packed James off to Ireland at the head of an army.

James landed in Cork in March 1689 and was received with open arms

throughout the Catholic heartlands of the south and east.

But Protestant Ulster firmly, and not for the last time, said no.

Over the 17th century, plantation projects had entrenched

Protestantism in Northern towns like Enniskillen and Londonderry.

For three brief years, James' Catholicisation drive had

undermined this until William's dramatic landing in England

swung the pendulum back towards Protestantism.

Now the landing of French troops in southern Ireland had raised

Catholic hopes once again.

But for James to take full control of Ireland, he'd need to win

the northern Protestant stronghold of Londonderry.

On 18th April, James and his army reached the city,

which barred its gates to the king.

Every August the Apprentice Boys' Parade commemorates the long siege

that followed.

The city held out against James and his army for 105 days.

And people began to starve.

This is a true account of the siege of Londonderry

written by the Reverend George Walker

and it makes chilling reading.

Horse flesh sold for one shilling and eight pence a pound.

A quarter of a dog, five shillings and sixpence,

fattened by feeding on the bodies of the slain Irish.

A dog's head, two shillings and sixpence.

A rat, one shilling, and a mouse, sixpence

William sent three ships stocked with provisions.

They sailed through enemy fire and broke the massive

blockade that James' army had built across the river.

The siege was ended.

But the rest of Ireland remained loyal to James.

William might have won England without bloodshed, but

if he wanted to be King of Ireland he would have to fight for it.

William's forces landed at Carrickfergus in June 1690

and marched south to meet James.

William's and James' two armies then met for the first

and only time in pitched battle on the banks of the River Boyne.

This was a battle within a family.

William was taking on his own father-in-law.

But it was also a major international war to

determine the European balance of power.

James' army was made up of Catholic Irish and French soldiers.

William's much larger army was made

up of English, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Danish, Norwegian,

and French Huguenot soldiers as well as his own elite Dutch Blue Guards.

This is where King James' Jacobite army pitched camp

before the battle.

It started off with

this very, very heavy mist hanging over the river, and then that would

have burnt off over the course of the morning, but William used that

mist and the cover of it to move 10,000 of his soldiers towards

Slane in a flanking manoeuvre, to come in on James' left flank.

At ten o'clock the Dutch Blue Guards crossed at King William's Glen

and forded the river there, came in to Oldbridge village,

and then over the course of the morning,

literally wave upon wave of about 2,6000 Williamite soldiers

came across the river, using the islands in the river

and engaged with the Jacobites on the south bank of the River Boyne.

And then where we're standing now, and as we look down towards

Drybridge, this is where the final crossing took place with

King William himself coming across in the early afternoon when

the tide was on its way back out and both armies met up here around the

Jacobite camp, very intense fighting for about half an hour, and then

the Jacobites were pushed back.

It was a decisive Williamite victory.

After the Battle of the Boyne, James returned to France.

The Irish had a new name for him - Seamus al Caca, James the shit.

William of Orange, King Billy, still has a huge symbolic importance

here in Ulster today, where he's seen as a Protestant hero.

William took power in England with barely a shot being fired

but his conquest of Ireland was anything but bloodless.

Thousands of soldiers were killed in battle

and many more died through disease and starvation.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, William's troops were suppressing

the first Jacobite rebellion, fought by Highlanders loyal to James,

their Stuart King.

William successfully subdued all opposition in England

and Ireland but in Scotland tiny pockets of resistance held

out for the next 50 years.

In the Highlands, the Fort of Inverlochy was garrisoned with

20-foot high stone walls, 15 guns and barracks for a thousand men.

It was re-named Fort William after the King.

This is the ante-chamber built by King William at Hampton Court.

This is where you waited to see the King.

And I think it tells you everything you need to know about

William's style of monarchy.

He's got rid of the French tapestries,

the lush portraits of mistresses that his predecessors favoured.

Just look at it. This is a man of war.

A man who built up one of the biggest land armies England

had ever seen for his campaign against Louis XIV.

This is the chateau at St Germaine. It used to be Louis' residence

until he upgraded to Versailles and gave this to James.

So James lived here like a king but a king without a kingdom.

A king of style of shadows but no substance.

Not bad, though, is it, for a man who'd lost everything?

Louis gave James a palace because he needed him to look like a king.

The king across the water, the Stuart thorn in William's side.

James lived in exile, refusing ever to consider the one

thing that might have retrieved the crown for his own son.

He insisted on bringing up young James, the rightful heir,

as a devout Catholic.

James died in St Germaine.

His tombstone reads, "The man who once wore a crown now rests

"as dust here.

"What good is a throne? Death wears away all things."

This is the Royal Naval College in Greenwich,

originally commissioned by William as a home for retired sailors

and designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

At the centre of the Painted Hall are William and Mary,

enthroned in triumph.

Mary died of small pox in 1694.

This awkward couple might not have been that close

when they married, but now William risked infection, tending

her on her deathbed and spent over £100,000 on her funeral.

Mary died childless so William's heir was Mary's younger sister Anne.

Anne and her husband had only one living child.

But three days after his 11th birthday

he caught small pox and died.

This was, of course, a personal tragedy.

But it was also a constitutional crisis.

There was no Protestant heir. So in June 1701,

the English Parliament passed an Act of Settlement.

This ruled that Anne would not be succeeded by

her Catholic half-brother, James Stuart, but by a Hanoverian,

one of her German second cousins.

The Act of Settlement went further than that. It explicitly

banned Catholics from the English throne.

This is still the law today.

When William died in 1702,

his sister-in-law, Anne, was proclaimed Queen.

In her first parliamentary speech she said, "I know my own

"heart to be entirely English,"

which played well in England after years

of a Dutch king but it didn't sound so good north of the border.

The Scottish Parliament gave Queen Anne a warm Edinburgh welcome

by passing an Act of Security.

This is it.

The act was intended to send a clear message to Anne

and her English ministers.

It stated that on Anne's death the Scottish crown would pass to

a Protestant but not the Hanoverian line,

unless Anne's ministry guaranteed certain safeguards.

These included the frequent and free meeting of the Scottish Parliament,

and the freedom of Scots to trade without English interference.

If not, on Anne's death, the English

and Scottish crowns would pass to different successors.

This placed the two kingdoms on a collision course.

The uneasy partnership of regal union that had survived

since 1603 might soon be over.

For England, this created a huge potential danger.

Its old enemy France could ally with Scotland

and invade England from the north.

This had to be avoided at all costs

so Anne's ministers quickly drew up plans for an Anglo-Scottish Union.

And north of the border, a window of opportunity opened.

Five years earlier many Scots had taken a massive

hit on an unwise speculation.

They'd punted 25% of the entire country's wealth on a risky

overseas investment.

The Darien Scheme.

This was a trading post set up in Panama to give the Scots

a foothold in the East Indies' spice markets.

It failed...spectacularly.

Scotland was hurting. It needed a bail-out.

England could help.

Some of the Scots who lost money over Darien were offered

compensation, but more importantly, Scotland was offered free

trade with England and its colonies.

This might be the key to financial recovery, but there was a price.

And for the Scots, the price was sovereignty. The price was Union.

This grand building had been designed for Charles I's

Scottish parliaments.

68 years later his grand-daughter, Queen Anne, made it redundant.

Because the majority in the Scottish Parliament say yes,

and approved the treaty.

Farewell to independence and hello to Union.

Outside the Scottish Parliament, and for many politicians inside,

the decision was hugely unpopular.

Efforts were made to sugar the pill.

The Scots got to keep their separate legal and educational systems.

They got to keep their Church.

The stiff-necked inheritors of John Knox didn't have to bow

the knees to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But the two kingdoms were united, Great Britain had been created.

Queen Anne had achieved what her great-grandfather, King James VI

of Scotland and I of England, had always dreamed of.

She had united Scotland and England into one state.

An uneasy, unequal and mercenary match,

but a marriage never the less.

I think this was a little like the dynastic

marriages of the 17th century royals.

It was driven by strategy, not love.

Negotiating a satisfactory deal between England

and Scotland hadn't been easy.

And here you can see here all the detailed provisions that

went into the 1707 Act of Union.

This document lays the foundations for modern Britain.

But it was only the latest in a series of experiments of different

ways of ruling these islands attempted during the Stuart century.

These had ranged, from James VI and I's warm and fuzzy rhetoric

of a union of "hearts and minds", to the forced union under Cromwell,

and now, this pragmatic negotiated agreement under Queen Anne.

Exactly 300 years after Queen Anne's death the 2014 Scottish

Referendum will decide if the settlement she made will last or

if Scotland will, once again, become an independent country, sharing

a monarch with England just as it had throughout the Stuart century.

Queen Anne died, childless, in August 1714.

The Stuart era was over.

They'd ruled Scotland for hundreds of years

but Britain for only one dramatic century.

How should we judge them?

It's tempting to reach for old cliches like failed, doomed,

tragic, even wrong but romantic, but it's more complex than that.

Theirs was a century in which a father gained three kingdoms,

but his son lost his crowns and then his head.

In which his son was triumphantly restored to all three thrones

but the brother who succeeded him was deposed by his own daughter.

In which a Dutch king traded absolute power for military

might, and his successor brought her kingdoms union,

but failed to give them an heir.

But don't underestimate the Stuarts.

In 1603 they inherited a multiple monarchy that was religiously

divided, woefully underfunded, and structurally dysfunctional.

The century of their rule was extraordinary. For the first time,

the Stuarts pushed the idea of a single united kingdom.

An idea, that for good or ill, ultimately ended

in Anglo-Scottish union, and the political creation of Great Britain.