England and Scotland. Two realms divided, until now.
In 1603, they had come together in one person -
James VI of Scotland and I of England.
He wanted to be known as the king of Great Britain.
But what was this new thing in the world, this Great Britain?
In the first years of the 17th century, only the map makers could tell you.
One of them, an ex-tailor called John Speed, published his atlas of 67 maps
called The Theatre Of The Empire of Great Britaine,
covering every inch of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.
What lay behind Speed's atlas was an optimistic vision
of happy, harmonious Britannia coming together under a king who was determined to bring unity
after centuries of war and hatred. In the Vale of the Red Horse in Warwickshire,
John Speed had a glimpse of what this British heaven on Earth might look like.
The meadowing pastures with the green mantles so embroidered with flowers
that, from Edgehill, we might behold another Eden.
On October the 23rd 1642, another man, King Charles I,
surveyed the same landscape from the same ridge.
The meadows were now full, not with cows and harebells, but cannon, pikes and musketeers.
By nightfall, there would be 3,000 British corpses lying in the freezing mud.
Here at Edgehill, Eden had become Golgotha.
Over the next long years, the nations that both James and Charles yearned to bring together
would tear each other apart in murderous civil wars.
Hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost in battles, sieges, epidemics and famine.
A raw body count fails to measure the full enormity of a disaster
which reached into every part of Britain, from Cornwall to County Connaught, from York to the Hebrides.
It tore apart communities of the parish and the county
which, all through the turmoil of the Reformation, had managed to agree
on how the country should be governed and who should do the governing.
Men who had broken bread together now tried to break each other's heads.
Men who had judged together now judged each other.
At the end of it all, there would be a united Britain, as the Stuarts had hoped,
but it would not be a united kingdom. It would be a united republic.
The civil wars were not just an accident, or an occasion to dress up as Cavaliers and Roundheads.
They were that most un-British event - a war of ideas, ideas that mattered deeply to contemporaries
because at the heart of them was an argument about liberty and obedience.
That argument became lethal here at Edgehill and it would echo for generations through British history.
As a matter of fact, that argument has never really gone away.
To the survivors, looking back, the issue was simple.
Whether the King should govern as a god by his will and the people governed by force as beasts,
or whether the people should be governed by their own consent.
Yes, that's the voice of a republican in exile - Edmund Ludlow.
That same voice, that same memory,
would be heard through the centuries and in revolutions far beyond our shores -
in America in 1776, in France in 1789.
It goes against the grain. A bit embarrassing - not to say painful -
to be thought of as the fountainhead of revolutions. Not very British.
All that shouting, all that Bible waving, all that killing. So was it all an aberration, then?
Well, no, actually.
These wars were the crucible of our modern history.
Out of the fires of these wars came, eventually, a genuinely parliamentary monarchy.
But no-one understood it at the time. There was no script which commanded, "Go forth and be democratic."
When the 24-year-old Charles became King,
no-one in their right mind could possibly have imagined a war between Parliament and the Crown.
No succession in over two centuries had been as settled or as unthreatened.
Charles may have been smaller than life, long-faced, painfully formal,
private to the point of being secretive, a stickler for decorum, as cool, as still, as pallid as marble,
but, to many, this was a welcome contrast with his father James
who'd been loud-mouthed, pedantic and uncouth.
But, from the beginning, for those who were paying attention,
there was something ominously distant about this small man on a big horse -
too lofty to bother with a coronation procession, a man who believed that kings were little gods on Earth.
Charles saw himself as the father of the nation and, like any 17th-century father,
he thought he was responsible for the wellbeing of his family.
In return, he expected to be strictly obeyed.
Of course, like James before him, he would listen to the people through their representatives in Parliament,
but only when HE chose and only on matters HE saw fit to be discussed.
But the House of Commons was filled with historians and lawyers
and, for them, Parliament was not simply a matter of royal convenience.
Ever heard of Magna Carta?
For these men, parliamentary history, the history they were reading and writing,
was an ongoing epic of liberty and THEY were the keepers of the flame.
The countdown to the civil wars started now, though nobody heard it.
It was a countdown that could have been stopped time and time again.
But the ticking grew louder and louder until, by 1642, it would be deafening.
And what triggered that countdown? Money.
One of the first things this young King did was declare war on Spain.
Nothing was more ruinously expensive than foreign war. There was the added complication that, in England,
even little gods on Earth had to go cap in hand to Parliament for the money to fight.
For Charles, the issue was personal.
Wars of religion were tearing Europe apart.
Protestants and Catholics were killing each other from Sweden to Hungary with unspeakable cruelty.
They'd forced his own sister, the queen of Bohemia, into exile.
In his quiet way, Charles burned to be a Christian warrior.
There was also the matter of his older brother Henry.
A champion of the joust, celebrated by the poets as a Protestant hero, Henry was supposed to have been King,
but he had died when Charles was a boy and his armour had passed on to him.
It was too big.
All his life, Charles would try and fit the steel,
try to become the gartered Charlemagne beneath the British oak.
This war against Spain would be his big chance.
Surely Parliament would cough up the money for the great Protestant crusade?
"Oh, yes," was the answer, "but..." And it was a big but.
"..with all due respect, we don't much care for your choice of commander, the Duke of Buckingham.
"So, while we are happy to fork over subsidies,
"we rather think we'll make it a short-term contract, renewable IF he turns out all right."
But Parliament knew perfectly well it wouldn't. From the start, Parliament had Buckingham's number.
To them, he was an upstart nobody, a peacock with a pretty face
who'd been promoted, outrageously, above the great earls of the land.
He'd been James' favourite - well, actually, more than a favourite if court scandal was to be believed -
and now he'd wormed his way into Charles's favour, too.
The pair of them had travelled incognito to Spain in a bid to woo the Spanish infanta for Charles.
They returned from their escapade empty-handed.
But, to the young, insecure Charles,
glamorous, worldly Buckingham had become his idol.
To the rest of the court, however, Buckingham was a parasite, a viper.
Why would one give HIM a blank cheque?
It was obvious what would happen to the money, and it did.
Buckingham blew a cool 240,000 pounds in a raid on France so botched,
it seemed the act of a saboteur, not a supremo.
So, if Charles wanted a penny more, then his darling had to go.
Presume to talk to the King about HIS choice of trusted generals and ministers?
Presume to tell the King? Presume to lay down the law? That was an end of kingship itself.
So, in 1626, Charles did what he assumed kings worth the name were perfectly entitled to do.
He would dismiss Parliament and collect the money himself through a forced loan.
It was the politest bullying. Charles was always polite.
The gloves were off. Loan refusers were threatened, prosecuted.
Two of them - Sir Francis Barrington and Sir Edmund Hampden - died, either in prison or shortly afterwards.
Many did pay up, but their compliance spoke of fear as much as loyalty.
They'd always been professional grumblers when it had come to tax,
but these country gentlemen were now speaking a new and dangerous language.
No tax could be lawful without the consent of Parliament, they said.
The money ran out again in 1628
and Charles was forced to call another Parliament.
Speaker after speaker rose to the rostrum in defence of the liberties of England.
They drafted a formal list of their grievances in a petition of rights
which Charles graciously conceded as the price for saving his beloved Buckingham.
Any slight chance of Charles honouring it, and it was slight enough to begin with, disappeared
when, later in 1628, Buckingham was assassinated, to national cheering.
Convulsed with grief and hardened by rage, Charles shut Parliament down.
As the doors were being closed, one MP, Sir John Eliot, stood up
and roared that anyone imposing a tax without Parliament's consent
would be a capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth.
Charles disagreed - Eliot was the traitor.
So off to the Tower of London he went where he died in 1632.
But, for Charles, the rainstorm of words had now mercifully stopped.
In their place beamed sunlight from the heavens.
Triumphantly, too, the war with Spain was now over,
so no more begging for money. No more of THAT aggravation.
So in 1630, as far as Charles was concerned, peace had broken out in Britannia.
His father James had always preached peace, and James was now much on Charles's mind.
Charles decided his father's memory deserved something special
and, courtesy of the Flemish Catholic painter Peter Paul Rubens, he would get it.
Not one but three huge painted tributes. A go-for-broke manifesto for the Stuart dynasty.
They would be placed way up high on the ceiling of the building he had inherited from James -
Inigo Jones's masterpiece, the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
In 1636, they were triumphantly hoist aloft for all the world to see.
There are three visions here of James' benevolent rule.
In one panel, James is depicted as the bringer of peace and prosperity.
In the central panel, Rubens gives us James being carried to heaven as a god.
In the third,
he is Solomon being offered the two crowns of England and Scotland.
The banqueting house in Whitehall simply takes your breath away
by the sheer cheek with which it ignores the English Channel.
It's a piece of Italy in Britain - classical columns, tall windows,
the ultimate architectural light box designed to flood the Stuart monarchy with brilliance.
It was also meant to pin any unbelievers to the floor
through the power of its allegories, singing the virtues of the godlike king.
When you walked in and remembered that the Stuarts had described kings as little gods on Earth,
you realised they were not kidding.
The Banqueting House was Charles's absolutist dream land.
It was here that Charles could act out the grandest of his fantasies,
that his three kingdoms - England, Scotland and Ireland -
were yoked together in harmony under the ruler who was firm, but just.
What better way to give this new British court a European make-over
than to turn it into a byword for Baroque gorgeousness?
There would be a stunning, new, royal art collection gathered from Europe
of the quality to make popes and emperors moan with envy - Mantegnas, Titians, Rembrandts.
Charles's unprepossessing French queen, Henrietta Maria, with her sallow skin and discoloured teeth,
was airbrushed into stardom by the glossiest glamorist of them all - Anthony Van Dyck.
And, beyond the palace, the King was satisfied to see his will being done.
People he disapproved of being made to desist.
I like not this.
Out in the Shires, his taxes were being collected,
his justice was being carried out and the skies had not fallen in.
Who missed the talkers, the Parliament, now? Surely, nobody.
Sooner or later, Charles was going to have to come down to earth.
When he did, he'd be bound to notice that his earthly kingdom was ruled, not by images, but by words.
Now, unlike the invitingly soft scenery of Rubens's fantasy kingdom,
words were hard things, black and white things.
In the hands of wordsmiths - lawyers, preachers, printers - they were razor sharp
and would cut through the Stuart mush about British union
and bring the playground of the gods crashing to the ground.
The nay-sayers had not gone away and they had not shut up.
The men who, in 1625, declared taxes without Parliamentary consent to be illegal still thought this in 1635.
Yes, they reluctantly forked up, but it didn't stop them smouldering with rage.
Typical was a Buckinghamshire landowner called John Hampden.
John Hampden was not some abrasive, unworldly hothead.
He was a well-respected and important member of the county community.
Hampden had been deeply moved by the plight of Sir John Eliot in prison.
He'd visited him and looked after his teenage boys.
Now he would inherit the mantle of tax resistor - against ship money,
the tax that paid for the upkeep of the navy.
Why should counties with no coastlines pay this?
It may only have been a few shillings and Hampden lost his case,
but he won the argument. The embers were hot again.
Alongside the lawyers in Parliament, Charles now faced another group of intransigent critics
who had something even more unanswerable than Magna Carta - holy scripture. They were the Puritans.
For the hotter kind of Protestants, the Puritans,
the Stuart obsession with harmony and unity was, at best, meaningless claptrap
and, at worst, it was a plot to delude the gullible into bending the knee to Rome again.
For them, the reality was conflict, the unbridgeable division between the saved and the damned.
There was an endless battle going on between the saints and the legions of the devil.
The fires had already been lit in Europe.
The Reformation was a war, and that war had not yet been won.
The Puritans looked around them. But all they could see from this King was a betrayal of the godly Reformation.
Peace with Catholic Spain abroad
and, at home, even worse - a church ruled by bishops who were little better than Papists,
bishops who berated the Puritans for having taken the Reformation too far.
In the face of this cosmic battle, to stay still, to keep silent was a sin and a crime.
For the Puritans, Charles I ought to have been a custom-built king - austere, decorous and chaste.
But the fact was, his religion still seemed to need Protestant mumbo jumbo, all those signs and mysteries.
Even this would have been palatable had he not wanted to foist it on everyone else,
to force everyone to kneel at its shrine.
The Puritans declared war against any creeping signs of Romanism in the church.
Paintings and statues, crucifixes and altar rails.
And it escaped nobody's notice that Charles was married to a Catholic.
These men were very much in a minority,
but, of course, being the elect, they expected to be in a minority, the party of redemption.
In fact, they glorified in the slightness of their numbers,
the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army.
Men like the London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington
would be in the front line of this battle, a storm-trooper of the Reformation, always ready to fight.
You may see now how Antichrist doth plot against the poor church of God.
But so long as we put our trust in the Lord, let us once again take note of his great deliverances
from those great and devilish, bloodsucking Papists.
Of course, Charles was not going to lose any sleep over the Nehemiah Wallingtons of this world,
but Puritanism was not just the faith of merchants and artisans.
Plenty among the gentry and the nobility believed as passionately in the word of scripture
and, for all of them, it was an article of faith that nobody -
neither Pope nor King - would ever be allowed to flout the word of God.
And Charles would never be allowed to forget it.
Yes, finally, they were a minority.
But it was one of Charles's most costly errors to let so many in the Protestant middle of the country
come to regard HIM as a greater threat to their church than the Puritan militants.
For this fatal error, Charles had one man to thank -
William Laud, whom he made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.
Poor old Laud. Is there anything good to be said for Laud and the principles he stood for?
He's remembered as an arrogant and destructive man. But put yourself in his vestments and it looks different.
Far from being an elitist, Laud thought it was the Puritans who were the authoritarians.
Thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.
Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.
The Puritans with their obsession with reading and preaching and their gloomy fatalism
deprived the ordinary people of what they needed from the church - colour, spectacle,
a sight of the saviour in the form of his cross upon the altar,
the comforts of ritual, sacrament and ceremony, a fence to keep dogs off the communion tray
and, most of all, the consoling possibility that sinful souls might at the end be received into Christ.
What was so very wrong with that?
Well, what was wrong was that Laud was not presenting his programme as an option, but as an order.
Believe this, worship like this, pray like this or take the consequences.
Anyone who defied him found himself before his special tribunal.
Dissidents like Prynne, Burton and Bastwick became Laud's highest profile victims.
They had their ears cut off.
Laud's iron fist went unopposed,
for the time being.
By the mid-1630s,
Charles could see no obstacle to consummating the great Stuart plan of harmony across the three kingdoms,
whether they wanted it or not.
England was under control
and, thanks to the brutal tactics of his Lord Deputy in Ireland -
Charles's other right-hand hard man, Thomas Wentworth - so was Ireland.
That just left Scotland
and, in particular, its obstinate, cantankerous, Presbyterian kirk.
It had a galling and, to Charles, completely unacceptable contempt for the authority of bishops.
Charles was determined to break this.
Then the whole realm could pray and worship as one.
But the obsession with union which so consumed both James and Charles
would, in the end, turn out to guarantee nothing but hatred and division.
Charles, born in Dunfermline, was himself Scottish, so, surely, there could be no problem with this.
Well, yes, there could.
It had taken Charles eight years to bother travelling to Edinburgh for his Scottish coronation.
He'd become Scotland's very first absentee king,
and there would be a price to pay.
Charles was completely incapable of appreciating Calvinism's call for a great moral purification.
As far as he was concerned, Scotland and England were not all that different.
If one kingdom had been bent to his royal will by a show of firmness, so would the other one.
But the Scottish Reformation had been nothing like England's.
South of the border, changes had happened in the church at a slow and fitful pace.
In Scotland, Calvinism had struck in great, electrifying bursts of charismatic conversion,
backed up by teachers and ministers and only forced into a reluctant and periodic retreat by James I
who, unlike his son, had known when to stop.
So when Charles announced the introduction into Scotland of the new prayer book,
he would discover just how little he understood of the kingdom of his birth.
The royal council had, very obligingly, let it be known
that the prayer book had to be introduced, at the latest, by Easter 1637.
Then there was a printing delay.
This gave ample time for the Calvinist preachers and lords to organise exactly what they'd do.
Archbishop Laud, the King, the council, the bishops, everyone fell straight into the trap.
Now, whoever thought a little thing like this would start a revolution?
The British wars began here in St Giles's Cathedral, Edinburgh,
on the morning of July the 23rd 1637.
The first missiles that were launched were not cannonballs. They were footstools.
They were launched straight down the nave and their targets were the dean and bishop of the cathedral.
They had just started to read from a royally authorised new prayer book,
and this attempt to read from the liturgy had triggered a deafening outburst of shouting and wailing,
especially from the many women gathered in the church.
The prayer book riots, though, were just the fuse.
Those who lit it wanted to blow up the bishops and the whole Royal church establishment in Scotland.
On February the 28th 1638, a national covenant was signed in a four-hour ceremony,
along with sermons and psalms, exhorting the godly to be the new Israel.
Next day, the covenant was brought to the open churchyard at Greyfriars,
where hordes of ordinary Scots added their signature.
Copies were made and distributed the length and breadth of Scotland.
For countless thousands of Scots,
signing the covenant was just an extension of the vows they took in kirk.
But, rapidly, the document assumed the status of a patriotic scripture,
determining who and who was not a real Christian, who and who was not truly a Scot.
For Charles, there was no question of negotiating. They were all rebels.
They must all be punished.
There was just one snag.
It wasn't Charles who had the formidable army, but the Scots,
veterans of the wars of religion in Europe.
Facing his first really crucial test,
Charles, the British Charlemagne, found he couldn't raise money and he couldn't raise men.
It took one bruising skirmish for Charles to see the folly of further fighting. A truce was hastily signed.
But he wouldn't back off.
By now, Charles was desperate enough for men of money
to do what he'd hoped he'd never have to do again - call a Parliament.
After 11 years of gathering dust,
the House of Commons would once again be full of passionate argument and legal fury.
If Charles thought that 11 years meant the old quarrels had been forgotten,
he was ignoring a force new to British politics - the news.
For the great political dramas of the last 20 years had been hotly consumed by a reading public
addicted to newspapers, pamphlets, woodcuts and the so-called sixpenny separates,
recording debates and controversies, and dispatched around the Shires.
The 1640 Parliament took up exactly where it had left off in 1629 when Charles had closed it down.
It must have come as an unpleasant surprise, then,
when this new Parliament, instead of laying imagined grievances aside, immediately began to resurrect them.
This Parliament lasted only three short weeks before, once again, Charles suspended it.
But his list of options was getting shorter by the day, and they were all bad.
He wasn't going to cave in to the Scots or reopen Parliament.
But there was a third way, courtesy of his Lord Deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth.
Why not use an Irish Catholic army to crush the Presbyterian Scots?
Grateful for his advice,
Charles made Wentworth Earl of Strafford, but hesitated.
Charles knew that Protestant England was unlikely to approve of a Catholic army attacking their brother Scots.
What followed in 1640 was a breakdown of deference of frightening magnitude.
Officers were being attacked by their own men.
The latest round of fighting with the Scots was a disaster.
Newcastle, with its priceless coal, was captured. To get the Scots out of England, Charles needed cash, fast.
He had no choice now. He would HAVE to reopen Parliament.
There'd never be a better opportunity
for John Pym and his fellow Parliamentary leaders to rein in the King.
Pym had discovered, whether he understood the word or not, the elixir of revolution.
Yesterday's truism - obey the King - is tomorrow's bad joke.
Yesterday's unthinkable - abolish all bishops -
seems to be tomorrow's necessity.
All round London were enormous seething crowds,
practically laying siege to Westminster.
John Pym's demands were simple and blunt -
no taxes, ever, without Parliament's say-so,
Parliaments to be elected every three years
and most decisively of all, looking right into Charles's eyes,
no Parliament, especially not this one, could be dissolved without its own consent.
When Charles, through gritted teeth, conceded, it was the destruction of the absolute monarchy. Or was it?
The King did still have one card he could play -
that Catholic army that Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, had raised in Ireland.
Pym now knew he would have to annihilate Strafford if he was to defend Parliament from this threat.
So, in the spring of 1641, Strafford was impeached.
Sick and grey haired, he proved frustratingly impossible to convict of treason.
So Pym resorted to an act of attainder instead.
This merely required a burden of suspicion.
When Strafford had spoken of an Irish army reducing the kingdom, hadn't he meant England, argued Pym?
But there was one problem. The act of attainder needed the signature of the King.
Poor Charles. Memories of Buckingham must have flooded back into his mind.
For a king obsessed by loyalty, how could he abandon Strafford, his most faithful ally?
It was Strafford himself who spared Charles the agony of indecision.
He knew that only his own death could save the King and the country from further upheaval.
In a final letter written to Charles, Strafford begged the King to do what had to be done.
May it please Your Sacred Majesty, I understand that the minds of men are more and more incensed against me
and, to set Your Majesty's conscience at liberty, I do most humbly beseech Your Majesty,
for preventing evils that may happen by your refusal, to pass the bill.
Weeping, Charles signed the warrant.
Strafford was led out onto Tower Green, surrounded by jeering crowds, and beheaded.
Charles never forgave himself for this act of betrayal.
It had never occurred to Strafford that his death would actually make things worse for Charles, not better.
What happened next was the worst that could happen -
Ireland erupted.
With Strafford executed, Irish Catholics felt unprotected against Protestant reprisals.
In a pre-emptive strike, they attacked first.
Late in 1641, news of Irish killings began filtering through England,
graphically illustrated by a campaign of atrocity prints.
Now, bad things did happen,
but the usual fantasy pictures of impaled babies
tripped the wire of Anglo-Protestant paranoia.
Even worse, it was rumoured that the Catholic rebels claimed to be acting on behalf of the King.
The Puritan press hit the streets screaming, "We're next."
Charles was painfully aware of how costly his dream of a united Britain had become.
First, the Presbyterian Scots had brought down his personal rule.
Now the mass panic triggered by the Catholic Irish threatened to finish off his power altogether.
With events now spiralling out of control,
Pym saw this was the moment to try and strip the King of his authority. Charles tried to arrest him.
But Pym, and four others, had been tipped off that the King was marching on Parliament with an armed guard.
They waited till the last moment and slipped out at the back. Charles was left empty-handed.
It was an unmitigated fiasco.
The gamble had only been worthwhile so long as Charles was sure of absolute success.
Exposed now, just as Pym had wanted, as a naked, abject failure,
Charles appeared to be something worse than a despot - a blundering despot.
Both sides were moving fast beyond any point of reconciliation.
Pym made it clear that Parliament now needed to protect itself and England from the King.
It set about raising an army.
In July 1642, Bulstrode Whitelock thought out loud about the abyss facing the country.
It is strange to note how insensibly we have slipped into this beginning of a civil war
by one unexpected accident after another,
as waves of the sea which have brought us this far and which we scarce know how.
What the issue shall be, no man alive can tell. Probably few of us here may live to see the end of it.
What's amazing and very touching about the spring and summer of 1642
is the abundance of evidence we have about the agonies of allegiance.
The real soul-searching that people went through when they were pondering
the most painful decision of their lives - which side to join themselves to -
and how earnestly and how honestly they tried to justify that decision
to their families, their friends and themselves.
Cruellest of all, it tore fathers away from sons.
The sad history of one Buckinghamshire family says it all.
The Verneys had been the very model of a loving, companionable, gentry family.
But they were torn apart in this crisis. Ralph had sat next to his father during the 1640 Parliaments,
but now he not only expressed support for the Parliamentary cause,
but swore the oath required of all members after the militia ordinance.
Now, oaths were very serious things in the 17th century.
Taking this one split Ralph not only from his father, but from his hothead younger, Royalist brother Edmund
who absolutely failed to see why Ralph should not be honouring not only his father, but the King.
And yet, and yet, the Verneys did remain a family.
Ralph had made his vow to Parliament,
but his father felt under no less an obligation to Charles.
This bond of personal loyalty held despite Edmund having little enthusiasm for the King's actions.
I do not like the quarrel and do heartily wish the King WOULD yield and consent to what they desire
so that MY conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master.
I have eaten his bread and served him near 30 years
and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him.
In the third week of August 1642, Charles raised his standard. The Rubicon had been crossed.
The honour of holding Charles's personal flag in the battle fell to Sir Edmund Verney.
He swore only death would prise it from his hands.
By the time the Royalist army arrived at Edgehill, its prospects had been transformed.
It was now about 20,000 strong,
about 14,000 of whom took up position on the ridge in the early afternoon of October the 22nd.
At the top of the hill were the King and his two sons -
Charles, the Prince of Wales, and the nine-year-old James, Duke of York -
along with Prince Rupert and his toy poodle Boy.
It was here that Charles I planted his flag.
In mid-afternoon, the commander of the Parliamentary army,
the Earl of Essex, began to cannonade the Royalist infantry.
Balls thudded and hissed, taking a life here, a limb there.
Then Prince Rupert led his cavalry forward down the hill.
For the men in the Parliament lines, watching a distant trot turn into a canter and then a charge
and seeing their own muskets have no effect on the hurtling horsemen,
the moment of truth had arrived.
War slammed into them.
Big, dark horses. Bright, deadly steel. They panicked and broke,
Rupert's horsemen following fleeing troopers.
Rupert must have thought this was going to be easy.
But by now the Parliamentary infantry had crawled forward,
the two great phalanxes of pikemen heaving and pushing at each other
until they dropped of exhaustion.
Somewhere, amidst the smoke, fire and steel was Sir Edmund Verney.
The Royal standard clenched in his hand made him an obvious target.
They never even found his corpse.
# There lies a knight
# Slain under his shield
# With a down... #
In the following months, the war broke down into grim, grinding local conflicts.
Parliament held onto London. The King tried to nail down bases of strength in the north and south-west.
The south-western campaign was especially savage.
Towns like Exeter and Taunton changed hands. Local families were divided between brothers and cousins.
Old friends became new enemies. Two such opponents, men in every other respect virtually indistinguishable,
were William Waller, a Parliamentary general, and Ralph Hopton, a Royalist.
In a lull in the fighting, Hopton wrote to Waller asking for a meeting.
Waller felt he had to turn him down, but wrote back of the deep sorrow he felt at their broken friendship.
It's the classic lament of this terrible civil war.
To my noble friend Sir Ralph.
Sir, My affections to you are so unchangeable
that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person.
But I must be true to the cause wherein I serve.
That great God which is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad scene I go upon this service
and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy.
But I look upon it as an opus domine, which is enough to silence all passion in me.
We are both upon the stage and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy.
Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities, whatsoever the issue be.
I shall never relinquish the dear title of your most affectionated friend and faithful servant,
William Waller.
The scythe of mortality, always busy, never fussy, swept up all kinds and conditions of men.
Officers and rank and file. Musketeers and troopers.
Camp whores and sutlers.
Young apprentices who put on a helmet for the very first time
and hardened old mercenaries who had grown rusty.
Soldiers who had no idea where to get a pair of boots or anything to fill their bellies
and peasants who had absolutely nothing left to give them.
Drummer boys and buglers. Captains and cooks.
By the autumn of 1643, Parliament was utterly demoralised.
Bristol had fallen to the Royalists.
The King had established a court and a military government in Oxford.
Many Parliamentarians, weary of the poverty and slaughter, were making noises about peace.
Bulstrode Whitelock wrote...
Women are weary of their being robbed of children, of their chastity and their parents.
Is it not time for us to be weary of these discords and to use our utmost endeavours to put an end to them?
This was not what John Pym wanted to hear.
Even as he was dying, tortured by cancer of the bowel,
to squash a peace movement, he pulled off a last coup which would transform the war.
On September the 25th 1643, an alliance was struck between Parliament and the Scots -
the Solemn League And Covenant.
In 1637, Scotland had begun the resistance against Charles I.
Seven years later, the Covenant would all but finish him off.
At Marston Moor outside York on a wet afternoon in July 1644,
the full force of the Anglo-Scots alliance hammered the Royalist army.
It was the bloodiest battle of the war. The cream of Charles's army was annihilated.
Among the victors was the MP for Cambridge, a cavalry officer with iron in his soul.
His name was Oliver Cromwell
and he was, he thought, doing the Lord's work.
Cromwell was himself an East Anglian country gentleman,
but he knew that gentility was no use in THIS war, only effective fighting men.
After Edgehill, he had told John Hampden...
I had rather have a russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows
than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.
In the winter of 1644-45,
Cromwell and a Yorkshire general Sir Thomas Fairfax set about to make a new kind of army,
prepared to accept discipline in return for decent supplies of food, boots and shelter.
And it would be an army that knew what it was fighting for.
I fight for the preservation of our Parliament, in the being whereof,
under God, consists the glory and welfare of this kingdom.
At Naseby, in June 1645,
the two wings of the New Model Army closed in on a Royalist force about half their size.
At the end of the fighting, nothing was left of the Royal army,
except the dead left strewn across the fields.
The last Royalist strongholds were taken one by one. Bristol. Carlisle.
At Basing in Hampshire, one of the most vicious sieges in a war full of them
came to a long, drawn-out, bloody conclusion.
The war was over and Parliament had won.
So, finally, God HAD spoken.
Surely, even Charles could see that?
Surely, that would be an end to the bloodshed and the country could return to reasonableness?
There were many in Parliament aching for just this,
a settlement that would allow Charles to keep his throne,
some kind of return to what had been on the table back in 1642.
Surely, after all the blunders and bloodshed, the botched coups and the futile slaughters,
he would do the right thing, he would share power?
But Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional king.
He gagged at the idea of being reduced to a subaltern monarch, taking, not giving, orders.
The war might be over, for now, but for Charles the plotting was not.
For the next two years, in a bid to reverse his defeat, Charles tried to play off Parliament against the army,
the army against Parliament and the Scots against both.
Oliver Cromwell finally realised that, as long as Charles was around,
he was always going to be a rallying point for the discontented, and there were bound to be a lot of them.
But Cromwell was also enraged by Charles's presumption at defying the verdict of God,
so clearly revealed at Marston Moor and Naseby.
It was evident then that King Charles had to go. Whether or not he had to die, well, that was another matter.
A second civil war flared up, once more requiring from Cromwell all his military ruthlessness.
With his annihilation of the Royalist Scottish army in 1648 at Preston,
Charles's final hope had gone.
Any thought of conciliation with the King was now purest folly.
Those MPs who persisted in the idea that Charles could be reasoned with
now had a furious and vengeful army to answer to.
When Colonel Thomas Pride used his troops to weed out any MPs suspected of going soft on Charles,
the country realised there was a new power in the land.
This was the soldiers' show now. Britain belonged to them, and they belonged to God.
They had no desire to go back to a country of princes, lords and gentlemen. They wanted Jerusalem now.
And they wanted the biggest sinner of them all, the man of blood, Charles Stuart,
to feel the fire of God's wrath.
The final question could be addressed.
What should happen to Charles?
Cromwell agonised, prayed and wept, beseeched the Lord of Hosts to give him an answer.
In the end, politics not prayer decided it. The King would have to die if the country was ever to heal.
But not done away with in some dark corner.
No, Charles was going to be tried in the open and then beheaded in public.
Cut his head off with the crown on it.
This would be THE great turning point in British history.
The trial would kill one kind of Britain and give birth to another -
a republic, a kingless state of God.
For both Charles and Oliver Cromwell, the final act would become a theatre, a classroom, a debating chamber.
Charles would play the classic Stuart part of holy martyr -
as his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots had done - imposing, dignified, tragic.
But he knew as well as Oliver Cromwell did that the outcome was never in doubt. The King would die.
The only question was as what? Martyr or traitor?
What had he learned? In the end, the answer was nothing.
On January the 30th 1649, he was led out through the Banqueting House
onto the scaffold erected right outside in Whitehall.
The windows were all boarded up,
so Rubens's great anthem to the godlike omnipotence of kings was invisible in the gloom,
the light gone out of it.
But Charles didn't need the pictures. He had the script off by heart.
A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.
So the last words out of Charles I's mouth were...the truth.
With nothing left to lose for himself and everything to gain for his son,
he was not about to confuse anyone about the nature of the kingdom that God had ordained.
It was the same kingdom that Rubens had painted on that ceiling.
The anointed sovereign, answerable only to the Almighty,
laying down laws for the benefit of his subjects.
He offered justice and he expected obedience.
That was it. Take it or leave it.
It had always been about that, really.
All the pious hopes of turning Charles in to a parliamentary monarch were just so many castles in the air.
# There were three ravens
# Sat on a tree
# Down a down, hey down, hey down
# They were as black as they might be
# With a do-own... #