August, 1588.
Europe is convulsed by religious war, and Protestant England faces
the world's foremost Catholic power.
With the Spanish Armada
in the Channel and a large and fearsomely professional
Spanish army in the Low Countries, England is under dire threat.
On the 18th of August, 1588, Queen Elizabeth I came
to review her troops here at Tilbury.
She wore a breastplate and carried a sword and addressed them in words
that have echoed down the centuries.
"I know I have the body of a weak
"and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king,
"and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain
"or any prince of Europe should dare invade the border of my realm."
But, even as the Queen spoke, the moment of danger had passed.
The English fireships had broken up the Armada's invincible formation
off Calais, and coastal storms would do the rest.
Nevertheless, despite the defeat of the Spanish Armada,
England would not escape the horrors of religious war.
And some of those who'd heard Elizabeth at Tilbury
might live long enough to see
another English monarch raise his banner in defiance on English soil.
But, this time, the king's enemies would not be foreign princes,
but his own people.
Within a generation, the monarchy was to pass from the triumphs of
Elizabeth to the humiliation and defeat of her Stuart successors.
With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth's reputation
stood at a zenith at home and abroad.
Even the Pope, who'd help finance
the Armada expedition, expressed his admiration of her
and only regretted that they were unable to have children together.
Inheriting their combined talents,
their offspring would rule the world, he said.
Defending the realm was the most fundamental duty of
an English monarch and Elizabeth had acquitted herself admirably.
But Elizabeth inherited a crown, the imperial crown, whose power
had been greatly expanded by her father Henry VIII's decision
to make himself supreme head of the Church and control
the religion of his subjects as well as their everyday lives.
Could Elizabeth, mere woman that she was, maintain this lofty claim?
Known as the Royal Supremacy,
the Monarch's powers over religion proved to be a double-edged sword.
For the Crown had taken control of the Church at a time of
uniquely bitter religious conflict.
Protestant fought with Catholic, and different kinds of Protestant
fought with each other.
How could the monarch, as supreme head of the Church,
avoid being drawn into this conflict, which threatened to turn
quarrels about religion into disputes with the Crown?
Elizabeth did her best in establishing a Church of England
that was Protestant in its doctrines,
but Catholic in the appearance of its ceremonies and clerical dress.
Elizabeth's policy was successful in heading off
much Catholic opposition, but it had
the opposite effect of opening up divisions on the Protestant side
between those who wanted the rigorous, stripped-down
Protestantism of the Continent and Scotland, and those who followed
Elizabeth in her attachment to bishops and ceremonies.
This was not a struggle between government and opposition.
Rather, it was a schism within the highest ranks
of the Elizabethan establishment, with Elizabeth's chief minister
and eldest confidante, William Cecil, on one side,
and her Archbishop of Canterbury, William Whitgift, on the other.
The bad feeling between the two men
burst into the open in the Queen's own presence
and Elizabeth came down publicly and heavily on Whitgift's side.
"Matters of religion,"she insisted,
"were for her and her bishops alone."
Neither the council nor parliament had any say in the matter. Instead,
since her supremacy over the church came to her from God alone,
she was answerable only to God for how she chose to exercise it.
This was Henry VIII's own high view of the Royal Supremacy
and in sticking to it, Elizabeth showed herself
every inch her father's daughter.
But who would continue the difficult, but necessary,
balancing act of the middle way in religion after the ageing Elizabeth?
Her nearest blood relation was King James VI of Scotland.
Son of a Catholic mother, but brought up
in the rigorously Protestant kirk, the possibility of James's accession
aroused wildly contrasting hopes.
While he was still only a claimant, he could flatter them all.
But when, if, he became King of England, he would have to choose.
Crowned at the parish kirk in Stirling on July 29th, 1567,
James had been King of Scotland since he was a small boy.
He was also heir to his mother's claims to England.
James was the only child of Mary Queen of Scots'
disastrous marriage to Lord Darnley.
When he was barely a year old, his mother, widely suspected
of murdering his father, had been forced to flee to England
by a Protestant revolt.
But, cradle-king though he was,
James still needed rearing and educating like any other child.
This boy, of great rank and greater prospects still, was largely
brought up at Stirling Castle.
It was a strange, insecure, kind of childhood.
A series of regents,
who ruled Scotland on his behalf, were murdered in quick succession
and the boy's own life was more than once in danger.
In and among it all, James received an impressive education
at the hands of his principal tutor, George Buchanan.
Dour and self-opinionated, Buchanan was a leading figure
in the Scottish Presbyterian kirk, in which the supreme authority
was not the king, as in England, but the General Assembly of the Clergy.
Kings also, Buchanan believed, were mere servants of their people,
who could, and should, be punished if they misbehaved.
Buchanan's style as a teacher was important too.
Like many 16th-century teachers, Buchanan thought that
sparing the rod spoiled the child.
He set about beating and birching
his beliefs and learning into James with gusto.
This treatment indeed succeeded
in making James a considerable scholar.
But in terms of religion and politics, it produced only an equal
and opposite reaction, to which James was able to give expression
with unusual force and clarity.
And this is the result.
It's the True Lawe Of Free Monarchies,
which James wrote and published in 1598.
In it, he says succinctly, "Kings are called Gods.
"They are appointed by God and answerable only to God."
James grounded these assertions, just as Henry VIII had his claim to
the Royal Supremacy, in the biblical story of the Old Testament kings.
But James went beyond even Henry VIII, by claiming to be absolute
in affairs of State as well as those of the Church.
In 1601, Elizabeth's leading ministers
began to make moves to secure James's path to the English throne.
The matter became pressingduring the Christmas holidays of 1603,
when both Elizabeth's health and her temper suddenly worsened.
In mid-January, she moved to Richmond for a change of air,
but within a few weeks, she was clearly dying.
She lay on a pile of cushions
on the floor of her privy chamber, refusing to eat and unable to sleep.
Finally, she was carried to her bed,
became speechless and died in the small hours of the morning
of the 24th March after Archbishop Whitgift
had lulled her into her last sleep with his impassioned prayers.
Elizabeth had restored Protestantism,
preserved the Royal Supremacy,
protected her country from invasion,
and allowed nothing to challenge either her crown or her popularity.
Above all, her studiously broad Church religious settlement
had brought peace, though at the inevitable price
of alienating extremes of all-sorts.
The Great Queen dead, all eyes now turned to Scotland, and to James.
James VI of Scotland was proclaimed King James I of England within eight
hours of Elizabeth's death.
And his first parliament proclaimed that he was by "inherent birth right
"and lawful succession"
the inheritor of the imperial crown of England and Scotland.
It sounded good, but it was a
dangerous doctrine, since it implied that James's title to the throne was
above and beyond the law, as of course James himself,
as the author of the Trew Law Of Free Monarchies, firmly believed.
CHOIR SINGS
In April 1603, James arrived in London in triumph,
as the undoubted heir of his great, great grandfather, Henry VII.
Henry VII had commissioned the imperial crown here as the symbol
of the recovery of the monarchy
from the degradation of the Wars of the Roses.
Now James, the first ruler of all Britain, would endow it with
a larger significance still.
James's aim was to be "Rex pacificus", the peace-maker king.
He would reconcile Catholic and Protestant, thus re-establishing
Christian unity at home and abroad.
He would end England's debilitating war with Spain, and, above all,
he would terminate the ancient feud between England and Scotland,
and fuse instead the two warring kingdoms into a new,
greater, united realm of Britain.
It was an enormously ambitious programme and, to realise it, James,
in a strikingly modern gesture, summoned three major conferences
on peace, religion and union with Scotland.
The peace conference
and ensuing treaty at Somerset House were commemorated in this painting.
Through them, James ended the 20-year war with Catholic Spain.
It was an auspicious start
for James, the international peace-maker.
But the result, paradoxically, was trouble at home.
On the one hand, the Somerset House treaty meant that the hotter
Protestants were shocked to discover that England, now at peace with the
leading Catholic power,
would no longer be the champion of their fellow Protestants in Europe.
And, on the other hand,
the extremer Catholics were equally dismayed to find out that Spain
had not extracted toleration for Catholics as a price of the peace.
Abandoned abroad, such Catholics turned in desperation to self help
and direct action at home.
At the beginning of November 1605, James was shown a tip-off letter,
warning that the political establishment of England
would receive a terrible blow in the parliament he was due to open
on the 5th November.
James immediately guessed that the wording of the letter
pointed to an explosion.
But, in order to catch the plotters red-handed,
it was decided not to search the vaults under the parliament chamber
until the night of the 4th.
At 11pm, the search party entered and found a man standing guard
over a pile of firewood, 35 barrels of gunpowder
and with a fuse in his pocket.
His name was Guy Fawkes.
If the gunpowder had exploded as planned, it would have been the
terrorist bombing
to end all terrorist bombings, wiping out most of the British
royal family and the entire English political establishment.
Nevertheless, the immediate political consequences were small.
To James's credit, there was no widespread
persecution of Catholics in England and the peace with Spain held.
But, in the longer term, the plot played an important part
in the development of the Catholic myth in England.
The reality was that English Catholicism
was a beleaguered minority faith.
But, in the fevered imagination
of the hotter sort of Protestants, it became instead the fifth column
of a vast international politico-religious conspiracy
masterminded by the Pope in Rome and aiming not only
at the conversion of England, but at the subversion of English
Protestantism and English freedoms, and by the foulest possible means.
And so, at the second of James's
great conferences to determine the nature of the religious settlement
under the new king, those hot Protestants,
known pejoratively as Puritans, demanded that the English Church
be purged of what they regarded as its damnable Popish elements.
But they reckoned without the seductive powers
of the English monarchy and the English Royal Supremacy.
In Scotland, James VI had sat in the body of the Church to be admonished
by the preacher high in his pulpit as "God's silly vessel".
But in England, as here in the chapel royal at Hampton Court,
it was this same man, now known as King James I, who sat high above,
enthroned in this magnificent royal pew whilst the preacher,
under correction, went about his humbler task far below.
It was the most graphic possible illustration of the power of the
Royal Supremacy, which James was
determined to keep in England and, if he could, to extend to Scotland.
Instead, therefore, as the Puritans had hoped, of making the Church of
England more like the kirk in Scotland, James used the Hampton
Court conference to proclaim that he was satisfied with the Elizabethan
religious settlement as it stood and was resolved to keep it as it was.
He would not, any more than Elizabeth, soften
Archbishop Whitgift's hard line in
enforcing ceremonies and vestments, which the Puritans thought Popish.
And, above all, he would allow not an inch of movement away from
the English government of the Church by bishops towards a role
for presbyteries or assemblies of clergy, as in Scotland.
He even managed to subvert the Puritan demand for
a new translation of the Bible.
James eagerly agreed, since he detested this, the so-called
Geneva version of the Bible, which was then used by Presbyterians
in Scotland and Puritans in England, because of its marginal notes, which
showed typically a hot Protestant disrespect for kings and queens.
The King James version of the Bible on the other hand, as the large and
learned team of translators explained in this preface, was to
tread soberly the middle way between Popish persons on the one hand
and the self-conceited brethren, that is the puritans, on the other.
It was born out of a long-dead politico theological dispute
and it's the only classic ever to have been written by a committee.
Nevertheless, the King James version
of the Bible became the book which, more than any other,
shaped the English language and formed the English mind.
James's other lasting legacy was the union of the crowns of
England and Scotland.
And he set out his case for union in a speech from the throne
at the opening of his first English Parliament in March 1604.
His succession had united the kingdoms of England and Scotland,
ending the ancient division of the island of Britain.
Moreover, the King claimed, these divisions were largely in the mind.
Were not England and Scotland already united by a common language,
the Protestant religion and similar customs and manners?
Was not the border practically indistinguishable on the ground?
It was as though God had always intended the union to happen.
To resist union therefore, James concluded, was not simply
impolitic, but impious.
It was to put asunder kingdoms which God himself had joined together.
But the English Parliament,
impoliticly and impiously, decided to look the gift-horse of union
in the mouth.
Partly, it was a question of straightforward
anti-Scottish xenophobia.
But more fundamental causes were involved as well.
These centred on James's apparently
innocuous wish to rename the Anglo-Scottish kingdom "Britain".
But a new name meant a new kingdom.
It would be like, one MP said, a freshly-conquered territory
in the New World.
There would be no laws and no customs and James, by his own rules
in the Trew Law Of Free Monarchies, would be free to set himself up
as an absolute, supra-national Emperor of Great Britain.
The English Parliament, in contrast,
would be left as a mere provincial assembly.
It wasn't an enticing prospect for MPs who saw themselves
as the great council of the realm.
James's reaction was to try to enact the union symbolically,
using his own powers under the Royal Prerogative.
By proclamation, he assumed the title of King of Great Britain.
He re-designed the royal coat
of arms, with the lion of England balanced by the unicorn of Scotland.
And he insisted on a British flag, known as "The Jack"
after the Latin form of the name James, again by proclamation.
But, not content with symbols,
James also practiced a kind of union by stealth.
The English political elite had
prevented him from establishing an evenly balanced Anglo-Scots council.
But a King could do what he liked with his own court.
So, in revenge, James filled his bedchamber,
the inner ring of his court, almost exclusively with Scots.
It was a pleasure, since James took a more than fatherly interest in
Scots lads with well-turned legs and firm buttocks.
But it also suited him politically, since it compelled proud Englishmen
to sue for patronage to his Scots favourites
and they had to bribe them as well.
But James's policy of union by stealth had a fatal flaw.
He had inherited a substantial debt from Elizabeth.
He'd a large family to maintain and he wanted to continue pouring money
on his favourites and his pleasures.
For all this, the crown's so-called "ordinary income"
from land and custom duties was hopelessly inadequate.
There was no choice but to ask Parliament to vote money.
But the English Parliament
saw no reason why tax payers' money, their money, should end up in the
pockets of Scots favourites, and they said so rather crudely.
"How," asked one MP, "could the cistern of the Treasury
"be filled up if money continued to flow thence by private cocks?"
Cocks meant taps, and, well, what it means now.
So, James's project for British union remained an unfulfilled dream,
while his relations with Parliament turned into disaster.
By the time of his death, in 1625,
he had gone into a sort of internal exile, abandoning the task
of government, and secluding himself with his favourites and his horses.
Nevertheless, James managed, to stick to the middle ground
and hold together the warring extremes of the Church of England on the one hand and the
differing religious politics of England and Scotland on the other.
The result was a smooth succession
on both sides of the border of James's son Charles
to the glittering inheritance of the imperial crown of Great Britain.
But, within a decade and a half, Charles, by his intransigence
and his ineptitude, had thrown it all away.
Charles was crowned King of England
at Westminster Abbey on 2nd February, 1626.
For James, divine right had been an intellectual position, for Charles
it was an emotional and religious one.
This was immediately made clear by his coronation service, which,
meticulously choreographed by the up-and-coming cleric, William Laud,
lovingly reproduced all the splendour, solemnity
and sacred mysteries of the medieval Catholic rite.
The ceremony
is one of the best-documented as well as the best-organised of coronations,
thanks to the survival of these two service books here.
This is Charles's own copy of the coronation service,
which he used to follow the ceremony.
And this is Laud's version of the same text, which he used like
a kind of score to conduct the service.
He also made notes in the margins in a different coloured ink to record
unusual features of the ceremony as it actually took place.
These notes take us into Charles's own mind.
During the five-hour long ceremony,
the King was invested with the carefully preserved robes and regalia
of Edward the Confessor, the last sainted Anglo-Saxon king,
and Charles's attitude to these ancient relics was unique.
Here Laud notes that he insisted on placing his feet inside the sacred
buskins or sandals that were normally only touched against the royal leg,
and here, that he actually used, apparently for the only time
in the 1,500-year history of the coronation, the Anglo-Saxon
ivory comb to tidy his hair after he had been anointed on the head.
This wasn't mere idle curiosity. Instead, Charles was treating
each and every item of the regalia as a sacrament of monarchy.
With each touch of the precious oils and the ancient fabrics and jewels,
God was washing away the merely human in him
and leaving him purely, indefeasibly and absolutely a king.
Or so Charles at least thought.
Charles, as his behaviour at his coronation would suggest,
was an aesthete, a lover of beauty, elegance and order.
His tutor had been chosen
not for his scholarship but for his taste in fashion and Charles himself
grew up to be not only fastidious in dress and manners but also
the greatest connoisseur ever to have sat on the throne of England.
He built up a staggering collection of Old Master paintings
and he commissioned portraits of himself and his family
from the greatest contemporary artists like Sir Anthony van Dyck.
And it is van Dyck above all who shows us Charles as he wanted to be,
suggesting the grandeur of his kingship on the one hand
and the Christ-like wisdom
and self-sacrifice, with which he hoped to rule, on the other.
Like most royal heirs, Charles defined himself
by espousing policies that were the opposite of his father's.
He was pro-war, but Parliament, despite its vocal enthusiasm
for a Protestant crusade in Europe, was never prepared to vote enough tax
to make war a serious option.
Frustrated by Parliament's unwillingness to put its money
where its Protestant mouth was, Charles, instead of fighting
the Catholic French, married the French,
and of course Catholic, Princess Henrietta Maria in 1626.
On account of her religion,
the marriage was extremely unpopular with Parliament.
It didn't even succeed in cementing an alliance with France.
The result was that Charles soon found himself in the worst of all
possible worlds - without tax, with a Catholic wife and fighting
a hopeless war against both major Catholic powers, France and Spain.
Charles, looking for a scapegoat for the debacle,
found it in what he saw as Parliament's sullen obstructiveness.
Charles decided that parliaments were more trouble than they were worth
and that in future he would rule without them.
All over Europe, monarchs were dispensing with parliaments.
So, in attempting personal rule, Charles was simply following
the European trend. But, unlike his European counterparts,
Charles lacked the legal ability to tax his subjects at will.
Only a parliament could legislate new taxes.
So, like his father before him, Charles's only recourse was
to squeeze more revenue out of his customary rights and prerogatives.
Fortunately, he got a crack team of lawyers to help him.
The most ingenious was the attorney general, William Noy.
"I moil in the law"
was the contemporary anagram of his name, and he moiled,
that is, toiled or laboured,
in the legal archives to great effect,
but his masterpiece was ship money.
Ship money was a traditional levy imposed on the port towns to raise
vessels for the navy in time of war.
As, for example, against the Spanish Armada
in the heyday of Elizabethan England.
This was uncontroversial, even popular, but attorney general Noy
said that the law allowed the King to extend ship money from the ports
to the inland counties,
and to impose it in peacetime as well as during war.
All this at the King's mere say-so.
The extended ship money was first imposed in 1634
and within a year, it was yielding over 200,000 annually
and producing 90% of what the King demanded.
This was the holy grail, which had eluded English kings
ever since the Middle Ages -
A large-scale, permanent income which came in regularly,
year by year, without the bother of consulting parliaments.
The idea of taxing without parliamentary consent was bound
to cause grievance, and Charles exacerbated matters by attempting
religious innovation as well.
Whatever the formal rules of the Church of England,
much of the country had seen the development of a stripped-down,
fundamentalist Protestantism,
very little different in practice from the Scottish Kirk.
But a richer, more ceremonious vision had been preserved in a handful of
places, in particular in the chapels royal and the greater cathedrals.
Here there were choirs, organs and music, candles
and gold and silver plate on the communion tables
and rich vestments for the clergy.
William Laud, now Charles's Archbishop of Canterbury,
determined to use the Royal Supremacy
to impose this opulent religious tradition on the whole country.
He did so because he thought religion should be about sacraments
as well as sermons, and appeal to the senses as well as to the mind.
In England, the policy, despite some foot-dragging and protest,
aroused little overt resistance. Indeed, many welcomed it.
Emboldened, Charles and Laud decided
that it should be extended to Scotland as well.
Here, the Reformation had been far more thoroughgoing and radical
and the risks of change were correspondingly greater.
But Charles, confident as ever in his God-given rightness, was undeterred.
He decided that a barely modified version of the English Prayer Book
should be used throughout Scotland.
And he did so on his own personal authority, without consulting
either the Scottish Parliament or the General Assembly of the Kirk.
Charles was behaving as though
he were the supreme governor of the Scottish Kirk, indeed.
But would the Scottish Presbyterians accept his authority?
The answer came on Sunday 28th July, 1637, when the new prayer book
was used for the first time here in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh,
in the presence of the assembled Privy Council of Scotland.
But as soon as the dean had begun the service,
a great shout erupted from the crowds at the back of the church.
Heavy clasped bibles and folding stools were hurled at the councillors
and the clergy, and the rioters were only ejected from the church
with difficulty by the guards.
And even outside, they continued pounding on the doors
and pelting the windows until the service was finished.
Then the protest turned political.
And here in Greyfriars kirk in Edinburgh,
an influential group of citizens and noblemen drew up and signed
an undertaking to resist Charles and "the innovations and evils"
he had introduced into the Kirk.
Borrowing the name from God's solemn compact
with the Jews in the Old Testament,
the undertaking was known as The Covenant,
and its adherents were called Covenanters.
The scene at Greyfriars was repeated in churches all over the lowlands.
It was now the Covenanters, not Charles, who controlled Scotland.
Britain, which so far had escaped the wars of religion that had devastated
much of the rest of Europe, now faced the horrors of sectarian conflict
on its own soil.
By 1640, Charles's religious policies
had brought about a crisis throughout Britain.
Scotland was in the hands of the covenanters, whilst in England,
Charles's opponents drew strength from events north of the border.
But it was the recall of Parliament after 11 years,
which brought things to a head.
Charles had no choice, since only Parliament could vote the money
needed to suppress the covenanters,
but equally Parliament proved an unrivalled forum
for the King's opponents.
Most dangerous of these
was the hitherto obscure lawyer and MP for Tavistock, John Pym.
Pym believed that Charles's policies in Church and state were
the result of a Catholic conspiracy
to subvert the religion and liberties of England.
But instead of wasting his time in fruitless opposition,
he'd use the 11 years without a parliament
to build up a compelling dossier for his case.
In the 1630s Pym read voraciously,
followed every detail of politics at home and abroad
and noted down useful headings and extracts in this little book.
The result was that when Charles was forced to recall Parliament,
Pym was the best informed and the best prepared man in the House,
ready with both a rhetoric of opposition to
Charles's government and a plan of action for curbing Royal power.
Charles hoped to prey on English xenophobia to persuade Parliament
to impose an immediate vast tax to crush the traitorous Scots.
Pym countered by dragging up his list of political and religious grievances
against Charles's government of the 1630s.
Charles then tried to break the deadlock
by hinting at the surrender of Ship Money,
but the hint only emboldened Pym.
Finally Charles lost patience with a parliament which had, once again,
failed to deliver, and dissolved it after less than a month.
He would fight the Scots without a parliamentary grant.
It was a catastrophic decision.
These are the mighty ramparts at Berwick on Tweed,
the border fortress built by Henry VIII to protect England
from the Scots.
Expensively refortified by Charles, it stood as a seemingly impregnable
barrier between the two countries.
But in August 1640, the Scots army, large, well disciplined,
well armed and well provisioned,
took the daring decision to outflank Berwick,
cross the River Tweed further upstream
and head straight for Newcastle,
which, in contrast to Berwick, was only lightly defended.
Only the River Tyne now stood between the Scots and Newcastle.
They forced a crossing at Newburn and entered Newcastle, which had
been abandoned by its garrison in triumph on the 30th August.
Never had so many run from so few
and never had Scotland won a greater victory on English soil,
or one with such momentous consequences.
With the Scottish army encamped on English soil,
Charles was forced to call Parliament again.
Once again Charles faced Pym.
Pym cleverly focused on
the financial and constitutional grievances against Charles.
Here Parliament was united in its opposition and Charles was forced
into a wholesale surrender of Ship Money and the rest.
Boxed in by his opponents in the English Parliament,
Charles tried to break out by coming to terms with the Scots.
In the summer of 1641, he journeyed to Edinburgh
and in an astonishing change of front,
accepted the religious and political revolution of the last three years.
He worshipped in the Kirk, agreed to the abolition of Bishops
and filled the Government of Scotland
with the leading covenanters and his own sworn enemies.
The King also played several rounds of golf
and, reasonably confident that he'd solved one of his problems, returned
in an excellent mood to England.
Events in England also seemed to be moving in Charles's direction.
For, with Charles's surrender of Ship Money and the like,
the religious divisions of the Commons, between Puritans like Pym,
and those known as Episcopalians, who were sympathetic to Charles's
ceremonious religion, were opening up.
Pym tried to whip his troops into line by forcing
'The Grand Remonstrance' to the vote.
This was a searing condemnation of Charles's policies in state,
and especially in Church.
These amounted, the Remonstrance claimed,
to an all-embracing Catholic conspiracy
to subvert the religion and liberties of England.
The King himself, it was careful to point out,
had only been the unwitting agent of the conspiracy.
Nevertheless, Charles's gullibility meant that he could never be trusted
to choose his own advisers or to command his own troops again.
The Remonstrance was nominally addressed to the King.
But in fact, it was a manifesto
for a constitutional revolution at least,
perhaps even for an armed revolt.
The Remonstrance was also bitterly divisive
and after days of acrimonious debate,
it was only passed by 159 votes to 148.
A bare majority of 11.
The vote showed that the broad-based opposition to Charles had broken up.
And the more Pym pushed the Puritan attack on Charles's Church,
the more his majority risked disappearing entirely.
But then Charles over-reached himself.
Convinced, probably correctly, that amongst MPs were traitors,
who colluded with the invading Scots,
Charles determined to bring five members of Parliament, including Pym,
to trial on charges of High Treason.
On 4th January 1642, King Charles strode into the chamber
of the House of Commons to arrest his principal opponents.
His guards stood outside, fingering their weapons
as, in an uneasy silence, the King sat himself in the Speaker's chair.
"Where are the five members?" the King demanded, calling them by name.
In response, the Speaker fell on his knees,
protesting that he could answer only as the House directed him.
In fact, the five members, forewarned of the King's movements,
had made good their escape by boat
from the back of the Palace of Westminster
as Charles and his guards had entered on the landward side at the front.
Instead, it was Charles himself who had walked into a trap.
By trying to seize the five members by force, he'd shown himself to be
a violent tyrant.
By failing, he'd revealed himself to be impotent.
As Charles left the Chamber empty-handed,
he murmured disconsolately, "All my birds have flown."
So too had most of his power.
Battle lines were now drawn up.
Charles's violent ill-thought-out gesture not only preserved Pym's
parliamentary majority, but also turned London
decisively against the King.
In the country, however, Pym's increasingly extreme
Puritan attack on the Church won Charles a devoted following.
But in fact Charles was no longer really King of Great Britain,
or even of England.
Instead he was only the leader of a faction.
For history had come almost full circle.
The attempt to expand the powers of the imperial crown
so as that it ruled both Church and state,
and Scotland as well as England, had backfired.
Instead England was about to return
to the factional strife of the Wars of the Roses
and Britain to the national struggles
of the Anglo-Scottish wars.
And it began at Nottingham when Charles raised his standard
in a war against his parliament and half his people.
Subtitles by BBC Broadcast