A History of Britain (2000) s02e02 Episode Script
Revolutions
1 On January 30th, 1649, the English killed their king.
It had happened before - all those Edwards and Richards done in by their subjects.
But this was different.
The British monarchy itself had been exterminated.
Now there was just the people and its parliament, the keepers of the liberties of England.
What use was freedom when you were frightened? What the people really wanted to know was - who would keep them safe? Who'd stop the soldiers burning and pillaging, allow people to sleep quietly in their beds? Who'd protect them from the wars of religion and politics which seemed to go on and on and on? Would it be parliament or would it be a great general like Oliver Cromwell? "It doesn't matter," said hard-headed philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a royalist who'd come back to Cromwell's England.
"What the country needs is a strong ruler "who embodies ALL the people.
"Whatever or whoever can save the country from anarchy, "whatever can save you from yourselves.
"Never mind about what's right or wrong.
"Put yourself in the hands of the power that protects, "the all-powerful Leviathan.
" If that's Oliver Cromwell, then so be it.
It's the reasonable thing to do.
The Scots, the English and the Irish were not about to be reasonable.
They were much too busy being righteous.
Over the next half century, righteousness would kill a lot of the British.
At the end, reason would appear, but not before a lot of tears had been shed.
Tears of rapture and tears of grief.
Not everyone was lying awake at night biting their nails about the plight of kingless Britain.
For many, this was the dawn of a new age.
No one had foreseen this during the civil wars, but in giving them victory, the Almighty had shown them that Albion must be turned into Jerusalem.
He had lain the Stuart kings in the dust.
The only king to follow now was King Jesus, and the only true government that of his saints.
Let them sing aloud, let the high praise of God be in their mouth and a two-edged sword in their hand! The kingdom of God was at hand, the most blessed revolution of all.
No one was more convinced of this than Albion's holy warrior - Oliver Cromwell.
Religion was not at first the thing contended for, but God brought it to that issue and at last it proved that which was most dear to us.
Cromwell called himself "a seeker", and what he sought all his life was God's destiny for himself and for his country.
At first, he'd been innocent of the Lord's design.
For years, he'd led the life of an obscure East Anglian country gentleman.
As Cromwell began to make his way in the world, some sort of crisis happened to his modest fortune.
But what the world might have seen as misfortune was, through the cunning of the Almighty, his saving grace.
He underwent some kind of religious conversion.
The vanities were stripped away so he might be opened to the light.
Oh, I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light! This is true.
I hated Godliness, yet God had mercy on me.
Oh, the riches of His mercy! The sense that God had some special service for him made a new man of Cromwell.
He knew where he was going.
He knew what had to be done.
He must tear the sword out of the hands of the untrustworthy, Papist-loving king.
He went to war as a complete novice with no military experience.
His sense of divine appointment was his armour.
It made him supremely confident, cool under fire, but never reckless.
An aura of invincibility began to cling to him.
He became the driving force of the Godly Revolution.
When the vanquished king defied God's judgement, his blood was needed to expiate the crime.
But it became obvious that doing away with the monarch was no guarantee of doing away with the monarchy.
For if Charles couldn't be among his subjects in person, his proxy could.
The Greek word 'icon' means both an image and a copy.
The "Eikon Basilike", the spitting image of the king, appeared within a week of his execution.
It was an instant bestseller, going through 35 editions in a year, and it made Charles an imperishable martyr a latter-day Christ sacrificed for the sins of his people.
Like Christ, Charles would be resurrected wearing his heavenly crown and made flesh in the person of his son, Charles II, awaiting the call from exile in France.
The poet John Milton, a champion of the parliamentary Commonwealth, was hired to attack the cult of the king martyr as so much wicked idolatry, to persuade the fearful and gullible they didn't need a Charles I.
In fact, they didn't need any Stuart monarch.
"Look," he wanted to say, "just stop worrying about the dead king.
"You're the sovereign now.
Come to think of it, you've always been the sovereign.
"Kings have been yours to hire or fire.
" But when Cromwell and Milton told the people that it was time for them to govern themselves, they didn't, of course, mean to be taken literally.
What? Every jumped-up weaver or ploughman with some sixpenny book-learning appointing himself the magistrate of Mucking-on-the-Wold, granting himself the vote? Heaven forbid! That way lay chaos.
No, the people should put the government into the hands of the kind of men God saw fittest to exercise it - incorruptible men of substance and piety.
"Oh, I see," said free-born John Lilburne, the Leveller, an ex-army officer who wanted to level the distance between the mighty and the humble, the rich and the poor.
"The same kind of people who got us into this mess.
" We've all known a John Lilburne, some of us have even been John Lilburne.
First at the barricades, first to be arrested, won't shut up! But love him or hate him, you know he won't go away.
To Cromwell, he was a pain in the neck, a dangerous loudmouth, capable of wrecking discipline in the army.
Lilburne, for his part, detested the new regime.
All you intended when you set us fighting was to unhorse our old riders and tyrants so that you might get up and ride in their stead.
The soldiers read Freeborn John and believed they should have a vote.
Give them an inch and they take a mile and, pretty soon, they'd start believing their officers were the tyrants Lilburne and the Levellers said they were.
They had to be stopped.
An army was not, repeat not, a commune.
I tell you, you have no other way to deal with these men, but to break them or they will break you.
Yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders and frustrate and make void all that work that with so many years' industry, toil and pains you have done.
I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.
Off to the Tower went the Leveller leaders like so many traitors.
Then something astounding happened.
A petitioning campaign to demand the Levellers' release was mobilised in London by Leveller women.
For the Puritans, the cardinal virtues of women were silence and meekness.
But these women were shameless, obstinate, loud-mouthed, and, it has to admitted, brave.
Leveller women had always been involved in the movement's campaigns.
Elizabeth Lilburne had been politicised through her efforts to spring her husband from one prison or another.
Mary Overton had been brutally punished for printing and distributing her husband's tracts.
Tied to a cart and dragged through London's streets with her six-month-old baby, pelted and abused like a common whore.
But the most impassioned and articulate of the sisters was Katherine Chidley.
She started as a charismatic preacher and turned to politics in an attempt to make the Commonwealth understand the particular sufferings of her sex.
We have an equal share and interest with men in the Commonwealth, and it cannot be laid waste.
Considering that poverty, misery and famine, like a mighty torrent, is breaking in upon us and we are not able to see our children hang upon us and cry out for bread and not have wherewithal to feed them, we had rather die than see that day! This was not what Oliver Cromwell had expected from Jerusalem.
It got worse.
In May 1649, some hundreds of soldiers mutinied and tried to combine forces in Oxfordshire.
Cromwell rode hell for leather - 50 miles in a day - and caught them in the middle of the night at Burford.
One of the prisoners, Anthony Sedley, locked in the church, expecting the worst, carved his name into the font.
The next morning, three of his comrades were led into the churchyard and shot.
Then Oliver went off to get an honorary degree in law from Oxford.
He made sure that the mutinous soldiers were shipped off to a place where they could vent their frustration on someone else.
"Angry, are we?" was his line.
"Want to know who's to blame for prolonging the civil wars?" Say hello to the Antichrist across the Irish Sea.
The target of Cromwell's march through blood was an army of royalists holding out in Ireland in the name of the king's son.
It was as much Protestant as Catholic, but in his conviction they were the legions of the Devil, Cromwell was not about to make nice distinctions.
At Drogheda, on the main road between Dublin and Ulster, he made it only too clear what he had in mind.
There's no point side-stepping this horror, is there? This was Cromwell's war crime, an atrocity so hideous, it's contaminated Anglo-Irish history ever since.
We need to get right just what this atrocity was.
What it wasn't was the indiscriminate butchery of women and children.
No eye-witnesses ever claimed to have seen any such thing.
But what Cromwell did order, unhesitatingly and without any mercy, was, in any case, an act of unspeakable murder.
At least 3,000 royalist soldiers were butchered at Drogheda the vast majority after they had surrendered and disarmed.
At St Peter's Church, Cromwell had his soldiers burn the pews beneath the steeple to smoke out the defenders, who were incinerated in the flames.
The General saw no need to hang his head about the massacre.
We are come to break the power of lawless rebels who, having cast off the authority of England, live as enemies to human society, whose principles are to destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them.
We come by the assistance of God to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted right to it.
This is absolutely authentic Oliver Cromwell and today it makes for unbearable reading.
No, it's not the confession of a genocidal lunatic.
It IS the confession of a narrow-minded, pig-headed Protestant bigot and English imperialist, and that surely is bad enough.
Cromwell treated Ireland like the primitive colony he thought it was, moving the native Irish off their farms and using the land to pay his soldiers.
Before he could finish his pacification, if that's what he thought it was, another piece of unquiet Britain rose up to mock him.
For the Scots had invited the 20-year-old Charles II to come and be their king and went to war on his behalf.
Cromwell lured them into England in the summer of 1651.
The Scottish army found itself caught between two massively bigger forces.
At the Battle of Worcester, on the 3rd September, it went down to a ruinous and irreversible defeat.
Charles went on the run, hidden by royalist sympathisers until he could get smuggled out of the country.
(TRUMPET FANFARE) So when Oliver Cromwell returned to London in the autumn of 1651, it was as an English Caesar, the like of whom had not been seen since the days of Edward I.
If Cromwell was God's Englishman, it was because he felt in his marrow that England was God's true promised land and the best thing for Britain was that it become as English as possible.
The Stuart dream of the united Britain, of course, had been what had started the civil wars.
Now Cromwell had ended them by making that dream a reality.
Not as a united kingdom, but as a united republic of Great Britain.
But what kind of republic was it supposed to be? Cromwell knew the county was exhausted from almost 15 years of war.
It was time, as he said, "to heal and settle".
But this didn't mean business as usual.
Surely God didn't mean for so much blood and treasure to have been spilled only so that ungodly lawyers and money brokers could get richer? That seemed to be the way things were going under the parliament - the keeper of the liberties of England, as it styled itself.
It still sat as it had when its members were purged by the army to allow the king's trial to proceed, ridiculed by its enemies as the "Rump".
To Cromwell, the Rump was a monstrosity, a bastion of selfishness and greed, more like Sodom than Jerusalem.
Worst of all, it showed no signs at all of wanting ever to close down.
When it designed a bill to replace old members and keep itself going indefinitely, this was the last straw.
On April 20th, 1653, Cromwell marched down to Westminster in the company of a troop of musketeers.
Moses was descending from the mountain and he was not a happy prophet! At first, it seemed as though the Member for Cambridge might behave himself.
Cromwell sat in his usual seat, he doffed his hat, he asked the Speaker respectfully if he might address the House.
He even commended the Rump for its care of the public good, but as he warmed to his task, niceties were tossed aside and he began to berate the astounded members for their indifference to justice and to piety.
"I expect you think this is not parliamentary language," he said.
"Well, I confess, it is not, "and neither are you to expect any such from me.
" The hat went back on, always a very bad sign.
Cromwell marched up and down the chamber, shouting that the Lord had done with them and had chosen instruments more worthy of their calling.
Some poor soul tried to stop him in full spate, but Cromwell was in exterminating angel mode and brushed him aside contemptuously.
"You are no parliament!" he bellowed, "I say, you are no parliament!" With that, he called in the musketeers.
The boots entered heavily, noisily.
Parliament was shut down.
This was a depressingly modern moment, a classic coup d'état, in fact.
At this point, Cromwell crossed the line from bullying to outright dictatorship.
In so doing, he undid at a stroke the entire point of the war he himself had fought against the king's unparliamentary conduct.
Cromwell liked to claim he was striking a blow against "ambition" and "avarice", but what he really wounded, and fatally, was the Commonwealth itself.
This is the point at which Cromwell could've seized power, and everyone expected him to.
But Cromwell wasn't working for himself, he was working for God.
In parliament's place, he'd set up an assembly of men hand-picked for their piety.
It would be an assembly of saints, and his language was very different as he exhorted them to go about their business.
Love all the sheep, love the lambs.
Love all.
Tender all.
But mystical rapture and politics don't go well together.
At least, not in Britain.
In a few months, the unworkable assembly collapsed, its leaders begging Cromwell to put it out of its misery.
He duly obliged.
Now there seemed no alternative but to take the crown - to become Oliver I.
This was still a step too far for a man God had told to punish the haughtiness of kings.
So instead he chose to become a Lord Protector.
That had a good ring to it.
Authority, but not tyranny.
He was king in all but name, but a constitutional sovereign, ruling with a council and a newly-elected parliament.
His great hope was for a settling, but the truth was that the Protector himself was anything but settled about the direction he should take the country.
Should Britain be righteous or reasonable? It was a civil war he fought over and over again in his own head.
Squire Cromwell could see the virtues of a reasonable state of affairs.
Given a breathing space, the old world of counties was coming ever so cautiously back to life.
Magistrates were sitting at courts, gentlemen riding to hounds, war-damaged houses being repaired, children being married off, friends and neighbours asked to dinner.
And when some of those gentlemen were elected to the Protectorate parliaments, the old connections between Westminster and the counties, the secret of English government, were, at last, being put back together.
But the righteous side of Cromwell fretted that this return to an older way of doing things was too successful.
It was not so much healing as backsliding.
Royalism by the back door.
So in 1655, Cromwell turned his mastiffs loose.
The Major Generals.
They took righteousness out into the shires - the Protestant Taliban on horseback.
"Muffle the bell-ringers, snoop on the ale-houses, "lock up the fornicators cancel Christmas!" John Evelyn, ardent royalist and gentleman of letters, who grudgingly endured the Leviathan of the Cromwellian state, was one of countless people who were on the short end of the generals' bullying.
I went with my wife to London to celebrate Christmas Day, Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter Chapel.
As he gave us the Holy Sacrament, the chapel was surrounded by soldiers all the communicants and assembly surprised and kept prisoner by them, some in the house, others carried away! It was a public relations disaster for the Protectorate.
The prudent Cromwell reasserted himself over the pious and he got rid of the Major Generals in a hurry! There were some places where the two instincts worked together, and changed Britain as a result, and this is one of them - the Synagogue of Bevis Marks in London.
Historians sometimes complain that it's difficult to find hard evidence of any good that came out of the Protectorate.
Well, this is hard enough evidence for me.
For it was on these unforgiving backless oak benches that the first Jews to be admitted since the expulsion 360-odd years before parked their behinds.
Under the Protectorate, Jews were allowed finally to worship openly and to live openly in what became a little piece of early multi-cultural London.
It's Oliver Cromwell we have to thank for opening a new chapter of Anglo-Jewish history - my history.
(JEWISH RELIGIOUS SONG) His Apocalyptic timetable told him that the conversion of the Jews would herald the coming of the last days.
His business sense told him that, through their network in the Dutch and Spanish trading world, the Jews could be a priceless source of commercial and military intelligence.
Piety and pragmatism, those twin qualities, so often at odds inside Cromwell's personality, this time came together to make him, as far as the Jews were concerned, a true Lord Protector.
But not king.
In the end, and so unlike the king he had destroyed, Cromwell could never shake off his sense of unworthiness.
It was what saved him and Britain from a true dictatorship.
Oliver Cromwell believed he worked for God.
Real dictators think they are God.
It was those men who fancied themselves little gods - Charles I or the republican oligarchs - who most aroused Cromwell's contempt.
Simplicity was a word he used all the time about himself and it was the highest of moral compliments.
But to prolong the Protectorate, he needed to be more of a Leviathan than he could ever stomach.
That is both his exoneration and his failure.
It's one of the most extraordinary ironies of British history that Cromwell's Protectorate, demonised by both royalists and republicans alike, ultimately formed the blueprint for our constitutional monarchy - a chief executive who chose his government, but who were both answerable to a regularly elected parliament.
But Cromwell himself would not live to see this happen.
On September 3rd, 1658, the anniversary of the Battle of Worcester, Cromwell died while an immense black tempest was raging over England, ripping out trees and sending belfries crashing to the ground.
It was, the old wives said, the Devil coming for his soul.
What Oliver Cromwell left behind was not a workable political system, but a vision.
He may have been an angry, ruthless, overbearing man, perhaps even a manic depressive, but that vision was something of startling sweetness - a sighting of Jerusalem, a place where everyone would be free to receive Christ in their own way, provided that they did not disturb the peace and conscience of anybody else.
After all his marches and slaughters and fits of table-pounding red-faced fury, what, it turned out, Oliver Cromwell wanted for everyone was a quiet life.
But Catholics were excluded from this vision because for Cromwell, as for the country at large, Catholicism meant tyranny.
The Protector may have left the country safe from despots, but not from anarchy.
After his death, it returned with a vengeance, power swinging between soldiers and politicians, sleepless nights and nagging questions from ten years before.
Who'll keep us safe? Who do we obey? Where do we find a sovereign to protect us? It took another hard-headed soldier to see the only way to restore order.
General George Monck had been a royalist in the Civil War and a Cromwellian when it seemed that only the Protector could keep the peace.
He realised that, with the Lord Protector gone, there was only one person who could take his place.
That was a new king.
The irony about the restoration of Charles II was he came to the throne not because England needed a successor to Charles I.
He came to the throne because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.
There was universal rejoicing, bonfires and feasting.
The chaos brought by Cromwell's death was ending.
This new Charles seemed just what everyone had hoped for - a model of sweet reason.
That, at any rate, is what Samuel Pepys thought.
Pepys was a pure product of Cromwell's England.
He was present when the new king boarded his flagship home.
En route, the tall, dark-haired man strode up and down the quarterdeck telling the story of his escape after the Battle of Worcester.
Here was a king full of charisma.
He had magic.
(CROWDS CHEERING) But would his reason survive the emotions stirred by his return? The diarist John Evelyn recorded, with unrepentant royalism burning in his breast: This day came in His Majesty to London after a sad and long exile, with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy, the way strewn with flowers, the bells ringing.
I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.
And all this without one drop of blood and by that very army which had rebelled against him.
The king was crowned at Westminster on the 23rd April, 1661.
His reign was backdated to the day after his father had been beheaded.
But even before the king was crowned, there were those with long memories looking for revenge.
On January 30th, 1661, exactly 12 years after Charles I's severed head dropped into the straw, the remains of Cromwell and the regicides were dragged from their tombs and hanged from the gallows at Tyburn before being buried in a deep pit.
Over the next months, eleven other king-killers were hanged, drawn and quartered.
The old Cromwellians watched all this in tactful, furtive silence.
They wondered just how reasonable this new regime might actually be.
Killing the killjoys, though, Charles knew, would not damage his popularity.
Given a free vote, the people would, especially after the Major Generals, vote for pleasure over piety.
(FEMALE SINGER) Lavender's green, diddle-diddle And leading the dance, of course, was Charles himself, constitutionally incapable of being so churlish as to spurn any woman generous enough to invite him into her bed.
They all did.
This was the golden age of ogling.
If Puritan England had been governed by the ear, wide open to receive the word of God, the Restoration restored the sovereignty of the eye.
Its ruling passion was "scopophilia", the addiction of the gaze, whether eyeballing an outrageous wig, a plunging neckline, a louse caught in the lens of a microscope or the constellations of the stars.
Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle Lavender's green Charles's boyish enthusiasm for optical instruments suggested he might turn out to be a new kind of Stuart, whose vision dwelled not in cloudy realms of absolutism, but which was precisely focused, concerned to observe reality - political as well as physical.
He might, in fact, turn out to be that most unlikely thing - a reasonable Stuart king.
This was the Stuart for whom the physical world was his alpha and omega, who was earthy in his realism.
All too earthy, some thought, as they looked down in disgust at a theatre of indolence, punctuated by debauchery, that had become the court.
They were not so worldly, not so rational, as to be free of the fear that some day there would be a reckoning.
Some day soon, as it turned out.
In the summer of 1664, a comet appeared in the skies over England.
Its sallow tail could be seen with unprecedented clarity through the lens of the new telescopes owned, among others, by the king.
But what most people saw was disaster in the offing.
They had all read their almanacs.
They knew that the Apocalypse would be heralded by pestilence, fire and war.
A year later, thousands of bodies killed by bubonic plague were being tossed each week into the great pit of Aldgate and there was nothing science could do about it, except count the dead with the care demanded by modern statistics.
(MAN) My part of death No one so true Did share it Come away Come away Death One-sixth of London's population perished.
The infection ebbed with the onset of autumn, but the trepidation hung around for the number of the Beast was 666.
And sure enough, up from the smoky regions of Hell, in the first week of September, 1666, came the diabolical fire.
In the early hours of Sunday September 2nd, the Lord Mayor of London was woken to be told that a fire had started in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane.
His response was "Pish! A woman might piss it out!" As he snored on, the flames reached the warehouses flanking the Thames between the Tower and London Bridge, brimful of tallow, pitch and brandy.
A monstrous fireball came roaring and sucking out of the narrow streets, feeding on overhanging bays and gables.
In another hour, 200 to 300 houses had been swallowed by the flames.
John Evelyn, who'd said for years that overcrowded London was a disaster waiting to happen, took no joy in the fulfilment of his prophecy.
Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle.
God grant mine eyes that I never behold it again, who now saw 10,000 houses all in one flame.
The noise and crackle and thunder of the impetuous flames.
The shriek of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches like a hideous storm.
London was but is no more.
When the rain started, a week after the outbreak of the fire, allowing an early stocktaking, the scale of the devastation horrified even the pessimists.
13,200 houses had been destroyed, along with some of the most famous buildings of the city.
St Paul's Cathedral was in ruins.
The new Leviathan, it seemed, had no fire insurance.
Still, there were those who were determined that London would rise as a phoenix from its ashes and, like the reborn, rebuilt Rome, astonish the world.
This had long been on the mind of Christopher Wren, mathematician, architect and brilliant prodigy of the Royal Society.
So when Roman antiquities were found in the debris around St Paul's, one of them a tablet bearing the Latin inscription "Resurgam" - I shall arise, Wren took the message to heart.
London had once been a great Roman city and now would outdo the ancients, with great piazzas, broad avenues, calculated to afford geometrically satisfying vistas and up to fifty new churches.
And at its heart would be a new St Paul's, a cathedral the like of which had never been seen in northern Europe.
He built a giant wooden model to show the king and clergy just what they would be getting.
How could they not be awestruck by the huge dome that used the same technology as a microscope to flood the interior with light? But there was a problem.
Wren had designed his cathedral as a Greek cross, sacrificing the traditional floor plan of a Protestant church in favour of perfect acoustics and light.
You can almost hear the mystified, angry complaints of the reverends.
"Where exactly is the choir supposed to go? "How do we process up a nave which isn't there?" Mostly they said, "Call us old-fashioned, "but this looks suspiciously to us like a Catholic basilica.
"We'll be damned "if we're going to let St Paul's turn into St Peter's.
" When the king told him to go back to the drawing board, Wren's normally very dry eyes are said to have filled with tears.
He would have his chance to build his dome, but only when it was joined to a long nave, something resembling a traditional church.
The irony was, for all his Roman enthusiasm, Wren believed he was building a truly Protestant church but his timing was terrible.
Ever since the Reformation, Britain had been victim to anti-Catholic fear and, once again, in Charles's reign, it erupted.
Not all of it was misplaced.
Charles was suspected of having secret Catholics in his government, and so he did.
He was also suspected of making secret treaties with the militantly Catholic Louis XIV of France.
And so he had.
But there was worse much worse.
The king's own brother, James, Duke of York, had actually converted to the Roman Church and he made no secret of it.
With no children born to the king, the first Catholic ruler since Bloody Mary was an imminent prospect.
There was shivering in the shires.
A century before, Queen Elizabeth had been threatened with Catholic assassination plots.
The Jesuit lurking in the shadows was a permanent fixture in popular nightmare.
When an ex-Jesuit called Titus Oates concocted a pack of lies about a plot to murder the king, invite a French invasion and create a Catholic state under James, he tripped the Guy Fawkes alert.
And when the magistrate investigating the charges was found mysteriously murdered on Primrose Hill, it seemed obvious that Oates knew what he was talking about.
It set the jittery country right over the edge.
Anti-Catholic violence swept the country.
Riots, burnings, lynch mobs, kangaroo courts.
For some politicians, the ugly mood of the country was a golden opportunity to press their favourite cause.
James, Duke of York, should never be allowed to sit on the throne.
He had to be excluded.
Anything to stop the cycle of religious wars from breaking out again.
It was an extraordinary crisis in the history of the British monarchy.
At stake were not only the lives of hundreds of those victimised by all the lies and hysteria, but the fate of the polity itself.
Because to concede exclusion was to accept parliament had the right to judge who was fit or unfit to occupy the throne.
And that was a concession Charles II was absolutely not about to make.
Charles met the most serious crisis of his reign with his most powerful weapon - reason.
He offered a compromise.
His brother would be allowed to succeed if he agreed to be a private Catholic and not to lay a finger on the Church of England.
Riding the wave of paranoia, the newly elected parliament summoned to Oxford turned him down.
They assumed that memory was on their side, that Charles would remember the fate of his stubborn father, who'd triggered a war when he too had been suspected of being soft on Catholicism.
But historical memory is a double-edged sword.
(TRUMPET FANFARE) When the Commons met in the Great Hall of Christchurch to hear what they thought would be the royal capitulation, they found themselves instead confronted by a Leviathan in ermine.
"This is the king's will," he said.
"Take it or leave it.
" It was a breathtaking gamble.
Backed up by the House of Lords, Charles had left the exclusionists in the Commons no alternative but to go to war.
He was betting that the memory of the last round would be a deterrent.
He was right.
The tombs of the dead from Edgehill, Marston Moor and Worcester were still being carved.
That war began as a parliamentary protest and ended in Puritan crusade.
Who wanted that back? Not the exclusionists.
They blinked first.
James did get the keys to the kingdom when his brother died in 1685, and he inherited a new parliament with a massively royalist majority, along with widespread public sympathy.
Within three years, though, he had squandered it all.
James never had any intention of hiding his faith.
His Catholicism wasn't just a private comfort to be celebrated away from the public gaze.
No, James was going to be a visible Catholic king but he was playing a dangerous game.
When James tried to reverse anti-Catholic laws, pillars of the establishment - the country gentry and the Church - were horrified.
When the bishops complained, the king declared, "I shall find a way to do my business without you.
" The protesting bishops were locked up in the Tower.
James's timing was disastrous.
For he was doing all this when Louis XIV, the militantly Catholic King of France, was threatening Europe.
By January, 1688, James had managed to alienate all his natural allies and turn himself into a more dangerous version of his father, Charles I.
He was even filling the officer ranks of the army with Irish Catholics.
The only consolation was that, at 52, he had no son.
Next in line to the throne was his daughter Mary, a staunch Protestant, who'd married the Dutch prince, William of Orange, hero of the resistance to Louis XIV.
On June 10th, 1688, all this changed.
James's wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a boy, who was duly baptised with Roman rites.
Now, not only was the king Catholic, so was his dynasty.
What could be done? Well, something quite extraordinary.
Seven leading statesmen sent a message to Holland with an explosive request.
"Prince William," they asked, "would you mind invading Britain "and saving us from a Catholic king?" William of Orange wanted to save his country from Catholic despots, but the country he had in mind - first, foremost and always - was the Dutch Republic.
English politics were always a sideshow for William to the main event.
That was the great European war against Louis XIV.
What choice did he have? There would be British troops in that war.
To ensure they'd be fighting for him, not against him, 100 years after the Spanish Armada had failed to do the very same thing, William set out to conquer Britain.
He was nothing if not thorough.
60,000 copies of William's manifesto blanketed England in an effort to present the planned invasion as a response to a spontaneous uprising against the Catholic tyrant.
It was so persuasive that he succeeded in making James seem the foreigner in his own land and the Dutchman the true Brit.
The fate of the Armada was a sobering thought, so his Dutch invasion force made the Spanish one seem puny.
This time there were 600 vessels and up to 20,000 troops.
(WOMAN) Lero, lero, lilli burlero Lilli burlero, bullen a la Lero, lero, lilli burlero Lilli burlero, bullen a la He landed at Torbay on November 5th - Guy Fawkes Day.
Obviously, God was a Protestant! When he realised that this Protestant invasion was really going to oust him, James' courage failed him.
His resolution in meltdown, his nights haunted by the ghost of his daddy, he fled the kingdom.
William claimed that he'd come just to restore English liberties, but now he had Dutch soldiers in the streets, and if he decided to be king after all, who was going to say otherwise? In February 1689, William of Orange and Mary Stuart were proclaimed King and Queen of England.
But during the ceremony, something profoundly novel happened.
A Declaration of Rights was read out listing the conditions under which the new monarchs would be allowed to sit on the throne.
Parliament had changed the job description of the ruler.
It turned out that the country did not need Leviathan.
It wanted a chairman of the board, and Dutch William fitted that role to a tee.
William III would fight his wars by asking, not demanding funds from the elected representatives of the people.
Ruling together with parliament, his government looked remarkably like a reasonable version of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate.
History has called this a "Glorious Revolution".
It was probably neither, but afterwards, the British monarchy would never be the same again.
But the old monarchy had one last desperate play to make.
In March, 1689, James landed in Ireland with 20,000 French troops.
The Catholic Irish flocked to their king.
Like the English, they'd become pawns in someone else's chess game.
Outside Drogheda, two armies, two worlds, faced each other across the River Boyne.
One belonged to the old world of faith and fervour, the other, Dutch and German professionals, were part of a modern war machine.
No prizes for guessing who won.
Nobody.
(MAN) It is the patriotic duty of Irish men and Irish women to engage in that legitimate armed struggle.
We will never surrender! Never, never, never, never! (PEOPLE CHEERING) (NEWSPEAKER) I appeal to Unionists to engage fully in the search for a lasting peace.
I, too, am an Ulsterman and we don't need the British ministers to rule us
It had happened before - all those Edwards and Richards done in by their subjects.
But this was different.
The British monarchy itself had been exterminated.
Now there was just the people and its parliament, the keepers of the liberties of England.
What use was freedom when you were frightened? What the people really wanted to know was - who would keep them safe? Who'd stop the soldiers burning and pillaging, allow people to sleep quietly in their beds? Who'd protect them from the wars of religion and politics which seemed to go on and on and on? Would it be parliament or would it be a great general like Oliver Cromwell? "It doesn't matter," said hard-headed philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a royalist who'd come back to Cromwell's England.
"What the country needs is a strong ruler "who embodies ALL the people.
"Whatever or whoever can save the country from anarchy, "whatever can save you from yourselves.
"Never mind about what's right or wrong.
"Put yourself in the hands of the power that protects, "the all-powerful Leviathan.
" If that's Oliver Cromwell, then so be it.
It's the reasonable thing to do.
The Scots, the English and the Irish were not about to be reasonable.
They were much too busy being righteous.
Over the next half century, righteousness would kill a lot of the British.
At the end, reason would appear, but not before a lot of tears had been shed.
Tears of rapture and tears of grief.
Not everyone was lying awake at night biting their nails about the plight of kingless Britain.
For many, this was the dawn of a new age.
No one had foreseen this during the civil wars, but in giving them victory, the Almighty had shown them that Albion must be turned into Jerusalem.
He had lain the Stuart kings in the dust.
The only king to follow now was King Jesus, and the only true government that of his saints.
Let them sing aloud, let the high praise of God be in their mouth and a two-edged sword in their hand! The kingdom of God was at hand, the most blessed revolution of all.
No one was more convinced of this than Albion's holy warrior - Oliver Cromwell.
Religion was not at first the thing contended for, but God brought it to that issue and at last it proved that which was most dear to us.
Cromwell called himself "a seeker", and what he sought all his life was God's destiny for himself and for his country.
At first, he'd been innocent of the Lord's design.
For years, he'd led the life of an obscure East Anglian country gentleman.
As Cromwell began to make his way in the world, some sort of crisis happened to his modest fortune.
But what the world might have seen as misfortune was, through the cunning of the Almighty, his saving grace.
He underwent some kind of religious conversion.
The vanities were stripped away so he might be opened to the light.
Oh, I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light! This is true.
I hated Godliness, yet God had mercy on me.
Oh, the riches of His mercy! The sense that God had some special service for him made a new man of Cromwell.
He knew where he was going.
He knew what had to be done.
He must tear the sword out of the hands of the untrustworthy, Papist-loving king.
He went to war as a complete novice with no military experience.
His sense of divine appointment was his armour.
It made him supremely confident, cool under fire, but never reckless.
An aura of invincibility began to cling to him.
He became the driving force of the Godly Revolution.
When the vanquished king defied God's judgement, his blood was needed to expiate the crime.
But it became obvious that doing away with the monarch was no guarantee of doing away with the monarchy.
For if Charles couldn't be among his subjects in person, his proxy could.
The Greek word 'icon' means both an image and a copy.
The "Eikon Basilike", the spitting image of the king, appeared within a week of his execution.
It was an instant bestseller, going through 35 editions in a year, and it made Charles an imperishable martyr a latter-day Christ sacrificed for the sins of his people.
Like Christ, Charles would be resurrected wearing his heavenly crown and made flesh in the person of his son, Charles II, awaiting the call from exile in France.
The poet John Milton, a champion of the parliamentary Commonwealth, was hired to attack the cult of the king martyr as so much wicked idolatry, to persuade the fearful and gullible they didn't need a Charles I.
In fact, they didn't need any Stuart monarch.
"Look," he wanted to say, "just stop worrying about the dead king.
"You're the sovereign now.
Come to think of it, you've always been the sovereign.
"Kings have been yours to hire or fire.
" But when Cromwell and Milton told the people that it was time for them to govern themselves, they didn't, of course, mean to be taken literally.
What? Every jumped-up weaver or ploughman with some sixpenny book-learning appointing himself the magistrate of Mucking-on-the-Wold, granting himself the vote? Heaven forbid! That way lay chaos.
No, the people should put the government into the hands of the kind of men God saw fittest to exercise it - incorruptible men of substance and piety.
"Oh, I see," said free-born John Lilburne, the Leveller, an ex-army officer who wanted to level the distance between the mighty and the humble, the rich and the poor.
"The same kind of people who got us into this mess.
" We've all known a John Lilburne, some of us have even been John Lilburne.
First at the barricades, first to be arrested, won't shut up! But love him or hate him, you know he won't go away.
To Cromwell, he was a pain in the neck, a dangerous loudmouth, capable of wrecking discipline in the army.
Lilburne, for his part, detested the new regime.
All you intended when you set us fighting was to unhorse our old riders and tyrants so that you might get up and ride in their stead.
The soldiers read Freeborn John and believed they should have a vote.
Give them an inch and they take a mile and, pretty soon, they'd start believing their officers were the tyrants Lilburne and the Levellers said they were.
They had to be stopped.
An army was not, repeat not, a commune.
I tell you, you have no other way to deal with these men, but to break them or they will break you.
Yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your heads and shoulders and frustrate and make void all that work that with so many years' industry, toil and pains you have done.
I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.
Off to the Tower went the Leveller leaders like so many traitors.
Then something astounding happened.
A petitioning campaign to demand the Levellers' release was mobilised in London by Leveller women.
For the Puritans, the cardinal virtues of women were silence and meekness.
But these women were shameless, obstinate, loud-mouthed, and, it has to admitted, brave.
Leveller women had always been involved in the movement's campaigns.
Elizabeth Lilburne had been politicised through her efforts to spring her husband from one prison or another.
Mary Overton had been brutally punished for printing and distributing her husband's tracts.
Tied to a cart and dragged through London's streets with her six-month-old baby, pelted and abused like a common whore.
But the most impassioned and articulate of the sisters was Katherine Chidley.
She started as a charismatic preacher and turned to politics in an attempt to make the Commonwealth understand the particular sufferings of her sex.
We have an equal share and interest with men in the Commonwealth, and it cannot be laid waste.
Considering that poverty, misery and famine, like a mighty torrent, is breaking in upon us and we are not able to see our children hang upon us and cry out for bread and not have wherewithal to feed them, we had rather die than see that day! This was not what Oliver Cromwell had expected from Jerusalem.
It got worse.
In May 1649, some hundreds of soldiers mutinied and tried to combine forces in Oxfordshire.
Cromwell rode hell for leather - 50 miles in a day - and caught them in the middle of the night at Burford.
One of the prisoners, Anthony Sedley, locked in the church, expecting the worst, carved his name into the font.
The next morning, three of his comrades were led into the churchyard and shot.
Then Oliver went off to get an honorary degree in law from Oxford.
He made sure that the mutinous soldiers were shipped off to a place where they could vent their frustration on someone else.
"Angry, are we?" was his line.
"Want to know who's to blame for prolonging the civil wars?" Say hello to the Antichrist across the Irish Sea.
The target of Cromwell's march through blood was an army of royalists holding out in Ireland in the name of the king's son.
It was as much Protestant as Catholic, but in his conviction they were the legions of the Devil, Cromwell was not about to make nice distinctions.
At Drogheda, on the main road between Dublin and Ulster, he made it only too clear what he had in mind.
There's no point side-stepping this horror, is there? This was Cromwell's war crime, an atrocity so hideous, it's contaminated Anglo-Irish history ever since.
We need to get right just what this atrocity was.
What it wasn't was the indiscriminate butchery of women and children.
No eye-witnesses ever claimed to have seen any such thing.
But what Cromwell did order, unhesitatingly and without any mercy, was, in any case, an act of unspeakable murder.
At least 3,000 royalist soldiers were butchered at Drogheda the vast majority after they had surrendered and disarmed.
At St Peter's Church, Cromwell had his soldiers burn the pews beneath the steeple to smoke out the defenders, who were incinerated in the flames.
The General saw no need to hang his head about the massacre.
We are come to break the power of lawless rebels who, having cast off the authority of England, live as enemies to human society, whose principles are to destroy and subjugate all men not complying with them.
We come by the assistance of God to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted right to it.
This is absolutely authentic Oliver Cromwell and today it makes for unbearable reading.
No, it's not the confession of a genocidal lunatic.
It IS the confession of a narrow-minded, pig-headed Protestant bigot and English imperialist, and that surely is bad enough.
Cromwell treated Ireland like the primitive colony he thought it was, moving the native Irish off their farms and using the land to pay his soldiers.
Before he could finish his pacification, if that's what he thought it was, another piece of unquiet Britain rose up to mock him.
For the Scots had invited the 20-year-old Charles II to come and be their king and went to war on his behalf.
Cromwell lured them into England in the summer of 1651.
The Scottish army found itself caught between two massively bigger forces.
At the Battle of Worcester, on the 3rd September, it went down to a ruinous and irreversible defeat.
Charles went on the run, hidden by royalist sympathisers until he could get smuggled out of the country.
(TRUMPET FANFARE) So when Oliver Cromwell returned to London in the autumn of 1651, it was as an English Caesar, the like of whom had not been seen since the days of Edward I.
If Cromwell was God's Englishman, it was because he felt in his marrow that England was God's true promised land and the best thing for Britain was that it become as English as possible.
The Stuart dream of the united Britain, of course, had been what had started the civil wars.
Now Cromwell had ended them by making that dream a reality.
Not as a united kingdom, but as a united republic of Great Britain.
But what kind of republic was it supposed to be? Cromwell knew the county was exhausted from almost 15 years of war.
It was time, as he said, "to heal and settle".
But this didn't mean business as usual.
Surely God didn't mean for so much blood and treasure to have been spilled only so that ungodly lawyers and money brokers could get richer? That seemed to be the way things were going under the parliament - the keeper of the liberties of England, as it styled itself.
It still sat as it had when its members were purged by the army to allow the king's trial to proceed, ridiculed by its enemies as the "Rump".
To Cromwell, the Rump was a monstrosity, a bastion of selfishness and greed, more like Sodom than Jerusalem.
Worst of all, it showed no signs at all of wanting ever to close down.
When it designed a bill to replace old members and keep itself going indefinitely, this was the last straw.
On April 20th, 1653, Cromwell marched down to Westminster in the company of a troop of musketeers.
Moses was descending from the mountain and he was not a happy prophet! At first, it seemed as though the Member for Cambridge might behave himself.
Cromwell sat in his usual seat, he doffed his hat, he asked the Speaker respectfully if he might address the House.
He even commended the Rump for its care of the public good, but as he warmed to his task, niceties were tossed aside and he began to berate the astounded members for their indifference to justice and to piety.
"I expect you think this is not parliamentary language," he said.
"Well, I confess, it is not, "and neither are you to expect any such from me.
" The hat went back on, always a very bad sign.
Cromwell marched up and down the chamber, shouting that the Lord had done with them and had chosen instruments more worthy of their calling.
Some poor soul tried to stop him in full spate, but Cromwell was in exterminating angel mode and brushed him aside contemptuously.
"You are no parliament!" he bellowed, "I say, you are no parliament!" With that, he called in the musketeers.
The boots entered heavily, noisily.
Parliament was shut down.
This was a depressingly modern moment, a classic coup d'état, in fact.
At this point, Cromwell crossed the line from bullying to outright dictatorship.
In so doing, he undid at a stroke the entire point of the war he himself had fought against the king's unparliamentary conduct.
Cromwell liked to claim he was striking a blow against "ambition" and "avarice", but what he really wounded, and fatally, was the Commonwealth itself.
This is the point at which Cromwell could've seized power, and everyone expected him to.
But Cromwell wasn't working for himself, he was working for God.
In parliament's place, he'd set up an assembly of men hand-picked for their piety.
It would be an assembly of saints, and his language was very different as he exhorted them to go about their business.
Love all the sheep, love the lambs.
Love all.
Tender all.
But mystical rapture and politics don't go well together.
At least, not in Britain.
In a few months, the unworkable assembly collapsed, its leaders begging Cromwell to put it out of its misery.
He duly obliged.
Now there seemed no alternative but to take the crown - to become Oliver I.
This was still a step too far for a man God had told to punish the haughtiness of kings.
So instead he chose to become a Lord Protector.
That had a good ring to it.
Authority, but not tyranny.
He was king in all but name, but a constitutional sovereign, ruling with a council and a newly-elected parliament.
His great hope was for a settling, but the truth was that the Protector himself was anything but settled about the direction he should take the country.
Should Britain be righteous or reasonable? It was a civil war he fought over and over again in his own head.
Squire Cromwell could see the virtues of a reasonable state of affairs.
Given a breathing space, the old world of counties was coming ever so cautiously back to life.
Magistrates were sitting at courts, gentlemen riding to hounds, war-damaged houses being repaired, children being married off, friends and neighbours asked to dinner.
And when some of those gentlemen were elected to the Protectorate parliaments, the old connections between Westminster and the counties, the secret of English government, were, at last, being put back together.
But the righteous side of Cromwell fretted that this return to an older way of doing things was too successful.
It was not so much healing as backsliding.
Royalism by the back door.
So in 1655, Cromwell turned his mastiffs loose.
The Major Generals.
They took righteousness out into the shires - the Protestant Taliban on horseback.
"Muffle the bell-ringers, snoop on the ale-houses, "lock up the fornicators cancel Christmas!" John Evelyn, ardent royalist and gentleman of letters, who grudgingly endured the Leviathan of the Cromwellian state, was one of countless people who were on the short end of the generals' bullying.
I went with my wife to London to celebrate Christmas Day, Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter Chapel.
As he gave us the Holy Sacrament, the chapel was surrounded by soldiers all the communicants and assembly surprised and kept prisoner by them, some in the house, others carried away! It was a public relations disaster for the Protectorate.
The prudent Cromwell reasserted himself over the pious and he got rid of the Major Generals in a hurry! There were some places where the two instincts worked together, and changed Britain as a result, and this is one of them - the Synagogue of Bevis Marks in London.
Historians sometimes complain that it's difficult to find hard evidence of any good that came out of the Protectorate.
Well, this is hard enough evidence for me.
For it was on these unforgiving backless oak benches that the first Jews to be admitted since the expulsion 360-odd years before parked their behinds.
Under the Protectorate, Jews were allowed finally to worship openly and to live openly in what became a little piece of early multi-cultural London.
It's Oliver Cromwell we have to thank for opening a new chapter of Anglo-Jewish history - my history.
(JEWISH RELIGIOUS SONG) His Apocalyptic timetable told him that the conversion of the Jews would herald the coming of the last days.
His business sense told him that, through their network in the Dutch and Spanish trading world, the Jews could be a priceless source of commercial and military intelligence.
Piety and pragmatism, those twin qualities, so often at odds inside Cromwell's personality, this time came together to make him, as far as the Jews were concerned, a true Lord Protector.
But not king.
In the end, and so unlike the king he had destroyed, Cromwell could never shake off his sense of unworthiness.
It was what saved him and Britain from a true dictatorship.
Oliver Cromwell believed he worked for God.
Real dictators think they are God.
It was those men who fancied themselves little gods - Charles I or the republican oligarchs - who most aroused Cromwell's contempt.
Simplicity was a word he used all the time about himself and it was the highest of moral compliments.
But to prolong the Protectorate, he needed to be more of a Leviathan than he could ever stomach.
That is both his exoneration and his failure.
It's one of the most extraordinary ironies of British history that Cromwell's Protectorate, demonised by both royalists and republicans alike, ultimately formed the blueprint for our constitutional monarchy - a chief executive who chose his government, but who were both answerable to a regularly elected parliament.
But Cromwell himself would not live to see this happen.
On September 3rd, 1658, the anniversary of the Battle of Worcester, Cromwell died while an immense black tempest was raging over England, ripping out trees and sending belfries crashing to the ground.
It was, the old wives said, the Devil coming for his soul.
What Oliver Cromwell left behind was not a workable political system, but a vision.
He may have been an angry, ruthless, overbearing man, perhaps even a manic depressive, but that vision was something of startling sweetness - a sighting of Jerusalem, a place where everyone would be free to receive Christ in their own way, provided that they did not disturb the peace and conscience of anybody else.
After all his marches and slaughters and fits of table-pounding red-faced fury, what, it turned out, Oliver Cromwell wanted for everyone was a quiet life.
But Catholics were excluded from this vision because for Cromwell, as for the country at large, Catholicism meant tyranny.
The Protector may have left the country safe from despots, but not from anarchy.
After his death, it returned with a vengeance, power swinging between soldiers and politicians, sleepless nights and nagging questions from ten years before.
Who'll keep us safe? Who do we obey? Where do we find a sovereign to protect us? It took another hard-headed soldier to see the only way to restore order.
General George Monck had been a royalist in the Civil War and a Cromwellian when it seemed that only the Protector could keep the peace.
He realised that, with the Lord Protector gone, there was only one person who could take his place.
That was a new king.
The irony about the restoration of Charles II was he came to the throne not because England needed a successor to Charles I.
He came to the throne because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.
There was universal rejoicing, bonfires and feasting.
The chaos brought by Cromwell's death was ending.
This new Charles seemed just what everyone had hoped for - a model of sweet reason.
That, at any rate, is what Samuel Pepys thought.
Pepys was a pure product of Cromwell's England.
He was present when the new king boarded his flagship home.
En route, the tall, dark-haired man strode up and down the quarterdeck telling the story of his escape after the Battle of Worcester.
Here was a king full of charisma.
He had magic.
(CROWDS CHEERING) But would his reason survive the emotions stirred by his return? The diarist John Evelyn recorded, with unrepentant royalism burning in his breast: This day came in His Majesty to London after a sad and long exile, with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy, the way strewn with flowers, the bells ringing.
I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.
And all this without one drop of blood and by that very army which had rebelled against him.
The king was crowned at Westminster on the 23rd April, 1661.
His reign was backdated to the day after his father had been beheaded.
But even before the king was crowned, there were those with long memories looking for revenge.
On January 30th, 1661, exactly 12 years after Charles I's severed head dropped into the straw, the remains of Cromwell and the regicides were dragged from their tombs and hanged from the gallows at Tyburn before being buried in a deep pit.
Over the next months, eleven other king-killers were hanged, drawn and quartered.
The old Cromwellians watched all this in tactful, furtive silence.
They wondered just how reasonable this new regime might actually be.
Killing the killjoys, though, Charles knew, would not damage his popularity.
Given a free vote, the people would, especially after the Major Generals, vote for pleasure over piety.
(FEMALE SINGER) Lavender's green, diddle-diddle And leading the dance, of course, was Charles himself, constitutionally incapable of being so churlish as to spurn any woman generous enough to invite him into her bed.
They all did.
This was the golden age of ogling.
If Puritan England had been governed by the ear, wide open to receive the word of God, the Restoration restored the sovereignty of the eye.
Its ruling passion was "scopophilia", the addiction of the gaze, whether eyeballing an outrageous wig, a plunging neckline, a louse caught in the lens of a microscope or the constellations of the stars.
Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle Lavender's green Charles's boyish enthusiasm for optical instruments suggested he might turn out to be a new kind of Stuart, whose vision dwelled not in cloudy realms of absolutism, but which was precisely focused, concerned to observe reality - political as well as physical.
He might, in fact, turn out to be that most unlikely thing - a reasonable Stuart king.
This was the Stuart for whom the physical world was his alpha and omega, who was earthy in his realism.
All too earthy, some thought, as they looked down in disgust at a theatre of indolence, punctuated by debauchery, that had become the court.
They were not so worldly, not so rational, as to be free of the fear that some day there would be a reckoning.
Some day soon, as it turned out.
In the summer of 1664, a comet appeared in the skies over England.
Its sallow tail could be seen with unprecedented clarity through the lens of the new telescopes owned, among others, by the king.
But what most people saw was disaster in the offing.
They had all read their almanacs.
They knew that the Apocalypse would be heralded by pestilence, fire and war.
A year later, thousands of bodies killed by bubonic plague were being tossed each week into the great pit of Aldgate and there was nothing science could do about it, except count the dead with the care demanded by modern statistics.
(MAN) My part of death No one so true Did share it Come away Come away Death One-sixth of London's population perished.
The infection ebbed with the onset of autumn, but the trepidation hung around for the number of the Beast was 666.
And sure enough, up from the smoky regions of Hell, in the first week of September, 1666, came the diabolical fire.
In the early hours of Sunday September 2nd, the Lord Mayor of London was woken to be told that a fire had started in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane.
His response was "Pish! A woman might piss it out!" As he snored on, the flames reached the warehouses flanking the Thames between the Tower and London Bridge, brimful of tallow, pitch and brandy.
A monstrous fireball came roaring and sucking out of the narrow streets, feeding on overhanging bays and gables.
In another hour, 200 to 300 houses had been swallowed by the flames.
John Evelyn, who'd said for years that overcrowded London was a disaster waiting to happen, took no joy in the fulfilment of his prophecy.
Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle.
God grant mine eyes that I never behold it again, who now saw 10,000 houses all in one flame.
The noise and crackle and thunder of the impetuous flames.
The shriek of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches like a hideous storm.
London was but is no more.
When the rain started, a week after the outbreak of the fire, allowing an early stocktaking, the scale of the devastation horrified even the pessimists.
13,200 houses had been destroyed, along with some of the most famous buildings of the city.
St Paul's Cathedral was in ruins.
The new Leviathan, it seemed, had no fire insurance.
Still, there were those who were determined that London would rise as a phoenix from its ashes and, like the reborn, rebuilt Rome, astonish the world.
This had long been on the mind of Christopher Wren, mathematician, architect and brilliant prodigy of the Royal Society.
So when Roman antiquities were found in the debris around St Paul's, one of them a tablet bearing the Latin inscription "Resurgam" - I shall arise, Wren took the message to heart.
London had once been a great Roman city and now would outdo the ancients, with great piazzas, broad avenues, calculated to afford geometrically satisfying vistas and up to fifty new churches.
And at its heart would be a new St Paul's, a cathedral the like of which had never been seen in northern Europe.
He built a giant wooden model to show the king and clergy just what they would be getting.
How could they not be awestruck by the huge dome that used the same technology as a microscope to flood the interior with light? But there was a problem.
Wren had designed his cathedral as a Greek cross, sacrificing the traditional floor plan of a Protestant church in favour of perfect acoustics and light.
You can almost hear the mystified, angry complaints of the reverends.
"Where exactly is the choir supposed to go? "How do we process up a nave which isn't there?" Mostly they said, "Call us old-fashioned, "but this looks suspiciously to us like a Catholic basilica.
"We'll be damned "if we're going to let St Paul's turn into St Peter's.
" When the king told him to go back to the drawing board, Wren's normally very dry eyes are said to have filled with tears.
He would have his chance to build his dome, but only when it was joined to a long nave, something resembling a traditional church.
The irony was, for all his Roman enthusiasm, Wren believed he was building a truly Protestant church but his timing was terrible.
Ever since the Reformation, Britain had been victim to anti-Catholic fear and, once again, in Charles's reign, it erupted.
Not all of it was misplaced.
Charles was suspected of having secret Catholics in his government, and so he did.
He was also suspected of making secret treaties with the militantly Catholic Louis XIV of France.
And so he had.
But there was worse much worse.
The king's own brother, James, Duke of York, had actually converted to the Roman Church and he made no secret of it.
With no children born to the king, the first Catholic ruler since Bloody Mary was an imminent prospect.
There was shivering in the shires.
A century before, Queen Elizabeth had been threatened with Catholic assassination plots.
The Jesuit lurking in the shadows was a permanent fixture in popular nightmare.
When an ex-Jesuit called Titus Oates concocted a pack of lies about a plot to murder the king, invite a French invasion and create a Catholic state under James, he tripped the Guy Fawkes alert.
And when the magistrate investigating the charges was found mysteriously murdered on Primrose Hill, it seemed obvious that Oates knew what he was talking about.
It set the jittery country right over the edge.
Anti-Catholic violence swept the country.
Riots, burnings, lynch mobs, kangaroo courts.
For some politicians, the ugly mood of the country was a golden opportunity to press their favourite cause.
James, Duke of York, should never be allowed to sit on the throne.
He had to be excluded.
Anything to stop the cycle of religious wars from breaking out again.
It was an extraordinary crisis in the history of the British monarchy.
At stake were not only the lives of hundreds of those victimised by all the lies and hysteria, but the fate of the polity itself.
Because to concede exclusion was to accept parliament had the right to judge who was fit or unfit to occupy the throne.
And that was a concession Charles II was absolutely not about to make.
Charles met the most serious crisis of his reign with his most powerful weapon - reason.
He offered a compromise.
His brother would be allowed to succeed if he agreed to be a private Catholic and not to lay a finger on the Church of England.
Riding the wave of paranoia, the newly elected parliament summoned to Oxford turned him down.
They assumed that memory was on their side, that Charles would remember the fate of his stubborn father, who'd triggered a war when he too had been suspected of being soft on Catholicism.
But historical memory is a double-edged sword.
(TRUMPET FANFARE) When the Commons met in the Great Hall of Christchurch to hear what they thought would be the royal capitulation, they found themselves instead confronted by a Leviathan in ermine.
"This is the king's will," he said.
"Take it or leave it.
" It was a breathtaking gamble.
Backed up by the House of Lords, Charles had left the exclusionists in the Commons no alternative but to go to war.
He was betting that the memory of the last round would be a deterrent.
He was right.
The tombs of the dead from Edgehill, Marston Moor and Worcester were still being carved.
That war began as a parliamentary protest and ended in Puritan crusade.
Who wanted that back? Not the exclusionists.
They blinked first.
James did get the keys to the kingdom when his brother died in 1685, and he inherited a new parliament with a massively royalist majority, along with widespread public sympathy.
Within three years, though, he had squandered it all.
James never had any intention of hiding his faith.
His Catholicism wasn't just a private comfort to be celebrated away from the public gaze.
No, James was going to be a visible Catholic king but he was playing a dangerous game.
When James tried to reverse anti-Catholic laws, pillars of the establishment - the country gentry and the Church - were horrified.
When the bishops complained, the king declared, "I shall find a way to do my business without you.
" The protesting bishops were locked up in the Tower.
James's timing was disastrous.
For he was doing all this when Louis XIV, the militantly Catholic King of France, was threatening Europe.
By January, 1688, James had managed to alienate all his natural allies and turn himself into a more dangerous version of his father, Charles I.
He was even filling the officer ranks of the army with Irish Catholics.
The only consolation was that, at 52, he had no son.
Next in line to the throne was his daughter Mary, a staunch Protestant, who'd married the Dutch prince, William of Orange, hero of the resistance to Louis XIV.
On June 10th, 1688, all this changed.
James's wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a boy, who was duly baptised with Roman rites.
Now, not only was the king Catholic, so was his dynasty.
What could be done? Well, something quite extraordinary.
Seven leading statesmen sent a message to Holland with an explosive request.
"Prince William," they asked, "would you mind invading Britain "and saving us from a Catholic king?" William of Orange wanted to save his country from Catholic despots, but the country he had in mind - first, foremost and always - was the Dutch Republic.
English politics were always a sideshow for William to the main event.
That was the great European war against Louis XIV.
What choice did he have? There would be British troops in that war.
To ensure they'd be fighting for him, not against him, 100 years after the Spanish Armada had failed to do the very same thing, William set out to conquer Britain.
He was nothing if not thorough.
60,000 copies of William's manifesto blanketed England in an effort to present the planned invasion as a response to a spontaneous uprising against the Catholic tyrant.
It was so persuasive that he succeeded in making James seem the foreigner in his own land and the Dutchman the true Brit.
The fate of the Armada was a sobering thought, so his Dutch invasion force made the Spanish one seem puny.
This time there were 600 vessels and up to 20,000 troops.
(WOMAN) Lero, lero, lilli burlero Lilli burlero, bullen a la Lero, lero, lilli burlero Lilli burlero, bullen a la He landed at Torbay on November 5th - Guy Fawkes Day.
Obviously, God was a Protestant! When he realised that this Protestant invasion was really going to oust him, James' courage failed him.
His resolution in meltdown, his nights haunted by the ghost of his daddy, he fled the kingdom.
William claimed that he'd come just to restore English liberties, but now he had Dutch soldiers in the streets, and if he decided to be king after all, who was going to say otherwise? In February 1689, William of Orange and Mary Stuart were proclaimed King and Queen of England.
But during the ceremony, something profoundly novel happened.
A Declaration of Rights was read out listing the conditions under which the new monarchs would be allowed to sit on the throne.
Parliament had changed the job description of the ruler.
It turned out that the country did not need Leviathan.
It wanted a chairman of the board, and Dutch William fitted that role to a tee.
William III would fight his wars by asking, not demanding funds from the elected representatives of the people.
Ruling together with parliament, his government looked remarkably like a reasonable version of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate.
History has called this a "Glorious Revolution".
It was probably neither, but afterwards, the British monarchy would never be the same again.
But the old monarchy had one last desperate play to make.
In March, 1689, James landed in Ireland with 20,000 French troops.
The Catholic Irish flocked to their king.
Like the English, they'd become pawns in someone else's chess game.
Outside Drogheda, two armies, two worlds, faced each other across the River Boyne.
One belonged to the old world of faith and fervour, the other, Dutch and German professionals, were part of a modern war machine.
No prizes for guessing who won.
Nobody.
(MAN) It is the patriotic duty of Irish men and Irish women to engage in that legitimate armed struggle.
We will never surrender! Never, never, never, never! (PEOPLE CHEERING) (NEWSPEAKER) I appeal to Unionists to engage fully in the search for a lasting peace.
I, too, am an Ulsterman and we don't need the British ministers to rule us