A History of Britain (2000) s02e03 Episode Script
Britannia Incorporated
1 In the Britain of King William III, turning up late could get you killed.
State business was meant to run like clockwork.
Time was money.
Money was power.
In the Highlands of Scotland, though, the timeless tradition of the clans still ruled.
To William's annoyance, some clans remained obstinately loyal to his predecessor, James II, the Stuart king driven out in 1688.
Even worse, those Jacobites had won a short-lived victory over William's troops at the Battle of Killiecrankie.
William's right-hand man in Scotland, the Lord Advocate, believed it was high time to teach the clans a lesson in loyalty.
The chiefs were given a deadline to pledge an oath of allegiance - January 1st, 1692.
Acknowledge William as your lawful king.
Those who make the pledge will be rewarded, those who don't, punished.
The Chief of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe missed his appointment by five days.
At dawn on February 13th, 1692, Williamite troops from the Argyle Regiment, already quartered in Glencoe, were ordered to carry out a massacre.
They butchered 38 of the clan and the rest of the village - old men, women and children, some half-naked - fled into a raging snow storm where many of them died.
In London and Edinburgh, news of the massacre at Glencoe was greeted with pious professions of shock, especially, of course, from those who'd had the responsibility of organising it.
An enquiry was held but, needless to say, it was a sham.
If the intention had been to cow the Jacobites into submission, it had all gone horribly wrong.
The massacre was a public relations disaster for William's government.
The Scottish parliament voted it an act of murder.
How could victim and perpetrator ever be reconciled now? How could Scotland, stricken with poverty, with its national pride deeply wounded, ever come together with its rich and ruthless neighbour? But come together they did, and the two countries, for centuries divided by politics and religion, would make a future together based on profit and interest.
What began as a hostile merger would end as a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world - Britannia Incorporated.
It was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history and this is how it happened.
(FANFARE) In England, the 1690s were the years when the victors of 1688 congratulated themselves on a "Glorious Revolution".
In Scotland, there'd be years of purgatory.
After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.
For several summers in a row, the sun refused to appear.
Torrential rains poured down.
Cattle and sheep became diseased with foot rot.
Fields of barley and oats turned into mildewed slurry.
The Jacobite clergy said this was God's wrath for turfing out the rightful king.
In all this darkness, there were some who saw the light, a light that was going to shine hot and strong on Scotland.
A plan that would transform the country from impotence and destitution into riches and power beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
It would make Scotland - or its colonial trading post, New Caledonia - the hub of the universe.
And where was that to be? Well, of course, in Panama.
A group of merchants and bankers, including William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, had the idea of creating a Scottish trading post on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama.
At first sight, the idea sounds like the purest lunacy, but look at the map of world trade and it becomes visionary.
A major obstacle to east-west trade was the long, dangerous, and ruinously expensive journey round Cape Horn.
A trade route that cut through Panama was an obvious boon.
At Darien, the distance between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans was only 40 miles.
Goods could be carried across the narrow strip of land to waiting merchant ships.
The trading economy of the world would be revolutionised and Scotland would run it.
The Darien scheme instantly captured the imagination of the Scottish people.
Men and women from all over Scotland queued up to invest in the venture.
When the first fleet sailed from the Firth of Forth in July 1698, flying the Saltire and the extraordinary company flag of Indians, llamas, towered elephants and the beaming rising sun, it was carrying more than the 1,200 people selected to be the lucky colonists.
It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.
But the only information the Company of Scotland had about Darien was from a pirate surgeon called Lionel Wafer, who claimed he knew the Caribbean very well and had convinced them the place was paradise.
The climate was mild, he said, the soil fertile and the natives friendly.
They were also vain, spending much of the day combing their long hair so, naturally, the ship's cargo included combs - thousands of them.
The rest of the cargo says something about the conditions they were expecting to encounter.
Crate-loads of catechisms and Bibles for converting the pagans.
1,400 hats, an even greater supply of wigs.
The Darienites were expecting to live like lairds of the lagoon! But before the ship got anywhere near Darien, the dream had turned into a nightmare.
Forty crew and passengers died on the long voyage, and when they found their golden island, it was, of course, a mosquito-infested swamp.
The natives did not, it seemed, want their combs or anything else.
In a sweltering, rainy jungle, all the colonists' efforts went into lugging cannon into a primitive stockade bravely christened Fort St Andrew.
They were dying now of disease and hunger at a rate of ten a day, and their supplies ran with maggots.
And there was no outside help.
Tropical New Caledonia was a direct threat to the English trading empire and the government in Westminster was determined it should fail.
A law was passed making it illegal for any Englishman to invest in the scheme or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.
When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh, all they found were hundreds of graves.
Back home, when the full extent of the disaster sunk in, the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.
They consumed a full third of Scotland's liquid capital, but the most serious casualty of the fiasco had been the last, best hope of a national rebirth - Scotland going it alone.
That hope died in the malarial swamps of Darien.
Many laid the failure of Darien squarely at England's door for its deliberate sabotage of the scheme.
A wave of Anglophobia swept the country startling the men who ran things in Westminster.
They became more worried when it looked likely that Queen Anne, who had succeeded William in 1702, would die childless.
A crisis over the succession loomed.
For the defenders of the revolution of 1688, whoever succeeded her simply had to be Protestant.
In Scotland, after the humiliation of Darien, many Scots favoured Anne's half-brother, the Catholic James Edward Stuart, who was living in exile with England's old enemy - France.
Westminster could not tolerate these kinds of threats from its own back yard.
It had to take away Scotland's independence and insist on full political union.
The creation of a single British state under a single parliament was now a matter of immediate urgency.
(SHOUTING AND DRUMS BEATING) The politicians knew they needed a sweetener to make the Union more palatable and this is it.
In this chest was deposited The Equivalent, the exact amount lost in the Darien adventure, all £398,000 of it.
You can almost hear the advocates of union saying, as they beamed broadly, "Now, this is what union means.
"You seem to be a little hard pressed for funds.
"Well, now Scotland's debts will be Britain's.
"Sink or swim, we shall do it together.
" The Equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions, was the carrot dangled before members of the Scottish parliament.
By now, there were many who were already looking south, saw reality, smelled the profits.
But behind the carrot, of course, lay the stick.
Westminster threatened to block Scottish exports to England unless Scotland entered union negotiations.
The writing was on the wall.
Distraught, Lord Belhaven delivered a lament over the funeral pyre of Scottish independence.
I see our mother Caledonia, like Caesar sitting in the midst of the Senate, attending the final blow and breathing out her last.
We are an obscure, poor people, though formerly of better account, removed to a remote corner of the world without name and without alliances.
In 1707, the deed was done.
A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.
It took just ten weeks to go through the Scottish parliament, six through Westminster.
Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.
What kind of nation was this Great Britain? To answer that, all you needed to do was to go to the new Royal Naval Hospital, a palatial retirement home for pensioned-off servicemen, in Greenwich.
It was a triumphal statement of how Britain saw its place in the world in the early 18th century.
On the ceiling, painted by Sir James Thornhill, a jubilant allegory celebrates the reign of William of Orange and his wife Mary.
Thornhill's design is a shameless steal from the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, but the artistic larceny is, of course, making a point.
Here, Apollo the sun god shines not on the Catholic Sun King, Louis XIV, but on the British monarchs.
Over there, in France - despotism and popery.
Over here, thanks to William - liberty and Protestantism.
Over there - the curses of serfdom, misery and superstition.
Over here - the blessings of navigation, trade and science.
But, of course, you don't go to ceiling paintings for the unvarnished truth.
The truth was that we had been at war for almost 25 years, give or take a few intermissions.
And during that time, Britain had been transformed by the experience.
It was no longer a case of gallant little England defending the sceptr'd isle against the serried ranks of despots.
Now, we sat at the heart of the greatest war machine in the world.
That machine couldn't work without the lubrication of money, so along came a national debt needed to pay for it all.
And this debt needed servicing, so enter the armies of money men - accountants, tax assessors, Customs and Excise officers.
Buried inside all the crowing propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling, there was one crucial nugget of truth.
Louis XIV could demand money for his wars, William III had to ask for it.
Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king, except in Britain.
Here parliament, not the monarchy, signed the cheques.
The longer the war went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse it had grew bigger and bigger.
What's more, the kind of politics raging in Britain, we can recognise as distinctly modern.
Two parties - the Whigs and Tories - diametrically opposed, not just about the policies of the day, but about the entire political character of the nation and the upheaval of 1688 that had created it.
Whigs and Tories were not two parties who, when the barracking was done, could meet up for a drink and a bawdy joke.
They went to different taverns, coffee houses and clubs.
They were two armed camps.
And the artillery barrages that flew between them were often red hot.
250,000 votes were at stake in elections, more than 20% of the adult male population.
And nothing was spared to grab them - money, drink, libels, gangs of toughs.
This was all-out war at the hustings.
(SHOUTING AND SCREAMING) Tories accused the Whigs of being fanatics, the dregs of the populace, atheists, Commonwealth men.
Whigs accused Tories of being willing tools of the Jesuits and the French.
Since the Revolution said there should be an election every three years, this guaranteed an awful lot of politics.
The political temperature reached fever pitch in 1714 when Queen Anne died with no heir.
To make sure of a Protestant successor, no fewer than 57 individuals with blood ties to Anne were passed over to arrive at the next King of England - an uncharismatic, middle-aged man who didn't speak English.
George, Elector of Hanover, now King George I of Great Britain.
The Whigs backed his arrival in Britain and were rewarded when the new king appointed a Whig government.
In response, the Tories ridiculed the new king as a lecherous dolt.
His coronation was greeted with rioting in twenty towns.
(SKIRL OF BAGPIPES) But by far the most serious trouble now came from across the border.
The Union failed to dampen enthusiasm in Scotland for the Jacobite cause.
In fact, quite the opposite.
The promise of trade and abundance had failed to cross the Firth of Forth, and all of Scotland was suffering from high taxes imposed by Westminster.
The Jacobite leader, the Earl of Mar, buoyed up by promises of support from English Tories and Jacobites, declared James the rightful king at Braemar and proceeded to raise an army.
The Jacobite slogan of "King James and no Union" meant support from both the Highlands and Lowlands came swiftly.
10,000 men joined the rebellion.
When news came through of a Jacobite rising in Lancashire, the government knew it was in serious trouble.
But the Earl of Mar set new records for military ineptness.
After the Battle of Sheriffmuir, which ended in a draw, and with his troops outnumbering the Hanoverian army, Mar moved energetically into retreat! By the time James Edward Stuart landed at Peterhead on December 22nd, it was all over.
The Hanoverian dynasty remained, but the Jacobite rising was yet another demonstration of just how unstable the new political order was.
After this stormy start to the 18th century, if anyone would've predicted it would be followed by decades of calm, they would've been thought an absurd optimist, yet that's exactly what happened.
It came about through the efforts not of a king, a religious leader, or a general, but a political manager of uncanny genius.
He'd been, like his father and grandfather before him, a Norfolk squire and an MP.
He'd moved smoothly through the big-money jobs - Paymaster-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He'd come to dominate British political life for a quarter of a century.
He was Robert Walpole.
Although he never actually had the title, Walpole was, in effect, Britain's first Prime Minister and, under his leadership, the British economy boomed as never before.
Walpole's appeal was to shameless self-interest.
From the pursuit of it, he believed, would come the country's greater good.
"Which do you prefer?" he might've said.
"A battle over principles and religious convictions?" That was only going to lead to war, turmoil and poverty.
"Or would you rather have what I offer you? Peace, political stability and low taxes.
" What today we'd call "a healthy business environment".
From the beginning, Walpole, nicknamed "Cock Robin", had made a bet that the politics of the future would be about portfolio management rather than religious passion or legal debate.
In 1712, he'd been sent to prison for embezzlement and the experience gave him a painful lesson in how tightly intertwined were political and financial fortunes.
But perhaps his greatest asset was his unerring grip on the psychology of loyalty.
Walpole made a point of taking every new Whig member of the House out to dinner.
Tête-à -tête.
And there, with a glass of his best claret in your fat little hand, and a haunch of mutton juicily oozing on the trencher and Cock Robin's glittering eyes twinkling amiably at you, assuring you that the life of the party, the state of the nation, depended on you, the new member from Little Mucking-on-the-Wold.
How could you not express undying devotion and loyalty to his interest? Walpole sat at the controlling centre of a vast empire of patronage.
The jobs at his disposal conferred honour as well as cash on the holder and they were dangled on a string by the great political puppeteer.
In retrospect, we can see that Walpole built Britain's, in fact the world's, first modern party political machine.
He had placemen in parliament primed to vote as he directed.
He had George I and then George II eating out of the palm of his hand.
And in case anyone was tempted to flirt with the opposition, he had the kind of information that could make life really difficult for them.
In short, Walpole had the goods.
The goods, in fact, in every sense of the word.
As well as looking after the country's interest, Walpole made sure he looked after his own.
Just how much of a fortune he made for himself is spectacularly on view here at his country house in Norfolk, Houghton Hall.
Houghton was the Whig Xanadu, the last word in opulence.
Anything that riches could buy, Walpole bought.
Marble, mahogany, figured damask, shimmering silks and satins, classical sculpture, glorious Renaissance and Baroque art, all shipped to his East Anglian pleasure dome.
But Houghton was not just about living the good life, much as its master revelled in it, it was also a statement of grandeur meant to stun sceptics into recognising that only someone truly in command of the nation's fortunes could possibly afford something like this.
King George may have had the throne, but Cock Robin had the palace.
There's no doubt that Walpole's appeal to self-interest was infectious.
With the glittering prizes dangled before their noses, the governing class of the country - 180 peers and 1,500 country gentry - lined up to trade in party passion for Palladian houses.
They stopped shouting and started building.
And what they built was designed to insulate them from the grubbiness of the real world - and Robert Walpole showed them the way.
This stone column marks the spot where the village of Houghton stood.
It had been here for centuries, but now it was just an inconvenience.
It was too close to Walpole's house and it definitely spoiled the view, so he simply had it demolished and moved down the road.
Of course, they could tell themselves, and they did, that their houses and parks were not just monuments to wealthy self-indulgence.
They were also a testimony to the greatness and glory of the nation.
Stephen Switzer, one of the leading landscape architects of the day, certainly saw this as his duty.
Magnificent gardens, statues and waterworks complete the grandeur.
It is then that we may hope to excel the gardens of the French and make that great nation give way to the superior beauties of our gardens, as her late prince has to the invincible force of British arms.
This was the kind of battle the rich and powerful in Hanoverian Britain really liked to fight - war by gardening.
Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the great 18th-century landscape gardens.
Taking inspiration from ancient Roman villas, aristocrats like Sir Henry Hall, who built Stourhead, even thought of their parks as a kind of public education and encouraged locals to pay a visit, provided they stuck rigidly to the designated tour route.
That route would not just meander between ponds and trees, but towards classical buildings designed to kindle feelings of virtue and patriotism in their breast.
But sharing all this pastoral graciousness only went so far.
For the ruling class, their land was now a money pump.
Big profit-yielding farms replaced strip farming, and smallholders were turfed off their land.
Too bad.
Landowners needed all the money they could get to keep up appearances, not just in the country, but in the town, and above all in the place which was the biggest, brashest, fastest-growing city in Europe - London.
Here, the winners and losers of Walpole's Britain jostled side by side.
700,000 of them.
One in ten Englishmen.
Foreign visitors were astounded at the noise, the hectic throngs packing the streets, the tireless hucksterism, the glittering greediness of it all.
The modern morality tales of painter and engraver William Hogarth are peopled by innocents arriving dewy-fresh from the country surrendering to the temptations of the city and falling hopelessly into a deep, dark, sink of iniquity and disease.
But however much moralists frowned on the new consumerism gripping the city, economic realists knew it was the way forward.
(WOMAN) Come buy my greens and flowers fine Your houses to adorn There had been other great emporium cities in Europe, but nothing like this.
London had invented serious shopping and it had something like 20,000 shops to prove it.
Its shops would lure the customer to buy something they'd never thought of acquiring.
Novelty items like oriental goldfish, which became an aristocratic marvel.
Caged canaries, finches and parrots.
Unheard-of luxuries became commonplace, priced to appeal to the middle class.
China from Holland from which to sip your tea.
Exotic fruits like pomegranates and pineapples.
The first commercially available condoms.
Lambskin for the rich, linen soaked in brine for the not-so-rich.
London's consumer culture was Mephistopheles winking an eye, crooking a finger, and proffering credit.
But terrible things could happen to those who ran out of credit and ran out of time.
A debt of just £2 would get you locked up in a debtor's prison.
The prison, like almost everything else in greedy, managerial, Hanoverian Britain, was a business - a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
£5,000 was the price one John Huggins paid for the wardenship of the Fleet Prison, the equivalent of half-a-million pounds today.
The way he could recoup his investment was to charge inmates for their stay.
The hotel from hell, including, of course, the rent for their shackles.
A fiver would get you your own cell, a few shillings more, something approximating food.
Less than that, you took your chance in the packed common prison, sleeping on the floor, no air, no sanitation and smallpox waiting to get you.
"Who are the real criminals?" was the cry on the streets, in coffee houses, and in the newspapers of London.
Everywhere you looked, the line between the law enforcers and the law breakers seemed arbitrary.
In 1725, the Lord Chancellor was convicted of embezzling £80,000.
People had had enough.
In the 1730s, satires and essays and poems and pictures documented a rising wave of revulsion at the world Walpole had brought into being.
A sense that beneath all the platitudes about peace and stability lay squalor and corruption.
A walk through London, for example, was a walk over prostrate bodies, big and little.
Infants, whose mothers were unable, or sometimes unwilling, to raise them, were abandoned on the streets.
But there came a point when someone was tired enough of stepping over half-dead babies found in the gutter to do something about it.
That someone was a 53-year-old retired merchant sea captain called Thomas Coram.
Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts from the Transatlantic timber trade.
All he wanted was to have a quiet life in Rotherhithe where he could smell the Thames and the sea.
But the sight of all those tiny abandoned corpses wouldn't leave him in peace.
Worse, he knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the workhouse and sent out to wet nurse was close to 100%.
(BABIES CRYING) So Thomas Coram determined to tap some of that new-found wealth to create a foundling hospital, a place where babies could be deposited, legitimate or illegitimate, and would be given a decent chance of survival.
For nearly 20 years, he made himself a nuisance to his friends, petitioning the king and everyone else until the funds got raised.
In 1741, the hospital opened its doors to its first children.
Not surprisingly, it couldn't cope with demand.
To decide which children could and couldn't get places, there was a heartbreaking lucky dip.
Mothers lined up to draw wooden balls out of a bag.
A white ball, and your baby was in.
A red ball, you were on the reserve list.
A black ball Well, you were back on the streets.
Inside this cabinet are some of the saddest things left to us by the 18th century.
These are the keepsake tokens given to their babies by desperate mothers just at the point when they'd leave them to the tender mercies of the Foundling Hospital.
There's a whole world of sorrow and love in this extraordinary cabinet.
It speaks not just of the destitute.
Some of the pieces, like this beautiful mother-of-pearl heart with the initials, presumably of the baby, suggest that some of these mothers were quite well-to-do.
But in many other cases, the pieces speak of real hardship.
They were just the things the mothers happened to have on them when they had to get rid of the children.
Some of these mothers had nothing at the last minute to offer their little babies except a nut - a nut meant to be worn as a pendant.
There's a little hole where the string was supposed to be strung through.
Sometimes things that had a little work on them - like this beautiful sewn heart.
Or, most desperate of all perhaps, just this flimsy little piece of ribbon.
Imagine a mother saying goodbye for the last time to her baby just taking a bit of ribbon from her hair or her wrist and giving it, as she hoped, to her child.
Now, if this wasn't heartbreak enough, it only gets worse when you know that none of these things ever found their way to the children.
(BABY CRIES) The Foundling Hospital couldn't hope to work miracles overnight.
Nearly half the babies died in the first year, but that was a huge improvement over the usual figures.
This was the middle-class parish at work - well off, busily charitable and as much interested in virtue as in wit.
There had been philanthropy before, but this was the first time that businessmen came together with high-profile artists, writers and sculptors in a campaign of conscience to attack a hideous evil in what was supposed to be a Christian modern metropolis.
The charges of the hospital would be employed in the service of the nation.
In the Navy if they were boys or in domestic service if they were girls.
The Foundling Hospital was philanthropy with a purpose.
Its charges would be model Britons of the future, not gin-soaked, syphilitic rakes.
They were going to be sober, educated, industrious, God-fearing and, above all, patriotic.
Rule, Britannia This was Britannia's time.
Britons never will be slaves (CHOIR) Rule, Britannia Britannia rule the waves Britons never will be slaves The lyrics for this chest-thumping song were written by two Scots for a play about Alfred the Great, and they were sung by merchants and businessmen who saw Britain's future lay with the blue water empire of trade.
But someone was in the way of this prosperous future - and that someone was Robert Walpole.
Merchants felt Walpole and his cronies cared too much about land and not enough about business.
So they were not amused when Walpole raised taxes on things that made money for them - beer and coal - while making damn sure to keep the land tax low.
What would be the only thing that could raise those land taxes? War, of course.
So no wonder Walpole, unforgivably, pussyfooted around the Spanish when they presumed to interfere with our ships.
When he signed a treaty with Spain that was seen as an unpatriotic sell-out, the merchants were even more incensed.
Walpole's effigy was burned in the streets by crowds roaring for his political head.
Walpole's allies and time-servers in parliament were suddenly nowhere to be seen.
His political enemies closed in gleefully for the kill.
To deprive them of the satisfaction, Walpole walked, a broken man, back to his wine and his dogs at Houghton.
It was the end of an era.
Now the gung-ho patriots could have their get-rich war, and they must have thought it would be a breeze.
Britain could fight abroad because it was so united at home.
But in 1745, that unity would prove a bitter illusion.
The Jacobite cause had refused to die, especially amongst the clans of north-west Scotland, where it fed off continued opposition to the Union.
What the Jacobites needed was a figurehead and, in 1745, they got one, a leader many saw as a model of virile fearlessness.
The son of James Edward Stuart, the man known to us and to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The fact the Prince's full name was Charles Edward Louis Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart should tell us that the Prince was less the incarnation of the old Scotland of the clans and much more a fully-fledged graduate of the pan-European Italo-Polish-Franco-Irish-Catholic international community.
But still, he was a Stuart, and that blood certainly mattered to the Prince himself who, at 24, sailed from France to Scotland to win back the throne for his father.
On the 19th August, 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart stood here at Glenfinnan, watched his family standard being raised, and told the assembled clansmen he'd come to make Scotland happy.
That would've been news to some of the crofters who'd been threatened with having their cottages burned unless they joined the Jacobites.
But the sight of Bonnie Prince Charlie - and compared to George II and to his own embittered, ageing father, he certainly was bonny - standing here in the glen at the head of Loch Shiel in his tartan plaid did seem to promise, if only for a moment, a new Scottish future.
Or, at the very least, the end of the miserable captivity of the Union.
But happiness? Well, that was going to prove a lot harder to come by.
The structure of clan society meant that support for the prince gathered quickly.
In England, families were becoming a kind of business.
In the Highlands of Scotland, kinship was much more a matter of blood.
Clan loyalty was built around the idea, even when it was a mythical idea, of a common ancestor.
The grandest landlords in the Highlands, like their Lowlands counterparts, were becoming connoisseurs of fine claret and chamber music.
But the local laird had a lot in common with his crofters.
They both spoke Gaelic, they wore tartan plaid and sporran, and they ensured they had broadswords and daggers ready when the chieftain called.
Buoyed by the prince's claim that the French were behind them and planned an imminent invasion, Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army moved swiftly, catching the inadequate Hanoverian forces in Scotland completely unprepared.
But when the prince finally took what was the big prize, Edinburgh, he hadn't won over the whole of Scotland.
The Lowlands were overwhelmingly loyal to King George.
It's quite possible that more Scots fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie than for him.
Nonetheless, it seemed that the prince couldn't put a foot wrong.
When his army faced the Hanoverians at the Battle of Prestonpans, they won a resounding victory.
At Holyroodhouse, debate raged as to what to do next.
The Highland chiefs, sceptical of finding support in England, advised Charles to make the Stuarts masters of the north, but to go no further.
But for Charles, nothing less than a conquest of England would do and he won the day by a single vote.
The Jacobites were on their way south.
In rapid succession, Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester all fell to the prince's army without a shot being fired in their defence.
With the Jacobites approaching Derby at the beginning of December and the bulk of His Majesty's forces fighting in Europe, there was close to pandemonium in London and the south.
There was a run on the Bank of England and all the shops in London closed.
The few soldiers left to protect the capital were not, shall we say, of the kind of calibre to inspire much confidence.
But just as in 1715, it could be said the Jacobites defeated themselves.
They didn't do it on the field of battle, but in this room at Exeter House in Derby, on December 5th, 1745.
The prince and his chiefs argued bitterly whether to go forward or retreat.
"London is just 130 miles away," said the prince.
"Move on the capital and the French will come.
"Besides, we've got precious little time.
"The Redcoats will be back from Europe soon.
" "No," said Lord George Murray, joint commander of the prince's army.
"I no longer believe the French are coming.
"It's time to cut our losses.
It's time to go home.
" This time, the prince lost the vote by a substantial margin.
The Jacobites turned about and headed north, beginning the long tramp back to Scotland through dreadful winter weather, pursued by the newly-returned British regiments.
Their retreat turned into a nightmare.
It's hard to know which was more murderous - the snows of December and January or the vengeful, pursuing troops of George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland.
Cumberland gave a taste of what he was capable of at Carlisle.
The garrison had been captured by Jacobites on their march south, but they were unable to hold out against Cumberland's advance.
Into this tiny space were crammed hundreds of Jacobite soldiers, locked up without any air or any water.
What they did have were these shiny stones.
Smooth, damp, slimy - a terrible memento of their distress.
To this day, they're called "licking stones" because the prisoners were brought to such horrible extremities that they were forced and reduced to sliding their tongues in these cavities to try and collect the pathetic amount of moisture gathered on the rock.
This really was Hanoverian Britain's Black Hole of Calcutta.
By the time winter turned into spring in the Highlands, it was unmistakably clear that, whatever its temporary successes, the Jacobite war was lost.
With every passing week, the Hanoverian advantage in men, money and guns told.
The armies eventually faced each other at Culloden, near Inverness.
Cumberland's force was only a third as big again as the prince's, but it was lethally better equipped.
A new verse of the National Anthem proved to be prophetic as the big guns began to fire.
(WOMAN SINGS) Just an hour after the firing had started, there were 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders lying slaughtered.
Only 50 of the Hanoverians had perished.
It was perhaps better to be one of those felled by Hanoverian guns.
It spared you the sight of British soldiers coming at you, while you lay wounded, to finish you off with their newfangled bayonets.
As one Hanoverian officer noted: Our men, killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in blood and splashing it about one another, look like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.
Charles Edward survived the battle and gave the order: Every man for himself.
He went on the run until it was safe to be shipped back to France.
In England, the victory was riotously celebrated.
Effigies of Bonnie Prince Charlie were burned at the stake.
Many Scots, too, were pleased to see the end of the Jacobite threat, delighted the prince had gone.
But in the heartland of his support, north-west Scotland, Charles Edward left behind a population prostrate before the avenging army of the Duke of Cumberland, determined to break the Jacobite clans for ever.
Villages were burned to the ground, captured men hanged or shot.
Cattle were stolen, thousands driven from their homes.
Even the wearing of Highland dress was banned, in an effort to strip the clans not just of their possessions, but of their identity.
The hopes and dreams of the Jacobites had to live in the secret world of things, things that could be hidden or disguised - a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair or the mysterious emblems engraved on wine glasses.
Take a look at this board.
At first sight, it seems an indecipherable smudge of paint.
But if you look at it the right way - reflected against the silvered mirror of a cylinder, it turns into The Lost Love, the boy born to be king, the saviour across the water.
Unhappily for the keepers of the Jacobite flame, Charles Edward in exile went rapidly downhill.
Too many mistresses, far too much drink, years of indolence, made him prematurely decrepit.
(WOMAN) Will ye no' come back again? But the romantic myth of the prince would survive the wreckage of his real history.
It would live in the poems and popular ballads, where he would always be the dashing, charismatic boy prince.
Will ye no' come back again? But Jacobitism as a political force was spent.
In the decades following Culloden, a transformation would take place in Scotland.
The Jacobite warriors who'd been unable to break Britannia were given an alternative to returning to their old obsessions of clan loyalty - join the future, join the army of the British Empire.
Many thousands took the offer.
Instead of being the perennial victims of that empire, they now colonised it.
In the cities, too, a new Scotland was being born.
In just 20 years or so after Culloden, it became common to refer to Edinburgh and Glasgow as hotbeds of genius.
The collapse of the backward-looking cult of honour made room for the flowering of the forward-looking cult of modernity.
In the academies, drawing rooms and reading clubs of Scottish cities, hopeless dreams were replaced by the appetite for hard facts and hard cash.
The first British theory of progress was sketched out by Scottish philosophers like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.
They looked at their own country's tragedy and saw in its history the entire arc of human social evolution, from hunting and gathering societies to settled farmers and, finally, to true civilisation - the world of commerce, science and industry, the world of the towns.
It was another Scot, Robert Adam, who became the first British king of architectural style.
Less than 20 years after Bonnie Prince Charlie had retreated from Derby, a different Scottish conqueror came to Derbyshire and, this time, he was invincible.
At Kedleston Hall, Robert Adam built in a new style for a new kind of aristocrat.
Its owner, the first Lord Scarsdale, was a true new Briton - rich, not just from land, but from the coal mines of Derbyshire.
What he wanted was a house that would not overpower the visitor with vulgar displays of swaggering wealth, but somewhere that would speak of Roman grandeur, of noble classical austerity, of loftiness of mind, of purity of taste, a palace of contemplation, a temple of virtue.
Could the accumulation of private riches be a force for general happiness? The Scot who made the deepest mark on the future of Britain certainly thought so.
In 1746, while the last survivors of Cumberland's butchery were being hunted down, Adam Smith, son of a customs officer, had an exhilarating vision of the future.
That vision was based on Smith's rejection of guilt and sin.
But it would his revolutionary book, "The Wealth of Nations", which would mark Scotland's farewell to sentimental self-destruction.
Upbeat and optimistic about the happiness of material life, Smith laid out, as a matter of scientific fact, mankind's natural drive to self-betterment.
Allowed to follow their natural urges, men would create, without even willing it, a better world.
Richer, freer, more educated.
The best thing government could do was get out of the way and allow the "invisible hand of the market" to do its work.
The economic world was like a watch, he wrote, its springs and wheels all admirably adjusted to the ends for which it was made.
So, too, the countless movements of men would perfectly interact for the purposes for which God had made them.
That purpose was progress, and it was one of history's sweetest ironies that it had fallen to Scotland - poor, bloodied, mutilated Scotland - to show Britannia the way ahead.
If you want to see the future, forget the pompous monuments of England's past.
Come north instead to the new towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh and see the future of Britain.
The future, perhaps, of the world.
State business was meant to run like clockwork.
Time was money.
Money was power.
In the Highlands of Scotland, though, the timeless tradition of the clans still ruled.
To William's annoyance, some clans remained obstinately loyal to his predecessor, James II, the Stuart king driven out in 1688.
Even worse, those Jacobites had won a short-lived victory over William's troops at the Battle of Killiecrankie.
William's right-hand man in Scotland, the Lord Advocate, believed it was high time to teach the clans a lesson in loyalty.
The chiefs were given a deadline to pledge an oath of allegiance - January 1st, 1692.
Acknowledge William as your lawful king.
Those who make the pledge will be rewarded, those who don't, punished.
The Chief of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe missed his appointment by five days.
At dawn on February 13th, 1692, Williamite troops from the Argyle Regiment, already quartered in Glencoe, were ordered to carry out a massacre.
They butchered 38 of the clan and the rest of the village - old men, women and children, some half-naked - fled into a raging snow storm where many of them died.
In London and Edinburgh, news of the massacre at Glencoe was greeted with pious professions of shock, especially, of course, from those who'd had the responsibility of organising it.
An enquiry was held but, needless to say, it was a sham.
If the intention had been to cow the Jacobites into submission, it had all gone horribly wrong.
The massacre was a public relations disaster for William's government.
The Scottish parliament voted it an act of murder.
How could victim and perpetrator ever be reconciled now? How could Scotland, stricken with poverty, with its national pride deeply wounded, ever come together with its rich and ruthless neighbour? But come together they did, and the two countries, for centuries divided by politics and religion, would make a future together based on profit and interest.
What began as a hostile merger would end as a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world - Britannia Incorporated.
It was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history and this is how it happened.
(FANFARE) In England, the 1690s were the years when the victors of 1688 congratulated themselves on a "Glorious Revolution".
In Scotland, there'd be years of purgatory.
After the massacre at Glencoe came famine and pestilence.
For several summers in a row, the sun refused to appear.
Torrential rains poured down.
Cattle and sheep became diseased with foot rot.
Fields of barley and oats turned into mildewed slurry.
The Jacobite clergy said this was God's wrath for turfing out the rightful king.
In all this darkness, there were some who saw the light, a light that was going to shine hot and strong on Scotland.
A plan that would transform the country from impotence and destitution into riches and power beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
It would make Scotland - or its colonial trading post, New Caledonia - the hub of the universe.
And where was that to be? Well, of course, in Panama.
A group of merchants and bankers, including William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, had the idea of creating a Scottish trading post on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama.
At first sight, the idea sounds like the purest lunacy, but look at the map of world trade and it becomes visionary.
A major obstacle to east-west trade was the long, dangerous, and ruinously expensive journey round Cape Horn.
A trade route that cut through Panama was an obvious boon.
At Darien, the distance between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans was only 40 miles.
Goods could be carried across the narrow strip of land to waiting merchant ships.
The trading economy of the world would be revolutionised and Scotland would run it.
The Darien scheme instantly captured the imagination of the Scottish people.
Men and women from all over Scotland queued up to invest in the venture.
When the first fleet sailed from the Firth of Forth in July 1698, flying the Saltire and the extraordinary company flag of Indians, llamas, towered elephants and the beaming rising sun, it was carrying more than the 1,200 people selected to be the lucky colonists.
It was carrying the hopes of an entire nation.
But the only information the Company of Scotland had about Darien was from a pirate surgeon called Lionel Wafer, who claimed he knew the Caribbean very well and had convinced them the place was paradise.
The climate was mild, he said, the soil fertile and the natives friendly.
They were also vain, spending much of the day combing their long hair so, naturally, the ship's cargo included combs - thousands of them.
The rest of the cargo says something about the conditions they were expecting to encounter.
Crate-loads of catechisms and Bibles for converting the pagans.
1,400 hats, an even greater supply of wigs.
The Darienites were expecting to live like lairds of the lagoon! But before the ship got anywhere near Darien, the dream had turned into a nightmare.
Forty crew and passengers died on the long voyage, and when they found their golden island, it was, of course, a mosquito-infested swamp.
The natives did not, it seemed, want their combs or anything else.
In a sweltering, rainy jungle, all the colonists' efforts went into lugging cannon into a primitive stockade bravely christened Fort St Andrew.
They were dying now of disease and hunger at a rate of ten a day, and their supplies ran with maggots.
And there was no outside help.
Tropical New Caledonia was a direct threat to the English trading empire and the government in Westminster was determined it should fail.
A law was passed making it illegal for any Englishman to invest in the scheme or give assistance to the desperate Darienites.
When a second Scottish expedition arrived at New Edinburgh, all they found were hundreds of graves.
Back home, when the full extent of the disaster sunk in, the fate of the Darien expeditions became a national trauma.
They consumed a full third of Scotland's liquid capital, but the most serious casualty of the fiasco had been the last, best hope of a national rebirth - Scotland going it alone.
That hope died in the malarial swamps of Darien.
Many laid the failure of Darien squarely at England's door for its deliberate sabotage of the scheme.
A wave of Anglophobia swept the country startling the men who ran things in Westminster.
They became more worried when it looked likely that Queen Anne, who had succeeded William in 1702, would die childless.
A crisis over the succession loomed.
For the defenders of the revolution of 1688, whoever succeeded her simply had to be Protestant.
In Scotland, after the humiliation of Darien, many Scots favoured Anne's half-brother, the Catholic James Edward Stuart, who was living in exile with England's old enemy - France.
Westminster could not tolerate these kinds of threats from its own back yard.
It had to take away Scotland's independence and insist on full political union.
The creation of a single British state under a single parliament was now a matter of immediate urgency.
(SHOUTING AND DRUMS BEATING) The politicians knew they needed a sweetener to make the Union more palatable and this is it.
In this chest was deposited The Equivalent, the exact amount lost in the Darien adventure, all £398,000 of it.
You can almost hear the advocates of union saying, as they beamed broadly, "Now, this is what union means.
"You seem to be a little hard pressed for funds.
"Well, now Scotland's debts will be Britain's.
"Sink or swim, we shall do it together.
" The Equivalent money, along with favourable trade concessions, was the carrot dangled before members of the Scottish parliament.
By now, there were many who were already looking south, saw reality, smelled the profits.
But behind the carrot, of course, lay the stick.
Westminster threatened to block Scottish exports to England unless Scotland entered union negotiations.
The writing was on the wall.
Distraught, Lord Belhaven delivered a lament over the funeral pyre of Scottish independence.
I see our mother Caledonia, like Caesar sitting in the midst of the Senate, attending the final blow and breathing out her last.
We are an obscure, poor people, though formerly of better account, removed to a remote corner of the world without name and without alliances.
In 1707, the deed was done.
A Treaty of the Union had been drafted.
It took just ten weeks to go through the Scottish parliament, six through Westminster.
Scotland and England were now joined at the hip.
What kind of nation was this Great Britain? To answer that, all you needed to do was to go to the new Royal Naval Hospital, a palatial retirement home for pensioned-off servicemen, in Greenwich.
It was a triumphal statement of how Britain saw its place in the world in the early 18th century.
On the ceiling, painted by Sir James Thornhill, a jubilant allegory celebrates the reign of William of Orange and his wife Mary.
Thornhill's design is a shameless steal from the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, but the artistic larceny is, of course, making a point.
Here, Apollo the sun god shines not on the Catholic Sun King, Louis XIV, but on the British monarchs.
Over there, in France - despotism and popery.
Over here, thanks to William - liberty and Protestantism.
Over there - the curses of serfdom, misery and superstition.
Over here - the blessings of navigation, trade and science.
But, of course, you don't go to ceiling paintings for the unvarnished truth.
The truth was that we had been at war for almost 25 years, give or take a few intermissions.
And during that time, Britain had been transformed by the experience.
It was no longer a case of gallant little England defending the sceptr'd isle against the serried ranks of despots.
Now, we sat at the heart of the greatest war machine in the world.
That machine couldn't work without the lubrication of money, so along came a national debt needed to pay for it all.
And this debt needed servicing, so enter the armies of money men - accountants, tax assessors, Customs and Excise officers.
Buried inside all the crowing propaganda of the Greenwich ceiling, there was one crucial nugget of truth.
Louis XIV could demand money for his wars, William III had to ask for it.
Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king, except in Britain.
Here parliament, not the monarchy, signed the cheques.
The longer the war went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse it had grew bigger and bigger.
What's more, the kind of politics raging in Britain, we can recognise as distinctly modern.
Two parties - the Whigs and Tories - diametrically opposed, not just about the policies of the day, but about the entire political character of the nation and the upheaval of 1688 that had created it.
Whigs and Tories were not two parties who, when the barracking was done, could meet up for a drink and a bawdy joke.
They went to different taverns, coffee houses and clubs.
They were two armed camps.
And the artillery barrages that flew between them were often red hot.
250,000 votes were at stake in elections, more than 20% of the adult male population.
And nothing was spared to grab them - money, drink, libels, gangs of toughs.
This was all-out war at the hustings.
(SHOUTING AND SCREAMING) Tories accused the Whigs of being fanatics, the dregs of the populace, atheists, Commonwealth men.
Whigs accused Tories of being willing tools of the Jesuits and the French.
Since the Revolution said there should be an election every three years, this guaranteed an awful lot of politics.
The political temperature reached fever pitch in 1714 when Queen Anne died with no heir.
To make sure of a Protestant successor, no fewer than 57 individuals with blood ties to Anne were passed over to arrive at the next King of England - an uncharismatic, middle-aged man who didn't speak English.
George, Elector of Hanover, now King George I of Great Britain.
The Whigs backed his arrival in Britain and were rewarded when the new king appointed a Whig government.
In response, the Tories ridiculed the new king as a lecherous dolt.
His coronation was greeted with rioting in twenty towns.
(SKIRL OF BAGPIPES) But by far the most serious trouble now came from across the border.
The Union failed to dampen enthusiasm in Scotland for the Jacobite cause.
In fact, quite the opposite.
The promise of trade and abundance had failed to cross the Firth of Forth, and all of Scotland was suffering from high taxes imposed by Westminster.
The Jacobite leader, the Earl of Mar, buoyed up by promises of support from English Tories and Jacobites, declared James the rightful king at Braemar and proceeded to raise an army.
The Jacobite slogan of "King James and no Union" meant support from both the Highlands and Lowlands came swiftly.
10,000 men joined the rebellion.
When news came through of a Jacobite rising in Lancashire, the government knew it was in serious trouble.
But the Earl of Mar set new records for military ineptness.
After the Battle of Sheriffmuir, which ended in a draw, and with his troops outnumbering the Hanoverian army, Mar moved energetically into retreat! By the time James Edward Stuart landed at Peterhead on December 22nd, it was all over.
The Hanoverian dynasty remained, but the Jacobite rising was yet another demonstration of just how unstable the new political order was.
After this stormy start to the 18th century, if anyone would've predicted it would be followed by decades of calm, they would've been thought an absurd optimist, yet that's exactly what happened.
It came about through the efforts not of a king, a religious leader, or a general, but a political manager of uncanny genius.
He'd been, like his father and grandfather before him, a Norfolk squire and an MP.
He'd moved smoothly through the big-money jobs - Paymaster-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He'd come to dominate British political life for a quarter of a century.
He was Robert Walpole.
Although he never actually had the title, Walpole was, in effect, Britain's first Prime Minister and, under his leadership, the British economy boomed as never before.
Walpole's appeal was to shameless self-interest.
From the pursuit of it, he believed, would come the country's greater good.
"Which do you prefer?" he might've said.
"A battle over principles and religious convictions?" That was only going to lead to war, turmoil and poverty.
"Or would you rather have what I offer you? Peace, political stability and low taxes.
" What today we'd call "a healthy business environment".
From the beginning, Walpole, nicknamed "Cock Robin", had made a bet that the politics of the future would be about portfolio management rather than religious passion or legal debate.
In 1712, he'd been sent to prison for embezzlement and the experience gave him a painful lesson in how tightly intertwined were political and financial fortunes.
But perhaps his greatest asset was his unerring grip on the psychology of loyalty.
Walpole made a point of taking every new Whig member of the House out to dinner.
Tête-à -tête.
And there, with a glass of his best claret in your fat little hand, and a haunch of mutton juicily oozing on the trencher and Cock Robin's glittering eyes twinkling amiably at you, assuring you that the life of the party, the state of the nation, depended on you, the new member from Little Mucking-on-the-Wold.
How could you not express undying devotion and loyalty to his interest? Walpole sat at the controlling centre of a vast empire of patronage.
The jobs at his disposal conferred honour as well as cash on the holder and they were dangled on a string by the great political puppeteer.
In retrospect, we can see that Walpole built Britain's, in fact the world's, first modern party political machine.
He had placemen in parliament primed to vote as he directed.
He had George I and then George II eating out of the palm of his hand.
And in case anyone was tempted to flirt with the opposition, he had the kind of information that could make life really difficult for them.
In short, Walpole had the goods.
The goods, in fact, in every sense of the word.
As well as looking after the country's interest, Walpole made sure he looked after his own.
Just how much of a fortune he made for himself is spectacularly on view here at his country house in Norfolk, Houghton Hall.
Houghton was the Whig Xanadu, the last word in opulence.
Anything that riches could buy, Walpole bought.
Marble, mahogany, figured damask, shimmering silks and satins, classical sculpture, glorious Renaissance and Baroque art, all shipped to his East Anglian pleasure dome.
But Houghton was not just about living the good life, much as its master revelled in it, it was also a statement of grandeur meant to stun sceptics into recognising that only someone truly in command of the nation's fortunes could possibly afford something like this.
King George may have had the throne, but Cock Robin had the palace.
There's no doubt that Walpole's appeal to self-interest was infectious.
With the glittering prizes dangled before their noses, the governing class of the country - 180 peers and 1,500 country gentry - lined up to trade in party passion for Palladian houses.
They stopped shouting and started building.
And what they built was designed to insulate them from the grubbiness of the real world - and Robert Walpole showed them the way.
This stone column marks the spot where the village of Houghton stood.
It had been here for centuries, but now it was just an inconvenience.
It was too close to Walpole's house and it definitely spoiled the view, so he simply had it demolished and moved down the road.
Of course, they could tell themselves, and they did, that their houses and parks were not just monuments to wealthy self-indulgence.
They were also a testimony to the greatness and glory of the nation.
Stephen Switzer, one of the leading landscape architects of the day, certainly saw this as his duty.
Magnificent gardens, statues and waterworks complete the grandeur.
It is then that we may hope to excel the gardens of the French and make that great nation give way to the superior beauties of our gardens, as her late prince has to the invincible force of British arms.
This was the kind of battle the rich and powerful in Hanoverian Britain really liked to fight - war by gardening.
Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the great 18th-century landscape gardens.
Taking inspiration from ancient Roman villas, aristocrats like Sir Henry Hall, who built Stourhead, even thought of their parks as a kind of public education and encouraged locals to pay a visit, provided they stuck rigidly to the designated tour route.
That route would not just meander between ponds and trees, but towards classical buildings designed to kindle feelings of virtue and patriotism in their breast.
But sharing all this pastoral graciousness only went so far.
For the ruling class, their land was now a money pump.
Big profit-yielding farms replaced strip farming, and smallholders were turfed off their land.
Too bad.
Landowners needed all the money they could get to keep up appearances, not just in the country, but in the town, and above all in the place which was the biggest, brashest, fastest-growing city in Europe - London.
Here, the winners and losers of Walpole's Britain jostled side by side.
700,000 of them.
One in ten Englishmen.
Foreign visitors were astounded at the noise, the hectic throngs packing the streets, the tireless hucksterism, the glittering greediness of it all.
The modern morality tales of painter and engraver William Hogarth are peopled by innocents arriving dewy-fresh from the country surrendering to the temptations of the city and falling hopelessly into a deep, dark, sink of iniquity and disease.
But however much moralists frowned on the new consumerism gripping the city, economic realists knew it was the way forward.
(WOMAN) Come buy my greens and flowers fine Your houses to adorn There had been other great emporium cities in Europe, but nothing like this.
London had invented serious shopping and it had something like 20,000 shops to prove it.
Its shops would lure the customer to buy something they'd never thought of acquiring.
Novelty items like oriental goldfish, which became an aristocratic marvel.
Caged canaries, finches and parrots.
Unheard-of luxuries became commonplace, priced to appeal to the middle class.
China from Holland from which to sip your tea.
Exotic fruits like pomegranates and pineapples.
The first commercially available condoms.
Lambskin for the rich, linen soaked in brine for the not-so-rich.
London's consumer culture was Mephistopheles winking an eye, crooking a finger, and proffering credit.
But terrible things could happen to those who ran out of credit and ran out of time.
A debt of just £2 would get you locked up in a debtor's prison.
The prison, like almost everything else in greedy, managerial, Hanoverian Britain, was a business - a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
£5,000 was the price one John Huggins paid for the wardenship of the Fleet Prison, the equivalent of half-a-million pounds today.
The way he could recoup his investment was to charge inmates for their stay.
The hotel from hell, including, of course, the rent for their shackles.
A fiver would get you your own cell, a few shillings more, something approximating food.
Less than that, you took your chance in the packed common prison, sleeping on the floor, no air, no sanitation and smallpox waiting to get you.
"Who are the real criminals?" was the cry on the streets, in coffee houses, and in the newspapers of London.
Everywhere you looked, the line between the law enforcers and the law breakers seemed arbitrary.
In 1725, the Lord Chancellor was convicted of embezzling £80,000.
People had had enough.
In the 1730s, satires and essays and poems and pictures documented a rising wave of revulsion at the world Walpole had brought into being.
A sense that beneath all the platitudes about peace and stability lay squalor and corruption.
A walk through London, for example, was a walk over prostrate bodies, big and little.
Infants, whose mothers were unable, or sometimes unwilling, to raise them, were abandoned on the streets.
But there came a point when someone was tired enough of stepping over half-dead babies found in the gutter to do something about it.
That someone was a 53-year-old retired merchant sea captain called Thomas Coram.
Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts from the Transatlantic timber trade.
All he wanted was to have a quiet life in Rotherhithe where he could smell the Thames and the sea.
But the sight of all those tiny abandoned corpses wouldn't leave him in peace.
Worse, he knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the workhouse and sent out to wet nurse was close to 100%.
(BABIES CRYING) So Thomas Coram determined to tap some of that new-found wealth to create a foundling hospital, a place where babies could be deposited, legitimate or illegitimate, and would be given a decent chance of survival.
For nearly 20 years, he made himself a nuisance to his friends, petitioning the king and everyone else until the funds got raised.
In 1741, the hospital opened its doors to its first children.
Not surprisingly, it couldn't cope with demand.
To decide which children could and couldn't get places, there was a heartbreaking lucky dip.
Mothers lined up to draw wooden balls out of a bag.
A white ball, and your baby was in.
A red ball, you were on the reserve list.
A black ball Well, you were back on the streets.
Inside this cabinet are some of the saddest things left to us by the 18th century.
These are the keepsake tokens given to their babies by desperate mothers just at the point when they'd leave them to the tender mercies of the Foundling Hospital.
There's a whole world of sorrow and love in this extraordinary cabinet.
It speaks not just of the destitute.
Some of the pieces, like this beautiful mother-of-pearl heart with the initials, presumably of the baby, suggest that some of these mothers were quite well-to-do.
But in many other cases, the pieces speak of real hardship.
They were just the things the mothers happened to have on them when they had to get rid of the children.
Some of these mothers had nothing at the last minute to offer their little babies except a nut - a nut meant to be worn as a pendant.
There's a little hole where the string was supposed to be strung through.
Sometimes things that had a little work on them - like this beautiful sewn heart.
Or, most desperate of all perhaps, just this flimsy little piece of ribbon.
Imagine a mother saying goodbye for the last time to her baby just taking a bit of ribbon from her hair or her wrist and giving it, as she hoped, to her child.
Now, if this wasn't heartbreak enough, it only gets worse when you know that none of these things ever found their way to the children.
(BABY CRIES) The Foundling Hospital couldn't hope to work miracles overnight.
Nearly half the babies died in the first year, but that was a huge improvement over the usual figures.
This was the middle-class parish at work - well off, busily charitable and as much interested in virtue as in wit.
There had been philanthropy before, but this was the first time that businessmen came together with high-profile artists, writers and sculptors in a campaign of conscience to attack a hideous evil in what was supposed to be a Christian modern metropolis.
The charges of the hospital would be employed in the service of the nation.
In the Navy if they were boys or in domestic service if they were girls.
The Foundling Hospital was philanthropy with a purpose.
Its charges would be model Britons of the future, not gin-soaked, syphilitic rakes.
They were going to be sober, educated, industrious, God-fearing and, above all, patriotic.
Rule, Britannia This was Britannia's time.
Britons never will be slaves (CHOIR) Rule, Britannia Britannia rule the waves Britons never will be slaves The lyrics for this chest-thumping song were written by two Scots for a play about Alfred the Great, and they were sung by merchants and businessmen who saw Britain's future lay with the blue water empire of trade.
But someone was in the way of this prosperous future - and that someone was Robert Walpole.
Merchants felt Walpole and his cronies cared too much about land and not enough about business.
So they were not amused when Walpole raised taxes on things that made money for them - beer and coal - while making damn sure to keep the land tax low.
What would be the only thing that could raise those land taxes? War, of course.
So no wonder Walpole, unforgivably, pussyfooted around the Spanish when they presumed to interfere with our ships.
When he signed a treaty with Spain that was seen as an unpatriotic sell-out, the merchants were even more incensed.
Walpole's effigy was burned in the streets by crowds roaring for his political head.
Walpole's allies and time-servers in parliament were suddenly nowhere to be seen.
His political enemies closed in gleefully for the kill.
To deprive them of the satisfaction, Walpole walked, a broken man, back to his wine and his dogs at Houghton.
It was the end of an era.
Now the gung-ho patriots could have their get-rich war, and they must have thought it would be a breeze.
Britain could fight abroad because it was so united at home.
But in 1745, that unity would prove a bitter illusion.
The Jacobite cause had refused to die, especially amongst the clans of north-west Scotland, where it fed off continued opposition to the Union.
What the Jacobites needed was a figurehead and, in 1745, they got one, a leader many saw as a model of virile fearlessness.
The son of James Edward Stuart, the man known to us and to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The fact the Prince's full name was Charles Edward Louis Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart should tell us that the Prince was less the incarnation of the old Scotland of the clans and much more a fully-fledged graduate of the pan-European Italo-Polish-Franco-Irish-Catholic international community.
But still, he was a Stuart, and that blood certainly mattered to the Prince himself who, at 24, sailed from France to Scotland to win back the throne for his father.
On the 19th August, 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart stood here at Glenfinnan, watched his family standard being raised, and told the assembled clansmen he'd come to make Scotland happy.
That would've been news to some of the crofters who'd been threatened with having their cottages burned unless they joined the Jacobites.
But the sight of Bonnie Prince Charlie - and compared to George II and to his own embittered, ageing father, he certainly was bonny - standing here in the glen at the head of Loch Shiel in his tartan plaid did seem to promise, if only for a moment, a new Scottish future.
Or, at the very least, the end of the miserable captivity of the Union.
But happiness? Well, that was going to prove a lot harder to come by.
The structure of clan society meant that support for the prince gathered quickly.
In England, families were becoming a kind of business.
In the Highlands of Scotland, kinship was much more a matter of blood.
Clan loyalty was built around the idea, even when it was a mythical idea, of a common ancestor.
The grandest landlords in the Highlands, like their Lowlands counterparts, were becoming connoisseurs of fine claret and chamber music.
But the local laird had a lot in common with his crofters.
They both spoke Gaelic, they wore tartan plaid and sporran, and they ensured they had broadswords and daggers ready when the chieftain called.
Buoyed by the prince's claim that the French were behind them and planned an imminent invasion, Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army moved swiftly, catching the inadequate Hanoverian forces in Scotland completely unprepared.
But when the prince finally took what was the big prize, Edinburgh, he hadn't won over the whole of Scotland.
The Lowlands were overwhelmingly loyal to King George.
It's quite possible that more Scots fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie than for him.
Nonetheless, it seemed that the prince couldn't put a foot wrong.
When his army faced the Hanoverians at the Battle of Prestonpans, they won a resounding victory.
At Holyroodhouse, debate raged as to what to do next.
The Highland chiefs, sceptical of finding support in England, advised Charles to make the Stuarts masters of the north, but to go no further.
But for Charles, nothing less than a conquest of England would do and he won the day by a single vote.
The Jacobites were on their way south.
In rapid succession, Carlisle, Lancaster, Preston and Manchester all fell to the prince's army without a shot being fired in their defence.
With the Jacobites approaching Derby at the beginning of December and the bulk of His Majesty's forces fighting in Europe, there was close to pandemonium in London and the south.
There was a run on the Bank of England and all the shops in London closed.
The few soldiers left to protect the capital were not, shall we say, of the kind of calibre to inspire much confidence.
But just as in 1715, it could be said the Jacobites defeated themselves.
They didn't do it on the field of battle, but in this room at Exeter House in Derby, on December 5th, 1745.
The prince and his chiefs argued bitterly whether to go forward or retreat.
"London is just 130 miles away," said the prince.
"Move on the capital and the French will come.
"Besides, we've got precious little time.
"The Redcoats will be back from Europe soon.
" "No," said Lord George Murray, joint commander of the prince's army.
"I no longer believe the French are coming.
"It's time to cut our losses.
It's time to go home.
" This time, the prince lost the vote by a substantial margin.
The Jacobites turned about and headed north, beginning the long tramp back to Scotland through dreadful winter weather, pursued by the newly-returned British regiments.
Their retreat turned into a nightmare.
It's hard to know which was more murderous - the snows of December and January or the vengeful, pursuing troops of George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland.
Cumberland gave a taste of what he was capable of at Carlisle.
The garrison had been captured by Jacobites on their march south, but they were unable to hold out against Cumberland's advance.
Into this tiny space were crammed hundreds of Jacobite soldiers, locked up without any air or any water.
What they did have were these shiny stones.
Smooth, damp, slimy - a terrible memento of their distress.
To this day, they're called "licking stones" because the prisoners were brought to such horrible extremities that they were forced and reduced to sliding their tongues in these cavities to try and collect the pathetic amount of moisture gathered on the rock.
This really was Hanoverian Britain's Black Hole of Calcutta.
By the time winter turned into spring in the Highlands, it was unmistakably clear that, whatever its temporary successes, the Jacobite war was lost.
With every passing week, the Hanoverian advantage in men, money and guns told.
The armies eventually faced each other at Culloden, near Inverness.
Cumberland's force was only a third as big again as the prince's, but it was lethally better equipped.
A new verse of the National Anthem proved to be prophetic as the big guns began to fire.
(WOMAN SINGS) Just an hour after the firing had started, there were 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders lying slaughtered.
Only 50 of the Hanoverians had perished.
It was perhaps better to be one of those felled by Hanoverian guns.
It spared you the sight of British soldiers coming at you, while you lay wounded, to finish you off with their newfangled bayonets.
As one Hanoverian officer noted: Our men, killing the enemy, dabbling their feet in blood and splashing it about one another, look like so many butchers rather than Christian soldiers.
Charles Edward survived the battle and gave the order: Every man for himself.
He went on the run until it was safe to be shipped back to France.
In England, the victory was riotously celebrated.
Effigies of Bonnie Prince Charlie were burned at the stake.
Many Scots, too, were pleased to see the end of the Jacobite threat, delighted the prince had gone.
But in the heartland of his support, north-west Scotland, Charles Edward left behind a population prostrate before the avenging army of the Duke of Cumberland, determined to break the Jacobite clans for ever.
Villages were burned to the ground, captured men hanged or shot.
Cattle were stolen, thousands driven from their homes.
Even the wearing of Highland dress was banned, in an effort to strip the clans not just of their possessions, but of their identity.
The hopes and dreams of the Jacobites had to live in the secret world of things, things that could be hidden or disguised - a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair or the mysterious emblems engraved on wine glasses.
Take a look at this board.
At first sight, it seems an indecipherable smudge of paint.
But if you look at it the right way - reflected against the silvered mirror of a cylinder, it turns into The Lost Love, the boy born to be king, the saviour across the water.
Unhappily for the keepers of the Jacobite flame, Charles Edward in exile went rapidly downhill.
Too many mistresses, far too much drink, years of indolence, made him prematurely decrepit.
(WOMAN) Will ye no' come back again? But the romantic myth of the prince would survive the wreckage of his real history.
It would live in the poems and popular ballads, where he would always be the dashing, charismatic boy prince.
Will ye no' come back again? But Jacobitism as a political force was spent.
In the decades following Culloden, a transformation would take place in Scotland.
The Jacobite warriors who'd been unable to break Britannia were given an alternative to returning to their old obsessions of clan loyalty - join the future, join the army of the British Empire.
Many thousands took the offer.
Instead of being the perennial victims of that empire, they now colonised it.
In the cities, too, a new Scotland was being born.
In just 20 years or so after Culloden, it became common to refer to Edinburgh and Glasgow as hotbeds of genius.
The collapse of the backward-looking cult of honour made room for the flowering of the forward-looking cult of modernity.
In the academies, drawing rooms and reading clubs of Scottish cities, hopeless dreams were replaced by the appetite for hard facts and hard cash.
The first British theory of progress was sketched out by Scottish philosophers like Adam Ferguson and David Hume.
They looked at their own country's tragedy and saw in its history the entire arc of human social evolution, from hunting and gathering societies to settled farmers and, finally, to true civilisation - the world of commerce, science and industry, the world of the towns.
It was another Scot, Robert Adam, who became the first British king of architectural style.
Less than 20 years after Bonnie Prince Charlie had retreated from Derby, a different Scottish conqueror came to Derbyshire and, this time, he was invincible.
At Kedleston Hall, Robert Adam built in a new style for a new kind of aristocrat.
Its owner, the first Lord Scarsdale, was a true new Briton - rich, not just from land, but from the coal mines of Derbyshire.
What he wanted was a house that would not overpower the visitor with vulgar displays of swaggering wealth, but somewhere that would speak of Roman grandeur, of noble classical austerity, of loftiness of mind, of purity of taste, a palace of contemplation, a temple of virtue.
Could the accumulation of private riches be a force for general happiness? The Scot who made the deepest mark on the future of Britain certainly thought so.
In 1746, while the last survivors of Cumberland's butchery were being hunted down, Adam Smith, son of a customs officer, had an exhilarating vision of the future.
That vision was based on Smith's rejection of guilt and sin.
But it would his revolutionary book, "The Wealth of Nations", which would mark Scotland's farewell to sentimental self-destruction.
Upbeat and optimistic about the happiness of material life, Smith laid out, as a matter of scientific fact, mankind's natural drive to self-betterment.
Allowed to follow their natural urges, men would create, without even willing it, a better world.
Richer, freer, more educated.
The best thing government could do was get out of the way and allow the "invisible hand of the market" to do its work.
The economic world was like a watch, he wrote, its springs and wheels all admirably adjusted to the ends for which it was made.
So, too, the countless movements of men would perfectly interact for the purposes for which God had made them.
That purpose was progress, and it was one of history's sweetest ironies that it had fallen to Scotland - poor, bloodied, mutilated Scotland - to show Britannia the way ahead.
If you want to see the future, forget the pompous monuments of England's past.
Come north instead to the new towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh and see the future of Britain.
The future, perhaps, of the world.