British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley | History Documentary

0:00 [Music] Lots of people remember their history

0:06 lessons from school as dates and battles, kings and queens, facts and figures.

0:12 But the story of our past is open to interpretation.

0:17 And much of British history is a carefully

0:19 edited and even deceitful version of events.

0:24 You might think that history is just a record of what happened.

0:27 Actually, it's not like that at all.

0:30 As soon as you do a little digging,

0:32 you discover that it's more like a tapestry of different

0:36 stories woven together by whoever was in power at the time.

0:42 In this series, I'm going to debunk some of the biggest fibs in British history.

0:47 In the 17th century, politicians and artists helped turn a foreign invasion

0:53 into the triumphal tale of Britain's glorious revolution.

0:56 Hello.

0:57 Hello.

0:59 In the 19th century, a British government coup in India was rebranded

1:05 by the Victorians as the civilizing triumph of the empire.

1:12 And in this episode,

1:13 I'll find out how the story of the Wars of the Roses was invented

1:18 by the Judas to justify their power and then

1:21 immortalized by the greatest storyteller of them all.

1:26 Shakespeare presented this as the darkest chapter in the nation's history.

1:31 Now is the winter of our discontent.

1:35 Two rival dynasties, the House of Lancaster and the House of York,

1:40 were locked in battle for the crown of England.

1:44 This was the real life Game of Thrones.

1:47 Brothers fought against brothers.

1:49 Anointed kings were deposed and innocent children were murdered.

1:55 Never before had the country experienced such treachery and bloodshed.

2:01 In 1485, a wicked king, Richard III, was slain and Henry Tuda took the throne.

2:12 Henry's victory would herald the ending of the Middle

2:15 Ages and the founding of the great Tuda dynasty.

2:19 It was to be England's salvation.

2:22 Also, the story goes, with history,

2:25 the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred.

2:33 [Music] In 1455, the village of Stubbins in Lanasher was

2:47 the scene of a legendary battle in the walls of the roses.

2:53 The fighting began with volleys of arrows, but then to their horror,

2:57 both sides realized that they'd run out of ammunition.

3:02 In desperation, the Lancastrians grabbed some makeshift weapons.

3:06 They happened to have a supply of their local delicacy,

3:09 black puddings from Berry.

3:11 And with these, they pelted the Yorkists.

3:16 But as luck would have it, the Yorkists had their own supply of missiles.

3:21 Yorkshire puddings with which they've bombarded the Lancastrians.

3:26 [Music] Now, most disappointingly,

3:35 this 15th century food fight never really happened.

3:39 It's a local legend that was conjured up as long ago as 1983.

3:45 But what the Battle of Stubbins Bridge does tell us

3:48 is that although the dates and the details might be hazy,

3:52 the Wars of the Roses are still alive

3:54 and well in what you might call our national memory.

3:58 What you think you know about the Wars of the Roses

4:01 though and what really happened are two quite different things.

4:07 According to the history books, the Wars of the Roses is the story of the fatal

4:12 rivalry between the House of Lancaster and the House of York,

4:16 between the Red Rose and the White.

4:19 But the saga of a country divided by 30 years

4:22 of bloody wars and deadly hate was largely invented by the Judas,

4:27 then spun into the dynasty's foundation myth by the greatest storyteller of all,

4:32 William Shakespeare.

4:35 [Music] And there is a firm basis

4:41 for this tale of devastating national conflict.

4:44 On a single day in 1461, the bloodshed was only too real.

4:50 In the middle of a snowstorm on the 29th of March in Town,

4:54 New Yorkshire, the Lancastrian and Yorkist forces clashed headto-head.

5:01 The result was utter carnage.

5:08 The Lancastrians started out the day pretty well,

5:10 but then the tide began to turn against them.

5:14 They were chased by the Yorkists down this steep and icy slope.

5:18 The blizzard was still blowing, and that little river at the bottom was flooded.

5:23 They couldn't get any further.

5:24 This meant that the Yorkists came down the hill and started massacring them.

5:30 So many men died that their blood stained the snow red.

5:37 So this became known as the bloody meadow.

5:44 A century later, William Shakespeare would depict the battle as a medieval

5:48 Armageddon where fathers slaughtered their own

5:51 sons and sons murdered their own fathers.

5:55 Talton had come to symbolize a country torn apart by war.

6:01 The scale of the killing was so great that there's been

6:05 nothing else quite as bad in the whole of our history.

6:09 On the first day of the Battle of the Som in July 1916,

6:13 19,000 British soldiers were killed.

6:16 But here at Talton, contemporary reports talk about 28,000 dead.

6:23 That's 1% of the entire population killed on a single day.

6:31 [Music] 20 years ago, Bradford University's archaeology department reveals

6:43 the true barbarity of the fighting

6:45 when they uncovered the remains of 43 men killed at Talon.

6:52 George, we've got five skulls of people here on the table.

6:56 How was this gentleman finished off here?

6:59 He's kind of square.

7:01 That is with a horseman's hammer.

7:03 But this particular skull has another sign

7:08 of extreme violence inflicted uh with a pole axe.

7:12 The head was forced down into the spine.

7:17 So the skull has actually showed signs of splitting.

7:21 this sort of desecration of the body that's

7:24 actually robbing them of life in the next life.

7:27 You're disfiguring them and they can't be resurrected.

7:31 This battle is truly horrendously brutal.

7:34 But is it the norm for the Wars of the Roses?

7:37 No, it was exceptional.

7:39 Certainly in the enormous number of people who fought and died at Tton.

7:45 I think people might have the impression that they

7:47 were just fighting for decade after decade after decade.

7:50 But within this period, how many battles actually were there?

7:54 Well, there were skirmishes, but in terms of real battles, around about eight.

7:59 The feud between the houses of Lancaster and York did fester for three decades.

8:05 But the idea that this was a period utterly ravaged by allout war,

8:10 well, that's just historical fiction.

8:14 Yes.

8:14 Toutton was a truly brutal battle, but it was also unique.

8:20 The other battles in the Wars of the Roses had much lower death tolls.

8:24 And the idea that the country was totally consumed by war is wrong.

8:30 Some historians argue that out of the 32 years of the Wars of the Roses,

8:35 the fighting only lasted for a total of 13 weeks.

8:39 That would mean that there were months, years,

8:42 even a whole decade when England was at peace.

8:48 The reason we talk at this era as the wars at the Roses isn't an accident.

8:53 It's the story told by the winning side,

8:56 the history the Tudtor wanted us to remember.

9:01 It began with their account of the battle that brought the war to an end,

9:06 the Battle of Bosworth.

9:11 The Lancastrian Henry TUDA emerged as a victorious

9:15 hero who'd ended 30 years of bloodshed.

9:19 He'd saved the nation from a villainous tyrant, the Yorkist King Richard III.

9:25 [Music] The Judas made sure Bosworth would be remembered

9:30 as the ultimate clash between the forces of good and evil.

9:35 helped along by William Shakespeare, who relished their juicy tale,

9:40 the battle has been so mythologized that it's hard to sort fact from fiction.

9:46 Historians used to think that the Battle of Bosworth took place

9:49 about 2 miles away over there up on top of the hill.

9:53 But over the last 10 years, all sorts of interesting finds have

9:57 been emerging from the fields immediately here.

10:01 That's things like parts of 15th century swords and badges

10:06 and about 40 of these fantastically deadly looking cannonballs.

10:11 The battle must have taken place here.

10:14 Now, despite this confusion about its location, a a myth,

10:19 a legend has grown up about exactly what happened that day,

10:23 it's one of our great national stories, and it goes something like this.

10:30 King Richard III goes into battle wearing

10:33 a crown symbol of what's at stake that day.

10:37 Richard declares, "This day I will die as king or I

10:41 will win." And even his enemies admit that he fights courageously.

10:47 Richard gets within a sword's length of Henry Tuda,

10:51 but the enemy forces overwhelm him.

10:54 In desperation, he cries out, "My horse, my horse,

10:58 my kingdom for a horse." And then he's killed with a blow to the head,

11:04 and he loses his crown.

11:11 After Henry's victory, Richard's crown is discovered in a hawthornne bush,

11:17 and Henry is crowned with it on the battlefield.

11:27 Now, how much of this really happened?

11:31 It's impossible to say, but the reason that this is the story we know

11:36 is because it's the one Henry wanted us to remember.

11:41 Henry wanted to make everyone aware of his decisive victory on the battlefield.

11:46 But that was the easy part.

11:49 In a nation divided, Henry's enemies still believed that he was a user

11:54 who'd stolen the crown from the anointed King Richard III.

11:59 Henry needed to legitimize his new reign.

12:02 So when his first parliament met a few months after Bosworth,

12:05 he made sure that it was his version of events that was recorded.

12:11 One telling detail that Henry had written into the records of Parliament

12:15 was that his reign had begun on the 21st of August 1485.

12:21 Now, this is a bit odd cuz the Battle

12:23 of Bosworth wasn't until the 22nd of August 1485.

12:29 Was this a slip of a quill?

12:31 No, it was deliberate.

12:35 Henry was claiming that he'd already been king even before the battle.

12:41 So he wasn't a usurper stealing the crown.

12:44 He was just taking what was rightfully his.

12:48 He cunningly realized that his success didn't

12:51 just lie in victory on the battlefield.

12:53 It also lay in the way that the history

12:56 of the Wars of the Roses would be written.

13:02 Henry's next move was equally cunning.

13:05 On the 18th of January 1486,

13:08 Henry VIIth married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.

13:15 Henry would present his match as the start

13:17 of a glorious new chapter in the nation's history.

13:24 Henry realized that picking the right wife was important,

13:28 but that telling the right story about the marriage was even more so.

13:34 The story that he wanted to tell was

13:36 that this was one of the most important marriages in history.

13:40 Here he was a Lancastrian marrying Elizabeth, a Yorkist.

13:45 They were going to heal the nation.

13:48 They'd once been bitter rivals, but now they were loving bedfellows.

13:53 But his cunning storytelling had another advantage, too.

13:57 It glossed over the very inconvenient fact that an awful lot

14:01 of people thought that he had no right to the throne at all.

14:06 [Music] Henry hoped that his marriage to Elizabeth

14:14 would be seen as a fresh start.

14:19 It would also divert attention away from his less than royal lineage.

14:27 This is a genealogical role showing the kings

14:30 of England going right back into the mists of time.

14:34 It goes back as far as Brutus,

14:36 the mythical king a thousand years before the Romans.

14:40 You can't even see Brutus because he's still rolled up.

14:43 We couldn't fit the whole thing onto the table.

14:45 And as you come down this end towards me,

14:48 you move forwards into the period of the Wars of the Roses.

14:52 These circles contain pictures of all the different kings.

14:56 Most of them called Edward.

14:58 This one's called Rex Ted, which pleases me.

15:02 As we get down here, we have some Henry's.

15:04 Henry V 6th.

15:06 Here's another Edward.

15:08 Here's Richard III.

15:09 And then the main red line peters out.

15:12 Where is the next king, Henry VIII?

15:15 Well, he's been squished in at the side as the husband of Elizabeth of York.

15:22 So, where's he popped up from?

15:24 This black line tells us it goes back to Henry's grandmother,

15:29 Catherine, who was a proper queen of England.

15:33 But her second husband, Henry's grandfather,

15:36 was this chap Owen Tuda, a servtor in Camera.

15:40 That means a chamber servant or in other words a bit of rough.

15:48 This family tree reveals Henry's dirty secret.

15:53 The fact that his claim to the throne was decidedly dodgy.

15:58 It wouldn't surprise you to learn that the scroll belonged

16:00 to a family who didn't like Henry, the Dela Poles.

16:04 They were plotting against him.

16:06 The document also explains why he had to marry Elizabeth.

16:10 She really was royal.

16:12 She was the daughter of a king.

16:14 Whereas Henry himself was just the grandson of a servant.

16:19 But this isn't the tale that Henry would tell us if he were here.

16:22 He didn't present his marriage as a matter of political expediency.

16:27 He described it as an extraordinary act of reconciliation.

16:35 Henry made his marriage, the union of the houses of York and Lancaster,

16:40 into the centerpiece of a super successful

16:42 propaganda campaign to secure his new dynastic ambitions.

16:48 This really beautiful book is a medieval anthology

16:51 of poetry pros and advice for educating a prince,

16:56 but it's best known for its wonderful illustrations,

17:01 including this one at the Tower of London.

17:04 This particular picture has a coat of arms.

17:07 And these two creatures are very curlyhaired lions.

17:12 They're black now cuz they've tarnished, but they were once silver.

17:16 and they were the silver lions of King Edward IV.

17:20 They show that this book was once in his library.

17:26 The Yorkist King Edward won the throne

17:28 in 1471 after defeating his Lancastrian opponents.

17:34 This time in the border we have got red and white roses representing the House

17:40 of Lancaster and the House of York and their rivalry in progress at the time.

17:45 and the Wars of the Roses.

17:47 The odd thing though about this illustration is that during

17:51 the actual time of the Wars of the Roses,

17:54 when this manuscript was first produced,

17:57 the red rose had nothing at all to do with the House of Lancaster.

18:01 The border was changed.

18:03 It was added in at a later date by Henry VIIth himself.

18:07 He was the one who adopted the red rose as the House of Lancaster's symbol.

18:13 And now look at this.

18:16 Adopting the red rose for Lancaster was only

18:19 the first stage of Henry's iconographical plan because now he

18:23 could combine it with the white rose of his wife

18:26 Elizabeth of York to create the multicolored tuda rose.

18:30 Normally the inner petals are white and the outer petals are red.

18:34 This one happens to be quartered, but you get the general idea.

18:38 It's red and white together.

18:40 And so this new TUDA rose became the symbol of the new TUDA dynasty.

18:46 And it was such a powerful symbol

18:48 that it allowed Henry VIIth to completely revise history.

18:55 The rose became Henry VIIth's logo,

18:58 shorthand for the story of how he'd heroically united a divided nation.

19:03 Over time, he made it the universally recognized symbol of TUDA might.

19:10 Across the country, from books to buildings, tuna roses started to bloom.

19:17 In Cambridge, Henry made King's College Chapel into the backdrop

19:22 for one of the most overwhelming displays of TUDA propaganda.

19:28 Anna, this chapel was begun by Henry V 6, but he didn't finish it, did he?

19:33 Well, the chapel had been being built for quite some time,

19:36 but then the Wars of the Roses happened.

19:38 resources got diverted.

19:39 And so when Henry VIIIth became king, it was unfinished.

19:43 It looked nothing like this.

19:44 None of this beautiful vated ceiling.

19:46 It was makeshift.

19:47 It had a sort of timber ceiling.

19:49 And it was very much a sort of work in progress and really was much more

19:53 of a sort of blight on the landscape

19:54 than anything that made a great statement of power.

20:00 But in 1508, Henry VIIIth gave the chapel a much needed cash injection.

20:05 Now, this is a bit different, isn't it?

20:07 Henry died the following year, but his financial backing ensured that the chapel

20:12 was completed and decorated according to his tuda vision.

20:17 It's fantastic.

20:17 I mean, it's the story really of Henry VIIth's journey to the throne.

20:22 It's his claim to the throne.

20:23 We have the greyhound, which is the symbol of Margaret Bowfort, his mother.

20:27 We have the dragon highlighting Henry's Welsh descent.

20:32 And we have, of course, TUDA roses everywhere.

20:34 They look like they're on steroids.

20:36 What kind of chemicals have they been treated

20:38 with to make them so juicy and enormous?

20:40 They look like cabbages.

20:41 It's tuda chemicals, isn't it?

20:43 It's the sort of vitality, the verility of the tudas.

20:46 And of course, above the tuda rose, you see the crown.

20:48 So again, it's underlying this.

20:49 These are now royal symbols.

20:51 This is Henry saying game over.

20:54 Now, now it's the Tudas all the way.

20:56 And really, I would argue that it's almost like one

20:58 of the first sort of ubiquitous brands that people across the country,

21:02 you know, identify with.

21:04 They know the TUDA brand.

21:05 They know the tuda rose.

21:06 It's all about propaganda.

21:08 It's all about mythmaking.

21:10 But I think, you know, we're still talking about it.

21:12 So, it was hugely successful.

21:15 With control of the crown, Henry also controlled the narrative.

21:20 In the emerging tuda tale of the Wars of the Roses,

21:23 Henry was the conquering hero.

21:26 And not surprisingly, the historians during his reign all agreed.

21:31 This book is called The History of the Kings of England.

21:34 And it's the work of an exceptionally unreliable narrator

21:39 written by John Rouse who is an antiquaryy and historian.

21:44 And he's writing it during the reign of Richard III

21:46 but he actually finishes it after Henry VIIth has become king.

21:51 John Rouse has written this book for his new boss Henry VIIIth.

21:55 What's he got to say about him?

21:57 He talks about Henry being such a good king

22:00 that he will be remembered for generations to come.

22:03 future secularist for many centuries.

22:05 He will be remembered.

22:07 Rouse started writing this book when Richard III was still the boss.

22:12 What does he have to say about Richard III?

22:15 John Rouse isn't very complimentary about Richard at all.

22:18 And in fact, let's look at the passage where he describes Richard's own birth.

22:24 Okay.

22:24 Says that he had been in his mother's womb for 2 years.

22:29 He was born kum dentus with teeth with teeth.

22:33 Eapillis and humorous.

22:35 So that's hair to the shoulders to his shoulders.

22:38 Very hairy.

22:39 And then there's this slightly mysterious word that could be talons.

22:43 Talons which quite creepy, isn't it?

22:46 That's very monstrous.

22:48 And then it says he was born under the sign

22:50 of Scorpio and he continued to behave in life like a scorpion.

22:56 This is a really striking vilification of Richard III.

23:00 Is this the first one?

23:02 Does it all start here?

23:03 Essentially, yes.

23:04 The demonization of Richard is taking place here.

23:08 And in fact, later down on this particular page,

23:11 Rouse accuses Richard of committing several murders,

23:16 including the murder of his own wife, the murder of his nephews,

23:20 and also the fact that he had killed with his own hand Henry VI.

23:24 What do you think Rouse's motives were

23:26 for for writing this history in this particular way?

23:29 John Rouse is writing specifically in order

23:32 to praise the new king of England, Henry VIIth.

23:36 He was only writing what he expected his readers would want to read.

23:42 Demonizing Richard when you're now ruled by his arch rival

23:45 Henry was certainly sensible and Tuda historians onwards went to town.

23:52 Richard III was said to be malicious, roughful, and envious as a king.

23:57 He was also a lump of foul deformity,

24:00 ill-featured of limbs, and hard favored of visage.

24:06 As Ralph reveals, telling the truth was

24:09 less important than pandering to the right master.

24:14 At an earlier stage of his career,

24:16 he'd written other works in which he praised Richard the Third instead.

24:20 This document is called the Rouse role and John Rouse actually made

24:25 it for presentation to Anne Neville who was the wife of Richard III.

24:29 We've got the same historian John Rouse writing just three

24:33 years earlier while Richard III is still king of England.

24:36 This is Richard himself and in fact he's described here as the most

24:42 mighty prince Richard King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland.

24:50 And then it goes on to say that he got

24:52 great thank of God and love of all his subjects,

24:58 rich and poor, and great love of the people of all other lands about him.

25:04 So this couldn't be any better really.

25:07 He's a fantastic king.

25:08 He's doing a great job and everybody loves him.

25:10 And physically, he's not what I was expecting at all.

25:16 We have no sign of a a hunchback here at all, is there?

25:19 No, he's the perfect knight.

25:21 In fact, he's wearing his armor.

25:23 He's got rather lovely face.

25:26 He's got beautiful curly hair,

25:28 although it's in a bit of a pudding basin, which isn't my favorite hairstyle.

25:32 He's actually depicted more as a Renaissance prince rather than

25:36 the deformed caricature that we know of from the works of Shakespeare.

25:42 So Julian, we've got two very contrasting

25:45 pictures of Richard III from the same historian.

25:48 Where does the truth lie?

25:51 Well, who knows where the truth actually lies?

25:53 But what we can say is that John Rouse was writing in order

25:58 to gain a favor of the people who are actually paying him.

26:02 That's really depressing.

26:03 We can't believe historians.

26:06 You can never believe a historian.

26:10 Well, tell that to the Tudtors because

26:12 Henry and his historians dodgy stories were unshakable.

26:16 When Henry VIIIth died in 1509 and his son Henry VIII succeeded him,

26:21 the new Henry didn't abandon his father's dynastic founding myth.

26:26 Far from it, he embraced the tale and made it his own.

26:31 Unlike his father, the new King Henry hadn't had to fight for his crown,

26:35 and there were no questions over his right to rule.

26:39 But he still emlazed the dynasty's new symbol,

26:42 the tuda rose onto one of the country's most formidable institutions,

26:47 the yman of the guard.

26:49 I think I might have a better codpiece than you.

26:52 I think you might do, Alan.

26:55 I'm clearly wearing the trousers of a muscular giant like yourself.

27:01 When were the ymen of the guard um formalized as a body of men?

27:06 Well, that was after the battle of Bosfield in 1485.

27:09 Uh Henry VIII of course defeated Richard at that battle and having

27:13 defeated him of course was pretty much worried for his own safety.

27:17 Yeah.

27:17 And so then uh formed up to 300 yman of the guard.

27:23 Henry VII adopted his father's yman guards and increased their number to 600.

27:29 When Henry appeared on important occasions,

27:32 he'd be surrounded by this magnificent troop.

27:35 Show me my TUDA version.

27:37 Henry also introduced the Yman's iconic scarlet uniform,

27:42 and a modern version of it is still worn today.

27:46 And you're going to slip into something equally comfortable yourself.

27:49 Yes, I am.

27:50 One arm in.

27:52 Now, let's let's discuss our our chests.

27:55 Okay.

27:57 On my chest, I've got a tuda rose, but it's going to become the rose of England.

28:02 It is indeed.

28:03 is still there 500 years later.

28:05 This is a symbol that's really endured, isn't it?

28:08 Absolutely.

28:08 And that's a very fancy fistle introduced when King James

28:11 the 6th of Scotland became James the 1st of England.

28:14 Of course, over here the shamrock which was uh introduced on the act of union.

28:18 So you have the whole of the United Kingdom on your belly.

28:22 We do.

28:27 Superb.

28:28 Are we ready for our photo opportunity?

28:31 Indeed.

28:36 [Music] Under Henry VII, the TUDA rose went from being the symbol of one

28:43 royal marriage to an emblem for the whole nation.

28:47 This TUDA rose has been an incredibly powerful and longlasting symbol.

28:53 You'll still find it today representing England on the Queen's coronation dress,

28:59 on the Duchess of Cambridge's wedding dress,

29:02 and you might even find it in your pocket because it's still on for 20p.

29:14 [Music] Henry VII had nailed down his father's version

29:19 of the story of the walls of the roses.

29:23 By the middle of the 16th century,

29:25 the people who'd experienced the wars had pretty much all died.

29:29 But the story was still alive.

29:33 And when Elizabeth I came to the road in 1558,

29:36 her grandfather's mythmaking proved incredibly useful.

29:42 Ah, here I am in my younger days.

29:45 This is Elizabeth the First's coronation portrait.

29:48 She's wearing all the trappings of majesty.

29:51 She's holding her orb and scepter and she's wearing man, the royal fur.

29:57 But this picture glosses over the fact that Elizabeth's

30:00 coronation was a bit of a touchandgo affair.

30:04 The problem was that she was the daughter of Anne Berlin,

30:07 the product of a marriage that had been declared null and void.

30:12 You could argue that she was illegitimate.

30:14 This was such a big problem that it was actually

30:17 quite hard to find a bishop willing to anoint her.

30:21 Right at the start of her reign, Elizabeth had to assert her right to rule.

30:27 And she did so in the same way that her father

30:29 Henry VIII and grandfather Henry VIIIth had done before her.

30:33 If you look closely at her magnificent gold coronation robe,

30:38 you'll see that it's embroidered with the TUDA rose.

30:41 She herself was treated as the living embodiment of the TUDA rose.

30:47 The poet Edmund Spencer even described how in the royal

30:51 cheek the red rose was melded with the white.

30:56 In almost every respect,

30:57 Elizabeth brilliantly delivered on the promise of her predecessors.

31:02 But as the decades passed, she failed to produce an heir.

31:06 And without that heir,

31:07 Elizabeth's subjects were haunted by specters of a horribly familiar past.

31:15 As the country faced an uncertain future in the 1590s,

31:19 the memory of the Wars of the Roses took on a new meaning.

31:24 People started to worry that when the queen died,

31:26 there might once again be civil war

31:29 with rival claimments fighting for the crown.

31:32 History might repeat itself.

31:38 [Music] At the end of the 16th century,

31:46 the history play transformed tuda fibs into compelling fiction.

31:52 For the nation's greatest playwright, William Shakespeare,

31:55 The Wars of the Roses had all the ingredients for drama.

32:00 And with his Mackie rebellion plots and his murderous villain,

32:05 he wrote the conflict's definitive script.

32:12 Henry V 6th, part one, was the first of Shakespeare's plays covering the wars,

32:17 and it proved a very palpable hit.

32:21 One of the play's best known scenes is set in the gardens of Inner Temple,

32:25 one of the inns of court.

32:27 It's the very start of the conflict and the leading

32:30 nobles are deciding which side to fight for, red or white.

32:36 Richard, Duke of York, is going to challenge the king Henry V 6 for the crown.

32:41 And he tells his supporters to pluck a white rose.

32:46 The Duke of Somerset, who's on the king's side,

32:49 he tells his supporters to pluck a red rose, a bleeding rose, he calls it.

32:56 And at the end of the scene,

32:57 the Earl of Warick prophesizes the bloodshed to come.

33:02 This brawl today in the temple garden, he says,

33:06 shall send between the red rose and the white

33:10 a thousand souls to death and deadly night.

33:15 The scene became famous because it neatly turned the messy

33:19 reality into a straightforward struggle between red and white.

33:25 and it went on to inspire an Edwardian painting,

33:28 which is one of the war's most celebrated images.

33:32 This floral phony war preceding the actual fighting, didn't really happen.

33:39 But nevertheless, you'll see pictures of it in history books.

33:42 And that's because Shakespeare's fictional version of the Wars

33:46 of the Roses is such a good story.

33:48 is so powerful that it trumps the truth.

33:53 From John Rouse's character assassination of Richard III onwards,

33:58 Shakespeare found his history books packed with tales of the conflict.

34:03 They were ripe for recycling.

34:05 After Henry V 6, parts 1, 2,

34:08 and three, came one of his masterpieces, Richard III.

34:14 Andrew, this is an early, very early collected edition of Shakespeare's works,

34:19 and it's split into the comedies and the tragedies, but then also the histories.

34:24 Is that a new category of play?

34:26 There have been history plays before, but Shakespeare is one of the first

34:28 writers who writes a sustained number of histories.

34:31 The Henry V 6th plays are blockbusters.

34:33 Parts two and three are written first,

34:35 and they are so popular that part one is then written afterwards.

34:39 It's the first kind of trilogy that we have surviving.

34:42 So, it's a history.

34:43 It's not funny.

34:44 It's not sad.

34:44 It's a bit of both.

34:45 So, you can do what you want

34:46 with a history depending on what the facts tell you.

34:48 You don't have to stick to the facts.

34:50 Goodness.

34:51 Quite have to stick to the facts.

34:52 No, that's old fashioned of you.

34:55 How does Shakespeare go about taking history and turning it into fiction?

34:59 What's his method?

35:00 Shakespeare's very much a magpie.

35:02 He uses bits and pieces from history as he wants to.

35:06 He uses chronicles like Holland's Head,

35:09 which was one of the most important of TUDA

35:11 chronicles that um shows the triumph of the Tudtor.

35:15 Sometimes you can catch him in the act

35:17 of of of being inspired by these histories, can you?

35:20 Oh, certainly.

35:21 There's this um passage which describes Richard III.

35:24 He was small and little of stature.

35:27 So was he of body greatly deformed, the one shoulder higher than the other,

35:31 his face small, but his countenance was cruel.

35:34 A man would judge it to savor and smell of malice, fraud, and deceit.

35:40 That's a that's a killer line.

35:42 I recognize this character.

35:44 This is the evil Richard that we know and love.

35:47 Exactly.

35:47 And that's that's something that Shakespeare clearly expands.

35:50 He's really not afraid to use history, to use the past to make moral points,

35:55 is he good, bad, do it like this, don't do it like that.

35:58 That's exactly right.

35:59 History is told and retold because it tells you lessons.

36:03 because you start to think about things that you

36:05 might be able to do rather better than last time.

36:08 A cautionary tale for Elizabeth and audiences.

36:13 Tales of the country torn apart by rival factions struck a powerful cord.

36:19 Just 60 years earlier, Henry VI's break with Rome had caused

36:23 the country to divide along religious fault lines, Protestant and Catholic.

36:30 So, another civil war seemed an everpresent danger.

36:35 Is this all happening because Elizabeth the First is getting old.

36:39 They're worried she's going to die.

36:40 They're worried there's going to be another War of the Roses.

36:43 Ex.

36:43 That's exactly right.

36:45 There's a great fear that there will be a religious war that will be

36:48 even worse than the than the donastic war of the Wars of the Roses.

36:52 So, this is water cooler conversation in the 1590s.

36:56 I would have thought so.

36:57 Yes, Shakespeare redefined the Wars of the Roses and he turned

37:03 Richard III from a crude tuda cliche into a truly captivating anti-hero.

37:10 From David Garrick in the 18th century to Edmund Keane in the 19th,

37:15 the biggest stars of the stage have made their names playing the part.

37:22 Right from the start,

37:23 audiences were fascinated by Shakespeare's character of Richard III.

37:28 There's a story about the most famous Elizabeth and actor, Richard Burbage.

37:34 He was playing the part and that night he got

37:36 a message from a lady who'd been in the audience saying, "Come to my room, Mr.

37:40 Burbage.

37:41 I've taken a fancy to you." But she wanted him to come in character.

37:47 She'd been seduced by Richard III's blend of cruelty and charisma,

37:52 which has kept people interested ever since.

37:59 Shakespeare followed the lead of TUDA historians

38:02 by playing up Richard's apparently monstrous appearance.

38:08 And the Royal Shakespeare Company's costume collection reveals how Richard's

38:12 physical body has come to define our image of the man.

38:17 Robin, how many different depictions of Richard

38:20 III have you had here in Stratford?

38:22 Well, since 1886, which was the first permanent theater company in Stratford.

38:27 There's been around 45 different productions.

38:30 Wow.

38:30 He's definitely one of the most popular, I think.

38:32 Yes.

38:33 The first one I can show you is actually my favorite and that's

38:36 a 1984 production of Richard thei and it

38:38 was actually played by Sir Anthony Shear.

38:41 He played it as a spider.

38:43 In the text he's described as a bottled spider.

38:47 He was wearing um a very tight Lycra bodysuit.

38:51 It's a bit like those pajamas that kids wear with Superman,

38:54 you know, and they have built-in muscles.

38:56 Exactly.

38:57 Yeah, exactly.

38:59 This is one of three humps that were used in the production

39:04 and it's the one that he wore um most the time on stage.

39:08 So it's I guess you could say his favorite hump.

39:12 It smells bad.

39:15 It does.

39:15 Yes.

39:16 It's a very unattractive item altogether, isn't it?

39:19 It was actually strapped on to Anthony sheer little buttons up the front.

39:24 So he would have worn this very tight and close to his body.

39:28 It's basically because of Shakespeare that I'm thinking that the smell

39:31 of Anthony Shir's sweat is the smell of evil.

39:36 So, can we have a look at a contrasting Richard III?

39:39 This is from a 1980 production of Richard III,

39:43 Alan Howard, who played Richard III.

39:46 Again, this is a different concentration on another disability.

39:49 Uh, critics actually compared it to a surgical boot.

39:52 Unlike Anthony Shear who was very nimble across the stage,

39:56 Alan Howard uh his interpretation was very very slow, very heavy.

40:02 You could see how much pain he was in throughout the production.

40:07 What's going on with this arm here?

40:09 Ah, yes.

40:10 That's uh Richard's withered arm.

40:12 Oh, it really is withering away.

40:14 It looks like a zombie falling to pieces as he walks along.

40:17 Is he always portrayed with a a physical problem of some kind?

40:22 Yes, I think they do all have um some type of disability.

40:27 Today, I think we we kind of take that with us.

40:29 So, Shakespeare's idea of Richard III is kind of our idea of Richard III really.

40:37 For Shakespeare and his first audiences,

40:40 Richard's hunch and his arm and his limp weren't just physical deformities.

40:46 They believed in the science of physomy that suggested

40:50 that your outward appearance reflected your inner self.

40:54 So if Richard was deformed, he must have had an irredeemably evil soul.

41:02 The tale of the princes in the tower reveals

41:05 the enduring power of Shakespeare's depiction of the monstrous Richard.

41:12 In 1483, Richard imprisoned his two young nephews in the Tower

41:17 of London after the death of their father, King Edward IV.

41:22 And there he had the tender babes murdered, this ruthless piece of butchery,

41:28 giving him the crown that was rightfully theirs.

41:36 In the 17th century, people were still gripped by tales of evil Richard.

41:41 So well over a hundred years after the disappearance of the unfortunate princes,

41:46 their fate remained a fascinating mystery to be solved.

41:52 And in 1619, the historian, Sir George Buck,

41:56 heard that the bodies of the princes might still be in the tower.

42:01 Buck wrote that certain bones, like the bones of a child,

42:06 had been found in a remote and desolate turret of the tower.

42:11 But on closer examination, these turned out to be the bones of an ape.

42:16 It's quite a sad story.

42:18 One of the apes from the tower managerie wandered off.

42:21 It somehow got itself into this turret and there it died.

42:28 A few decades later, one John Web reported a more promising lead.

42:35 A secret sealed room had been discovered,

42:39 built into one of the walls at the king's lodgings.

42:42 That's a building that was here.

42:44 It's gone now.

42:48 And in the secret room, there was a table.

42:51 And on the table, there were bones.

42:54 This time, at least the bones were human, not animals.

42:58 But the problem was that these were the remains

43:00 of really little children, 6 or 8 years old.

43:03 too young to have been the little princes.

43:08 At last, in 1674, the 190year-old mystery appeared to have been solved.

43:16 Workmen excavating the foundations of a predecessor

43:20 at this staircase discovered a wooden chest.

43:23 And in it were more children, two of them.

43:27 This time it was decided that they really and truly were the little princes.

43:34 The discovery of these remains only

43:36 fueled an obsession with this legendary crime.

43:40 And when the princes were at last laid to rest,

43:43 the reigning monarch Charles II seized the opportunity

43:47 to condemn wicked King Richard's terrible wrong.

43:51 These bones from the tower were brought

43:53 to a final resting place at Westminster Abbey,

43:57 burial place of kings and queens since Edward the Confessor.

44:01 Charles II commissioned a special marble funeral ern for the little princes

44:07 and this proved to be the perfect place to hold their murderer to account.

44:13 The inscription on it said that they'd been

44:15 killed by their perfidious uncle Richard the usurper.

44:20 So the stewarts took the tuda tale about Richard's crimes.

44:25 They accepted it as fact and they even set it in stone.

44:34 When Queen Victoria came to the throne more than three

44:36 and a half centuries after the start of the Wars of the Roses,

44:40 the conflict was little more than a distant memory.

44:46 And the Victorian vision of medieval England was

44:48 shaped by the bestselling novelist, Sir Walter Scott.

44:53 His rip roaring tales of knights in shining armor were

44:57 full of historical fantasy but very short on historical fact.

45:05 To 19th century romantics like Walter Scott,

45:09 the walls of the roses represented the middle ages gone wrong.

45:13 Scott wasn't very fond of the period.

45:16 Out of more than 20 novels,

45:18 he only set one in it, the rather obscure Anne of Gearstein.

45:23 And he doesn't make it sound very nice.

45:26 England is torn and bleeding.

45:29 There are piles of slain bodies and quite a lot of drenching in blood.

45:35 To Walter Scott, the walls of the roses had too

45:37 much brutality and not enough chivalry to be a bestseller.

45:42 But what Walter Scott did do for the walls of the roses was give it its name.

45:48 Listen to this.

45:48 He talks about the civil discords so dreadfully prosecuted

45:53 in the walls of the white and red roses.

45:56 This is more than 300 years after the ending of the conflict.

46:00 But this is the first time that anybody's called it that.

46:04 Most Victorians didn't question the wellestablished

46:07 mythology of the Wars of the Roses,

46:10 and they enjoyed a spot of Shakespeare as much as their predecessors.

46:15 But 19th century historians took a very dim view of the period.

46:23 So Helen, we're sitting in the middle of a Victorian vision of the Middle Ages,

46:27 which they loved, but they didn't much like the 15th century, did they?

46:31 They didn't.

46:32 They were very interested in the Middle Ages as a whole,

46:34 but they saw the 15th century as something dark, corrupted, an unhappy time.

46:40 Who were these Victorian historians writing about the Wars of the Roses?

46:43 The key figure is William Stubs, Bishop William Stubs.

46:47 He was a hugely influential figure in the development of the discipline.

46:51 It was while he was Regis professor at Oxford that the first

46:54 students began to be able to take history as a degree subject there.

46:58 But he was also a clergyman.

47:00 He ended his life as bishop of Oxford.

47:02 He could really turn a phrase, couldn't he, Mr.

47:04 Stubs?

47:05 Yes, certainly.

47:06 The 15th century in Stubs' view goes something like this.

47:10 The sun of the plantaginates went down in clouds and thick darkness.

47:15 The coming of the Tudtor gave as yet no promise of light.

47:18 It was as the morning spread upon the mountains, darkest before the dawn.

47:23 It sounds like Victorian historians were quite

47:26 happy to pass judgment on the past.

47:29 black and white, good and bad.

47:31 They're not only not afraid to judge the past, they saw it as part of their job.

47:35 For historians like Stubs,

47:37 their Christianity was an intrinsic part of what it meant to be a historian.

47:42 So, they needed to look in the archives.

47:45 They needed to find out the information.

47:46 They were great scholars, but then they needed to stand back to assess

47:50 what they'd found and stand in judgment on it.

47:54 and their judgment had to take in the moral dimensions of their world view.

48:00 They were quite willing to say that certain actions,

48:04 certain people, and certain periods were evil.

48:08 I'm thinking that he's typical of a type

48:10 of historian that we call wig historians.

48:12 That's a broad grouping.

48:13 But what is this thing called wig history?

48:17 Really, when we talk about wig history,

48:18 we're talking about a view of history as progress,

48:21 as a movement towards the best of all possible worlds,

48:25 which is embodied in 19th century society, 19th century politics.

48:31 So, Victorians see an onward march of progress up

48:35 to the walls of the roses, then it slips back, and then it's up and up and up

48:39 again to the glorious perfection of Queen Victoria.

48:42 Progress isn't always quite that straightforward.

48:44 Obviously, there are lumps and bumps along the way,

48:46 but the 15th century seemed a pretty dark age

48:50 when the country collapsed into civil war and it seemed

48:53 as though the forces of law and the enlightenment of constitutional

48:58 progress were being overwhelmed by overmighty subjects and aristocratic faction.

49:06 Although Bishop Stubs and his colleagues weren't writing for the mass market,

49:11 their judgment on the walls of the roses as a great leap backwards,

49:15 as an interruption to the march of progress, has proved extremely influential.

49:25 [Music] Ah, now this is perhaps my favorite history book.

49:33 It's called 1066 and all that, a memorable history of England.

49:39 It's basically a spoof of those very self-confident

49:43 Victorian historians like Bishop Stubs and his chums.

49:47 And like them, it's not afraid to make judgments about history.

49:52 Here's the 17th century English Civil War,

49:54 for example, between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads.

49:58 The Cavaliers being wrong but romantic and the Roundheads right but repulsive.

50:05 What have they got to say about the Wars of the Roses?

50:09 Well, it was all because the Baronss who made a stupendous effort using

50:14 sackage carnage and wreckage so to stave off the Tudtor for a time.

50:21 They achieved this by a very clever plan known as the Wars of the Roses.

50:26 So, just like the Victorian historians,

50:29 this book thinks that it was the fault of the bad baronss.

50:33 Clearly, the whole thing's a joke.

50:35 But minus the jokes and plus a few more dates,

50:39 this was pretty much how generations of school kids were taught their history.

50:46 But no account of the Wars of the Roses could

50:48 ever hope to rival the remarkable staying power of Shakespeare's drama.

50:54 In the 20th century, his Richard III made the leap from stage to screen.

51:01 Join bravely in a twitch.

51:05 In 1955, Lawrence Olivier both directed and starred in Richard III.

51:11 He turned Shakespeare's story into a technical spectacular.

51:16 and he turned Richard III himself into the ultimate Hollywood villain,

51:21 complete with pathetic villainous news.

51:23 Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.

51:32 Olivier delivers his scheming monologues straight down the camera,

51:37 eyeball to eyeball, he draws us into his murderous plots.

51:42 I can smile and murder whilst I smile.

51:47 He's both monstrous and magnetic and wet my cheeks

51:51 with artificial tears and frame my face to all occasion.

51:55 This was the definitive Richard III for the 20th century.

51:59 Everybody else who played the part would be measured against Olivier.

52:08 In America, the film was shown on television

52:12 the same day that it opened in cinemas.

52:15 As many as 40 million people watched it.

52:18 That's more than the total number of people who'd seen it

52:21 in theaters over the whole 350 years since it was first performed.

52:31 40 years after Olivier,

52:33 Ian Mckllen played Richard III as the greatest tyrant of them all,

52:38 Adolf Hitler, [Music] [Applause] complete with nudous mustache.

52:49 Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious son by this son of York.

53:01 This version of Richard III didn't make any

53:04 connection to the real events of the 15th century.

53:07 Shakespeare's plot was so well known that it

53:10 had become a sort of timeless parable.

53:13 [Music] Richard III had become the biggest baddie in history

53:23 and the wars of the roses symbolized a nation's darkest hour.

53:29 on top of the world.

53:32 I'm rolling along.

53:35 Rolling along.

53:39 But a new and radically different tale of Good King Richard was also emerging,

53:45 which turned Shakespeare's familiar story on its head.

53:50 In 1924, the Richard III society was founded to counter what they saw

53:56 as outrageous tuda lies and to paint

53:59 a much more flattering portrait of Richard there.

54:03 Richard was a good lord and a mighty

54:06 prince and he definitely didn't have a hunchback.

54:10 [Music] Centuries after Richard's death, his supporters,

54:18 the Ricardians, were determined to clear his name.

54:23 The culmination of Richard's rehabilitation came in 2012 with the extraordinary

54:29 discovery of his body here in this car park in Leicester.

54:34 After centuries of conjecture and halftruths and even downright lies,

54:41 here was some hard evidence for the real Richard.

54:47 Just 5 ft under the tarmac, archaeologists made the remarkable find.

54:57 The Ricardians were delighted finally to lay eyes on their hero.

55:02 But even from a quick glance,

55:04 it was clear that this man did have an abnormal curvature of the spine.

55:12 In a battle where opinions mattered more than facts,

55:16 Richard's physical imperfections didn't shake the Ricardian's conviction.

55:20 In the Wars of the Roses, the wrong man had come out on top.

55:25 But then the final twist in the tale is that Henry VIIIth,

55:29 not Richard, was the true villain of the piece.

55:33 To the Ricardians, the triumphant tuda was nothing more

55:37 than a ruthless usurper who had slandered Richard's good name.

55:44 As Henry VIIth faced their roth, his defenders rallied round.

55:49 In 2013, another royal fan club was born, the Henry TUDA Society.

55:56 So, Nathan, what is this?

55:57 It's a small representation of a statue that we're hoping to put up in Pemrock.

56:03 I feel that Henry Tuda is an overlooked monarch.

56:07 Since Richard was dug up,

56:09 there's been a bit of sort of rehabilitation of his reputation.

56:13 Do you think this means that inevitably Henry Tudtor has gone down?

56:17 Unfortunately, yes.

56:18 It does seem that way for one king to become unmaligned.

56:22 It seemed for some feel that another has to become maligned.

56:25 So, how many members have you got?

56:26 Currently, there's 12,000 people on my Facebook page.

56:29 Wow.

56:30 And how many has Richard III got then, shall we?

56:32 Let's compare.

56:33 Did you say you've got 12,000?

56:35 I have 12,358.

56:37 Oh, I hate to tell you this, Nathan, but Richard III has got 16,000.

56:42 He is ahead of you, but not by much.

56:44 Not by much.

56:44 Uh, we're hot on your tails, Richard.

56:46 And is there sort of tension between the two societies?

56:49 How do you get on together?

56:50 Not well, I imagine.

56:51 Um, if you believe some things you read on Facebook,

56:53 this man was a monster, a usurper, a ruthless, evil king.

56:58 But in my opinion, this was a king who was without

57:01 doubt the cleverest man to ever sit on the throne of England.

57:03 And he was recognized throughout Europe as a generous family man.

57:09 The need to find a hero and a villain

57:12 of the Wars of the Roses remains as strong as ever.

57:17 In 2015, 530 years after his death on the battlefield at Bosworth,

57:23 Richard III was finally laid to rest in Leicester

57:27 Cathedral in a tomb fit for a king.

57:31 Ironically, the discovery of Richard's curved spine shows that what had

57:36 seemed to be the most outrageous piece of mythmaking of all,

57:40 the hunchbacked king, was close to reality.

57:44 But fascinating though, Richard's bones are,

57:47 they can't really tell us what sort of a man or what sort of a king he was.

57:54 Because history is more than a series of dates, facts, and bones.

57:59 is a collection of stories,

58:01 and all stories reveal just as much about their authors

58:05 as they do about the heroes and the villains they portray.

58:09 While Richard has been laid to rest,

58:11 the story of the Wars of the Roses certainly hasn't.

58:16 Next time, I'll be exploring the Glorious Revolution.

58:21 Was it really glorious?

58:23 And was it really a revolution?

58:30 Lots of people remember their history lessons from school as dates and battles,

58:35 kings and queens, facts and figures.

58:39 But the story of our past is open to interpretation.

58:43 And much of British history is a carefully

58:46 edited and even deceitful version of events.

58:49 You might think that history is just a record of what happened.

58:53 Actually, it's not like that at all.

58:56 As soon as you do a little digging,

58:58 you discover that it's more like a tapestry of different

59:01 stories woven together by whoever was in power at the time.

59:07 In this series, I'm going to debunk some of the biggest fibs in British history.

59:12 In the 15th century,

59:14 the story of the walls of the roses was invented by the Tudtor

59:18 to justify their power and then immortalized

59:21 by the greatest storyteller of them all, William Shakespeare.

59:25 Now it's the winter of our discontent.

59:29 In the 19th century, a British government coup in India was rebranded

59:35 by the Victorians as the civilizing triumph of the empire.

59:42 And in this program, I'll discover how in the 17th century,

59:46 British MPs joined forces with a Dutch prince

59:49 to spin a foreign invasion into a story of liberation.

59:55 If you think that William the Conqueror was

59:58 the last person to invade these shores, think again.

1:00:02 Just 300 years ago, another William,

1:00:05 William of Orange, led an equally successful attack.

1:00:09 William has gone down in history to some as the heroic King Billy.

1:00:14 To others, he's a bloody usurper.

1:00:18 But his attack isn't remembered as a foreign invasion.

1:00:22 It's often described instead as a peaceful transfer of power,

1:00:27 a necessary measure that saved England from the tyrannical King James II.

1:00:34 This was our glorious revolution.

1:00:38 Or so the story goes, with history,

1:00:41 the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred.

1:00:51 [Music] In the 17th century,

1:01:00 the English civil wars between royalists and republicans

1:01:03 tore the country apart and Charles I was beheaded.

1:01:10 Never again would the monarchy be allowed to wield absolute power.

1:01:15 So in 1685 when James II became king and started throwing

1:01:20 his weight around his enemies decided that something must be done.

1:01:27 What followed became known as the glorious revolution.

1:01:32 [Music] James II is the villain of this carefully constructed tale.

1:01:40 He abdicates, giving way to the noble Dutch Protestant

1:01:44 William III of Orange and his English wife Mary.

1:01:49 In this swift and glorious transfer of power,

1:01:52 the golden couple put an end to the absolute power of the monarchy.

1:01:56 They banish Catholicism and restore order and liberty to our nation.

1:02:03 And all without a drop of English blood being spilt.

1:02:10 For many people, James II was a good old-fashioned tyrant,

1:02:16 harking back to the bad old days of Charles I.

1:02:21 But the biggest problem with James was the fact that he

1:02:24 was a Catholic king in a country that was largely Protestant.

1:02:29 In England at least, a Catholic monarch was associated with absolutism.

1:02:34 He believed in the divine right to rule and to ride roughshot over his subjects.

1:02:41 James didn't do much to play down this tyrannical image.

1:02:45 When a rebellion rose up against him, he executed 250 of the participants.

1:02:52 And when seven Anglican bishops dared to challenge his pro-atholic policies,

1:02:58 he threw them into the Tower of London.

1:03:01 James' enemies wanted a Protestant monarch

1:03:04 who respected the powers of Parliament.

1:03:08 So James was a Catholic.

1:03:10 He appointed his fellow Catholics to high office.

1:03:13 That caused annoyance.

1:03:14 And worst of all, he married a Catholic, Mary of Moderna.

1:03:19 This meant that any children,

1:03:20 any heirs that they might have would be Catholics, too.

1:03:24 But for James' Protestant enemies, there was a glimmer of hope.

1:03:30 James hadn't produced a Catholic heir.

1:03:33 He only had his two daughters,

1:03:35 both Protestant from his first marriage, and his new wife,

1:03:39 Mary, had lost eight children as a result of miscarriages,

1:03:44 still births, and deaths in infancy.

1:03:47 If James's wife Mary proved unable to give him a baby boy,

1:03:52 and time was ticking on, she wasn't getting any younger,

1:03:55 then James' line would stutter to a stop.

1:03:59 This Catholic part of the royal family would simply die out.

1:04:04 [Music] Then on the 23rd of December 1687,

1:04:18 it was announced that Mary of Mosa was pregnant again.

1:04:23 As each month passed,

1:04:24 it looks ever more likely that she might give birth to a healthy baby.

1:04:31 The Protestants thought that something had to be done.

1:04:34 Were they going to rise up against James and have a civil war?

1:04:38 No.

1:04:39 Instead, they waged a war of words.

1:04:42 The bed chamber became a battlefield.

1:04:47 With the horrors of the English civil wars still within living memory,

1:04:51 reside was out of the question.

1:04:54 Any regime change would need to be legally justified.

1:04:58 So, James's enemies began to spin a yarn.

1:05:03 As Mary's pregnancy progressed,

1:05:06 people put it about that it was a fake or perhaps a fantasy.

1:05:11 Even James's grown-up daughters, the Protestant princesses,

1:05:14 Mary and Anne, got in on the act here.

1:05:17 They spread gossip that nobody had felt the baby quickening.

1:05:21 And here's the clincher.

1:05:23 Nobody had seen any milk.

1:05:26 But on the 10th of June 1688,

1:05:29 Mary of Moderna defied the doubters and gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

1:05:36 Now, you might think that the birth would have

1:05:38 put an end to the debate, but in fact,

1:05:40 it intensified it because some people said that the real baby had died

1:05:45 and that an impostor had been smuggled into the queen's bed in a warming pan.

1:05:57 The title in London's coffee houses started

1:06:00 to sway public opinion against the king.

1:06:04 And James's response only made the situation worse.

1:06:09 He summoned 42 witnesses to make sworn

1:06:12 statements that they'd seen Mary give birth.

1:06:17 James published these depositions.

1:06:19 It was an attempt to silence his Protestant enemies.

1:06:24 John, tell me a bit more about this warming pan incident.

1:06:28 How does it actually work?

1:06:30 Comes from quite an innocuous detail in these depositions.

1:06:33 So, there's a gentle woman of the bed chamber called Margaret Dawson who says,

1:06:37 "I saw fire carried in to warm the queen's bed in a warming pan." But then,

1:06:43 um, in this pamphlet, a full answer to the depositions,

1:06:47 which basically goes through the depositions and tears them to pieces and says,

1:06:50 "This isn't good enough.

1:06:51 This isn't enough detail.

1:06:52 It's not enough evidence.

1:06:53 It picks up on this detail of the warming pan and it says inside

1:06:57 that warming pan was an illegitimate child who

1:06:59 had been born in the convent next door.

1:07:02 The pamphlet gives us a route that the child took.

1:07:04 It's carried through these passages.

1:07:06 So this is the passage below um up some stairs through

1:07:09 a closet above through some more passages above through here um

1:07:14 through a gallery then through some lodgings and then into the queen's

1:07:18 great bed chamber into the bed where she's in labor.

1:07:21 Um, and through the curtain and the dot goes all the way

1:07:25 into the bed and then they they pop the child into the bed.

1:07:28 It must have happened.

1:07:29 The map says that it did indeed.

1:07:31 Uhhuh.

1:07:32 What other sort of stuff was produced that helped

1:07:34 to tell this story at the warming pan?

1:07:36 What we what we have here is a pair of images.

1:07:38 The first of which is celebrating the prince's birth.

1:07:41 So you have Mary of Medina here with her hand in the Prince of Wales's crib.

1:07:45 Prince of Wales here is looking very splendid.

1:07:48 He has some flowers in his hair.

1:07:50 Um, and it's a kind of hello, we've got a lovely little baby boy.

1:07:53 Exactly.

1:07:54 Isn't that lovely?

1:07:55 Um, and then what happens in this one is subverted a bit.

1:07:59 It is.

1:07:59 This figure that's added in here is Father Edward Petra,

1:08:02 who's an English Jesuit who had rose to be an adviser of James II.

1:08:07 This led to rumors that he was in fact the father of the Prince of Wales,

1:08:11 which is why he's creeping up behind her and giving her a squeeze.

1:08:14 That's exactly right.

1:08:16 Do you think it's possible that James II wouldn't have got

1:08:19 into so much trouble if he'd been able to tell a better story?

1:08:22 One of the problems is that the warming pound fiction is even

1:08:25 though it's not plausible that people are willing to go along with it

1:08:29 because they would rather believe that the child was illegitimate than face

1:08:33 the prospect of an England that is Catholic for years and years and years.

1:08:42 The warming pan affair may sound far-fetched,

1:08:46 but it was a juicy tabloid tale, powerful enough to stir up treason.

1:08:59 James' right to rule was increasingly being questioned,

1:09:03 and James' enemies had now won the public

1:09:06 support they needed to remove the anointed king.

1:09:19 There was once a grand tuda mansion here in the village

1:09:22 of Hurley on the banks of the river Tempames.

1:09:26 It was called Lady Place.

1:09:28 Its owner was the third Baron Love Lace,

1:09:32 a member of Parliament and one of James II's enemies.

1:09:37 Love Lace was a bit of a rogue.

1:09:39 He was a drinker and a gambler and above all a Catholic hater.

1:09:45 Once he got a court summons for some public order offense,

1:09:49 but the magistrate issuing it was a Catholic.

1:09:52 So Love Lace took his court summons.

1:09:54 He screwed it up and he used it to wipe his bottom in public.

1:10:03 Nothing of Lady Place stands above ground today,

1:10:07 but hidden away here in someone's back garden, a little bit of it still remains.

1:10:17 These are the sellers of Lady Place and they're connected by a secret

1:10:22 tunnel to the banks of the river Tempames just over there.

1:10:25 So you could arrive and leave unseen.

1:10:28 Love Lace hosted clandestine meetings here for likeminded

1:10:32 noblemen who were all plotting against King James II.

1:10:37 [Music] In these secret meetings, a plot was hatched to overthrow the king.

1:10:47 But these men weren't going to take up arms themselves.

1:10:50 Instead, they wrote a letter inviting someone else to do their dirty work.

1:10:58 This is a copy of the letter they wrote, dated the 30th of June, 1688.

1:11:05 It's been signed by seven people, but they haven't given their names.

1:11:10 They've given secret code numbers.

1:11:13 Instead, somebody has written in later who they really were.

1:11:17 Shrosbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, the Bishop of London, Russell, Sydney.

1:11:23 These were all top politicians.

1:11:25 You can see why they didn't want to sign them

1:11:27 with their names because their letter is just full of treason.

1:11:31 Listen to this.

1:11:32 The people are so generally dissatisfied with the present

1:11:36 conduct of the government in relation to their religion, liberty and properties.

1:11:42 And here they get right down to business.

1:11:45 19 parts of 20 of the people throughout the kingdom are desirous of a change.

1:11:54 Playing on anti-atholic sentiments,

1:11:56 this letter tells the tale of a country in peril.

1:12:00 a country that needed to be saved.

1:12:04 It was addressed to a Protestant prince from the Netherlands, William of Orange.

1:12:12 It even talks about William landing in England.

1:12:15 And it says that the people will venture forth to meet him when he does this.

1:12:20 The message is pretty clear.

1:12:22 It is William, Prince of Orange, please invade us.

1:12:28 In the unfolding drama of the Glorious Revolution,

1:12:33 this wouldn't be described as treason.

1:12:36 It was the letter of invitation,

1:12:38 a plea from a belleaguered nation in a time of need.

1:12:43 If William accepted, he would be presented as the answer to England's prayers.

1:12:52 This is William's palace pet low in the Netherlands from where

1:12:56 he reigned as stat holder which is almost like a constitutional king.

1:13:03 And it's pretty clear why William was

1:13:05 the conspirator's ideal candidate to take the English throne.

1:13:11 William was James II's nephew.

1:13:14 But more importantly, his wife really was a steward.

1:13:18 She was James's own daughter, Mary.

1:13:23 In England, Ireland, and Scotland,

1:13:26 these Royal Stewart credentials might help make

1:13:29 the coup look more like a legitimate succession.

1:13:34 If William and indeed Mary could be placed on the English throne,

1:13:39 then this needn't be seen as a coup at all,

1:13:42 just as an orderly transition from father to daughter.

1:13:46 And these two had excellent credentials as monarchs

1:13:49 in waiting because they were both Protestant.

1:13:53 [Music] James's enemies had chosen well,

1:13:58 but William of Orange had even more to gain from going along with their plan.

1:14:06 William was playing an even longer game than simply becoming king of Britain.

1:14:11 And this is why the invitation was so attractive to him.

1:14:16 If he were to invade and get the crown, then he'd be toppling a Catholic king.

1:14:21 Good thing.

1:14:22 More importantly, though, he'd be getting more power to move against

1:14:27 an even more dangerous Catholic threat near our home.

1:14:31 Louis the 14th, the Sun King of France.

1:14:37 Louis the 14th was the most absolute of absolute monarchs

1:14:42 and his armies were a constant threat to the Dutch Republic.

1:14:47 William was determined to protect Protestant Northern Europe against Louie.

1:14:54 The rivalry between the two men was played out in a game of garden design.

1:15:00 Here, William ordered fountains even bigger and better

1:15:06 than those at Louis's own opulent palace, Versailles.

1:15:14 But for evidence of William's more enlightened style of monarchy,

1:15:19 you have to go into his bedroom.

1:15:24 In the 17th century, the state bedroom wasn't a private place.

1:15:29 This is where the sovereign received important guests.

1:15:34 What would you say is the most significant difference between

1:15:36 Louis the 14th's bedroom at Versailles and William's bedroom here?

1:15:41 I think it's the absence of a ballastrate just where

1:15:43 we stand here to divide the room into two parts.

1:15:47 And uh in France people had to make a bow

1:15:50 in front of the ballrit even if the king was absent.

1:15:54 But William the third is more, you know, uh, more open to the public,

1:15:58 more open-minded perhaps and and more open to the parliament.

1:16:03 Maybe that's the difference.

1:16:05 So, we got Louie, the absolute monarch,

1:16:07 with his get out, stay away ballast trade.

1:16:09 But William, not as a Democrat, but as a more friendly Republican.

1:16:14 He says, "Come on in." I believe so.

1:16:16 A friendly king.

1:16:17 Exactly.

1:16:20 But William wasn't going to beat Louisie with oneupmanship in the bedroom.

1:16:25 He needed Protestant allies to crush Louie in battle.

1:16:30 Getting his hands on the British Navy would give William the edge he needed.

1:16:35 And now he had an open invitation to walk right in and take it.

1:16:41 So this is William's private closet.

1:16:44 Yes.

1:16:44 A room for secrets.

1:16:46 Exactly.

1:16:46 Exactly.

1:16:47 It's the most intimate space you can imagine.

1:16:50 It's very small but very elaborate and it's his office more or less.

1:16:54 Yes, it's his office.

1:16:55 He he worked here at this very spot.

1:16:57 Am I right to imagine William III sitting here reading his letter

1:17:02 of invitation and drawing up his plan for the invasion of Britain?

1:17:06 Oh, it's so tempting.

1:17:07 Yes, I want to believe it was at that low that he made plans for his invasion.

1:17:11 It all took place here.

1:17:13 So this is a really significant room in the whole of British history.

1:17:17 It is [Music] Britain's parliamentary conspirators had their champion lined up.

1:17:30 But who was really controlling the narrative here?

1:17:35 Now we think that William was invited to invade England.

1:17:39 But what's the real story?

1:17:41 It's more complicated than that, isn't it?

1:17:43 It is definitely more complicated because he had

1:17:47 already taken the decision to go to England probably

1:17:49 in November 1687 and if he got the invitation

1:17:54 by the English then we say he was safe.

1:17:58 He wanted to legitimize his trip by asking people in England

1:18:02 to invite him so that he could give the expedition a legal car.

1:18:10 In April 1688, two months before the invitation,

1:18:14 one of the seven conspirators had come here

1:18:17 to the Hague for a secret meeting with William.

1:18:21 Gilbert Bernard, William's chaplain and historian, kept a record of the meeting.

1:18:27 Bernard wrote that William said it would be

1:18:30 great if some people in England would invite him

1:18:33 and that he would be ready in a few

1:18:35 months time by the end of September to come over.

1:18:39 That's to invade England.

1:18:40 That's to invade England.

1:18:42 Yeah.

1:18:42 William was a lifetime enemy of Louis the 14th.

1:18:47 So there was a great chance that that there would be a new war.

1:18:50 And in that war um England had to help William the third.

1:18:55 So he has to put together a document that's going

1:18:58 to sell his case to the English to the British people really.

1:19:02 And this fantastically is handwritten.

1:19:06 This must be the original the declaration

1:19:09 of his highness William uh Prince of Orange.

1:19:13 The reasons inducing him to appear in arms

1:19:17 in the Kingdom of England for the preserving

1:19:19 of the Protestant religion and for restoring the laws

1:19:22 and the liberties of Great Britain and Ireland.

1:19:25 So nothing in there about France.

1:19:27 It's all about you guys.

1:19:28 English people be happy.

1:19:30 Yes.

1:19:30 William says that he wants to call a free

1:19:34 and legal parliament that would abolish all the rules

1:19:37 or all the laws uh and all the violations

1:19:40 of the laws that James II had perpetrated.

1:19:44 So he had it written by a Dutch civil servant.

1:19:48 It was translated into English by Bernett and it

1:19:51 looks to me like Bernett has has improved it.

1:19:54 You can see him adding in extra little words and rewriting it here.

1:19:58 And he's added in a bit about the Houses of Parliament.

1:20:01 He's added in remarkable.

1:20:03 Presumably that was all helping to sell the case to make it smoother,

1:20:07 to make it more acceptable to the British because of course the English people

1:20:11 weren't going to know anything about the real

1:20:13 plans of William the Third with England,

1:20:15 namely that England would have to join him against France.

1:20:20 I'm more and more impressed with William's foresight.

1:20:24 It seems that he's several moves ahead

1:20:26 of everybody else in a European game of chess.

1:20:30 And it's very clever the way he's

1:20:32 written himself into the story with the pre-invitation,

1:20:36 then the invitation, then the declaration.

1:20:40 You can see all of these things as individual pieces of politics

1:20:44 as spin if you like until they stick and then they become history.

1:20:55 With his declaration to the British prepared,

1:20:58 William and his parliamentary plotters put his invasion plan into action.

1:21:05 His flag proudly proclaimed his message for religion and liberty.

1:21:14 But just as they set sail,

1:21:16 a storm blowing from the west stalled William's progress and kept him in port.

1:21:22 And because it helped James, people called it the Catholic wind.

1:21:28 But then and it suddenly turned around.

1:21:30 William's luck changed.

1:21:31 His luck certainly changed and it blew

1:21:33 just as hard from completely the opposite direction.

1:21:36 So that was the Protestant win that shot him

1:21:38 all the way down the So now they had

1:21:40 the initiative and and shot down the the channel

1:21:43 at record speed with a very strong easterly wind behind him.

1:21:49 Can you describe this fleet that came sailing down the English Channel?

1:21:54 Well, lots of people saw it.

1:21:56 That's the first thing.

1:21:57 It was so huge that uh when they came down

1:22:00 the channel they decided to make a parade of it

1:22:03 and went through 25 a breast stretching almost from do all

1:22:06 the way to Calala with uh brigade bands playing cheerful tunes.

1:22:11 The idea was to offend King James and Louis the 14th

1:22:15 at the same time which they did very effectively because

1:22:17 lots of people saw this and were utterly astonished of course

1:22:20 because nothing like it had been seen before or again.

1:22:23 So it's a cross between a fleet and a pantomime.

1:22:27 William III understood the importance of uh making a big impact

1:22:31 on the public theater if you like of the theater of politics.

1:22:34 He understood that very well.

1:22:35 Yes.

1:22:36 Now we've been talking about this as an invasion.

1:22:39 Is that the right word to use in your opinion?

1:22:42 Uh it it was an invasion but it was very

1:22:45 important to present it as if it were not an invasion.

1:22:48 One of the things the Dutch troops were given very strict

1:22:51 orders about was that they must never call it an invasion.

1:22:54 whatever they do that they would be severely punished.

1:22:57 They were told they must not tell the English

1:22:59 that they had invaded and conquered the country.

1:23:04 The parliamentary conspiracy was going to plan.

1:23:07 Hello.

1:23:08 Woohoo.

1:23:09 William's huge army disembarked unopposed here at Brixham.

1:23:16 The locals in this Devon fishing village just stood by and watched.

1:23:27 One Dutch observer reported that all along the roadside the men, the women,

1:23:32 and the children were waving out,

1:23:34 "God bless 100 good wishes to you." Well, he was Dutch.

1:23:39 He would say that, wouldn't he?

1:23:42 William really had left nothing to chance.

1:23:45 Amongst all these supplies coming off the ships at Brixham, the spare boots,

1:23:49 the pickled herrings, the horses, there was one more vital weapon of war.

1:23:55 It was a printing press.

1:23:58 Before setting sail, William printed his version of events,

1:24:02 60,000 copies of the Declaration, an early example of printed propaganda.

1:24:09 And as soon as he landed, he started printing even more.

1:24:14 William was carpet bombing England with his manifesto.

1:24:18 His declaration was everywhere,

1:24:20 listing his reasons inducing him to appear in arms in the Kingdom of England.

1:24:27 He's not keeping a low profile, is he?

1:24:34 As he marched on exit, the Dutch prince's army met with no resistance.

1:24:41 He entered the city in spectacular fashion,

1:24:44 not as an invader, but as the nation's savior.

1:24:49 [Music] 200 soldiers in armor led the way on Flemish horses,

1:24:54 accompanied by a further 200 Africans from the Dutch colonies in white turbons.

1:25:02 [Applause] William himself was dressed in gleaming armor,

1:25:07 a white plume blowing in the wind.

1:25:11 He was riding a white horse.

1:25:15 His banner bore the words God and the Protestant religion.

1:25:21 [Music] If you knew your Bible, the symbolism was pretty obvious.

1:25:26 A white horse heralded the arrival of a divine conqueror or even Christ himself.

1:25:34 In the book of Revelation, heaven opened, and behold, a white horse.

1:25:41 He who sat on him was called faithful and true.

1:25:46 In righteousness he judges and makes war.

1:25:50 In his eyes are flames of fire, and on his head are many crowns.

1:25:56 [Music] William had come to seize the crown.

1:26:02 But by presenting himself in his theatrical getup,

1:26:06 he didn't look like an invader.

1:26:08 He looked like a Christian savior.

1:26:19 William's theatrical progress didn't stop there.

1:26:26 In exit Cathedral, he ordered his chaplain to preach from the text

1:26:30 of his declaration with his theme of a free parliament,

1:26:35 the securing to the whole nation the free enjoyment of all their laws,

1:26:40 rights, and liberties under a just and legal government.

1:26:46 He also gave religious asurances, the preservation of the Protestant religion,

1:26:51 the covering of all men from persecution of their consciences.

1:26:57 The chaplain then led the congregation in the tea dam,

1:27:01 a hymn in which the people asked God to save them,

1:27:04 to lift them up, and most importantly to govern them.

1:27:11 [Music] And then with quite dazzling hubris,

1:27:23 he seated himself here in the spectacular

1:27:26 throne of the medieval bishops of Exat.

1:27:33 He wasn't king yet, but with his propaganda

1:27:36 and his pageantry and his sense of purpose, he was halfway there.

1:27:47 The Dutch prince was cleverly transforming himself into a very British hero,

1:27:52 a Protestant knight in shining armor, leading a glorious revolution.

1:27:58 Not an invader, not a usurper, but a liberator.

1:28:04 James was in trouble.

1:28:07 And as he prepared for battle to put

1:28:09 an end to William's story of triumph, disaster struck.

1:28:14 James had a nose bleed and retreated from the battlefield.

1:28:19 The conspirators said that the nosebleleed was a sign of weakness.

1:28:24 And when James fled England, they announced that the king had abdicated.

1:28:33 The fleeing James had gone into exile in Louis the 14th's Catholic France.

1:28:39 To his enemies, this confirmed where his true loyalties had been all along.

1:28:47 [Music] There was now a constitutional power vacuum.

1:28:51 For William to fill James's royal shoes,

1:28:54 he and the parliamentary conspirators would have to keep promoting their agenda.

1:29:00 William's glorious progress had to be turned

1:29:02 into a plausible new chapter in British history.

1:29:07 Mary's Stewart lineage now came into play.

1:29:10 She and William were offered a joint monarchy.

1:29:13 They'd rule together.

1:29:14 This had never happened before, and it hasn't happened since.

1:29:17 But this special arrangement allowed a story that was really about conspiracy

1:29:23 and intrigue to be transformed into the tale of an orderly succession.

1:29:32 On the day William and Mary formally accepted the joint crown,

1:29:36 they had a declaration read aloud to them.

1:29:39 It defined the limits of their power as well

1:29:42 as the duties and responsibilities they owed to Parliament.

1:29:47 That declaration was enshrined in law as the Bill of Rights.

1:29:54 It set down Protestant superiority in law

1:29:58 and banned Catholics from ever taking the throne.

1:30:02 It enshrined certain civil liberties.

1:30:06 And it ordered that no law should be imposed without parliamentary approval.

1:30:13 Most of all, it formalized a narrative that backed

1:30:16 up William and Mary's claim to the throne.

1:30:21 The Bill of Rights gave the conspirators the constrained monarchy they wanted.

1:30:28 It strikes me that this bill was a very

1:30:30 finely judged piece of sort of political magic.

1:30:34 Is that correct?

1:30:35 I think that the main thing that it was intended to try

1:30:39 to sort of persuade people of was that this was not an invasion,

1:30:45 but it was rather a legitimate coronation.

1:30:48 So, in the first part of the document,

1:30:51 it's an attempt on the part of the political

1:30:53 nation to wrigle out of a slightly sticky situation.

1:30:56 That's to say, they've got to characterize

1:30:58 James as a tyrant and as therefore illegitimate,

1:31:03 which makes the revolution legitimate.

1:31:07 Having written James and any future Catholic threat out of the picture,

1:31:12 the Bill of Rights now declared William and Mary's legitimate right to rule.

1:31:18 So that's part one.

1:31:19 And then part two is the future, is it?

1:31:22 That's right.

1:31:22 Yes.

1:31:23 So part two is the declaration of rights proper.

1:31:26 It is if you like that bit that might be seen as um an expression

1:31:30 of enlightened ideas and assertion of the liberty

1:31:34 of the people and of the sovereignty of parliament.

1:31:37 So for example they say there that the king

1:31:40 may not raise taxation without the consent of parliament

1:31:44 that there has to be free elections that there

1:31:46 has to be freedom of speech in parliament.

1:31:51 The transition from a monarchy with absolute power

1:31:54 to a monarchy in service to parliament was almost complete.

1:31:59 The Bill of Rights began what we now call our constitutional monarchy.

1:32:05 It's the foundation stone of parliamentary democracy.

1:32:10 The Bill of Rights was a winner's charter.

1:32:13 It was written by and for the supporters of the new regime.

1:32:18 It legitimized the joint monarchy of William and Mary,

1:32:21 but it also gave more power to Parliament.

1:32:24 Much more power.

1:32:25 So much that you could call it a revolution.

1:32:29 And if you happen to be a Protestant parliamentarian,

1:32:32 then you might even think that it was all rather glorious.

1:32:38 The events of 1688 now had a suitably grand title.

1:32:45 The conspirators were determined to find the perfect

1:32:48 words for this glorious and historic episode.

1:32:56 Best of all, the coup had gone like clockwork,

1:32:59 so they could describe it as a peaceful transition, a bloodless revolution.

1:33:08 [Music] But as William's glorious revolution

1:33:15 was rolled out across Scotland and Ireland, it was anything but.

1:33:22 James' supporters were known as the Jacobites.

1:33:25 And in Ireland and Scotland, they continued the struggle against William.

1:33:32 In March 1689, James joined his allies in County

1:33:37 Cork with troops supplied by Louis the 14th.

1:33:41 William landed in the north of Ireland the following year and marched on Dublin.

1:33:47 On the 1st of July 1690, their armies met here on the banks of the river Boing.

1:33:58 And now for the first time in the whole of their long power struggle,

1:34:03 James II and his son-in-law William faced each other

1:34:07 in the field at the Battle of the Bo.

1:34:13 James' army was over 25,000 strong.

1:34:16 William had a force of 40,000 men.

1:34:22 This would be a bloody battle.

1:34:24 William attempted to cross the river from the west.

1:34:27 James diverted most of his troops to head him off.

1:34:33 But this left the rest of James' army exposed.

1:34:38 William was merciless.

1:34:40 James' soldiers held out for 3 hours before being overwhelmed.

1:34:47 One French witness said, "This is the sixth battle that I've seen,

1:34:52 but I've never seen such a route." Williams troops were ruthlessly efficient.

1:34:58 They picked off the fleeing Jacobites like hairs amongst the corn.

1:35:02 He said James was defeated.

1:35:10 He fled again to France and would never return.

1:35:17 But the fighting continued and William

1:35:21 sanctioned even bloodier slaughter elsewhere.

1:35:25 A year after the boy, Williams men met Jacobite forces at Orim

1:35:30 in County Gway on the 12th of July 1691.

1:35:35 It was carnage.

1:35:38 The Jacobites suffered losses of 7,000.

1:35:42 Williams side only 700.

1:35:48 In the aftermath of the battle,

1:35:50 one observer reported seeing Irish soldiers with mutilated

1:35:55 limbs asking for the sword as a remedy.

1:35:59 Meanwhile, others, he said,

1:36:01 spewed forth their breath mixed with blood and frets.

1:36:06 There was so much blood that it flowed over the ground,

1:36:09 and you could hardly take a step without slipping in it.

1:36:16 This battle marks the end of Jacobite resistance in Ireland.

1:36:21 William would be later reinvented as a Protestant hero, King Billy.

1:36:27 For jubilant Protestants,

1:36:28 Okram went down in history as the single most celebrated battle.

1:36:34 So why has the battle of the boy

1:36:37 lived longest in the national memory of Ireland?

1:36:42 It happened because of a funny kind of a mixup.

1:36:46 People had always celebrated or commemorated

1:36:50 the Battle of Owim on its anniversary,

1:36:52 the 12th of July, until 1752 when the calendar

1:36:57 changed to bring Britain into line with Europe.

1:37:01 Roughly 10 days got lost to British history.

1:37:05 But people had got used to the idea of celebrating on the 12th of July.

1:37:09 It's just that under the new system,

1:37:11 the battle whose anniversary was closest to that date wasn't Okrim.

1:37:16 It was the Battle of the Boone.

1:37:18 And that's why the Boone has ended up on the fridge magnet.

1:37:24 The Battle of the Boone still has

1:37:25 an almost sacred significance for Irish Protestants.

1:37:31 King Billy has secured the future of their religion.

1:37:34 For them, his status as a national hero and savior remains intact to this day.

1:37:41 [Music] Jacobite uprisings against the glorious

1:37:46 revolution in Scotland were also brutally crushed.

1:37:51 In 1692, Williams men in Scotland ordered the notorious Gleno massacre.

1:37:58 It was punishment for the clan Macdonald's delay

1:38:00 in signing an oath of allegiance to William and Mary.

1:38:05 38 were murdered and another 40 women and children

1:38:09 died of exposure after their homes were torched.

1:38:14 [Music] But despite brutality and bloodshed in Scotland and Ireland,

1:38:22 the narrative of the glorious revolution held fast in England.

1:38:27 For William and the English Parliament,

1:38:29 of course, this was a glorious revolution.

1:38:32 Because despite the rebellions and the bloodshed, they'd won.

1:38:36 And if you win a conflict, you get to pick its name.

1:38:41 [Music] As Britain left behind the turmoil of the 17th century,

1:38:48 the Glorious Revolution took its place in the history books.

1:38:53 For Parliament and the crown, the ends had justified the means.

1:38:59 An absolutist king had been replaced with a constitutional monarchy,

1:39:03 and it was now time to celebrate the architects of this sensible revolution.

1:39:13 In the 18th century,

1:39:14 those seven people who'd written the letter inviting William

1:39:17 of Orange to come over started to be glorified as heroes.

1:39:22 In 1773, the historian John Dal Rimple came up with a name for them.

1:39:28 I love this name.

1:39:29 It makes them sound like an action film.

1:39:32 They were called the immortal 7.

1:39:36 And the sellers of Lady Place where

1:39:39 the plotters had met became a site of pilgrimage.

1:39:45 The conspirator love lace had brought William himself down here after

1:39:50 his coronation to see the hallowed place where it all began.

1:39:54 And successive kings would visit it as it

1:39:57 became a shrine to the glorious revolution.

1:40:02 And this inscription that marks the fact

1:40:05 that the revolution of 1688 was begun here.

1:40:12 This was a bit of brazen mythmaking,

1:40:14 but it chimes perfectly with the national mood.

1:40:19 The peace and prosperity that followed the establishment of our constitutional

1:40:24 monarchy was presented as the direct consequence of the glorious revolution.

1:40:30 And in the late 18th century,

1:40:32 that point of view was given an extra boost by events across the channel.

1:40:38 France's proud absolute monarch Louis V 16th

1:40:42 was removed from power and executed by revolutionaries.

1:40:51 The violence and terror of the French Revolution sent shock waves around Europe.

1:40:59 In Britain, it was held up as further proof

1:41:01 of the virtues of the orderly transfer of power.

1:41:05 In 1688, the Glorious Revolution was now celebrated

1:41:10 as a symbol of enlightened British values and superiority.

1:41:16 As the rest of postrevolutionary Europe descended into chaos and war,

1:41:21 Britain marched self-confidently into the 19th century to the tune

1:41:26 of parliamentary democracy and industrial progress and imperial expansion.

1:41:33 For 19th century historians,

1:41:35 it was the glorious revolution that was the foundation of all this success.

1:41:42 The greatest champion of this view was

1:41:44 the historian and wig politician Thomas Babington McCauley.

1:41:50 McCauley's Magnumopus was called the history of England.

1:41:55 This is a book that transforms

1:41:57 the conspirator's carefully concocted tale into history.

1:42:02 McCauley presents the glorious revolution

1:42:04 as the master stroke of our national story.

1:42:08 [Music] He writes, "It is because we

1:42:12 had a preserving revolution in the 17th century

1:42:16 that we have not had a destroying revolution

1:42:19 in the 19th for the authority of law,

1:42:22 for the security of property, for the peace in our streets.

1:42:26 Our gratitude is due to William of Orange.

1:42:31 1848 became known as the year of revolution

1:42:35 across Europe with the notable exception of Britain.

1:42:40 The publication of McCauley's book in that same year was perfectly timed.

1:42:45 When I was a history student, we were told to read it with great

1:42:49 caution because this was wig history, a bad thing.

1:42:54 It was a powerful person's view of the past.

1:42:58 Even at the time in the 19th century,

1:43:00 people recognized that McCauley was writing from a very particular standpoint.

1:43:05 When Karl Marx came to write Das Capitol,

1:43:08 he called him that great falsifier of history.

1:43:13 As a communist, Marx's view of history is never considered to be unbiased.

1:43:18 But McCauley's position was equally influenced by his own political views.

1:43:24 He was a wig politician, a member of a party that saw Victorian Britain

1:43:30 as a shining model of democratic progress in action.

1:43:34 For the wigs, this was only possible because of our glorious revolution.

1:43:43 When the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt after a fire in the 19th century,

1:43:47 McCauley and the Wigs saw this palace

1:43:50 of democracy as a shrine to the glorious revolution.

1:43:56 They commissioned a series of frescos to remind MPs of the story

1:44:01 of the tyrant King James and the nation's savior William.

1:44:07 Alice Loyle was a heroine of the Glorious Revolution who hid fleeing

1:44:12 rebels in her home and was arrested for it by James's forces.

1:44:18 She is sentenced to death which of course is burning

1:44:20 at the stake for a woman because women aren't hanged.

1:44:23 A plea goes to the king for clemency and all he does

1:44:27 is he allows her to be beheaded rather than burnt at the stake.

1:44:34 The next painting shows the release of the seven

1:44:37 bishops who James had thrown into the Tower of London.

1:44:44 This is evidence that James was completely unpopular by the masses.

1:44:49 The quantity of the public who just celebrated their acquitt was

1:44:53 evidence that he was not the right man for the job.

1:44:57 In the final painting,

1:44:59 James' tyranny is erased by the glory of constitutional monarchy.

1:45:06 This is the peak of the glorious revolution, is it?

1:45:08 This is the point where it all goes well.

1:45:11 The cler of the House of Lords, John Brown,

1:45:15 is reading the Declaration of Rights to them.

1:45:19 And we, the viewer, are reading with the cler.

1:45:21 We are the people reading to these two monarchs saying,

1:45:26 "You have to do what we say in this document.

1:45:29 You're not to do what James did and disobey

1:45:33 and make up your own rules." And you know,

1:45:36 for McCauley, this is the beginning of that story

1:45:38 of Parliament's power and the monarchy being slowly restricted.

1:45:45 You can absolutely see why this picture is right outside the House of Commons.

1:45:50 Makes complete sense, doesn't it?

1:45:53 McCauley's wig version of events held sway into the 20th century.

1:45:58 The empire and two world wars had consolidated a sense of patriotic pride.

1:46:06 In 1988, just a few yards away from McCauley's glorious frescos,

1:46:11 the House of Commons debated a proposal

1:46:14 to send the Queen a message from Parliament,

1:46:17 marking the 300th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.

1:46:21 [Music] The main events are well known.

1:46:24 The defiance of the orders of King James II by the bishops and the judges.

1:46:29 The invitation to William of Orange and Mary

1:46:32 to defend our ancient rights and liberties.

1:46:35 the landing at Tor Bay and the peaceful transfer of power

1:46:38 which gave rise to the title of the bloodless revolution in England.

1:46:42 Although it was not like that in Scotland

1:46:45 and it was a very different story in Ireland.

1:46:48 Margaret Thatcher's socialist adversary Neil Kinnock had

1:46:52 a rare moment of agreement with her.

1:46:55 This motion to express to her majesty our pleasure

1:46:59 at the tentinery of the revolution is a worthy act.

1:47:03 Not only because it celebrates a significant advance,

1:47:07 as the prime minister just said,

1:47:08 but also because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy

1:47:14 and the ways in which arduously and slowly

1:47:17 it has been brought this far to our time.

1:47:23 Why do you think, Ted,

1:47:24 that the wig version of the Glorious Revolution persisted for such a long time?

1:47:28 I I think it lasted for such a long time because it was not

1:47:31 just a version of history that sort of worked for a particular political party.

1:47:35 It was also something that really spoke to Britain's place in the world

1:47:39 in the 19th century and and it really uh fitted into narratives about the growth

1:47:45 of Britain as a world power as as the apex of civilization

1:47:51 in the world as you know um the exemplar in terms of its political institutions.

1:47:56 So everything that the revolution said about it

1:47:59 as a founding moment in sort of the creation

1:48:01 of this British liberty uh was really sort of feeding

1:48:04 into um this rise to power of the British state.

1:48:08 So we have these soldiers and administrators straddling the globe

1:48:11 with their power poses and they think it all began in 1688.

1:48:15 Yes.

1:48:15 Yes.

1:48:16 Yes.

1:48:18 But then Tony Ben's dissenting voice challenged the dominant version of events.

1:48:24 Then we are told that this was the birth of our democratic rights.

1:48:29 There were the people who had were represented in this house

1:48:32 in 1688 were 2% was it of rich men,

1:48:37 no working people, no middleclass voters, no women.

1:48:41 It was nothing to do with democracy at all.

1:48:47 When do people really start to say,

1:48:49 "Hang on, it wasn't that glorious for people who were poor,

1:48:53 people who were women, people who were Irish,

1:48:54 people who were Scots." When does that start coming forwards?

1:48:58 With the development of Marxist thought and socialist thought as well,

1:49:01 focusing upon uh no longer upon the political elite,

1:49:04 but upon uh ordinary working men and women.

1:49:08 And so we start to get that um being questioned.

1:49:11 But one other aspect there is also, you know,

1:49:13 in terms of what people define as a revolution.

1:49:16 And and so as a kind of more class-based Marxist definition

1:49:21 of what a revolution was came to the four, this doesn't count.

1:49:24 This doesn't count.

1:49:25 It's not a real revolution.

1:49:26 You know, we don't we don't include this in our list of of real revolutions.

1:49:30 And instead 16 the 1640s, the civil war,

1:49:34 the execution of Charles the becomes the real revolution.

1:49:37 And this is the thing that people should focus on, celebrate,

1:49:39 talk about, try and educate people about.

1:49:45 After 300 years, 1688's status

1:49:49 as a bloodless revolution was questioned and revised.

1:49:54 Margaret Thatcher conceded that it may have been a little less than glorious.

1:50:00 Even great events are subject

1:50:02 to constantly shifting judgments and interpretations.

1:50:06 Not every legacy of 1688 is a happy one.

1:50:10 Above all, in Ireland, in the 20th century,

1:50:17 the legacy of 1688 erupted into violence.

1:50:22 Republicans versus unionists, Catholics versus Protestants.

1:50:32 The people of Britain and Ireland continued

1:50:35 to create competing accounts of the past, often with tragic consequences.

1:50:46 For Protestants celebrating the battle of the boy,

1:50:49 the hero of the drama retains his power to this day.

1:50:55 His image is paraded in the orange marches held in his name.

1:51:01 And even when the marchers move on, his image remains.

1:51:09 In some parts of Belfast, then you can still spot images of William III.

1:51:14 He's part of the fabric of the city.

1:51:17 Riding about on his white horse, in his 17th century wig and coat,

1:51:22 he looks a bit in Congress in this urban environment.

1:51:25 He's a long way away from the palaces and battlefields where he really lived.

1:51:31 in Protestant Northern Ireland.

1:51:33 Everybody knows him by a different name, King Billy.

1:51:38 We're taking here to show you one of the older style murals.

1:51:42 Prince of Orange.

1:51:44 Prince of Warren.

1:51:47 I see King Billy's on his white horse.

1:51:50 And it is significant because the first mural or painting,

1:51:52 wall painting of Billy was in East Belfast back in 1904.

1:51:56 And he was painted on a white horse.

1:52:00 This horse was never white.

1:52:02 His horse was brown.

1:52:03 A white horse would have made him a very easy target.

1:52:05 The horse is white because it looks glorious.

1:52:08 A white stallion.

1:52:09 And you can almost see it.

1:52:10 It looks like it's walking on water.

1:52:12 So that portrays him as like a god type figure.

1:52:18 So Peter, who is King Billy in the minds of all of his supporters?

1:52:22 Well, in certain areas, in certain areas in the city,

1:52:26 if God sits here, Billy sits about 3 and a half inches above him.

1:52:30 So, that's how important he is.

1:52:31 Yeah.

1:52:32 What do Catholics think about King Billy?

1:52:35 Would you like me to be honest?

1:52:38 When I grew up, Billy was just a hate figure.

1:52:41 A hate figure.

1:52:41 He was a hate figure for because well, his army defeated the Catholic army.

1:52:46 Yeah.

1:52:46 Um, the celebration, the orange men, July 12th, the bonfires.

1:52:51 Most Irish Catholics see it as the parades rubbing their nose

1:52:55 in orange dog poop a couple of thousand times a year.

1:52:58 So for one side is history and culture and identity.

1:53:01 And the other side said he is seen as a villain.

1:53:07 The troubles that scarred Britain and Ireland throughout

1:53:10 the 20th century are a vivid reminder that there's never

1:53:13 one definitive version of history and that the past

1:53:18 is always interpreted through the eyes of the present.

1:53:24 In 1998, the people of Northern Ireland voted for change.

1:53:29 Yes.

1:53:30 71.12%.

1:53:33 [Applause] The Good Friday Agreement came

1:53:36 into force and tensions finally began to ease.

1:53:42 But 1688 still has a powerful place in Irish culture.

1:53:48 In 2007, a Jacobite musket from the Battle

1:53:52 of the Boone made a rare public appearance.

1:53:55 On a joint visit to the site of the battle of the boy,

1:53:58 Northern Ireland first minister Ian Paisley and the Irish

1:54:02 Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shared a photo opportunity with it.

1:54:07 The gun became an unlikely prop in the peace process.

1:54:14 8 years later, the musket came up for auction here in Belfast.

1:54:20 This deadly looking thing was made at the Tower

1:54:23 of London in 1685 for James II's army, hence the J2R on the side of it there.

1:54:31 It was used by a dragoon almost certainly at the battle of the boy.

1:54:37 A dragoon is a soldier who gets off his horse to fight and he fires his carbine.

1:54:43 This is a sort of short musket.

1:54:45 As he does so, flames come out of the end of it,

1:54:48 which look like the tongue of a dragon, which is why he's called a dragoon,

1:54:53 and which explains the lovely little picture of a dragon on the side down here.

1:54:58 At the auction, the gun was sold

1:55:00 for a hefty £20,000 to an anonymous telephone bidder.

1:55:06 Later, it came out who this had been.

1:55:09 It was the Museum of Orange Heritage.

1:55:12 This Jacobite gun was bought by the very

1:55:16 people against whom it had originally been fired.

1:55:22 The museum was adding a new chapter to the tale of the revolution.

1:55:28 Exhibiting this Jacobite artifact in an orange institution can be seen

1:55:34 as an attempt to bring the two opposing sides of history back together.

1:55:42 The established account of William's glorious

1:55:45 revolution created in the 17th century

1:55:48 and reinforced by later history makers has cast a long shadow in Ireland.

1:55:55 But now some light is shining in.

1:55:59 Instead of reverberating to the roar of cannon fire, the charge of men,

1:56:05 the shot of musket, or the clash of sword steel,

1:56:09 today we have tranquility of still water where we

1:56:14 can contemplate the past and look forward to the future.

1:56:21 [Music] Invitation or invasion?

1:56:26 Liberator or usurper?

1:56:29 Triumph or treason?

1:56:32 The story of the glorious revolution is still being written.

1:56:39 One of the biggest fibs in British history.

1:56:46 Next time I'm in India discovering how the British

1:56:49 crown reinvented the Raj in the 19th century.

1:56:55 [Applause] People often remember their history

1:57:02 lessons as full of dates and bassels, kings and queens, facts and figures.

1:57:09 But the story of the past is open to interpretation.

1:57:13 And much of British history is a carefully

1:57:15 edited and even deceitful version of events.

1:57:20 You might think that history is just a record of what happened.

1:57:24 Actually, it's not like that at all.

1:57:26 As soon as you do a little digging,

1:57:28 you discover that it's more like a tapestry of different

1:57:32 stories woven together by whoever was in power at the time.

1:57:37 In this series, I'm going to debunk some of the biggest fibs in British history.

1:57:43 In the 15th century,

1:57:44 the story of the Wars of the Roses was invented by the Tudtors

1:57:48 to justify their power and then immortalized

1:57:51 by the greatest storyteller of them all, William Shakespeare.

1:57:55 Now is the winter of our discontent.

1:57:59 In the 17th century, politicians and artists helped turn a foreign invasion

1:58:04 into the triumphal tale of Britain's glorious revolution.

1:58:09 Hello.

1:58:10 Hello.

1:58:12 And in this program, I'll discover how in the 19th century,

1:58:16 a British government coup in India created the British Raj and was

1:58:22 heralded by the Victorians as the civilizing triumph of the empire.

1:58:28 In 1877, Queen Victoria got a promotion when she was made empress of India.

1:58:36 She was now up there with emperors like Alexander the Great or the Caesars,

1:58:42 the most powerful potent hates in history.

1:58:45 But Victoria's promotion wasn't just an expression of Britain's military might.

1:58:50 With Victoria as its motherly figurehead,

1:58:53 Britain was cooking up a new imperial vision.

1:58:58 Tyranny and exploitation were things of the past.

1:59:02 This would now be a caring empire driven by core Victorian values of honor,

1:59:08 respect, and justice.

1:59:10 Or so the story goes.

1:59:12 With history, the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred.

1:59:22 [Music] 20 years after Victoria became Empress of India,

1:59:31 Britain staged an incredible spectacle.

1:59:34 On the 22nd of June 1897, the nation celebrated her diamond jubilee.

1:59:40 Victoria was now the longest serving monarch in British history.

1:59:45 300,000 people had lined the streets to watch the Queen making

1:59:50 her procession from Buckingham Palace all the way up here to St.

1:59:54 Paul's Cathedral.

1:59:55 Every minute of the day was very tightly timetabled.

1:59:59 You could read in the newspapers exactly where she was supposed

2:00:03 to be and when she was supposed to get here at midday.

2:00:07 Now, all these people had turned out because this was a rare chance to see

2:00:12 the little old lady who'd led the nation

2:00:14 for 60 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

2:00:19 But perhaps even more importantly, this was a chance to celebrate the best

2:00:23 thing that had ever happened to Britain, its empire.

2:00:30 Since Victoria's reign began in 1837, the British Empire had grown to become

2:00:35 the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

2:00:39 In 1897, Victoria ruled over 370 million subjects across the globe.

2:00:46 And the jewel in the empire's crown was India.

2:00:51 Now obviously India brought prestige and wealth to the British Empire.

2:00:55 But it did something else very important as well.

2:00:58 It gave the British the opportunity to show

2:01:00 other nations how imperialism should be done.

2:01:05 Victoria's Jubilee was a great excuse for a national slap on the back

2:01:10 to celebrate Britain's imperial ideals of fair play, justice, and honor.

2:01:16 Little mentioned that the British were invaders in foreign lands,

2:01:20 that India had been won by fighting bloody battles against Indian resistance.

2:01:27 This history of Victoria's reign was published in Jubilee year 1897.

2:01:33 And the writer brings the story of empire right up into the present.

2:01:37 He claims that all the Indian people in London

2:01:40 for the Jubilee celebrations were delighted to be here.

2:01:43 And what's more, they represented other happy Indians back at home.

2:01:48 One felt, he writes,

2:01:50 that each of them represented thousands more who were ready in the hour

2:01:55 of peril to draw the sword for the motherland and its queen.

2:02:00 He says that the jubilee marks the high point of the imperial idea.

2:02:06 Now you might be thinking what a lot of nonsense.

2:02:09 But this vision of India as the jewel in the crown

2:02:12 of a benevolent empire was fervently believed by most Victorians.

2:02:17 It had been carefully crafted since 1858 when

2:02:20 the government had taken formal control of India.

2:02:24 Queen Victoria herself had issued the new regime's imperial mission statement.

2:02:29 We British will now wholeheartedly respect our Indian subjects.

2:02:33 India will share all the benefits that have made our tiny island nation great.

2:02:42 [Music] A history of aggressive conquest and exploitation was

2:02:47 being molded into an uplifting story to justify the empire.

2:02:52 It began here in Kolkata where the British had

2:02:55 made their Indian base in the late 18th century.

2:03:00 Looking at a map of India,

2:03:02 you might think that Kolkata or Kolkata as it used to be known

2:03:05 is a bit of a funny place to choose for an imperial capital.

2:03:09 It isn't bang in the middle like the really ancient city of Delhi.

2:03:14 That was a much better place for dominating the subcontinent.

2:03:17 But when the British first set up shop in the 18th century,

2:03:21 they weren't intending to dominate the subcontinent at all.

2:03:24 They'd come here to get rich through trade.

2:03:28 And for that, Kolkata suited them perfectly.

2:03:31 [Music] Kolkata's Hulie River flows out into the Bay of Bengal

2:03:41 and into convenient sea routes to take goods back to Britain.

2:03:46 But the first Britons to exploit India's

2:03:49 riches here weren't members of the establishment.

2:03:52 They were buccaneering, money-making entrepreneurs.

2:04:00 They were employees of a vast multinational corporation,

2:04:04 the British East India Company.

2:04:09 The East India Company merchants first came to India

2:04:12 in 1615 during the reign of Elizabeth I.

2:04:19 Haggling with the local elite,

2:04:20 these Wheeler dealers gained a foothold in Kolkata

2:04:23 and began to dominate trade in the region.

2:04:28 This private company had no imperial

2:04:30 ambitions and certainly no civilizing mission.

2:04:34 For them, India was simply a cash cow to be plundered.

2:04:40 Relying on trade deals with the local rulers,

2:04:42 the company men now set about exploiting all the riches that India had to offer.

2:04:47 From silks to cotton to tea to spices,

2:04:55 this band of merchant adventurers stopped at nothing in their pursuit of wealth.

2:05:01 Playing by their own rules, they reneeded on trade deals.

2:05:05 They refused to pay tribute to local rulers and when they didn't get their way,

2:05:10 resorted to violence.

2:05:12 With their sharp trading practices,

2:05:15 today these men seem little more than pirates.

2:05:19 [Music] But the company didn't describe themselves

2:05:24 as a bunch of bloodthirsty and aaricious merchants.

2:05:27 No, these men were British and honorable to the core.

2:05:33 The company's official title made this explicit.

2:05:37 They called themselves the Honorable East India Company and they

2:05:42 went to great lengths to engineer a facade of British respectability.

2:05:48 And they built monuments like this, an almost exact replica of the Church of St.

2:05:53 Martins in the fields in Trafalga Square.

2:05:57 In fact, St.

2:05:58 John's Church also housed the East India

2:06:01 Company's first council chambers where these AngloIndian

2:06:05 merchants could discuss their real interests

2:06:07 making money and they were quite successful.

2:06:11 By the late 18th century,

2:06:13 they were like independent rulers of large parts of India

2:06:17 with their own private army of Indian foot soldiers or SEO.

2:06:21 As the company grew in power,

2:06:23 it still had its pretensions to that word honorable.

2:06:27 But a rather different insight can be found inside St.

2:06:30 John's.

2:06:31 A picture by Johan Zoffan, the company's go-to portrait painter.

2:06:36 So Jay enter, we're standing in a Christian church.

2:06:39 We're looking at a painting of the Last Supper.

2:06:42 Yeah, that's not such a surprising thing to find.

2:06:44 No, it's not.

2:06:45 Uh except that Jesus and all the others present here are actually

2:06:49 members of the fashionable Anglo-Indian society

2:06:51 in Kolkata in the late 18th century.

2:06:53 So real people sat to have their pictures painted.

2:06:57 Yes.

2:06:57 Jesus in the middle is a Greek bishop named Father Parthno.

2:07:01 Yes.

2:07:01 To his left, the lady figure is actually the police

2:07:05 sergeant of Kolkata in the late 18th century named WC

2:07:09 Blackwear who was a transvestite and who was very famous

2:07:13 for stalking and rounding up criminals while dressed as a woman.

2:07:16 Hang on.

2:07:17 You can't just say that.

2:07:19 Are you saying that St.

2:07:20 John is a transvestite policeman?

2:07:22 Ah, here it is.

2:07:23 That's Zoferni's funny take on this.

2:07:25 Slightly subversive.

2:07:27 Okay.

2:07:27 And who else?

2:07:29 This bearded guy sitting on the right foreground

2:07:32 with this dagger showing up on his waist.

2:07:34 He's a Judas here.

2:07:36 He's actually an auctioneer named William Tull.

2:07:38 He looks pretty unhappy.

2:07:40 He He looks pretty pissed uh playing Judas here.

2:07:43 All the others, they are all company men, powerful, and influential.

2:07:48 Isn't this bordering on sacrilege though?

2:07:51 You've got to be pretty arrogant to depict yourself as an apostle.

2:07:54 I guess you can say that.

2:07:56 But that arrogance comes from the actual power

2:07:59 wielded by these people because they are not

2:08:01 only making money doing commerce but they are

2:08:03 also ruling the roost in politics and administration.

2:08:06 They called themselves the honorable East India Company.

2:08:10 They they weren't honorable from our point of view today at all.

2:08:13 How do you explain that?

2:08:14 Well, it's part of the self-image which the British created for themselves

2:08:19 in order to feel good about their enterprise which was really about commerce

2:08:24 and moneymaking and they were

2:08:26 actually portrayed by fairly influential intellectuals

2:08:29 at that time as honorable like David Hume uh whose volumes on the history

2:08:33 of England portrays these people as very honorable holding up the British

2:08:38 values and uh Hume actually says somewhere in those volumes that the reason

2:08:43 why they could transform themselves so quickly from a trading enterprise

2:08:46 into such a powerful political entity was the strength of their character.

2:08:54 Endorsed by the likes of David Hume,

2:08:56 the company men ruled India with little accountability and the British

2:09:01 government was happy as long as the money kept

2:09:03 rolling in because the British East India Company profits enriched

2:09:08 the British economy by67 billion pounds a year in today's money.

2:09:13 But not everyone was impressed.

2:09:16 In 1756, the local ruler of Bengal, Sir Udalla,

2:09:21 led an uprising against the East India Company.

2:09:24 He captured Kolkata and locked a group of company

2:09:28 men in a tiny prison called the Black Hole.

2:09:32 Many died of suffocation.

2:09:34 The British government would join the company to take terrible revenge.

2:09:38 But only after presenting this event as a savage assault on Britain.

2:09:43 The black hole of Kolkata was about to enter the history books.

2:09:47 To the memory of the 123 persons who perished in the black hole prison.

2:09:55 Now British people will have heard of the black hole of Kolkata.

2:09:58 Yes.

2:09:58 But what really was it?

2:10:00 Now the only account of a survivor of a firsthand account of that is

2:10:05 from a British general called John Hallwell who was in that room.

2:10:09 What sort of detail does he give us in his account?

2:10:12 John Hallwell is fairly graphic in his details.

2:10:15 I have an extract here from the Chambers Edinburghough Journal.

2:10:19 This is Hallwell's quote.

2:10:21 The first effect of their confinement was

2:10:23 a continued sweat which soon produced intolerable thirst

2:10:28 succeeded by excruciating pains in the chest

2:10:31 with difficulty of breathing little short of suffocation.

2:10:34 So this is a very graphic horrific dark story that he's telling.

2:10:39 True.

2:10:39 This is this is very horrific but the what we

2:10:42 know is that at that time it suited the British narrative.

2:10:46 So they could not just come about

2:10:47 and slaughter the natives but their retribution as ruthless

2:10:52 and brutal as it was had to be

2:10:54 justified by some pre-existing Indian savagery or barbarism.

2:11:00 It was more than two centuries later in the 1960s

2:11:03 that Indian historians began to question Hwell's account for the first time.

2:11:08 And the first one who did that very significantly was a historian named

2:11:12 RC Majunar who wrote a book in 1962 where he raised two questions.

2:11:17 One is that if it was so dark and so cramped in that little black

2:11:22 hole then how could Hallwell write such

2:11:25 a graphic description with such excruciating and horrific details.

2:11:30 The other question was that if the room was so small then

2:11:34 there was no way you could cram together 146 people in that.

2:11:40 So even if Hallwell were true about people dying of suffocation,

2:11:44 it couldn't have been more than 60 or 70 people, not more.

2:11:49 Uh we don't know.

2:11:50 He was Majima was a nationalist historian.

2:11:52 So his account was also very subjective.

2:11:55 Was he trying to make the British look really bad?

2:11:58 Uh lawyers.

2:11:59 Yes.

2:12:00 Yes.

2:12:00 Massages of the truth.

2:12:02 But we don't know the real truth.

2:12:03 What happened?

2:12:06 At the time, the facts, what really happened in the black hole,

2:12:10 didn't matter to the company or the British government.

2:12:13 They simply wanted to regain control.

2:12:16 So, a horror story was very useful in whipping up public support back home.

2:12:21 And when the East India Company under General Robert Clive took their revenge,

2:12:26 Clive's troops were reinforced by the might

2:12:28 of the British army at government expense.

2:12:31 Clive was victorious.

2:12:33 He was given a periage and immortalized in the colonial narrative.

2:12:37 He was now Clive of India.

2:12:41 But British faith in the East India Company had been shaken.

2:12:47 The problem was that the company had stopped making a profit.

2:12:51 Reestablishing control of Kolkata and Clive's other military

2:12:55 maneuverings had cost an awful lot of money.

2:12:58 The company had had to borrow money from the government, a lot of it.

2:13:03 People at home were beginning to ask, was it worth it?

2:13:09 [Music] The company's honorable status was in doubt.

2:13:29 While it was being bankrolled millions by the government,

2:13:31 company men like Clive were getting rich and throwing their money around.

2:13:36 For many, they were no longer seen as the best of British,

2:13:40 but more like oriental tyrants, corrupt and abusing their power.

2:13:45 [Music] Clive had amassed a personal fortune of4 million in today's money.

2:13:53 This immediately made him one of the richest men in the country.

2:13:57 And he wasn't alone.

2:13:59 There were other ex East India Company men coming

2:14:01 back to Britain with these huge piles of cash.

2:14:05 and they were ready to splash it about on buying property and power.

2:14:10 [Music] This is seizing coat in Gstersha purchased

2:14:18 in 1795 by a company man Colonel John Cochril.

2:14:23 After his death, it was then embellished

2:14:25 with this extravagant Indian facade by his brothers,

2:14:29 also company men, Charles and Samuel.

2:14:32 The Cockwell family created a fantasy mini version

2:14:36 of India here in the middle of the Cotswwells.

2:14:39 From the inside, the house seems like a fairly standard Palladian villa,

2:14:44 but on the outside, it's been given this fantastical Mughal coating.

2:14:50 There are Muslim architectural features like the green dome on the top

2:14:54 and the minouetses and these very distinctive deeply overhanging eaves.

2:15:00 But then again, there are also Hindu features

2:15:02 in the architecture such as the octagonal columns each

2:15:06 side of the door and at the top

2:15:08 of the columns a little decoration of a lotus flower.

2:15:11 But then again on top of that there are

2:15:14 the architectural jokes in the corners above the arch up there.

2:15:18 Well, we've got some Union Jacks with its mashed up Muslim and Hindu features.

2:15:28 A visitor from Georgian India would have thought

2:15:31 there was something a bit odd about this place.

2:15:33 But imagine what the Glosters neighbors must have thought.

2:15:36 To them it must have looked totally alien.

2:15:40 Like many company men,

2:15:42 the cockarles had come back with delusions of grandeur to match their wallet.

2:15:47 To the old establishment,

2:15:50 these men were now seen as corrupt upstars with ideas above their station.

2:15:55 And in the popular press,

2:15:56 they were satarized by cartoonists like James Gilray and labeled as Nabobs,

2:16:02 a perversion of the title Nawab, an Indian ruler.

2:16:08 Andrea, what was the problem with these East India men coming back to Britain?

2:16:12 Why were they so disliked?

2:16:13 Well, part of it was a little bit of wealth envy.

2:16:16 They were coming back with massive fortunes,

2:16:18 buying their way into local society, uh throwing their money around.

2:16:22 But it went a lot deeper than that.

2:16:24 uh the main concern really was how they had got their money.

2:16:27 So if we look at this cartoon for example,

2:16:29 shows a sort of typical NABO being carried through

2:16:33 a sea of dead Indian bodies clutching onto his money bags.

2:16:37 He's got4 million pounds in each hand.

2:16:39 He's weighed down by his riches.

2:16:41 Absolutely.

2:16:42 And although he's got dying, drowning Indian people in the water,

2:16:46 he's he's really bothered about not getting his slippers wet, isn't he?

2:16:48 This was the the concern that these Nabobs were coming

2:16:52 back having spent their time in India simply concerned with profit.

2:16:55 So they're concerned that this money must

2:16:58 be being acquired through sharp trading practices,

2:17:01 through corruption, blackmail, speculation, profitering,

2:17:05 all of these kinds of dark arts that are

2:17:07 seem to be closer to robbery than to fair trade.

2:17:09 How did the political establishment fight back against this?

2:17:13 Well, the main way they fought back

2:17:14 was by impeaching the Governor General, Warren Hastings.

2:17:18 And we can see here this is um

2:17:20 a very famous political cartoon of the time which shows

2:17:22 the uh political adversaries uh Edmund Burke and Charles

2:17:26 James Fox uniting to try and take down Warren Hastings.

2:17:30 This is Warren Hastings,

2:17:31 a western ruler of Bengal wearing uh Indian turban clothing.

2:17:37 He's got his little slippers on again

2:17:39 and uh he is riding upon a strange creature.

2:17:43 I believe it's a camel.

2:17:45 He doesn't look much like a camel but that's slightly stylized camel.

2:17:48 Yes.

2:17:49 And he's he's representing the East India Company at this point is he?

2:17:52 Yes.

2:17:53 Effectively um the bigger concerns here are

2:17:56 not so much about Hastings as a person but about what the East India Company is

2:17:59 doing how governance is being carried out in India.

2:18:02 But of course all of that is a little

2:18:03 bit dry for capturing public opinion and public enthusiasm.

2:18:08 Uh and Burke realizes that to have this debate he needs to go for a target.

2:18:12 Uh, and and that target is Warren Hastings.

2:18:15 By company standards, Hastings wasn't the shadyiest character by any means,

2:18:20 but he was high profile.

2:18:22 The perfect scapegoat for the government.

2:18:25 He was charged with tyranny, robbery, corruption, and blackmail.

2:18:30 The trial dragged on for 7 years.

2:18:32 In the end, it was impossible to make all the charges stick to one individual.

2:18:36 Hastings was acquitted.

2:18:38 But the show trial had worked.

2:18:40 The East India Company had been discredited.

2:18:45 The government was waking up to the dire situation in India.

2:18:50 In future, company men would be kept in check.

2:18:56 In 1784, the government passed an act.

2:18:59 Its full title makes it pretty clear what it was all about.

2:19:02 It was an act for the better regulation

2:19:05 of the affairs of the East India Company.

2:19:10 The cozy relationship between the company

2:19:12 and the British establishment was on the turn.

2:19:16 The merry band of merchants were now depicted as rather too merry,

2:19:21 drunkards who'd succumbed to the vices of the Orient

2:19:24 and grown too close to the locals and their culture.

2:19:29 Take for example the rather fabulously named James Achilles Kirkpatre.

2:19:34 This is his memorial in St.

2:19:36 John's Church.

2:19:37 He was a left tenant colonel for the company

2:19:40 and he had a Muslim wife and Muslim children.

2:19:44 There was a boy Gulam Mali and a girl Nor and Nissa.

2:19:49 He was obviously perfectly happy with the situation.

2:19:52 But not everybody was.

2:19:54 Shortly before Kirk Patrick's death, his children came to live in England.

2:19:58 And there they were given new names for their new life.

2:20:02 Here's the record of their baptism.

2:20:04 Gulam Ali became William George and Noran Nissa became Catherine Aurora.

2:20:12 Must have been confusing for the poor kids.

2:20:16 As the enforced conversion of his children

2:20:18 from Islam to Christianity reveals some company men

2:20:22 like Kirk Patrick had more enlightened views

2:20:25 about race and religion than the British establishment.

2:20:29 At the end of the 18th century,

2:20:31 the government began to think that the company was growing degenerate,

2:20:36 corrupted by the influence of native religions.

2:20:39 The most dangerous of all, Hinduism.

2:20:43 Hindus made up 90% of the 250 million strong Indian population.

2:20:49 The British called the country India,

2:20:52 but its ancient native name was Hindustan, land of the Hindus.

2:21:01 Ever since the British had arrived in India,

2:21:03 they'd struggled to understand Hinduism with its

2:21:07 to them exotic gods and goddesses,

2:21:10 more than a million of them in its confusing cast system.

2:21:14 But at least the earlier visitors in the 18th

2:21:16 century had had a go at appreciating it.

2:21:20 For example, the Scottish historian William Robertson thought

2:21:23 that Hinduism expressed the sophistication of Indian culture.

2:21:28 He wrote that the Indian people had made

2:21:30 more progress towards civilization than any other people.

2:21:37 Robertson's opinions reflected a certain 18th

2:21:40 century view of India's culture as exotic, fascinating, even praiseworthy.

2:21:47 By the 19th century though, many British people reviled Hinduism.

2:21:53 The ancient custom of sativ for example of burning

2:21:56 a man's widow after his death seemed shocking.

2:22:00 It had been East India Company policy not to rock the boat,

2:22:04 not to interfere with native beliefs.

2:22:07 But now the British establishment was taking a very different view.

2:22:12 Historians were now totally disrespectful of Indian culture.

2:22:16 In fact, they were horrified by it.

2:22:19 For example, James Mill wrote a wildly successful history of India

2:22:23 and he doesn't have a good word to say about Hindus.

2:22:26 He thinks they're full of antisocial passions and malignancy.

2:22:32 But at the same time, they're cowards.

2:22:35 This people run from danger with more trepidation and eagerness than

2:22:40 has been ever witnessed in any other part of the globe.

2:22:44 The funny thing was that James Mill had never been to India.

2:22:48 He probably hadn't even met a Hindu.

2:22:50 And then we have the evangelical historian Charles Grant.

2:22:55 He too thinks that the natives are extremely depraved.

2:22:59 But Mr.

2:22:59 Grant has a solution.

2:23:01 He thinks it's the introduction of our light

2:23:04 and knowledge among that benited people,

2:23:06 especially the pure salary wise principles of our religion.

2:23:14 Grant's history became a Bible for missionaries.

2:23:17 and James Mills.

2:23:18 Well, that became the standard textbook for any

2:23:21 young company official going out to India.

2:23:24 In fact, Mill was even employed back

2:23:26 in Britain to oversee the education of new recruits.

2:23:32 The anti-Hindu propaganda in these history books helped

2:23:36 justify the government's assault on the East India Company.

2:23:39 It opened the way for more direct meddling in the affairs of India.

2:23:44 The British government claims that they were protecting

2:23:47 company men from further pollution by immoral practices.

2:23:52 And in 1811, when the government gave

2:23:54 missionaries the license to preach in India,

2:23:57 they thought the natives would be grateful for their conversion to Christianity.

2:24:03 But in 1857, that comforting fiction went up in flames.

2:24:09 In March of that year,

2:24:10 resistance to the British erupted amongst the Indian soldiers.

2:24:15 Over the next 15 months, bitter fighting broke out with heavy

2:24:19 military and civilian casualties on both sides.

2:24:23 India became a bloodbath.

2:24:25 The East India Company's hold on the country was falling apart.

2:24:29 This is the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle.

2:24:35 It was a state-of-the-art weapon.

2:24:38 It had performed very well for the British army in the Crimean War.

2:24:42 So when the East India Company's army needed new guns in 1856,

2:24:46 this is the model they chose.

2:24:48 Unfortunately, they were shooting themselves in the foot.

2:24:53 The problem was the cartridges.

2:24:56 They were lubricated with tallow.

2:24:59 That's animal fat, either pork or beef.

2:25:02 To load the gun, you have to bite the end off the cartridge like this.

2:25:07 Ah, and out comes the powder.

2:25:11 Now that's not very nice for anybody to have to do.

2:25:15 And the majority of the soldiers in the East

2:25:17 India Company army were either Hindus or Muslims.

2:25:21 To them, it was sacriiggious because for Hindus,

2:25:25 the cow is a holy animal and Muslims are forbidden to eat pork.

2:25:30 As wave after wave of rebellion spread across the subcontinent,

2:25:34 the cartridges became a rallying point for Indian resistance

2:25:38 to the British and their disregard for Indian religions and culture.

2:25:45 For the Indian soldiers,

2:25:47 this business of the cartridges was important because it was tangible.

2:25:51 It focused their grievances.

2:25:54 For the British though,

2:25:55 it was used to bolster the fiction that this was a purely military matter.

2:26:00 It wasn't part of wider discontent.

2:26:02 This was simply an Indian mutiny by describing

2:26:11 the uprising as a mutiny, a military matter.

2:26:14 The British were trying to control the story.

2:26:18 Like the black hole incident a 100 years before.

2:26:21 The situation seemed to call for swift sharp retribution.

2:26:26 If this was painted as soldiers disobeying orders or a military mutiny,

2:26:31 then a brutal response was justified.

2:26:42 This is Barakpur just outside modern Kolkata.

2:26:46 In Hindi, Barakpur means the city of barracks.

2:26:50 And in 1857, this was the site of an East India Company army base.

2:26:56 The Indian uprising began here, as did the British decision to call it a mutiny.

2:27:04 I'm going to see the statue of an Indian

2:27:07 soldier who said to have started the rebellion, Mongol Pande.

2:27:13 It was 29th of March 1857 that he came out of his barracks with his red coat,

2:27:20 the hat but significantly not the pantaloon but the traditional Indian dohi.

2:27:26 Oh, so the top half was British and the bottom half was Indian.

2:27:30 That might be indicative of something you

2:27:31 know something going to revolt against the British.

2:27:34 And what happened then?

2:27:36 One of the British officers came forward

2:27:39 but Mongol Pande shoot him but he missed.

2:27:42 A second British officer came and he ordered the SEO to come out to help them

2:27:50 but most of the you know Indian SEO they didn't you know come out to help him.

2:27:56 Nobody came the other didn't come.

2:27:59 No no they didn't come.

2:28:00 Yeah.

2:28:00 Then the third officer who was the commanding officer he came

2:28:04 and he called the seo to come out or he will shoot them.

2:28:09 Then the seo came but when mongul pande saw that then he shoot himself he was

2:28:16 injured seriously and he was arrested and after

2:28:21 that he was hanged under this banyan tree.

2:28:24 It sounds to me like this really was technically a mutiny.

2:28:28 He broke the rules of being a soldier.

2:28:30 Yeah, in the British eyes, of course, he did.

2:28:32 But from the Indian point of view, this was a just thing.

2:28:36 It is the result of the colonial exploitation of India by the British.

2:28:41 And when did Indian historians themselves start to come

2:28:44 out with their own version of what happened?

2:28:46 It was a person called B D Sabar who read who wrote a book

2:28:52 in the early 20th century and the name of the book is first war of independence.

2:28:59 Now here also you know not Indian mutiny or Indian

2:29:02 revolt Indian war of independence still now in school

2:29:06 books in in textbooks in the colleges Mumbul Pande is

2:29:10 regarded as the first murder of the Indian independence movement.

2:29:14 Do you think that this whole event, call it a mutiny, a war,

2:29:18 whatever you like, it's really fascinating case study for historians, isn't it?

2:29:21 Sure.

2:29:21 It it is.

2:29:22 It is.

2:29:23 You have to see the whole thing in the perspective of the time.

2:29:29 Visiting Barakpur today with the crumbling ruins of the military

2:29:33 barracks around the cherished memorial to Mongol Pande.

2:29:36 History is on the side of the SEO.

2:29:40 But in 1857, it was a very different story.

2:29:45 Back then, today's heroic freedom fighter was portrayed

2:29:49 by the British establishment as a drugcrazed villain,

2:29:53 disobeying orders, the ring leader of a mutiny.

2:29:58 As the resistance quickly spread across the country,

2:30:01 remember Mongol Pondai became the Indian resistance cry.

2:30:07 And for the British, Hyundai became a byword for mutineer.

2:30:13 The killing on both sides was ferocious.

2:30:16 For the British, the crisis point came in June 1857 when

2:30:21 Indian rebels at Cornpo killed over 200 British women and children.

2:30:27 They then dumped their bodies in a well.

2:30:31 Once again, the British began whipping up a frenzy for vengeance.

2:30:35 The scene at the cornpaw slaughter was deliberately left

2:30:38 untouched to provoke the bloodlust of the relief forces.

2:30:44 For instance, we we have this shoe that survives

2:30:47 and it was found near the well at Gondur.

2:30:51 So the story goes that this little shoe fell off the foot of a dead

2:30:56 little boy as his body was being thrown down the well for disposal.

2:30:59 That's right.

2:31:00 Do you see this as a sort of a prop

2:31:02 for telling a particular story about what happened on that day then?

2:31:06 I certainly think so.

2:31:07 I think if this was a soldiers boot, it wouldn't have had the same impact.

2:31:11 It's a childhood.

2:31:12 It's a really powerful thing to see, isn't it?

2:31:14 It's a motive.

2:31:15 It's telling you they're not just um attacking our men,

2:31:19 they're attacking our women, they're attacking our children.

2:31:21 It goes further with another object that is linked to the same incident.

2:31:27 A lock of hair that is in our collection.

2:31:30 Have a quick read of the description.

2:31:32 The little note says hair of the murdered women and children, over 200 of them.

2:31:37 But another account tells us of the Highlanders

2:31:40 that arrived at the well of Konpur and vowed to themselves that for every strand

2:31:45 of hair that we find, a mutin shall die.

2:31:48 Oh my goodness.

2:31:49 The message was revenge.

2:31:51 justification for revenge.

2:31:53 The message was received loud and clear and the British retribution

2:31:58 was merciless to show people at home that vengeance had been done.

2:32:03 It was then graphically recorded.

2:32:05 This watercolor is a depiction of mutineers being blown away.

2:32:10 They're tied to the mouths of cannons and then blown to pieces.

2:32:14 So the cannonball is about to come out through the middle of him.

2:32:17 Quite gruesome.

2:32:18 You see typically reports say the head goes up,

2:32:22 the arms go to the side and the legs fall.

2:32:24 Why were they killed in such an inhumane manner?

2:32:28 It was something used by the Mughals in the 1600s

2:32:31 which was really aimed at punishing Hindu people so

2:32:34 that they wouldn't have a body in their afterlife and therefore

2:32:38 couldn't go through the reincarnation cycle that they believed in.

2:32:42 So the scattering of the physical remains of the person this ensured a kind

2:32:47 of double death in this life and for all future lives to come.

2:32:50 Certainly so and that's one of the reasons why this is probably

2:32:53 painted and it was a way of stamping authority and and showing victory.

2:32:59 By the time the British finally crushed the rebellion in July 1859,

2:33:04 conservative estimates say that 11,000 British

2:33:08 and over 100,000 Indians had died.

2:33:11 The British were victorious, but India was in turmoil.

2:33:16 Since the unrest had started, the government had begun to realize that India

2:33:20 couldn't be held by brute force alone.

2:33:23 Britain needed to start winning over Indian hearts and minds.

2:33:29 The government decided to begin a new chapter for British rule in India.

2:33:35 In 1858, the East India Company were told, "You're fired." Now,

2:33:43 when the government had intervened previously

2:33:45 in the business of the East India Company,

2:33:48 it had been with the aim of moderating its affairs.

2:33:51 Sometimes there'd been a bit of a slap on the wrist.

2:33:54 But this time, it was different.

2:33:56 This was a full-on asset stripping, annihilation of the East India Company.

2:34:02 It was immediately stripped of all power.

2:34:06 The company's top dog, the governor general,

2:34:08 was evicted from his palatial residence and sent home

2:34:12 to be replaced by a new government representative, the viceroy.

2:34:17 The new age of the Raj was dawning.

2:34:20 The government now had to prove that the regime in India really

2:34:24 had changed and was already weaving an imperial narrative to do just that.

2:34:31 To avoid accusations of corruption or self-interest,

2:34:35 power wasn't transferred directly to Parliament.

2:34:39 Instead, it was vested in the person of Queen Victoria herself.

2:34:43 Victoria eagerly got in on the act.

2:34:46 She made a public proclamation to the world that the new regime

2:34:50 had swept away all the bad practices of the old East India Company.

2:34:56 We will respect the rights, dignity, and honor of the native princes.

2:35:02 Everyone of any religious faith shall alike

2:35:06 enjoy the equal and impartial protection of law.

2:35:10 We will respect land inherited from ancestors.

2:35:14 Our earnest desire is to stimulate the peaceful

2:35:17 industry of India to promote public works and improvements.

2:35:22 Their prosperity will be our strength.

2:35:27 Victoria's proclamation was a master stroke.

2:35:31 It transformed a government coup into a moral

2:35:34 mission to improve the lives of all Indians.

2:35:42 The new declaration distanced the British establishment

2:35:45 from any involvement in the East India Company's atrocities.

2:35:49 Britain's image as a plundering nation was now being

2:35:53 repackaged for both Indian audiences and those back home.

2:35:59 In this 18th century image, Britannia is taking things from the empire.

2:36:03 She's saying, "M jewels,

2:36:06 I want them." And even her lion is looking greedily at the ropes of pearls.

2:36:11 But in the 19th century image, the relationship is the other way round.

2:36:15 In this picture, Victoria is giving something to her grateful imperial subject.

2:36:21 Look, this lucky fellow is about to get a present.

2:36:24 And this, as the title of the painting puts it,

2:36:27 is the secret of England's greatness.

2:36:31 Britain's new imperial mission statement was clear.

2:36:34 The empire would take responsibility for the welfare of its Indian subjects.

2:36:40 They would no longer be subjugated and exploited, but respected and rewarded.

2:36:45 That would smooth things over.

2:36:48 In 1861, a new nightly order was created.

2:36:52 The order at the Star of India.

2:36:55 When the Indian princes were made knights commander of this order,

2:36:59 they were supposed to feel like they joined the British establishment.

2:37:03 Bit like school prefects getting given a badge.

2:37:06 But they were also given at this point

2:37:08 a medal showing the head of Queen Victoria.

2:37:12 Now hang on.

2:37:14 Human representations can be offensive to Muslims as many of the princes were.

2:37:19 Once again, the British were merily misunderstanding their Indian subjects.

2:37:25 In reality, the replacement of East India Company rule

2:37:28 with the British Raj offered only a veneer of change.

2:37:32 Beneath the surface,

2:37:33 the British government was continuing to exploit India's riches.

2:37:38 But this message that the empire was

2:37:40 now all about civilization was very powerful.

2:37:44 And in 1868, this imperial manifesto gained another powerful champion,

2:37:50 the new prime minister Benjamin Draeli.

2:37:53 He coined the phrase the jewel in the crown

2:37:57 to emphasize his view of India's importance for the empire.

2:38:02 The Israeli was highly ambitious.

2:38:04 Partly for himself, yes, but also for Britain and for the empire.

2:38:09 He thought that Britain shouldn't just maintain its empire, it should expand,

2:38:14 and that for this purpose, a figurehead,

2:38:16 like an empress, would be awfully useful.

2:38:19 In 1876, the Israeli engineered the Royal Titles Act,

2:38:24 giving his imperial jewel some extra sparkle.

2:38:29 Queen Victoria would become the Empress of India.

2:38:34 This was a very clever move on Disrades part.

2:38:38 Ever since Albert had died in 1861, Victoria had been in mourning.

2:38:43 She'd rather withdrawn from the world,

2:38:46 and her people thought that she'd forgotten about them,

2:38:49 almost that she'd been sherking her responsibilities.

2:38:53 But now she was back in the limelight.

2:38:57 The imperial narrative now had a powerful yet maternal leading lady.

2:39:02 The Israeli enjoyed his own promotion too

2:39:05 as the delighted Victoria made him an earl.

2:39:09 But Victoria's elevation didn't have unanimous approval.

2:39:13 Many fought the title of empress stank of autocratic rule.

2:39:18 It was against the principles of constitutional monarchy.

2:39:23 And besides, what would the Indian population think?

2:39:28 Dizrai and his supporters needed to spin a story

2:39:31 to prove that Victoria's promotion was best for Britain,

2:39:35 best for India, best for the empire.

2:39:39 What was needed was a party.

2:39:41 And that's exactly what they got.

2:39:46 Lord Littton, who was Queen Victoria's newly promoted representative in India,

2:39:51 expressed the opinion that Indians would go mad for a bit of bunting.

2:39:58 There were immense cultural differences,

2:40:00 but both Indians and the British reveled in pageantry and spectacle.

2:40:06 Celebrations were to be held across India,

2:40:09 and there would be one showstoppping event.

2:40:13 It was decided that the celebrations weren't to be in Kolkata but here in Delhi.

2:40:18 Because this wasn't just a party.

2:40:21 This was a cleverly crafted statement of propaganda.

2:40:26 The choice of Delhi was highly symbolic.

2:40:30 For centuries, Delhi had been the capital

2:40:32 of the great ruling Indian dynasty, the Mughals.

2:40:37 It was still full of magnificent buildings signifying their power.

2:40:42 By situating themselves amidst all this grandeur,

2:40:47 the British were claiming that they were

2:40:49 the natural successors to a mighty empire.

2:40:52 [Music] Delhi had also played a central role in the so-called mutiny.

2:41:01 The rebels had made their stand alongside

2:41:03 the last Mughal emperor here in his red fort.

2:41:12 By holding the celebrations in Delhi,

2:41:15 the British were reminding the Indians that their dominance.

2:41:19 The British couldn't deny that they were foreign interlopers.

2:41:22 But they now hammered home the message that they were a benign force for good.

2:41:28 To appeal to the Indians, the entire event took the form of a durb bar,

2:41:32 a tradition where Mughal emperors held court with their subjects.

2:41:37 These formal ceremonies were accompanied

2:41:39 by lavish festivities with vibrant musical

2:41:43 processions leading to the final audience with the emperor at his fort.

2:41:48 In 1877, the British created their own Durbar spectacular

2:41:53 with an extraordinary mishmash of Indian and British pageantry.

2:41:59 when the Darbar of 1877 happens,

2:42:03 the idea of a Dharbar is retained but it's given a spin.

2:42:06 I'm saying that uh the Darbar of 1877 reminds me a little of the chicken tikka

2:42:12 masala which incidentally I ate for the first time when I went to uh to England.

2:42:17 Not something that featured in Indian menus till quite recently.

2:42:20 So the idea of a chicken tikka masala is an invention based on three staples

2:42:27 taken from an Indian diet but but turned

2:42:30 and transformed into a completely unrecognizable dish.

2:42:34 How did the British go about reinventing this tradition?

2:42:38 For example, the Shahai players

2:42:40 that would have traditionally accompanied a royal

2:42:43 procession in Mughal India were replaced by a fanfare of Vagnner.

2:42:48 And I would imagine that the 88,000 people who had

2:42:52 gathered to watch the spectacle and the 63 Maharajas who'

2:42:56 come from different parts of the country to be a part

2:42:59 of the Darbad had possibly never heard of Vagna play.

2:43:02 Lots of things were invented.

2:43:04 For example, look at these.

2:43:06 Many of the rulers did not really have their own heraldry, their own insignia.

2:43:11 This is completely the figment of somebody's imagination.

2:43:14 So this is a brand new coat of arms invented for the ruler of Hyderrobat.

2:43:20 Completely.

2:43:20 He's lucky he's got a lovely little tiger.

2:43:23 He does indeed.

2:43:24 These seem to me very Anglo-Saxon images because

2:43:27 the tradition of of heraldry that's a western European thing.

2:43:30 What have the other ones got then?

2:43:32 This is this goes with him.

2:43:34 This is He has been given some pictures.

2:43:36 Some No, I these are falcons again.

2:43:38 Falcons.

2:43:39 uh uh and and uh what looks like a tiger, but I'm not sure what that is.

2:43:44 But this is again invented tradition.

2:43:46 These are things that were invented for the occasion

2:43:50 in 1877 with Vagnner trumpeting out over the spectacle.

2:43:55 The Derbar was a resounding success story.

2:43:59 It was spun so cleverly that few commented on its

2:44:02 vast costs at a time when famine was ravaging India.

2:44:08 The money could have been spent on saving the 5

2:44:11 and a half million Indians who died from starvation.

2:44:16 But no, this was the climax to the positive story

2:44:18 that the Raj was a wonderful new age of empire.

2:44:28 At the finale, a proclamation was read out.

2:44:31 It was from the queen.

2:44:33 We trust it began.

2:44:35 She's using the royal we.

2:44:36 that the present occasion may tend to unite

2:44:39 in bonds of close affection ourselves and our subjects.

2:44:44 That from the highest to the humblest, all may feel that under our rule,

2:44:48 the great principles of liberty, equity, and justice are secured to them.

2:44:54 This is the object of our empire.

2:45:01 Every action was now heralded as part of the civilizing narrative.

2:45:06 Train stations and railways would modernize

2:45:09 this ancient disconnected territory as never before.

2:45:13 And new educational institutions would offer every Indian

2:45:17 subject the chance to improve his or her lot.

2:45:27 Educating the natives was a key part of the mission of empire.

2:45:32 At least according to Thomas Babington McCauley, politician and historian,

2:45:37 McCauley thought that Indian school boys ought to study British history

2:45:42 because that would show them how a society could and should develop.

2:45:47 Britain showcased the triumphant march of progress.

2:45:53 McCauley first expressed his educational policies in the 1830s.

2:45:58 He thought that with a good dose of education,

2:46:00 Indians could not only better themselves, but help the British run the country.

2:46:06 Of course, they'd have to get the right sort of education.

2:46:10 Not Indian, but British.

2:46:16 McCauley thought that there was less valuable

2:46:18 historical information to be collected from all

2:46:21 the books ever written in Sanskrit than you

2:46:24 would find in an English prep school textbook.

2:46:28 McCauley believed that a native could only be

2:46:31 called learned or honorable if he'd learned his Milton,

2:46:35 his lock, and his Isaac Newton.

2:46:39 Giving Indians British educational opportunities became

2:46:42 a key enterprise under crown rule.

2:46:46 It was central to the repackaging of the empire.

2:46:50 But for the people of India,

2:46:51 the new educational policy exposed the civilizing claims

2:46:55 of the British to be something of a sham.

2:47:00 the Indians, the educated Indians,

2:47:02 they had started realizing that they had been uh sort of tricked by the uh

2:47:10 British imperialists because uh while the queen

2:47:13 the proclamation of the queen had spoken of equality,

2:47:17 there remained a lot of discrimination between the British

2:47:21 and the Indians uh in so far as jobs were concerned.

2:47:25 What sort of jobs were these educated Indians hoping to get?

2:47:28 They wanted to hold important po post in the civil services.

2:47:33 Uh moreover, they wanted to hold important positions in the realm of law.

2:47:39 But here there was a bar.

2:47:41 Indian judges, they were never allowed to try an European offender.

2:47:46 The European offender was exclusively tried

2:47:50 by a British judge or a European judge.

2:47:53 So we have the the rhetoric of empire.

2:47:55 Yes, very clear.

2:47:57 But the reality is quite different.

2:47:58 It was definitely different.

2:48:00 There was a glass ceiling and beyond

2:48:02 that limit the Indians could not cross over.

2:48:06 In 1883, there was a move to smooth over the cracks.

2:48:11 CPlbert, a member of the Kolkata Law Council,

2:48:14 put forward a motion to give Indian judges the right to try British individuals.

2:48:20 But that didn't go down very well either.

2:48:23 It disturbed the Anglo-Indian community because they they shuddered at the very

2:48:29 thought of their trial under an Indian a brown judge.

2:48:35 So there was a white mutiny against uh

2:48:38 the Ilbert bill and ultimately the bill was defeated.

2:48:42 Would you say that the Ilbert bill then was the last straw for educated Indians?

2:48:46 They got fed up with the empire.

2:48:48 Yes, that was the last straw on the camel's back.

2:48:52 For many newly educated Indians,

2:48:54 the rejection of the Ilbert bill was evidence that Victoria's

2:48:58 proclamation was little more than a pack of lies.

2:49:02 The Imperial mission was having a rough ride in India.

2:49:06 But one person remains true to the new story of a benign British Empire.

2:49:14 [Music] Yes, the Empress of India was very partial to a chicken ticker.

2:49:26 [Music] Victoria may never have visited the jewel in her crown,

2:49:34 but she did create a tiny slice of India on the aisle of white.

2:49:39 At her holiday home of Osborne House,

2:49:42 she created a special Indian room, the Durbar room.

2:49:46 It was put together by Indian craftsmen

2:49:48 under the supervision of Roard Kipling's grandfather.

2:49:52 Victoria couldn't go to her Durbar, but with her new room,

2:49:56 the Durbar had come to her, and she was far

2:49:59 better informed about India than most of her British subjects.

2:50:05 In the late 19th century,

2:50:06 most Britons had never met anybody from the subcontinent.

2:50:10 But a growing number of Indians were now making Britain their home.

2:50:15 In 1889, Britain's first purpose-built mosque was constructed

2:50:19 to cater for this growing Indian population in Woking.

2:50:24 And it's here that I'm meeting Shrebani Basu who's researched

2:50:28 the life of a man who fired up Victoria's passion for India.

2:50:33 Abdul Karim.

2:50:36 Here we've got Abdul Karim looking terribly grand.

2:50:40 What's all these medals that he's wearing here?

2:50:42 Well, she gave him land and titles.

2:50:45 He had every title.

2:50:46 Just stopped short of a nighthood.

2:50:48 Actually, he's quite the aristocrat in his sort of study,

2:50:51 at ease, looking extremely distinguished if I absolutely.

2:50:55 And there's a photo of Queen Victoria there

2:50:57 and a photo with the queen on the table there.

2:50:59 Is he just a sort of token gesture to bolster

2:51:02 the idea that she's this benign empress of India?

2:51:06 You know, it started like that.

2:51:08 He was sent to her as a jubilee present,

2:51:10 as a servant to stand behind her at table, just look grand and wait on her.

2:51:15 But this relationship developed within a year he's

2:51:19 become her private teacher her munchi and for 13

2:51:22 years he taught her udu and by the end of her life she could read and write udu.

2:51:27 She loved showing off.

2:51:29 She would invite royalty from India and you know say a few lines in udu.

2:51:33 Is this her own private journal?

2:51:36 This is actually her last entry in her journal.

2:51:38 It's quite moving because it's written two

2:51:40 months before her death uh November 7th 1900

2:51:44 Winds Castle and uh she writes about

2:51:46 the weather that she's just got back from Balmoral.

2:51:49 They weren't exactly talking about high politics.

2:51:52 Sounds more domestic.

2:51:54 It is the journals show a domestic side but we know that she

2:51:57 took a keen interest in Indian politics and this is coming from Abdul because

2:52:01 of the letters she writes to the viceroy in which she asks detailed

2:52:05 questions about riots tension between Hindus

2:52:08 and Muslims and she even offers some solutions.

2:52:11 Uh she says the Hindus have so many festivals.

2:52:14 Why can't they just postpone one of their festivals

2:52:16 so they don't clash during Maharam and the poor

2:52:18 viceroy Lord Lands down he writes back postponing a Hindu

2:52:22 festival would be like changing the day for Christmas.

2:52:24 So she's a little bit naive but she's trying very hard.

2:52:28 Victoria was taking her symbolic empress role rather

2:52:32 too literally and the British establishment were not amused.

2:52:37 The doctor, he actually writes that this is all munchi mania and it

2:52:42 reaches a stage where they actually want to label the queen insane

2:52:47 and they say we will if you don't stop now because of the munchi

2:52:51 we will say you are insane and then she gives them a yearful.

2:52:56 Victoria's munchi mania reached its peak

2:52:59 in 1897 the year of her diamond jubilee.

2:53:03 On the day of the celebrations, Abdul Karim was her honored guest.

2:53:07 For his dismayed detractors, this was the year of the moonshine.

2:53:12 But things would very shortly change.

2:53:15 In 1901, Victoria, Empress of India,

2:53:19 died after 63 years on the throne at the age of 81.

2:53:24 While the nation mourned her passing in recognition

2:53:27 that she'd nurtured the empire towards unprecedented greatness,

2:53:32 her beloved Abdul Karim was finally put in his place by the establishment.

2:53:37 Sent back to India, stripped of his honors and gifts.

2:53:43 As Britain entered the 20th century, the empire was strong,

2:53:48 but the imperial narrative was wearing thin.

2:53:52 Indian resistance to British power was growing and even some

2:53:55 Britons began to question the recent history of the Raj.

2:54:00 One historian who'd formerly been an ardent imperialist had this to say.

2:54:05 He said that the empire treated its subject

2:54:08 races with a curious mixture of good and evil.

2:54:15 The stories of the black hole of Kolkata

2:54:17 and the Indian mutiny were being rewritten.

2:54:22 The villains of the Raj were turning

2:54:24 into heroes of a growing nationalist movement.

2:54:28 When the British gave up control of the Indian subcontinent on August the 15th,

2:54:33 1947, Britain lost 80% of its subjects, nearly 390 million people.

2:54:41 Its jewel in the crown had gone forever.

2:54:44 And as the new Indian flag was raised at the red fort in Delhi,

2:54:48 India's first prime minister Handit Neru spoke of India's trrist with destiny.

2:54:56 History begins a new for us.

2:54:59 The history which we shall live and act and others will write about.

2:55:06 A richly embroidered chapter in British history was at an end.

2:55:13 In this series, I've tried to tell you how

2:55:15 stories from history change according to who's telling them.

2:55:20 But don't think that I have given you the definitive version.

2:55:23 Because I promise you that in years to come,

2:55:25 a different historian will be telling you a different tale.

2:55:30 [Music]