A History of England

While the British army was on the European continent, putting up a pretty useless fight against the French in the Austrian Netherlands, Charles Edward Stuart launched a new uprising - or possibly rebellion, depending on your point of view - back in Britain. Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie to some, his uprising - the final attempt to put the Stuarts with their absolutist views of monarchy back on th...

There was no real problem with a woman inheriting the Austrian throne. But it could be a useful pretext for war by nations keen on advancing their own interests militarily. Frederick II of Prussia was quick to go to war - the Philosopher Prince became a Military King when he had the power to  - and he seized the rich Austrian province of Silesia (which is actually Polish, but neither the Aust...

Ah, those were the days. When Britain went to war over a sea captain who'd had an ear cut off. And taught the Spanish a thing or two. Except, of course, that Britain didn't go to war for that reason. And they taught Spain nothing. In fact, the Spanish taught the British a lesson, though we shall discover later that it wasn't listening. It took Britain eight years to decide to go to war with Spain,...

Britain, its idealists claimed, was launching an Empire of Freedom. The reality, sadly, was rather different. Europeans, with Brits in the forefront, had developed a love of tobacco, and above all a sweet tooth. They wanted sugar for their cakes and pastries, but above all for their coffee, chocolate and, that new British institution, tea. But sugar production requires backbreaking work under terr...

'Robin', or Robert Walpole, Britain's first and longest-serving Prime Minister, came to be known as 'Cock Robin'. Possibly because people around him felt his success had made him cocky. The regime over which he presided was termed the 'Robinocracy'.  It was an era of peace, stability and improving government finances. Not enough to save him ultimately from his adversaries, dissident Whigs suc...

The title 'Prime Minister' used to be a term of abuse. To be honest, depending on the holder of the office, plenty of people would maintain it still is.  The first person of whom it was used as a real title in Britain, even if still not officially, was Robert Walpole. We've already met him, as a man who did rather well out of the South Sea Bubble, if more by good luck than by good judgement....

Not all bubbles are all that bubbly. The South Sea Bubble made some people a lot of money - such as Isaac Newton, the physicist but also skilful financier - or a colossal amount of money - such as Thomas Guy, who founded Guy's Hospital, still one of England's great teaching hospitals. But it also ruined a lot of others. Rather like every bubble, down to the present day. This bubble also opened the...

England in the early eighteenth century was undergoing great changes. London was Europe's biggest city. And the country was rapidly emerging as a major business centre, displacing the Netherlands from that position. It had a thriving stock exchange and huge overseas trade, led by the venerable East India company. It was also becoming a far livelier place in politics and in thought, with more toler...

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an extraordinary woman, both in her personality and in her contribution to the world, specifically in medicine.  This episode looks at both aspects, trying to pick out the complex character behind her image, in particular her possibly ambivalent and certainly far from obvious sexuality.  Then, however, it looks at how she became a leading benefactor to humanity, by in...

In the dying days of her reign, we see Queen Anne refusing royal assent to a bill, a historic moment only because it was the last time ever that a British monarch blocked a bill passed by both Houses of Parliament from becoming law (but she did do it on the advice of her ministers...) We also see her engineering herself a Tory government, backing her High Church Anglican views. Not for long though...

It's time for a new country. Time to shake off the old bickering small nations around the island of Britain. It's time for Great Britain to emerge as a powerful new player on the world stage, bringing together Scotland on the one hand and England-and-Wales on the other. Though the fact that Wales is already just an adjunct of England shows what's likely to lie in store for Scotland down this road....

The War of the Spanish succession was really just the continuation of the Nine Years' War, but this time with the specific issue of the succession to the Spanish throne at stake. That, incidentally, meant that Spain swapped sides, fighting with France this time around, since the dying Spanish king had triggered the war by leaving his crown to a claimant from the French royal family. It was a war w...

As William III, reigning alone since the death of his wife Mary II, approached the end of his reign, there was clearly a vital issue to address. Mary's sister Anne was the only Protestant heir to the throne recognised in law, and England was certainly not going to put up with another Catholic monarch, after James II. But to find a non-Catholic heir meant going back up the royal family tree quite a...

Just as soon as William III could free himself up from wars in the British Isles, to secure his throne (and his wife Mary II's), he got stuck into the fighting on the Continent, on behalf of his home country of Holland. This was the Nine Years War, where the Grand Alliance fought to block the attempts of Louis XIV's France to win the territory it needed to give it what it regarded as defensible bo...

That’s it: we’ve reached the great and dreadful moment of the Battle of the Boyne, an event that casts its shadow right down to the present day. Each year – on an oddly chosen anniversary date – Orangemen, called after William of Orange, march in Northern Ireland to remind everyone of their triumph over Catholic forces. Then the episode switches its attention to Scotland, and events just as iconic...

It's the run up to the Battle of the Boyne.  So we're chatting about the many motivations for William III's invasion of England. Yes, the aims of the Glorious Revolution, protecting or simply implementing a particular view of a certain number of English liberties, mattered. But there was also the much more personal objective of protecting his wife's claim to the English throne, which he would...

The Glorious Revolution led to England having two reigning monarchs for the price of just one: William III and Mary II, or Williamandmary, as we like to think of them.  It started with a Bill of Rights, which no one signed and never became law, but it was destined to have a great role in the future. Curious, isn't it, how something with no immediate impact can turn out to be historic? Some bi...

Was it glorious? Was it even a revolution? The Glorious Revolution brought to an end the short and little lamented - indeed, lamentable - reign of James II of England, James VII of Scotland, and with it, the Stuart dynasty on the throne of England. But there was little fighting, particularly as James behaved uncharacteristically and fled abroad, after offering little resistance. And while there wa...

We stand on the brink of saying goodbye to the Stuart kings, at last (not, alas, to the Stuarts though: they'll be back a couple more times to haunt us). The history of England saved the worst to last: James II, or James VII in Scotland, was the bottom of the barrel, the worst of the Stuarts, the man whose only achievement was to help shorten his reign by his sheer ineptitude.  We'll find out...

In the course of Charles II's reign, we saw governments fall and an opposition beginning to emerge. The result was the formation of two distinct groups, the Whigs and Tories, the former looking for limited royal power, the other more strongly royalist. Neither was keen on Catholics, but the Whigs were rather more intent on protecting the country against what they saw as Papist plotting to overthro...

When we last took a look at the so-called golden age of Charles II, we talked about the persecution of Catholics and, in particular, the witch hunt launched against them during the Popish Plot craze launched by Titus Oates's fabrications. But Catholics weren't alone in being given a lousy time. Puritans, the more fundamentalists of Protestants, were also targets. They were seen as the main archite...

Was that golden age, following the restoration of the monarchy in England, really that golden? This episode looks at how it lost its sheen, particularly when the champion fabricator or fake news and false denunciations, Titus Oates, came along and plunged the country into the hysteria of the Popish Plot. That was like so many other witch hunts, even the McCarthy anti-Communist hunt in the 1950s. A...

Charles II's Golden Age continues in this next episode, although the title, with its trace of irony, rather betrays some of the things that were going on under the surface. A lot of duplicity by the merry monarch, as well as some fine mistresses, and a growing head of steam for more active anti-Catholicism, drawing considerable encouragement from the behaviour of the monarch himself Illustration:...

As any fan of Tolkien's Lord of Rings can tell you, nothing beats the return of a king. After the chaos that followed Richard Cromwell's following Oliver as Lord Protector, the restoration of Charles II, another Stuart, to the English throne seemed a relief and a promise of stability. What's more, his character - not for nothing is he called the Merry Monarch - promised lots of good things. Sadly,...

In the 1650s, power concentrated in England into fewer and fewer hands, until in the end a Lord Protector was appointed and - surprise, surprise, since he dominated the Army Council which appointed him - Oliver Cromwell got the job. As it happens, a (somewhat cowed) parliament worked alongside him, so in a sense England had reached the point which parliament had sought before the Civil Wars: share...