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Documentary, British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley S01E02 The Glorious Revolution
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00:00Lots of people remember their history lessons from school as dates and battles,
00:10kings and queens, facts and figures.
00:13But the story of our past is open to interpretation.
00:18And much of British history is a carefully edited and even deceitful version of events.
00:24You might think that history is just a record of what happened.
00:28Actually, it's not like that at all.
00:31As soon as you do a little digging, you discover that it's more like a tapestry of different stories
00:37woven together by whoever was in power at the time.
00:41In this series, I'm going to debunk some of the biggest fibs in British history.
00:47In the 15th century, the story of the Walls of the Roses was invented by the Tudors to justify their power
00:54and then immortalized by the greatest storyteller of them all, William Shakespeare.
00:59Now it's the winter of our discontent.
01:03In the 19th century, a British government coup in India was rebranded by the Victorians as the civilizing triumph of the Empire.
01:16And in this program, I'll discover how in the 17th century, British MPs joined forces with a Dutch prince to spin a foreign invasion into a story of liberation.
01:30If you think that William the Conqueror was the last person to invade these shores, think again.
01:36Just 300 years ago, another William, William of Orange, led an equally successful attack.
01:43William has gone down in history to some as the heroic King Billy.
01:48To others, he's a bloody usurper.
01:52But his attack isn't remembered as a foreign invasion.
01:56He's often described instead as a peaceful transfer of power,
02:01a necessary measure that saved England from the tyrannical King James II.
02:07This was our glorious revolution.
02:12Or so the story goes.
02:14With history, the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred.
02:19In the 17th century, the English civil wars between Royalists and Republicans tore the country apart.
02:39And Charles I was beheaded.
02:42Never again would the monarchy be allowed to wield absolute power.
02:49So in 1685, when James II became king and started throwing his weight around,
02:55his enemies decided that something must be done.
02:58What followed became known as the Glorious Revolution.
03:08James II is the villain of this carefully constructed tale.
03:14He abdicates, giving way to the noble Dutch Protestant William III of Orange
03:20and his English wife Mary.
03:23In this swift and glorious transfer of power,
03:26the Golden Couple put an end to the absolute power of the monarchy.
03:30They banish Catholicism and restore order and liberty to our nation.
03:37And all without a drop of English blood being spilt.
03:42For many people, James II was a good old-fashioned tyrant, harking back to the bad old days of Charles I.
03:55But the biggest problem with James was the fact that he was a Catholic king in a country that was largely Protestant.
04:03In England, at least, a Catholic monarch was associated with absolutism.
04:08He believed in the divine right to rule and to ride roughshod over his subjects.
04:15James didn't do much to play down this tyrannical image.
04:20When a rebellion rose up against him, he executed 250 of the participants.
04:26And when seven Anglican bishops dared to challenge his pro-Catholic policies, he threw them into the Tower of London.
04:35James' enemies wanted a Protestant monarch who respected the powers of Parliament.
04:42So, James was a Catholic.
04:44He appointed his fellow Catholics to high office.
04:47That caused annoyance.
04:48And worst of all, he married a Catholic, Mary of Modena.
04:53This meant that any children, any heirs that they might have, would be Catholics too.
04:58But for James' Protestant enemies, there was a glimmer of hope.
05:03James hadn't produced a Catholic heir.
05:07He only had his two daughters, both Protestant from his first marriage.
05:12And his new wife, Mary, had lost eight children as a result of miscarriages, stillbirths and deaths in infancy.
05:21If James' wife, Mary, proved unable to give him a baby boy,
05:26and time was ticking on, she wasn't getting any younger,
05:29then James' line would stutter to a stop.
05:32This Catholic part of the royal family would simply die out.
05:48Then on the 23rd of December, 1687, it was announced that Mary of Modena was pregnant again.
05:55As each month passed, it looked ever more likely that she might give birth to a healthy baby.
06:02The Protestants thought that something had to be done.
06:08Were they going to rise up against James and have a civil war? No.
06:13Instead, they waged a war of words.
06:16The bedchamber became a battlefield.
06:19With the horrors of the English Civil War still within living memory, Regicide was out of the question.
06:28Any regime change would need to be legally justified.
06:32So James' enemies began to spin a yarn.
06:37As Mary's pregnancy progressed, people put it about that it was a fake or perhaps a fantasy.
06:44Even James' grown-up daughters, the Protestant princesses, Mary and Anne, got in on the act here.
06:51They spread gossip that nobody had felt the baby quickening,
06:55and here's the clincher, nobody had seen any milk.
06:59But on the 10th of June, 1688, Mary of Modena defied the doubters and gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
07:09Now, you might think that the birth would have put an end to the debate,
07:14but in fact, it intensified it, because some people said that the real baby had died
07:20and that an impostor had been smuggled into the Queen's bed in a warming pan.
07:26The tittle-tattle in London's coffee houses started to sway public opinion against the King,
07:38and James' response only made the situation worse.
07:43He summoned 42 witnesses to make sworn statements that they'd seen Mary give birth.
07:51James published these depositions. It was an attempt to silence his Protestant enemies.
07:58John, tell me a bit more about this warming pan incident. How did it actually work?
08:04It comes from quite an innocuous detail in these depositions.
08:07So there's a gentlewoman of the bedchamber called Margaret Dawson who says,
08:12I saw fire carried in to warm the Queen's bed in a warming pan.
08:17But then in this pamphlet, a full answer to the depositions,
08:21which basically goes through the depositions and tears into pieces and says,
08:24this isn't good enough. This isn't enough detail. It's not enough evidence.
08:27It picks up on this detail of the warming pan.
08:30And it says inside that warming pan was an illegitimate child who had been born in the convent next door.
08:35The pamphlet gives us the route that the child took.
08:38It's carried through these passages, so this is the passage below, up some stairs,
08:43through a closet above, through some more passages above, through here,
08:48through a gallery, then through some lodgings, and then into the Queen's great bedchamber,
08:53into the bed where she's in labour, and through the curtain.
08:57And the dot goes all the way right up. Into the bed itself.
09:00And then they pop the child into the bed.
09:02It must have happened. The map says that it did.
09:05Indeed.
09:06What other sort of stuff was produced that helped to tell this story at the warming pan?
09:10What we have here is a pair of images. The first of which is celebrating the Prince's birth.
09:15So you have Mary of Medina here with her hand in the Prince of Wales' crib.
09:20The Prince of Wales here is looking very splendid. He has some flowers in his hair.
09:24And it's a kind of... Hello! We've got a lovely little baby boy.
09:28Exactly. Isn't that lovely?
09:30And then what happens in this one? It's been subverted a bit.
09:33It is. This figure that's added in here is Father Edward Petra,
09:37who's an English Jesuit who had rose to be an advisor of James II.
09:41This led to rumours that he was, in fact, the father of the Prince of Wales.
09:45Which is why he's creeping up behind her and giving her a squeeze.
09:48That's exactly right.
09:50Do you think it's possible that James II wouldn't have got into so much trouble
09:54if he'd been able to tell a better story?
09:56One of the problems is that the warming pan fiction is,
09:59even though it's not plausible, that people are willing to go along with it
10:03because they would rather believe that the child was illegitimate
10:06than face the prospects of an England that is Catholic for years and years and years.
10:12The warming pan affair may sound far-fetched, but it was a juicy tabloid tale,
10:24powerful enough to stir up treason.
10:28James' right to rule was increasingly being questioned.
10:38And James' enemies had now won the public support they needed
10:42to remove the anointed king.
10:45There was once a grand Tudor mansion here in the village of Hurley
10:58on the banks of the River Thames.
11:00It was called Lady Place.
11:03Its owner was the Third Baron Lovelace,
11:06a Member of Parliament and one of James II's enemies.
11:11Lovelace was a bit of a rogue.
11:14He was a drinker and a gambler and, above all, a Catholic hater.
11:19Once he got a court summons for some public order offence,
11:23but the magistrate issuing it was a Catholic.
11:26So Lovelace took his court summons, he screwed it up
11:29and he used it to wipe his bottom in public.
11:37Nothing of Lady Place stands above ground today.
11:40But hidden away here in someone's back garden,
11:45a little bit of it still remains.
11:51These are the cellars of Lady Place,
11:54and they're connected by a secret tunnel
11:57to the banks of the River Thames just over there,
11:59so you could arrive and leave unseen.
12:02Lovelace hosted clandestine meetings here
12:05for like-minded noblemen
12:07who were all plotting against King James II.
12:14In these secret meetings,
12:16a plot was hatched to overthrow the king.
12:20But these men weren't going to take up arms themselves.
12:24Instead, they wrote a letter,
12:27inviting someone else to do their dirty work.
12:30This is a copy of the letter they wrote,
12:35dated the 30th of June, 1688.
12:39It's been signed by seven people,
12:42but they haven't given their names.
12:44They've given secret code numbers instead.
12:47Somebody has written in later who they really were.
12:51Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley,
12:55the Bishop of London, Russell, Sydney.
12:57These were all top politicians.
12:59You can see why they didn't want to sign in with their names,
13:02because their letter is just full of treason.
13:05Listen to this.
13:06The people are so generally dissatisfied
13:09with the present conduct of the government
13:11in relation to their religion, liberty and properties.
13:16And here they get right down to business.
13:19Nineteen parts of twenty of the people
13:22throughout the kingdom are desirous of a change.
13:28Playing on anti-Catholic sentiments,
13:30this letter tells the tale of a country in peril,
13:34a country that needed to be saved.
13:37It was addressed to a Protestant prince from the Netherlands,
13:41William of Orange.
13:46It even talks about William landing in England,
13:49and it says that the people will venture forth to meet him
13:52when he does this.
13:54The message is pretty clear.
13:56It is, William, Prince of Orange, please invade us.
14:03In the unfolding drama of the Glorious Revolution,
14:07this wouldn't be described as treason.
14:10It was the letter of invitation,
14:13a plea from a beleaguered nation in a time of need.
14:18If William accepted,
14:19he would be presented as the answer to England's prayers.
14:24This is William's palace,
14:28Petlo in the Netherlands,
14:30from where he reigned as Stadtholder,
14:33which is almost like a constitutional king.
14:37And it's pretty clear why William was the conspirators' ideal candidate
14:42to take the English throne.
14:46William was James II's nephew.
14:49But more importantly, his wife really was a steward.
14:53She was James's own daughter, Mary.
14:57In England, Ireland and Scotland,
15:00these royal steward credentials might help make the coup look more like
15:05a legitimate succession.
15:07If William, and indeed Mary, could be placed on the English throne,
15:13then this needn't be seen as a coup at all,
15:16just as an orderly transition from father to daughter.
15:20And these two had excellent credentials as monarchs-in-waiting,
15:24because they were both Protestant.
15:26James's enemies had chosen well.
15:29But William of Orange had even more to gain from going along with their plan.
15:38William was playing an even longer game than simply becoming king of Britain.
15:45And this is why the invitation was so attractive to him.
15:49If he were to invade and get the crown, then he'd be toppling a Catholic king.
15:55Good thing!
15:56More importantly, though, he'd be getting more power to move against an even more dangerous Catholic threat near our home.
16:04Louis XIV, the Sun King of France.
16:11Louis XIV was the most absolute of absolute monarchs,
16:16and his armies were a constant threat to the Dutch Republic.
16:21William was determined to protect Protestant Northern Europe against Louis.
16:27The rivalry between the two men was played out in a game of garden design.
16:37Here, William ordered fountains even bigger and better than those at Louis's own opulent palace, Versailles.
16:49But for evidence of William's more enlightened style of monarchy,
16:53you have to go into his bedroom.
16:58In the 17th century, the state bedroom wasn't a private place.
17:03This is where the sovereign received important guests.
17:08What would you say is the most significant difference between Louis XIV's bedroom at Versailles and William's bedroom here?
17:15I think it's the absence of a balustrade, just where we stand here, to divide the room into two parts.
17:22And in France, people had to make a bow in front of the balustrade, even if the king was absent.
17:28But William XIII is more, you know, more open to the public, more open-minded perhaps, and more open to the parliament.
17:37Maybe that's the difference.
17:39So we've got Louis, the absolute monarch, with his get-out, stay-away balustrade.
17:43Yeah.
17:44But William, not as a democrat, but as a more friendly republican, he says, come on in.
17:49I believe so.
17:50A friendly king.
17:51Exactly.
17:52But William wasn't going to beat Louis with one-upmanship in the bedroom.
17:58He needed Protestant allies to crush Louis in battle.
18:03Getting his hands on the British Navy would give William the edge he needed.
18:09And now he had an open invitation to walk right in and take it.
18:15So this is William's private closet.
18:18Yes, a room for secrets.
18:20Exactly, exactly.
18:21It's the most intimate space you can imagine.
18:24It's very small but very elaborate.
18:26It's his office, more or less.
18:28Yes, it's his office.
18:29He worked here at this very spot.
18:31Am I right to imagine William III sitting here, reading his letter of invitation and drawing up his plan for the invasion of Britain?
18:40Oh, it's so tempting.
18:41Yes, I want to believe it was at that low that he made plans for his invasion.
18:45It all took place here.
18:47So this is a really significant room in the whole of British history.
18:51It is.
18:56Britain's parliamentary conspirators had their champion lined up.
19:01But who was really controlling the narrative here?
19:07Now, we think that William was invited to invade England.
19:13But what's the real story?
19:15It's more complicated than that, isn't it?
19:17It is definitely more complicated.
19:19Because he had already taken the decision to go to England, probably in November 1687.
19:26And if he got the invitation by the English, then, let me say, he was safe.
19:32He wanted to legitimise his trip by asking people in England to invite him so that he could give the expedition a legal cover.
19:42In April 1688, two months before the invitation, one of the seven conspirators had come here to The Hague for a secret meeting with William.
19:55Gilbert Burnett, William's chaplain and historian, kept a record at the meeting.
20:01Burnett wrote that William said it would be great if some people in England would invite him and that he would be ready in a few months' time.
20:10By the end of September to come over. That's to invade England.
20:14That's to invade England, yeah.
20:16William was a lifetime enemy of Louis XIV.
20:20So there was a great chance that there would be a new war.
20:24And in that war, England had to help William III.
20:29So he has to put together a document that's going to sell his case to the English, to the British people, really.
20:36And this, fantastically, is handwritten. This must be the original.
20:41The declaration of His Highness William, Prince of Orange, the reasons inducing him to appear in arms in the Kingdom of England for the preserving of the Protestant religion and for restoring the laws and the liberties of Great Britain and Ireland.
21:00So nothing in there about France. It's all about you guys, English people. Be happy.
21:04Yes. William says that he wants to call a free and legal parliament that would abolish all the rules or all the laws and all the violations of the laws that James II had perpetrated.
21:19So he had it written by a Dutch civil servant. It was translated into English by Burnett.
21:25And it looks to me like Burnett has improved it.
21:28You can see him adding in extra little words and rewriting it here.
21:32And he's added in a bit about the Houses of Parliament. He's added in remarkable.
21:37Presumably that was all helping to sell the case to make it smoother, to make it more acceptable to the British.
21:43Because, of course, the English people weren't going to know anything about the real plans of William III with England.
21:49Namely, that England would have to join him against France.
21:53I'm more and more impressed with William's foresight.
21:59It seems that he's several moves ahead of everybody else in a European game of chess.
22:05And it's very clever the way he's written himself into the story.
22:09With the pre-invitation, then the invitation, then the declaration.
22:14You can see all of these things as individual pieces of politics, as spin, if you like, until they stick.
22:23And then they become history.
22:30With his declaration to the British prepared, William and his parliamentary plotters put his invasion plan into action.
22:37His flag proudly proclaimed his message for religion and liberty.
22:49But just as they set sail, a storm blowing from the west stalled William's progress and kept him in port.
22:56And because it helped James, people called it the Catholic wind.
23:02But then...
23:03And it suddenly turned round.
23:04William's luck changed.
23:05His luck certainly changed.
23:06And it blew just as hard from completely the opposite direction.
23:10So that was the Protestant wind.
23:11That shot him all the way down the channel.
23:13So now they had the initiative too.
23:15And shot down the channel at record speed with a very strong easterly wind behind him.
23:20Can you describe this fleet that came sailing down the English Channel?
23:27Well, lots of people saw it.
23:30That's the first thing.
23:31It was so huge that when they came down the channel, they decided to make a parade of it.
23:37And went through 25 abreast, stretching almost from Dover all the way to Calais.
23:42With brigade bands playing cheerful tunes.
23:45The idea was to offend King James and Louis XIV at the same time.
23:50Which they did very effectively.
23:51Because lots of people saw this and were utterly astonished, of course.
23:54Because nothing like it had been seen before. Or again.
23:57So it's a cross between a fleet and a pantomime.
24:00William III understood the importance of making a big impact on the public.
24:06A theatre, if you like.
24:07The theatre of politics. He understood that very well, yes.
24:10Now, we've been talking about this as an invasion.
24:13Is that the right word to use, in your opinion?
24:16It was an invasion, but it was very important to present it as if it were not an invasion.
24:22One of the things the Dutch troops were given very strict orders about was that they must never call it an invasion.
24:28Whatever they do, they would be severely punished.
24:31They were told they must not tell the English that they had invaded and conquered the country.
24:35The parliamentary conspiracy was going to plan.
24:41Hello! Woohoo!
24:43William's huge army disembarked unopposed, here at Brixham.
24:48The locals in this Devon fishing village just stood by and watched.
24:54One Dutch observer reported that all along the roadside, the men, the women and the children were waving out,
25:09God bless, a hundred good wishes to you.
25:12Well, he was Dutch, he would say that, wouldn't he?
25:16William really had left nothing to chance.
25:19Amongst all these supplies coming off the ships at Brixham, the spare boots, the pickled herrings, the horses,
25:26there was one more vital weapon of war.
25:29It was a printing press.
25:31Before setting sail, William printed his version of events, 60,000 copies of the Declaration,
25:40an early example of printed propaganda.
25:43And as soon as he landed, he started printing even more.
25:48William was carpet bombing England with his manifesto.
25:52His Declaration was everywhere, listing his reasons inducing him to appear in arms in the Kingdom of England.
26:01He's not keeping a low profile, is he?
26:08As he marched on Exeter, the Dutch prince's army met with no resistance.
26:15He entered the city in spectacular fashion, not as an invader, but as the nation's saviour.
26:24200 soldiers in armour led the way on Flemish horses,
26:28accompanied by a further 200 Africans from the Dutch colonies in white turbans.
26:39William himself was dressed in gleaming armour, a white plume blowing in the wind.
26:45He was riding a white horse.
26:47His banner bore the words God and the Protestant religion.
26:54If you knew your Bible, the symbolism was pretty obvious.
27:00A white horse heralded the arrival of a divine conqueror, or even Christ himself.
27:08In the book of Revelation, heaven opened, and behold, a white horse.
27:15He who sat on him was called Faithful and True.
27:20In righteousness he judges and makes war.
27:24In his eyes are flames of fire, and on his head are many crowns.
27:30William had come to seize the crowns.
27:34William had come to seize the crown.
27:37But by presenting himself in his theatrical get-up,
27:40he didn't look like an invader.
27:42He looked like a Christian saviour.
27:45William's theatrical progress didn't stop there.
28:00In Exeter Cathedral, he ordered his chaplain to preach from the text of his declaration,
28:07with his theme of a free parliament.
28:09The securing to the whole nation the free enjoyment of all their laws, rights and liberties,
28:17under a just and legal government.
28:20He also gave religious assurances.
28:23The preservation of the Protestant religion.
28:26The covering of all men from persecution of their consciences.
28:31The chaplain then led the congregation in the Te Deum,
28:35a hymn in which the people asked God to save them, to lift them up,
28:40and most importantly, to govern them.
28:55And then, with quite dazzling hubris, he seated himself here,
29:00in the spectacular throne of the medieval bishops of Exeter.
29:03He wasn't king yet, but with his propaganda, and his pageantry, and his sense of purpose,
29:15he was halfway there.
29:16The Dutch prince was cleverly transforming himself into a very British hero.
29:27A Protestant knight in shining armour, leading a glorious revolution.
29:32Not an invader, not a usurper, but a liberator.
29:37James was in trouble.
29:41And as he prepared for battle to put an end to William's story of triumph, disaster struck.
29:49James had a nosebleed and retreated from the battlefield.
29:54The conspirators said that the nosebleed was a sign of weakness.
29:57And when James fled England, they announced that the king had abdicated.
30:07The fleeing James had gone into exile in Louis XIV's Catholic France.
30:13To his enemies, this confirmed where his true loyalties had been all along.
30:17There was now a constitutional power vacuum.
30:26For William to fill James' royal shoes, he and the parliamentary conspirators would have to keep promoting their agenda.
30:34William's glorious progress had to be turned into a plausible new chapter in British history.
30:40Mary's Stuart lineage now came into play.
30:44She and William were offered a joint monarchy.
30:47They'd ruled together.
30:49This had never happened before and it hasn't happened since.
30:52But this special arrangement allowed a story that was really about conspiracy and intrigue
30:59to be transformed into the tale of an orderly succession.
31:03On the day William and Mary formally accepted the joint crown, they had a declaration read aloud to them.
31:13It defined the limits of their power as well as the duties and responsibilities they owed to Parliament.
31:21That declaration was enshrined in law as the Bill of Rights.
31:26It set down Protestant superiority in law and banned Catholics from ever taking the throne.
31:36It enshrined certain civil liberties and it ordered that no law should be imposed without parliamentary approval.
31:46Most of all, it formalised a narrative that backed up William and Mary's claim to the throne.
31:53The Bill of Rights gave the conspirators the constrained monarchy they wanted.
32:01It strikes me that this bill was a very finely judged piece of sort of political magic.
32:08Is that correct?
32:10I think that the main thing that it was intended to try to sort of persuade people of was that this was not an invasion,
32:18but it was rather a legitimate coronation.
32:23So, in the first part of the document, it's an attempt on the part of the political nation to wriggle out of a slightly sticky situation.
32:31That's to say, they got to characterise James as a tyrant and as therefore illegitimate, which makes the revolution legitimate.
32:40Having written James and any future Catholic threat out of the picture, the Bill of Rights now declared William and Mary's legitimate right to rule.
32:53So, that's part one. And then part two is the future, is it?
32:56That's right, yes. So, part two is the declaration of rights proper.
33:01It is, if you like, that bit that might be seen as an expression of enlightened ideas,
33:07an assertion of the liberty of the people and of the sovereignty of Parliament.
33:12So, for example, they say there that the king may not raise taxation without the consent of Parliament,
33:19that there has to be free elections, that there has to be freedom of speech in Parliament.
33:23The transition from a monarchy with absolute power to a monarchy in service to Parliament was almost complete.
33:34The Bill of Rights began what we now call our constitutional monarchy.
33:39It's the foundation stone of parliamentary democracy.
33:44The Bill of Rights was a winner's charter.
33:48It was written by and for the supporters of the new regime.
33:51It legitimised the joint monarchy of William and Mary, but it also gave more power to Parliament.
33:58Much more power. So much that you could call it a revolution.
34:03And if you happen to be a Protestant parliamentarian, then you might even think that it was all rather glorious.
34:10The events of 1688 now had a suitably grand title.
34:17The conspirators were determined to find the perfect words for this glorious and historic episode.
34:26Best of all, the coup had gone like clockwork, so they could describe it as a peaceful transition.
34:37A bloodless revolution.
34:40But as William's glorious revolution was rolled out across Scotland and Ireland, it was anything but.
34:54James's supporters were known as the Jacobites.
35:00And in Ireland and Scotland, they continued the struggle against William.
35:06In March 1689, James joined his allies in County Cork with troops supplied by Louis XIV.
35:14William landed in the north of Ireland the following year and marched on Dublin.
35:21On the 1st of July 1690, their armies met here, on the banks of the river Boyne.
35:28And now, for the first time in the whole of their long power struggle, James II and his son-in-law William faced each other in the field at the Battle of the Boyne.
35:45James's army was over 25,000 strong. William had a force of 40,000 men.
35:53This would be a bloody battle. William attempted to cross the river from the west.
36:02James diverted most of his troops to head him off.
36:07But this left the rest of James's army exposed.
36:12William was merciless. James's soldiers held out for three hours before being overwhelmed.
36:20One French witness said,
36:24This is the sixth battle that I've seen, but I've never seen such a rout.
36:30William's troops were ruthlessly efficient.
36:33They picked off the fleeing Jacobites like hares amongst the corn, he said.
36:42James was defeated.
36:44He fled again to France and would never return.
36:47But the fighting continued, and William sanctioned even bloodier slaughter elsewhere.
36:59A year after the Boyne, William's men met Jacobite forces at Ockrim, in County Galway, on the 12th of July 1691.
37:08It was carnage.
37:11The Jacobites suffered losses of 7,000.
37:15William's side only 700.
37:18In the aftermath of the battle, one observer reported seeing Irish soldiers with mutilated limbs, asking for the sword as a remedy.
37:32Meanwhile, others, he said, spewed forth their breath mixed with blood and threats.
37:40There was so much blood that it flowed over the ground, and you could hardly take a step without slipping in it.
37:47This battle marks the end of Jacobite resistance in Ireland.
37:55William would be later reinvented as a Protestant hero, King Billy.
38:01For jubilant Protestants, Ockrim went down in history as the single most celebrated battle.
38:07So why has the Battle of the Boyne lived longest in the national memory of Ireland?
38:16It happened because of a funny kind of a mix-up.
38:20People had always celebrated or commemorated the Battle of Ockrim on its anniversary, the 12th of July.
38:27Until 1752, when the calendar changed to bring Britain into line with Europe.
38:35Roughly ten days got lost to British history.
38:39But people had got used to the idea of celebrating on the 12th of July.
38:44It's just that under the new system, the battle whose anniversary was closest to that date wasn't Ockrim.
38:50It was the Battle of the Boyne.
38:52And that's why the Boyne has ended up on the fridge magnet.
38:58The Battle of the Boyne still has an almost sacred significance for Irish Protestants.
39:05King Billy has secured the future of their religion.
39:09For them, his status as a national hero and saviour remains intact to this day.
39:14Jacobite uprisings against the glorious revolution in Scotland were also brutally crushed.
39:25In 1692, William's men in Scotland ordered the notorious Glencoe Massacre.
39:32It was punishment for the clan MacDonald's delay in signing an oath of allegiance to William and Mary.
39:3938 were murdered.
39:42And another 40 women and children died of exposure after their homes were torched.
39:51But despite brutality and bloodshed in Scotland and Ireland,
39:56the narrative of the glorious revolution held fast in England.
40:00For William and the English Parliament, of course this was a glorious revolution.
40:06Because despite the rebellions and the bloodshed, they'd won.
40:10And if you win a conflict, you get to pick its name.
40:14As Britain left behind the turmoil of the 17th century, the glorious revolution took its place in the history books.
40:25For Parliament and the Crown, the ends had justified the means.
40:32An absolutist king had been replaced with a constitutional monarchy.
40:38And it was now time to celebrate the architects of this sensible revolution.
40:43In the 18th century, those seven people who'd written the letter inviting William of Orange to come over,
40:54started to be glorified as heroes.
40:57In 1773, the historian John Dalrymple came up with a name for them.
41:03I love this name. It makes them sound like an action film.
41:07They were called the Immortal Seven.
41:08And the Cellars of Lady Place, where the plotters had met, became a site of pilgrimage.
41:19The conspirator Lovelace had brought William himself down here,
41:24after his coronation, to see the hallowed place where it all began.
41:29And successive kings would visit it as it became a shrine to the glorious revolution.
41:34And this inscription that marks the fact that the revolution of 1688 was begun here.
41:44This was a bit of brazen myth-making, but it chimes perfectly with the national mood.
41:51The peace and prosperity that followed the establishment of our constitutional monarchy was presented as the direct consequence of the glorious revolution.
42:04And in the late 18th century, that point of view was given an extra boost by events across the channel.
42:11France's proud, absolute monarch Louis XVI was removed from power and executed by revolutionaries.
42:21The violence and terror of the French Revolution sent shockwaves around Europe.
42:32In Britain, it was held up as further proof of the virtues of the orderly transfer of power in 1688.
42:42The glorious revolution was now celebrated as a symbol of enlightened British values and superiority.
42:49As the rest of post-revolutionary Europe descended into chaos and war, Britain marched self-confidently into the 19th century to the tune of parliamentary democracy and industrial progress and imperial expansion.
43:08For 19th century historians, it was the glorious revolution that was the foundation of all this success.
43:14The greatest champion of this view was the historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay.
43:24Macaulay's magnum opus was called The History of England.
43:29This is a book that transforms the conspirators' carefully concocted tale into history.
43:36Macaulay presents the glorious revolution as the masterstroke of our national story.
43:42Macaulay writes,
43:45It is because we had a preserving revolution in the 17th century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the 19th.
43:55For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace in our streets, our gratitude is due to William of Orange.
44:041848 became known as the year of revolution across Europe, with the notable exception of Britain.
44:14The publication of Macaulay's book in that same year was perfectly timed.
44:19When I was a history student, we were told to read it with great caution, because this was Whig history, a bad thing.
44:28It was a powerful person's view of the past.
44:32Even at the time in the 19th century, people recognised that Macaulay was writing from a very particular standpoint.
44:38When Karl Marx came to write Das Kapital, he called him that great falsifier of history.
44:47As a communist, Marx's view of history is never considered to be unbiased.
44:52But Macaulay's position was equally influenced by his own political views.
44:59He was a Whig politician, a member of a party that saw Victorian Britain as a shining model of democratic progress in action.
45:09For the Whigs, this was only possible because of our glorious revolution.
45:14When the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt after a fire in the 19th century, Macaulay and the Whigs saw this palace of democracy as a shrine to the glorious revolution.
45:30They commissioned a series of frescoes to remind MPs of the story of the tyrant King James and the nation's saviour, William.
45:40Alice Lyell was a heroine of the glorious revolution who hid fleeing rebels in her home and was arrested for it by James's forces.
45:52She is sentenced to death, which of course is burning at the stake for a woman because women aren't hanged.
45:58A plea goes to the king for clemency and all he does is he allows her to be beheaded rather than burnt at the stake.
46:05The next painting shows the release of the seven bishops who James had thrown into the Tower of London.
46:19This is evidence that James was completely unpopular by the masses.
46:23The quantity of the public who just celebrated their acquittal was evidence that he was not the right man for the job.
46:32In the final painting, James's tyranny is erased by the glory of constitutional monarchy.
46:39This is the peak of the glorious revolution, isn't it? This is the point where it all goes well.
46:46The clerk of the House of Lords, John Brown, is reading the Declaration of Rights to them.
46:53And we, the viewer, are reading with the clerk. We are the people reading to these two monarchs saying you have to do what we say in this document.
47:04You're not to do what James the second did and disobey and make up your own rules.
47:09And, you know, for Macaulay this is the beginning of that story of Parliament's power and the monarchy being slowly restricted.
47:19You can absolutely see why this picture is right outside the House of Commons.
47:25Makes complete sense, doesn't it?
47:28Macaulay's Whig version of events held sway into the 20th century.
47:33The Empire and two world wars had consolidated a sense of patriotic pride.
47:40In 1988, just a few yards away from Macaulay's glorious frescoes,
47:45the House of Commons debated a proposal to send the Queen a message from Parliament marking the 300th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.
47:56The main events are well known.
47:59The defiance of the orders of King James the second by the bishops and the judges.
48:04The invitation to William of Orange and Mary to defend our ancient rights and liberties.
48:08The landing at Torbay and the peaceful transfer of power which gave rise to the title of the bloodless revolution in England.
48:17Although it was not like that in Scotland and it was a very different story in Ireland.
48:22Margaret Thatcher's socialist adversary, Neil Kinnock, had a rare moment of agreement with her.
48:29This motion to express to Her Majesty our pleasure at the tercentenary of the revolution is a worthy act.
48:38Not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said,
48:43but also because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy
48:48and the ways in which arduously and slowly it has been brought this far to our time.
48:54Why do you think, Ted, that the Whig version of the Glorious Revolution persisted for such a long time?
49:03I think it lasted for such a long time because it was not just a version of history that sort of worked for a particular political party.
49:10It was also something that really spoke to Britain's place in the world in the 19th century.
49:14And it really fitted into narratives about the growth of Britain as a world power, as the apex of civilisation in the world,
49:27as the exemplar in terms of its political institutions.
49:31So everything that the revolution said about it as a founding moment in the creation of this British liberty
49:36was really sort of feeding into this rise to power of the British state.
49:42So we have these soldiers and administrators straddling the globe with their power poses and they think,
49:48it all began in 1688.
49:50Yes, yes, yes.
49:52But then Tony Benn's dissenting voice challenged the dominant version of events.
49:57Then we are told that this was the birth of our democratic rights.
50:04There were the people who had, were represented in this house in 1688,
50:09what 2% was it, of rich men, no working people, no middle-class voters, no women.
50:16It was nothing to do with democracy at all.
50:19When do people really start to say, hang on, it wasn't that glorious for people who were poor,
50:27people who were women, people who were Irish, people who were Scots,
50:30when does that start coming forward?
50:32With the development of Marxist thought and socialist thought as well,
50:36focusing upon, no longer upon the political elite, but upon ordinary working men and women.
50:42And so we start to get that being questioned.
50:45But one other aspect there is also, you know, in terms of what people define as a revolution.
50:51And so, as a kind of more class-based Marxist definition of what a revolution was came to the fore...
50:58This doesn't count!
50:59This doesn't count. It's not a real revolution.
51:01You know, we don't include this in our list of real revolutions.
51:05And instead, the 1640s, the Civil War, the execution of Charles I,
51:10this becomes the real revolution and this is the thing that people should focus on,
51:13celebrate, talk about, try and educate people about.
51:19After 300 years, 1688's status as a bloodless revolution was questioned and revised.
51:28Margaret Thatcher conceded that it may have been a little less than glorious.
51:32Even great events are subject to constantly shifting judgments and interpretations.
51:40Not every legacy of 1688 is a happy one, above all in Ireland.
51:50In the 20th century, the legacy of 1688 erupted into violence.
51:55Republicans versus Unionists.
51:59Catholics versus Protestants.
52:04The people of Britain and Ireland continued to create competing accounts of the past,
52:12often with tragic consequences.
52:14For Protestants celebrating the Battle of the Boyne, the hero of the drama retains his power to this day.
52:27His image is paraded in the orange marches held in his name.
52:33And even when the marches move on, his image remains.
52:40In some parts of Belfast, then, you can still spot images of William III.
52:49He's part of the fabric of the city.
52:52Riding about on his white horse, in his 17th century wig and coat,
52:56he looks a bit incongruous in this urban environment.
53:00He's a long way away from the palaces and battlefields where he really lived.
53:05In Protestant Northern Ireland, everybody knows him by a different name.
53:11King Billy.
53:13We're taking it here to show you one of the older style murals.
53:17Prince of Orin.
53:19Prince of Orin.
53:21I see King Billy's on his white horse.
53:24And it is significant because the first mural or painting, wall painting, of Billy
53:29was in East Belfast back in 1904.
53:31And he was painted on a white horse.
53:35His horse was never white.
53:36His horse was brown.
53:38A white horse would have made him a very easy target.
53:40The horse is white because it looks glorious, a white stallion.
53:44And you can always see that it looks like it's walking on water.
53:47So that portrays him as, like, a god-type figure.
53:50So, Peter, who is King Billy in the minds of all of his supporters?
53:55King Billy.
53:57Well, in certain areas, in certain areas in the city,
54:00if God sits here, Billy sits about three and a half inches above him.
54:04So that's how important he is.
54:06Yeah.
54:07What do Catholics think about King Billy?
54:10Would you like me to be honest?
54:12When I grew up, Billy was just a hate figure.
54:15A hate figure?
54:17He was a hate figure for it.
54:19Because, well, his army defeated the Catholic army.
54:21Yeah.
54:23The celebration, the Orange Men, July 12th, the ball fires.
54:25Most Irish Catholics see it as the parades rubbing their nose in orange dog poop a couple of thousand times a year.
54:33So, for one side, he's history and culture and identity.
54:36And the other side, he is seen as a villain.
54:38The troubles that scarred Britain and Ireland throughout the 20th century are a vivid reminder that there's never one definitive version of history.
54:51And that the past is always interpreted through the eyes of the present.
54:56In 1998, the people of Northern Ireland voted for change.
55:04Yes, 71.12%.
55:08The Good Friday Agreement came into force.
55:13And tensions finally began to ease.
55:16But 1688 still has a powerful place in Irish culture.
55:21In 2007, a Jacobite musket from the Battle of the Boyne made a rare public appearance.
55:30On a joint visit to the site of the Battle of the Boyne, Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley and the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern shared a photo opportunity with it.
55:42The gun became an unlikely prop in the peace process.
55:46Eight years later, the musket came up for auction here in Belfast.
55:53This deadly looking thing was made at the Tower of London in 1685 for James II's army, hence the J2R on the side of it there.
56:06It was used by a dragoon almost certainly at the Battle of the Boyne.
56:10A dragoon is a soldier who gets off his horse to fight and he fires his carbine.
56:17This is a sort of short musket.
56:19As he does so, flames come out of the end of it, which look like the tongue of a dragon.
56:25Which is why he's called a dragoon and which explains the lovely little picture of a dragon on the side down here.
56:31At the auction, the gun was sold for a hefty £20,000 to an anonymous telephone bidder.
56:41Later it came out who this had been. It was the Museum of Orange Heritage.
56:46This Jacobite gun was bought by the very people against whom it had originally been fired.
56:56The museum was adding a new chapter to the tale of the revolution.
57:02Exhibiting this Jacobite artefact in an orange institution can be seen as an attempt to bring the two opposing sides of history back together.
57:12The established account of William's glorious revolution created in the 17th century and reinforced by later history makers has cast a long shadow in Ireland.
57:29But now some light is shining in.
57:32Instead of reverberating to the roar of cannon fire, the charge of men, the shot of musket or the clash of sword steel, today we have tranquillity of Stillwater where we can contemplate the past and look forward to the future.
57:54Invitation or invasion? Liberator or usurper? Triumph or treason? The story of the glorious revolution is still being written.
58:10One of the biggest fibs in British history.
58:15Next time, I'm in India discovering how the British crown reinvented the Raj in the 19th century.
58:26USURA
58:50USURA
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