Monarchy with David Starkey

Himself - Presenter:
So this is not another picture book story of kings and queens. Instead, it's a real, grown up history of how a monarchy created a nation. It starts where the monarchy of the nation did: the chaos and the violence of the Dark Ages.

Himself - Presenter:
When Alfred died in 899, he still ruled over only part of England, but his legacy was to be the permanent unification of the country. The actual work was the task of his sons and grandsons, but it was Alfred who, in the crucible of the Viking invasions, had forged an idea of England that was more than simply cultural or linguistic. It was political, or rather, uniquely in Europe at the time, it was a combination of all three.

Himself - Presenter:
The century of Edwards had reshaped the English monarchy. The king was now more closely identified with the interests of his people, and he would never again be able to rule effectively without the consent of Parliament. He was expected to fight wars, but they had to be wars in the national interest.

Himself - Presenter:
The slaughter of the English elite on the battlefields of 1066 meant that England became a very different country.

Himself - Presenter:
The Battle of Hastings brought an end, after 600 years, to the Anglo-Saxon adventure.

Himself - Presenter:
But, despite the castles and the presence of Norman soldiers in almost every town, Anglo-Saxon resistance was growing. William was to find that England would not be defeated so easily. William the Conqueror had captured the country, but he had not yet subdued its people.

Himself - Presenter:
Above all, it announced Henry's determination to carry out a legal counter-revolution, and bring back the laws of Edward the Confessor. In other words, he would rule in the traditional way, with consent, like an Anglo-Saxon king, and not with force and extortion like a Norman.

Himself - Presenter:
The key to English politics has been a combination of strong government with government by consent. The latter was the great achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, which the Normans were wise enough to keep. But the Norman kings themselves, with their castles, their knights, their administrative flair, and above all, their indomitable wills, made the monarchy infinitely stronger.

Himself - Presenter:
In 1399, however, the king had indeed murdered his predecessor king. The taboo was broken. What was there to stop others doing the same to Henry or his descendants?

Himself - Presenter:
And, in December 1413, only eight months after his own coronation, Richard's body was brought to Westminster Abbey in a magnificent procession, and reburied amongst his fellow kings, here, in the tomb which Richard had commissioned for himself. The stain of 1399 was wiped out, and Henry was able to benefit from the usurpation without incurring the stigma or the bad conscience of his father.

Himself - Presenter:
With their deaths, the male line of the House of Lancaster, which had promised to revive the monarchy, was extinguished.

Himself - Presenter:
By the time Henry was 30, he'd lost everything that his father had won. Only Calais remained in English hands. Thanks to Henry, 100 years of war with France had yielded nothing. The prestige and the glory of the English crown were destroyed.

Himself - Presenter:
The agreement became known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter. But in fact it was only the most famous and ambitious of a succession of attempts stretching back to the coronation oath of Henry I and the memories of Anglo-Saxon England to define the rights and duties of king and people.

Himself - Presenter:
The Council at Oxford drew up a revolutionary way of governing the country that was intended to turn England into a crowned republic.

Himself - Presenter:
Henry's second marriage and the royal supremacy, which was its intellectual foundation, were profoundly divisive.

Himself - Presenter:
Henry' supreme headship of the church, which had begun in the name of freeing England from the Papal yoke, was turning into a new royal tyranny to be enforced in blood.

Himself - Presenter:
Henry never waivered in his detestation of Luther and all his works. But his attitude toward Rome, just as Thomas More predicted, underwent a revolution. The reasons were Henry's need for a son and heir and love.

Himself - Presenter:
The supremacy may have begun as a mere convenient device to facilitate his marriage to Anne Boleyn, but it had quickly taken on a life of its own as Henry had persuaded himself that it was his birthright, his raison d'etre, and above all, his passport to fame, not only vis-?-vis his father but in the eyes of posterity as well.

Himself - Presenter:
Double-crossed by both King and Parliament, the Army's Council of Officers now decided to strike down both.

Himself - Presenter:
Oliver was now indeed king in all but name. Cromwell had rid Britain of its king, but now as Lord Protector, he held more power than any king ever had, and his achievements equaled or even exceeded those of any legitimate English monarch.

Himself - Presenter:
But during two decades of war and upheaval, important lessons had been learned. Never again would an army be permitted to wield political power in England, and never again would the English seek to resolve their political differences by force.

Himself - Presenter:
Fortescue, the leading intellectual of Lancastrian England, would play an important part in the construction of the new reformed Yorkist monarchy of England.

Himself - Presenter:
It was a plot between two powerful mothers, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose sons were lost, and Margaret Beaufort, whose son Henry Tudor was in exile, that would prove Richard's undoing and decide England's fate.

Himself - Presenter:
Henry died in his bed, and he died rich, but if the last 40 years had proved anything at all, it was that traditional English limited monarchy had, in the age of continental absolutism and increasingly professional armies, ceased to work.

Himself - Presenter:
With her pregnancy exposed as a delusion, power started to ebb away from the Queen.

Himself - Presenter:
By ignoring Henry VIII's call for moderation and resorting instead to religious extremes, Edward and Mary had provoked conspiracy, rebellion, and, finally, Ponet's head-on challenge to the authority and legitimacy of kingship itself.

Himself - Presenter:
The specter, which Elizabeth had striven so hard to lay, of a second person who differed in religion from the monarch was about to rise once more.

Himself - Presenter:
Nevertheless, the King James Version of the Bible became the book which, more than any other, shaped the English language and formed the English mind.

Himself - Presenter:
The result was that Charles soon found himself in the worst of all possible worlds: without tax, with a Catholic wife, and fighting a hopeless war against both major Catholic powers, France and Spain.

Himself - Presenter:
The attempt to expand the powers of the imperial crown so that it ruled both church and state, and Scotland as well as England, had backfired.