Within three hours of his father’s death Richard was proclaimed to the sound of trumpets Lord Protector by the Grace of God. ibid.
Charles [II] was proclaimed by both Houses. ibid.
Charles II … He famously fathered seventeen bastards by a plethora of mistresses. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e1: The Return of the King
He invoked his royal power to dispense the law in favour of both Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants ... The House of Commons, with its hardline Anglican majority, refused the King point blank. ibid.
The elected returned parliaments in 1679 and again in 1680 in which there was a clear majority for James’s exclusion. Charles would have to fight for his brother’s right to the throne. And with it for the very idea of hereditary monarchy itself ... Faced with two successive parliaments in which there had been a clear majority for the exclusion from the crown of his brother James, Charles dissolved them both. ibid.
The Church of England now condemned all the doctrines of Whigism as false, seditious and impious, and declared most of them heretical and blasphemous as well. ibid.
Holland had conquered England without a shot being fired. ibid.
William and Mary would be joint King and Queen – a sort of double monarchy unique in the history of England ... William and Mary were formally offered the crown. ibid.
William of Orange was Dutch rather than Norman ... The Dutch conquest of 1688 would also have profound consequences, and not just for England but arguably for the whole of the rest of the world. For the revolution in government that it ushered in transformed England from a feeble imitator of the French absolute monarchy ... The Dutch conquest invented a modern England, a modern monarchy, perhaps even modernity itself. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e2: The Glorious Revolution
James had done something that many people thought had made him ineligible to the kingship of Protestant England: he converted to Catholicism. There were attempts in Parliament to have him excluded from the succession. But the protests had died away. The climate had changed. ibid.
The Tories now supported a Catholic king. ibid.
James II was England’s first Catholic king for over a hundred and fifty years. ibid.
An Act of Parliament called the Test Act forbade the employment of Catholics in any public post including the army. ibid.
Elizabeth was one of the most remarkable individuals ever to wear the crown. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e3: Rule Britannia
What William did believe in was pre-destination. ibid.
Since the reign of Charles II kings have known where they stood. ibid.
30,931. William’s parliament was united in its determination to drive a hard bargain with the king. ibid.
For all his military successes in Europe, William was deeply unpopular in England. ibid.
She [Anne] enjoyed a series of intense friendships with other women. ibid.
But the English parliament was determined not to have a Catholic. So in 1701 they passed the Act of Settlement which handed the succession to Sophia of Hanover and her eldest son George. They were an improbable fiftieth and fifty-first in succession ... It was now the Scots’ turn ... Each parliament now appointed a set of commissioners to try to thrash out an agreement in London ... On 16th January 1707, after three months of clause by clause debate the Scottish parliament voted decisively. ibid.
George owed his crown to Parliament, which under the Act of Settlement barred Catholics from succeeding to the throne. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e4: Empire
Royal influence helped win the Whigs a comfortable majority in the Commons that lasted for nearly a century. ibid.
The Whigs fell to arguing amongst themselves. ibid.
One of the leading followers of the Prince of Wales was the up and coming Whig politician Robert Walpole. ibid.
The Temple of British Worthies [at Walpole’s home] is a Whig pantheon. ibid.
He [Walpole] still remains the longest serving prime minister. He created the office. ibid.
On 21st January 1793 King Louis the VI was sent to the guillotine ... Few such foreign events have evoked such horror in England. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e5: Survival
From henceforth monarchies would be measured by how they responded to this new post-Revolutionary world ... What the British monarchy would do was by no means a foregone conclusion. ibid.
King George III: who was only just recovering from his first bout of madness. ibid.
Monarchy is the supreme embodiment of history and tradition. ibid.
At the time of his collapse [George III] the Prince of Wales ... was already 48, under the combined influences of drinks, drugs, like the opium compound Laudanum ... He spent gigantically too. ibid.
The Tories tried to form a government and Victoria wrecked their chances. ibid.
This left Albert a free hand to shape his own vision of monarchy. He arrived in a Britain transformed by the Reform Act. ibid.
Five hundred years ago an eighteen-year-old boy sat on this chair in Westminster Abbey to be crowned King of England. He would grow up to become the most infamous monarch in history. Henry VIII is the only king whose shape you remember. David Starkey, Henry: Mind of a Tyrant I, Channel 4 2009
One of the most important and original monarchs ever to have sat on the Throne of England. ibid.
It was the beginning of the end for [Perkin] Warbeck’s extraordinary odyssey. Within a few months he too was in the Tower. ibid.
Within weeks of coming to the Throne the seventeen-year-old had married. His queen was Catherine of Aragon. David Starkey, Henry: Mind of a Tyrant II
Henry the warrior King had turned back into Henry the Playboy Prince. ibid.
On 19th May 1536 at the Tower of London, Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, mounted the scaffold. David Starkey, Henry: Mind of a Tyrant III
A man changed and warped by a passionate love affair and a bitter divorce. ibid.
Anne: she was playing for higher stakes. ibid.
Who would prevail – the Minister [Wolsey] or the Mistress [Boleyn]? ibid.
Henceforth, the universal Church would be the Church of England. David Starkey, Henry: Mind of a Tyrant IV
The scars of Henry’s terrible vengeance are still visible ... They were ruthlessly suppressed. ibid.
He succumbed to septicemia: he was 55 years old. ibid.
They plucked communion tables down
And broke our painted glasses;
They threw our altars to the ground
And tumbled down the crosses.
They set up Cromwell and his heir –
The Lord and Lady Claypole –
Because they hated common prayer
The organ and the maypole. Thomas Jordan, How the War Began 1664
The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings and Parliament – representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power – concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions. Tony Benn, article 1st June 2001, ‘The Levellers and the Tradition of Dissent’
The English Civil War was in many senses the most traumatic set of events in English history. Professor Jeremy Black
Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland in 1649 has become notorious in Irish history. It’s regarded as a clear sign of the cruelty of the English. Professor Jeremy Black
On a freezing January day in 1649 the executioner’s axe ended the reign and the life of King Charles I. It was the final melancholy episode in one of England’s saddest stories. Jeremy Black, The English Civil War I, BBC 2002