The Story of Britain Read online

  The new building was round, three storeys high, and had a thatched roof but no windows. Inside, galleries surrounded an empty circular courtyard into which a platform jutted out with two pillars painted to look like marble. The building was a theatre.

  Everyone knew the theatre’s story. The company of actors who owned it, the Chamberlain’s Men, used to work on the other side of the river, but had an argument with their landlord so they had to move. Then one of them pointed out that although the landlord owned the ground, the theatre itself belonged to them. So one morning they turned up with a team of carpenters, took down the theatre and carried it away. They put it back up in Southwark and called it the Globe.

  The actors often came to watch the builders at work. Some of them were stars, and people craned their heads to see them push their way through the crowd. They pointed out Richard Burbage, who always played the hero; and Will Kemp, a famous comedian. Sometimes the theatre was visited by a dark man with thinning hair, a beard and one earring. He wasn’t the most famous actor, but wrote the best plays. His name was William Shakespeare.

  Shakespeare wrote plays like Romeo and Juliet that made audiences cry, comedies like Much Ado About Nothing that made them roar with laughter, and histories like Richard III that made them hiss at the king who murdered his nephews. Just like Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare was good at writing about ordinary people as well as kings and queens. And he showed how English could be used to describe anything in the world.

  Londoners loved plays. On performance days, crowds gathered outside the Globe at dawn, and by the time the play began, the yard or “pit” where poor people stood was packed, and the galleries were crowded. Then, with a blast of music, the performance began, and Shakespeare’s words took the audience into another world: to ancient Rome in Julius Caesar, Scotland in Macbeth, or Prospero’s magical island in The Tempest.

  By the end of Elizabeth’s reign Londoners were surrounded by people and things that had come from far away. Southwark was full of foreign sailors; ships sailed up the Thames from China and Africa; warehouses were packed with Indian tea and Russian furs. A lot had changed since the end of the Middle Ages. And the people of England felt more and more proud of their island, which had fought off Spain and sent ships all over the world.

  It was Shakespeare, of course, who found the best words to describe it:

  This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’ed isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea.

  TIMELINE

  1487 Lambert Simnel claims to be Edward IV’s nephew. Ten years later Perkin Warbeck, who claims to be one of the princes in the Tower, is caught and executed.

  1509 Henry VII dies and Henry VIII becomes king of England.

  1513 James IV of Scotland is killed by the English at the Battle of Flodden.

  1515 Thomas Wolsey becomes chancellor of England.

  1517 Martin Luther protests against the pope, and the Reformation begins.

  1520 Henry VIII meets Francis I, king of France, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

  1521 Martin Luther and the pope quarrel at the Diet of Worms.

  1527 Henry declares he wants to divorce Catherine of Aragon.

  1529 Thomas Wolsey is dismissed and Thomas More becomes chancellor.

  1533 Henry marries Anne Boleyn, and the pope excommunicates him.

  1534 Henry becomes head of the Church of England, and the next year Thomas More is executed. Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister.

  1536 Henry starts to close down monasteries. People in the north of England protest against the Reformation in the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  1540 Henry doesn’t like his new wife, Anne of Cleves, and Thomas Cromwell is executed.

  1540s John Knox begins the Reformation in Scotland.

  1542 James V of Scotland dies, leaving the throne to his baby daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots.

  1547 Henry VIII dies. His son becomes Edward VI and gives orders to make England Protestant. Soon after, rebellions begin in Cornwall and Norfolk.

  1553 Edward dies. Lady Jane Grey is queen for nine days before Mary arrives in London to claim the throne.

  1556 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is burnt at the stake.

  1558 Mary dies and Elizabeth becomes queen.

  1561 Mary, Queen of Scots, returns to Scotland. Seven years later, she flees to England.

  1587 Mary, Queen of Scots, is beheaded.

  1588 The Spanish Armada tries to conquer England.

  1594–1603 Tyrone’s rebellion. In 1599 Elizabeth sends the earl of Essex with an army to Ireland. The rebellion ends in 1603.

  1599 Shakespeare and his actors build the Globe Theatre in Southwark.

  1600 The East India Company is founded by merchants trading to India and China.

  1603 Queen Elizabeth dies. James VI of Scotland becomes King James I of England.

  Britain United

  WHEN Queen Elizabeth died, the throne passed to her cousin King James VI of Scotland, so England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland were united for the first time under a Scottish king. Although England and Wales were one kingdom and Scotland another, people began to talk about them together as Britain.

  Everyone cheered as James rode south to be crowned. At his coronation he made a famous speech: “Hath not God made us all one island, encompassed with one sea? These two countries are now united, whereby it is now become like a little world within itself.”

  Until then, the English and Scots had fought each other for centuries. Sometimes Scotland won, and sometimes England, but in fact, the two nations were never as different as they thought. Scottish kings were descended from Normans, while people in the Scottish Lowlands were much like those across the border in Cumberland or Northumberland.

  James Stewart (in England he began spelling his name “Stuart”) was clever, wrote books and liked discussing politics. As King James VI of Scotland he had ruled his kingdom well. Although he angered highlanders, who lived in the northern mountains, by making them give up tartan, bagpipes and speaking Gaelic, he stopped the Scottish barons fighting and kept Scotland mostly at peace. But when he became King James I of England as well, he found ruling the three kingdoms of Scotland, England (which included Wales) and Ireland much harder. All the arguments about religion that had been going on since the Reformation were getting worse, not better, and every country in Europe was descending into rebellion and warfare. The fighting across central Europe was so long and bitter it became known as the Thirty Years War, and although James’s kingdoms stayed out of that conflict, they had problems enough of their own. In the next hundred years, they would face revolution and civil war, military takeover and religious persecution. One Stuart king would be killed, and another driven from his throne, while for ten years Britain would have no king at all, but be ruled by religious fanatics and an army general. James’s reign saw the beginning of those troubles. And although he was learned, James was impractical and had no common sense.

  “He’s the wisest fool in Christendom,” joked Henry IV of France.

  James wanted everyone to join either the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, and ordered a new translation of the Bible into English, the Authorized Version or King James Bible, which was used for the next three hundred years. But Puritans hated his churches. Scottish Presbyterians demanded an end to bishops, while English Puritans wanted the whole country to be run by the law of the Bible. Dressed in black, the women wearing headscarves, they even refused to go into village churches.

  “Built by Catholics!” they spat.

  They prayed at home, banned dancing and drinking, and if they heard someone swear in the street, shook their heads and hissed, “Sinner!” They called themselves “the Saints”, for they believed God
had chosen them to go to heaven, while everyone else would go to hell. To them, James’s churches, with their bishops and fine robes, might as well have been Catholic.

  Meanwhile, real Catholics – not that there were many left in England, Wales or Scotland – hated James as well. They had expected him to treat them less harshly than Elizabeth had done. But James did nothing to help them.

  People who believe too strongly in religion can never compromise with anyone else. Certain that God is telling them what to do, they persuade themselves the most terrible things are justified. And sure enough, not long after James became king of England, a small group of Catholics turned to violence.

  They decided to blow up the king and Parliament.

  The Gunpowder Plot

  ONE day, the people who lived in the courtyard next to the Houses of Parliament met a new neighbour.

  “John Johnson,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  In those days Parliament wasn’t closed off behind railings, and there were houses and shops right next to it. John Johnson moved into an apartment by Parliament steps, saying he was looking after it for a merchant friend of his. Every day barrels were delivered for the merchant, and Johnson rolled them down into the cellar. The neighbours were too busy to think much about him, for it was late October, the time of the yearly opening of Parliament, when lords and MPs gathered for a speech by the King. Every day, carpenters bustled up and down the steps, while caterers delivered food for the feast.

  But that year King James’s advisers were worried, for his minister, Robert Cecil, had received a letter warning him not to attend. He sent secret agents to investigate, and discovered the Catholic plot.

  Anxiously he discussed what to do with the other advisers. “Killing the king and Parliament would bring total chaos!” he said.

  “And that,” said Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, “is exactly what the plotters want!”

  They agreed that Howard should search the buildings around the House of Lords, and he set off that afternoon, knocking on doors and asking people to open up storerooms. At the apartment next to Parliament steps he met John Johnson, who politely showed him a cellar that ran right under the House of Lords. Piles of old wood and coal were stacked up against the walls.

  “What do you keep in here?” Howard asked.

  “Old stores,” Johnson replied. “I keep meaning to clear it out!”

  With only a few hours to go before Parliament opened, Howard went back to his office more anxious than ever. He imagined the lords and MPs packing the benches, the roll of drums as King James walked up the steps, the silence when he rose to speak – and then the thunderous roar of an explosion, windows shattering and walls collapsing as a column of smoke billowed up into the air above Westminster. It mustn’t happen, he thought.

  But where had the plotters hidden their bomb? He wondered where he would hide a bomb, if he wanted to blow up Parliament, and found himself picturing a cellar running right under the House of Lords, a cellar that seemed to be full of old wood and coal – but was that all it contained?

  “Soldiers!” he shouted. “Follow me!”

  He ran all the way back to Parliament, burst through the door of John Johnson’s apartment and tumbled down the steps to the cellar. By the light of his lantern the soldiers pulled the coal and wood aside, and behind them found barrels full of gunpowder.

  “John Johnson” was captured in the apartment, dressed in travelling clothes to make his getaway. He soon revealed who the other plotters were, and confessed his real name – Guy Fawkes.

  When news spread that an attack had been averted, people lit fires to celebrate. And ever since, the day Guy Fawkes was caught – 5 November – has been Bonfire Night, when people set off fireworks to remember the day the government was nearly blown up.

  The Mayflower

  AFTER the Gunpowder Plot James tried harder than ever to make people join the Church of England, and persecuted Catholics and Puritans who refused. Eventually a group of Puritans decided to leave England altogether and found a colony in America where they could live and worship as they pleased.

  There was already an American colony called Virginia, where the colonists had built a village, cut down trees and planted tobacco plants. They had often fought with the Native Americans, until one of them married a Native American princess called Pocahontas, who came to London and met King James.

  The Puritans decided to start their own colony, so they hired a ship called the Mayflower, and paid its captain to sail them across the Atlantic Ocean.

  The journey was hard. The Mayflower was blown north until the sea was cold, green and covered in mist. It was two months before they saw land, but by then it was winter and they had almost run out of food, so they stayed on the Mayflower, hungry and seasick, wondering if their colony would ever work. In spring they landed, and the Native Americans taught them how to fish and grow corn. When they gathered their first harvest, they held a Thanksgiving feast to thank God for saving them.

  What none of them knew as they ate their feast was that one day the United States of America would be the most powerful country in the world. And one day millions of Americans would celebrate “Thanksgiving” each year to remember the arrival of the “Pilgrim Fathers”.

  The Troubles of King Charles I

  KING James died in 1625. By then his eldest son had died, so his younger son, Charles, became king of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Charles was good-looking and charming, but when people got to know him they realized he was stubborn, not very clever, and determined to have his own way. He soon became unpopular. Puritans hated him even more than they had hated James, because he married a Catholic princess from France, Henrietta Maria, and then appointed an archbishop of Canterbury called William Laud, who was Protestant but gave the Church of England new rituals which Puritans thought were just like Catholic ones.

  Apart from religion, Charles argued with Parliament about how the kingdom ought to be governed. It had long been the custom in England and Scotland for kings to ask Parliament’s approval of any new laws. King John had been made to sign Magna Carta because no one liked the idea of a king doing what he wanted. Simon de Montfort had first called Parliament, and Edward I had always asked Parliament to agree taxes. That was how the government of England worked, and Scotland was much the same.

  In other kingdoms, though, parliaments were much less important. The king of France was so powerful he ruled all by himself. He believed God had made him king, and all the power in France belonged to him. Charles dreamed of having absolute power in his kingdom as well. Unfortunately he was very extravagant and needed money to fight wars, buy paintings (he persuaded the great Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck to come and paint him), and build palaces like the Banqueting House in London. To raise money he needed taxes, and that meant calling Parliament.

  But the House of Commons was full of Puritans who hated Charles’s luxurious habits and Catholic wife, and knew he really wanted to govern without Parliament, like the king of France. So they sent him a letter called the Petition of Right, reminding him of their right to be consulted properly on all laws and taxes.

  “How dare they!” Charles raged. “I’m king and will do what I like!”

  So he ignored the Petition of Right, dismissed Parliament and, for eleven years, ruled his kingdoms by himself. To raise money his lawyers went through old history books and found taxes that didn’t need Parliament’s agreement. But old-fashioned taxes made people furious, and Puritans became even angrier when Archbishop Laud kept changing the Church of England.

  “He wants us to worship like Catholics!” they complained.

  The Scots were angrier still. When Laud told them to use a new prayer book from England, they refused, and drew up an agreement called the Covenant, telling Charles to leave their churches alone. Thousands of Scots signed the Covenant, queuing in marketplaces and walking for miles across mountains to add their names to it.

  Charles was furious when he hea
rd about the Covenanters’ rebellion, but didn’t have enough money to put it down. The first army he sent to Scotland was too small to fight a battle; the second was defeated by the Covenanters, who captured Newcastle and demanded a huge ransom for it. Since the king couldn’t afford to pay the ransom, he had to call Parliament and ask for new taxes. But by then MPs were furious with Charles for trying to rule without them. They attacked him so fiercely that he dismissed them after only three weeks and called elections, hoping the new Parliament would be more helpful.

  It wasn’t. Its MPs were even angrier.

  “He ignored our Petition of Right!” they bellowed from their benches. “He can’t be trusted!”

  When a rebellion broke out in Ireland and Charles asked them for an army to put it down, they refused.

  “Give King Charles an army?” they roared. “Never! He’ll use it against us!”

  And five of the MPs wrote out a list of all the mistakes Charles had made, and everything wrong with how he ran Britain. Their leader, John Pym, called it the Grand Remonstrance.

  “Treason!” shouted Charles, trembling with rage. And he decided to arrest them.

  A few days into the new year, he set off down Whitehall with drawn sword and a troop of soldiers behind him. People hurried to watch. No king had ever attacked Parliament before. A crowd fell in behind the soldiers, squeezed up Parliament steps, and pushed forward to see what would happen.

  The House of Commons was full. MPs lined the benches on both sides. Most of them were grim-faced men dressed in Puritan black. When the king appeared in his court finery, he seemed like an exotic bird from a zoo. Charles unrolled a sheet of paper and read out the names of the five MPs, John Pym’s among them.