Everything would depend on Henry’s son – the nine-month-old … Henry [VI] was also named King of France … The government of England and France was divided between the King’s two uncles … French resistance couldn’t be suppressed. ibid.
By the time Henry was 30 he’d lost everything his father had won. Only Calais remained in English hands. ibid.
Now York turned the tables on the house of Lancaster … Henry would remain King whilst he lived and York would succeed only after his death, but everybody reckoned without Queen Margaret’s ferocious mother-love … She led her forces against York: Margaret was victorious. ibid.
He seized the throne and ruled as King Edward IV; Henry was captured … But then his own followers started to quarrel … A total and final defeat for the house of Lancaster … Henry VI was dispatched with a blow of the head. ibid.
Civil war and revolution: politics fused with religion first strengthening the monarchy, then bringing it to its knees. In this revolutionary period the monarchy acquired a potent new symbol: an elaborate outsized crown made for the Tudor dynasty. Monarchy by David Starkey s2e1: The Crown Imperial, Channel 4 2005
Henry [VII] was a man who should never have been King at all; he seized the throne against all the odds … His enemies, three brutal brothers, tore themselves apart through murder and betrayal. ibid.
By the mid-1470s Elizabeth had presented Edward [IV] with five daughters and crucially two sons. ibid.
He was crowned King Richard III at Westminster on July 6th with the full blessing of parliament … Opposition to Richard was growing. ibid.
The two sides came face to face at Bosworth in the Midlands … Henry was crowned Henry VII two months later promising to restore the glory days of his namesake King Henry V. ibid.
Arthur, Henry’s son and heir, died. ibid.
On 24th June 1509 Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII, was crowned … No-one could have guessed how radical even revolutionary it would prove to be. Monarchy by David Starkey s2e2: King and Emperor
His brother Arthur died suddenly of a fever followed soon after by his beloved mother. ibid.
One of Henry’s first acts as King was to marry his brother’s widow … six years his senior. ibid.
Rome instead was the obstacle that had delayed his divorce for five long years. ibid.
More refused the oath and he was imprisoned. ibid.
Through the rule of a minor, and two women gave England a sort of stability; but it also ushered in profound political turmoil as well. Monarchy by David Starkey s2e3: Shadow of a King
In their camp outside Exeter the rebels drew up a list of demands for concession by Edward’s government. ibid.
In the winter of 1552 Edward started to cough blood … The young King was dying. ibid.
For Mary was Edward’s legal heir: she would succeed as Queen and supreme head. ibid.
With her pregnancy exposed as a delusion power started to ebb away from the Queen. ibid.
Matters came to a head in the parliament of 1556 which attempted to force Elizabeth to name a successor and by implication to exclude the claim of Mary, Queen of Scots. ibid.
The first to move against her was Rome. ibid.
23rd November 1658: this ruler was not a king, he was instead a regicide, a king killer: his name was Oliver Cromwell. Monarchy by David Starkey s2e5: Cromwell the King Killer
After a dozen battles and thousands dead the war had bogged down: for the parliamentarian the stalemate provoked crisis and soul-searching. ibid.
1645: The New Model Army: this was England’s first truly professional fighting force. ibid.
Charles characteristically overplayed it rejecting the astonishingly lenient terms he was offered by Cromwell and the other army leaders in order to guarantee religious toleration. ibid.
Cromwell was invested with a royal robe of purple velvet lined with ermine, a gilt bound and embossed Bible, a golden hilted sword, and a massive solid gold sceptre. He swore a version of the coronation oath. ibid.
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.
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.