A History of England
David Beeson
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Top 10 A History of England Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best A History of England episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to A History of England for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite A History of England episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
149. The road to committee room 15
A History of England
07/02/23 • 14 min
This episode picks up Ireland’s story again, just as the English establishment turned its guns on Charles Stewart Parnell.
Round 1 of its attack was launched through the Times newspaper, in a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’. It set out to show that, despite his public commitment to the parliamentary road to achieving Ireland’s aspirations, in reality and in the background he was prepared to collaborate with men of violence. Indeed, in the second article of the series, the Times published a letter apparently from Parnell to a leading Fenian, in which he seemed to condone one at least of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882.
That attack failed when it emerged that the letter was simply a forgery.
Even so, damage had been done to the Irish movement by the sheer extent of the investigations carried out by the Commission set up to examine the allegations against Parnell. It cleared him but found other mud to throw at different parts of the Irish movement.
Round 2 of the attack came when William O’Shea, husband of Katharine, the great love of Parnell’s life, sued for divorce. The revelations at the trial were immensely damaging to him. In this episode, we follow events up to the point where the Irish Parliamentary Party, having rallied to him at one meeting, have called another to review that decision and Parnell has weakened his position by publishing a manifesto that could hardly have been better calculated to offend people on whose support he needed to count.
Illustration: The Times attack on Parnell, accusing him of association with criminality.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
29. More gilded than golden?
A History of England
04/08/21 • 11 min
When we last took a look at the so-called golden age of Charles II, we talked about the persecution of Catholics and, in particular, the witch hunt launched against them during the Popish Plot craze launched by Titus Oates's fabrications.
But Catholics weren't alone in being given a lousy time. Puritans, the more fundamentalists of Protestants, were also targets. They were seen as the main architects of the English republic that had just ended. They were also seen as dangerously unorthodox, when conformity was viewed as the right way to go. This was the last time, indeed, when anyone made the attempt to impose a single faith on Britain. So Episcopalians, the trend within the Church of England that was as close to Catholicism as you could get without giving up on Protestantism altogether, also persecuted Dissenters and Non-Conformist Protestants. And it wasn't a nice sight either...
So this was another group of people for whom the age wasn't terribly golden.
Ultimately, that was something that also revealed the relative loss of power of the king, and the emergence, notably in parliament, of tendencies of opinion opposed to each other, for or against the king. Religion and politics melded. And, for our next episode, we're going to see how that led to the beginnings of the party system.
Illustration: The martyrdom by drowning of Margaret Wilson, a Scots Presbyterian who refused to bow to Episcopalian authority. Engraving from a nineteenth-century drawing by J E Millais.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
17. Things fall apart
A History of England
02/07/21 • 10 min
Charles I, like his father, proved extremely good at not being at all good at getting on with people he really needed to be really good at getting on side. Just like with his Dad, that mainly meant Parliamentarians. People like John Hampden, one of the great warriors against royal overreach, and a certain Oliver Cromwell who - and I don't think this is a spoiler - would have a pretty big role to play later.
There was one big difference between father and son, though: James managed to avoid things getting so bad that they degenerated into actual warfare.
Welcome to the threshold of the English Civil Wars.
King Charles I, by Gerrit van Honthorst, oil on canvas, 1628
National Portrait Gallery, London, 4444
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
20. Interlude
A History of England
02/22/21 • 14 min
The First Civil War had ended. King Charles I had lost, which wasn't just a military or political problem, but a religious one too: after all, if God had made him king, and God also determined who won wars, who could make sense of what was going on? Had God sided with Parliament against the king he'd set on his throne in the first place.
In practical terms, Charles was in captivity, a prisoner of Parliament. In the country at large, normal politics could have restarted, if politics had been anything like normal. There were tensions between Parliament and Parliament's army, which was beginning to do some of its own political soul-searching. Which was particularly interesting, since it was the most powerful organisation in the country. And, within the army itself, there were tensions too, as new trends appeared, among common people, wondering whether, what will all the fighting they were doing, and all the sacrifices they had made, they shouldn't be given a bit more of a say in the running of the state.
Fascinating debates. Sadly cut short. Because Charles may have been down, but he wasn't yet out. And he could still do something destructive and self-destructive.
The illustration is the front page of one of the versions of the Leveller document, 'An Agreement of the People', laying out demands for wider political rights.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
25. Protectorate
A History of England
03/19/21 • 13 min
In the 1650s, power concentrated in England into fewer and fewer hands, until in the end a Lord Protector was appointed and - surprise, surprise, since he dominated the Army Council which appointed him - Oliver Cromwell got the job.
As it happens, a (somewhat cowed) parliament worked alongside him, so in a sense England had reached the point which parliament had sought before the Civil Wars: shared authority between a single ruler and itself. But most of the people running the system remained the same as before, or at least of the same class and mentality, and there had been no real revolutionary change. So it isn't hard to see that the republic would slide back into monarchy once Cromwell had died.
This episode also looks at a couple of lasting legacies, however: Jews allowed back into England, and the triumphant bursting of coffee onto the scene. Long before tea...
Illustration: Interior of a London Coffee-house, 17th century
Anonymous: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
27. The Golden Age continues
A History of England
03/29/21 • 8 min
Charles II's Golden Age continues in this next episode, although the title, with its trace of irony, rather betrays some of the things that were going on under the surface. A lot of duplicity by the merry monarch, as well as some fine mistresses, and a growing head of steam for more active anti-Catholicism, drawing considerable encouragement from the behaviour of the monarch himself
Illustration: Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with an unknown female attendant
by Pierre Mignard, 1682
National Portrait Gallery 497
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
36. Just one war after another
A History of England
05/13/21 • 13 min
Just as soon as William III could free himself up from wars in the British Isles, to secure his throne (and his wife Mary II's), he got stuck into the fighting on the Continent, on behalf of his home country of Holland. This was the Nine Years War, where the Grand Alliance fought to block the attempts of Louis XIV's France to win the territory it needed to give it what it regarded as defensible borders (its 'natural' borders).
It might have looked as though France was championing Catholicism against Protestant Holland, except that the Grand Alliance included Catholic states, most notably the major power Austria and the waning but still significant one, Spain. Getting the religion right obviously mattered, but never as much as serving the national interest.
This was the Nine Years' War, and nine years was a long time for pre-industrial economies to wage war. In the end, exhausted, the combatants were forced to the negotiating table. Changes were small, and the biggest questions left unanswered. The biggest of them all is what would happen once the inbred, deeply ill and childless king of Spain, Charles II, died. Who'd inherit his throne and his country's still considerable territories?
By not deciding such pretty crucial matters, the powers only left them to provoke another war in the near future. Just as soon as the Spanish king died. Which he did, not three years later.
Illustration: Charles II of Spain, by Juan Carreño de Miranda, showing the Hapsburg jaw, outwards sign of terrible health handicaps caused by generations of inbreeding.. Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
33. Two for the price of one
A History of England
04/28/21 • 11 min
The Glorious Revolution led to England having two reigning monarchs for the price of just one: William III and Mary II, or Williamandmary, as we like to think of them.
It started with a Bill of Rights, which no one signed and never became law, but it was destined to have a great role in the future. Curious, isn't it, how something with no immediate impact can turn out to be historic?
Some bits of it led to legislation, including the Settlement Act, which legitimised the new monarchs' rule, a pretty remarkable step, seeing as it made the sovereign's power dependent on parliamentary authority. Above all, the new approach firmly rooted the notion that the monarch needs the consent of parliament to some of his (or her) actions. That was especially true of the more expensive ones, since it and it alone would control taxation in the future.
All this was hardly the beginning of democracy, but it did mark the end of arbitrary royal power. A pretty significant development, given how absolutist other regimes were, notably in France, Europe's leading power at the time.
Illustration: King William III; Queen Mary II by Jakob van der Schley, after Hubert-François Gravelot (né Bourguignon)
National Portrait Gallery D10672
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
164. Liberal stirrings against Tory dominance
A History of England
10/15/23 • 14 min
We’ve been tracking years and years of Tory rule in Britain. It’s as though the once dominant Liberal Party had practically vanished from the scene. In fact, though, things were changing in its ranks, with new figures emerging to lead the party back towards government. One of these, David Lloyd George, we’ve met before but briefly and, in this episode, we get to know him better.
However, despite the moves to start sorting out the Liberals’ difficulties and, above all, the internal divisions that were losing it so much support, it still had more pain to come. The outbreak of the Boer War only revealed more dissension among its leaders and, since split parties don’t win elections, that together with the government’s apparent victory in South Africa as well as against the Boxer Rebellion in China, would cost the Liberals another landslide defeat in 1900.
Another landslide though not quite as big as might have been expected, given how much circumstances favoured the Conservatives and handicapped the Liberals. Was that a glimmer of hope for the future?
As well as Lloyd George, who won re-election in 1900 despite his anti-war stance, two other historic figures entered parliament at that election. Keir Hardie of the Independent Labour Party, who’d lost his seat in 1895, returned in 1900. And Winston Churchill won a seat for the first time, at the start of nearly 64 years in parliament with only a brief interruption.
Illustration: David Lloyd George, by Harry Furniss: fiery Welsh radical giving his opponents a bad time. National Portrait Gallery 3398
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
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FAQ
How many episodes does A History of England have?
A History of England currently has 237 episodes available.
What topics does A History of England cover?
The podcast is about History and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on A History of England?
The episode title '157. Triumph and Decline' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on A History of England?
The average episode length on A History of England is 14 minutes.
How often are episodes of A History of England released?
Episodes of A History of England are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of A History of England?
The first episode of A History of England was released on Nov 19, 2020.
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