It all came about because I had a bit of a rant on the radio. Chat shows actually encourage it: you’re not really invited for sensible sober thoughts expressed in polysyllablic utterances, you’re encouraged to let rip. So I did.
“The trouble with children these days…” – it was an easy opener. You could complete the sentence in a thousand different ways, but it was obviously going to be a rant – “…the trouble is they know all about the Tudors and nothing about the English Civil War.” My statement was something of an exaggeration born of talk among grandchildren, the loose chatter that surrounds the current educational mayhem, and substantial shreds of truth.
Well, I certainly got my comeuppance. A history teacher in West Yorkshire had been listening and was outraged by the gross insult this represented to her teaching and her pupils. She took her outrage along to her class and invited each of them to write to me, explaining what they knew about the English Civil War.
This they did. She promptly sent the whole lot of these letters off to the Mother of Parliaments, where I am expected to preside – with a cool head and no rants – over the laws of the land. Amends were called for.
And so it was that this week her class of 20 pupils and three of their teachers came to the House of Lords, at my invitation, to watch it in action and to hear from me something of what goes on. They had first visited the Banqueting House in Whitehall, to see the spot where King Charles had stepped out on to the scaffold and to his death on that snowy January morning in 1649. They had passed the statue of Cromwell that stands beside the House of Commons.
I was then able to show them Charles’s death warrant, signed by the 59 regicides, with Cromwell’s signature among them. I also drew their attention to the brass plaque in Westminster Hall which marked the spot where Charles had stood for his supposed trial. The King refused to acknowledge the right of the court to try him, thus sealing his fate, which was to be executed the following day.
Surely, this is just as fascinating a period as that of Henry VIII, which dominates both history lessons and television. Admittedly, it has fewer wives, plainer frocks and no dissolution of the monasteries. But the formal execution of a King before his own people is of huge historical importance.
It also, in its own way, has a fascinating, grisly glamour. Civil War battles cover the entire country from Scotland to Devon: they have their sprinkling of dashing figures – Prince Rupert, the Earl of Montrose and Thomas Fairfax to name but three. What’s more, the 17th century saw the most sustained and broad-ranging arguments about its constitution this country has ever known. The Putney debates of 1647 spoke for the first time of the nature of democracy. Notions of one man, one vote were floated. “The poorest he that is in England, hath a life to live, as the greatest he…” declared Thomas Rainsborough, speaking for the Levellers – a group, I’m sorry to say, also known as “the Ranters”.
So why do the Tudors trump the Cavaliers in the popular imagination? Perhaps because we’re all hooked on “relationships” these days and it takes someone with the genius of Hilary Mantel to unpick the intimacies between King and courtiers, and within dynastically arranged marriages.
So I was thrilled that the Yorkshire children I had slandered came to London to follow the history trail they had studied. Perhaps television will take note and deliver us a spanking new series dealing with a period as central to Britain’s history as ever the Tudors were. Then casting directors can switch their search from the famous six wives to women such as Nell Gwyn and Aphra Benn.