This is the story of the invasions of the British Isles.
Whoa!
It's the story of the enemies we feared,
it's the story of the fear of invasion itself,
and of the idea that we Britons are somehow unique.
There have been battles for Britain for millennia,
from weapons like these Hurricanes to sticks and stone axes.
Invasions come in many forms -
mass migrations, immigrants bringing ideas
and religions - all have shaped Britain and made it what it is.
The farming invasion.
A fashion invasion. The foodie invasion.
Cheers.
In this episode, there's Normans, Norse, and fantasists from Flanders.
And the Spanish Armada hasn't even arrived yet.
We love to believe in the island fortress.
Shakespeare wrote of, "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle".
In Rule Britannia, we've never been defeated.
Churchill called us, "The Island race".
It's a story we all tell ourselves,
but we all descend from people who came here from elsewhere,
for one reason or another.
This gap between that myth and the reality is a captivating tale,
and never more so than in the centuries
where we reached our period of peak invasion.
The story starts in what is today a rather unremarkable field in
southern England. It's grassy, it's on a slope,
but something happened here in the 11th century that changed the
history of Britain.
The Battle of Hastings is lodged in our brains as the last great
invasion of England -
an idea that has become as much a part of our mythology
as the white cliffs themselves.
But it isn't even vaguely true.
Since 1066, there have been at least 17 successful invasions of England,
Wales and Scotland,
and countless failed attempts.
Some have led to changes of ruler, some were by invitation,
others have been doomed from the start,
but they all matter because we have been shaped as much by the battles
we have lost as we have by the battles we have won.
So the Norman Conquest wasn't the last, then,
but it was the mother of them all.
It wasn't just an English army that was defeated here,
but an older English way of life.
So much so that much of what we now think of as quintessentially English
rose out of the blood and gore that once debased this nice, bland field.
The person to thank for that transformation?
A man of impeccable European origin and skill set.
The descendant of a feared Viking lord - good at fighting.
Relative of an English queen - good at giving orders.
Born and brought up in present-day France -
a flair for bureaucracy.
Supposedly boorish, definitely illegitimate.
The earliest sources describe him as William the Bastard.
We know him as William the Conqueror.
By the time William landed on the south coast of England,
he had been fighting for much of his adult life.
He didn't invade for a cause, but for something much more appealing -
a crown.
The English crown that he believed had been promised to him and then
given to his rival, Harold, instead.
In his armoury was the weapon that would prove to be decisive in his
quest and become part of the mythology of this invasion.
Tell me about this bow. Well, it's a basic hunting bow of 1066.
It is made out of yew,
one single piece of wood,
and it's going to be good enough to put an arrow up over that hill.
What sort of range would it have?
I'd say about 100, 150 metres.
Would you be able to hit anyone deliberately at that range?
Depending on the wind, how good I am, possibly.
But if I was going to aim for a large body of men,
I think I could hit one of them. Let's give it a go.
Pull out a sharp. There we are.
Whoa!
Just missed. Nearly.
Go, go.
That was good! That was good, very good.
What sort of tactics did the archers use?
Well, there's a very good one that is lob shotting.
You put an arrow very high up in the air...
..so they are going to have arrows coming straight out of the sun,
coming vertically down on their heads.
You can't keep your shield above your head
and in front of you at the same time.
Legend has it that one of the deadly Norman arrows did for King Harold,
hitting him right in the eye.
How do you think Harold died?
Well, everyone says an arrow in the eye.
We have seen knights wearing helmets,
they have steel mail shirts like mine.
There is no part of your body to be seen apart from your hands,
your knees, your feet, and your eyes, and so...arrow in the eye?
Well, if I had an arrow in my hand, that's not going to kill me,
but an arrow in my eye is definitely going to kill me.
Good shot. In the eye, I think.
Now, that,
I reckon, proves I've got Norman blood. You certainly have.
The tale of the brilliantly accurate arrow in the eye is the story we
tell ourselves, but one contemporary source suggests a very different story.
It suggests something much more humiliating,
sordid even,
and describes Harold being hacked to death at the hands of the
four Norman knights.
The first, cleaving his breast through the shield with his point,
drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood.
The second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet
and the third pierced the inwards of his belly with his lance.
The fourth hued off his thigh and bore away the limb.
His remains were then buried by the sea.
This bloody act was just a taste of things to come.
In the next few years,
an older England, which was itself the result of countless migrations
and invasions, would be obliterated from memory.
This transformation has been passed down through the generations as the
story of one man's ruthless ambition.
After the battle, Duke William returns to camp with Bishop Odo.
They are both weary after the terrible day.
It begins already, brother.
What do you mean? Many things -
Taming the knights,
keeping order,
putting down rebellion,
perhaps even controlling oneself.
All these things a man must do when he exchanges a dukedom
for a kingdom, sire.
Well, it shall be done, Bishop!
Now I have got it...
..I shall hold it.
I will bend them all to my will, the English and the Normans.
I will build castles to keep this land in order.
I will own every inch of England and my
lords and barons must bow the knee
for all they possess.
William's campaign north has been
described as a scorched earth policy.
It turned into ethnic cleansing,
as Anglo-Saxon landowners were driven out
and new Norman landlords moved in.
The castles they built were bigger, better, stronger,
unlike anything England had seen before.
And they said, "Not only have we defeated you,
"but we are here to stay."
They raised new churches and, of course,
their churches were also unlike anything England had seen before...
..taller, more ornate, superior,
like this one in Barfrestone in Kent.
In new churches like these,
they would have given thanks for their good fortune in hitting the
jackpot with England's rich and fertile land.
But just how rich was it?
20 years after the invasion,
they ordered a massive stocktake to find out.
There shall be a great book, as big as the Bible,
and in it the clerks will set out all that lies in England,
every farm, every fish pond,
every horse and plough.
In town after town, village after village,
every source of wealth was recorded by Norman inspectors.
The invaders referred to it as "the great survey".
The conquered referred to their
hellish day of reckoning as "Doomsday".
And as the wealth was entered into giant ledgers,
the name - Domesday Book - stuck.
This very place is mentioned in the Domesday Book.
Now, you might be surprised because it's so small,
but that's exactly the point.
Everywhere was important enough for the Doomsday Book.
It tells us that its value in 1066 was 50p,
that its household consisted of one poor woman.
And then, this is the really important bit, in 1086,
the tenant in chief was not the Archbishop of nearby Canterbury,
as you might suspect, it was Bishop Odo of Bayeux.
The Normans recorded England's wealth in such detail,
not out of curiosity,
but so that they could raise taxes.
It is mine!
William the Taxman just doesn't have the same ring to it as
William the Conqueror, but that's exactly what he was.
And these were taxes to pay for his armies, to pay for his court,
to line his own pockets.
England's new rulers used the Domesday Book to estimate the wealth
of their entire kingdom,
and that knowledge helped transform England into one of the strongest
and most cohesive countries in all of Europe.
Gradually, the otherness of the Norman Invasion faded into memory.
Their vocabulary worked its way into our language.
Years later, those French words,
those words of invaders, became terms that we used to describe the
finer things in life - amorous, tranquil, or restaurant.
But Anglo-Saxon words, on the other hand,
were used to describe base things - like sweat or shit.
Ever since then, the Norman Conquest has been the benchmark against which
all other invasions have been measured.
It's the reality on which the myth was founded.
Ever wonder how we got here, to the point where we have a Parliament,
where the most powerful people in the land are held to account,
criticised and even publicly lampooned?
Well, it has something to do with this next invasion.
Exactly 150 years after the Normans landed,
a remarkable invasion took place, an invasion by invitation.
In the 13th century, Rochester Castle was
one of the most important military bastions in the whole of England.
If Rochester fell, well, London was only two days' march away.
But, in 1216, a very curious incident happened just here,
one which has been all but lost to history.
The gates, designed to keep attackers and invaders out,
were thrown open to an approaching French army
and its leader, a French prince, was welcomed as a saviour.
The invader in question? Meet Prince Louis.
This is just one of a few pictures of him from the time.
He was invited to invade to help get rid of the tyrant bad King John.
And, thanks to the story of Robin Hood,
we have lots of pictures of bad King John.
King John's rule was so terrible that it echoes through the ages
as a low point in England's bloody history.
He is often described as the worst king England ever had
and this 1922 silent film of Robin Hood isn't far off the mark.
John was definitely fond of hanging people.
He may well even have been a puppy snatcher.
Don't even think about stealing a boar from his forest
if you want to keep both eyes in your head.
And if all that wasn't bad enough,
after being excommunicated by the Pope,
he even suspended the Church - all of it.
Depriving his citizens of confession, mass, last rites
and Christian burial was so tyrannical
that people were even afraid to die in case they didn't go to heaven.
England under John was a kind of living purgatory.
King John's tyrannical rule brought him into direct conflict
with many of his nobles.
They tried to find ways to curb John's absolute power
and asked him to sign a treaty called Magna Carta
that set clear limits on his authority.
At first, John agreed to do this.
But then, he changed his mind
and the patience of his barons ran out.
They decided that England needed a new king.
Prince Louis was the son of the French king
and a direct descendant of William the Conqueror.
He was 27, pious, brave and had proved himself as a military leader.
The barons couldn't have found a starker contrast to John.
In May of that year, he took up their invitation
to invade and landed on the coast of Kent.
A French army on English soil - again.
But, this time, there was no battle like Hastings.
Instead, they marched unopposed from the Isle of Thanet in Kent
to Canterbury, Rochester, and on to London.
So, how come most of us have never heard of this invasion?
I've managed to track down one of the few historians
who has delved into Louis's remarkable story.
So, these images are from the manuscript of a chronicle
written by Matthew Paris,
who was actually writing in the 13th century,
so they're almost contemporary,
and they tell the story very well of what Louis was doing.
So this is Louis arriving, this is him landing in England,
and it shows that Louis had various different types of people with him.
He had sailors to sail the boat,
he had armed knights in his retinue,
he also had lots of foot soldiers and engineers,
which is very important when you want to take castles.
And he also has administrators and clerics with him
because he's intending to govern.
And this figure here, as you say, stepping out of the boat first,
this is probably meant to be Louis himself.
And what's interesting about this is he's not wearing any armour
and that's because Matthew Paris, when he drew this picture,
was aware that, when Louis landed,
he was not faced with an immediate battle.
So, he's managed to get the whole story of Louis arriving in England
into this one picture. Very clever.
When he got to London, he was proclaimed king
by the barons who had invited him,
so there were cheering throngs of people in the streets.
I mean, let's just think about that for a moment.
Crowds of people cheering their new king,
who is riding through the streets of London,
and he is the son of the King of France.
Now, that's unprecedented.
But then, being proclaimed king in the street
doesn't make you the king!
Being the designated heir of the previous king doesn't make you king.
What makes you king is having the crown put on your head
and being anointed with holy oil.
What happened to John?
Well, he did the most useful thing that he could possibly have done
at this point and he died unexpectedly.
Now, you might think that this meant that Louis could get comfy
in his new kingdom, but apparently not.
John had an heir, a nine-year-old son called Henry.
And, faced with the prospect of Louis taking over England,
some of the nobles decided to crown Henry as king.
And then they pulled a masterstroke.
They offered to implement a new version of Magna Carta as well,
and Louis's invasion suddenly looked rather redundant.
So, this is a huge U-turn.
The implementation of Magna Carta is what John went to war to prevent
and now his associates are declaring their support for it.
This was very, very clever.
You wanted rid of John? He's dead, he's gone.
And you wanted Magna Carta. You wanted Magna Carta? Here it is.
Oh, and your new king is an innocent young boy
who cannot possibly be blamed for any of the things
that have happened before.
I think, if it wasn't for Louis,
we would never have heard of Magna Carta.
So, King John was intent on burying it.
He had already reneged on it.
He had succeeded in getting the Pope to annul it
and he was bent on revenging himself on the barons
who had made him agree to it in the first place.
Louis was offered 10,000 marks, a small fortune, to go away
and to stop saying that he had ever been the rightful King of England.
So, we have a French king we have never heard of,
who lasted just 18 months,
to thank for Magna Carta finally being implemented,
which helped enshrine our right to democracy and free speech.
Thank you, King Louis.
It's such an amazing story.
Why is it not so well-known?
I think, basically, it was written out of the history books
because later historians found it embarrassing.
They found it embarrassing that England had got to the point
where the best candidate for the throne
was the son of the King of France.
And so, when you look at the reigns of the kings of England
on the lists that you see, it runs very smoothly from John to Henry III
and Louis is just not there.
The next invasion that intrigues me took place here,
on the west coast of Scotland, in 1263.
FILM FOOTAGE: For the first time,
the saga of the mighty Viking hordes who swept across the world,
breaking every commandment of heaven and Earth,
as they put an age to the torch.
What was it about? Pillage, plunder, conquest?
Well, it was as much about trade as anything else.
And it's an invasion that never really ended.
Vikings first appeared in Britain in the eighth century
and, from then on, they returned regularly.
The Vikings didn't get to the west coast of Scotland
until a little later
but, when they did, they got up to their old tricks.
This is a wonderful primary source,
some images scratched onto a piece of slate that was found
on a tiny island out there in the Firth of Clyde.
Here we have a very unhappy-looking man, a monk,
and he's being taken into captivity
by this extraordinary figure in the centre,
a huge, wild-haired, tall Viking.
And beyond him is his unmistakable Viking ship.
This man's been taken from his home to be sold in a Norse slave market.
But if this sounds like the end of the world,
well, it was only just the beginning.
For 200 years, they raided and returned.
FILM FOOTAGE: To a Viking, there was no life
except life in battle.
There was no death except death in battle.
There were no women except women taken in battle.
But by the 13th century,
the wild bands of Pagan, slave-trading Vikings,
so beloved of Hollywood, had become something more organised.
A settled population of Norsemen, soldiers, traders and farmers,
who were really quite at home on Scotland's islands.
Who had sovereignty here?
Well, in the 13th century, this was Norse territory,
right from the Hebrides, the Western Isles, down through Kintyre,
the Clyde islands, right down to the Isle of Man.
People here owed allegiance to the Norwegian crown
and not the Scottish one.
At this time, relations were quite strained,
particularly as the Scottish kingdom was growing in confidence.
They wanted the Western Isles,
they wanted the western part of Scotland back.
This, of course, didn't go down very well back in Norway.
There was a particularly bad raid by Alexander
when he went to Skye and burned houses, burned villages,
killed women and children,
apparently had babies on the end of spears.
Really bad stuff, like atrocities.
Of course, this is the Norwegian account.
It might not quite have been as bad as that,
but that didn't play well back in Norway, and Haakon,
the king at the time, felt that he had to come here
and make Scotland realise this was Norse territory.
Why? Well, hard as it is to imagine,
this was near to the geographic centre of the Norse world.
You can get a sense of it from these famous chess pieces.
Made of walrus ivory, probably from Greenland, carved in Norway,
transported to Scotland to sell possibly as far south as Ireland.
This part of the world was a spaghetti junction of trade routes
that were valuable and lucrative.
One way or another, the fate of these islands
just had to be decided.
Were they to be the south-westernmost part of Norway,
or the north-westernmost part of Scotland?
The Norwegian King Haakon mustered what is said to be
the biggest fleet ever to sail from Norway.
In September, it gathered off the coast here at Cumbrae,
30 miles west of Glasgow.
Well, you had 120 ships, about 10,000 men, anchored off Arran.
This was one of the largest invasion forces ever to face Scottish shores.
And basically there were envoys going back and forth
and they were negotiating,
and Alexander III was basically being quite clever and quite wily.
He knew that the Scottish forces couldn't meet Haakon at sea.
He knew, if they landed, they would struggle with them as well.
So, he was basically waiting for the Scottish weather to do
what his own forces couldn't.
What happened was, at the end of September, the weather did break.
There was a massive storm,
a very powerful storm, according to the sources.
The fleet was in a bit of disarray.
Some of them came and anchored off Cumbrae
because it's a bit more sheltered.
But five ships were actually run ashore on the Scottish side,
to basically where Largs is now,
and that's when the Scottish forces came in and pounced,
and they kind of just faced each other off.
And it ended up more being sort of, some sling stones were thrown,
some arrows were shot, some insults were traded.
So, there was no real victory. There was nothing decided.
It's surprising the Norse didn't land their entire force.
Well, this is the interesting thing.
I think Haakon was here to make a statement with his force.
He was saying, "We have sovereignty over the Innse Gall area,
over the Hebrides, over Western Scotland. Look at my force."
I don't think it was his intention to ever invade.
Had he done that,
I think he had the numbers to actually cause serious damage.
Defeated by the weather, the Norsemen headed for safety.
Their king then died and their fleet never returned.
What happened to this Norse territory after the battle?
Well, basically, the change of allegiance to a Scottish king,
or to a Norwegian King, to the people living on this side,
didn't make that much difference to their everyday lives.
And really, the Norse-Gael culture, the culture of the Innse Gall,
the land of the foreigners, continued on.
There was still this idea that this place is different,
it was becoming Scots, and never really fully became Scots in a way.
The Norse left their mark on the language, the landscape,
and the culture.
A kind of currency existed here that allowed Norse Scotland
to take its place at the centre of the vast trade network.
It was a bullion economy.
Bullion made from plundered silver
and turned into something called ring money.
What are we making?
We are making a Viking-age ring money bracelet,
so that's this sort of thing.
So, they would be used to be traded for
food, goods, by the weight of the silver that was in them.
It was used as currency? Yes.
Show you the tapering.
Now, that really does start to make it longer.
And then, with a simple punch decoration,
which seemed to have no purpose, really,
other than to make them look pretty.
Is that the next stage? That's the next stage of this.
Place flat on the anvil and, with this hammer,
give it a good thwack like that.
Right, let me have a go. Yep, right, so...
Don't hit your fingers.
THEY LAUGH
It's so difficult!
Not bad.
THEY CHUCKLE
So, I've managed to take a silver bracelet
and significantly devalue it with my own incompetence!
We're now turning this into a bracelet
by shaping it around our wooden former.
So what do you think of my handiwork?
Well, it doesn't really matter so long as it weighs the right amount,
does it? So there we go, let's test it with the scales.
And put the weight on the other side.
And there we go. There we go. Perfect.
So, thanks to the Norse presence on the islands and beyond,
Scotland was exposed to a vast northern European market
and a sophisticated trading system
that would help to forge strong links with Scandinavia.
Not a bad legacy for a bunch of invaders.
Possibly one of our most audacious invasion stories
is that of a total impostor, who managed to invade no fewer
than three times, claiming to be the ruler of England.
So what did it take to carry that off?
Well, strange as it may seem, in 1496,
all that it took was some fine silks and a passing resemblance
to a missing prince to muster an invasion force large enough
to send the entire country into a tizz.
Aren't you forgetting something?
What about all the people so desperate to turn the clock back
they're willing to believe in pretty much anything?
The story captivated huge TV audiences in the 1970s
in a serialisation that featured the fresh-faced impostor as the puppet
of a foreign power sent to make mischief in England.
Don't you know who I am? No, my lord, I do not.
Who are you, my lord?
The situation arose at the end of the War of the Roses,
when the House of York lost power to the Tudors, and Henry Tudor,
Henry VII, took the throne.
His kingdom was far from united, riven by divisive politics,
self-interest and plots to restore the old rulers.
Supporters of the House of York
still longed to overthrow the Tudors
and they pinned their hopes of doing this on two princes
who had mysteriously vanished -
Edward and Richard.
Almost 15 years after his disappearance,
Richard of York suddenly reappeared,
determined to win back the throne for his family and their supporters.
His first invasion was at Deal in Kent.
Well, actually, Richard didn't invade himself.
He stayed on board his ship and left all of his supporters
to do the actual invading.
150 of them waded ashore at the beach
and then were promptly slaughtered by the town's garrison.
As soon as Richard realised what was happening,
he turned tail and fled for the sanctuary of Ireland.
Richard then pitched up in Scotland at the court of James IV.
Here I am. Will you hand me over?
Never. I gave my word I'd protect you, Richard,
and protect you I shall.
Either to do mischief to the Tudors or to advance the aims
of his European allies, or a delicious combination of both,
James agreed to help this strange character invade England - again.
It'll be the quickest capture of a kingdom
since the devil first landed in Ireland.
Well, when do we start? Tomorrow.
James lent him a small Scottish army and a few German mercenaries
and off they set, south.
You know, this river may look beautiful,
but it's as formidable a barrier as Hadrian's wall.
But in early autumn, Richard waded across the Tweed and into England.
The idea was that as soon as the Northumbrian nobles heard
that Richard of York was invading, they would rise up to support him.
But it was frankly wild and wishful thinking.
Richard and his army marched south into England,
destroying a handful of defensive towers along the way.
But it soon became clear that, in this part of England,
Richard and his cause were far less popular than he thought they were.
Richard and his Scottish army went quietly home.
On his return to Edinburgh, James grew tired of his guest
and sent him back to Ireland on a ship called the Cuckoo.
In Ireland, he did it again,
rallying support amongst those who yearned to bring back the old world,
and he set his sights on a place
where the Tudors' power was tentative.
Show me Cornwall, John. Here, your Grace.
Well, it's a long way from London.
But nearer than Scotland, your Grace.
And my master begs that you march immediately.
He roused his Cornish hosts by promising to end unfair taxation
from distant London.
He even proclaimed himself King Richard IV
and, when news of that proclamation spread,
that the old Yorkist claimant to the throne had returned,
people flocked to him.
His armies swelled to 6,000 men.
They marched on Exeter and Exeter fell.
But when Richard discovered that King Henry's army
was nearby and planning an attack, he fled.
The Cornish army surrendered and its leaders were executed.
Richard was captured trying to reach the coast,
taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower.
Having invaded three times,
having destabilised Henry VII's fledgling Tudor regime,
having cost the Exchequer many millions to raise men to fight him,
Henry still welcomed him to court.
Educated, exotic, romantic and entirely fake, he fitted right in.
After 18 months in captivity, he tried to escape,
was caught and his hosts' patience finally ran out.
On 23rd of November 1499,
the man who had passed himself off as Richard the prince
was taken to Tyburn gallows.
He read a confession admitting his true identity
and his true identity was remarkable.
He was not a prince.
He was not even a member of the House of York.
He was an impostor.
Grievously and wickedly I have claimed to be Richard, Duke of York,
second son of King Edward IV.
On my oath, I do now declare that all these claims and pretences
are nothing but sinful lies.
May God have mercy on my soul.
His name was Perkin Warbeck.
He was the assistant to a silk merchant,
who wore his master's wares to display their beauty.
He was the son of a merchant from Flanders.
But whether or not he was the pawn of a foreign power or a chancer,
a fantasist intent on power himself, he played his hand brilliantly.
He found supporters and backers who longed for the old days
and who were willing to suspend their belief to bring them back.
Even if that meant pinning their hopes on a charlatan
with a dodgy cause.
Nobles are executed by beheading,
but Perkin was hanged like a common thief.
A miserable end for the man who tried to steal the crown.
The Spanish Armada is one of those iconic invasion threats
which contribute to the myth of an unassailable island Britain.
But what we've forgotten is that many in England
wanted this invasion to happen.
Maybe even as many as 50%.
The Spanish ships, 130 of them,
came up the Channel to help land an army.
The Spanish had been encouraged
by Catholic nobles in England to invade.
They wanted to overthrow their queen,
the Protestant and unpopular Queen Elizabeth.
But Elizabeth and her Navy were having none of it.
If there's one painting I could choose to have above my fireplace,
then this would be it.
It's probably the moment in the Armada campaign
when Britain saved herself from invasion.
What's happening here is that the English have released
a pack of fire ships onto the Spanish fleet,
who were anchored at Calais.
Now, there is simply nothing more frightening
when you're on a sailing warship than being faced by a fire ship.
They were quite large ships, packed with combustibles,
anything that could burn,
usually things that could explode,
and they fell down on the Spanish.
The Spanish were so terrified
they cut their anchors and they fled from Calais.
The British followed them like a pack of dogs.
The story goes that Elizabeth went to an army camp near the coast
to encourage her troops' efforts against the imminent invasion.
The speech she made there has passed into legend
and become a rousing monologue for generations of actors.
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman...
..but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
And a king of England, too.
And I think foul scorn that Parma or Spain
or any Prince of Europe should dare
to invade the borders of our realm.
Pluck up your hearts.
By your peace in camp and your valour in the field,
we shall shortly have a famous victory.
CHEERING
The image of Elizabeth standing firm with her troops,
committed to repelling the invader together, has stuck.
But it was prime Tudor propaganda.
By the time Elizabeth showed up to make this speech at Tilbury,
the threat of imminent invasion had passed.
The English fleet had already caught up with the Spanish and,
in heavy conditions, engaged and defeated them.
A storm had then scattered what remained of the Armada.
Elizabeth was sharp and astute.
There was something else that could carry the propaganda message.
Coins would allow Elizabeth and her supporters
to exploit the fear of invasion further.
This is very exciting.
What have we got in here?
We've got a Dutch medal commemorating the defeat
of the Spanish Armada.
And when was this one made?
So, this was made in 1588, immediately after the events,
and it's sort of loaded with symbolism describing the defeat.
So here we've got, in Hebrew, Jehovah, the name of God,
coming out of a cloud with wind
blowing the Spanish Armada into disarray.
What's the link between Jehovah and the Spanish Armada?
Well, the idea was that the storm which dispersed the Armada
through the North Sea and then around the top of Scotland
was actually a divine intervention on behalf of the Protestants.
And the fabulous thing with coins, of course,
is there's always more than one message.
There is. There is another message on the other side,
so what you've got is a Protestant church
perched on a rock in the middle of a storm-tossed sea.
And this is the Protestant faith
resisting the forces of Catholic tyranny.
How effective was this as propaganda?
Well, the story it embodies becomes the real message.
You've got sermons being preached,
emphasising the importance of God's intervention
and the Protestant win,
and that story essentially becomes the norm.
It becomes established fact.
It's a wonderful thing you can pass on,
so I'll pass the message on to you
and you can then learn about the loss of the Armada.
Loss of the Armada, and then I can spread the message to someone else,
so on it goes. And how far did it go?
Well, I mean, news of the Armada gets as far as India.
There is mention at the Mogul court that they had noticed that Elizabeth
had defeated the Spanish.
Yeah.
It was part of a concerted campaign in the aftermath of the Armada.
A portrait shows how the triumph was officially recorded.
This portrait of Elizabeth, painted just after the Armada,
is an incredibly powerful piece of art
and a very powerful piece of propaganda.
Notice to the left on the window
we have the English Navy bearing down on the Spanish Armada,
those fire ships clearly visible.
And through the window on the right, we have a stormy sea,
we have the Spanish ships being wrecked on the rocks
of Scotland and Ireland.
To her right is an imperial crown
and her hand rests possessively on a globe,
her fingers resting just over the Americas.
What's so fabulous about this painting
is it leaves you in no doubt at all as to who rules the waves.
Elizabeth turned the Armada and threat of invasion
into a massive political coup.
History remembers her as uniting England
and the roughly 50% who were opposed to her, well,
they're simply forgotten.
The fear of invasion by sea is deeply embedded in our psyche.
Living by the coast today might be highly desirable,
but it wasn't always that way.
Sometimes, the coast was the most dangerous place you could live.
Why? Because of invasions and raids by pirates.
Now, pirates aren't your classic invaders.
Thanks to Hollywood, we think of them like this.
As seafarers and plunderers, fighting amongst themselves,
like in this glorious version of Blackbeard.
The thing about pirates
is that they always seem to be in far-flung locations,
like the Spanish Main, or treasure islands.
Arh, we got him trapped, Worley, trapped!
But the early 17th century gave us a pirate who wasn't at all like that.
This pirate practically crept into your home and snatched you away.
He became a terrifying bogeyman and folk demon.
Meet the Barbary Coast pirate.
The Barbary pirate was a demon in the popular imagination.
He was dark-skinned. He was unchristian.
Their reputation was based around raids like that in Mount's Bay
in Cornwall. One quiet Sunday,
they slipped ashore and took
an entire congregation from a church - 60 men,
women and children - and sold them into slavery on the Barbary Coast.
The Barbary Coast was the name given to the north coast of Africa.
It stretched from Libya to Morocco.
The pirate headquarters was the notorious city state of Sale
in modern-day Morocco.
There could be found the reason for their terrifying raids
and coastal invasions -
a bustling slave market.
The slave trade was as lucrative as plunder and theft.
Those with the rough hands would be sold at the slave market.
Those with soft hands like mine would be ransomed.
Women would be sold into harems.
The Sale Rovers, as they became known,
made the Barbary Coast infamous.
Your best chance of ever seeing home again was if you were ransomed.
Ransoming became a flourishing industry and no wonder.
Pirates could ask for vast sums of money.
50,000 pieces of eight?
Try up to £300 in the case of the Barbary Coast raiders.
Sums that only increased the likelihood
that they would come back again.
We tell ourselves the story that the Royal Navy
were second to none, but, throughout the 17th century,
the Coast of England and Ireland
was a lucrative hunting ground for Sale Rovers
and it led to one of the strangest invasions in Britain's history,
one that has been reported in Turkish records,
but not in our own.
For five years, this island in the middle of the Bristol Channel
became a Barbary Pirate HQ, a base for raids as far afield as Iceland.
The bogeyman in chief was the pirate Jan Janszoon.
Originally Dutch, in the parlance of the time, he turned Turk.
To better be able to strike up and down the North European coast,
he needed a base,
so sleepy Lundy Island became part of a Barbary pirate kingdom -
or so the story goes.
This piracy was a bustling business,
one known and feared in Britain's coastal communities,
thanks in part to letters like this.
"The ship was surprised by a Turkish man of war.
"Matthew lost his whole estate and was taken to Sale in Barbary,
"where the captain of the Turkish ship
"sold him for 350 Barbary ducats.
"He lives in misery in iron chains,
"is forced to grind in the mill like a horse all day long.
"He's fed on bread and water, and insufficient of that,
"and is tortured to make him turn Turk.
"A great ransom has been set on him, which, because of his losses,
"he cannot procure."
Trinity house to the Privy Council.
They find that there are 12, 13 or 1,400 Englishman captives
in Sale, all of the greatest part of them taken within 20 or 30 miles
of Dartmouth, Plymouth and Falmouth.
Writers complained the coast is not guarded by some handsome ships to
defend the king's subjects and that our friends are not restrained from
arming and aiding infidels.
Spurred on by the lack of security around our shores,
the Navy beefed up its defences.
The spectre of the green flag of the Sale Rovers
became a thing of the past around Britain's coast.
Their raids became another forgotten chapter in our history.
Why? Perhaps because the memory of them harassing Britain's coasts
at will didn't exactly fit with the idea of Britannia ruling the waves.
Possibly the most daring invasion of Britain
came in the 1660s, from one of our closest neighbours -
the Dutch Republic.
This was an invasion that became known as England's Pearl Harbor
and it was as much the result of English neglect
as it was of Dutch courage.
King Charles II was engaged in peace talks with the Dutch
over wars in the colonies.
But while talking peace,
both sides were secretly still scheming.
And when the talks stalled,
the Dutch launched a surprise attack and caught the English Navy
napping right here at their home dockyard
on the River Medway in Kent.
The majority of the English fleet was mothballed over here
in front of the dockyard, but over here,
on the morning of the sixth of June 1667,
a fog bank rose, revealing England's worst nightmare.
It was a vast Dutch task force...
..62 frigates, 15 smaller vessels, 12 fire ships.
And unarmed and unprotected, the English Navy was a sitting duck.
With a dockyard full of undefended ships,
the response of the Naval establishment was slow,
if not complacent,
and there was one reason for that -
the Admiralty thought they had it covered.
A huge defensive chain had been stretched across the river
to make it impenetrable and to keep the fleet safe.
This gives you a really good idea
of what the chain would have been like.
It's an enormous, it's about a metre long and maybe, what,
two inches in diameter.
It's an astonishing engineering achievement
to have something like this in the 1660s
and the force it would have taken to break a chain like this
would've been unimaginable.
Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist and secretary to the Navy,
recorded a vivid account of the entire affair
and how it played out in London.
"That all is safe as to the great ships against any assault,
"the boom and chain being so fortified,
"which put my heart into great joy."
But Pepys' joy didn't last for long.
The Dutch sent some heavy ships forward
and their weight snapped the chain.
"Ill news has come to court of the Dutch breaking the chain at Chatham,
"which struck me to the heart."
With the chain broken, fear of a full-blown invasion took hold.
In nearby London, sheer selfish panic set in.
The rich fled, taking whatever
they could carry of their wealth with them.
I presently resolved my father's
and wife's going into the country and,
at two hours' warning, they did go by the coach this day,
with about £1,300 in gold in their night bag.
The entire city is in a state of panic.
The Dutch now pressed their advantage,
putting troops ashore and sending fire ships towards the English ships
in the dockyard.
The scene vividly captured in the painting of the time.
Here you can see it unfold,
as some of the Navy's best ships and symbols of England's naval might
are lost and carried home by the Dutch as trophies.
It was a massive strategic and symbolic defeat for England,
so why is it not so well-known?
Especially as it is so well-documented.
These are all Dutch paintings,
from Dutch artists.
British paintings of this event
are few and far between.
And with the Dutch in such command,
it was open season on the source of England's naval power,
the dockyard itself.
A Dutch attack on this dockyard
would have set back the English naval project
by a decade, maybe more.
At a stroke, they would have enjoyed unchallenged access
to disputed colonies and foreign territories
and they'd have grown rich in the process.
But somehow Chatham dockyard was spared.
The Dutch fleet moved on.
And with this lucky escape,
the Navy was able to piece itself back together.
We might have all but forgotten this invasion now,
but at the time it was a major mauling.
Just the sort of thing best swept under the carpet.
The fear of invasion,
the invasions we have chosen to forget and the invasions
that have enriched our lives have all shaped who we are.
Since 1066, Vikings, Normans, French and Dutch forces
had all invaded and, to an extent, held British territory
and yet the idea of the British Isles as being uninvaded
was about to become one of the founding myths
of the newly born British Empire.
In the next episode -
the last ever invasion of the British mainland.
It's a little-known story...
Involving a middle-aged woman,
a revolutionary Irish-American commander,
some extremely incompetent French soldiers and this -
a pitchfork.
And the largest underground tunnels we've ever built
to guard against invasion.
I don't want to die in here.