Lesson video

Okay, so to start off, can you please write down the date in the top right hand corner of your piece of paper and the title, which is the arrest of five members.

As always, make sure both of these are underlined.

Just pause the screen as you get that completed.

Excellent.

So first to begin this lesson, what we really need to go back to is understanding all of the three kingdoms that Charles ruled as King.

You remember England, which was one of his kingdoms, was a largely Protestant country.

There was increasing Puritans within the country as well, but largely they were Protestant.

And in previous lessons, we've gone on to look at Scotland, and how they had a Presbyterian faith, which was essentially another way of being an extreme Protestant, very radical Protestant.

And we've seen all of the conflict that's happened there as part of the Bishop's wars.

Now, what we're going to go into now is what happened with Ireland, that we know is already a great Catholic country.

And that is a huge division.

How are you going to have a Protestant King in charge of a Catholic country and keep the peace? Well in short, Charles has not managed to do so.

Just to have a quick history of Ireland at this time, you had heard English monarchs, confiscating land from Ireland in order to profit from that land, in the crops that's grown on that.

So if you look at this map here, you've got lots of different, all the land that's highlighted in different colour is land that has been taken over by the English.

Now they started in the Tudor period under Henry the eighth, his son Edward the sixth did not continue with it, but then it did get taken back up again under Mary the first.

So this has been going on for a long, long time.

And Irish natives are becoming increasingly angry, at the English Protestants for taking their land.

And not only that, the Englishman started to replace the Irish nobility.

So what then starts to happen is that all of the Irish Catholics are removed from positions of power within Ireland.

So now they've got no power to complain against the English taking all of this land from Ireland.

And instead they just need to sit there and accept it, which is obviously going to allow anger to kind of fester against the English.

And, as well as that, if you've got more English Protestants coming into the country, that's going to undermine the Irish Catholic religion that they're very proud of and want to maintain, which is going to cause more divisions.

And as you know, as we've already looked at, the Earl of Strafford was the Lord, the tenant of Ireland.

So he was in charge of Ireland, but obviously he was an English Protestant.

And in the 1630s, as Charles was trying to raise money for that Bishop's war, the Earl of Stratford was tasked with raising money and increasing control.

So what this really does is make life worse for the Irish as they lose their money to the English, and also lose their control to the English.

So, what this sparks in 1641, is the Irish Rebellion.

Now to begin with, the Irish Rebellion did not want to seem like it is in this drawing.

I mean, he can see some really, really horrifying violence as we can see that child being killed.

But what the Irish basically wanted to do was to try and take back some control for themselves.

It was their country after all, and they really believed that England had no right to take what was theirs.

So initially they tried to just take over Dublin and they tried to do that without any bloodshed, but it was poorly led.

There wasn't enough soldiers that turned up to this.

So that's where they failed.

And with that failure, the resentment absolutely rocketed into violence as the Catholics fought back for control of their country.

And a lot of Protestants who were living in England, sorry, a lot of Protestants who were living in Ireland at the time, then fled back to England.

They were absolutely terrified for their lives and felt that the Irish would kill them.

And they gave reports of the Irish Catholics cutting off the ears, fingers, hands of English Protestants, even some reports of the Irish Catholics plucking out the eyes of the English Protestants.

And one really horrifying example of the violence in Ireland at this time was the Portadown massacre.

So this is where many Irish Catholics herded, naked English Protestants into freezing waters into the river.

And this was essentially to drown them.

And if anyone tried to escape from this river and climb up the banks, then they'd be killed for trying to escape.

And this was a really horrendous massacre of Protestants.

This' still remembered today by Protestants with the orange order parades, which takes place every year on the 10th of July.

Though obviously Charles is incredibly appalled at the violence that is taking place.

Okay.

We now got ourselves another conflict.

Not in Scotland this time, but now in Ireland.

So we're just going to take a quick pause point here, to have a think about this question.

How might the Irish rebellion affect the relationship between King and parliament? So we've seen in the past how conflict means that King in parliament are now going to have to work differently together.

So just some questions to help you think more deeply about this question, why might King and Parliament now work together? So why might it be a positive thing, for that relationship? And also why might the rebellion increase tensions between King and Parliament? So, why might it be a negative thing? Just like you to bullet point some ideas, maybe two or three in your books.

Just pause this slide while complete that.

Excellent work.

Now we're going to go through my answers.

Now as always, you might have very different answers to me.

That's absolutely fine.

I'm sure that well justified and correct.

But if you feel like you'd like to add in the answers that I've got on this screen, then as always feel free to pause me, so you can do that.

So, Charles the first first and Ireland.

Some positive outcomes of this, between relationships the King and Parliament.

Charles decided as he was so horrified against the actions of the Irish Catholics immediately, he decided he wanted to crush the Irish Rebellion.

And for the first time, in a really long time, this led to the public really rallying around Charles and supporting him in making that decision.

And also the effect then went into parliament, as many MPs were willing to give Charles their support as well.

So actually what you see here is many people kind of forming an Alliance with Charles as they're both fighting together against the common enemy, which is the Irish.

However, there were some negatives to this as well.

At some point within the country, there were rumours that Charles, was actually supporting the Irish Catholics.

Now there is absolutely no evidence to support this, but you'll remember from Charles marrying the French Catholic, Princess Henrietta Maria and due to his Catholic seeming church reforms, a lot of people believe that Charles was this secret Catholic and that at one point he was going to turn against the country.

So at this point, people were giving all of these rumours and saying, yeah, well, Charles is actually on the side of the Irish.

And it's all a lie.

So this is one negative.

You've got some rumours cropping up.

And secondly, John Pym, who you remember as being very aggressively against the King and the unofficial leader of the Parliament opposition to him start to become really concerned about this increasing enthusiasm towards Charles, due to him making the decision to go against Ireland.

So, what John Pym does, is he creates a document called the Great Remonstrance.

Okay.

So, what makes the document which was highlighting all of Charles' mistakes that he'd made as King whilst he was on the throne.

And to be precise, it includes 241 mistakes.

John Pym was not messing around when he created this document.

And within it, he also demanded for an increase to Parliament's power as well.

And what this document did, is it really split Parliament in two.

You had two groups, some that were in favour of this document being passed through parliament, but some had actually thought that Pym had gone too far.

They actually thought, look now is not the time for us to fight with in England.

We really need to rally together so that we can fix the Irish crisis.

So, the Great Remonstrance got actually get published, very, very nearly doesn't, but the majority of parliament voted for it to go through.

And here, you can see the reaction of Charles the first, following, the Great Remonstrance.

So, you've got this drawing or this painting here.

And what I'd like you to do is try and work out what you can see.

What can you learn about Charles' reaction? You can see him there in the yellow ring.

And I'd also like to point out two other features.

So you've got Charles the first in the House of Commons, we've got very angry MPs, and we've also got one MP kneeling before Charles.

And that just some details that I've highlighted for you, they're in this drawing.

Now what I would like you to do, is write down what this picture suggests about Charles the first's reaction.

So I've got some sentence starters for you here.

First things first, you want to zoom in on one detail.

Now that might be one of the three that I've already mentioned.

You might want to focus on something entirely different and that's completely up to you.

So just, first of all, focus in on that detail from the source.

And then secondly, what can you learn from that? For instance, if you've got very angry MPs, what does that suggest about Charles the first's reaction, to the Great Remonstrance? Okay, just pause the slide here, whilst you write down maybe one or two things that you can learn about Charles the first's reaction from this source.

Off you go.

Excellent stuff, okay.

So here's an answer that I came up with and by all means, that doesn't mean that what you've written down, is wrong if it's different to mine.

I'm just going to show you the process I've gone through Okay? So, in this picture, I can see a lot of MPs that look very angry at Charles the first.

You can see a lot of them would furrowed brows and looking quite shocked at him for turning up at their place work.

So then I've gone on to think about the reaction of Charles here.

And I've said, this picture suggests that Charles is doing something the MPs do not like such as protesting against the Great Remonstrance.

Okay? That's one thing that I've thought of.

You might have thought that, you might have zoomed in on the fact that you've got someone kneeling before Charles.

So in that case, you might have written down, in his picture I can see an MP kneeling before Charles.

So this picture then suggest that if you see someone kneeling, it's almost like they're cowering before them.

They are saying, look, I'm definitely not as powerful to you.

Maybe then this picture suggest that the MPs are asking for Charles' forgiveness for writing the Great Remonstrance, well not sure.

But, whatever you've done, I'm sure it's absolutely valid.

very well done.

What we're going to do now is actually learn exactly what is going on in that drawing as part of the information that you're going to read as part of your worksheet.

So what I'd like you to do now is have a read through these comprehension questions, just so that you know what key information you need to look for in your worksheets.

And then I'd like you to pause this video here, read the slides and answer the comprehension questions.

As always, please make sure you do this in full sentences so that all of the work that we're doing is to our highest ability, and we are doing our very best.

Excellent, off you go.

It was really well done for getting that completed.

I'm going to go through the answers now and as always feel free to pause me at any moment, if you'd like to improve your work or you feel like there's extra detail that you've missed out and you'd like to add in and as always, please make sure you're giving yourself a big tick when you've got an answer correct.

So question number one.

Why did the Irish dislike the English settlers? An acceptable answer, because they took their most fertile land and undermined Catholicism.

again, it's cracks absolutely, but we're not being specific here.

If I look at that acceptable answer, I don't know who they are.

I've not been specific naming the people.

So, an even better answer would read, the Irish resented the English settlers because the English had taken their fertile land and undermined their Catholic faith.

Good.

Question number two.

How many Protestants were killed during the Irish Rebellion? An acceptable answer, 10,000 is what historians believe today.

But any of the good answer is going to explain how we've managed to get to that number.

So, in the 1640s, there were reports of 200,000 Protestants being killed during the Irish Rebellion.

Historians believe, however, these figures to be over estimations, and place the amount of deaths closer to 10,000.

And this is actually really quite interesting because as you remember, when the Irish Rebellion happened, the English Protestants were absolutely terrified of what was going on.

There wasn't someone going around and counting the deaths and being very sort of accurate in counting them.

It came down to a lot of rumours and sort of scaremongering as reports would fly around about all of this abuse that happened towards the English Protestants.

Which is why those figures would So then as always, when historians are going back through your records, that's when they can then be more accurate, which is why we have that 10,000 figure Which just because it's smaller, please don't think that it's therefore an insignificant amount.

This was still a deeply horrifying event that happened within Ireland.

Question number three.

why did John Pym stop Charles receiving money to crush the Irish rebellion? The acceptable answer, he was concerned about the public's increasing support towards Charles.

A good answer is going to go into more detail and further explanation.

So John Pym knew that if Charles was successful in Ireland, the public would support Charles again and forgets about his previous mistakes.

Plus, Pym worried that Charles might use his new army against parliament so he blocked Charles from receiving any funds.

And this is really, really important.

It really shows the level of distrust between King and Parliament now.

Actually, they don't want to give him money because they're worried that if he gets a really strong army, then actually MPs' lives will be in danger.

Question number four.

What caused some MPs to disagree with the Great Remonstrance? The acceptable answer.

They thought parliament should focus on the Irish Rebellion.

Again, we can be more detailed here more specific.

So, even better answer, 148 MPs disagreed with the Great Remonstrance as they believed John Pym had gone too far.

They believe Parliament should be focused on stopping the Irish Rebellion rather than causing more problems within Ireland.

And it's got a really excellent bit of detail there, as we've got the absolute exact amount of MPs, who went against it.

Question five.

Why did many people accuse Charles of being a tyrant after the arrest of the five members? Acceptable answer, by turning against Parliament, he proved he could act with absolute power.