Program Title
By the Sword Divided, II

Episode number:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Original broadcast date
1988-08-28

Cast	Characters
Rob Edwards	John Fletcher
Sharon Mughan	Anne Lacey Fletcher
Timothy Bentinck	Tom Lacey
Lucy Aston	Lucinda Lacey
Peter Birch	Edward Ferrar #1
Rosalie Crutchley	Goodwife Margaret
Bert Parnaby	Sir Austin
Peter Jeffrey	Cromwell
Edward Peel
Andrew Maclachlan	Cropper
Eileen Way	Minty
Peter Guinness	Dick Skinner
Colin Haigh
Barrie Cookson
Janet Lees-Price
Jeremy Clyde	King Charles I
Andrew McCulloch	Leckie
Forbes Collins
Malcolm Terris
Christopher Neame	Henry Snelling
Joanna Myers
Simon Butteriss	Hugh
Robert Demeger
Robert Stephens
Simon Treves	King Charles II
Janet Price
Andy Bradford
David Collings	John Thurloe
Claire Davenport
Joanna McCallum	Frances Neville
Edward Rawle-Hicks
Gerald Sim
John Woodvine
Bill Wallis

Credits
Executive Producer: John Hawkesworth
Producer: Jonathan Alwyn
Director: Diarmuid Lawrence, Michael Custance, Brian Farnham

Intro
By the Sword Divided, II/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a new series created by John Hawkesworth, whose memorable contributions to Masterpiece Theatre include Upstairs/Downstairs and The Flame Trees of Thika. This time he returns with By the Sword Divided, a second series on one of the great upheavals of English history, the English Civil War. It was essentially a war between the people who accepted and the people who resented a king--Charles I--who imposed arbitrary taxes, raised his own armies, and dismissed all Parliaments that refused to vote him money. And the conflict was reinforced by the battle between the Protestants in Parliament and the high church supporters of the king. Now, the war ended in 1649 with the routing of the last of the king's armies in Lancashire, by a Cambridgeshire gentleman/farmer and a fierce puritan, Oliver Cromwell. In the last series we noted that throughout the country very many families where split in their loyalty and our story is about one of them.

The family is the Laceys, county squires. The patriarch is dead. His son, Tom, a very stalwart king's man, has survived; however, the running of the family mansion is now in the hands of his sister, Anne, who had married a parliamentary advisor to Cromwell, John Fletcher. There is another sister, Lucinda, and she is married to the king's chief aide, Edward Ferrar. And we come in on Lucinda understandably distressed to know the whereabouts and the fate of her husband, who is with the king. For, wherever he is, he must soon come to trial. Incidentally, the trial scene is taken from the shorthand transcript and so records the actual language of that time and place.

By the Sword Divided, episode one.



Episode number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7




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