The Devil's Whore: Episode 3

"We begin again..."

It's very neat, the parallel between the trials of Angelica and the king, both sentenced to die on the same day. Angelica languishes in a miserable cell, giving birth there, jeered at and humiliated over her last few days, with only the Lilburnes for friends, and dies painfully, with the cruel jeers of Percy ringing in her ears. Except she doesn't, because Sexby has replaced the hangman and her death is faked, if still bloody painful.

Charles actually dies. His humiliations are of a lesser type, though significant for a king; he has to pick up the ball from the top of his cane himself when it falls to the floor. Capaldi is amazing here, showing us both the King's arrogance and his vulnerability. His trial is equally unfair, but he, too, has the ironic support of John Lilburne, who will not compromise in matters of justice and gets himself arrested yet again.

Also unjust is Cromwell's behaviour in Ireland, which is more reminiscent of the Thirty Years War than the comparatively civilised conflict in England. Sexby receives advancement, being made a colonel, but the moral compromises he has to make are appalling. He betrays the soldiers under his command, who are hanged by Cromwell although he had assured then they would not be, and in Ireland he is certainly guilty of war crimes.  The plebeian philosopher at last dips his hands in the blood. (Although, of course,he has fought as a mercenary in the Thirty Years War himself; his hands can hardly have been clean in the first place.)

He's not good enough for Angelica, though, as she refuses his proposal of marriage. She may be increasingly radical, but Sexby would still be a match well below her station. Her eventual reluctant acceptance is a defeat for her.

As Sexby bloodied his hands further across the Irish Sea, Angelica continues her journey into radicalism by joining the radical, stoic and bonkers Diggers sect. She is attracted to their lifestyle but alienated by their creepily conformist religiosity, adhering to a vague, hippyish spiritualism. She is finally cast out of this egalitarian paradise, but not before asking why, if all are equal, do women toil in the fields all day and then cook for their children at night?

The most fun part of the episode is, of course, Lilburne's trial and speech, and his triumphant acquittal. But the last few minutes are far from fun; a damaged Sexby arrives back from Ireland and all but rapes his new wife, and then abandons her. And, worse, the ex-Digger with whom Angelica has now shackled up turns out to be an underling of Percy's...

This continues to be superb. It works as melodrama, with dramatic reversals of fortune, but this also serves to parallel with the experiences of the great and good, and to illustrate history, or rather a particular slant of history that seeks to explore the heritage of the British Left and present things, quite deliberately and fairly, a little anachronistically. All history, after all, exists only in relation to the present.