David Starkey: Was Henry VI that bad? David Starkey Lectures

[Music] distinguished uh deliveryman david starkey who will be no stranger to any of you on the count of his distinguished career as a historian and a broadcaster he has historically focused uh on the tudor period that he's also been an expert on the monarchy and on on the magna carta which i think sort of suggests that this may not be the last time we're inviting him to to give a talk but for now he's talking about the dawn of the tweeting period and the educational foundation of king's college and eaton thank you very much david fellow barbers ladies and gentlemen it is an enormous pleasure to be back in this hall where in many ways i began a career that broadened out from the university i owe this company and individuals here i'm delighted that john boots past master boots is here i owe this company a profound debt my first major exhibition was largely made possible by the cooperation of this company it's back in 1991 when i first discovered again through andrew harfield then the clerk i first discovered the extent i am forgetting to turn on my i don't normally forget to turn on in any way but there we are um the that's better um i that's right um as i was saying uh andrew harfield then clark it was then that i discovered the company's extraordinary tudor treasures of which of course the greatest is hanging there um the company the reason i got did it of course 1991 is the 500th anniversary of the birth of henry viii and i did my first major exhibition at the national maritime museum on the we called it a title i think i would probably repudiate nowadays a european court in england this was before we'd thought of brexit it was when the national maritime museum was still trying to sell it may indeed be so for all i know was still trying to sell itself as a european museum and of course this was the henry viii uh not of brexit but this was the henry viii of the treaties with france uh it was the henry viii of the close association with the habsburgs and everything else but it's a wonderful exhibition and you went in a very important way to it and indeed my life of course uh happily sort of enabled me to do henry's birth then the accession for henry's accession the exhibition for henry's accession in 15 uh in in you know nine uh in 2009 the exhibition for the 500th of his um accession and you actually lent that and that was the star of the great exhibition that we did at the british library so a deep debt and it's very nice to be able to pay a little of it here also of course it's a debt to the extraordinary educational achievement of the late middle ages i am a product not eaten it's very obvious isn't it um i'm not quite sure what eaten boys called people like me but it's something not terribly polite but my school was founded not very much later unlike ethan it was abolished uh by the activities largely of public school boys as grammar schools were destroyed but it was founded in 1525 again as part of that extraordinary educational endeavor of the late middle ages but what i want to talk about isn't so much the educational aspects of eaton and kings i want to talk about their building i want to talk about what they tell us about henry vi king henry vi who founds them and his successors who complete the extraordinarily extravagant schemes of the king we're used to thinking of henry correctly as one of the very very worst of english kings and there is a deep irony isn't there that one of the very very worst of our kings founds two of the most important national institutions eaton and kings but why do i describe him so bad as i'm sure you know he contrives to lose the entire inheritance of henry v he is a man of total absolute incompetence nowadays we make all sorts of excuses for him and probably say he was autistic and or something of the sort but he he destroys the greatest inheritance of any medieval monarch but he founds these two extraordinary creations of eaton and by windsor and of the twin at cambridge what was he doing well he was expressing of course and this is important that we realize this is expressing fundamentally a religious motive we tend to think of them as schools and as a university college the thing that links them is a devotion to the virgin mary and the thing that links them is something else they are what are called colleges again we really lost the sense of what the word college means in the context of the late middle ages we think of it as essentially either a university college or special sort of school or college as a learned body as something else of course it's an inheritance from the tutor period and that man's fascination with medicine be the college of physicians and that sort of thing but the term college in the late middle ages essentially means an ecclesiastical foundation devoted to the commemoration of its benefactor and again we need to understand this very clearly and it is the idea that if you found a college the fellows and the boys because usually it would be a foundation that would be said 10 or 12 priests there'd be something called a master or a provost there'd be 10 or 12 fellows which were in almost in various priests and then if it had an educational function there might be 20 30 40 boys there would be a choir and so on we focus on the boys and the school master the foundations invariably focused on the fellows the priests and the provost and their duty to pray for the soul of the benefactor to keep up a permanent cycle of prayer all of these buildings are part of the extern and foundations structures a part of the extraordinary late medieval view that salvation is essentially a complex process it's not the sort of lutheran act of conversion instead it is that obviously you know the medieval church is realistic we are mixed we are confused creatures we're not absolutely and simply good and bad and in order to recognize that fact the middle ages invented because there's absolutely no biblical basis for it it invented purgatory the middle state between heaven and hell and our extraordinary inheritance of medieval institutions which we retain more completely i think than any other country because of the accidents of our bizarre non-reformation the extraordinary inheritance of medieval institutions including livery companies were essentially there to pray for the souls of their founders to get them through purgatory that was the essential function so you left money as a kind of insurance policy on salvation um it the endowment the endowment was designed to maintain a permanent cycle of prayer and if you look at the foundation charter it's one so-called consolidated chart of eaton one of the most magnificent of 15th century documents it shows the king praying to the virgin in majesty offering up his prayers and the prayers of england because one of the things that eaton was supposed to do was not simply to offer up prayers for henry but to offer prayers for his entire realm and you see behind the king the lords and the commons the lord's still very much looking as they do now you know in in in in in their fancy colors of red and white and the house of commons of course very firmly below them um ratifying the king's desire for this permanent cycle of prayer so let's just understand what they are their religious foundations with as it were education attached so this will explain a lot of what i'm going to tell you the second thing that we need to think about is what the attest of the absurd vanity of henry vii henry vi both of them are conceived of on a gigantic scale gigantic scale the the the the the um the scale of kings about which i'll talk in a moment is roughly what henry intended though no thanks to him and his incompetence but eaton we must remember is the merest fragment of what he intended to construct the the chapel as it is now is about a quarter of what he wanted he envisaged a grand church longer than lincoln and wider than winchester and having built one rather handsome one because it's not big enough he then pulls it down and starts again and unfortunately falls and finds himself um fleeing from his own kingdom in 1460 before it's actually finished kings is an even more extraordinary story and it is as i said on kings that i primarily want to focus oh by the way the relationship between the two of them as i'm sure most of us know eaton is intended as the feeder school it's the feeder school to the college at cambridge it's um the the relationship between the two of them is originally established uh in in the previous century by william of wickham's fat twin foundations of winchester on the one hand and and new college at oxford on the other and the the statutes of eaton statutes of kings are very very closely modeled on on those of of uh of winchester and of new college and by the way there's another thing that one just needs quickly to slip in there the bishopric of winchester will constantly come up in what i'm talking about that is of course because it is the richest bishopric in the country it is one of the richest seas in all of europe the the english if you actually look at england it's got about a quarter of the number of bishops of sicily and the bishops cluster thickly in italy and most of them apart from the pope and the patriarch of venice and whatever are really rather poor the english bishops are few there are only 26 of them and they are generally speaking unless you get a runt sea like rochester or the worst fate for any any clergyman is to be given a welsh sea the infinite humiliation uh of of of of of of clander force and davids but you know you have to crawl your way up from there but winchester is vastly rich and if you actually look at the colleges of oxford about half of them are founded out of the wealth of the sea of winchester the last of them being of course christchurch which is woolsey is also bishop of winchester along with so many other things and and so much of the wealth of the sea goes there so and again bishoprics remember are en endowed with vast amounts of land we tend to see it as a kind of you know the products of the faithful counting pennies into boxes please please please these vastly rich landowners and the size of the cathedrals is a direct function of the wealth of the bishopric so some of the money goes to oxford so henry then uh founds on the model of new college and of uh the uh of of of new college and winchester he founds the uh he found his twin foundation the i mentioned the the ludicrous scale of eaton which means that it's not finished um at the time of his death the scale of kings is even more extraordinary and it completely transforms cambridge why does cambridge look so different from oxford the reason is henry vi he knocked cambridge down the extraordinary size of the uh of the court of kings college cambridge is the center of medieval cambridge those of you are at all familiar with cambridge you will know there is where the street where queens is and then the other side trinity lane so we have queensland and trinity lane that is the original high street of cambridge and he simply sweeps the center away and puts this gigantic or intends to put this gigantic structure there in other words henry is not only important in terms of the foundation of eaton and of kings he is the person who transforms the relationship and power balance of the two universities very important that we understand we tend to think of oxford and cambridge as a level pegging i am a cambridge man they do not when i found myself with stephen hawking in san francisco and new york launching the 800 campaign of cambridge i caused the free song of horror in which i said the first 400 years might as well not have happened not a single thought that matters not a single original idea emerges from the first hundred years of cambridge 400 3 400 years of cambridge is a mere school to produce east anglian archdeacons if you want to if you want to sense if you want a sense of total inferiority i speak as a cambridge man the total inferiority of cambridge to oxford look at old schools oxford magnificent structure with with its wonderful uh wonderful um fun vaulted roof and and which which which leads into bodily and all the rest and then look at its equivalent um at cambridge in the old schools which is now the university administrators common room which is an east anglian bar it is absolutely nothing else but it is the extraordinary shift of royal interest to cambridge which then transforms it so oxford is medieval and ecclesiastical cambridge is 15th 16th century and royal and his the sixth bizarrely that is the axis again but why does he donate why does he found the college in cambridge if it's this rubbish universe it's roughly of the standing of hull um uh i or you know east anglia or something why does he patronize cambridge and not oxford the reason is simple oxford had betrayed the faith oxford is the home of heresy it's the home of wycliffe and at the end of the 15th century so at the end of the 14th century and because of that you get the constitutions of oxford we've been just apologizing for them of course because of the uh relations with the jews and all the rest of it a few centuries earlier but the constitutions of uh uh are uh uh with with archbishop arundel and the constitution's uh issued in oxford by arundel and at the beginning of the 15th century freeze english academic life for a century and institutionalized and inquisition in england and the beginnings of persecution and all the rest so oxford oxford have been too good remember original thought in the middle ages doesn't get you stars in the research assessment exercise it gets you burned alive and oxford have been too good with original thought so cambridge is safely dull that's the reason you get you cambridge is safely orthodox that's why the money goes there so again as i said there's immensely ambitious scheme you knock down the middle of the end i mean can you imagine it you know he spends his fortune you buy it the entire this is you see why there's no sense of a medieval center in cambridge why market square is this odd thing that sits outside the university but when you think of the high in oxford and literally the main street of cambridge which ran through um ran through uh the site of king's college would have been exactly like that and but of course the other thing that it does once henry vi created this vast space everybody else wants two and and of course when he comes to found a college when he comes to found trinity it's got to be even bigger so you've had one enormous college which is kings then lady margaret beaufort will talk a little bit about her found another vast college at st john's and then henry viii has got to found the vastness of the lot um with trinity so you create totally different pattern of a few very very large colleges as opposed to the dense network of smaller colleges which characterizes oxford henry vi the explanation of the difference but of course he was he left eaton at least a working institution kings was barely even that at the time of his death this vast conceit for chapel was barely foundations there was no roof and only the west end you sort of rose even to the height of the eaves and what happens to both these foundations well of course they are then associated with the king as i've said who is an absolute failure and to a dynasty which is replaced by a rival what happens very quickly with eaton i promise i'd at least fill the story in what happens with eaton at first edward iii uh the the the the the king of the first king of the house of york decides effectively to extinguish it and and he transfers its vast endowment again at windsor distant george's chapel windsor he's particularly interested in the order of the garter and he's actually buried there but the the thing is that the eaton foundation is rescued by its first provost um and somebody who had been very much at the side of henry vi when he'd founded it by in fact the bishop of winters at the time william waynflete and it's he who rein helps the re-endowment and to make the buildings livable and usable though on a very very much smaller scale than had been envisaged by henry vi so we compart that story eaton is now working it's it's all right it's going to be okay kings is a very different story it is it did receive this vast endowment um it is stripped of its endowment um by edward and it it has the only bit that was really built the the the courtyard that sorry the the quad that's oxford uh the court the court was simply a demolition site a tiny bit of what is now the old schools was actually the functioning bit collegiate bit of kings it's also very important we understand something else all cambridge was a building site at this point the university had also made the terrible mistake of tearing down great saint mary's because it wasn't big enough and had run out of money so you've got to think of the entire center of cambridge at this point effectively as half finished buildings ruined buildings squatters it's a complete mess also playgroud how is how is this to be rescued well it sleeps under edward iv but famously of course edward iv although he had extraordinary luck he survived dethronement he'd come back he managed to produce two sons and a great clutch of daughters nevertheless the eldest son wasn't quite old enough to be king in his own right and he's usurped by the terrible richard iii easily the worst king in english history i hope there are members of the rich iii society here if so perhaps they will explain to me how somebody having seized the throne with something like a claim in 1483 tries to lose it to the weakest claimant in english history only two years later you know you've really got a lot of explanation to do but the crucial role of richard iii in our story is that he is the person who rescues the reputation of henry vi and here again there's this fascinating story of um of kings and other royals who die violent deaths we're familiar with the truth of this story of course from diana who was effectively sainted she was made a secular saint and anybody who visited um visited south kensington and kensington palace and saw the piles of votive offerings the rotting flowers the teddy bears all sort of things heaped up outside the gates of kensington palace that's exactly what happened with the death of of the violent death of the prince or of a king in the late middle ages they were as it were made saints by popular acclaim henry was being quite difficult to saint because great care had been taken to dump him in a in a relatively remote place chertsey abbey charts abby it is richard it is richard iii as it were determined to reconcile the dynasty reconcile himself to the ghost of henry vi who buries him at windsor and gives him a rather handsome rather noble tomb next to that of his own brother next to that of edward iv and at that point the cult of henry vi as a saint without being created a saint by the pope begins and richards does something else by the way you see exactly the same phenomenon uh with henry v whose father had murdered richard ii richard ii is rehabilitated re-buried in the abbey by henry v it's a great in other words roy these royal quasi saints who've been terribly bad in life but are reinvented in death are essentially used to their enemies your enemy reckons the the the were the rival house reconciles themselves and but sort of sort of sort of buys you off um um a bit like sort of you know piers morgan getting enthusiastic about diana you get the you get the general idea of that of that that kind of world but richard iii also shows his devotion by the way it's probably richard iii who had actually given the final blow to henry vi in the tower which lends an extra free song i'm not suggesting piers did anything similar but the the the that that lends the that lends the the final uh final edge to the story but richard also begins on a very large scale the rebuilding of kings he picks up uh a re-endows it he starts work very rapidly on rebuilding the chapel and all the rest he goes even further he turns anybody here from queens he turns queens into a rival college to kings determined to have a yorkist foundation to matter york is royal foundation to match the lancastrian foundation of kings but then unfortunately um and cambridge leaps onto the bandwagon declares him worthy of the mass salos popular the savior of the people once every year the university dances attendance upon him and then unfortunately of course he's defeated by henry vii at which point cambridge becomes absolute persona to the tudors it's a very extraordinary story and henry vii although again look at henry vii henry vii had encountered um had encountered henry vi as a boy his first great experience as as as a boy and at the time of the redemption in 1470 is when he's brought from the family that had been looking at the harbor family that had been looking after him in wales he's reunited with his mother lady margaret beaufort they go and see henry vi and at the palace of westminster and this is the moment at which two extraordinary things happen in henrietta richmond's life the future henry vii the first is that scene which is reproduced in shakespeare of henry vi uh sort of saying here prophesying the future succession of of of henry earl of richmond here is the boy to whom we must yield power and dominion and that scene does actually happen quite what the words are spoken there we don't know and the other thing which i discovered and again it's the word prevalence of old etonians in public lectures when i was giving a version of this lecture at harlaxton hall and then produced the the next bit of information i recited a prayer which appears in henry the six head of the seventh's will as the prayer that he'd learned in childhood and had used ever since whereupon six hands went up and said don't you know that's the prayer of eaton college in other words there is a very strong possibility that this prayer which also appears at the beginning of john blackman's life of henry vi which is later it's a tudor to the creation that prayer is real is henry vi and was learned by henry vii when he's a young man in 1470. so this very very and of course you know he claims to be a lancaster the head of the seventh claims to be a lancaster and all the rest nevertheless because richard iii had flung this vast amount of money uh and prestige at king's college he severs connection with it he strips it of his endowment he goes to cambridge only on the way to go anywhere else he avoids cambridge and it's it's extraordinary story so why then at the very end of his reign does he suddenly decide i am going to complete the building of kings college chapel on exactly the scale whereas ethan is a cobble job come on all the etonians admit your chapel's a mess it's a cobbled it's a cobble isn't it it's a cobbled job it's not architectural they're wonderful bits but as an architectural entity is hopeless whereas the chapel of kings is glorious it is one of the very greatest buildings of the world and it is so because henry vii decided to complete it absolutely as the founder intended using the foundations the structure we've no idea whether it's intended to have vaulting like that he there is only in a single very important respect henry vi and he's very precise about what he wants from buildings henry vi has specified that it shouldn't be decorated whereas of course henry vii is determined that it will be plastered with tudor badges and roses and crowns and all the rest which the fellows of kings i remember in my day with their typical shocking taste insisted in putting electric light bulbs inside if you remember those of you who are familiar with the interior so why does he do it who shifts his opinion what is the explanation and the explanation takes us to the heart of remember i began by talking about these things as essentially religious it takes us to the heart of the religion of the period it takes us into the extraordinary curious complex tormented character of king henry vii himself it takes us into notions of purgatory it takes us into notions of sainthood it takes us into notions of miracles all of these things are involved it's a complex story i'll try and get through most of it i at least hope that i sketch out the principal bits what seems to have happened is an interweaving between henry his mother lady margaret beaufort to whom of course he was profoundly attached you know again just driving home the awful realities of dynastic life she had given birth to him at the age of 13. this is because she was married at the earliest legal age remember the bible like present islam specifies an age of marriage of 12 and she's married to henry's father to edmund earl of richmond at that point so that he can get his hands on her estates um and the marriage of course is again part of the cementation of the lancastrian dynasty because henry earl of richmond is the uterine half-brother of uh of of you trying yeah bro half-brother uh of of of of of henry vi and because his mother is queen catherine of france who's run off with a handsome wealth squire of her household whom she's alleged to have caught sight of bathing and rather fancy uh anyway um and and lady margaret beaufort who descends in a direct but female and somewhat flawed line from john of gaunt again john of gaunt has this extraordinary story of three marriages one for love one for dynastic intention and the other because it was the au pair and and the tudors descend from the au pair uh they they they descend from from it's true from catherine swinford she is the au pair they they they and they were terribly happy together it was a kind of rather like charles and camilla except they produced lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of children um so so so henry has got his only claim to a royal descent is through this this this this third marriage of a third son so but his relations to his mother are profoundly closer if you look at their letters they're actually which a lot survive then they have more the tone of actually lovers than just mother and son and it's their intense relationship and their intense religious relationship and as well as political one but it's also the role of the confessor and this is something we have completely forgotten we know it abroad you know if you think of an imminent greece it is the supposed confessor the cardinal richnear uh if you think of the again the role of confessors in the spanish court and uh or the um or the uh uh or or the habsburg court we know they're powerful they were equally powerful in the english court and the way in which king's college finds itself completed is by the operation and cooperation of two confessors the confessor to the king and the confessor to lady margaret beaufort and the confessor to lady margaret beauford is somebody of whom most of you i think will have heard though perhaps not in the context of being a confessor to lady margaret beauford it's john fisher the bishop of rochester the martyr and the founder along with lady margaret of saint john's college and i want now to present a very different vision of fisher from the usual sort of hard-line saint which indeed he was fisher at this stage in the turn of the 16th century about 1500 he is the star academic at cambridge he is the ultimate superdom of the period he's staggeringly good looking um religiously ascetic flamboyant brilliant preacher extraordinary personality brilliant academically superb administrator you know the whole lot and he is the one who is brought in in 1501 when there's a great crisis in the university and the vice chancellor is foster is so modern vice chancellor is forced to resign as a political coup and fischer becomes vice chancellor on the same day that he gets his higher doctorate you know they could hire a doctorate of theology could hardly be anything more than that and it's quite clear from that point onwards lady margaret beaufort has got her eye on him as her confessor and she finally gets hold of him in 1504 now this in some ways is very extraordinary he's an academic star what does being a father confessor to lady margaret beaufort mean well it actually means in one sense you're an ecclesiastical body servant you know you you're with a woman who is quasi when actually behaves as royal my lady the king's mother she signs herself margaret r which may be margaret regina or maybe margaret richmond uh she she is the dowager countess of richmond and and so what you have to do of course you kneel before her if she says go and buy a loaf of bread you go and buy a loaf of bread because you're a body servant as well how did he put up with him because lady margaret beaufort she the second person in the kingdom in reality submits herself to him as her spiritual daughter his spiritual daughter she enacts a formal ritual in which she kneels she offers up herself body and soul she takes him as her godly father and also her principal counselor so it's this bizarre relationship with of course all the power that comes from that relationship with the woman of second standing in the kingdom and the first thing that fischer does is to get lady margaret beaufort intensely involved in cambridge we again have got all the dates of this wrong we've got the date in which lady margaret beauford gets hold of fischer it's given us 10 years earlier than it really was his academic career becomes unintelligible it's as late as 1504 we've also completely ignored the fact that lady margaret beaufort shows no interest in cambridge at all until fisher comes into her life it's fisher who attracts her to cambridge before that she had intended to commemorate herself in the way that we were talking about by a chantry a collegiate foundation along with her son in westminster abbey and it's fisher who persuades her to transfer that endowment to what to a little runt of a college in cambridge called god's house um which which which is which is reinvented as christ's why why does the transfer take place because the owner the the i skipped the owner the master that he actually is he's he's called um he's he's not called master at this point he's called procter which is very confusing this is also a university office a procter is a man called sickling who was clearly whilst you had fisher as the academic star and the superdom and whatever he's the one who does all the dirty work he's the one who does all the squaring of faculty writing off letters raising money and all the rest of it and he is i think the person points out to fisher that god's house had nominally had it's only nominally henry vi as its founder so lady margaret beaufort strips out the money from her westminster endowment and gives most of it to founding a new college in cambridge the founding christ and the building of this college begins and gets really underway and this is the point again at which you see fisher assuming a more and more heavy role in the university the role of of of chancellor and again 1504 he's also given the bishop of winchester and there's that's right the bishop of rochester the very bottom of the of the english of of the english scale of wealth of bishoprics and how because of course as the confessor and counsellor to his mother to to lady margaret beaufort the king's mother and he of course is used as an intermediary between lady margaret and henry vii and when the negotiations have to go through to transfer the endowment from westminster to this new new college in kings it is fisher who goes up to court goes up to greenwich and negotiates with henry vii and henry vii is deeply impressed by him writes back to his mother i'm very impressed by your confessor if you give me your consent i will make him uh i will make him uh bishop of rochester uh and so on so we've now got fisher moving firmly into both lady margaret beaufort circle and into the king's circle he's a royal councillor he's chance of the university he is bishop of rochester he's also because margaret beauford didn't believe in doing things by halves he's been made president of queens why has he been made president of queens because queens has got the only decent accommodation in cambridge um again it's created under richard the third uh when you get for the first time you get really serious royal interest in the university under richard iii and the then president of queens who's the real founder of the college does something very extraordinary if you remember the beautiful building of queens that runs by the mathematical bridge directly overlooking the river which is whose prospect is now totally destroyed by the monstrous fission that monstrous fisher building on the other bank unspeakable unspeakable combination but that lovely late 15th century building is originally built as guest accommodation and it is the only thing in cambridge that replicates a royal suite and that is why fisher is made president of queens it sews that the king and lady margaret can visit in style this notion that it was to enable fisher to stay in nice style whilst he's supervising the building of christ is amiable nonsense it's used by the king and it's used by lady margaret so have we got are we getting this we're getting it coming nearer and nearer and near but of course the really key confessor is the king's confessor now he is the absolute bull's-eye henry vii was having a terrible time with his confessors he is famous to us of course as this ruthlessly miserly king and i think turn is correct but at the same time he was fascinated with intense forms religious observance in particular the most as it were self-disciplining literally self-flagellating of orders the franciscan observance and this is this strange thing that the richer you were the more you needed some sort of extreme uh observant or you know uh poverty-stricken friar to pray for you so it's a kind of obverse you know it's it's sort of sorting out the magnificat on earth if you remember you shall pull down the mighty from the seas and exalt them of low degree because although you were king and vastly rich you were poor in heaven because you really hadn't done very well whereas he who flogs himself and is desperately poor is very rich in heaven so you get a kind of you get the idea a transfer effect and henry vii always had confessors who were friars observant but the friar's observant had renounced money so here you have the king who is keenest on money in english history who is also having a friar observant as his confessor you can imagine the kind of tensions we know about the tensions and they lead to a rupture of the relationship and the king has got to negotiate a new deal from the pope which authorizes him to appoint a new confessor the king of the pope he's a new pope julius ii so as the cardinal in charge of english affairs in rome adriano castellesi says you know he's a new pope he sort of you know he respects the rules he's a kind of keith starmer you know um um and he later on proved to be a key star indeed uh in in terms of disobeying the rules but that's another matter so the pope when the king says we can we sort of fix this problem with my confessors at first very very reluctant um but then he sends um his nephew uh guido baldo duca vorbino along to explain that he really had terrible favor that he wanted from henry vii um he really desperately wanted his nephew who by the way was a totally incompetent general and impotent and invariably lost battles he wanted him to be made a knight of the garter caster lazy is of course a genius he said absolutely impossible just as impossible it was that the pope should of course give that you know rather demanding um bull that my king wants wink wink so a deal is done the totally impossible fact of giving this italian the knighthood of the garter is rushed through in the same time the pope rushes through the absolutely ungivable right to the king to appoint a fresh confessor so it's how you handle relations with rome i think they don't the italians call it tangential the i think is the word anyway so the deal is done and a new confessor is appointed who is indeed the provincial of the father's observant a man called stephen barron see we don't he's french but so we did we don't really that is we just know him know his name in in in in a latin form what does fischer do it's so modern he offers him an honorary degree he's immediately the the king's father confessor is immediately whisked up to cambridge and given an honorary degree what you do next a series of distinguished lectures so a series of distinguished lectures is invented for the king's father confessor and of course um isn't it classic all students are compelled to attend there's abs there's there's absolutely no notion of a choice you you you get the we have again nobody has spotted this is entirely new the the the the we knew he gave lectures nobody's pinned it down i i was the first person to use although they've been in print for a century and a half the accounts of the proctors and it actually shows the tolling of the belt the lectures given by the king's confessor it shows the fact they had to bring in all the seats and moving all the furniture around because it was held in the gray friars and so on so you've got the king's confessor now being lined up on the side of cambridge as well well what is next fascinating henry i think is an undergoing genuine religious crisis because at this stage of his reign having been one of the most extraordinary lie i mean look at his life look at look at the fact that that he has virtually no claim to the throne that he's he's the child of a woman who's aged only 13 that his family um is is with within whatever it is three years of his birth and the lancastrian the rank at the house of lancaster falls he's driven into exile after 1470 and his first language is french he's nearly captured by richard iii and the he should have lost the battle of bosworth his entire life is this series of extraordinary as it were acts of divine mercy as he sees them as indeed fisher in a great sermon that i'll quickly talk about actually says to him you know you have enjoyed the most extraordinary grace of god but the grace of god turned against him he thought violently from 1502 onwards and he loses his first minister morton he loses um his eldest son prince arthur he loses his wife in the space of two years this extraordinary reversal of fortune and i think the whole part the whole crisis with you know the appointment of barons and whatever as we as well as the the the business of by the way to get the the torment of the character at exactly the same time that he's appointing stephen barron's he's also letting empsim and dudley lose his financial agents you know you get this extraordinary contradiction i think it's all sold for henry when suddenly god smiles on him again and again we're used to the armada storm there's another storm which arguably makes as much difference in european history which is the great storm that drives the uh philip of spain uh it's like the philippine spain uh philip of the netherlands the archduke philipp the fair uh and and joanna his wife the sister of catherine of aragon drives them ashore in january 1506 they've been sailing to claim uh their to claim castile in the right of joanna after the death of of isabella of castile and they're driven ashore uh which means effectively they're driven at short format which means effectively that they are prisoners of henry vii and henry had something that he very much wanted from the archduke phillip which is the duke of suffolk his idea he's really the earl of suffolk uh where his proper title would have been duke but they've been stripped of the dukedom and edmond de la pole earl of suffolk who descends directly from the yorkist royal house they've been all of these other pretenders like perkin warbeck and lambert similar he is the real thing and henry is desperately worried about him and chance and the hand of god delivers suffolk into his hands suffolk is handed over um with one of the sort of royal foggies uh supervising the process uh and of the cross-channel journey and all the rest of it and is safely popped into the tower and the promise of safe conduct and everything else which have been given to philip is conveniently forgotten so the king has got the man that he most wants he's got the royal alternative in his hands what does he do he goes on pilgrimage to waltzing where does he stop he stops in cambridge and in cambridge fischer takes over you have this extraordinary scene it's easter um you enact uh uh and uh sorry says george's day my point is they stay there for easter as well but but it's it's it's the 23rd of april and the the entire ceremonies of the orders of the garter are enacted in the in the sort of incomplete structure of the chapel at kings the man who officiates both at the mass and as prelate of the order is who john fisher and what does henry vii do he begins a re-engagement with kings and i think we can just see you know how the process is done so you begin and the um and of course end of the seventh being henry the seventh you begin by drawing up indentures contracts as a sum handed over you have a site meeting and all the rest of it 100 quid quite a lot and then it goes cold so obviously it's gone quite some far but there's still debate what happens next what happens next ladies and gentlemen simply is a miracle we've got to understand it is a miracle and the miracle occurs the following year in 1507. the king has the first we're not showing maybe throat cancer some of you can tell me if i describe the symptoms more fully it may be throat cancer or something of the sort but anyway and they call it they call it they call it a quincy um and he um finds it impossible to eat uh his life is despaired off he makes a will and so on and then suddenly he recovers now i don't i don't know the inside story obviously stephen barron did and i'm sure john fisher did but what does the king do to give thanks he doesn't go to the virgin at walsingham he goes to windsor where of course henry vi is buried and he begins making some amends and making a significant contribution to the uh building of the uh the finishing of the roof of the garter chapel which by the way is not undertaken by a king um it's undertaken by reginald bray henry seventh principal minister at that point and you can actually see bray's hemp press uh in in in in the vaulting and then this is what happens next he decides and i think it can only be because he gone to windsor why does he go to windsor because he must have prayed to henry vi as a saint remember he's he's he's he's as it were an unofficial saint um he is sainted by popular reputation the shrine the shrine again we must understand this the shrine is more visited at this point than that of thomas beckett um he is the popular miracle way worker so i am convinced that it he the reason that he goes he meet what it has to be the reason that he goes immediately to windsor and we have three days of offerings to henry's shrine to our lady of eaton and all the rest but most important of all he then goes on a specific visit to cambridge and he deliberately goes for the commencement that's the equivalent of the degree day and who delivers the speech fischer and fischer delivers this extraordinary sermon comes speech which is the basis of our real entire original biographical knowledge of henry it's the sermon which describes uh the you know the fact that his mother's only 13 at this extraordinary picaresque career of of disasters narrow squeaks with god always intervening and clearly at the end you get the pattern coming down and not only did you save england you've saved cambridge and how has cambridge been saved cambridge has been saved because of kings who benefited and he goes back to the supposed king canterbury the king of the east angles would allegedly stutter studied in athens under the anglo-saxons decided complete fiction of course decided to found the university of cambridge to uh to henry iii who had built the grave friars to edward iii who'd built king's hall not to be confused with king's college to henry vi and finally the king who will complete the legacy of henry vi a work that is called of a king because it is built by a king it is worthy of a king and only a king can finish it and you sir you know absolutely magnificent that's how kings comes to be finished we've got to understand the scale of what henry does is 10 000 pounds in cash one tenth of royal income the scale of henry's benefactions at this point as extraordinary as almost the scale of his bribes to the habsburgs because the again this bizarre quality of henry vii on the one hand this religiosity this this passionate desire for endorsement the by the by the uh by by the um observant order and on the other hand this utter graspingness because the the works of em and dudley are on a scale even more extraordinary than henry's generosity to kings in one year just to put this in perspective and i'll leave should i leave the thing hanging on this note of ambiguity ten thousand pounds finishes the building of kings college chapel in six years can you imagine the speed at which it's done at the same time he's building the hendra the sixth seventh chapel at westminster i mean the number of skilled masons that you have available and you're starting building john's utterly extraordinary ten thousand pounds to do that in one year he gives bribe to the habsburgs of 132 000 pounds in cash that's when royal income is a hundred thousand the extraordinary complexities of the man but the heart of it this bad king who turned into a good saint miracle-working saint and that convenient miracle that rescues henry vii from a quincy is why we have kings finished thank you [Applause] as expected a brilliant talk without notes just completely off the cuff we have got time for one or two questions or indeed recriminations [Laughter] not not treating these sacred buildings of the appropriate so could i ask a question i think we must be in the 90s um i i was asked for a big due at a new college which commemorated the link between eaton kings winchester and yeah and i think he was called the kitty concordia or something yes i mean the point the point is as i said um virtually everybody who is involved in the foundation of eaton had had begun at winchester i mean winchester is the model because winchester's a century earlier waynflete um who sorry wickham william of wickham uh is uh under edward iii he is the king's master building works he's also a war profiteer and disgracefully he's made bishop of winchester you know it's the equivalent of prince charles appointing one of his favorite architects you know it's it's that sort of thing and but but but he sets he he founds winchester and he founds new college in exactly the same relationship as kings and eaton and the statutes again are handed over again the man i was talking about waynflete william waynflete who receives eaton clearly is profoundly committed to it he had begun at winchester um and he actually takes boys from winchester um as when he's the first provost of eaton he may even have been the first master head master of eden but very briefly but then he's provost of eaton and he takes a posse of boys from from from winchester to get the school going so you have this deeply intimate relationship is there a document you know which is this which that i do not know i'm sorry you know i i'm a great believer in saying i don't know when i don't know and i'm sorry i can't answer that but then you you see again this process continues we've forgotten it because one half of it's gone when woolsey because woolsey of course is the real founder of christchurch which is to be known as cardinal college when he found out he also founds a grammar school a school a college school in ipswich which is intended to have exactly the same function and thomas moore tries to save both and he finds that the only one he can actually save is uh is is oxford um and henry gets it and the courtships get their hands on particularly duke and suffolk that not of that obviously this is charles brandon duke of suffolk gets his hands on on the winches on the on the ipswich stuff um so that's and that's the story and of course our champ harmon there was another ipswich man yes i didn't know that i i'm almost sure that's right right and but also in that picture um i don't know what's his education i mean bots again is a cambridge man where but seems to fit into the story i mean i have lectured on that here before and we might because i found out much more about about all of this and butts fits into the story primarily because he is the person in 1528 who is held to save ann berlin and he is also he's master of gonville which becomes gone villain keys and he then um acts really it's very cambridge spies he acts as sort of recruiter at cambridge for protestantism you know it's a it's a role a role that is you know going to continue rather differently in the university uh there there thereafter um um but but the the again this picture here we've never properly understood what the inscription is about and i've now really worked it out and some of you may have heard the joint anniversary lecture i gave for the royal college and the and the society and and the apothecaries i didn't know whether you did um but what if you look at the inscription there what the inscription is basically saying is henry viii is the patron of medicine who reinvented medicine because of his um patronage of of of um linuker and the rediscovery of the accurate text of galenik medicine so he's reformed reformed medicine by the discovery of the proper greek text because lineker devotes most of his life to you know very elaborate editions of of uh of galen and what it then says is in the same way that he has reformed medicine he has also reformed the church by going back to scripture that's what that inscription is about and i don't think it's been properly understood that's essentially what it's about and i think it's probably the reason why you in fact i would suspect that that that that notion there of the king as it were the king is showing himself there as the kind of doctor of his kingdom in both senses of the word the sense of teacher doctors teacher but also doctor as reformer purger and and and again you know very often because again you know they took the idea of body politic very seriously so you get the you get the notion of rulership as being very closely related to medicine but so that's where butts fits in and of course he's there as you all know and next room of course is chamber who is the absolute opposite in terms of religion right and the the henry's doctors you have one catholic and one prod it's a bit like northern ireland you know yes and and chamber is the complete opposite bots again is the first doctor to be knighted he is the first layman doctor whereas chamber is the last of the great uh high clerical doctors he's he is a master of saint stephen's uh you know the stephens chapel that becomes the that becomes the house of commons after secularization oh by the way do you all now see uh why oxford and cambridge nearly are dissolved in the 1540s and why you need catherine parr to save them because they're all religious foundations devoted to seeing souls through purgatory which henry viii has abolished sort of except he leaves provisions for purgatory in his will i mean henry henry again it's very much having having his i suppose not cake is wafer and eating it it's way it's waferism rather than cakeyism i think is is is is it any other question reduce you to silence that's shameful yes well there were an opportunity to chat over over a glass of wine and a and a sandwich in the sausage room or whatever next door so um i just it leaves me to thank uh david stark he was such a wonderful lecturer and um and and to welcome him back to the hall after rather really rather too long as i said i'm a very bad barber i'm very sorry so perhaps we'll give him a round of applause [Applause] hello and thank you for watching david starkey talks if as i very much hope you're enjoying them why not become more actively involved and join my members club as a member you'll be able to take part in the members only weekly question and answer session suggest topics for forthcoming videos and have priority booking for my forthcoming live events and while you're at it why not have a look at the store page on my website davidstarkey.com there you can purchase t-shirts and other merchandise by signed copies of my books and if you're feeling brave and a bit flush even arrange to take me out to lunch thank you once again for watching i look forward to hearing from you and to welcoming you to my members club [Music] you

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 32,442

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: CwtGF-20Pjs

Length: 64min 51sec (3891 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022