"England is a Crowned Republic". David Starkey

foreign ladies and gentlemen I think as we're talking about a coronation we can afford to be a little formal but it will cease that point it's also Ambassador um delightful that you really anticipate in my introduction because you know I'm a creature um that wonderful denigrating phrase television historian the sneer which the academic inflicts upon you I remember once when the even worse term was flung at me popular historian to which I responded I suppose it's better than being an unpopular historian anyway being a television historian can I remind you of the splendid visual aids which jorg has put behind us you have on this side the crowned Republic of Hungary and you have on that side the Royal Arms and I make no apology of using the term of the crowned Republic of the United Kingdom of Great Britain we are have been and if we survive always will be a republic but it's a republic under a crown now the fate of the crown of England has been very different the great Paradox is which is a profound Paradox that Hungary with a history of permanent impermanence permanent turbulence forever different never the same three or four coronation sites innumerable dentist is a non-dinisters failures of Royal Line user patients and whatever in contrast with Britain with this England in particular remember Britain is simply England with additions it is very very important it is very important that one understands this basic fact and one addition is nearly catastrophic which is that of Scotland I will talk about I will I will talk about that later very much later of course but but I will talk about it um the the uh England in contrast of fixed Frontier of fixed Constitution largely we have been a parliamentary monarchy since the 13th century undoubtedly of fixed coronation site or fixed coronation order I can go on nevertheless destroying everything of Royal antiquity when Charles is crowned it will be with factitious invented instruments there is not a single thing that goes behind 1660. there are myths and they are pure myths they're 19th century myths of Stuart rubies of Prince of sorry Stuart sapphires Prince of Wales rubies of the coronation spoon the coronation spoon is 12th century there isn't a shred of evidence it was ever used before 166 . so there's the paradox of a country of extraordinary stability which destroyed every single th symbol of monarchy and one of profound instability we just preserve that crown and if it hadn't been for the Republicans burying the lot in the 19 in in in the uh after the fall of the Republic um in in in the 19th century you would have preserved huge amounts of the actual fabric of the gloves um the Rob the the Royal robe does survive huge amounts of other things so this extraordinary contrast what I want now to do is to explore and again I am ignorant about Hungarian history it would be impertinent for me to pretend to do anything more than comment in terms of generality what I'm hoping to do is to throw out sufficient ideas beginning with this introduction that can be picked up by those who are interested in the questions for which we've got a proper half hour what I'm wanting to do in this first section here is to establish with in terms of that dialogue between consecration versus um contract and wanting to establish the authenticity of my idea of the English Royal Republic the term is of course those of you who are familiar with Walter budget in the in his English Constitution the the book remember to understand it you have to understand budget rights just before 1867. bill and I were talking about the importance of 1867 the broadening of the franchise from as it were the educated to the ordinary Working Man carried out of course like most important constitutional changes or at least good ones by the conservative party and the the the the budget writes just before that and he writes with the terror of a genuine liberal at the thought of popular government but he actually uses the term in that a royal Republic and he says a republic has enfolded itself beneath the Robes of monarchy but this idea goes back so much further one of the most interesting procedures of the idea here is actually John Adams the Founding Father of the United States or one of the greatest of the founding fathers in 1760 1760s a decade before the movement of Independence gets underway he writes informal terms that England is a republic the constitution of England is a republic that is to say the Monarch is under the laws there are known judicial procedures and so on to in all important senses it is a republic the idea that you have somebody was called the king as head of a republic is no problem the idea of a republic relates to the fixidity of a Constitution and the supremacy of legal arrangements as opposed to merely the arbitrary will of the ruler this idea goes back further and again Adams is just picking it up from the main tradition of English constitutional law if you go back to my own period of the 16th century the most important statement of this idea actually puts the term republic in the title The the day Republica and glorum which is written in the 1560s by Sir Thomas Smith Secretary of State and previously Latin secretary and he actually takes the title from Cicero and his last largely lost work the day did publica but also from from contarini Cardinal contarinis de Republica venetorum on the account of the Venetian Republic which again has a quasi-monautical figure at its head the Doge and from that point it stretches Way Way Back Into the Middle Ages how does this happen how does it come about how do we register it how do we make it from Simply a use of language Republic how do we anchor it into actual political practice let's then go back it's always a very good I once a historian one should go back one should go back preferably if one is a good historian to the beginning now I'm not going to go back to the beginning of English History because we have only an hour we've already got through 17 minutes of the title Endeavor I'll never again with the training of Television to keep roughly at the time um I will go back to what is our convenient starting point which is the coronation the coronation of King Edgar in 973. now there's a double reason for taking this because the order that's to say the coronation ritual of Edgar is plausibly and I'm not going to use anything stronger than the word plausibly the source of the Hungarian coronation ritual so we have a kind of common starting point with two we've got the common starting point which is really a finishing point of the idea of a royal Republic we also have the common starting point of the order the actual thing let's have a look at it this is he's the great grandson of Alfred our owner King who Bears the title great and his coronation is almost certainly a second coronation and he's really being crowned not simply as king of England though he is the first actually to issue a coinage with the formal title on it of Rex anglorum King of the English and whether there are English there isn't England at least that used to be the case it's clearly rapidly changing but there we are um um so he's Rex anglorum but he is also in effect and this is another important idea that we will play with because the Hungarian crown and the British and Edwards Crown are both arched crowns they are imperial crowns and this first coronation in our history in 973 is an imperial coronation it's a coronation again with a saint figure your first coronation is of course of a royal Saint we have a royal Saint and I'll come to in a moment but at this point it's Saint Dunstan the Archbishop of Canterbury who is one of the great uh precursors the the Great that's the wrong word Pioneers in England of of the the Benedictine monastic Revival and he is the the man who crams uh crowns Edgar and is almost certainly responsible for the coronation order itself two things about it the first is place it takes place of all things in bath and it takes place in bath because bath is both the site of one of these important new Benedictine Abbas some Dunstan that I'm talking about but it also harks back to something earlier it would then have been the site of the largest surviving Roman ruins in Britain the baths in bath probably still had something of the great arched think of the bars of caracala the great arched roof cultures that that Mesmerize the Anglo-Saxons remember the natural British building material is wattle and dorb and factually you think of our fascination with Romanticism we come to classicism rather late and and but that you have this extraordinary juxtaposition of the magnificence of Rome and everything that that represented and of course a church remember the great decision of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy is that really again it is the same as Hungarian monarchy that its religion will be Rome it is precisely that same decision which again characterizes since Stephen though of course Stephen is a choice and between uh Byzantium between Orthodoxy and Catholicism here it's a choice between Celtic religion the Senate of Whitby the the Celtic religion and that of Rome so he is crowned by an a great monastic revivalist and he's crowned according to it the the great order and the the the elements of the the similarity of the ceremony we saw the tape there of the coronation of the queen and I was one of those who first saw it I watched it as a boy of eight first time I'd seen television all dressed up in my best suit with my mother in a furious temper because we were watching it on next door's television and then she put on her very best rather tight um uh gray suit as we walked into the house she said pointing at the television I expect it's a fruit of immoral earnings there we are hahaha my mother is very important in my life anyway um I remember I can still remember the extraordinary scene there and and the the the the way in which it's anticipated by so much in the coronation of 973. the coronation of 973 began in exactly the same way that this one a 53 and maybe this one of uh 2023 will by swearing an oath the oath is different the oath is to keep the peace to church and people to repress rapacity and iniquity and to do justice in Mercy and in truth which is exactly the oath that the kings of hunger is swore also so there it is and then follows after that has been done follows anointing at which the anthem zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King was sung except of course the music was not by hand that is that's the key difference so you have but that coronation as I said was an imperial one it's followed immediately by an extraordinary symbolic rowing of the King on the river D in which those doing the rowing are an assortment of Celtic kinglets it's Such a Pity that sturgeon has resigned I would have loved I would I would have loved to see her performing the same service so uh there we are now how do we get from that Anglo-Saxon ceremony held in bath and thereafter moving around why we've got so many Kingstons in the country is that they were all at various points royal coronation sites and but basically in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy settling down at Winchester how come the shift to this fundamental point of Westminster why does it happen how does it happen well it happens because again at another one of these extraordinary points of intersection between British and Hungarian history may I use the word Conquest Hungary is a repeatedly conquered place 1526 the double fate of the second World War arguably the habsburgs we were conquered more radically and absolutely in 1066 and this fact needs to be understood your conquests left a more powerful sense of separateness and identity ours did something infinitely radical and fused the language we are a product of a double root the root of French and English English is an artificial language invented at the by Jeffrey Chaucer essentially at the end of The 14th Century it is unique in this regard it's why of course it is uniquely suitable for our multilingual world because it is itself a linguistic Fusion you cannot have an academic Academy in English you can't talk about pure English to coin a French phrase there cannot be a pure English we are we are a product of fusion so the the impact of the Norman Conquest infinitely radical it's a conquest that becomes so absolute that being English is the first great English historian the Ambassador was kind enough to refer to me as a very Junior one the first really great English historian woman malmesbury who was himself of anglo-saxon stock says that to be English was to be a badge of Shame you're a conquered and suppressed people subject to an effectively terrorist law what then happens is that the Norman conquerors progressively compromise progressively pull back from that if active obliteration of the Anglo-Saxon past and the first way you do it is by the sanctification of the last again holy Kings the sanctification of the last Anglo-Saxon King King Edward Edward the Confessor Saint Edward and he becomes William the Conqueror if you look again we have that extraordinary Grand Testament of all of this which of course is in France I mean dear me when we're talking about repossessing historically important artifacts I am prepared to swap the Elgin marbles for the Bayer tapestry and maybe maybe Mr macron with this fondness for negotiating the unnegotiable which he tests repeatedly with his own people might actually Ascend himself to do that but be the if you actually look at the structure of the bio tapestry it is designed to present William the Conqueror as the legitimate heir of Edward and Harold the Los Anglo-Saxon King as an illegitimate usurper that's the entire purpose of the thing and the result is that you get interpolating itself into the coronation idea and eventually into the coronation oath the idea of that there's a golden Anglo-Saxon age a systems of law which somehow somewhere mysteriously survive under the overlay of the Norman conquest and that is I think the foundation idea of so much that we're going to be talking about this idea that there is somewhere a foundation of law which is independent of the will of the Conqueror but it is vague it is merely elusive it is there bluntly so much in English History as a veil of decency thrown over brutality remember that idea of a veil of decency a drapery is common both to Edmund Burke and interestingly enough to Karl Marx the idea of the decency of language that you throw over over the horror out of of of of of reality but the element of reality is place William the Conqueror is crowned for the first time that anybody at Westminster the church that was built by Edward the Confessor the new church the West Church that's built um to the west of London on the slightly higher land uh on the foreshore of the Thames and and already Edward Edward the Confessor is buried there so William is actually crowned in front of the Tomb of the Confessor in the abbey this assimilation back to Anglo-Saxon England this this softening of the edges of Conquest continues from this point onwards the younger son that the youngest son of the Conqueror to succeed Henry the first deliberately marries back into the Anglo-Saxon Royal Line he deliberately marries um a Scottish princess who whose parentage is half Anglo-Saxon uh he he emphasizes much more than than than the Conqueror had done this this this this this kind of of subterranean sense of of of of of of of a legal background or whatever and by the way it is very important that the the I stress the intense we we tend to think of at the Norman conquest at its worst as a kind of rather violent version of a year in Provence um uh it really it really really is not and it's also very important to understand why the Normans are so Keen to conquer England because England was rich and Normandy wasn't one has to understand Anglo-Saxon England had the world's most sophisticated and I use that word deliberately world's most sophisticated system of coinage Edgar sets up a system of recoing it King I've been talking about sets up a system of re coinage in which I think it's it varies either every five or every seven years there is a complete recall of the coinage says it can be remitted according to approved finders and the the the the Norms have never seen quantities of gold such as They seized in England William the conquerors first Christmas back in Normandy these vast Treasures the loot of anger so far and again a profoundly tensile structure of government with the county being both a seat of local government but also it's really rather like a kind of cell within the structure of Communism sending Representatives up and it says this double frame of anglo-saxon government which which hinder the first brilliantly exploits if we can leap forward a little bit I'm afraid we have to jump centuries a lot this this notion of the Anglo-Saxon Origins becomes profoundly developed after the great rupture of Magna Carta at the beginning of the at the beginning of the 13th century the the rupture of 1215 by John's son the only person strikingly not to be crowned at Westminster Henry III as an infant crowned at Gloucester because at that point London at Westminster the Royal regalia all held by the French Invaders this is the moment at which England is very nearly conquered by France because the Magna Carta Lords invite in King Louis the lion of France I know sorry Prince really been through the lion of France um to defeat both John and and hopefully to remove his infant son Henry III but Henry III is crowned he survives thanks to the extraordinary Genius of William the Marshall uh the uh the late one he would have been called lord protector he's then just called Regent and the uh and the paper and the papal legit again another figure that plays a major part in Hungarian history our people legit guala um and um the uh what what uh Henry III does is deliberately to re-anglo-saxonize the monarchy he names it gives his sons Anglo-Saxon names do we realize Edward is a Edward it's Anglo-Saxon Edmund is a admund and he rebuilds Westminster Abbey he thought at first that he would actually make it the Church of the temple he thought he would make his coronation church the church of the temple which is why there is if those who have not seen it the Magnificent Round Church in the temple uh you know which is now the end of course go and look at it it's wonderful and he thought that might do and then he has this this extraordinary inspired view he will create something which I think is actually unique in European history that is to say a church that will be simultaneously the place where the king is crowned where the founder saint of the dynasty will lie and where the monarchs will be buried this extraordinary triple invocation of the sacredness of monarchy and the church that we will see the The Abbey that we will see very shortly is specifically built for the purpose of Coronation at the heart of the church in this enormously extended choir there lies The Shrine of the Confessor then a raid round it on elevated plinths there are the tombs of all his successes that was how the church was envisaged to work and then in front of it there is the hugely expanded area of the crossing which is actually labeled the coronation theater it's a theater and we now only can Glimpse its Splendor original the again there's been quite a lot of publicity about the amazing flaw the pavement which is by all the main structure of the church is French Gothic and by the way we think of our ancestors not having a sense of stylistic appropriateness the the West front of the Abbey is only finished in the reign of Henry VIII and it is deliberately built in the same style finished off by the wonderful Abbott Islip and then the towers are not added until the end of the 17th century deliberately in the same style right so you this but but so it's French Gothic but the area around the Royal tombs and the area of the theater is Italian again Rome and it's with the most magnificent detailing conceivable the cosmati pavement survives that's a pavement made out of precious stones including particularly porphery in extraordinary swirling patterns and it's being exposed for the coronation for the first time for a very long time indeed in a fully restored state but we can only glimpse of what it looked like because God because the actual uh Because the actual lower walls of the columns were also gold mosaic B in other words you must you you you you really need to have a sense of it you need to go to Sicily or indeed what is the rather wonderful restaurant Piccadilly that has got the the the the the the the the the Decay is more reality it's gone out of my the Criterion yeah go to the Criterion in London if you want the sets it's gold Mosaic or or indeed Ravenna it's it's an area of gold all destroyed of course once that area becomes open to the public after after the Reformation so there's this conscious invocation of Saint Edward and the point that again it's worth making and this is where we connect to the crown of Hungary and this idea of consecration you are consecrated not simply with the oils of unction the multiple anointing um quite how this is going to be done if Charles wears uniform I have no idea do you know how many times an English Sovereign has to be anointed Palms of the hand crown of the head shoulder blades breasts and there and there how you do that in tight uniform is beyond me but the king clearly knows better anyway um there is the there is the anointing there but above all what happened in the coronation certainly from Henry III onwards is you actually use the funeral regalia of Edward the Confessor so you use Edward the confesses Crown his robes his buskins his sandals the lot so the the the saint literally which is himself upon you we we don't have the reaction of earlier medieval kings we do of Charles the first we know Charles the first was so Keen to get himself inside the Royal buskins that he actually shoves his feet in with the shoes on and tears the hairs um and is the only one actually to use the the sacred Anglo-Saxon comb to comb of course he's much more hair than most Kings Tacoma's hair after the sticky oil of unction has been put upon it but there is this literal sense of the handing over now so there is coronation there is the sense of the past the passing down of antiquity the Revival of antiquity all of those things where does then the idea of contract come in because clearly consecration doesn't have very much to do with republicanism where does the idea of contract come from well the idea of contract fundamentally comes from the extraordinary again series of events to which Henry III is reacting that's to say Magna Carta very similar in many ways to your Golden Ball that's to say and essentially in in in in terms of 1215 an agreement forced upon unlike the Golden Bull forced Upon A reluctant King by a rebellious nobility which is designed to procure their special privileges and which also contains a clause which we have long forgotten in England which effectively turned England not into a royal Republic but what Hungary sort of becomes and what Poland absolutely became a noble Republic Clause 61 of Magna Carta which we are very carefully forgotten sets up a Committee of Public Safety consisting of 25 Barons it declares that everyone swear an oath not to the king but to the 25 Barons that everything that the King was accused of doing shall be decided by the 25 Barons who will sit as judge jury and then forces in their own cause and the 25 Barons shall have the right to Levy War upon the king sparing only this person that of his children and that of his Queen right now where English History and Hungarian history violently differ is that the Magna Carta of 1215 lasts barely three months our commemorations of it are to totally inappropriate the Magna Carta of 1215 happily is suppressed and is replaced I already referred to William the Marshall by a brilliant and characteristically English version in which it's the royalist charter of 1216 that survives and it's so very English it preserves all the good bits of the charter like the right to Justice beginning to sort out the process of Taxation all that sort of thing but carefully removes the Republican Clauses but does it in the fashion which is so English Toby will love this it sets up a committee and it labels all the eliminated Clauses as being specially difficult and worthy of mature consent and literally I'm quoting the Latin and worthy of mature consideration and they are carefully buried in the committee and then there is this again we get Magna Carta wrong because Magna Carta is not an event it is a process and the process lot the main process lasts 10 years the final reissue of Magna Carta uh in the 50 in in the 1220s um uh is is is overseen by the Archbishop would help to to draft it and had lost reputation so doing and that reissue of the 1220s is radically different and it is a testimony to the fact that English in the Hungarian history are going to follow very different courses because what the charter does the that that the issue of the early 1220s does it is in the name of everybody not the nobility and the charter is granted to Henry Henry III in return for a universal Grant of Taxation so you establish the principle of the redress of grievance in return for Taxation and that is I think the real Foundation of what then develops rapidly in the in the in the third in the 13th century the idea of a some form of representative assembly of Church of Nobles and of Greater Gentry and of townsman which we call a parliament and the the under the underpinning of all the ideas that I will be talking about of Republic uh in in England is that idea that there is a body that represents everybody and that binds everybody in the way I'm now quoting the words of the judges of The Next Century of the 14th century judges which binds everybody because everybody is there represented either in their own person the peers the Bishops or by their representatives be members of of of of of the lower house and it's that it's the creation of that body which is the enormous and peculiar feature of English History now anybody who knows anything about European history at this point will say stonky is talking rubbish virtually every country had some form of Estates what is the difference between the English estates and the Estates of Hungary the Estates of France the Estates of virtually wherever the difference is and if only the Supreme Court had understood this it would have not made the scandalous of a ruinous judgment that it did in terms of prorogation the Supreme Court gave the parody of the English Parliament that the par of the British Parliament that Parliament exists to hold the government to account in other words to be in useless this ladies and gentlemen your Excellency is why parliaments disappeared virtually everywhere in Europe because they got in the way of good government that's why they go the peculiarity about the English Parliament is it is developed by strong Kings not weak Kings it becomes an instrument of government and Parliament then as Parliament now which is what Boris was actually doing are rather Dominic Cummings was doing rather effectively parliaments have to be managed you saw the catastrophe of an unmanaged Parliament under Theresa May with with John burco and Dominic and and Dominic grieve I mean that is what happens or indeed the parliament of the Civil War be the long parliament or the rump Parliament an assembly or indeed the Scottish Parliament an assembly by itself cannot rule it has to be managed and the peculiarity then of the English Parliament is it becomes a regular part do you know we have more polymers in the Middle Ages than we do now you had what parliamentary election usually twice a year in times of War it's it is extraordinary if the machinery for raising Taxation and the machinery for changing law by consent now what this does of course it means that alongside this notion of the crown there is another notion of the realm it is the idea of the community of the realm and the great struggles of English History then are not between a ruler and an Estates as it were led by account Palatine or whatever as opposing forces clashing each other they are within the same structure of government that's the way one's gotten to understand it and the first Clash takes place and it's the one I think which again sets up the whole Machinery that I'm talking about it begins barely a bit less than a century after Magna Carta uh with the accession of Edward again a Edward Edward II the son of the the great warrior king Edward the first the malleus scotorum still on his tomb how long that's going to survive there you know um uh yeah down there and he he uh still in the habit there is the Hammer of the Scots there and and the you know that that's why the the stone of Schooner was the school I never know which round and it doesn't really matter why well why it will be put under the specially made coronation chair anyway his sum is is the reprobated with the second and when he comes to the throne he's already got a very dubious relationship with Piers gaviston who has actually given the task of carrying the crown at the coronation and all the rest of it and it's a rather disapproving chronicler of Saint Paul says the hands of the favorite bomb the ground gays were no popular more popular than than they were when I was a young man but never mind in that sense times have changed a little for the better um but the uh but Edward then when he comes to the throne in 1308 um there is an immediate realization there will be problems and what again is the striking difference in Hungary my understanding correctly that tripartite traditional coronation Earth is simply treated as a matter of form what happens in England we are so literal-minded you know very literal-minded people we change it and we make it reflect reality so it won't surprise you to know any of you know anything of medieval English History that we dropped the bit about suppressing rapacity and iniquity they were essential features of medieval English life and were clearly flourished by the king and everybody else so we drop that we keep Justice in Mercy and in truth we keep peace to church and people but we put in a series of Clauses on law there's a general clause about the laws of the Confessor and then in 1308 there is this most extraordinary Clause that the king is required to swear to uphold the laws and Liberties granted by let's get this right sorry to uphold I'm sorry it's been my wrong bit to uphold the rightful laws and customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen a future perfect in both Latin and French in other words to abide him to rule according to the laws which will be chosen by a form of parliamentary assembly and when of course he fails conspicuously to do that and he falls 20 years later in in 1327 he is subject and this again is quite extraordinary it's not you know bumped off horrible but he is bumped off horribly eventually but first he's subject to a form of trial again the ancestors of what's going on in America with Trump and whatever is all here in English History sense of Art and being very very serious sets of accusation call the articles of accusation and levied against him and they are derived directly from the breach of his coronation oath and the next of the last article the last article says he's simply incorrigible and must go but the next of the last article picks up the most as it were Noble of the coronation OS the the oath to do justice in Mercy in truth and explains he has defied it at every point and he's broken all the other articles of the Earth from this point onwards in other words we need to understand that underneath the magnificence of the of of of ceremony the magnificence of consecration the language of the church the touching on of sacred vestments the sacred crownless and Edwards the English coronation is a contract and you are held to that contract not by some notion of rebellion but by the actual possibility of parliamentary deposition and this is only the first such case we go forward to the to the end of the where we're at the beginning we're at the beginning of the 14th century you go to the end of the 14th century with Richard II a remarkably similar phenomenon to Edward II again it's terrible remember we we carefully suppress this the only successful medieval kings are warriors the medieval English Monarchy is essentially a war monarchy it's a supreme War monarchy of Europe though and again there's a direct relationship between War Liberty and representation that is also true of 18th century England all the greatest colonialists are the loudest Proclaimers of Liberty and if you don't believe me we can talk about this go and look at the statues in guildhall but but that's another matter anyway Richard Richard I'm afraid it's an awful prognostication for the reign of King Charles Richard is King Charles has become auxurious aesthetically sensitive worries about art um loves music poetry God help us anyway um he's this he's he is he is dethroned and with again the charge of saying and listen to it he thought the laws were in his own mouth not by process of parliament it's exactly the same phenomenon but again following the dethronement of Richard and the shift within the dynasty to his cousin to um to uh to Henry plantagenet to Henry we call Bowling broken Shakespeare uh the man who rules of Henry IV what is very striking is that there's yet another as there had been under uh under Henry III there's yet another ratcheting up of the consecration side of monarchy the French monarchy had had the oil of Clovis going back to the um going back to the baptism of Clovis Carol engines and all the rest of it what you have with what you have with with with with uh the English the English had as we can see as explained um with a a a a a going back to Edgar you have anointing going back to that point but under Henry IV you invent your own Legend there is Beckett appearing to a dream uh to uh too too Richard II saying there's a holy oil blessed by the Virgin but only a true king can have it so of course you Wicked over Richard II can't have it but your true successor will have it Henry IV and all the rest so from that point on and again the the the French the French ampulla the thing from which you pour uh the sacred oil or rather you actually look as it's very sticky so you dig in it's a bit like heavy mustard you dig in a spoon and and pull it out Elizabeth Elizabeth the first being ruthers in these matters said it smelt ill anyway um the the but it was plastered on that and the French one is in the form of a dove the spirit the Holy Spirit descending the English one was in the form of an eagle which is remade at the time of the at the time of the Civil War um so you'll get the creation uh of of of of the lancastian monarchy the Triumph of the Lancaster and monarchy against the French on the Henry of the fifth the collapse of England into the walls of the Roses following the the rule of Henry VI and by the way it's under Henry VI that for the first time the English Monarchy uses the double arched Crown because of being King of England and France the sense of an Imperial Dominion it comes in then and you can actually see it on the Magnificent tomb of his father Henry V the Conqueror of France in the Abbey which is the thing that marks the moment at which the the the platforms built by um by Henry III run out and you've got to start building new burial places so it's it's at the it's at the East end of that grid of that great horseshoe and and at the end of that process the succession of the House of Tudor and and the extraordinary groundbreaking breaking everything really reign of the man that I've spent most of my life studying Henry VIII where does Henry come into this process Henry is the only King who actually acknowledges that he broke his coronation oath Henry knows with the break with room and whatever that he has broken his coronation oath we even have his revision of it written afterwards but what I think is intended to be his second coronation how does he get away with it the answer is very straightforward he only kicks the church he doesn't kick the laity everything that he does against the church everything that he does against his wives everything that he does against Thomas More against John Fisher is done with the agreement of power and if we're too as they were see the reign of Henry VII there's a blood-stained one then I'm afraid the entire community of the realm of England has got its hands in it up to the elbows everything that Henry does because again it's a strong King Henry is brilliant especially with the aid of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell at managing Parliament but what you do at that point ladies and gentlemen it seems to me is you create for the first time in English government you create a double Center up to this point everything has been Westminster the king is buried there the king is crowned there Parliament meets there the Law Courts meet there the exchequer is there the king lives there remember government in the Middle Ages is only occasional government in the Middle Ages lasts as long as a university term at Oxford and Cambridge so it's a it's a minor incident in otherwise an agreeable time hunting and doing all the rest of it the wonderful stories of ambassadors arriving at the beginning of June and saying where's the king and said good you'll probably be back in October you know the only thing that turns government permanent is the rest of the red that point government becomes about enforcing opinions on the body of reformational Counter Reformation it becomes about enforcing opinions on the body of the population and under Henry you get a bifurcation of government this is the key thing my great tea trip Cambridge Jeffrey Elton talked about a revolution in government and he remember he's he's great German Jew and that extraordinary group of people that cut a knife through the academic establishments on both sides of the Atlantic but unfortunately he had absorbed the lessons of Max Weber he believed in bureaucratic government replacing charismatic government I was gently tried to explain to Henry and true so sorry to um to to Jeffrey how did Thomas Cromwell explain to Henry VII that he was redundant because of course you've replaced charismatic government with bureaucratic government I suggested it was the day before he was executed by a deliberately inexperienced executioner and and but what the proper understanding now let's get this right there is a revolution in government under Henry but it's not what Elton thought it was what happens under Henry is you create two policies and two centers of government Parliament and the Law Courts remain in the Palace of Westminster the king's part of the Palace of Westminster burns out in 1513 and is never rebuilt and instead the king takes over a palace whose name resonates through our history Whitehall and what the next Palace along and which had been originally the the townhouse of the archbishops of York vastly expanded by the King's first Minister by Woolsey and what he creates there is the new Machinery of secretarial and consilia government you put the secretary and the privy Council there in other words the instruments from which all our modern government descends but these ladies and gentlemen are not the instruments of an absolute bureaucracy why is the council called privy because it's next to the king's lavatory it is literally in the most private section of the palace the king never sits in it but it can only meet when he's in the building the secretary actually his office is next door to the king's bedroom and I can prove it because there are notes which say my cats can't get him because the king is sleeping late this morning and they're going to disturb him so in other words you create two centers of government and I would argue you actually at this point you create two different views of kingship you create a view of kingship under the law which is Westminster competing against the view of kingship which is the real actual will of the Monarch and the two are in potential conflict in this common Arena of Parliament and the conflict is of course exacerbated by religion and the conflict culminates in the reign of Charles the first of the House of Stuart because again it's really important we realize this the house Steward succeeds to the English Throne illegally they had been excluded by act Parliament under Henry VII and his will and that act of parliament is deliberately lost by Elizabeth and her counselors partly to facilitate Union with Scotland but also to facilitate the succession of the stewards so the stewards are able to imagine they've succeeded against parliamentary writ by Divine hereditary right and it is into the royal coronation oath [Music] terrible word prerogative creeps he will obey the law subject to the Royal prerogative a notion of a power which is above and beyond the ordinary law and above and beyond the power of parliament which of course with the Clash of religion leads to the Civil War and the again the Repeat Performance of Edward II Richard II and Charles the first except with Charles it's a genuine public trial and a genuine public execution as opposed to being done to death in private but you know what it's exactly the same issue the first line of the charges against Charles the first are that having been made King to obey the law of the land he then breaks it in other words his direct invocation of the coronation oath when Bradshaw is presiding over his trial which Charles Charles refuses to recognize the the quality of the the right of the court to charge him Bradshaw goes back to all these cases that I've been talking about and says you are a conditional King and of course finally with the Restoration in uh and the the uh and and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 uh with as it were but again just quickly sorry time time time terrible thing all time why does it with the execution of Charles the first and again it is really important we grasp this there is the deliberate attempt at destroying the whole name of monarchy you destroy all the Royal regalia you declare that the very title of King to be unnecessary burdensome and dangerous you try to root the word King from the language the destruction of the English Royal regulator is infinite the greater than what the french did why does it come back it comes back because you descend as you always do with a revolution straight into military dictatorship and the only way you can control Cromwell who has no limits on his power as Lord protector is by making him King he can't do it because the Army will let him so you bring back Charles Stewart instead but then under Charles II there is exactly the ribbon James II exactly the repeat of that that tension between King as king as will and King under the law until in 1689 we solve the problem permanently at least until the reign of Charles III that is to say in 1689 the that the the the the the the the that Clause relating to law uh which the king and the queen because film William and Mary are joint Mannix they have to swear very simply the following they have to swear that they will govern the people of the kingdom of England and the dominions there to belonging according to the statutes in Parliament agreed upon and all the laws and customs of the same they swear to rule by Act to Parliament and remember it is the Bill of Rights is not a Bill of Rights of the citizen or the subject it's a Bill of Rights of Parliament that the the body that is assumed to represent the entire nation is Parliament in 1689 and the again uh how very different from what is projected for the present coronation where members of parliament will be reduced to 20 for each house in the in the coronation of 1689 the entire House of Commons headed by the speaker is given a special Gallery actually overlooking the choir so directly over in other words the King has got to sort of look up and there is real Masters sitting there and as Gilbert Burnett preaches the sermon in which he contrasts the wonderful fortunate fate of the English now we are not ruled by despotic power for hint Louis XIV of France nor an ungoverned under multitude hint hint hint what had happened in the Civil War at which point ladies and gentlemen something that will not happen at the coronation of King Charles III huge Applause will accept in the Abbey as that idea of moderate parliamentary government triumphing over despotism on the one hand and popular Insurrection on the other is spelled out from that point onwards that idea of Republic is entrenched and I would suggest the first time that it has been threatened seriously is in 2023 but we can explore that thank you [Music]

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 16,772

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: Zs-MQRoF5a0

Length: 56min 4sec (3364 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023