The Crown and the Papacy - David Starkey

foreign [Music] thank you that is that we come with great joy to hear the first address from our keynote speaker I'm sure that Professor Starkey needs no introduction but I will introduce you uh David uh Professor David Starkey courses I think I think I'm writing the same principally known to us as a historian of the 16th century uh that someone who's learning and whose interests and who's writing uh range over a much widered array than that recently uh particularly with a flourishing presence in broadcasting and many areas of interest but particularly from the perspective of the history of England it's a great joy to me um that Professor Starkey who I've talked to know a little more personally in recent times has found the time and the interest and the energy to come and be with us this week we're very privileged and very fortunate and glad to have you with us David and you have wetted my appetite and I shared it with those who are here only with the wonderful three dresses that we have to look forward to and which the first the title you've given us is the crown that people see in the English hospice 1483 to 1525 of what it might have been in history and we are a little test the time this afternoon because of factors beyond our control so I think we'll probably be holding most of our discussion over tomorrow until tomorrow but without further Ado the great Delight David we're in your hands for your first address [Applause] well I do actually is are all microphones working yeah um you are hearing me well I'll go over here I may so the habits of countless years lecturing that you stand up and talk from a Lecter with extensive notes right um Jonathan it's very good of you to invite me and I am very flattered and also very surprised to be here is the best way of describing what I feel about this and what I think I'd like to do is begin briefly by explaining why I'm here what do I call myself um well many things but the phrase that I've I think is most useful in the context in which we are now I'm a high Church atheist um aren't most of you but there we are uh the the the joke of course in Northern Ireland is is always to ask you know whether you're a Protestant High church or a Catholic or whatever but I why do I call myself that I do because I've I used to be very plain and straightforward atheist I used indeed to be rather active within the national secular society is not that I'm ashamed of that but I think I've slightly grown out of it in the same way that I think I've grown out of the uh the uh intense libertarianism which characterized my appearances when I was on uh some of the question times but more particularly the moral maze in the 1990s and I suppose what's happened is I've changed myself and it was interesting enough it was a London taxi driver you didn't often get London taxi drivers who are philosophically literate and uh and he knew me and was saying what was I doing at the moment and I said well I was appearing on things like GB news we were very much conservative well when I first encountered you you were a Libertarian I was then forced to think but you're not often forced to do in a London cab I was forced to think why I suppose I've become Birkin I've become a believer in that it's almost mystical isn't it there is that edge of mysticism maybe Sublime mysticism and nonsense in conservatism that notion of a bridge across generations of of the contract of past present and future I've also become which is really why I'm here and it's another burkian idea the Birkin idea that The Human Experience the raw human experience is to painful to brutal it's the kind of nakedness that needs drapery that needs covering that needs the covering of gentility chivalry civilization tradition so that's why I'm here and I will fight a shy as possible of anything to do with faith that's your expertise it's not mine what I want to begin with and as Jonathan said I am primarily a historian of the Tudor period I've been for many for as long as I've really been doing anything I have been nudging my way to a full biography of Henry VII and the more I research it the more it seems to me extraordinary that the Reformation ever happened quite simply and also that all the attempts begin particularly with people like scariest brick but are embedded in the Catholic tradition of seeing Henry as somehow having gone wrong from the beginning the attempt at seeing him as somebody who received a troubled upbringing was kind of repressed teenager whilst the profound a profound disappointment to Lady Margaret Beaufort had uh you know Bishop Fisher shaking his head over him and whatever all this is complete and absolute nonsense and and total nonsense any notion that Henry is influenced by some sort of subterranean erasmianism it's nonsense as is the idea of erasmianism as it's conventionally understood it does not exist nobody apart from Erasmus in the early years of the 16th century believes in the possibility of Peace lots of people will play around with the idea for their own purposes but the notion that there is an erasmian tradition is preposterous similarly the idea that somehow England is irresistibly detaching itself from Rome beforehand is equally silly I want to present dramatically the opposite case that what we see from 1483 and we'll come back to that date in a moment I hope it will surprise you why don't I begin in 1485. and um what we see from 1483 is something completely different we see an intensification of relations between England and Rome we see um a increasing prominence of where you were yesterday where we are as it were by proxy here this is the the summer school as it were of the English Hospice of the the old Hospice of Saint Thomas and Edmund and opposite Santa Maria de verota as it still survives we see an increasing Royal intervention in that we even see the beginnings of the idea that should be and there should be an English curial cardinal so let's begin the story by doing what you've been doing today what I was doing in memory which is wandering through Rome we can follow the footsteps of young Englishmen as they do this in the middle years of the 15th century because one of the things that is very striking is that apart from Woolsey virtually everybody you've heard of in the English church has up to a decade in Italy there's an extraordinary intensification of anglo-english relations it was like anglo-italian relations in terms of the experience of uh of of um of Italian universities particularly bologna and Padua and remember what most of them are doing they're not coming here again why I'm rather attracted to them they're not coming here to study theology the last thing you want to study if you're an ambitious young Churchman is theology you come here of course to do Canon and civil law because you are ambitious and you know that that's how you're going to get on and more importantly if you don't get on that's how you'll make money and so you come and bologna is is one of the two great law schools it's now being rivaled by Padua with of course it's extraordinary Padua is the is is the landlord University of the Venetian Republic at that point you have the brenta canal connecting the two and very often a young Englishman will begin in Venice and he will have had his money because of course there's remittance of money he'll have had his money limited to Venice he will have his luggage sent there if he's lucky we know quite a lot about some of them because the inevitably you discover dude problems on the plane problems of travel are Universal and very often the person who is supposed to be remitting your money and sending you luggage cheats you so generous 10 years later you have a case in Chancery which means we as historians 500 years later can trace that unfortunate student experience when you arrive in Venice with no money and no luggage and no contacts and God helps you if you're very very lucky so the couple of tracks that I'm very interested in which will quickly explain why we are actually looking at 1483. there's one man called John Sherman who is a northerner all virtually everybody I'm going to be talking about like me is a northerner there's this extraordinary weight the the north this is the terrible function a terrible problem with what the Tory government is trying to do at the moment which is to refresh the economy of the North save in the 19th century the North had a single purpose it was to supply talent to the South and and the entire structures of Oxbridge were designed to bring this about with colleges like yours queens and so on and being set up very very much for that purpose so the two Northerns I'm interested in when is a man called John sherben he is lucky enough to find himself at the the receiving end of the patronage of a of a member of a quasi-royal house of the Neville family George Neville Archbishop of York he gets one of the Great it's the things that a young man wants and he gets the uh in York Minster um it's the uh uh it's it's the canary the cannon stall of is it mushroom and mushroom some of you will know some of you will know your Yorkshire better than I do but it was always regarded as the golden pre-bend it's the one with the largest income so he's got an income this is a young man who suddenly finds himself through a good Patron having an income of two or three hundred pounds a year what did he do with it he comes to Rome and he buys books and he spends agree where you know exactly he spends agreeable Saturday and Sundays wandering through wrote the Roman streets and the booksellers this newfangle thing called Printing and buying books and his books by a circuitous process finish up at Corpus Christi College Oxford so we know Mark Sherburn and so Sherman is here and like reasonably active around the papal Court uh the reason that this is so attractive is of course that everybody both as governments and individuals uh all sorts of things require petitions to the papal court for appointment two they're two to every ecclesiastical office but also many other matters all matrimonial matters at many matters of contract and so on finally finish up in Rome which in many ways operates as a sort of international Court also European court but of course extraordinary fees being levered and so on so Sherman is here in Rome developing a very nice little job as a royal proto-notary as well as enjoying himself buying books and clearly living a very agreeable life here so he's one one kind of semi-ambitious young Englishman another much more important example and born only a few miles from where I was a man called Thomas Langton and he's born in Appleby in Westmoreland uh he goes up to Cambridge he's on a poor farming stock he does extremely well he makes a friendship with somebody with the unlikely named Doggett and even more to be an unlikely named Doggett that he is a remote member of the royal family through a connection with the Boucher family and the two of them clearly become close friends Langton achieves a fellowship in the college which is now vanished as part of the amalgamation that creates Trinity College Cambridge and they decide they're going to come and make their Fortunes in Italy and they again it's that story of a nice amount of money that's remitted to Venice lost luggage and all the rest of it sued for later anyway they've settled down first in Bologna then in Padua spent 10 years here and then finally after having bought yet more books and yet more manuscripts Langton also returns to England where he becomes a leading Royal Clark under Edward IV and uh extraordinarily involves himself in those of us who were at the custom Castel Gandolfo today we looked at the papal court and one of the officers of the papal court is the Grand Master of the papal household and of course similarly in England the Royal household was an elaborate and very well organized and very complex and lavish machine and this young man from the north fashioned and Polished now fluent in Italian fluent in Latin fluent in the in the Aristotelian culture of Padua and of Bologna in the idea of the Aristotelian mean and whatever finds himself as a rapidly Rising Royal clock and this lad from a farm is responsible for redrafting the ordinances of the royal household with a grand Aristotelian introduction about it's important not to be too lavish and on the other hand not to be too mean instead you want an equipoise of perfect sensible economy he should really be running the country in Britain again shouldn't he between the two um what does this young man become he becomes the person who if Richard III had remained king would have ruled England he becomes profoundly disillusioned by the behavior of Edward IV Edward IV finishes Reign rather like Henry VII with that graspingness that meanness that um avarice in which the government becomes not for anything like a notion of the Commonwealth but purely for the king for the king's own benefit for the king's own wealth and he famously Langton is the young man who welcomed the young man now and a bishop of Bishop sorry let me get this way Bishop nominated Bishops and David's becomes touring with Richard in the north of England in 1483 the person who welcomes Richard as the best thing that ever happened to England the king who embodied the possibility of Reform of decency freedom and whatever what on Earth does this have to do with my subject he by this stage is rapidly emerging to the top of the royal Council if you look at we have the docket book the actual record of what Richard's government does virtually on a day-to-day basis and the first item of business that the the committed is still Lord protector at this point he's not actually yet made himself King one of the very first items of business on the first page is RS to become C that is sorry JS sorry let me get that right JS to become C John Sherman to become cardinal and bizarrely when you think of everything else that Richard has to do the largest single item of correspondence from King Richard is a series of letters to Cardinals to the pope to the college to individuals like Cardinal barbell all saying I want John Sherman to be made a partner um what is he we it is entirely unclear what he's thinking about why this sudden interest in having a curial card I think the guess because this is going to be the the theme of what I said we've tended obviously as we do because of our interests and how we how we approach all this we tend to think of room within some sort of spiritual or belief context we'd make far more sense even to include the divorce within the Diplomatic context these Popes are primarily rulers they are primarily rulers of an important territorial Italian principality and what I think Richard is wanting to do is to use Rome as an ally against France relations between England and France at this point are becoming very bad Edward IV had gone out of his way to normalize relations in their last stage he received a lot at the Treaty of Peking Yi gave him a large French pension he's angling to marry the woman who actually becomes Queen Elizabeth of England Elizabeth York of England he's angling to marry her to the French dufa in what would have been an extraordinary marriage sort of bearing in mind the previous relations between England and France and and all that ruptures uh uh in in in the last years of Edward's Reign and and and and Richard comes to the throne intending to reverse the whole of his brother's policies including that of of peace with France he wants to bring back something much more like the state of War of of the earlier 15th century to make sure that France does not control the whole of the channel Seaboard the risk at this point remember is France is very likely for answers defeated burgundy so it's going France is now controlling most of the Belgian Coast it's controlling the whole of the northern coast because Normandy and everything else fell earlier in the 15th century and it's now probably going to take Brittany as well so the great risk is of that developing so but we all know don't we that Richard is going to be defeated more interestingly is that move towards defeat that move towards uh which of course they didn't know was going to end to defeat the the move towards Bosworth what's going on well you've got this campaign which doesn't quite work to get Sherburn made a cardinal then the pope dies Pope sixtus the fourth he's the chapel Bill's assistant Chapel remember you've got to recall what Rome is like at this point Rome is Rome is simply really a series of ruins the papacy has only just returned from the Avignon captivity Rome is a malarial-ridden swamp and you get these are the first Renaissance popes they are aware of the Imperial past they're aware of the indignity of their present position they're trying to reconstruct things architecturally territorially quasi-imperially you'll remember the wonderful phrase of Thomas Hobbes that what is the papacy it is nothing but the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the dung Hill there of and they're trying to De dung Hill Rome and the creation of the Sistine Chapel is one of them anyway sisters dies and there is a a there's a very conflicted conclave and and um you you get the election of innocent the eighth and to that conclave um Sherman is actually acting as the guardian of the conclave is one of the Guardians of the conclave and very quickly of course now you've got a new pope you need to render obedience so Langdon comes now Bishop uh now and now Bishop of Salisbury comes to a to a heading a major Embassy to Rome and he's in Rome in 1484. presumably this scheme for an English garden who else is in Rome well it's you all know in 40 do we have do we all know 1484 you've got the final stage of the conspiracy which is going to put Henry VII we know they didn't it was going to put Henry VII on the throne at the Battle of Bosworth the key figure behind that conspiracy apart from Henry himself in Brittany lady Margaret Beaufort in London is this extra another great ecclesiastic John Morton the patron of Thomas Moore and all the rest of it who is in exit who fled into it he's a bishop of Eli and in the great Shakespeare scene in Richard III at the moment when you're going to have the Lord Chamberlain executed on a log uh Hastings executed on a log he is a bishop of really it was sent off to to get strawberries from his garden by Richard and wisely flees in eventually flees into Exile in the Netherlands so this is the key moment of that conspiracy what does John Morton do he goes to Rome so in Rome in 1484 on the eve of the battle of Bosler 1484-85 on the eve of the battle of Bosworth you have the man who would have ruled England under the king if Richard had won the battle Bosworth you also have the man who does rule England under the king when Henry VII does win the Battle of Bosworth that's a centrality of room what are they trying to do well I think I guess very much that length is part of the scheme to establish an English Cardinal it modern is is it's all been suspected is trying to lay the grounds for the marriage between Henry VII the future Henry VII Henry Earl of Richmond and Elizabeth and Elizabeth of York which of course is a problem because they are cousins and within the prohibited degrees and and in other words you will there have a what will quickly amount to a battle for people in people intervention or non-intervention in a Royal marriage a situation that we'll be very familiar with indeed so the beginning then of Henry VII's Reign uh the end of Richard's reign is this sense of a possibility of relations between England and Rome which is close and closer and based on the fact as I said all of these people have an Italian experience most of them have experienced the Roman Court almost all of them apart from the Oxbridge experience they have an experience of Padua bologna Ferrara or or or or or whatever it is and then there is again and I don't want to go at this point too much into ordinary history there is then the extraordinary episode of The Marriage of of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York with people in doubt with people endorsement and indeed the bull endorsing their marriage is the most explicit statement indeed it's the foundation of the Shakespearean myth of the Union of the Roses it's extraordinary isn't it that the papal bull supplies you with the legend of Shakespeare see in other words it's the it's the basis of uh it's it's the basis of of of Edward Hall's Chronicle um the union of the two Noble houses of York and Lancaster which itself is the underpinning of Shakespeare's great great swathe of History plays even more strikingly that bull is one of the very first to be translated into English by Bishop John Russell and published as a royal Brock right at the beginning of 1485 right at the beginning of the process of printing in an official translation and we have even the record of Henry VII's Council ordering the translation Bishop Russell is the most intellectual Bishop of the time the best best composer in English we have the actual decision to propagate this bull but of course it's all I wash this bull is written in England I think it's data is falsified we don't even know the actual date of the marriage of Henry VII and um and Elizabeth of York the date of the 18th of January I've demonstrated to be a total fiction they are in official documents referred to as married from the beginning of December which also has enormous advantage of meaning that Henry VII and Elizabeth of York did not have premarital sex otherwise it's impossible to account for the date of the birth of Prince Arthur so we're dealing then with a sub an extraordinary Subterranean diplomacy that we do not fully understand and a manipulation of Rome that we don't really understand either what we do know is immediately in the wake of this extraordinary series of documents you get and another one of these Northerners and wonderful names Christopher erswick Christopher urzwick who's a little bit to the west of where in furnace near to near the modern Baron Furness he sent off to Rome to do the dirty so around then the um around then the accession this extraordinary remember this extraordinary session of Henry VII a man with no claim to the throne at all you use papal endorsement as the fundamental way in which it's propagated because those bulls and then particularly after the battle of stoke the first Rebellion against him those Bulls provide the basic text the propaganda propagandistic text because they are also accompanied by anathema and against those who Rebel so you you get everywhere though these huge Royal progresses everywhere you'll get the leading Bishops going preaching to the papal bull and then pronouncing anathema you know literally Bell and book recorded in town city Cathedral everywhere as in other words the alliance between England and Rome and as as the the centerpiece the conveying legitimacy on the tutors all very close and all very cozy and then of course relations drift apart the complexities of politics in Italy the complexities of what Hen of the seventh is doing is relations with Spain and all the rest of it um Henry VII's policy which had begun by being also uh very very pro-french drifts in and out of being pro-french and whatever but finishes up somewhere very very much like the policy of Edward IV um a policy that's to say in which the English claim on France is bought off with a gigantic pension and Henry VII instead starts to establish a series of cozy relationships with all surrounding European powers that are based on a peace but be a guarantee that you won't support Rebels because Henry's claim that the throne is so weak and I try to I tried to explain in my old days to my students why on Earth there are so many Rebels against Henry VII you may remember them they all have very implausible names which are like Perkin warbeck and whatever one wonderfully satirized in 1066 and all that how is it that the the these strange people Royal scullions and whatever and tailors from Taylors from the north Netherlands are taken to impersonate a royal Prince I think the explanation is that because Henry VII had such an improbable claim to the throne people thought well if he can do it I can do it it's a bit like the Office of Prime Minister in the last few years um once once you've had the kind of person who has held it um wants to raise a man a was elected it was clear it was an office to which the no qualifications whatever so there is this there is this extraordinary process and I think it's very very similar uh in terms of birth not intelligence in Henry VII's case um then there's an extraordinary shift and this is the so we've we've had that first moment under Richard in 1483 continued forward by Hen of the seventh in 1485 in which there's sudden really serious interest in Rome in which the Royal uh in which the king in England starts to intervene in the Affairs of the hospice in which there was an ambition under uh Richard III to have an English Cardinals have an English curial Cardinal because of course the the two other great European the other at this moment two great European bars and of France and of the incipient Spain the the union of Ferdinand and Isabella do have curial Cardinals and do manipulate at papal paper elections and clearly if england were to resume its position which remember it had held at the Council of constance at the beginning of the 15th centuries dominant European part you have to have a place in Rome 1504 though there's an extraordinary shift and this is the moment at which I think we begin to move into a story that we can actually comprehend again it's a shift of people Reigns and be the the body of Pope Alexander VI has just died the dead or overe Pope Julius II The Warrior Pope has just been elected in England it's the moment at which the 13 year old future Henry VII goes to his father's Court and he finds a very different world the world of the end of Hen of the seventh reign suddenly shifts and the papacy is absolutely Central to this process because what Henry VII wants from the paper sit at this point but two things one of them we all know about and everybody has understood it perfectly he wants another ball from Rome which will enable a second son to marry the Widow of his eldest son because Prince Arthur has just died and so there is a negotiation conducted by of course there are no English Cardinals who instead have Cardinal Adrian Adriano castellesi acting as English agent in Rome and it's his wonderful correspondence that enables us to trace what's going on the new pope of course is a little bit shy it's very difficult to imagine uh Judas II as being a little unshy but Adriano says to me he's really a bit hesitant and he's not dealing with these things very quickly or competently but you know give him time he still have this wonderful phrase he's fresh to the job you know he's not yet quite sure how things are done or what are that to be done so that's one deal there's a deal that's needed rather because remember most good opinion was that that Prince Henry should not have been allowed to marry Cason of arrogant the main weight of of canon law opinion and including that of William Warren the Archbishop of Canterbury in England was that this was probably a bad idea and then any case she was rather shopsoil goods and and and and and so on so there's there's a bit of a problem about that but interestingly the major problem is about 10 to the seventh of the request Henry VII wants and this again gives us an extraordinary insight into what's going on and this is the first time and probably the last time I'm going to mention anything spiritual Henry VII wants a special bull called an indult that would enable him to choose his own father Confessor one of the things that's most remarkable in the developments in this period is English kings using franciscans as confessors at exactly the moment that the monarchy is becoming most visibly visibly selfish self-aggrandizing the the development of the private role of the king with the chamber with bastard feudalism with huge increase of personal Royal wealth with law breaking with Epsom and Dudley is exactly the moment that they are choosing confessors who are most vividly aware of the problems of wealth of selfishness and and all the rest of it anyway Henry has been having problems with this Confessor and he wants a new one and the pope makes a great deal of fuss about the king's right to choose exactly who he wants and then finally a deal is done and it's typical as how we all know Italy works now Castile easy goes with this it's now turned into a bundle of about four or five Bulls he goes to the pope he explains the situation to him and the Pope says absolutely it's really cannot be done that's the laser goes away the following day there is a knock at Castaway by the way his magnificent Palace still with the English Royal Arms on it is in the well is it called the Via Dela uh consideration it's still there it's palaces there which incidentally is where uh Alexander VI died in the garden probably poisoned by castilesi on behalf of Julius II whose favorite you're getting the general flavor of all of this anyway a messenger arrives at this very elegant Noble Palace with a request Pope is desperately Keen that his nephew gidobaldo the Duke of orbino be made a knight of the garter to which of course avian who understands the game completely says absolutely impossible Unthinkable these things never happen not even the greatest of Italian princes and then they settled down over a drink and they decide that two Impossibles equal one possible and who by the way um is is uh the uh he's a he's he's the son of a great contortieri uh he is the man who becomes the captain general of the papal armies despite impotence and and a complete failure of military of serious military military activity such of these things anyway he gets his Knighthood of the Garter which also is a wonderful consequence that it brings castillione to England about the Zari castillonia the author of the book of the Garter who actually watches the young Henry in action of court and includes him in the apparatus of of of of of of of of the book of the courteous of that that consequence and so he gets his uh um guidobaldo gets his kg castilloni comes to be installed in England on his behalf by proxy at Windsor and Henry VII gets his balls and he gets this extraordinary um Indulgence able to choose to choose his own Confessor and he chooses a man called Stephen Stephen baronius whatever is another Frenchman most of the people who are close to Henry uh are French um and uh it is Stephen Barron's operating in very close alliance with John Fisher who stage manages the deathbed of Henry VII but that's yet another lecture this concluding this this increasing closeness to Rome also has an important component of foreign policy France now thanks to peace with England remember English historians do not understand why England is so important in the European politics that focuses essentially on Italy why is the pope interested in England this is the period of the Italian Wars from 1496 when Charles VII of France is called in by the Pope by and and by Milan uh to as it were redress the balance of pirate in Italy and an extraordinary series of wars that last the Battle of Pavia uh in 1525 which is my terminal date um why is it why are the Italians in why are the venetians partly it's trade London is at that point the great trade already the great trading Metropolis of the north it's where the Venetian galleys go to Southampton uh the the stuff is taken often directly to Gallery will then go round into London before it goes on to Antwerp there are huge factories of florentine merchants of Lucchese and whatever London a major major trading center the really again the the wealth of the Medici so much of it depends on the cloth trade down and so on and so on but it's another very simple fact that we forget England is a very very long way from Rome but it's very near Paris if you have the French seeing their future power essentially in controlling either Lombardi induction of Milan and Naples or both the possibility of English intervention can stopper the very best laid French plans because it's only a couple of hundred miles from Calais where there's a heavily fortified English Bridgehead to Paris you can Scupper the whole thing and so so much of what I'm talking about now depends on that fact that English historians have simply forgotten the generations although of course contemporaries understood it Henry VII is very aware despite his very close personal relations with Louis XII of France they've actually been together when they were both princes in France in 1483 and and so they knew each other personally they were fond of each other but Louis is becoming immensely powerful this is process France remember in the Middle Ages is simply a geographical expression it's now becoming hugely powerful in the wake of the failure of the English in the Hundred Years War the intense consolidation of the French monarchy its shift into being a full-scale absolute monarchy particularly in the reign of Louis XI and so on and a France that's consolidating internally that thanks to the marriage of Louis XII and Anne Duchess of Bergen Duchess of Brittany has now assumed pretty much its modern Frontiers and is now aggressively advancing in particularly North Italy because Louis XII also had a claim he did he decent he's got a Visconti title he descends from the Visconti which were one of the ruling Dougal families of Milan so he's got a title there as well as another claim uh uh uh uh claim claim to Naples and he's able to make the claim to Milan good so Henry VII is becoming terribly aware of the overwhelming power of France what does he do he starts deliberately to patronize the house of Habsburg and this again is something that I've discovered and that I'm delighted about in the last far three four years of his Reign sixty percent of Royal revenue is spent on bribing the habsburgs is totally extraordinary he's deliberately creating a counterweight power to France that is to be used in Alliance with Rome this is the Rome is increasingly terrified now of French pressure coming down the the relations between the papacy and Louis XII are deteriorating and they will they will turn into open Warfare pretty soon and so England then is suddenly starting to play this extraordinarily important part um the um the story of the uh of of of of the Archduke Philippine whatever is shipwrecking in England and so on we we will have to leave out this it's a very good story um the this process develops and develops rapidly um Henry uh again very quick summary of of the position of the habsburgs it is the uh the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian um who is a very strange and extraordinary man has a series of unbelievably ambitious marriages all of which work so he himself marries the heiress burgundy this heir of that marriage the Archduke Philip marries Joanna the Mad of of of Spain of Castile and she becomes the heiress of Spain it's just extraordinary and and the son of that marriage future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V then inherits the lot complete with all the claims in Italy and all the claims to the new world you get the creation of this vast um Habsburg conglomerate which is what confronts Henry Henry VII my Henry when he comes to the throne in 1509 he's he's he himself have been present um in 1506 when the Archduke Philippe is Shipwrecked in England having received a hundred thousand pounds in cash entire Royal revenues are a hundred and ten thousand pounds he receives one year's entire Revenue in silver pennies to finance his voyage to claim the Throne of claimed the Throne of Castile after the death of of Queen Isabella of Castile instead on root he is Shipwrecked he's been to shore in the far west of England he is effectively under uh expose arrest he he is effectively a prisoner and the person who's sent to bring him to court the person who takes him to see the table of King Arthur the alleged Round Table of King Arthur at Winchester is hen the future Henry VII is Prince Henry um and he witness Henry is actually present at this extraordinary dinner which is held at Windsor and in which the new treaty between the uh England and that the house of Habsburg is is so modern it's celebrated over dinner Henry VII says to Philip and to his son and to his son Henry I'm going to have this table inscribed to commemorate this event just like the round table at Windsor at at Winchester so Henry then is is a child of this this shift towards an aggressive pro-habsburg policy that is designed to renew war with France unfortunately Henry VII doesn't seem to have told anybody else that this was in what is one of the Striking things about Royal policy and we've learned the same thing is politicians very often pursue utterly contradictory goals same time you will have two Royal policies so there's on the one hand the public policy of peace with France with huge pensions not just being paid to the king but every leading member of the royal Council so you have an enormous interest of the royal Council in maintaining peace with France on the other hand you have the young Henry VII who's been brought up in the world of castillione has been brought up in that world of scholar and gentlemen that notion of on the I'll be talking about convention and whatever that sense of serious education latinate education on the one hand but also combined with with jousting wrestling all the complete Public School curriculum which is what what what what castillione is really about and of course seeing War as the natural occupation of a king the right thing you should do and fighting French of the French of course as the right thing you should do but Henry finds himself against this profound opposition of his Council where does the support for War come from you've got the high Nobles I mean families and like the Talbots uh the Earls of Shrewsbury and whatever who have been leading Lights of the Hundred Years War are now bribed up to the neck by the French and clamoring to maintain peace with France where does support for War come from you lot it comes from the clergy the leading this again is the most extraordinary thing if you look at the usual accounts of the reign of Henry VII and I'm afraid accounts some of them have the name d Starkey attached to them again it's very important to recognize where your work goes right I described my my sort of political conversions and it's very important to recognize where your early work is wrong and not to day five what you wrote when you were a 20 year old 20 odd year old and I use I like everybody else talked about a war party I envisage an English aristocracy read into claw eager to renew the glories of the Hundred Years War not a bit of it every leading Noble on the king's council with the possible exception of the Earl of sorry he's a man will become Duke of Norfolk Howards is passionately in favor of peace with France why the shift Julius II Louis XII there is a tremendous outbreak of hostilities between the pope and the King of France needless to say it's because they've fallen out over another territorial dispute they came together and uh in the league of Cambray to dismember the Republic of Venice and they come very near to doing it but then of course what they do is they quarrel over the spoils the result is and uh the result is is oh very much open Warfare between the two but how is this process being handled by the English in Rome the first and the last time there is an English curial Cardinal and you all saw his tomb it's the tomb of cardinal Bainbridge Christopher Bainbridge which is the most beautiful object in the English college and Bainbridge is again it's an extra ordinary story who is bainbridge's Patron Thomas Langton where does Bainbridge come from the north which is his archbishopric the Archbishop the all of this and he is sent by Henry almost certainly without conciliary approval to Rome to conduct a totally another independent foreign policy against the king's Council to bring about war between England and France and he does it so well he actually becomes um he you wouldn't know it from that magnificent tomb but he become he becomes uh the the favorite the papal favorite of Julius II uh he he becomes paper prefect of the armies he is the man who actually leads the papal defense of the unsuccessful papal defense of Bologna and uh so he he is profoundly active active around the Pope in this this tremendous struggle with Louis XII um the uh Louis XII I'm afraid wins um and it's just really important that we realize what Louis XII does he has defeated the Pope in battle he's come within a whisker of actually capturing Julius II what's the first thing he does he organizes a general counsel to um a Dethrone uh the throne Julius so you have a consulate Pisa which which is which is according to the schismatic council it's also important to remember that um Louis XII by this point is divorced his first wife so he can give he can marry the The Duchess of burgundy eventually Henry using this is able to persuade the English Parliament to war who leads the approach to the parliament erasmus's principal English Patron William Warren Archbishop of Canterbury and Erasmus lies through his teeth this is Erasmus propagating the ideas of Peace this is Erasmus in cambridgeism Queens at this point in complete secret correspondence with with ammonia who is the King's Latin secretary this he's accumulating the materials that will lead to the great the great work Julius exclusos you know Julius shot out of Heaven because of the wickedness of his policies Erasmus knows exactly what is going on you will not find a word of William Warren's role despite the fact it is Warren who organizes the translation against cast your mind back to that papal bull in in 1485 it is it is Warren who does exactly the same exercise he has julius's briefing which he describes the pathetic sufferings of the papers at the hand of this wicked schismatic King of France who is worse than the Turk you invoke Crusade all of this it's all put into passionate English and we have the actual text that's read in Parliament Warren goes into both houses of Parliament 1512 this pathetic text is read the parliament weeps and Mourns and votes taxes and you get War not a word of it so in other words the war party is the church and it is the church in England supporting Rome for purely foreign policy reasons it um there can be no can be known and what is also striking I mean Warren is one of the very best churchmen of the period you know hence his patronage of Erasmus and whatever one of those who's most sensitive and one of those and who whose appointment in 1504 was a conscious Act of Reform remember Henry VII as being a good boy at this point but the the thing that drives War at this point they say the thing thing that drives this intensely close Union between England and Rome is foreign policy but it results in something extraordinary doesn't it Henry VII's first war he is for is fought under the papal flag when the English invade France in in in in in in 1513 they marched under the papal flag the Scots mocked them as papal eunuchs um at Sea and then of course a very unpleasant revenge is taken against the Scots which we won't discuss um the the uh Henry VII denounces his fellow King denounces Louis XII as heretic and schismatic and worse than took and it's a crusade so this is the king who 20 years later is going to break with Rome and exactly the same pattern just looking at my watch exactly the same pattern will repeat itself in the early 1520s in the early 1520s you get a sudden intensification of relations between England and Rome but the thing the thing that had been most important about 1509 is that you had an English resident Cardinal who is a Papal favorite so you get completely different level of relations between England and Rome why why then in 1523 is it that you send a bishop you send John Clark and Richard Pacey oh by the way were Protege of Bainbridge so you have this complete succession of Northerners who've stars at Oxbridge gone to Padua gone to gone to um gone to Bologna and whatever acting as English agents in Rome but why why why Aren't They isn't one of them made a cardinal why isn't there an English resident Cardinal the answer is the catastrophe of Woolsey Woolsey thinks that he can manage Rome at one remote and I think this is the essential failure of what goes on you don't build on this history you don't cement this history you don't embed it institutionally it's an occasional one it's an occasional series of approximations which um which which which do not do not entrench themselves fully but it is still important to understand how extraordinary it is the John Clark um who who becomes Bishop of bath and Wells the English resident in Rome at yet another period of of intense anti-french activity a very close alliance with the emperor Charles V what did his first mission to Rome Bean obviously been there with Bainbridge but what's his first mission to Roman 1521 why would he go to Rome gentlemen in 1521 shame on you this is the assertio September sacramentorum because Henry doesn't just fight twice as a Papal crusader he also is the only King who actually writes against Luther and the assertio which he genuinely does send me right he he assembles it the polishing is done by Thomas Moore This Magnificent copy of it is made for presentation to the pope of course print is important and it is in print but if you want a superior manuscript what you do is you you say if you want a superior copy you write it elaborately uh in in in in calligraphy in italic text on the finest of parchment is bound in silken Heaven only knows what else and verses in Henry VII's own Latin verses in Henry VIII's own hand dedicated to to to to to to Leo the tenth now cannot we see what this looks like as a pattern this is a king who fights for Rome this is the king who writes for Rome not only that the man who is responsible for the um for uh for the assertive September Sacrament is yet another northerner is cuff but Tunstall who is going to become Bishop of Durham and uh in in 15 and in 15 20 21 uh when when when you get the dart of bombs with all the rest of it he is actually ambassador to Charles V and again an extraordinary backstory which also involves Erasmus he had been erasmuses principal assistant in those years in England what did Erasmus been doing and he's on the one hand observing the horrors of the shift to war the renewal of universal War which he saw deplores and curses Julius the second four what is Erasmus actually doing he is putting together the novum instrumentum the new edition of the new Greek edition of the New Testament with the radical Latin translation and who is his principal assistant it is Cuthbert Tunstall and Tunstall then is immensely able young linguist he's also an arithmetician he writes a very important treaties on maths and is this extraordinary Observer of the of the Imperial diet and he writes one of the great dispatches of all time to Henry and to Woolsey this is just before Luther does here I stand unfortunately he's just left when Luther does that it would have been wonderful to have had his reaction to that but he's just got a copy of Luther's latest pamphlet the Babylonian captivity and with his extraordinary shrewdness and intelligence he immediately grasps two things about it one is the attack on the number of the sacraments and the basis of that attack of solar scriptura that only three sacraments communion baptism and possibly Penance can possibly have a direct scriptural Foundation which of course provides the basis of the uh of Henry's book but he does something else he understands immediately the importance of both Printing and of the vernacular and so Henry is warned on that and what Henry does on the basis of that England is the first country and by far the most successful to start off with to operate a directly organized inspired campaign of preaching and teaching against Luther and who was in charge of it the intellectual in charge of it is Bishop Fisher who is Henry's favorite clergyman at this point and who is responsible for acting as minister of police Thomas Moore so this is the world into which the Reformation breaks why lust there is a single explanation which is Henry's Lust For amberlin there is no other reason at all for Henry to change and why can't Henry get what he wants from Rome politics he chooses the worst possible moment to do it I can demonstrate that Henry and Anne pledged to marry on New Year's Day 1527. I can do it precisely because the letter in which Henry acknowledges Anne's gift in which he surrenders herself to him survives it's in French and it describes the gift as cleaner means New Year's Day gift it means nothing else there's only one New Year's day it can be which is 1527. unfortunately what happens a little later in 1527 the sack of Rome who sacks Rome the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor and at that point the pope is an imperial prisoner and there's the the new biography uh of Charles V has come up with the evidence I'm the Cardinal last night was getting very cross with me for the number of people that Henry VIII killed in England I bit my tongue and refrained from explaining to him that it was the Holy Roman Emperor who sacked Rome in scenes that would have disgraced the Nazis held the pope prisoner and had instructed his captain General de bourbon the rebellious dies on the eve of it all and instructed him to take the pope alive or dead and if alive to bring him to Spain and it was erasmus's favorite pupil who happened to be the emperor's Latin secretary who wrote a justification of the sack of Rome which says what a Pity it hadn't been worse because the pope had brought it on himself so do we see and do we see what Henry's psychology is this is a king who had done more for Rome than any other Monarch Henry has got an extraordinarily simple Old Testament morality you scratch my back and I scratch yours and you read the correspondence and fundamentally that is what it's about so there is but I think the background to it all is ironically this increasing proximity because of diplomacy which reduces this this intense sense of rejection hatred once it's denied and of course the knowledge that you know Louis XII with much less of a case have been able to get away with it able to get away with divorce so we need we need a much more realistically rooted approach to this and it seemed to me to be very wonderful that you were basing yourself around the English College where all of this happens where all of these people that I've been talking about wear Langton where urzwick where Bainbridge where Clark all were you were there Bainbridge is lying there that history is history is in Rome barely Beneath Your Feet thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I think David wow the influence says wow and what what you've done so many things what you've done is you've you've colored it uh as you said right at the end where we are now and where we've been with that absolutely Vivid um as if it were all happening yesterday but it was it's only five it's only 500 years ago and of course you've you've Helio and that very interesting distinction that you drew right at the beginning as well between you know well you do the spiritual alignment historian but of course the the distinction between them would be would be wrong to drive to drive the absolute distinction because as we try and engage spiritually we need always to be pulled back from myth-making and over a romanticization with that extraordinary uh historical account that you've given us and if I may say just one final personal reflection of mine uh what makes your delivery so compelling is your extraordinary gift of bringing alive the connection of persons and all the ways in which you've been able to trace for us well so and so was there was a system to him that that I think is is just a tremendous gift now I'm going to ask everyone else to um with what we've heard overnight because we have been squashed to time today and we've got lots of time tomorrow for discussion and reflection and question and continuing of the conversation but of course you can continue the conversation over drinks and dinner and so on and so forth but I think we won't have any formal question time this evening we'll give you a few minutes for another Comfort break or whatever or try and get to Chapel for evening prayer as close to six o'clock as we can and for the mass which will um and then we'll have um supper with Cardinal Casper but David you've just given us the most um exhilarities in the beginning so thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 28,081

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: fW5a6c1gSYY

Length: 66min 56sec (4016 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023