The Crown Jewels: The Official Illustrated History

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Brilliant and revelatory . Anna Keay has written a superb biography, which paints a vivid picture of the times and of her subject. She has an instinctive feel for character and place, and combines elegant prose with a novelistic gift for narrative. The White Tower, Edward Impey, ed.. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. The castle from 1485 to 2000. This has a real sort of mirror in the 17th century, during the Civil War in the 17th century. There’s a real feeling that something had to be done. Otherwise, God was going to strike down this nation, this errant nation. I think for that generation in the ’50s and ’60s, the sense that we simply have to do things differently because this pattern of life, this pattern of existence, this way we’ve operated as a society has been so destructive. Of course, this is an age where, until now, really, the job of anyone who we would consider to be a scientist in modern terms was to read the works of classical antiquity and to understand what Aristotle, or whoever it was, had said about the nature of the world. It was a new dawn. Boyle learned from Petty an approach, I suppose, to inquiring and looking for yourself to understand — from how things behaved when you cut them or inflated them or exposed them to light — what the properties of the world were. Charles II and the reconstruction of monarchy’ in Marcello Fantoni, George Gorse and Malcolm Smuts,eds., The Politics of Space: Courts in Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 1500-1750. Bulzoni, 2009

KEAY: Well, you could say that. But of course, there is a kind of counterfactual parallel because in what’s now the Netherlands — what was then called the United Provinces — there had been a revolution, sometimes called the Dutch Revolt, that had happened 100 years earlier in the 1560s, which had both rejected Catholicism and rejected monarchy. It became something that was governed by a series of states that had some institution called the States General where their representatives met.I think that it’s very important for all of us who care about this stuff to remind ourselves and remind each other about the things you can do that enable you to keep your beautiful windows, but also to make sure that you are not wasting energy. KEAY: Well, it’s an interesting point. I think, if you’d ask that question of a lot of historians working a generation or two ago, they would have said it’s all about economic forces. It’s all about the class struggle, if you like. I don’t think that’s my view. COWEN: You don’t think they’re a net force one way or the other? Because they do slow down legislation. They slow down change. It’s part of being — Whereas, if you go — equally interesting, but just very different — somewhere like Manchester, which is amazing — world’s first industrial city, had this extraordinary explosion in the 19th century. The railways were invented there. Everything was developing in a very different direction. So, one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between the fashion of the moment and things which we are going to regret, or our children or our grandchildren are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about, not considered.

George V also chose to wear the crown and had the stones set permanently, including dozens of aquamarines. Although, personally, I would be very sad to see the end of the union and very sad to see a breaking apart between England and Scotland, if you think about the 17th century, it does really underscore how much independent identity has always been there in those two nations, and how long a history each had before they became a whole. KEAY: Well, you don’t miss something that’s not there. I think it’d be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren church wasn’t worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. There are things which are clearly of much less interest or were poorly built, which are not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. To me, it’s all about assessing what matters, what we care about. KEAY: Well, yes, you could do that. You could do that, but I’m not sure where it gets you, really. Then you start saying, “Well, what about all the other things?” Do you go for a massive repatriation? You’d empty a lot of museums, and I’m not sure you’d solve a lot of problems, really. It’s been there for a long time.Charles Farris, public historian for Historic Royal Palaces, says the fact that this crown is reserved for the moment of crowning itself is immensely significant.

COWEN: It seems there are some monarchs — they don’t do much in the way of building palaces: Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth. Is that just random, or is there some systematic political economy reason why some monarchs are building palaces and others aren’t? Putting on a crown – a custom seen in diverse cultures from antiquity – has always been a useful way of asserting that it was you, not someone else, who was in charge in a period before these things were automatically long settled by primogeniture, notes Morris.

That is not the same as asking what the point is of the monarchy – because even kings and queens, in the strictest terms, don’t need coronations at all. Placing a crown on Charles’s head or anointing him with oil won’t make him the king – legally and constitutionally he has been doing the job since the moment his mother died last September. KEAY: Well, I don’t know. I’m not enough wired into the way the system works, but I think there needs to be a clear national policy of exploring that. And then there needs to be the will and the resources for local government to demonstrate that they have exhausted those possibilities before permission is given for new builds in many cases. But he wasn’t a person who had any experience of governing a place. He was hopeless with people. He was rude and abrasive and direct and would tell them that they were ignorant and absurd, in which he may well have been right. But as we know, in society, governing a place — it doesn’t necessarily work well if you tell . . . So, I don’t think he was temperamentally in any position to be a good governor. KEAY: Well, yes, not a stupid answer. I think the answer is, it was really, in my view, overwhelmingly about religion. There’s a historian who works on this period who talks about it and says you shouldn’t think of it as a revolutionary war. It’s really one of the last wars of religion. That was the biggest of the issues. There was a related secondary issue about the extent of royal power. That was in the mix, but it wasn’t the first issue.