The Crown Jewels: The Official Illustrated History

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COWEN: Given how central the 17th century is, in your mind — including disputes over the Book of Common Prayer, does it go to Scotland, James as an absentee monarch — when you look at the disputes today over Scotland becoming independent, how do you see that differently than, say, someone who doesn’t obsess over the 17th century? William Petty was an older man, senior to Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle came to Oxford as a student in his early 20s, but he was rich and had friends. William Petty was already a very well-regarded member of the establishment in Oxford University. He was the older man in terms of experience and in terms of scientific experimentation, which is what was their great obsession. But on the other hand, Robert Boyle was the man with money and with the ability to commission and fund activities and so on. Tradition dictates that after the monarch removes the Coronation Crown, they leave the Abbey wearing the State Crown. Charles II had a new State Crown made in 1661 – which featured 900 diamonds, 549 pearls, 20 emeralds, 18 sapphires and 10 rubies – but about 10 different versions have been made since. Queen Victoria’s once rolled off a cushion at the State Opening of Parliament, leaving it “crushed and squashed like a pudding that had sat down”. The key objects that will be used during the course of the ceremony are those made in 1661 for King Charles II’s Coronation – St Edward’s Crown, the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross, and the Sovereign’s Orb – as well as the 12th century Coronation Spoon and Deft, confident, deeply learned and provocative, underpinned by an extraordinary sense of the landscape and the architecture … Anna Keay traces with fierce intelligence the remarkable and restless lives’ Rory Stewart

Underneath the metal structure is a purple velvet cap, that is trimmed with ermine. The crown weighs in at almost 2.2kg and therefore cannot be worn for long. 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.

COWEN: If we look at most of the Western world, it seems to me that after World War II, there are very few, really very few beautiful new neighborhoods created. A lot of spectacular individual buildings, but it’s very hard to find neighborhoods that are as nice as what was built in the 1890s, the 1910s. Depends on the country, the era. What happened to neighborhood architecture? Why did it so radically decline in wealthier societies?

I think, if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer or named a better successor than his son, Richard, it could have endured. Fundamentally, it was before its time, I would say, and it was not sufficiently deeply rooted. Fundamentally, the people didn’t want a republic even though one was brought about. That meant it was always fragile. Splendid. Plotted like a novel, full of riveting detail, The Last Royal Rebel offers a vivid portrayal of politics in the dynastic age, when bloodlines ruled and accidents of nature swayed the fate of nations’.KEAY: Well, it’s a good question. The Heritage Lottery Fund — actually, I think it’s now called the National Lottery Heritage Fund — receives a significant sum of money each year from the National Lottery, which was set up in the ’90s to fund various things, including a lot of sports, including a lot of community work. It’s very broadly based. a b c d e f g h i j k l Lister-Kaye, Hermione (13 June 2014). "Anna Keay on India, motherhood and the Duke of Monmouth". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 7 April 2017. But so much of the work that is done through that program is amazing. Grassroots work, for example, in the town I live in, King’s Lynn — the local Fisher Folk Museum, which documents the lives of the fishing people of that town through generations: their livelihoods, their communities, their way of life. That wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Lottery Heritage Fund. That seems, to me, to be a wonderful thing and something that we should be really proud of. It’s incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. We look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished — wonderful country houses, we’ve mentioned. It’s fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world, built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the ’60s, regretted forever since. That means that when William the Conquerer became the first of now 40 monarchs to be crowned at Westminster Abbey almost a century later, he was already following an old-fashioned ritual, and “by the time of, say, Henry VIII, it was incredibly ancient,” says Keay, who is director of the Landmark Trust. “The objects with which the king was being invested would have seemed very, very archaic even then.

Solomon is made king, wood engraving, 1884. Edgar’s anointing with oil was a self-conscious invocation of the Old Testament anointing of King Solomon. Photograph: The Granger Collection/Alamy We can see lots now that we say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. This is not how society works.” But we didn’t experience what they experienced. I actually have real respect for a lot of that. I think a lot of things that were done . . . I’m going tomorrow to see a place somewhere called Letchworth, the world’s first garden city, which was planned and laid out north of London in the 1910s, which was completely about saying we’ve got to design a new world. Grounded in mastery of a formidable archival record . Keay displays a gift for eye catching detail, complemented by knowledgeable explanations . Her enthusiasm is infectious. But it is really stark. I don’t know the answer to it. I think there are observations I would make. One, I would say that the idea of the philanthropic neighborhood development scheme has really gone, but there was a lot of that that happened in the late 19th, early 20th century, with landowners — and also company directors, and so on — doing things that were going to be beautiful.You can add into the mix the extent to which you see — and there are obviously people who did — on top of those more practical issues, building as a way of expressing your status. If we think of somebody like Louis XIV in France, it’s clear that over and above any of those practical requirements or questions of means, the magnificence of the monarch, and therefore of the institution of monarchy and so on, was something that he realized and expressed in buildings on a massive scale. KEAY: Well, I think this is such a good question because this is, to me, what the study of history is all about, which is, you have to think about what it was like for that generation. You have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and ’60s, who had experienced, either firsthand or very close at hand, not just one but two catastrophic world wars in which numbers had been killed, places had been destroyed. The whole human cost of that time was so colossal, and the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn’t going to be killing one another at all time. I think he was well placed to advise on the business of running Ireland. He wouldn’t have been good at doing it himself. Had Henry Cromwell — to whom he gave this advice, and who had been given the job by his father, Oliver Cromwell, of governing Ireland — had he been given more time to do that, I think it could have been very successful. But it was very short-lived because when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, Henry Cromwell lost his position, effectively.

Neither the anointing with oil, the most sacred religious part of the rite, nor the solemn coronation oath are really necessary, says Bob Morris of the Constitution Unit at University College London. “If you don’t swear the oath, nothing happens,” he says. “There are no penalties if you don’t swear it. In that sense it was, from the beginning, symbolic.”Substantial …. The strength of this admirable biography is that it makes the reader consider Monmouth from Monmouth’s point of view, without the benefit of hindsight. Here is Monmouth, and here is his world. It is a considerable achievement’ 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. COWEN: Did the income tax and estate tax lead to the end of the era of great country homes? Because all of a sudden, they became a lot more expensive, right? The carrying costs are suddenly much higher.