Anna Keay: belief

Transcript context

…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? Well, it’s usually a pretty practical reason. Well, two. One is to do with money, and one is to do with the scale of your court. Henry VIII famously, by the time of his death, had something like 60 palaces. That was partly funded, of course, by the dissolution of the monasteries, which involved the state raking in huge amounts of money, which meant you could build and acquire on a huge scale. Secondly, he had a big family and a big court. You needed to have palaces for the queens, for the Prince of Wales, and for your other offspring and so on. Henry VIII built palaces on a great scale. He then passed the palaces on to his successors, who, to begin with, had inherited a huge patrimony, so the requirement or the need for more buildings had been sated. Also, of course, you go on to a series of singleton sovereigns. Edward VI is, obviously, basically a boy. He never gets beyond his teens. Mary Tudor is an adult woman. She’s married but has no children. Her husband is king of Spain, so he’s not really around very much. Then of course, famously, Elizabeth I is a singleton sovereign, unmarried and with no children. I think a lot of it is about practicality. 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. Why, concretely, do the monarchs wear crowns?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.