 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Glenn Richardson. I'm Professor of Early Modern History in the School of Arts and Humanities at St. Mary's, where I've been for quite a long time now. And I am an historian of what's called by historians the early modern period, more specifically the 15th and 16th centuries. And in broad terms, what I research and what I've been looking into for many years is, monarchy is a system of government as Renaissance monarchy is an idea in early modern Europe. So comparing the way the governments of England, of France, of the region known as the Holy Roman Empire, which is Germany and the central parts of Europe, and more latterly the lands of the Ottoman Turks all functioned. In this period, monarchy was the dominant system of government. It wasn't the only one, but it was the dominant system of government. And my research has always been trying to understand because monarchy is such an alien, notwithstanding our sacred queen, monarchy is such an alien concept in a way. If we really thought Elizabeth II was actually governing the country, we would probably find that rather weird. But there were, there were for thousands of years, many societies not just in Europe, but throughout the world, where that was a perfectly valid system of government and a functioning system of government, in which I would argue probably, here we go, no fewer people were more or less happy about the situation than modern government and modern democracy. I often challenge my undergraduate students to say, if you're an educated person in the 16th century, having gone to university, having a degree, you probably had far more influence actually, real influence in how your society around you was governed because of your education than you do in a modern mass democracy like we have now. By which I mean, I do not defend, you know, monarchy. I'm not a monarchist. I don't want to see the return of the monarchy in any practical sense. But I'm just, my whole kind of teaching and research has been trying to make sense. People don't generally, in my experience, unless they're completely crazy, do things that don't make sense to them. So what do you have to get your head into? What mindset do you have to get your head into in order to understand why monarchy and monarchs functioned effectively as they did for such a long time? I tend to use a lot of audio visual material when I'm lecturing and indeed in my research because I began many years ago, I did my doctorate on, get ready for the snazzy title, what was it called? Anglo-French political and cultural relations in the reign of Henry VIII. Snazzy. And what I was trying to do in that thesis, which was somewhat revisionist, was to sort of get away from this whole idea of diplomatic history where, you know, it was all about ambassadors writing letters and that it had nothing to do with any other aspect of the history of the period. And what I tried to do in my doctorate was to pull in things like evidence of art and architecture of the way people actually behaved, the way they talked to each other, the way they, who they sent to each other, these monarchs, relating to each other, so that diplomacy became more than just signing treaties or negotiating like Theresa May has been doing this morning. For the good of us all, I'm sure. So, and trying to see, therefore, diplomacy in international relations as part of the being, the substance of monarchy. And the two kings who I became particularly interested in and from which everything else is developed were the man you see before you hear, Francis I, the king of France, probably second only to Louis XIV, who most people have heard of, is a patron of the arts and a developer of a kind of conscious sense of French culture. In fact, Louis XIV builds on the lot of what Francis does. And in that single painting, you have, in a sense, the whole system of monarchy in one selfie, as it were, because that's effectively what it is. Here is the king. This is painted by Francois Clouet in about 1526, 27. In the center is the king, painted in the very fashionable clothes of the time. He's a big man. He was about six foot two. But his clothes also accentuate, if you look at the shoulders and things, accentuate the width of his shoulder, all designed to emphasize his power and authority as the central figure in society. You have next to him three boys. They're his three sons. So that alerts us to dynasty, the incredible importance of dynasty and keeping the dynasty going. You can't understand the reign, for example, of Henry VIII, who will come on too shortly, without having a real concept that dynasty is important for the continuity of the country and the family. And family and dynasty link together. So that's his three sons. As it happens, two of them died before they reached full adulthood. He was succeeded by the second son, the man who would become Henry II of France, who had been involved in the French Wars of Religion, married to Catherine de' Medici. On our left side, you have the nobility, members of the nobility, dressed in their finery. That's something which has interested me, how the monarchy actually interacts with people. A lot of modern, everybody thinks that monarchs just sort of said jump and everyone said how high. That's not how it worked at all. It was a constant process of negotiation between the man, or indeed the woman in certain countries like England, who was at the head of the system, trying to contain and keep cooperation between the people who own the land, who had the most money, who they depended upon to do the things that they needed to do. There was no police force, there's no civil service, and you rely on a hierarchical system of society and the nobility have got to be with you. And they expect you to do things for them. Gifts, lands, titles, offices, in return for which they will support you. And if you get that wrong, and quite a few kings did get that wrong, you can end up giving your head cut off. Try Charles the First, or Dun to Death in other ways, Edward II. So it's a very, very fragile system of government, monarchy, particularly in the Renaissance. So there's an ability. They're ostensibly supporting the monarch, but in fact also wanting things from him. On the other side, you have the church, the incredible importance of faith, and the justification, the ideology of monarchy, very much rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West and of course in Islam, in the East with Suleiman. And both systems, the centrality of clergy and the church as a spiritual power house of the monarchy is important. And finally you have the least best-dressed person in the entire room is an academic, yes, poorly paid, and reading his dissertation out to the king. This is one of the scholars at that Francis' court, reading to the king's evident pleasure a translation of a Greek author which he's reading. I don't know what the dog's name is, but he's very nice, got a lovely collar, and that might allude to hunting and all that kind of stuff that monarchs do. So in a sense that's now completely forgotten where I do my little clicky thing. Does that work? It does. So that's Francis and he sort of stands for what's going on. The person with whom he had a very close and competitive relationship was Henry VIII of England. And a lot of what went on in the 1520s and 30s in Europe had to do with the competitive relationship between these two kings. And as I said, that's where I began my research, but probably in the last sort of 10, 15 years, it's sort of gone over to the French side, more than the English side. I won't say very much about Henry. He's a legend in his own lifetime. And there's a reason, all those reasons why everybody knows who Henry VIII is a lot to do with his sense of his monarchy, of what was important. And as I said earlier, the most important thing for him were two things. Firstly, dynasty, securing the succession, which is why he went through all those wives trying to get himself a son, which eventually does, and religion. Henry VIII is a very religious monarch. We think how can he be that? He's been married six times. He's just done people to death and all the rest of it. It's because he's a religious monarch that he does all that. In order to having secured this accession with the birth of his son in 1537, having had to break from Rome in order to do that, his whole second half of his reign focuses on the relationship between worldly monarchy and the church and completely revolutionizes that relationship. So he's quite a significant king for reasons other than that. I'll skip over this. This is just a brief illustration of the hierarchical nature of society, which I've sort of illustrated already with the reference to Francis. That's another picture of the same king by an artist called Jean Clouet, painted in 1526. It's interesting that in this period, although kings could often appear in, like I've just shown you a picture of Henry formally in Parliament, as the queen still does when she opens Parliament each year, most of the time, what they're really trying to project an image of themselves is a kind of hyper-gentleman. So there's no crown, there's no robes of state or anything like that. He is showing you that he is, as he would say himself, the premier gentilm of the kingdom. So he is the first gentleman, the first noble. In other words, cooperate with me, work with me to enforce the law, to ensure the protection and extension of our territories, because that is the duty of monarchy. And I will be to you as a good lord. They have this concept of good lordship. And that, I think, is key to understanding how monarchy actually functions. It's much more cooperative than people imagine. So what essentially are kings meant to do? Well, according to the theorists, I'll come back to him in a second, according to theorists of power, not exclusively, but men like Erasmus of Rotterdam and perhaps more infamously, Nicola Machiavelli. If you read them and half a dozen other theorists of the time, I've argued that Renaissance monarch can really be summarised in three things, that a monarch has to be, and it doesn't matter whether he's a man or a woman, they have to in this society be three things. Firstly, a warrior, that is, to defend and if possibly extend the extent of territory which they and their nobles, upon whom they depend, can profit, either directly by ownership or exploitation of land, trade, whatever. So you've got to be outward looking, whether you're actually at war or doing things that give your country, your kingdom, an international profile, that is the first thing. The second thing is that you have to be an effective governor, that is, you've got to keep the line between competing nobles, you've got to ensure a valid legal system that, with all its faults, functions, and the, because the king or the queen is the fount of justice. It's why even to this day, you know, somebody is charged with something, it's the crown, R versus so and so, because the crown is meant to be the supreme fount of justice in all these societies, whether it's in Islamic Turkey, whether it's in France, Spain, wherever. And the third thing which they have to be is a great patron, that is, to be able to balance the competing interests of all kinds of sectors of society, not just within the nobility, but within the mercantile classes and even at what you might call a lower or ordinary social level. You've got to be able to be seen to be distributing favor, calling on people through their merit or for merit to do things for you and generally keeping the ring in this society which, as I said earlier, has only interpersonal relationships, really, to keep the whole thing together. There's no great formal institutions of formal power. Erasmus wants your king, your European king, to emulate Christ to be, while powerful, still humble, to avoid warfare, to do justice, to be a good boy or girl. And he famously writes a lot about that. Machiavelli is famously, rather less worried about morality, you need to do what you need to do. He's famously said if you want to, he's misquoted as saying, it is better to be feared than loved. The whole sentence is, it is better to be feared than loved, but the good prince will avoid being hated by the people. In other words, if you have to have either being feared or loved, how many was that? Thank you. Then go for it and do what you need to do. But just be careful because you need to avoid being hated by the people. And tyranny, they recognized tyranny as a concept, tyranny will bring revolution, rebellion, etc. and the downfall of your system. One of the characteristics of the period, the person I'm currently working on, is that that complex system I've just been outlining. Almost by necessity, monarchs need friends and helpers. And it's interesting that right across Europe and beyond, in the 16th century, what you might call the the minister emerges, for really for the first time in European history at least, not so much in Chinese or Indian history, but certainly in European history, a great minister of state emerges in all of these countries to try and guide and assist the monarch in what they're doing. And I could give you chapter inverses to who these people are. In the case of Henry, of course, it's the man who's very closely associated with this part of London, namely Cardinal Wolsey, in that his palace, which he built as a country residence to entertain people and as an expression of his power as the minister of the king and also as a papal legate and cardinal of the church, is of course Hampton Court Palace, which is a 10-minute bus ride away if the traffic's all right. I'm writing a biography of him at the moment, trying to sort of make sense of him as neither being a kind of relic of the Middle Ages, which is what a lot of 20th century historians made of him, that he was in an overweight, overpaid, over here, kind of churchman, who was everything that the corrupt church that Henry got rid of was all about. And trying to actually say, well, no, he might be that, but that's not really why he's important. He's important because of the extraordinary skill he's got in being able to manage about five or six portfolios. I mean, if there was a government now, Wolsey would have been Secretary of State, Foreign Secretary, Finance Minister, Treasurer. The whole lot was committed to him. And he was also responsible for England's relations with the Papacy and his whole career was built on telling the Papacy what it wanted to know about England and trying to arrange things for the Papacy and telling Henry that he could get the Papacy to do whatever it wanted to increase his power over the Church in England. That worked brilliantly for about 20 years until the King decides he wants to get rid of his wife, Catherine of Aragon, who is the aunt of the most powerful sovereign in New York, Charles V, and the Pope is not going to do anything to help Wolsey do that. And of course, he falls from power as a result. So he's a really interesting character. I'll pass on to the, oh, look at that. Some of the things which I've been looking at in more recent years is a meeting in 1520 between Henry VIII and Francis I of France and trying to understand what that was about. Huge amounts of money spent in this lavish entertainment, one of each other, really trying to impress and intimidate each other to inter- cooperation and trying to stop being attacked by each other. So, monarchy is a very tricky business. The last two slides I want to show are just because I mentioned Hampton Court. One of the reasons why they build palaces and things like that is because the court, which is the other institution I'm very interested in, it's not just the minister, it's not just the king, it's people who surround them. We began with a slide of what is the court, not judicial court, but the royal court. What kind of institution is it? How does it function? Who holds the keys to what doors? What determines whether you can get close to the king or not? Who can sit with him at lunch? Who can't? All that kind of etiquette and ceremony, which in many ways was seen in the last century is irrelevant and a sort of fripperite, not to do with the reality of power. I think in the 20th and increasingly now in the 21st century we're seeing it as incredibly important and central to understanding of early modern power. So, building buildings to house courts etc. is a very important aspect of a kind of magnificence, a compelling a compelling capacity to support the country is what these buildings are trying to say. Of course, they're very lavish, they're very luxurious, you know, but and I'm not sort of justifying the huge expenditure on them, but I'm trying to understand why they're built as they are and they're built to express power and also as actual machines for government as to see how how you actually work a monarchical system of authority. And my last slide is really probably the one that everybody knows all these monarchs, but they could stand for each and every one of the monarchs I've been studying, but we'll furnish with Henry the very famous portrait of Henry VIII by Holbein with standing with his hands on his hips like that. If you practically anybody in this country and many others, if you just showed them that without telling them anymore, they would know that was Henry VIII. And I think that says something about the importance of artistic, architectural, patronage and communication in the 16th century, which you didn't have, things like printing, etc., which you didn't have in centuries before, which is why, apart from the extraordinary things he does, that period of monarchy in general and his Renaissance monarchy in particular has fascinated me for these 20 odd years. Is that the time? Yes. Thank you.