Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithT Tyler .com Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am honored to be here with Anna Kay. Anna is truly a British institution. She is director of Landmark Trust, an architectural historian, historian of the Crown Jewels, an expert in 17th century history, a TV personality, and I'm a big fan of her latest book called The Restless Republic Britain Without a Crown.

0:51Anna, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Very simple question. What's the most plausible 17th century scenario where England remains a republic ongoing? Well, it could easily have happened and I think a lot of people have forgotten that there was a revolution in the British Isles and it was a republic for 10 years. But I think the trouble was really that it's a classic situation where there was a lot of unhappiness with what had been the case the monarchy, but the formulation of a stable republic had yet to be worked out. I think if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer or named a better successor than his son Richard, it could have endured.

1:29But 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. And so that meant it was always fragile. Would there have been a way without a crown to have put a lid on all the religious disputes? Wouldn't they have just simmered, led to more civil wars, and some kind of consolidation into autocratic power. And in that sense, there is no counterfactual where the republic just keeps on running. 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 revelation, sometimes called the Dutch revolt, that had happened in 100 years earlier in the 1560s, which had both rejected Catholicism and had rejected monarchy, and it became something that was governed by a series of states that the institution called the States General where they represent it is met.

2:22So it wasn't so much that religious turmoil and republicanism were irreconcilable, but in the case of England, the revolution, the throwing off the monarchy didn't have sufficient buy -in from the political nation, let alone the nation as a whole. It was really brought about by an army coup. So I think that meant for it was fragile and It was also linked to a kind of strong view held by a minority and very much represented in the army that a kind of very strictly Puritan regime was what was needed and I think that was kind of incompatible with the sort of peaceful set of circumstances because it wasn't widespread enough So yeah, but I mean you're right, which is these kind of actual avenues you kind of do take you into so many other What ifs that it becomes a bit fruitless after a while?

3:08And even simpler question, if the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn't about having a republic, what exactly was it about? What's like the stupid answer to that question? Well, yes, not the 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 kind of revolutionary war. It's really one of the last wars of religion. And so that was the biggest of the issues. There was a sort of related secondary issue about the extent of royal power. So that was in the mix, but it wasn't the first issue.

3:44Really, it was about Charles I who was the king who was being fought against by the Parliamentarian forces, wanted English religion, wanted the Protestant religion of England to be more elaborate, more like Catholicism in terms of the way it was performed and liturgy and so on. And that was something that was anathema to a lot of very sort of committed protestants, and that in that tension. How much of that was sincere belief, and how much was that simply a kind of arbitrary marker that different interest groups struggling for power fixed upon, and actually the civil war is about the interest groups struggling for power?

4:21It's an interesting point. I think if you'd ask that question of a lot of historians working a generational tour, they would have said, it's all about economic forces, it's all about the cloud struggle, if you like. I don't think that's my view. I think as we live in such a secular age and I would say in the UK much more so than in the States where really you know church going and religious conviction is very much a minority perceived so to to reimagine ourselves or to imagine the world of 17th century England where religion is such a strong force It involves a kind of mental leap that I think sometimes people have been reluctant to do and I think in terms of historians working on this period particularly in the mid -20th century really influenced actually by Marxist approaches to understanding the past.

5:07It was all seen as well this is the rise of this class, this is the this is the mercantile urban you know sort of strand of society trying to assert authority to climb the ladder and so on and I I just not at all convinced by those arguments myself I think religion was very very strongly held factoring people's lives and you read contemporary diaries and and so on, and it really is clear that people felt very strongly that wherever they were on the spectrum between a sort of absolutely kind of Calvinist Puritan or a Catholic in terms of the range that was around at the time, that personal conviction about what was right was really, really a big factor.

5:46So I don't mean that it was the only factor, but I think to treat it as somehow a cover for other motives is to do a disservice, I think, to the people of the age. 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? Then say someone who doesn't obsess over the 17th century. Well, I think the first thing is, I mean, first of all, I have to declare an interest because I am a I was born in Bortappan, Scotland.

6:21But I think that if you're interested in the 17th century, the kind of additional perhaps emphasis or lens that it gives you. It's first of all the memory of how the union came about in the first place. Great Britain, the unit was only in our historical time depth, relatively recent creation. I mean, it was there for a long time, 300 years, whatever it was, or is. But of course, what happened was that a sovereign exceeded to two kingdoms. And this happens quite often, historically. I mean, it happened quite often with other kingdoms in or countries in British history. So William III was the king of Great Britain and Ireland, but he was also the overlord of what's now the Netherlands.

7:02George I was the electropanover. And none of these things involved a political union. They were just two countries that happened to share his offering. And so that's the reason why, of course, although England and Scotland have been part of Great Britain as a political union since 1707, it was never a complete one. The legal systems have always been completely separate, completely distinctly education systems, much else besides. So 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. I do think 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.

7:45What did Robert Boyle learn from Sir William Petty? Well, this is the real, like, quick fire questions. What did Robert Boyle learn from Petty? Okay, so Robert Boyle obviously was as a young Irish nobleman was a student of the New Science in the 17th century. And William Petty was also, they came from very different backgrounds. So Robert Boyle had been brought out his son of an Irish nobleman in Great Comfort and Granger in Ireland and you know Silverspoon in his Marcent Silks to wear and William Petty had been born the son of a very poor clothier in a town on the south coast of England and they met both in Oxford and in Ireland in the 17th century, mid 17th century and they were both, I mean William Petty was an old man senior to Robert Boyle, Robert Boyle came to Oxford as a student in his early 20s but he was really rich and had friends and William Petty was already a very well regarded member of the establishment in Oxford University.

8:43So he was the kind of older man in terms of experience and in terms of scientific experimentation, which was their great obsession. But on the other hand, Robert Boyle was the man with money and with the ability to commission fund activities and so on. So I think Robert Boyle learnt from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the middle of the, in the 1650s, which was usally revolutionary, really, which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation. They were a group who would form the royal society when it was reformulated in the early 1660s and at William Petty's rooms on the high street in Oxford, rooms that still exist.

9:25This group of men gathered Christopher Ren was among them and they carried out experiments. And so, Boyle learned from William Petty, all sorts of things about the circulation of the blood, about vacuums, about the different characteristics of the human organs, all sorts of things. Because they had these amazing, broad areas of inquiry, and of course this is an age where, until now, really, the job of anyone who we were considered 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.

10:03So it was a new dawn and boil, learnt from petty, unapproach, I suppose, to inquiring and looking for yourself to understand from how things behaved when you cut them or inflated them or expose them to light what the properties of the world were. It seems petty understood Ireland pretty well and he had some sympathies for Ireland. And if he had been allowed to simply rule Ireland unconstrained, could he have done much better? Or is the actual problem one that there's simply no way you can rule Ireland at all without cementing in the sex -turnally elite, which is then going to lead to trouble? Yes, so William Petty is a scientist and an economist, as we would term it now, and he went to Ireland as a doctor.

10:44And because he had this very brilliant brain and analytical scientific mind, he kind of diagnosed what he saw as the not so much the problems but as the kind of the nature of Ireland. How many people lived there? How many had been dispossessed by the war wars and conflict of recent times? And he undertook this remarkable business of mapping Ireland as part of the redistribution of land, which was an extraordinary and horrific undertaking in many ways. But he wasn't a person who had an 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 sad.

11:25In which you may well have been right, but as we know in society governing a place doesn't necessarily work well if you tell. So I didn't think he was temperamentally in any position to be a good governor. What he absolutely was was somebody who saw past because it didn't interest him, prejudice and sort of traditional English dislike of the Irish because he was interested in things empirical and he'd also been trained by Catholics and so he didn't share most English people's horror of Catholics. And so I think he was well placed to advise on the business of running Ireland. He wouldn't have been good at doing it himself and had Henry Cromwell to whom he gave this advice and who had been given the job by his father all of a Cromwell of governing Ireland.

12:04Had he been given more time to do that, I think it could have well have been very successful, but it was very short lived because when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, Henry Cromwell lost his position effectively. And so the period of time when William Petty and Henry Cromwell were together working on the business of the reconstruction of Ireland was very short. But I think the evidence is there, aspirations for at the Andrew University, you could make it this great forward -looking nation that could be, you know, kind of model for modernity, could potentially have been very productive. It seems there are some monarchs.

12:38They 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 scale of your court. So Henry VIII famously, by the time of his death, had something like 60 palaces. But that was partly funded, of course, by the dissolution of the monasteries, which involved the government breaking and state breaking in huge amounts of money which meant you could build and acquire on a huge scale.

13:11And secondly, he had a big family and a big court. So you needed to have palaces for the Queens because they were separate palaces for Queens for the Prince of Wales and for your other offspring and so on. So Henry VIII built palaces on a great scale. He then passed their palaces onto his successors who to begin with and inherited a huge patrimony so they didn't you know the kind of requirement or the need for more buildings was had been stated. But also, of course, you go into a series of singleton sufferings. So, about the sixth is obviously basically a boy. He never gets beyond his teens. Mary Tudor is an adult woman, but she's married but has no children, and her husband is King Spain, so he's not really around very much.

13:47And then, of course, famously, Elizabeth I is a singleton sovereign on married and with no children. So, I think a lot of it is about practicality. But there's also, you know, 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. And so 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 realised and expressed in buildings on a massive scale.

14:24Why concretely do the monarchs wear crowns? Well, it's an interesting point because of course, they're actual practical jobs that a crown does. Sure. And it could be a sector where there's many different symbols of status. You could info a choir crown. Well, of course, there are also all those other symbols of status. So there are several sectors as an orb, there are spares, there's rings, there's a whole wardrobe of regalia as it's known. But essentially, it's about the echoing with this amazing sense of continuity of what was done by your ancestors and back to the kind of origins of your institution.

14:57So it's very interesting that if you look at images of monarchs within Britain going right back into the early middle ages, they all are wearing a ceremonial thing on their head. And then even if you look outside, you know, you look outside the British tradition, you see it in other nations, you see it in other traditions which are complete, which had no connection and no kind of interaction, for example, in traditional African societies where you see headdresses in the wearing of some ceremonial thing which denotes a person as being other than there's around the more important more special elevated.

15:29You see it in the archaeology, I mean the earliest English crayons I've been excavated from Iron Age graves, so this is before the advent of the written word. I mean there seems to be a kind of an almost sort of anthropological sort of universality of the idea that you're doing something special on your head as a way of setting you apart, but it also is you know it is very very clearly monarchs doing it because their predecessors do it and we see it in the middle ages, Henry III, who was of great long -lived and successful medieval monarch, really lionized his predecessor by several generations, but the confessor who'd been canonized by the Catholic Church, so it was a saint and had the graves were opened of previous monarchs, crowns which had been buried with the Morgoth out and so on.

16:09And of course for all monarchies, nowadays it's very sort of, we have a essentially a ceremonial monarchy in this country, but when you trace them back to a time when Monix actually had executive power, always the challenge was how did you pass it on to your children? How did you make sure that on your desk, although you might be a powerful and successful king, that soon as you die, all your enemies come in and grab everything. And so you have to create this sense that somehow it isn't just about you and your body and when you're dead, it's over, that there's some continuity, there's some kind of heredity that carries your, you know, aura and power and ability to command down through the generations.

16:46And anointing is part of this, which is a big thing, this is kind of business of a sort of holy endorsement of your line, but also the passing on of all these objects, which when you breathe your last on your deathbed is still there and attention can be drawn to them and then they're put on the head of your successor and your aura passes to him or her. So it's a very, it's an interesting cocktail of history, an anthropology and sociology anyway. Why is the British monarchy so extremely successful as a global institution, including in the United States. So Elizabeth passed, many people said, oh, this is the end of the line.

17:21That seems clearly untrue. The thing is just going to continue. It's extremely popular. It draws a wide spectrum of interest. What's the marketing genius behind what's going on? Why is it so well -known? You look at the royal families of Netherlands and Norway. They can speak English, but no one seems to care. Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I guess it's probably a cocktail of things. I think I suppose the kind of balance that's been struck between the non -executive head of state in the form of the monarch and the executive in the form of the government of prime minister and so on. But without dialing down much of the the bling and the splendor and the ceremony of the monarchy even though the power has gone has turned out to be a very successful formulation.

18:04So it's interesting because I don't know that it would necessarily have been obvious that that would have worked, you know, there might have been a feeling that it would be absurd to continue to have all these palaces and grounds and state coaches and all this kind of stuff when you're looking at something which is, you know, fundamentally part of the kind of ritual of state, but it doesn't actually exercising any kind of executive authority. But it happens to have kind of come to pass that actually that seems to be quite a sort of satisfying separation and there's something about a political nature of the monarchy and incredibly careful, they have to be about that.

18:39That in a world where everything seems to endlessly be in turmoil in terms of electoral politics and so on, to have a certain kind of sense of reassurance about it. I also think that it changes. I mean, I think if you've been talking about the success of the monarchy 30 years ago, it might have been a different conversation. I think there have been moments where the monarchy has felt very successful, others where it's felt more fragile. And then I suppose you have to layer into that, the fact some quite practical things like like the monarchy in this country is in an Anglophone country. So the language is spoken and the kind of traditions, Anglis accent traditions, if you like, have a certain kind of familiarity around the world, which makes a connection.

19:16Obviously also, I mean, long past now, but the sort of skeleton, if you like, of a monarchy which was once an empire that stretched around the world still has kind of connections and associations that makes the British monarchy of interest in places where the Swedish monarchy might not be as it were. So, your director of Landmark Trust, how should we, as outsiders, think about where the revenue comes from? How does it work financially? So, we're a charity, historic building charity. Our job is to rescue historic buildings that are in a derelict or in a bad way, to raise the money to restore them.

19:51And then we rent them out for people to stay in. So we have 200 buildings across the whole of the British Isles, castles and dairies and lighthouses and all manner of things, forts, artillery, forts. And we are self -financing. So the money that runs the charity comes from letting the building. So if you were to, if you were to, for you make money. Well, we don't, we generate money, yeah, but then we're back into the mission of the institution. And we part back in, if you were staying in London this week and you weren't staying in the smart hotel, you could be staying in a silk workers house in the East End built in 1707 or John Benjamin's own apartment, which is in Clark and Wale, both of which we own.

20:27And it would be staying in a wonderful, historic building, sleeping comfortable beds and everything. But as well as your money being a way of paying for your state, it also helps us to run our charity and then to go on into a choir more buildings that are with otherwise belost. And we have this amazing stock of buildings in this country. Do you grade your renters the way say Airbnb does or does anyone can come in and say the kids? We love them all. We love them all and we don't grade them. If you did something really awful, like you know, made a pile of adventure and set fire to it. We might not rent you another building, but we don't grade them.

21:00We are open to everybody. And we, as I say, we're a charity. So we don't price ourselves in a way that makes us available, any to the super rich. All sorts of people come and stay in our buildings. And anyone can do it. You just go on our website, lambartrust .org .uk, and you can choose from any number of wonderful follies and mini castles. We just finished restoring an amazing cast in the Inverness for people who go to Scotland maybe following their own routes. Beautiful building built in 1550, which had no roof and no floors until two years ago and we raised the money through people giving money philanthropically and also through grants and so on to re -roof at reflore it, put heat and power in and now you can have your own castle for the weekend.

21:41Is it socio -economic status that in essence stops your renters from trashing the places? Because if Airbnb had no star system, I would be quite worried, right? Whereas presumably you have an hour or a set of renters. If not higher in income, higher in education or historic understanding. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a sort of self -selecting group of people and I think the nature of our buildings, I think your right, which is that on the whole people go to them because they're really interested in that kind of thing and so it would be a counterinsured thing to crush it. You know, occasionally have people who make a bit of a mess but it's pretty rare and I think people respond to somewhere that feels really special and that you know is run by a charity and looked after with great care and there's a nice member of staff who keeps you the key or you know gets in contact with you.

22:25So I don't know, I think people's good nature and recognition I suppose of the specialness of what they're experiencing is pretty good, pretty good kind of force for keeping the behaving themselves. 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? Yes. costs are certainly much higher. Yes, it was definitely a big factor at the rise of inheritance tax, very so the land tax is. I mean, it didn't bring an end to them. You don't need to go very far in this country to see that, you know, that - But many more turned over to groups like Landmark Trust, right?

23:02Yes, yeah, it's true. And you know, a lot of them were sold off the interior stripped out. A lot of the interior sold to the states, actually. The very interesting phase in the history of British country houses really in the first sort of 20, 30 years of the 20th century, where there has to I live in this happened to, whole rooms, beautiful paneling from the Tudor period, prized off the walls, put in packing cases, and dealers would sell them to the kind of round -off hosts of the world who were recreating an idea of old Europe in new buildings. So there were a series of factors at play, I think it was to do, but also to do with the the first World War, I mean the extent of the death child taken by the first World War, the impact that had on these great states in terms of the workforce, not just of the owners of the houses, but also the people who were working on the estates was enormous.

23:50So it did make for a big shift, but I mean there's something called the Historic Houses Association in the UK which is a kind of club, sort of a trade association for people who are private owners of big historic houses and open them to the public or do public events and they have an annual conference and if you go to, you really wouldn't think the English or British country has is in trouble. I mean, there's thousands of people there and their buildings up and down the country where they're busy, you know, putting in farm shops and, you know, glamping, which is a very big thing and the UK and amazing, you know, kind of eco -projects and so on.

24:25So the taxation system and the kind of essentially the rise of the state as an institution that needed resources to be able to fund things like universal healthcare, which is obviously a wonderful thing, required the kind of growth of taxation and that definitely, particularly in the mid -20th century, took a big toll on landowners and big houses. Given the standpoint of your job, how is it you think differently about, say, a wealth tax? I don't know. I do think differently about a wealth tax. But it's encouraging the creation and maintenance of the asset you're dedicated to popularizing and preserving, right?

24:57Well, not necessarily. I mean, a lot of people who have big historic houses, I mean, a lot of them have them in charitable trust and do things which mean there is public benefit more generally from them and the various sorts of, I mean, it depends what sort of wealth tax on how it's calculated the basis of it is. But I think there are lots of ways you could formulate something that didn't penalise those who were clearly taking a very kind of responsible attitude to historic buildings. I also think that sometimes too much money is an absolute killer of historic buildings. You see the absolute to re -enation of wonderful buildings in, for example, the wealthy parts of London, where every corner has been stripped out, the plaster has been hacked off to be redone every 10 years by the next owner and all character and patented has been lost for them.

25:42So I think there's something to be said for poverty as a preserve or as well as wealth. Should Britain fund heritage through lotteries, which are generally regressive, right? They don't offer fair odds, poor people by the tickets. That does happen in this country She's probably there. Well, it's a good question. I mean, so 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 sport, using a lot of community work.