It feels like that has really diminished in the world of either the state does it, and they’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible, or developers do it, and they have another reason to do it as cheaply as possible. I agree, it’s something to really regret. It’s something we have to decide we care about, or we’re not going to make it any better.

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. I’m just not at all convinced by those arguments myself. I think religion was a very, very strongly held factor in people’s lives. You read contemporary diaries and so on, and it really is clear that people felt very strongly that wherever they were on the spectrum between absolutely 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. I don’t mean that it was the only factor, but to treat it as somehow a cover for other motives is to do a disservice, I think, to the people of the age. KEAY: Yes. William Petty is a scientist and an economist, as we would term it now. He went to Ireland as a doctor. Because he had this very brilliant brain and analytical scientific mind, he diagnosed what he saw as not so much the problems, but as the nature of Ireland. How many people lived there, how many had been dispossessed by the wars and conflict of recent times. 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. Charles II’s immediate successors were both crowned with the St Edward’s Crown - James II in 1685 and William III in 1689. But as royal tastes and fashions changed, it was not worn again in coronations for more than 200 years.Edward VIII was never crowned. William IV didn’t want to be and had to be persuaded against his will. Even Edgar had been king of the English since 959, waiting 14 years to summon the religious leaders to crown him in Bath – perhaps to mark his newly “imperial” status as ruler of several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, according to the historian Roy Strong. In modern times, meanwhile, no other modern European monarchy still has a coronation – their kings and queens simply get on with it.

A much-needed insight into the different perspectives and experiences that informed the Interregnum … Keay offers us a world turned upside down; but also a world made real. That’s a remarkable achievement’ Adrian Tinniswood, The Sunday Telegraph ***** Massie, Allan (2 August 2008). "The kingly touch of Charles II". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 6 November 2014. Review 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. 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/AlamySimilarly, if you look at the late 17th century with baroque buildings, and then you look at the design, for example, of our Crown Jewels, which were made — most of them — in the late 17th century, you see common motifs in terms of decoration, in terms of floral devices, in terms of the massing of objects, and the relationship between different elements. Keay grew up in a remote home in the West Highlands, the daughter of authors John Keay [1] and Julia Keay. [1] She is the granddaughter of Conservative politician and former chief whip Humphrey Atkins. [2] The Elizabethan Tower of London: the Haiward and Gascoyne Plan of 1597. London: London Topographical Society, 2001

But it happens to have come to pass that, actually, that seems to be quite a satisfying separation. There’s something about the apolitical nature of the monarchy, and how incredibly careful they have to be about that in a world where everything seems to endlessly be in turmoil in terms of electoral politics and so on, to have a certain sense of reassurance about it. 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. COWEN: Very simple question: What’s the most plausible 17th-century scenario where England remains a republic ongoing? 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.Keay skilfully navigates the reader through the complex history of the 1650s … It is a remarkable achievement, broad-ranging in both geographical and intellectual scope and impressively even-handed in its judgements’ Edward Vallance, Literary Review Westminster Abbey in London, ahead of the coronation of King Charles III. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/PA There are buildings up and down the country where they’re busy putting in farm shops and glamping, which is a very big thing in the UK, and amazing eco projects, and so on. The taxation system and 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 growth of taxation. And that definitely, particularly in the mid-20th century, took a big toll on landowners and big houses. 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.

Keay married fellow historian Simon Thurley in 2008. The couple have fraternal twins, Arthur and Maude, born in 2009. [2] [4] They live in London and Norfolk. [8] Awards and honours [ edit ] COWEN: It seems Petty understood Ireland pretty well, and he had some sympathies for Ireland. 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 this external elite, which is then going to lead to trouble?Robert Boyle learned from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the 1650s, which was utterly revolutionary, really, which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation.