大象传媒

Magnificence

COLIN BOWLES: I'm just forming some brass sections that will be part of the mount for one of the crowns.

PRESENTER/WILL GOMPERTZ: Colin Bowles has an unusual job.

COLIN BOWLES: The main function of the mount is to project the object into a space.

PRESENTER: He's part of the team responsible for presenting a new look display of the crown jewels.

COLIN BOWLES: Our job is to present the crown jewels in an aesthetically clean, uninterrupted way. The viewer will get a better view of the crown jewels than they have in the past.

PRESENTER: And he's under pressure to get the job done in time for the Queen's celebrations this summer. His brief is quite clear; to make these priceless objects which form part of the Royal Collection look magnificent.

In this programme made to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee I'll be going to the Tower of London to take a look at her diamonds, to see the part magnificence plays in the art of monarchy. After all, kings and queens have always needed to dress to impress. It's what sets them apart, defines their status, makes us believe. But are the silver tables, the golden coach and all that royal regalia, grand and prestigious or vain and vulgar? Have the magnificent objects accumulated by the monarchy over the centuries been acquired on behalf of the nation or at the nation's expense? It is that shiny side of the Royal Collection that I'll be exploring today.

PRESENTER: You cannot be anything other than slightly knocked out by them.

PRESENTER: The very grand.

RUFUS BIRD: This is a table which is made from embossed sheets of silver, so raised decorations ..

PRESENTER: And the tactically prestigious.

JUSTIBN CHAMPION: Charles saw that wealth and value was one way of giving his own monarchy magnificent.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: These things, although trapped inside their glass cases, are not mere historical curios, these are the equipment the Queen needs in order to do her job.

PRESENTER: And helping the Queen do her job is a fundamental role of the Royal Collection, is there to make the monarch look good. The gold plated tableware and the splendid crockery are all part of the show, designed to project status and substance but it also reflects back onto the institution giving us a glimpse into the power, passion and paranoia of some of our most famous rulers.

PRESENTER: Lavish doesn't quite do it justice.

PRESENTER: I'm in the white drawing room at Buckingham Palace.

PRESENTER: The chair is gold, the sofas are gold, the tables are gold, the piano, the grand piano is gold. Everything is gold.

PRESENTER: Magnificence is a term used to describe the practice of associating a sovereign with fine objects and its importance should not be under estimated.

PRESENTER: Then over here in the corner past the gold desk and a couple of other gold chairs and a gold screen and a gold fireguard ..

PRESENTER: As lounges go it must be one of the world's most lavish and bizarre. But then that's George the Fourth for you, more flash than subtle. We'll return to royal interior design shortly, but first something a bit more out there.

ARCHIVE - Queen Elizabeth II Coronation 02/06/53 - 大象传媒 Commentator Mary Malcolm: And now the coach moves. The coach is leaving the Queen's home on the greatest day of her life.

PRESENTER: Close your eyes and think of the Queen on a major royal occasion as she processes up the Mall. It conjures up that classic image of Her Majesty riding in a highly ornate fairytale-like gold state coach. The grand old bone shaker was first pressed into service by George the Third in seventeen sixty two and has been used on numerous state occasions ever since.

ARCHIVE continues: There is no sun out here at the moment but the sun is concentrated in the glorious gold of that lovely coach and in the Queen's smile, serenely happy, radiant, untroubled, as indeed she should be on this wonderful day.

PRESENTER: Very impressive. The gold state coach was the Aston Martin of its day, a classy four ton hand-crafted, technology-led horse drawn carriage which was finished in top of the range metallic gold. It was then decorated with cherubs, crowns, palm trees, lions' heads, tritons, dolphins and finished off with a sumptuous interior lined in blue damask. The coach and horses reside in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace which is where I met Jonathan Marsden, the Director of the Royal Collection.

PRESENTER: The first thing that strikes me about this carriage Jonathan is it is enormous for two people. It must be not far off the size of a London double decker bus.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: Yes it is. It's larger than is strictly necessary. And when George the Third came to the throne it was realised that the old state carriage, state coach had been made for Queen Anne and was not fit for purpose any more so there was a simple requirement. But this more than met the requirement. I mean it went far further than simply replacing the old banger.

PRESENTER: So it's very big, it's very golden, it's very ornate. What was he, what was he saying to the nation?

JONATHAN MARSDEN: The messages it conveys are all about first of all Britannia ruling the waves which she'd been exhorted to do in the seventeen forties. By now, seventeen fifty nine was the great year of naval victories and Britannia well and truly ruled the waves. So we celebrate the naval supremacy of Britain with this chariot which is drawn by these sea creatures blowing conches to announce the arrival of the ruler of the oceans. Interestingly however it is a triumphant image but not in the sense of parading military hardware through Red Square. If you look at the military trophies on each corner of the carriage they're broken and the weapons are put beyond use. They're snapped, the bow strings are slack. So what it's saying is it's proclaiming a new age of peace and what might come from that peace is described in all these paintings around the body of the coach.

PRESENTER: Which makes this piece of vehicular bling much more than a tasty toy fit for a king. It is an historical document, it's like a photograph, capturing and freezing in time a moment of great significance. Britain had a new king and a new attitude. Over to Linda Colley, Professor of History at Princeton University.

LINDA COLLEY: He's coming to the throne in the midst of an extraordinarily large war. In some ways the first global war ever. It's the seven years war. And it's a war in which Britain is tremendously successful, to a quite unprecedented degree. It's a war which sees Britain moving into Northern India, grabbing bits of Africa, taking all sorts of Caribbean sugar islands, moving into Canada, trashing the French at sea. There's a great sense in seventeen sixty of patriotic and nationalistic bravado. And this coach has to be interpreted within that time frame.

PRESENTER: That's him wrapping himself around British triumph. And his statement of Britannia, was that very important to George the Third, being the first Hanoverian king to be born in the country?

JONATHAN MARSDEN: Yes "I glory in the name of Britain" was his famous speech. I'm sure that this was his intent but it was the work of a group of people around him in his household as Prince of Wales for several years I think of Francis Hastings, Lord Huntingdon, and an obscure man called Thomas Hollis who was a journalist and a non-conformist and a wig. His ideas informed all the iconographical paintings on the coach.

PRESENTER: That kind of pomp and ceremony is a way for the King to celebrate Britishness and bind the nation was soon replaced by a more circumspect approach. America had decided it would be better off without the British and the French came to the conclusion they would be better off without a monarchy. Life was looking a little less golden for George the Third. A change of image was required.

LINDA COLLEY: You get a whole tradition of satirical prints showing him wearing ordinary clothes, almost dressed like a yokel in some images and with this emphasis on plainness simplicity. There's still magnificence but the magnificence is linked more to the nation rather than to the monarch.

PRESENTER: A monarchy that was all about the nation and not about the King, now that was a fresh approach and one that would have been totally alien to the ego of Henry the Eighth.

I'm walking into the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. Surrounding the Hall there is a series of stained glass windows which are magnificent but perhaps not quite as magnificent as the tapestries which hang below it. Now I'm joined by Rufus Bird who's the Deputy Surveyor of the Queen's works of arts. Rufus as I understand it they were commissioned or bought by Henry the Eighth and the idea was to project opulence and magnificence to the people who would gather in this hall - heads of state, dignitary - so they just knew what an important chap he was.

RUFUS BIRD: That's right. These tapestries represent the finest of Henry's frankly vast collection of tapestries, many of which were displayed at Hampton Court. And the Abraham Tapestries that we see here are the finest of that set. Some a hundred and fifty years or so later they were valued in the Commonwealth at eight thousand two hundred pounds, the most colossal sum, in fact that was even greater than any picture or any other work of art in the Royal Collection at the time.

PRESENTER: In the fifteen forties collecting tapestries was rather like collecting Jackson Pollocks today. The real players had to have the best examples. And the ten Abraham tapestries are at the very top end. Woven with a high percentage of silk with furlongs of gold and silver thread they are cinema screen scale art works whose aesthetic magnificence was unmatched. Henry would have enjoyed letting the other great imperial houses of Europe know that he was holding this artistic trump card. But there was another aspect to these giant works that appealed to Henry's sense of history as Anna Whitelock, an historian at the University of London explains.

ANNA WHITELOCK: Henry was I think forty six when he had Edward. Abraham also had a son in his older years and so he wanted to draw a parallel between the two and sort of fashion an idea of a sort of patriarchal kingship. I mean this of course is kingship post the reformation so Henry's sort of using religious ideas but in a secular way to present kingship. So it's quite interesting what's happening here.

PRESENTER: Rufus, these tapestries are a piece of overt showing off with Henry the Eighth wanting to demonstrate his wealth and importance to everybody who visited here but also I suspect compete with the Pope.

RUFUS BIRD: Yes the Pope and the other great rulers of the time - Charles the Fifth, Francis the First. They would have had similar sets which are woven with this gilt thread and certainly the Pope and his Acts of the Apostle set with the Rafael cartoon design of similar magnificence. But I think it's the subject matter which is of particular interest. The Abraham story, particularly with the fact that he's aligning himself with Abraham, the fact that he was only answerable to God, not having to answer to some earthly intercessor like the Pope.

ANNA WHITELOCK: It's hard for us to understand when we see these tapestries that they're impressive and they're big but of course they're all very faded. They were bright, bold colours that would completely enliven a room especially if you think about the Great Hall with a big fire in the middle of it and the fire light kind of catching on the gold in these tapestries. I mean it would be the most amazing sight and it really would be Henry completely framed in this amazing theatrical backdrop.

PRESENTER: A king of such exulted status requires a backdrop for his own magnificence and these tapestries certainly do the job. Henry was a master at using culture for making subtle political points, for impressing those at home and abroad with his wealth and taste and for celebrating his own majesty and that of his offspring. He realised very early on that the medium is the message. You could call it the art of monarchy.

A little more than a century later and life was looking at lot less magnificent for the monarchy. Charles the First had the misfortune of becoming the first and only king to be tried and executed by his subjects who in the shape of Oliver Cromwell turned the country into a republic. A few years later the monarchy was restored with Charles the Second becoming King in sixteen sixty. The old desire for the glitz and the glamour was still there was were the inter-European jealousies. But money was in short supply. The tensions and troubles besetting the newly installed king are captured in a story of a small silver table in Windsor Castle that is in the care of the Royal Collection's Rufus Bird.

So I'm just coming into the Queen's Ballroom at Windsor Castle which has kind of got a seventeenth century theme. Along one wall there is six fantastic paintings by Van Dyke. On the other side is a window out into the engine courtyard and then to my right is a silver table. Rufus this is wonderful but totally unusable.

RUFUS BIRD: This is a table which is made from embossed sheets of silver so raised decoration, so of course you couldn't possibly put anything down on it. You have in the centre here a crown with fleur-de-lys and little crosses all of which is quite highly raised. It's pressed through from underneath which gives the impression of this embossed three dimensional type decoration.

PRESENTER: What was the purpose of that because it clearly makes the table useless as a functioning object.

RUFUS BIRD: Purely for display.

PRESENTER: Charles the Second was making a bold statement with this table. He wanted to emulate France's Sun King Louis the Fourteenth who had upped the magnificence stakes by building Versailles. But a monarchial game of keeping up with the Joneses can compromise your position as Andrew Thompson a history fellow at Queen's College Cambridge points out.

ANDREW THOMPSON: I think the silver table's very interesting because it shows the way in which a monarch like Charles the Second who has rather constrained financial resources feels compelled to compete with Louis the Fourteenth who has rather superior financial resources. The slight ironic thing here is that Louis the Fourteenth is financing Charles the Second at this point. So in a sense you could say it's almost Louis the Fourteenth paying for the table as well.

PRESENTER: Justin Champion from the University of London says that if the King wanted to enhance his domestic reputation he needed to at least appear as important as his opulent neighbours.

JUSTIN CHAMPION: Charles the Second restored in sixteen sixty with fiscal sort of basis that were somewhat fragile, used every effort he had to attempt to create an English monarchy along the same styles. And whether it was magnificent buildings in the centre of London, whether it was the classic portraiture representing both himself and the aristocracy in beautiful splendour, Charles saw that wealth and value was one way of giving his own monarchy magnificence.

RUFUS BIRD: The table would have been placed against the wall in a window peer as it is here with windows at either side and below a large mirror. The candles would have reflected into the mirror and of course that would have provided more light and would have course then reflected onto the table's surface to provide that fabulous glitter and shimmer and sense of extraordinary richness and magnificence.

JUSTIN CHAMPION: The diplomatic context of the period is very complicated. The English are constantly fighting the Dutch. What they do not want to do is fight the French because they feel they'll lose. And Charles very, very, very secretly negotiates the so called Treaty of Dover in sixteen seventy with Louis the Fourteenth that promises he will not fight against the French. And I think that's emblematic in some sense of the gap between the public representation of monarchy, Charles the Second wants to be an English Sun King. But also the private complexities that diplomacy in this period forced kings into having these very odd and difficult relationships.

RUFUS BIRD: We're lucky in this country that we have any silver furnishing at all because in France where Louis the Fourteenth had furnished Versailles he had to melt it all down in order to fight.

JUSTIN CHAMPION: If the secret Treaty of Dover between an English protestant king and Louis the Fourteenth the sort of antichrist of Roman Catholic power had been known in Charles the Second's reign it would have probably finished him off.

PRESENTER: So high risk secret deals are part of the art of monarchy. But then magnificence on a budget has never been easy. Unless of course that is the point you were wishing to make.

KENT RAWLINSON: As you sort of cast your eye across the entire sweep ..

PRESENTER: I'm with Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace.

PRESENTER: .. the River Thames. I can't imagine that there is another view in Britain that describes the history of our architecture quite like the one we're currently having. Is that a fair assessment Kent?

KENT RAWLINSON: I think that's true not only of this view but of Hampton Court Palace as a whole. It's basically a textbook of English architecture or I suppose a textbook of English royal architecture.

ANDREW THOMPSON: One of the things that monarchs across Europe in the late seventeenth century are trying to say is they're trying to impress both their allies and their enemies but also their domestic audiences by the size of the palaces that they have.

PRESENTER: Andrew Thompson from Cambridge University.

ANDREW THOMPSON: So there's a real renaissance of palace building in this period. The Austrians build a huge palace at Sch锟絥brunn. There's a large palace built in Berlin at Charlottenburg and of course the palace on which many of these are modelled, Versailles built by Louis the Fourteenth just outside of Paris. William the Third is trying to be impressive in a similar sort of ways to other European monarchs. But of course what he's doing at Hampton Court is much more remodelling rather than building from scratch. So he's saying not only am I trying to compete culturally but also I'm doing this by living within my means so it's not nearly so grand or impressive as some of these other European palaces.

PRESENTER: Why don't you come round here Kate.

KATE HEARD: Yeah.

PRESENTER: I'm at Windsor Castle with Kate Heard, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection. She is showing me a poster sized print of Wren's New Fa锟絘de for Hampton Court which was commercially made to sell to the public.

KATE HEARD: Prints like this are very popular at this period and they're either bought by people who perhaps have seen the East front of Hampton Court and want a record of what they've seen or by people who haven't and can't get to Hampton Court.

PRESENTER: And why the fuss? Why make this print? What's the big deal?

KATE HEARD: Well Hampton Court is suddenly very important from not having been at all important in the seventeenth century. When William and Mary come in sixteen eighty eight they really adopt Hampton Court. They rebuild it or rebuild large parts of it with this lovely, as you see this lovely you know very modern, very forward looking design. The court was moved out to Hampton Court. In seventeen hundred there was a big move out to Hampton Court about the date of this print. So people wanted to know what this building looked like. This was where government was taking place.

PRESENTER: A sense of celebrity about the whole thing.

KATE HEARD: Absolutely. Yes. This is, I mean this is the most important residence in the land in some senses. I mean this is where the King and Queen live so people wanted to know what it looked like. If they couldn't see it themselves they could buy prints like this.

PRESENTER: William the Third's plan was designed to be cost effective but high impact. He was motivated by a political and a religious goal. The plan, to hire the country's leading architect to transform Hampton Court from a Tudor triumph into a protestant palace, an exemplar of good taste and sound husbandry, for an appreciative public to admire. Justin Champion again.

JUSTIN CHAMPION: One of the ways in which William very cleverly remodels some of the legacy of the Stuart regime into a much more protestant sense of what a court is happens at Hampton Court. So for example the entrance to Hampton Court, the main stairway, shows William the Third being represented as a Roman emperor expelling pagan Roman Catholicism from the land. This would be the first thing that any diplomats or visiting officials would have seen. But more importantly at the back of Hampton Court we see a huge representation of William the Third as Hercules, again expelling superstition from the land, representing liberty and virtue and Protestantism. So there's an attempt in one sense to create a new sense of a godly protestant monarch that really drives forward into the eighteenth century. And we, we can still see the legacy of that at Hampton Court today.

PRESENTER: A wonderful building, table, tapestry or coach are nice accoutrements for a monarch, but there again they are all within easy reach of the wealthy. There is though one piece of magnificence that cannot be bought or worn by anybody other than the sovereign and that is the Crown of State. The imperial state crown lives in the Tower of London among the other crown jewels which is where I went to meet Jonathan Marsden, Director of the Royal Collection.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: The point about the imperial state crown is it is absolute tip top of craftsmanship in the sense that these diamonds are held in these precarious open settings so there's nothing behind them, they're just held at the sides and that gives them the maximum chance to perform they possibly could so it is quite obviously the most exquisitely made object that anyone could wear.

PRESENTER: I thought it was a stand out object, its three thousand plus precious stones twinkling at me behind a reinforced glass case.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: In the last hundred and fifty years certain stones have sort of come and gone. The Cullinan diamond only came into the Crown Jewels in the nineteen hundreds so Cullinan two displaced the enormous sapphire known as the Stuart Sapphire which is now on the back of the crown so there has been a little shuffling around occasional as new things arrived. But the major stones have been used certainly on the state crown going back to the time of Charles the Second and some of them, for example St Edward's Sapphire, possibly the Stuart Sapphire were used in earlier crowns as well. The enormous stone in the front in the cross there known as the Black Prince's Ruby also just possibly might have been part of the earlier regalia but is first noted after the restoration. These things although trapped inside their glass cases are not mere historical curios but living working objects. These are the equipment the Queen needs in order to do her job.

ANDREW THOMPSON: There are a wide variety ways of showing majesty but a crown is a very important and potent symbol of doing that and of course it's used not just by monarchs but also the Pope himself has a papal crown as well. It's about a way of differentiating the monarch from the rest of the people by the quality of their head gear and the opulence that that shows.

PRESENTER: The crown is still an object which thousands, millions of people queue up to look at this and if the Queen did the State Opening of Parliament or if a monarch wasn't crowned I sense that would be an issue even today.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: Exactly. The crown is something that seems impossible to get rid of whatever else you do constitutionally. The longevity of the crown is amazing. I mean I think it was you know at least two thousand years of evidence in this country of crown wearing and when there isn't even a monarch as there wasn't during that short interregnum in seventeenth century you somehow couldn't get rid of the concept of the crown.

PRESENTER: Cromwell did.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: Well he did but at the end of his time there was a crown on his coffin.

PRESENTER: It is the ancient symbol of being a monarch but why does it still resonate today? I asked Sir David Cannadine from Princeton University why does royal regalia with all its fairytale connotations continue to beguile and impress?

SIR DAVID CANNADINE: I think it works very well in many ways for the British monarchy to present itself as being in part the descendant of a monarchy which in earlier times was immensely magnificent and I think that the monarchy draws a certain degree of legitimacy from as it were recycling the magnificence of earlier times. I think it's also probably quite a good idea not to be thought to be too magnificent in a democratic nation and that of course was not George the Fourth's world, so that today the monarchy's engagement with culture is patronising the Royal Variety Performance and showing up at the F A Cup Final at Wembley. And so it's moved as it were from in-egalitarian magnificence to democratic culture. And I think in that sense it's repositioned itself rather well and even as it becomes in some sense the embodiment and legitimator of democratic culture as in the Royal Variety Show and the F A Cup Final it can still at the same time draw on this inherited magnificence from an earlier time.

PRESENTER: Magnificence and the monarchy go together like an actor and the stage. All that opulence is there to support, present and contextualise the status of the sovereign. There is an element of suspension of disbelief about the whole thing. It is theatre. But it's played out in the real world with real consequences. The golden coat is designed to engender a binding sense of nationhood with the monarch cast as the lead player while spectacular tapestries create a backdrop against which a king can build a dynasty. A glittering silver table provides a prop for a sovereign and a grand palace, the set in which a king can play a political role. But it is the regal costume that receives the standing ovation. People will queue for hours to see the crown jewels because they want to believe in the magnificence in the monarchy, just as much as the monarchy wants to play the part. And it is that willingness for each party to play their role which is at the core of a successful monarchy. After all we all love a magnificent show.

In the next programme I'll be talking about us, the people, the monarch's subjects and exploring our evolving relationship with a regal institution that was once a dictatorship that now only exists because we want it to.

JONATHAN MARSDEN: The Queen can only choose one sword to do this job and she's chosen this one because it was her father's as Colonel of the Regiment.

PRESENTER: We live in a constitutional monarchy in which the sovereign has much less power but it is still able to elicit a sense of awe.

SIR GUS O'DONNELL: It's incredibly daunting to have your monarch standing over you with a very large sword.

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