There’s a wonderful place up near Liverpool called Port Sunlight, which was all laid out by a great industrialist — absolutely the most beautiful place that you could imagine — for people who would be working for him. There’s something about the aspiration of beauty and a sense of responsibility for creating it. It’s not that they aren’t great people. A lot of them are; they’re wonderful people. But to me, it’s an utterly absurd basis on which to involve somebody in the process of legislation.

KEAY: 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. KEAY: [laughs] Oh, that’s a very funny question. I didn’t know that they did. Do houses in the States have lots more storage?KEAY: Except that they’re from a pool, all of whom are hereditary. When the House of Lords reform happened in 1997 or thereabouts, it was a compromise. Instead of all the hereditary peers being able to sit in the House of Lords, they said they’ll only be a hundred, and they can nominate among themselves who they are. But it seems to me absurd that there should be a hundred. I mean, they’re all men, apart from anything else. KEAY: I think it is The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I think it’s just an amazing novel. It really, really bears rereading. It’s less fashionable now than it was maybe 20, 30 years ago, but it is tremendous. He wrote some pretty creepy other novels, one called The Collector, which I wouldn’t particularly recommend, amazing though it is. I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman, as a love story and as a dialogue with Victorian literature, is peerless. In her book The Crown Jewels, historian and Director of the Landmark Trust Dr Anna Keay describes St Edward’s Crown as, “essentially a very simple structure. Gold elements – the headband, the crosses and fleurs-de-lys and arches – were bolted together to form the frame of the crown. The settings for the jewels were then fixed through this frame from behind. Each gem was held in place by a gold collar, with the stones set in clusters surrounded by white enamel mounts in the form of acanthus leaves.”

It’s incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. We look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished — wonderful country houses, we’ve mentioned. It’s fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world, built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the ’60s, regretted forever since. COWEN: An even simpler question: If the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn’t about having a republic, what exactly was it about? What’s the stupid answer to that question? Massie, Allan (2 August 2008). "The kingly touch of Charles II". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 6 November 2014. Review Neither the anointing with oil, the most sacred religious part of the rite, nor the solemn coronation oath are really necessary, says Bob Morris of the Constitution Unit at University College London. “If you don’t swear the oath, nothing happens,” he says. “There are no penalties if you don’t swear it. In that sense it was, from the beginning, symbolic.” KEAY: I’m trying to save an amazing building outside Edinburgh, a house called Mavisbank, which was built in the 1720s for a man who was one of our great renaissance figures, the great pioneer of the Scottish Enlightenment. It’s the most beautiful, beautiful house. It’s derelict, just walls standing, but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in, and it’s clinging onto life by its fingernails. My great hope for what I’m doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse.

It did make for a big shift. But there’s something called the Historic Houses Association in the UK, which is a kind of club, a trade association for people who are private owners of big historic houses and open them to the public or do public events in them, and they have an annual conference. If you go to it, you really wouldn’t think the English or British country house is in trouble. There are thousands of people there. Brilliant and revelatory . Anna Keay has written a superb biography, which paints a vivid picture of the times and of her subject. She has an instinctive feel for character and place, and combines elegant prose with a novelistic gift for narrative. KEAY: We love an electric blanket because you don’t need to heat your bedroom because you don’t need your bedroom too warm, but it doesn’t mean when you get into bed, you are not freezing. Keeping warm in the winter is a bit of a challenge, but mostly, it’s the most wonderful, delightful thing you could possibly imagine and a massive, massive privilege to live in a very old and beautiful building. Next, the Archbishop placed the Coronation Ring – which represents “kingly dignity” – on the fourth finger of the Queen’s right hand. Presenter Richard Dimbleby described it thus, “The ring wherein is set a sapphire and a ruby cross and which is often called the Wedding Ring of England.” When it comes to your point about heritage, I think it’s good to have a second chamber. I think there’s a debate to be had about what the basis of that is, in terms of how you would come to have a seat in it. But I believe that a concern for our environment and the buildings and places in which we live and were built by our ancestors is a really universal one, and it doesn’t require you to have a particular social slice of society in the House of Lords to ensure it’s protected.

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? KEAY: Well, it’s a good question. 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 sports, including a lot of community work. It’s very broadly based. 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. I think that meant it was fragile.She was educated at Oban High School in Argyll and Bedales School. She then read history at Magdalen College in Oxford. [1] [2] As far as making sure that old windows are doing their job and keeping you warm, because there’s a real, real risk at the moment — with the completely correct focus on insulation in buildings — that all our beautiful old sash windows, with their wonderful handmade glass, get put in skips, and UPVC windows get put in instead. William Petty was an older man, senior to Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle came to Oxford as a student in his early 20s, but he was rich and had friends. William Petty was already a very well-regarded member of the establishment in Oxford University. He was the older man in terms of experience and in terms of scientific experimentation, which is what was their great obsession. But on the other hand, Robert Boyle was the man with money and with the ability to commission and fund activities and so on. Underneath the metal structure is a purple velvet cap, that is trimmed with ermine. The crown weighs in at almost 2.2kg and therefore cannot be worn for long. 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.

KEAY: Well, you don’t miss something that’s not there. I think it’d be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren church wasn’t worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. There are things which are clearly of much less interest or were poorly built, which are not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. To me, it’s all about assessing what matters, what we care about. Deft, confident, deeply learned and provocative, underpinned by an extraordinary sense of the landscape and the architecture … Anna Keay traces with fierce intelligence the remarkable and restless lives’ Rory Stewart This is an exceptional book about an exceptional time: that one decade in its history when Britain was a kingless state. In a series of meticulously researched and deftly drawn character studies – of idealistic proto-communists, pistol-wielding countesses, zany visionaries, journalistic rakes, through to Protector Cromwell himself – Anna Keay brilliantly conveys what it was like to live amid the contrasts and contradictions, the heady optimism and the bleak despair, of that tumultuous age. The Restless Republic is a triumph. It is hard to imagine a better introduction to the volatile world of the 1650s’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.