The Crown Jewels: The Official Illustrated History

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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 ] KEAY: I think Handel, whose music, I hope, we will be hearing at the coronation, which is coming up next year.

COWEN: But it’s discouraging the creation and maintenance of the asset you’re dedicated to popularizing and preserving, right? While Queen Elizabeth II championed the St Edward’s Crown as a royal symbol, Charles has chosen a different crown as the emblem for his reign. But the significance of the St Edward's Crown endures.

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. 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, 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. KEAY: Well, yes, not a 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 revolutionary war. It’s really one of the last wars of religion. That was the biggest of the issues. There was a related secondary issue about the extent of royal power. That was in the mix, but it wasn’t the first issue.

KEAY: Well, there are all sorts of things. The Scottish Enlightenment is such a completely gripping, extraordinary phenomenon that this tiny little country — my birthplace but micro little place on any worldview — through the course of the early and into the later 18th century, had such incredible influence around the world. I think the buildings of that period, the political thought, the poetry — all these things we should all know more about, we should teach it more to our children, and we should celebrate it. KEAY: I’m all for abolishing the House of Lords myself, personally. I think it’s totally past its sell-by date as an institution. The fact that we still have nearly a hundred members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers, who are, by definition, all men, I find extraordinary. Deft, confident, deeply learned and provocative, underpinned by an extraordinary sense of the landscape and the architecture within which events occurred – alert to the strange echoes and coincidences of history contained in those spaces – Anna Keay traces with fierce intelligence the remarkable and restless lives of a restless republic’ So, one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between the fashion of the moment and things which we are going to regret, or our children or our grandchildren are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about, not considered.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. The Elizabethan Tower of London: the Haiward and Gascoyne Plan of 1597. London: London Topographical Society, 2001