Dan Snow's History Hit - Monarchy

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

For hundreds of years, monarchy has reigned as the dominant political model in Europe. But how has this system - where political life was shaped by the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling family - maintained such a strong grip for so long? How did these dynasties cope with female rule, child monarchs, mistresses or pretenders to the throne? How were names, numbering and the visual display of heraldry express an identity and cement loyalty? Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews, and her joined see on the pod to untangle this complex web of internal rivalries and loyalties in the politics of the royal and imperial dynasties of Europe. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a treat I've got for you today. We're talking monarchy, we're talking that strange system of government where parent hands down to child, supreme power and estate. A system of government that until so recently was the norm, unremarked upon, endemic across Europe and so much of the world. I got Robert Bartlett on the podcast, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. He's written this fabulous book on monarchy. It was a great chance to talk to him about not just English and British monarchs, but monarchs from all over Europe. It's a very, very comprehensive study, this one. If you want to watch documentaries about medieval monarchs, well, we've got plenty of them, let me tell you, on History Hit TV. Go and check out historyhit.tv. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you will get a month for free,

and then you get your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. It's frankly a sweet deal. Takes you through depressingly to the end of summer up here in the Northern Hemisphere, and you have all of your history needs met. It's like the Netflix for history.

It's brilliant. So head over there and do that, but in the meantime, please listen to Robert Bartlett. You're going to enjoy this. So head over there and do that. But in the meantime, please listen to Robert Bartlett. You're going to enjoy this. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure.

Monarchy, it's an idea that we're both familiar with, but in some ways very distant from. When's the golden age, if that's the right way to put it? When's the golden age of monarchy in Europe? I would say the golden age lasted for about 3,000 years probably. It's quite a long Golden Age. I mentioned in the book at the beginning of the 20th century most of Europe was still ruled by monarchies. I think there were only two republics, France and Switzerland. And that of course has changed dramatically in the last 120 years where there are very few monarchies left and no European monarchs have any real political power. But prior to that, right up to the 19th century, I think monarchy was the dominant form in Europe. And that's why the topic is, of course, of particular interest.

And you make the point that in order to legitimise that dominance, they had to do all sorts of things, whether it's heraldry, emphasis on lineage, emphasis on perhaps the divine roots of their royal line. I mean, what are some of the things, just explain some of the things that they had to do in order to bolster what effectively was just a grip on power? Well, it's a grip on power that has a basis in their minds, in their blood. That's why the book is called Blood Royal, because the idea is that that right

to rule is transmitted biologically. It comes from your bloodline. That's the theory. And it's a theory that could have perhaps made sense in societies like those of the Middle Ages, where quite a great deal was based on inheritance and bloodline. So the aristocracy, for example, they claimed their right because of their blood. We even use the phrase nowadays, blue blood. It's

a claim that's inherent in the family. And so the aristocracy could understand that kind of claim. And then, of course, you've got, particularly with the development of Christian ritual, you've got things like coronation. And in coronation, kings were anointed. And anointing was a very special act which set them apart from everybody else they were called the lords anointed and kings were keen to have that backing of the church behind them those monarchies that didn't have coronation of that kind in the early middle ages like scotland or norway those kings made special efforts to get the pope to allow them to be crowned so it's something they saw as important. And then, of

course, you've got the things you mentioned, like heraldry and so on, which is the visible panoply that goes with it. Heraldry is a very good example because the society literacy is quite restricted in this society. So something that's visual proclaims who you are without using words, through symbols, like the three lions for England or the fleur-de-lis for France. That's very effective in this society. I quote in the book, actually, a very nice phrase from an earlier scholar. She says, in this period, people could read a coat of arms more easily than they could read a letter,

which I think is a nice point. We now regard the system of inherited absolute power as probably slightly absurd. And therefore, is it very difficult to shed that modern mindset? So, for example, when I look at some of the extraordinary efforts that Henry VII, so some of the monarchs who weren't hugely legitimate in English history, that I happen to know about, maybe Henry VII or Edward IV. When we look at the efforts they went to to proclaim through heraldry,

I see that as a sign of just complete insecurity. Clearly they're just sort of making up for the fact that they know they're just a bit of a ruffian who seized a crown on the battlefield. Is that my perspective of someone who finds the whole thing slightly absurd? Well, I think the point underlying your question, there clearly was brute power behind many of these regimes. And that comes out particularly clearly where the power is won through battle, as in the two cases you've mentioned, Henry VII and Edward IV. But I think Edward IV would have made the claim that

he had a rightful claim, and his rightful claim was through his royal descent. He was descended from actually two separate lines from children of Edward III. And much of the argument between him and the Yorkists and the Lancastrians on the other side was who had the better hereditary right. They produced family trees. One of the passages in my book is about the development of the family tree, the graphical family tree in which you show descent in a diagram. And that seems to have come in from about the 10th century. And of course, it's an ideal tool for people who want to argue about the transmission of power through descent. Both the Yorkists and the Lancastrians produced their own versions of

family trees showing their claims. So I don't think it's ever a question simply of what you might call warlords. There are examples, but usually there would be a claim beyond that. Even for those people who start new dynasties, they usually claim some legitimising fact. And after that, it really is a question of rules of succession and descent, family law in a way. That's such a good point, because I think I'm getting two things mixed up here. One is monarchy itself and the other is heredity, right? So if you look at the Roman Empire, people like Pertinax, who was a slave who then became a monarchical figure, it doesn't seem that that was a huge problem of the Roman Empire.

And if you look at early Anglo-Saxon England, despite the fact that most monarchs were descended from Alfred, there was a sense in which the Witan would get together and agree the best man for the job, which you see in practice, obviously, with Harold Gobinson. Was that ever really an option, a monarchy but by appointment by the kind of group of oligarchs, or is it just so much easier to go with blood, to go with primogeniture? I agree with you entirely. It's important to distinguish monarchy and hereditary monarchy. There's a short passage in the book in which I talk about elective monarchy. And the best example of that is what is normally called the Holy Roman Empire, which was, in fact, geographically,

in the main period I'm talking about was Germany and northern Italy. And for long periods in the 13th and early 14th centuries, that was genuinely elective, with the result that there was no dynasty that ruled continuously in that period. There were different dynasties that took the imperial throne one after the other. So that's a very good example of something where we have a monarchy, but it's not a hereditary monarchy. The German aristocracy had fought quite hard to stop it becoming hereditary. And earlier dynasties, the Ottonians and the Salians and the Hohenstaufen, had fought quite hard to make it hereditary. So that for a long period under those dynasties, it is in theory elective, but in practice hereditary.

But there's always the constant tension to try and ensure that it doesn't become truly hereditary. In the end, they produced that. So for a very long period in the central Middle Ages, that's an elective monarchy. You do have an example there. And the Roman Empire, you mentioned, the Roman Empire, of course, continues throughout the Middle Ages in the East, the Byzantine Empire. And one of the things that people noticed at the time about the Byzantine Empire was the lack of enduring dynasties and the way that people could come in from outside and become emperor. That's reflected in the quick turnover of these dynasties, families or rulers. It's carrying on the tradition of the Roman Empire, which never

really settled into a clearly hereditary system with very long term. When I talk about long term dynasties, I'm talking about people who established their dynasty for hundreds of years. I mean, the most extreme example, the dramatic example is the Capetian kings of France. They come to the throne in 987. They hand the throne on from father to son in an unbroken succession till 1316, more than 300 years later. And even then, the kings of France afterwards, even though it goes to a cousin after that, they're all descended in the male line.

All kings of France from 987 to the end of the royal monarchy in 1848 are all descended in the male line, in the same family. So that's a really enduring dynasty. If you look at Byzantium, you don't see that at all. And that's a good example of what you're pointing out about the Roman Empire itself, yes. Was there much discussion among contemporaries, among scholars and thinkers, about the fact that you do have a hereditary monarchy every so often, you get an absolutely useless king, and therefore the advantage and disadvantage of the elective principle. Yes there was and there's even a phrase that is sometimes used,

rex inutilis, useless king, that's what they call it and there's a debate about that and there are certain cases where kings are in fact opposed for being useless. Another related question is if you take the hereditary doctrine seriously it does open the way for two things that could be controversial which is inheritance by a child and inheritance by a woman and in this very patriarchal society inheritance by a woman was an open question should the throne go to a king's daughter if he had no sons? And then the one about minorities, if the king dies leaving a child, should that child have the right to rule? Because kings, of course, are meant to be, amongst other things, war leaders. So the idea of having an adult male would, one might think, be built into the idea of kingship. And you do have systems like Irish kingship, for example. Irish kings had

many sexual partners. They would therefore almost always have many sons. There was no record of a female ruler or a child ruler in the Irish royal dynasties from the 10th, 11th centuries up until the disappearance of those families under Judas. But in many other places, the hereditary sense was so strong that female rule was allowed. I have a chapter in the book just on female sovereigns. The earliest one is in Byzantium in 797, the Empress Irene. She's not really a model because she becomes empress by deposing and blinding her son. So it's not really a good role model, but she's the first one.

There are two more Byzantine empresses in the 11th century. And then from the early 12th century, there's a sequence of them in Western and Central Europe. So I counted 27 in my sample. There may be some I've missed. So it's a possibility, and that's a very interesting development, a possibility of there being female rule. And then there are many, many more child kings and queens, child rulers. It seems to have been accepted. Even when you think, in this competitive military world,

isn't it a bad idea having a child as a king? People are always quoting a passage from the Bible, woe to the land whose king is a child. It depends on what regency arrangements were made and so on. If you've got William the Marshal as your regent then it's totally fine. It was very much in my mind. There's the big new biography of Henry III just come out of course and his early years he had a very fine regency. But when you get a disastrous king like Charles VI of France or Edward II of England or Henry VI of England, do you not start getting people going, this system is deranged, we need an alternative? Or do you just go, God, someone find a cousin to put on

the throne? I think the latter. I mean, nobody is criticising monarchy in those reigns. They're simply saying, this one's got to go, we want another one. And you find people who are willing, ruthless people, like Mortimer, for example, or Duke of York, who make their claims and can eventually enforce them and get rid of those people. You mentioned Charles VI and Henry VI, of course. They suffer from mental illness.

They suffer from severe mental illness that incapacitates them. And so it's obvious that something has to be done. It may be a regency, or eventually it might be, you know, people thinking in the case of Henry VI, let's get rid of him. So you've got those situations. It seems to me a very different world. I mean, I was just reading recently that the act that the English Parliament passed in 1649, just after chopping off the head of Charles I, they then went on to abolish monarchy. They passed an act which was specifically aimed at abolishing monarchy. And it says in it that they didn't see the point of kingship

and they didn't think kingship was a good idea. And you very, very rarely get that in the Middle Ages. What you do tend to get is non-monarchical movements of opposition to kings, but they very, very rarely express themselves in terms of a philosophical opposition to monarchy. For example, in northern Italy, the northern Italian cities are fighting for years, decades, against the Holy Roman Emperor who claimed to be their overlord, and they are not organised as monarchies, and they're not advancing the claim of another family. They are cities, they are basically republics. So there is a struggle there between societies

that are not based on monarchy, and a monarch and a dynasty who is attempting to enforce the rights that he perceives. But that very rarely comes out in very much in the way of very developed political thought. You do have people thinking about the rights of monarchy. Of course you do. Famously, Dante writes a book called Monarchy. And he's very pro-monarchy. He's very pro, in fact, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He's very pro-monarchy. He's very pro, in fact, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. From the point of view of the church, you get a lot of ideology which says that ordinary secular monarchs are subordinate to the church and should be subordinate to the church. But that's a slightly different point of view from saying that this is a very bad way to organise secular society.

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I mean, if you look at the anarchy that followed the death of Henry I or the War of Spanish Succession that followed the death of Charles, I think it all too often presumably looked like the abyss that awaited societies if they were to dispense with a king. I mean, was there just this assumption that you needed a firm hand on the tiller? Yes, successful kings are very often successful war leaders. And the people they've got to get to support them immediately are the military aristocracy.

And if they can get the support of their own military aristocracy, then that secures their position. And one of the ways of doing that was by leading them in successful war. There you have a bond between the aristocracy, who have their own entrenched position in society, and monarchical government. And the kings and queens, for that matter, needed to make sure that their aristocracy, or at least a bulk of their aristocracy, were behind them. Because if they didn't, things would begin to disintegrate. were behind them, because if they didn't, things would begin to disintegrate. And then you've got a countervailing force, which is always there, I think, which is aristocrats who are brought up with a very high opinion of themselves, thinking they have very high blood. They're brought up to

fight. They're brought up to command. They're very wealthy. They might very well resent monarchical power. So the king has a rather difficult task to follow there. He has to pursue this path of getting his aristocracy behind him, but stopping them becoming too powerful. And of course, if they do become too powerful, that's when you get these so-called reigns of weak kings and so on. I've had a thought, watch out, here it comes. Is it interesting that as the king, as monarchs in, say, Britain and France France and elsewhere successfully gain a monopoly of power of military force in their countries they sort of neuter this traditional military aristocracy which had its own independent and possibly sometimes rival bases of military power the

trouble is by neutering that by gaining that monopoly if you look at the struggles of the British crown English and British crown in the 17th, 18th centuries, by losing private armies of the earls of Northumberland and the Norfolk's, you're then vulnerable to power grabbing politicians, aren't you? I mean, the Stuarts and the Georgians, you can't have it both ways. You almost need the military power bases of those great lords because otherwise you're in trouble. Yes, you've pointed to a very important development. There's a famous definition of the state which says that it has a monopoly of power, of military power, of force. That's one of the definitions of the state. And if you look at the early modern period, one of the things that does happen in monarchies such as the French monarchy, for example, famously, is that the military power of

the independent mobility is curtailed and replaced by royal force, the force of a royal state army. And that's one of the ways that you see a transition from a society which, as you say, where the aristocrats have their private armies. Of course they do, yeah. But then you can see the other point that you've just made, you know, that monarchs need to draw on military power. And if it's available from the great aristocrats, then they have to find some way of balancing their own authority with power that is represented by those monarchs. That's why these, you know, the very successful military leaders in English history, you know, famously Edward I and such like, they don't try to destroy aristocratic power, which would be virtually impossible to do anyway. They harness it. But they've also got to be careful of making

sure that the aristocrats are with them. I think medieval kings are always riding a tiger when it comes to their military aristocracy. And one of the things that really marks a change, I mean, I think the world I'm talking about in this book, this dynastic world, is very, very different from the Europe of the last 100 or 150 years. And one of the things, obviously, is that the power at the top is no longer transmitted biologically. And connected with that is the thing that's come up several times in our discussion, that there's no longer a military aristocracy, an independent military aristocracy. Those two things do go together. It strikes me that Charles Stuart, Louis XVI and Nicholas Romanoff could have used a military aristocracy.

I mean, Charles almost still had one, but it's all very well having a monopoly of state power. But if something goes wrong with your army, like you can't get politicians to pay for it, or it just falls apart, bad leadership leadership then you're extraordinarily vulnerable as absolute ruler aren't you yeah and these are the famous examples of monarchy going down in flames and there have been many of them since you know this the english were a bit ahead of the game really when chopping their king's head off in the 17th century but from the time of the french revolution

it gathers pace. And by the time we get to the present day, obviously, real political power in monarchy is a matter of the past, something that we haven't grown up with, we haven't known for 100 years or more. That's why the book was interesting to write, because you're trying to convey some very, very important general feature of past European history that can't be referred to simply by saying it's just like X nowadays, right? Fascinating. MBS in Saudi Arabia must have occasionally flitted across your consciousness. Yes. I'm not saying there aren't in the world today places where there are real monarchists, where the monarchs have political power. There are, but there are so few of them

in comparison with the world of medieval Europe. What realistic alternatives cropped up in the time and in the spaces that you explore? So you've mentioned the northern Italian cities. We've talked about the Commonwealth in 17th century England. What about, for example, Venice or Switzerland? Were there any places where innovations were made, where they thought about trying to dispense with monarchy altogether? Yes, I talk about two republics in the last chapter of the book,

and the two are about as different from each other as you can get. One is Iceland, and the other is Venice. They're really different places, but they were both genuinely republican constitutions for quite a long time. Iceland, as you know, was settled by Norwegians coming there. There was no one there apart from perhaps a few Irish monks. And they built it from the ground up. And they never wanted to acknowledge the monarchical authority of the other Scandinavian kings, because Norway and Sweden and Denmark had kings. And so for a very long period, hundreds of years, from the time of the settlement right up to the 13th century,

Iceland was governed by an assembly where the powerful landowners got together. It had a very weak church. It had no kings. It's sometimes even called the period of the Commonwealth or Free State, something like that. So Iceland is a very good example of what can be done by a Germanic people getting together with the traditions of assembly and so on. In the mid-13th century, the kings of Norway didn't want to have that anymore. They insisted that Iceland recognise them as king. And the church was on side. A cardinal went there and he said,

it's quite wrong for a place to have no king. You should have a king like everywhere else. And the Icelanders were forced to acknowledge the authority of a Scandinavian ruler, which was then the situation up until modern times. Venice was quite different. Venice was originally recognised the authority of the Byzantine Empire but gradually became wealthier and wealthier as a trading city and with its wealth it eventually reached the stage of being able to have real de facto independence from the Byzantine Empire. And in the end, it actually was instrumental in conquering the Byzantine Empire, its previous overlord.

And that was run on a slightly different system where you had something like monarchical rule, the doge, but the doge was elected. And no family established hereditary right to the Doge ship. There was a time when it looked as if there might be a family that was going to do that, but it didn't. And so there was an oligarchy. There was an oligarchy of wealthy men, mostly making their money from trade and finance, and they, the Senate, and a system of councils. So it was an entirely republican system, although it did have an elected head for life, just like the popes, the doges, were elected for life. So you've got there two absolutely different systems from the dynastic world.

So let's finish up with where did it all go wrong? How did this deeply entrenched, endemic system of monarchism fall apart so incredibly dramatically? Are we being Marxist about it? Are we saying that the focus of power and this new middle class had sprung up and they just weren't buying it? Or the catastrophe of the First World War, what happened? Well, if you call that Marxist, I think we are being Marxist, yes. I think the growth of literacy, the industrialisation of society, creation of a large body of educated people who didn't yet have

access to political power at all, if you think of just something like the power to vote for parliaments or representative institutions. And once you've started doing that, then I think you're on a road where you, why should you stop at the top? If you can get rid of entrenched aristocracies, if you can get universal suffrage, of course, if you have universal suffrage, then you've already, you're on the path to an industrial modern democracy. You don't have to actually get rid of the monarchy. It's usually you get rid of the monarchy if the monarchy has quite a lot of power. In the European countries where monarchy has survived, it has survived by

giving away its political power freely. The monarchy is now centred in, strangely enough, I don't know if it's a coincidence, but in sort of social democratic, mainly Protestant parts of Europe, Britain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain is an exceptional case. And so eventually, the social and economic transformation of society, producing a mass educated population which had political demands and expectations, led, I think, to the end of that dynastic world. And yet what's so interesting is I can't think of a political thinker, perhaps this is instructive, there isn't a sort of call to arms like there was with maybe, I don't know, abolition or suffragism. I don't know, abolition or suffragism. The monarchs just seem to just collapse one after the other as politicians just got rhythm and just seize power themselves. Was there an intellectual bedrock to this wave of republicanism?

Well, I think if you think of the idea of the rights of man and equality and so on, the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, yeah, these do issue in general statements and claims about what is the proper way to organise society. And it's the proper way to organise society doesn't actually have any room for monarchs. Famously, of course, in the American Revolution, they discussed for a while whether they should have a king and whether George Washington should be their king. But they came down against in the end. So added to that kind of ideological and intellectual strand,

what about the catastrophe of the First World War? Monarchical Europe failed to deliver on that kind of central promise of stability. You know, the greatest war in all of history ushered in, partly exacerbated, partly caused by a bunch of monarchs who were actually cousins. I mean, this is the opposite, surely, to what monarchs say they're going to deliver. I agree with that entirely. There were three major empires, Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire, that disappeared as a result of the First World War. And monarchy never returned to those countries. And I'd agree entirely that that was a catastrophe. If there hadn't been the

First World War, it's one of those games, you know, if this hadn't happened, what would have happened? Possible, indeed, to imagine that those countries would move towards a more democratic, participatory kind of government, but still have a figurehead who was a monarch, as happened in Scandinavia and in Britain, for example. So, yep, I'd agree entirely that that was an acceleration of the pace, that many hundreds of years of monarchy went down the drain as a result of the First World War. Fascinating stuff. Thank you so much. The book is absolutely brilliant. It is called? It is called Blood Royal, Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe. Can I ask one last question? Was there an awareness, given the basic human behaviour of people like Edward II's wife,

was there an awareness that actually we're probably not descended from Alfred the Great, but never mind, we have to pretend we were. I mean, was there that level of self-awareness? Did they really think that they had the blood of Alfred in their veins 600 years later? I think they did. And I think they might have been right as well. These lines of descent are pretty well established. And they spent a lot of time emphasising descent.

We've mentioned heraldry already, the use of family trees, also in naming patterns, you know, you name your sons after ancient kings. There's a great stress on continuity of blood, the propagation of blood, that's a central tenet. Maybe there were people with doubts about it but the record we've got that comes down is marked more by assertion than by doubt I think well if Edward III was Edward II's son I'll be very surprised indeed I've got to say yeah it was Mel Gibson wasn't it oh god of course okay so thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast great pleasure pleasure. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes

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Thanks.