Melvyn Bragg has written several bestselling works of non-fiction (as well as his acclaimed novels): On Giants Shoulders, based on his BBC radio series, 12 Books That Changed the World, The Adventure of English and The South Bank Show: Final Cut. He was born in 1939 and educated at Wigton’s Nelson Thomlinson School and at Oxford where he read history. He is President of the National Campaign for the Arts, and in 1998 he was made a life peer. He lives in London and Cumbria.

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

First published in paperback in 2010 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

1

Copyright © Melvyn Bragg 2009

The right of Melvyn Bragg to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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ISBN 978 1 444 74285 5

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To Alan Blaikley

CONTENTS

Introduction

a The Calendar

b The Field of the Cloth of Gold

c The Origins of Mathematics

d Witchcraft

e Socrates

f Cryptography

g Antimatter

h Darwin: programme 1

i Darwin: programme 2

j Darwin: programme 3

k Darwin: programme 4

l Agincourt

m Plate Tectonics

n Kierkegaard

o Tea

p The Peasants’ Revolt

q Black Holes

r Avicenna

s The Origins of Life

t The Siege of Constantinople

u Alchemy

v Shakespeare’s Language

w Angels

x The Fibonacci Sequence

y J.S. Mill

z The Divine Right of Kings

Afterword

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

In Our Time began with a sacking: mine. In 1998 I was appointed to the House of Lords and the BBC decided that Start The Week should be stripped of my presence to preserve its political integrity. As far as any of us on the programme could remember there had been no politics on Start The Week during my ten years in the chair, but I left with no complaints.

I’d been very lucky to broadcast on one of Radio 4’s bedrock programmes. The producer, Marina Salandy Brown, and I introduced scientists, historians and philosophers on to that Monday morning slot, and changed the nature of the programme. A change which I am glad that my successor Jeremy Paxman and his successor Andrew Marr have kept.

Being fired turned out to be one of the best things that has happened to me in my broadcasting life. James Boyle, the then Controller of Radio 4, engineered a return to the air for what he called ‘a ring-fenced programme’ on what was then known as ‘the death slot’, Thursday mornings just after nine. I was grateful for his offer and the result was a programme I was able to build from scratch. Save for the weeks when the homework is too heavy or too obscure, I love doing it: a seminar without an exam at the end of it – though at times the seminar is the exam.

The idea was gradually to end the plugging of books, to focus on one subject only, to range over an eclectic and as intellectually demanding a spectrum as we could manage, to court unpredictability of subjects and, above all, to cast only scholars who were also teaching academics. It took a while to complete the jigsaw but these were the aims and eventually we got there. Olivia Seligman was the initial and enabling producer and away we went.

James Boyle supplied the wonderfully incongruous title. Helen Boaden, his successor as Controller of Radio 4, extended the programme from thirty minutes, which was just too tight, to forty-five, which gave it breath and made it possible to drive through a decent argument. Mark Damazer, the current Controller, has supported us in word, elliptical emails and deed. For instance, it was his idea to have the consecutive daily run for the four Darwin In Our Time programmes.

This book is a selection from the several hundred programmes broadcast over the last eleven years.

At first I thought that I would cut out choice pieces from scores of programmes and aim at a patchwork quilt. Or arrange gobbets from several programmes in disciplined sections: Physics, Philosophy, History, Biology, etc. Or simply pick out what seemed the juiciest bits and pitch them together rather as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney did in their Rattle-Bag collection. And there were other schemes, but none, I concluded, served the purpose.

This was to give to those interested the full benefit of the learning of the often outstandingly distinguished contributors. No matter they were asked to pour the accumulation of decades of scholarship into a half pint, at most a pint glass, they never wavered in the attempt to bring to the table the essence of their research so that the listeners got a taste of the best. And they do this with a lucid eloquence which is courteous even when they disagree.

I have kept the conversational nature of these discussion programmes intact. There are a few small cuts. About 95 per cent of the programmes are live and in the effort to press for concision there are often the manoeuvrings of ‘sort of’, ‘actually’, ‘in a sense’, like the minor adjustments ships make as they prepare to dock. Many of those have gone, as have the remarkably few repetitions.

Again, after several variations, I settled for the simplest form which was to lay out the discussions like a conversation and not for example turn it into a prose piece, which was one of many rejected ideas. You could say this discussion form had its origin in one of the oldest and most influential of all intellectual forms – the Dialogues of Plato. You could also bring less flattering examples to bear. But at this level it is, I think, an effective way to bring often complex ideas to an interested public without losing the complexity of the idea or, I hope, the interest of the public.

So here we go. From Socrates to the Fibonacci Sequence, from Plate Tectonics to the Calendar, Agincourt to Angels, the Peasants’ Revolt to the Origins of Mathematics, Witchcraft to the Siege of Constantinople, Darwin to the Divine Right of Kings, the Field of the Cloth of Gold to Cryptography and more.

There were many contenders hard to leave out, especially, perhaps, the Alphabet. For some reason it became a toss-up between that and the Calendar. Yet it seems at the very least ungrateful to leave out what the Chambers Encyclopaedia calls ‘a system of writing theoretically having a one-to-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme’. And then there are the iconographic and ideographic writings of ancient man, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and our own alphabet begat by the Romans, heavily influenced by the Greeks. And the Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic . . .

Then I discovered that I had selected twenty-six ‘chapters’ and the way to pay a tribute to the apparently infinite power of these mere twenty-six letters was open.

a

The Calendar

The calendar orders the lives of millions of people. It is an invention that gives meaning to the passing of time, it marks out our daily existence. It links us to the arcane movements of the heavens and the natural rhythms of the earth. It is both deeply practical and profoundly sacred.

But where does this strange and complex creation come from? Why does the week last seven days but the year twelve months? Who formed these concepts and through them shaped our lives? The answers involve Babylonian astronomers and Hebrew theologians, Roman emperors and English scholars. Isaac Newton, for instance, designed a calendar said to be mathematically flawless but no one could understand it. Gregory XIII seems to have got it right.

With me to discuss the calendar are Robert Poole, Reader in History at St Martin’s College, Lancaster, and author of Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reformation in Early Modern England ; Kristen Lippincott, Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; and Peter Watson, Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, and author of A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind.

Kristen Lippincott, what were the first calendars based on?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: The best way to think about the calendar is to put yourself back in the shoes of ancient man. You’re sitting there in the middle of some field, watching the daily rhythms, and the first rhythm that you really notice, beyond day and night, is the waxing and waning of the moon. You notice that every twenty-eight days you get a full moon back, and almost all of the early calendars are lunar calendars. In fact we have lunar calendars dating back to 10,000 BC.

The next big cycle that you notice is the cycle of the year, and the first one is usually by the stars. When certain bright stars appear on the horizon, it marks the beginning of a new year. And then the third thing that you notice is that the sun is in the same place in the sky after 365 days. So those are the three basic kinds of calendars that you can have: a lunar calendar, a sidereal or star calendar, or a solar or sun calendar.

MELVYN BRAGG: Were these seen to be useful for diurnal existence from the very beginning?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Certainly we find that most early calendars, and most religious calendars, are lunar based, because it’s something seen in the moon every night, waxing and waning, it’s something that is ingrained very much in people’s souls, if you like. Those of us who live in cities now don’t really notice it. You can imagine, before electric lights, whether or not it was a full moon really mattered to people’s lives, and so we find that most of the early religious calendars are lunar and are very deeply ingrained.

Beyond this, of course, the stars and the sun mark the seasons, so they tell you when to plant, when to reap, when to sow. Also things like navigation were based on calendars. There’s a passage, I think in Homer, where it says: ‘don’t sail unless the Pleiades are rising on the horizon with the sun.’

MELVYN BRAGG: And then Hesiod talks about farming and agriculture with regard to the seasons.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: All his Works and Days is saying is ‘when the slug climbs the tree, that’s the time when Orion is rising’. It really gives you a very good calendar that still works today.

MELVYN BRAGG: And that kind of country lore – ‘when the slug climbs the tree’ – lingered on in this country, in country areas, until quite recently.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Certainly the Farmers’ Almanac, which you can still buy – not at any newsstand, but it is available – tells you that kind of folklore, which is true. It’s based on observation.

MELVYN BRAGG: Peter Watson, as I understand it the first sophisticated calendar was developed by the Babylonians, who were mathematicians and astronomers. Could you tell us about that calendar?

PETER WATSON: As Kristen says, they noticed that there are twelve lunations, twelve months in a year, more or less. They had their twelve months, then they had an extra period. This has happened all over the world. A sort of thirteenth month of varying lengths, generally regarded as unlucky. But it was the Babylonians who devised this system based on sixty, sixty being the lowest common multiple of twelve and thirty, or roughly the number of days in a month. The Babylonians therefore gave us minutes and seconds, as well as weeks and years and days. The Latinisation of this is still based on sixty.

And the first division of this was called ‘pars minuti prima’ in Latin, the ‘first small division’, and that phrase became corrupted to ‘minute’ and the second division was ‘pars partes minutae seconde’, and that phrase in time became corrupted to ‘second’. And then they also noticed that as the sun rises it passes through the stars and this idea comes down to us, via the Greeks, as the Zodiac – the Greek word ‘zodion’, meaning ‘little animal’. Some of the stars in the sky were shapes. As the Babylonians saw it they looked like animals, and so this is how we arrive at both the Zodiac and the fact that it is a circle around a point, which we now divide into 360 degrees. It’s all related to the same system.

MELVYN BRAGG: What did they do with the days that were left over?

PETER WATSON: This was called the intercollated month and it was regarded, not just in Babylon but in other early cultures around the world, as very bad luck. You were very careful about what you did on those days and some cultures don’t even give this period a name. To name it was to make it even worse luck.

MELVYN BRAGG: Would you consider this to be a great legacy that the Babylonians passed on? Was this brought together for the first time in an extensive and coherent form by them?

PETER WATSON: Yes. The smaller parts of the calendar are the Babylonian legacy. As I say, everybody could notice the year and the months. The Babylonians regarded the seventh day, the fourteenth day, the twenty-first day and the twenty-eighth day as unlucky, and there were various taboos on what you could do on those days, and there you see the beginning of the week. They also regarded the twentieth day as very lucky, because the twentieth day of any one month was the forty-ninth day of the previous month. That’s seven times seven, regarded as lucky. And the ‘full moon day’ was known as the ‘shabatum’, I think I’ve got that right. When the Jews then went into exile in Babylon, they appropriate the word as ‘Shabbat’, the Sabbath, the day on which you don’t really do any work. That has come down to us from the Babylonians, and we still have the word and the concept of the Sabbath.

MELVYN BRAGG: Who did the Babylonians pass this calendar on to, who took it to the next stage?

PETER WATSON: I think both the Greeks took a lot of it on and, in time, the Romans. And the Romans eventually developed through the Julian reforms many new things. But the astrological influence that the Babylonians seemed to have started round about 500 BC has come down to us in the astrological week that we still essentially use.

MELVYN BRAGG: You mentioned the Romans – how did the early Roman calendar work?

PETER WATSON: According to legend the first king of Rome, Romulus, had a ten-month calendar.

MELVYN BRAGG: Why was that?

PETER WATSON: It began in March. To begin with they seem not to have had any words for what we now call January and February. People may have wondered why September, which is the ninth month, is based on a word that means seventh, and this is because originally the Roman year started after the spring equinox in March.

MELVYN BRAGG: So they just didn’t bother with those? They had two fallow months there that they weren’t even going to count?

PETER WATSON: Not to begin with, no.

MELVYN BRAGG: They didn’t count them at all?

PETER WATSON: No. Then later on, the second king of Rome, I think it was, introduced February and January. And to begin with February came before January and later still this was changed and January started the year. But they also had, the same as the Babylonians, this overlap period, this intercollated thirteenth month, which they call ‘Mercedonius’, which is our word ‘mercenary’, meaning ‘wages’, because this was when all the people got paid. That eventually dropped out and we come to the Julian reforms.

MELVYN BRAGG: Let’s talk about the Julian reforms with you, Robert Poole. What did Julius Caesar find wrong about the calendar that he thought needed reforming?

ROBERT POOLE: He found that the calendar, the Roman calendar, which had been more or less inherited wholesale from Egypt, had slipped out of sync with the year by very nearly a hundred days. This was partly because the Egyptian measurement of the year at 365 and a quarterish days was not quite right but partly also because these intercalary days and months had been manipulated for various political purposes to influence the dates of elections and the length of terms of office.

MELVYN BRAGG: You mean the days that didn’t really count, the priests and politicians would just use to extend their stay in office?

ROBERT POOLE: That’s right. And for some reason the balls had all rolled to one side of the snooker table. All the days had accumulated and the year was nearly three months out of sync. What should have been the time of the spring equinox was actually being counted in winter. So, in 45 BC there was a great year of confusion, which consisted of 445 days, which put everything back on line, and then Caesar got his astronomer, Sosigenes the Greek, to come up with a new calculation of the year, and they got it at 365 and a quarter days, and Caesar instituted the system of leap years – one day extra every four years – that kept the calendar more or less on track for many centuries to come. They were only eleven minutes out, on average, for each year, and it was centuries before anybody even noticed, so it was remarkably accurate.

MELVYN BRAGG: How successfully was this reform implemented? Did people begin to take the calendar more seriously because it was more accurate?

ROBERT POOLE: We don’t have any records or information about that. The interesting thing is that you could actually put all these extra days in a year and it doesn’t seem to have had any massive ill-effects in a slow agricultural society that didn’t always calculate very precisely by days.

MELVYN BRAGG: Did it have any other uses, this calendar that Caesar implanted? We know him best in this country as a general, or whatever title he had, a warlord in some way. Did it help those administrative, military arrangements to have a more accurate calendar?

ROBERT POOLE: It certainly helped taxation. In fact the Roman cycle of taxation, the Indiction, remained in use in the Christian Church until the early modern period. The Romans were famous for being extremely well-organised people and the taxation system was helped no end by having accurate years.

PETER WATSON: Maybe we should point out that Julius Caesar was assassinated the year after the changes, and a lot of people thought that this was because he interfered with the calendar.

MELVYN BRAGG: He was assassinated under the old system, on the Ides of March, wasn’t he?

PETER WATSON: That’s right, yes.

MELVYN BRAGG: What about those Ides – was that the way the Roman calendar worked before Caesar got hold of it?

ROBERT POOLE: I’d have to pass that one over to Peter, the classicist.

PETER WATSON: Their month was divided into the Kalends, which started on the new moon – that’s where our word ‘calendar’ comes from – into the Ides, which was on the full moon – Ides I think is derived from the word meaning ‘to divide’ – and the Nones, which was eight days before. They’d numbered the days and this was the system in use in Rome really until Christian times. And the astrological week that we use now caught on because astrology became very popular in Augustan Rome.

MELVYN BRAGG: Can we talk about the Christian calendar now, Kristen Lippincott? When did the Christians start to have a voice in the calendar?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: The early Christians just kept on with the Roman calendar and didn’t really change it at all, except probably with a man named Dionysius Exiguus or, as we often say, Denis the Short. He was the one that said why should we good Christians be keeping a Roman calendar, shouldn’t we have a calendar based on the life of Christ? So he was the first one that really focused on the day of Easter, and that’s when the problems started to arise with the calendar because Easter is, essentially, an inheritance from a lunar calendar and the Roman civil year is, essentially, a solar calendar, and one of the problems with the lunar cycles and the solar cycles is they don’t match. That’s to say they only line up once every nineteen years and this is why Easter’s a moveable feast. It slides backwards and forwards in the civil calendar and this is when the problem began, because people said how are we going to start to fix our religious feasts, how are we even going to know when the religious feasts happen, when we’ve got this problem? And for about 500 years almost every educated monk was involved in calendar studies.

MELVYN BRAGG: And just to restate for people who may not be as up to date with early Christian history: the idea of dating Easter correctly was astoundingly important to early Christians, wasn’t it? Crucial is a better word.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Yes. If your whole religion – that’s perhaps putting it too broadly – but if you are a Christian one of the main reasons you are a Christian is because on a certain day, with a certain kind of celestial configuration, Christ was reborn. If you don’t know what day that is, then this becomes really worrying. One of the things that was established in the fourth century was that the Council of Nicaea said we must fix the date of Easter, we must know when this happens and they came up with a formula that’s quite complex, and I probably won’t remember it correctly, so please someone jump in and help me . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: Shall I push it over to Robert, he’s worked it out. Can you tell us why it was so difficult a day, Easter, Robert Poole, and what factors were involved that made it difficult?

ROBERT POOLE: It’s not just a matter of combining a lunar calendar with a solar calendar and the two not fitting. There are also political or religious considerations because Christ was crucified around about the time of the Jewish feast of the Passover, which is lunar, but the one thing the early Christians wanted to do was to distance themselves from the Jewish calendar, the Jewish religion and Jewish practice. So they had to find a method of having an Easter which on the one hand would track the Passover, so that Easter was happening at the right time of the year, but on the other hand it wouldn’t actually reproduce it.

As a further complication, the Christian holiday was a Sunday whereas the Jewish one was a Saturday. The eventual result was the formula that Easter should be on the first Sunday on or after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the spring equinox, which was defined as 21 March and not the actual natural equinox. And it was this fixing of Easter to a date and not to an actual natural event that caused it to drift out when the calendar drifted out over succeeding centuries.

MELVYN BRAGG: When did they actually get down to really fixing that?

PETER WATSON: Well, I think it’s useful to say that for the first Christians time . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: We’re talking about the first three centuries ad, three or four centuries?

PETER WATSON: Yes, time really wasn’t very important because they all thought that Christ was coming again in their lifetime. So they didn’t actually pay too much attention to time to begin with. Then there’s a really amazing coincidence that Kristen has mentioned, this nineteen-year cycle, which was pretty accurate but not quite accurate. This chap Victorius of Aquitaine found out that if you multiply it by twenty-eight it’s even more accurate.

So, if you’re still with me, we’re on nineteen times twenty-eight, which gives you 532, and Denis the Small, he doesn’t know it’s year 532 at the time. If anything it’s year 287 after the accession of Diocletian, the Roman emperor. So Denis does the calculations and by an astounding coincidence he finds that Christ was born exactly 532 years ago. In other words, the moon and the stars and the sun are in exactly the same position in the year he’s doing this calculation as the year Christ was born, according to him. Therefore this is surely a sign from God that I’m in the right place at the right time and this idea of dating everything from the birth of Jesus is a sign from God saying yes, go ahead and do it.

MELVYN BRAGG: That was when the ad dating began?

ROBERT POOLE: Yes, and the previous reference point was the reign of Diocletian. Diocletian was famously a persecutor of Christians, so the birth of Christ was obviously a much, much better date for the Christian Church by then.

MELVYN BRAGG: Did Bede, the Venerable Bede, when he wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples, did he bring dates to bear in there? Was he using the dating system that we’ve been talking about?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Most of the great, what we might call mathematicians, or you could call them religious men, of the Middle Ages were very interested in how the calendar worked. One of the things that Bede recognised, because there had been enough of a time difference from the early calendar, is that the equinox was slipping, the actual celestial equinox, was slipping backwards against the calendar. He was one of the first people to say we’re going to have to do something about this calendar because we are slipping out of line with the stars.

MELVYN BRAGG: So there’s the artificial and the natural, almost in competition all the time, certainly often in contradiction, aren’t they? Did they realise that at the time?

ROBERT POOLE: It was realised by monks and astronomers and those who observed the sky, but it didn’t really matter in everyday life. Plenty of civilisations, the entire Middle Eastern world, the entire Islamic world, work on lunar calendars that are very precise, the moon is very regular, but these calendars don’t quite match the solar year, the new year. Every now and again there’s an intercalary month.

It doesn’t matter too much whether you’re anything up to two or three weeks out in the seasons in an agricultural society. But of course it does matter when you’re talking about calculating the date of Easter and it was a source of great embarrassment to the Christian Church that Islamic scholars would point out that their Easter, the Christians’ famous Holy Day that was supposed to be on this first Sunday on or after the first full moon after the equinox, wasn’t happening anywhere near the equinox at all. It was happening on completely the wrong date, and this appeared to undermine the claims of the Christian Church to be the true church.

PETER WATSON: Kristen is right. Easter is central to a Christian and to celebrate it in those days too early meant that you were guilty of hubris, you didn’t need God for salvation. To celebrate it too late meant you didn’t care. In both senses it was sacrilegious. The ancient kings in Egypt, when they came into office, had to swear that they would not change the calendar. Even today, I think, to change the Jewish calendar would need a meeting of the Great Sanhedrin, which is almost unthinkable. Yes, it was very, very important, and then a whole lore, in Christianity, developed around this, that the spring equinox was the day of maximum light because you had twelve hours of sunlight and twelve hours of moonlight. The moon had borrowed light from the sun, just as we ‘borrow’ our salvation from Christ. This is how the importance of Easter really grew and why so much time and energy went into settling the date, not just for the year you were in, but for future years.

MELVYN BRAGG: Was this the time when the sacred and the scientific became intensely intertwined?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: They wouldn’t have made those kinds of distinctions. They were scientists because they were looking for answers to religious problems and it’s one of those things that waxes and wanes itself. Sometimes people will believe in dogma under the aegis of religion, sometimes they believe in dogma under the aegis of science, but just to add to what Peter was saying, there’s another matter. In addition to both things that have been said, if Easter was moving backwards against the equinox, there’s a possibility that you’d have Easter backing in hundreds of years, backing up against Christmas, and the horror of horrors would be that you’d sacrifice Christ before he was born. So anyone with any kind of sense of deep time realised that was on the cards.

MELVYN BRAGG: Can we move to 1582 when there was a major reform of the calendar under Pope Gregory XIII? Robert Poole, why was this necessary and what did he do? Was he worried about the problem that Kristen’s been bringing up?

ROBERT POOLE: He was worried about the problem of Easter in particular, yes. The calendar reform of the Roman Catholic Church of 1582 has been a good subject for Catholic historians because there’s a traditional story told about the Protestant rise of science, and yet here we have the Catholic reform of the calendar which appears to present a big scientific correction before the Protestant rise of science. But in fact if you look back the Catholic reform of the calendar was an act of the Counter-Reformation, an act of piety to do with the date of Easter.

From the late Middle Ages the Catholic Church had been aware, and very anxious, that the date of Easter was wrong. Copernicus was set on the job, and his book was eventually published. De Revolutionibus in 1543 was in fact meant to be a first draft of reform of the calendar, but he went a bit too far back to basics. And they didn’t get around to the actual calendar reform until the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent. The Counter-Reformation Council of Trent was a failure in bringing the whole of Christendom, of western Christendom, back together, but they could at least have a single reformed calendar, promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church under papal authority, and it would be obvious. It was generally accepted that the calculations were right, so at least that was one small thing that could become universal, a new calendar.

MELVYN BRAGG: What did this imply when they re-created it? Did the days change, the weeks, what happened?

ROBERT POOLE: They knocked ten days out of October 1582. It was promulgated by a papal bull, but very few countries, even Catholic countries, simply accepted the papal bull. They nearly all had some kind of law or civil decree that said they were reforming the calendar, not because the pope says so but because it’s the right thing to do, and because we say so. Even one or two Protestant states picked up the reform, parts of the Netherlands, for example.

MELVYN BRAGG: As I understand it, it was more quickly accepted by Catholics than by Protestants, some of whom, including this country, resisted it for a very long time.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Well, they thought it was a papist plot. They were saying wait a minute, you’re taking away ten of our days. What’s this all about? And it’s interesting because certainly when it was presented at the court of Elizabeth I, her best scientist, he’s often called ‘the Magus’, her best scientist, John Dee, said of course it makes sense. But the politicians rallied round and elbowed Dee out of the way and said no, something sneaky’s going on here and we must stick to our own calendar.

MELVYN BRAGG: Well, they were rightly anxious about what the pope said, as he’d put a price on the head of Elizabeth I. Not a man to be trusted in the courts of London. But Dee did his own calculation and came up with much the same as came out from the Council of Trent.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: He was a brilliant mathematician. Unfortunately in later ages we see him as some sort of crazy astronomer and magician, but he had the right kind of ideas.

MELVYN BRAGG: What were the consequences of England and other Protestant countries resisting this Gregorian calendar, and how long did they resist for? What happened? One date in this part of Europe, another date in the other part of Europe?

PETER WATSON: Britain, I think, didn’t go on to the new calendar until 1752, so there was nearly two hundred years when they were using a different calendar. It wasn’t quite as important then as it is now. You know, you didn’t get ‘chariot-lag’ or ‘galleon-lag’ like you get jet-lag.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: But there were other problems. One of the things that we think about was the ‘us’ versus ‘them’. If you think about it, the calendar, regardless of whether you were using a Julian calendar or a Gregorian calendar, from country to country and sometimes even from town to town, the date on which you started the year changed. There were six different days that people would begin the year on. So you could be in February and it could be February 1501 or February 1502. The day or the year wasn’t something that was really solidified until much later.

MELVYN BRAGG: So the major difference with the Julian calendar was the difference of catching up on those days. Were there any other refinements on the Julian calendar?

ROBERT POOLE: Essentially the difference between Julian and Gregorian was the matter of the ten days that were different. There was a real patchwork of dates as Kristen says, particularly in Central Europe in all the German Protestant and Catholic princedoms. You could travel through several calendar zones in one day if you had a fast-enough coach. It created genuine difficulties with diplomatic correspondence and with the confusion of dates between diplomats.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: And certainly for historians. The big health warning for any historian who thinks that if it says 15 February 1502 he knows what day it is, that’s a complete misunderstanding of how the calendars worked in those days. We don’t know what year it was unless they marked it ‘old style’, ‘new style’, ‘German style’, ‘Italian style’, ‘Faroese style’, ‘Milanese style’ . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: What effect did it have on the economy of these countries, their connecting economies?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: I really don’t think it had that much effect, because not only were the calendars different, weights and measures were different and distances were different, and it was just the kind of thing that you accepted. The same way that we cross the border and we realise that we have to give up our pounds for euros, they would give up their calendar, their time, their measurements and their distances, and that was just something that they accepted. It wasn’t until travel became much more common that people started to realise that it was an inconvenience.

PETER WATSON: Yes, I think so. The other thing that happened around this time, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is that the great voyages of discovery took place, and calendars around the world were discovered, in India, in Central America, in China, and found to be different. They were found to be very different in some ways and yet very similar in other ways. Most calendars end up with about 360 days in the year, twelve times thirty, and then something left over, and this was true in Central America, this was true in China, this was true in India, although India had six seasons, China had cycles of ten days, cycles of twelve days, all interlocking.

The Jesuits thought that this is proof that these people were not saved and needed Christian help. They didn’t have much success in changing that. As late as 1953, after Britain left India, Nehru, who was on a special commission to look at the Indian calendar, found that there were thirty calendars in use in 1953 in India. But again it was mainly, as Kristen says, an agricultural, fairly slow-moving society, and I think you can make too much of what we would think – that chaos would ensue. But we’ve only had the International Date Line since, what, 1886. So we’ve only been living with just over a century of what you might call ‘jet time’, where minutes matter rather than years.

MELVYN BRAGG: It was in the middle of the eighteenth century that England finally accepted the Gregorian calendar. Why did they think that they could unbend then?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: I think it’s a combination of things. The religious split between Catholicism and Protestantism wasn’t quite as strong during that particular period and also it had to do with the increased trade in the continent – if you’re bringing a lot of merchandise back and forth, you want to know what day it is.

MELVYN BRAGG: Robert Poole, did the calendar reform in England go smoothly? In 1750, it was done by Lord Chesterfield, as I understand it. What did he do?

ROBERT POOLE: The originator, if you like the guiding light, was Lord Chesterfield, who’d been ambassador in France and who’d had trouble writing to his mistress back in England, having to date the correspondence correctly. Chesterfield was well connected in the Royal Society and government and so was able to pilot a calendar reform bill through parliament. And what it did was to bring the English, or now British, Julian calendar in line with the continental calendar by removing eleven days from September 1752, so that Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September, and there were eleven days simply missing.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: And it’s wonderful if you look at diaries, like ladies’ diaries or farmers’ diaries of the period, because they just say ‘this month is missing many days’, and there’s just a big blank in the middle of the calendar, usually with a little floral decoration.

ROBERT POOLE: Or sometimes with a very complicated explanation.

MELVYN BRAGG: What were the consequences?

ROBERT POOLE: Well, the consequences were quite mixed, because the calendar was only half reformed. The Act stated that anything, any human or Church date should simple move with the new calendar, so that for example Christmas Day, 25 December, would actually come eleven days sooner after the calendar reform. There were now eleven days fewer before Christmas, so Christmas was actually moved forward in the natural year, which may account for the fact that we don’t have many white Christmases. Christmas used to be on our 5 or 6 January. That’s when old Christmases were, more or less around Twelfth Night now.

However, there were two important exceptions made. One exception was for fairs. If you imagine a Michaelmas Fair on 29 September. Michaelmas is a time when apples ripen, you can bring your Michaelmas Fair forward eleven days in the natural year, but you can’t make the apples ripen any sooner and your Michaelmas goose isn’t going to be fat enough for the corporation feast. So fairs were to go with the old calendar. Your Michaelmas Fair was to happen, in the future, on 10 October, and if you think about it, this means that there are eleven days fewer between old Michaelmas and the new Christmas Day, so the relationship between the human year, the civil calendar, the Church calendar and the natural year was permanently disrupted. In the case of Chester you can see this. Chester had a mayor-making, a major celebration, on St Denis’s Day, which was when the St Denis Day Fair was held in Chester. What happened was that the Act brought the mayor-making forward by eleven days but left the fair in the same natural position. The two were sundered and they had to bring in an amendment to the Calendar Reform Act which was hurriedly tacked on to an Act for preventing cattle distemper to bring the two back together again.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: They say there were riots in the street, but I haven’t seen any evidence that there were. You know, people waving banners saying ‘Give us back our eleven days’ seems to be a myth. But people were very concerned about taxes, because if you’ve lost eleven days of income, but you still have to pay tax for a year, did you have to pay that eleven days’ worth of income? One of the things that did not change was the tax year. The old English year ended on 25 March, and one of the reasons why we still pay taxes beginning on 6 April is that it is eleven days after 25 March.

PETER WATSON: Because New Year’s Day used to be in March and was changed at the same time.

ROBERT POOLE: Yes. That was purely a local convention, that was nothing to do with the Gregorian or Julian calendar. Pepys dated the New Year in his diary as 1 January, all the newspapers were 1 January, all the almanacs were then, but for certain legal purposes it was still 25 March, so the legal year started on 1 January too, but the tax year was left, in effect, where it is now.

MELVYN BRAGG: Is there an inference that somehow the natural year and the calendar year got out of sync, and we’re still living with the consequences of this, which are not entirely happy?

ROBERT POOLE: We’re still living with the tax year that starts on 6 April. The old tax year ends, in effect, on what is old Lady Day. But yes, in the upper echelons of society, amongst educated people, it was now normal to keep diaries and almanacs and to follow time day by day, but lower down in society people were still regulated much more roughly by feast days. They would date things according to so many weeks or so many Sundays after Michaelmas, and now that calculation, that relationship, was lost to people.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: But then the question that’s fundamental is, and perhaps what you’re really asking is – does it really matter? I mean, does it matter if you have a certain fair when the apples ripen and it’s called 10 October or it’s called 21 October – does it really matter? And this is one of the things that I’m always surprised at when people talk about time or calendars, or they write to me at the museum. They think these things are real, that they’re true. They forget that all of our timekeeping measurements are man-made. It’s something we’ve created, so it’s more or less making a rod for our own back. If things don’t work, it’s our fault.

MELVYN BRAGG: Peter Watson, has this now become the accepted calendar, the Gregorian calendar? Is it on the way to being a global calendar?

PETER WATSON: Oh, I think it’s a global calendar now, yes. There are still remnants of other calendars. One, for example, is the Olympic cycle. There was a calendar, or a cycle, in ancient Greece called the octaeteris, which was another cycle which went out of kilter and was corrected every eight years, and so the Greeks held the Olympic Games – twice in an octaeteris – every four years, and we still have that four-year cycle. So there are remnants, I think, all over the world. And of course the Islamic calendar is different, the Jewish calendar is different, and . . .

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: The Chinese calendar.

PETER WATSON: Yes. You know, these people live quite happily. Jews in Britain live quite happily with both calendars, don’t they, and so do the Indians. You can make too much of the difficulties. I think you don’t have to be a master mathematician to live with the fact. We live with the fact that some months are thirty days, some are thirty-one. We manage, don’t we?

ROBERT POOLE: The simple point about the calendar is that people always imagine that time should be mathematical and regular, that we should have something like an equivalent of the metric system and in the French Revolution they did try to metricate the calendar into ten days, ten-day weeks, but it just didn’t work. It didn’t, it just wasn’t accepted.

PETER WATSON: Mainly because they only had a day off every ten days!

ROBERT POOLE: Yes, it was deeply unpopular. But what you have to accept is that the elements of the calendar simply don’t divide into each other, they’re incommensurable. It’s like Alan Bennett’s vicar and the sardine tin of life, whatever you do there’s always a little bit left in the corner.

PETER WATSON: In the Russian Revolution they had a week of five days, with no time off, and you can imagine how popular that was. I did a couple of books out of Russia and there was a practice there, as well as this five-day week, in Communist Russia for people to work on Saturday mornings for the good of the state. They would work for nothing. This was after the weekend had been reintroduced in the Second World War, and if you did work on a Saturday morning you were known as a ‘subotnik’, and this is the same word as ‘Shabbat’, still surviving in Communist Russia. So the Babylonian idea is still there until very recently, the last ten years.

MELVYN BRAGG: How accurate is the present calendar?

ROBERT POOLE: Technically . . .

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Good enough.

ROBERT POOLE: Good enough. Technically the standard of time is the number of how many millions of vibrations of a caesium atom – I don’t know where they keep the actual atom … but there is a theoretical standard. The interesting thing is that people have come up with all sorts of reform calendars. There’s a sort of international standard calendar that was invented in Sweden which is much too boring to be popular. And whatever you do, in the end, all of these calendars, all these caesium atom vibrations, they all end up being adjusted back to the solar year. We get the extra pip now and again. The fundamental standard remains the solar year, and really if we want a different calendar we’re going to have to go and colonise another planet.

PETER WATSON: It is getting shorter though, isn’t it, by a few seconds every century?

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: That’s why we add the pips. It’s a nice sort of circle because what we’re trying to do is bring it back almost to Homer and Hesiod, so that you know that when the Pleiades are rising on the horizon you shouldn’t go sailing.

MELVYN BRAGG: That’s what it’s come to, has it?

ROBERT POOLE: If you want to know the time, ask an historian.

PETER WATSON: But to reinforce Kristen’s point. There was an Easter Act in Britain in 1928 which said that we could celebrate Easter as on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, but we never bothered implementing it because we know what to do now and so the mystery’s gone out of it. You just have to imagine that there are seven planets circling each other, so that the gravity is changing the configuration all the time, and this reinforces Robert’s point that at any particular time the situation is untidy.

MELVYN BRAGG: Well, you said earlier, Kristen, that it’s all artificial and I agree with you, intellectually you’re right, it is artificial, but I would say now many people in the world are much more calendar-driven than they are natural-day driven.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: The funny thing is that we as human beings have fallen so in love with our own structures that we think that they’re true. People have this thing on their wrist and they think it controls their day. People have a calendar, therefore they use it to control their day. Try throwing away your wristwatch – you still live.

MELVYN BRAGG: But you don’t control your day if you have to trade in Hong Kong.

KRISTEN LIPPINCOTT: Exactly.

MELVYN BRAGG: Or get to Frankfurt by such and such a time, or even get to Carlisle by such and such a time.

PETER WATSON: Who would want to do that?

MELVYN BRAGG: Too many people when I catch the train! And with that I’m off to Euston.

TRANSMITTED: 19.12.2002

b

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

In the spring of 1520, 6,000 Englishmen and their servants followed their king across the sea to France. They weren’t part of an invasion force but were attendants to King Henry VIII travelling to take part in the greatest and most conspicuous display of wealth and culture and courtly sports that Europe had ever seen. They were met by Francis I, king of France, and 6,000 French noblemen, women and servants on English soil in northern France. The English erected a temporary palace; there were elaborate tents, jousting, pavilions and golden fountains spouting perpetual claret. For just over two weeks they created a temporary town the size of Norwich, then England’s second most populous city, on the ‘Camp du Drape d’Or’, or Field of the Cloth of Gold.

What drove the French and the English to create such an extraordinary event? What did the two sides do when they got there, and what, if anything, was achieved?

With me to discuss the Field of the Cloth of Gold is John Guy, Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; Steven Gunn, Fellow and Tutor in History at Merton College, Oxford University; and Penny Roberts, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick.

Steven Gunn, can we start with an outline of the European geopolitics of the time around 1520? Where are the main powers?

STEVEN GUNN: There were three leading powers in western Europe in the early sixteenth century, and of those three, England was the smallest. England had been quite an aggressive political power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had a well-established system of government, but its population was only about two and a half million. France, on the other hand, was a much larger population, something like sixteen million. It had expanded dramatically over the previous sixty, seventy years, with places like Brittany, Gascony, Normandy, Provence being taken under the control of the French crown. France had a tax system which was able to raise taxes without the consent of parliament, the parliament of the kind that English kings had to go to, and France had a standing army.

The most unpredictable of the European powers was the new multiple monarchy being put together by Charles of Hapsburg. Charles of Hapsburg had been ruler of the Netherlands since he was six. When he was sixteen he became king of the Spanish kingdoms, which he inherited from one of his grandfathers. When he was nineteen he inherited the Hapsburg hereditary lands in Austria, southern and western Germany from his other grandfather, and he was then elected Holy Roman Emperor, Emperor of Germany. So Charles of Hapsburg had put together the biggest empire in Europe for seven hundred years, and nobody knew quite what he was going to do with it. Clearly he was a rival of France, there were territorial disputes along the Pyrenees, in Italy, in the border between what is now Belgium and France, and one of the big questions at the Field of the Cloth of Gold was which side would England find itself on in that dispute.

MELVYN BRAGG: So we had tiny England, an expanding and powerful and confident France and this huge empire, as you say the biggest since Charlemagne for seven hundred years. But just to put it in perspective – although we needn’t develop this for the moment or at all – lurking in the east were the Ottomans who, in 1529, nine years after the Cloth of Gold, were at the gates of Vienna. They were out there, bringing some sort of pressure from the east.

STEVEN GUNN: The Ottoman Empire had been expanding in a way like the French monarchy, very dramatically over the previous seventy years, taking Constantinople, overrunning Serbia, Bulgaria, and were about to overrun Hungary, and already by the 1490s you could see the fires lit by the Ottoman raiding parties if you went up to the top of the church towers in Venice. So Europe was well aware of the pressure from the Ottoman Empire from the south.

MELVYN BRAGG: In 1518 there was a Treaty of London – that was what we might call now an international treaty run mainly not by kings but by ambassadors. Can you tell us what happened there and how significant that was?

STEVEN GUNN: The idea of the Treaty of London was to make peace between all the European powers to enable them to resist the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. It started as a papal initiative but it was taken over by the king of England. That is why it becomes the Treaty of London. So it is outward-looking but it is also inward-looking amongst the European powers because it is a non-aggression pact. The idea is that none of the European powers will start a war against any other, and if one of them does the other powers who are signatories to the treaty will combine to back the person who is being attacked. But of course the problem with that is working out who is the aggressor and who is the offended party when things start to break down between any of those powers.

MELVYN BRAGG: Briefly before we move on. England is far and away the smallest force in all this and yet it keeps exercising its power. Was the fact that the Treaty was made in London indicative of the way in which Henry VIII and particularly Cardinal Wolsey seized the initiative? Let’s concentrate on Cardinal Wolsey. John Guy.

JOHN GUY: Wolsey is a genuinely international figure. He is not just Henry VIII’s chief minister he is a Renaissance cardinal and he is a special legate, a plenipotentiary legate, who has powers that almost make him, if you like, the pope of northern Europe. By the time of the Treaty of London he is riding high.

MELVYN BRAGG: Let’s just get that clear. He is not only a representative of the pope, he can speak for the pope, he can make crucial decisions . . .

JOHN GUY: And he does. One of the complaints the pope has about the Field of the Cloth of Gold is that Wolsey doesn’t tell him what is happening and just carries on and doesn’t answer his letters, so he is exercising tremendous power here. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold he is not simply representing Henry VIII he is also representing Francis I in terms of organising it.

MELVYN BRAGG: Wolsey is immensely wealthy, he is a butcher’s son from Ipswich but he has become an archbishop and then a cardinal – a great power with Henry VIII and a great power with Rome as well. Alter rex in Rome, alter papa in London. Where did that wealth and power come from? What was his grip on Henry VIII?

JOHN GUY: Well, his grip on Henry VIII is his charisma and of course he bolsters that by obtaining a series of wealthy bishoprics. He becomes Archbishop of York, he uses his position as papal legate to, if you like, extract money from the English Church. And quite a bit of that comes to him from things like the probate of wills. But the trick is really oratory. Wolsey is a master diplomat, he is a great personality, he is charismatic, but he is a master of rhetoric, persuasion. He is his own public relations consultant. It was said of him that he had a special gift of natural eloquence with a filed tongue so that he was able to persuade and allure all men to his purpose. He will sell you anything, he will talk you into anything.

MELVYN BRAGG: And Henry was beguiled by him, was he?

JOHN GUY: Henry was beguiled by him. Henry was by no means stupid and Henry was in control, but at this period he is very happy to license Wolsey to run most of domestic policy and much foreign policy on his behalf. He will chip in as and when. I think the key point is that by 1518 Wolsey is riding high and he is riding high on a policy of peace because England, as we said, is a small nation. It actually can’t afford to be at war the whole time and what Wolsey does he taps into the wider Renaissance impulse of that time. Erasmus has written The Complaint of Peace in 1517. People think this is a special moment. Thomas More enters Henry VIII’s service at this time and he does it because he thinks Wolsey is the man who is going to change not just England but the world, by which they mean Europe.

MELVYN BRAGG: It was the time of books changing you. Machiavelli has already written a book now but it isn’t going to be published until the thirties, but there is a book called De Cardinalatu, published in Urbino in 1511. Wolsey seems to have followed its tenets very specifically.

JOHN GUY: This book De Cardinalatu is the A to Z of how to be a cardinal. It is the key text, if you like, of prescriptive literature. It is by Paolo Cortese, Bishop of Urbino. He has various jobs in the Vatican, he knows the Roman bureaucracy inside out. The book is in three parts and the most important are the first two.

The first says a cardinal will achieve greatness through first of all his moral virtue and justice, mercy, equity, peace – you know, these are stressed as the international values. But then the second book is how to do it. How to do it is first of all oratory, rhetoric, persuasion; the second is magnificence, your art collections, your palaces, you found a hospital, you found colleges, you found libraries, you are patron of music, because music is in their view part of health care. And what is interesting about this is all the parts that certainly in the English tradition have never been stressed about Wolsey or have been disliked – his palaces, his art collections, his colleges, the bits that don’t seem to fit in – are central to the way he fashions his identity.

MELVYN BRAGG: Penny Roberts, did Wolsey instigate the Field of the Cloth of Gold?

PENNY ROBERTS: I think that would be a fair comment and, as John said, he clearly had influence or at least he had a good relationship with Francis I as well so he was able to act as a very effective broker between the French and the English kings. I think it would be fair to say that he is very much the architect of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

MELVYN BRAGG: We have heard from Steven and John enough to know what the English were hoping to get out of it – prestige, being on equal terms, being a player. How did Wolsey persuade Francis I that there was something in it for France?

PENNY ROBERTS: It is very interesting, isn’t it, to consider this idea of an alliance between England and France, the traditional enemies? France, of course, had traditionally also encouraged the Scots in their hostilities towards the English, so there was a great deal of latent suspicion between the English and the French. It is only some seventy years since the end of the Hundred Years War when English armies had come in waves devastating the French countryside in the name of upholding the claim of the English king to the French throne.

MELVYN BRAGG: Henry VIII still thought he had a claim to the French throne?

PENNY ROBERTS: Oh indeed. Henry himself had invaded France in 1513, won the Battle of the Spurs, taken the towns of Therouanne and Tournai and wanted to recreate the great days of Henry V. Henry V was very much his role model. Of course these weren’t victories on the scale of Agincourt or anything of that type, but it did establish Henry’s reputation as a military leader. For Francis, at the same time, he was establishing his prowess . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: They are both in their twenties, these young men?

PENNY ROBERTS: That’s right. Francis comes to the throne about six years after Henry, but very early on his reign he establishes his military reputation in his Italian campaign, winning a famous battle at Marignano in 1515, after which the French actually capture the important city of Milan. This is a victory on a far greater scale than what Henry had achieved and I think both sides are aware of this. So France isn’t concerned about England as the threatening force it had been in earlier centuries and, as Steven has said, France was a very much bigger and more powerful player by this time.

MELVYN BRAGG: What did Wolsey tell Francis I that made him think this is good for me to let the English force come to France, to let this man who had made claim to the French throne come to France, let as many English warriors and noblemen, who are a fighting force, a fighting machine, come to France? How did he persuade him?

PENNY ROBERTS: Well, Francis, like Henry, was very much influenced by these humanist ideals which John has already outlined. This idea of a universal peace. Kings, Renaissance princes, see themselves very much as peacemakers and so he is persuaded by this argument about creating an ideal of universal peace. It allows Francis, as it does Henry, to present themselves as great Renaissance princes, so on that level he is very much in line with the thinking about the ideal of universal peace. But there is also the wider political context of the aftermath of the imperial election where Charles V has become the leading power in Europe.

MELVYN BRAGG: In 1519, the year before?

PENNY ROBERTS: That’s right, and indeed Francis had attempted to stop Charles becoming emperor at that time.

MELVYN BRAGG: But there is a narrower personal dimension as well, isn’t there? Henry VIII was always asking, how tall is Francis, is he as tall as I am? Are his legs as strong as mine? I am not going to shave off my beard until I meet him. He saw this chap over there winning victories, the victories he wanted, but they both had imperial ambitions in terms of wanting to be Caesars. You got glory through war. I have got to meet this man and test myself and show that I am as big as he is.

PENNY ROBERTS: I think that is right. There are two parts to this: there is the wider political context which is clearly very important. England is able to act as a broker between the Empire and France and it is very nice for the English to feel they are being wooed by these two great powers but, as you say, there is this very personal element. This I think is very persuasive in terms of the actual meeting between the kings rather than the treaty itself which is obviously negotiated by ambassadors. Francis and Henry have a mutual curiosity about each other. They both have very similar reputations, tall, physically very strong, very athletic, they have great reputations in the jousts and those sort of military pursuits. They have a shared interest in hunting, in the ladies, they are very much men of their time. They like to surround themselves with the latest Renaissance fashions, humanists, and also to be great patrons of the arts. They have a lot in common and it is clear that this mutual curiosity is one of the driving forces behind them actually agreeing to this meeting.

MELVYN BRAGG: Just to end this introductory passage, John Guy, the man who wasn’t there was the most powerful man in Europe by a long chalk, indeed as we said, the most powerful man for seven hundred years – a very young Charles V. But he made sure he had a little pincer movement on the encounter, didn’t he?

JOHN GUY: Well, he is the absent presence because he meets Henry VIII the month before Henry VIII actually sets out for Calais on his way to the Cloth of Gold. Henry goes to meet Charles V and Henry crosses the border to Gravelines, he goes to the Netherlands, he brings Charles to Calais and entertains him there after the Field of the Cloth of Gold. So in a way the idea of this being bilateral is only achieved by looking narrowly at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. If you extend the context it is actually multilateral between these three great powers. But again Wolsey, I think, is the key figure behind the scenes, orchestrating the sequence of meetings.

MELVYN BRAGG: Must have been fun to be Wolsey, must have been great fun bringing them all together and playing around. OK, Steven Gunn, they are set and they go. How did they decide on a location? That must have been a lot of fuss: what are the distances and so on, English soil or French soil – can you get us to the Field of the Cloth of Gold?

STEVEN GUNN: As soon as they begin talking about where to meet it is obvious that they are going to meet somewhere around the edge of the English territory in France. The English have held Calais since 1347 and Calais is the main English military and trade base in France. But the question is how far will the English come away from Calais and how far in this calculation of royal honour will the French condescend to go into English territory, and so they end up meeting as near the edge of English territory as they can, but still inside English territory, because the English insist that because their king has had to come across the sea he has put more effort into the meeting and so he should be just inside his own territory.

MELVYN BRAGG: From what I have read, it seems as though Francis I was quite relaxed about all this?

STEVEN GUNN: I think he was. Where they end up meeting is in effect halfway between the last fortress of the English area in France, Guînes, and the first fortress of the French – or the last, coming from Paris – Ardres. So they have each got a small base from which they can move into this no-man’s-land in the middle.

MELVYN BRAGG: As we have said, these are massive forces, 6,000. It is much the size of Henry V’s army at Agincourt. Plus 6,000 on the French side, and they are there for a fortnight. Can you just give us some idea of the accommodation? They built a town as big as Norwich, the second most populous city in England, as I said in the introduction.

STEVEN GUNN: On the English side the English built a special palace, a temporary palace especially for the occasion, and what is really interesting about that is that it is on a classical design. It is an exact model, a replica of the sort of palace that you build as recommended in the De Cardinalatu. So we know Wolsey, who actually designed this, was the mastermind. There was a quadrant, each side over 300 feet long. At the entrance was a classical pillar. There were these fountains that you already mentioned that were spouting wine for much of the time.

MELVYN BRAGG: Perpetual claret. What a thought . . . !

STEVEN GUNN: Then you came in and the palace was eight feet high of brick and then the rest was temporary, timber, canvas – the canvas was painted to resemble brick. But you came into the courtyard and you were immediately struck because there was 5,000 feet of clear glass. It must have been stunning, with bay windows, and then the apartments laid out on a quadrant for Wolsey, for Henry VIII, for Catherine of Aragon and for Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, the former queen of France. Beyond that was a chapel and then there was a gallery which led to Guînes castle which was where a lot of the other English were staying.

So the English trumped the French in the accommodation. It was stunning. The French relied on tents, royal tents. Francis had a special tent built with a couple of almost ships’ masts in the middle holding it together, wonderful decoration, astronomical symbols over the roof. The English too needed tents. They said the French had 400 tents to back up the royal tents for this number of people. The English had what they said was 820 lodgings in tents and I think there must have been three or four people to each lodging.

MELVYN BRAGG: So the great palace built by Wolsey was a plantation of English greatness. It showed who was boss. I am sorry to be so vernacular in this, but it really did, didn’t it? It surprised the French, who had a great show of men and were much richer and so on, and of course it survived a storm near the end. A lot of tents blew down but not the palace.

STEVEN GUNN: And also by building in this classical style the English were talking the international language of the Renaissance. This was not domestic architecture. So it seemed that England was somehow this great player on the European stage. After all, Wolsey is claiming here through art and diplomacy to be the arbiter of Europe. Interestingly that is exactly what Erasmus, the great humanist leader, had said in The Complaint of Peace – that since kings and princes will never agree on peace they will always tend to want to find glory in war. Therefore they will need some great leader of the Church, some great cardinal, to act as the arbitrator, and if you want to sum up Wolsey in a nutshell, he is an arbitrator in excelsis.

MELVYN BRAGG: What is really fascinating is that you seek peace through magnificence. That is the thing that took my imagination. I remember, when I read this stuff years ago, I hadn’t got that. Can you give us some idea of what programme they had worked out? We hear of chivalric jousting – what else?

PENNY ROBERTS: It is very much about magnificence in forcing peace and, as I have said, the idea of monarchy as universal peacemaker is very important. But there is always this slight tension because at the same time they are supposed to be presenting themselves as very important military figures and this is where the jousting and the feats of arms come in. At the same time as they are making peace this is seen to be a sign of their strength. They are making peace because they wish to make peace, not because they are in a position of weakness, so they are also having these combats which demonstrate that they are very forceful and if they wanted to go to war they could do and they could cut a figure in that sense. So the actual occasion and all the events are very carefully planned because there is this need to have absolute balance between the two sides.

MELVYN BRAGG: So everywhere the two kings met they had to come precisely the same distance and all that. It must have been wonderful for the clerks working out those calculations.

PENNY ROBERTS: Absolutely. When they came to the actual meeting they had to elevate the two sides of the valley so that when they saw each other they were at exactly the same height so there wouldn’t be any kind of sense of pre-eminence. A fanfare would sound so they would leave their entourages at exactly the same time and go down with their horses and meet at an appointed meeting place.

MELVYN BRAGG: Was this the one-to-one meeting?

PENNY ROBERTS: Yes, this was the one-to-one meeting that took place on 7 June and it was all very carefully mapped out. It was very interesting as well. They would ride towards each other as though they were going to actually have combat but just at the last moment they turn their horses and they embrace. So underlining each act of peace is a sense of rivalry, a sense that they could be in combat if they wished to be.

MELVYN BRAGG: Could you, John Guy, tell us a bit about the character of the kings? As we say, they are both in their twenties. Henry has been king for about eleven years, Francis has been king for about six years – and what sort of character? Were they similar in character? We know that Francis liked to think he was Caesar and Henry had imperial ambitions, but can you just give us more than that.

JOHN GUY: I think Francis and Henry are quite similar. I think actually Francis is more confident. He is more sure of himself. I think Henry always has this slight psychological sense of inferiority, the need to please, the need to go that extra mile. Charles V, I think, is on the sidelines. I think he is much cannier. I think he is much more practical than he is often made out to be. I think he is quite wily. He supposedly had a great theory of universal monarchy, which mostly came from his advisers, but I think in practice he is much more willing to broker deals. But Francis sees himself as Caesar, the most Christian King, like a Roman emperor, and Henry is chasing after that, he is coveting that. That is why Henry also runs when the post of Holy Roman Emperor is contested for in 1519.

MELVYN BRAGG: Splendour runs into gluttony at one stage, from my reading of it anyway. Steven, can you give us an idea of the amount drunk and eaten?

STEVEN GUNN: Well, keeping the fountains running with wine was obviously a major requirement, because the English had 40,000 gallons of wine with them, which works out about four pints per person per day. They also, being English, had 14,500 gallons of beer and ale, and they had the material with them to brew a lot more ale when they needed it. Obviously the French enjoying English hospitality may have been consuming some of that, but it is still an impressive scale of consumption.

MELVYN BRAGG: Did they take all of their own food? Or did they live off the land?

STEVEN GUNN: They took all their own food. This, as we have said, was something the size of an English army you might send to France, so in effect they move into army supply mode, except that because it is a grand display you don’t only do quantity you also do variety. So, for example, we know from the royal household accounts their fish: they have got 9,100 plaice, 7,836 whiting, 5,554 soles, 2,800 crayfish, 700 conger eels, 3 porpoises and a dolphin. To have a proper banquet you have got to have a range of things like that.

JOHN GUY: And that was just the fish menu, because didn’t they have 337 oxen and 2,000 sheep?

PENNY ROBERTS: 1,200 capons.

JOHN GUY: And I read someone was boiling beef for six weeks beforehand.

MELVYN BRAGG: What about their clothes? A Field of the Cloth of Gold – was that the dress code? Did everything have to be gold?

STEVEN GUNN: There is clearly a sense that you dress in the most spectacular fashion you can. One of the French memoirists who writes about it talks about seeing noblemen walking around with their estates on their backs because they have mortgaged their lands or sold off their woods in order to procure the best clothes they possibly can.

MELVYN BRAGG: And they took furniture as well. It is a big display. Can we just go into this? We are talking about display, aren’t we?

JOHN GUY: The royal palaces, virtually all the standing palaces, were emptied and all the silver, gold, Westminster Abbey’s copes and ornaments were taken, and of course the nobles took their own kit. I mean the displays of plate, the jewels, the imagery and the chapel. The chapel was very important in the royal palace too. These were just spectacular.

STEVEN GUNN: And you would take things like tapestries for hanging on the wall, carpets made in Turkey, the kind of things you see in Holbein portraits which are much too valuable to put on the floor, but you put them on tables. All those sorts of soft furnishings would be filling up these tents and the temporary palace to overwhelm people when they walk in and see them.

PENNY ROBERTS: Another example of the sort of extravagance and glamour as well is the ladies who come along in the finest Renaissance fashions. The French ladies in particular were asked by Francis to come and show off the latest Italian Renaissance fashions and were much criticised by the Italian ambassador in particular for wearing very provocative clothing. Polydor Virgil later on complains that the English ladies then adopt these, having seen these ladies at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in these magnificent costumes.

MELVYN BRAGG: Was there diplomacy going on round the edges?

PENNY ROBERTS: Absolutely. After the kings have their initial one-to-one meeting they then go into a tent with Cardinal Wolsey and Admiral Bonnivet, who were the two individuals who had mainly negotiated the Treaty of London, in order to sign a new Treaty. This agrees to the marriage of the Dauphin to the Princess Mary and to the handing over of monies as a royal pension to the English crown. So there are these various meetings but also all the time there are ambassadorial meetings and negotiations going on between the two sides.

MELVYN BRAGG: As I understand it, the days were organised around dinner – old-fashioned north country dinner between twelve and two o’clock – and they went to dinner and before and after that there were jousting. You have said jousting – what else? Can you go into a bit more detail, because the fun is in the detail of this, isn’t it? So jousting every day, I presume – what else?

PENNY ROBERTS: Jousting every day except Sundays. On Sundays the kings go off and dine with each other’s queens and Cardinal Wolsey dines with the Queen Mother of France, Louise of Savoy, so there are these very nice dining occasions on a Sunday. Obviously they are not allowed to fight on those days. Yes, most days there is jousting and there is what is termed feats of arms both on horseback and on foot and the . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: The English archers show how good they are, don’t they, just to remind people about Agincourt? There are archery displays.

PENNY ROBERTS: That’s right. There is also wrestling between the Bretons and the English. The Bretons are clearly seen as the best wrestlers in France and so there are various battles of that type, but there is also the fact that the two sides are organised into groups and they ensure that the two kings never meet each other directly within these combats.

MELVYN BRAGG: So imagine these people swirling around in that place – must have been extraordinary. We can’t keep repeating it too often, because it is an extraordinary thing. Towards the end there was a great Mass, again engineered by and conducted by Cardinal Wolsey himself. It was Corpus Christi, which was a big event in the Catholic calendar and he must have known that when he set the dates. Can you just tell us the significance of that Mass, Steven Gunn, and how he conducted it?

STEVEN GUNN: Well, in some ways the Mass reproduces the kinds of competitive magnificence between the two courts that we have seen all the way through the meetings. The French king’s chapel choir sings parts of the services, the English king’s chapel choir sings other parts of the service and presumably there is a sense of competition between the two. But Wolsey demonstrates again a central role in the whole thing by the fact that he is the priest who sings Mass and he has attending on him, holding the bowls and towels, the highest English noblemen. These are people who certainly would have despised his father as a butcher from Ipswich and pretty clearly come close to despising him, and yet are having to be his servants for the purpose of singing Mass.

MELVYN BRAGG: And there is an unexpected – this is the worst prompt I have ever done in my life! – there is an unexpected interruption in the Mass, isn’t there, Steven?

STEVEN GUNN: There was an unexpected interruption which remains rather obscure: something which must have been part of the entertainment appears flying over the crowd. No one is quite clear whether it is a firework or quite what it is. Some people report it as being something like a flying dragon. It may be like a flying salamander. There are particular heraldic problems here, because Francis I’s personal badge is a salamander whereas the red dragon from the Welsh ancestry is part of the Tudor arms. It looks as though it may well have gone off early and was supposed to happen at some later point. It becomes untethered, or the fireworks go off unintentionally.

MELVYN BRAGG: But this is during the Mass and a lot of people think it was meant to be?

STEVEN GUNN: It was meant to be part of the spectacular display of the Mass, yes.

MELVYN BRAGG: Another of Wolsey’s . . .

JOHN GUY: The Venetian ambassador says it is the Elevation of the Host, but he has got that completely wrong. There is one thing about the Mass though, to come back to the issue of peace, that I think is really important. Wolsey gets a man called Richard Pacey, who is the Dean of St Paul’s and Henry’s Secretary, to preach the sermon. Pacey is the same guy who is in fact giving the Latin oration on peace in the Treaty of London.

MELVYN BRAGG: What language did he preach in?

JOHN GUY: He would probably have preached in Latin. He is a great friend of Erasmus. He is one of the key figures in this humanist peace campaign, I think the other thing that the Mass did was something else that in a way was very comical. When they got to the Pax, where the kings were asked to kiss the special emblem of the Pax, in fact neither of them will go before the other, so they just look at each other and it is taken away and the queens do the same, but then they decide just to kiss each other.

PENNY ROBERTS: It is nice as well, isn’t it, because the Mass is the ultimate ritual, it brings people together, it is seen as a uniting ritual, and so it is very important for the symbolism of peace and up to this point the kings mostly have been having their own Masses in their own chapels in their own pavilions and palaces. Except on one occasion when Francis bursts into Henry’s bedchamber early one morning, hands him his sword and says, ‘I am your prisoner’ and accompanies him to Mass. I think it is a very nice breakdown of the etiquette, very much reinforcing the friendship and the unity and the wish for peace.

MELVYN BRAGG: Making himself completely vulnerable to him. There must have been hints, there had been assassinations before. Henry was being very bold going to meet his traditional, ferocious enemy – on English soil, but right on the edge of theirs. He was taking his life into his hands to a certain extent. Yet those two kept showing each other that they weren’t enemies.

PENNY ROBERTS: Yes, and I think Francis was very disarming. He was very magnanimous, allowing them to meet on English soil. He was quite prepared, he went along with the etiquette, but he was a very spontaneous kind of character and he often got himself into all kinds of scrapes and accidents and it is very characteristic of him to turn up in the bedchamber in this way. A performance which Henry repeated a few days later, so he wasn’t offended. It demonstrated that he went along with it.

MELVYN BRAGG: Let’s talk about the sources for a minute, because they might throw a lot out of joint. Was it thought at the time – by the chroniclers and the diarists – to be a great spectacular extraordinary event?

JOHN GUY: Oh absolutely. There were newsletters in France, that is one of the ways we know about this so much, the Venetian ambassador was enormously impressed with all this and wrote a very long account of it. It is true that the sources are actually contradictory. Take for example the fountains with the wine. One account says that one fountain was claret the other one was malmsey; another one says one was wine and the other was beer; one account says they were flowing all the time and everybody got sozzled, and another account says they were only actually switched on during the banquets when one of the kings was entertaining one of the queens. So the sources are rather confused.

STEVEN GUNN: There are also printed accounts. You can actually buy an account of the jousting and the meeting between the kings printed in a pamphlet on the streets of Paris. This is the first great age of European news printing, and clearly this is a big event that people wanted to read about.

PENNY ROBERTS: I think both sides are very much checking each other out as well. I mentioned about the fashions of the ladies, but the Venetian ambassador not only reports on the provocative fashions of the French ladies but also the excessive drinking of the English ladies. They are passing round cups and sharing it, which is seen, and these are reinforcing all kinds of stereotypes about one another. It is very much about matching up these forces and it makes an impression across Europe.

MELVYN BRAGG: Are there significant differences, Steven or John, significant differences in the accounts? Is there something there is a real clash on?

JOHN GUY: Well, there is a significant difference in terms of how we understand the meeting, because of the fact that the English administrative accounts survive much better than the French ones do because of various fires in archives and so on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So we really don’t know much about what the French take with them. Whereas in France there is a much stronger tradition of memoir writing so we have people who were there later on writing in their memoirs of what happened in a way that people don’t really do on the English side, so it gives a rather different quality to the two kinds of information.

MELVYN BRAGG: And this wrestling business, Penny, between Francis I and Henry VIII – it comes from a French source, doesn’t it? Can you tell us about it?

PENNY ROBERTS: That’s right. It comes from the memoir of the Sieur de l’Orange, who is a close childhood friend of Francis. He had grown up with him as one of his gentlemen of the chamber and he recounts this tale. After the kings have been watching some wrestling, as I have said, between the Bretons and the English . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: At which the English had won on that occasion?

PENNY ROBERTS: That’s right.

STEVEN GUNN: Because the Bretons didn’t turn up, I think that’s right?

PENNY ROBERTS: I think that could well be the account, and . . .

STEVEN GUNN: They wrestled with non-Breton wrestlers.

PENNY ROBERTS: Yes, the Bretons were the best. The two kings were drinking together, bantering and exchanging comments, and Henry it is who challenges Francis – ‘let’s have a wrestle’ – and grabs him by the shoulders. They are both very tall, as I mentioned, and physically strong, and I think Henry was hoping as rather the heavier figure that he would be able to outdo Francis, but Francis was rather more agile, a bit lighter, and was able to bring him down with what was termed a ‘tour de Bretagne’, ‘a Breton turn’, which was clearly the best way to wrestle somebody to the ground, which is very humiliating for Henry of course.

It is only reported in one source and it is a great question about whether or not it is apocryphal and in fact never occurred. There is great silence from the other sources. May be good reasons for that, because obviously this is an occasion where there is supposed to be this equality and they are not supposed to have any direct combat. What is nice about it, I think, even if it is not true it signals how there is this intense rivalry which is bubbling under the surface at all times.

MELVYN BRAGG: And the source was Francis’ best friend. An interesting and perhaps irrelevant point about the Brittany Throw is that Breton and Cornish wrestling and Cumberland wrestling are supposed to have come from the Celtic – he probably did the Buttock, as we call it in the north-west – but we can go into that in greater detail at another time. Probably a Cross-Buttock. If there was a competition in dazzle, Steven Gunn, who won?

STEVEN GUNN: I think they both won, because the economy of magnificence is something where if you have displayed in the right way then you have shown how kingly you both are. There is one sense in which it is a competition but there is another sense in which both the kings win because you have shown what magnificent kings you are. After all, you are talking to each other and to the international audience, but you are also talking to your own subjects and both kings can say, ‘look how seriously I am taken, look at what a great ruler I am.’

MELVYN BRAGG: It seems like a magnificent folly because three years later they are at war again, these two, aren’t they, and Henry’s forces get very near Paris?

JOHN GUY: The thing breaks down because of what happens in Italy. Within months of the Field of the Cloth of Gold Charles and Francis are at war over Italy, over Milan and Naples which are key goals of Francis. It shows how fragile all of this was. On the other hand, if you look at it in their terms, you see this Renaissance spectacle, this dazzle. I disagree a little bit with Steven, I think both sides won, but I think England won more because England now seems to be right at the forefront of the Renaissance, of Renaissance diplomacy, of Renaissance ideas. England, the weaker state, the weakest of all these three great powers, is now able to tip the balance. So the question is when Charles and Francis fall out after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, what side England is going to back and probably at that moment Henry and Wolsey have never been more powerful.

MELVYN BRAGG: Henry VIII and Wolsey by force of personality, we must remember again how tiny England was, less than a fifth of the size of France, the king had no standing army, which the French had, very low tax base and nothing like the size of Charles V, and yet they came on and said, ‘we are equal to you, we hold the balance.’ And it was personality, it was personality politics.

JOHN GUY: It was personality and magnificence, because the trick is this PR through magnificence. And another thing, the Mass – at the end of the Mass, Cardinal Wolsey pronounced a plenary indulgence, a general indulgence, dispensation, forgiving everybody all their sins. Now very few people could do that. Only the pope could do that, but Wolsey could do it because of his special plenipotentiary powers. That is charismatic, you know, that religious element which marks out Henry VIII and Wolsey. Of course Henry sees what can be done through this method and within ten years he is claiming himself and not the pope to be Supreme Head of the Church in England.

MELVYN BRAGG: Penny Roberts, do you think it was an expensive waste of time for the French, then?

PENNY ROBERTS: No, I don’t. They are establishing their reputation as a very magnificent court. It is a fantastically glamorous event which everybody in Europe recognises and the fact is we still see it as an exemplar of what Renaissance princes do. It still has that resonance and I think from that point of view it wasn’t a waste of time for them. Francis was spending quite a lot of money on all kinds of things during this period of his rule. He had been spending on the imperial election, his Italian campaigns and so on, so it was just part of his sense of extravagance. I don’t think the French feel that they lost out.

STEVEN GUNN: I think it is striking also that it is clearly something that contemporaries could read in two different ways. Some people can say what a magnificent occasion it had been. Then you have someone like Bishop John Fisher who preaches a sermon not long afterwards and uses it as an illustration of how the joys of heaven are much more solid than the joys of earth, because the joys of earth are transient like the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where they were having a war again afterwards. No one could even see the cloth of gold when the wind blew and the dust got in the clothes. So it is something that contemporaries could use as a sign of how passing things are.

MELVYN BRAGG: Did it do anything about the perception of kingship at the time, John Guy?

JOHN GUY: I think the focus now is very much on this side of imperial kingship. What is the difference between a Roman emperor as Francis sees himself, and a king? Of course the answer is that imperial kings are sovereign and increasingly they look not just to the great Roman emperors like Constantine, Justinian and so on, they also look to the priest kings of the Old Testament, who have sacerdotal powers. Francis was the Most Christian King. Henry coveted a similar title . . .

MELVYN BRAGG: Henry was thought to be the Most Christian King at that time, wasn’t he? The pope thought better of Henry than he thought of Francis, there were more rumblings in France than there were in England at the time.

PENNY ROBERTS: The traditional French title is of Most Christian King. First Son of the Church is always cited and Francis had had an agreement with the pope whereby he had increased his powers over the Church at this time.

STEVEN GUNN: And that is why Henry wants to get the title of Defender of the Faith, which he then does within a couple of years afterwards.

JOHN GUY: And then it moves on, because within ten years Henry has failed to get his divorce because Wolsey’s plenipotentiary powers are not strong enough to beat Charles V in Italy. And so when Wolsey falls, Henry, as it were, subsumes Wolsey’s powers as well as his own and ousts the Pope and then declares that England is an empire and he is Priest King.

PENNY ROBERTS: And Henry needs to get Francis back on side at that point as well because he wants the support of the Parlement of Paris for his divorce and he gets Francis to assist him in this way, and Anne Boleyn is very keen on nurturing Anglo–French relations.

STEVEN GUNN: They meet again, they meet again in Boulogne in 1532, as part of those negotiations.

MELVYN BRAGG: But never again to be such a single spectacular event.

TRANSMITTED: 6.10.2005