Dangerous Magic Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection

It's quite likely that you know this place.

Windsor Castle.

1.5 million people come here every year...

..to bathe in our nation's greatest export - British pomp...

..and immerse themselves in a history that goes back nearly 1,000 years.

But a ticket to Windsor Castle buys you access to something else as well.

Now, many of the tourists streaming through these galleries

haven't travelled halfway round the world to visit an art gallery,

and yet that, along with many other things,

is exactly what they're paying to see.

Every room's an Aladdin's cave.

In this case Rubens, Rubens everywhere.

But that's not all.

A reliquary clock.

You can wind it up and it'll play Handel.

Ming porcelain.

Children of the Duke of Buckingham by Van Dyck.

Wonderful group portrait of the family of Charles I.

It's fantastic. And look here, look at this.

The decorative arts as well.

This cabinet.

This would have taken somebody probably three years of his life to make it,

and yet we pass through in five seconds.

All of these things are part of the unparalleled Royal Collection.

More than a million works of art owned by the Queen

and handed down from monarch to monarch.

Housed in our nation's palaces,

as well as many other museums and institutions,

the Royal Collection projects permanence.

The reassuring stability of the monarchy and our nation.

This is Britain, blowing its own trumpet.

But scratch the surface,

and a multitude of other stories are revealed as well.

Oh, my word!

The fall and rise of great dynasties.

Private royal passions.

Unashamed decadence.

A ruler's quest for control.

You can sense his aloofness,

his total conviction that he is right and everyone else is wrong.

In the first programme of this series,

I'm exploring the troubled birth of the modern Royal Collection.

When the Tudors and early Stuarts discovered the hypnotising,

operatic powers of art...

changing the way the nation looked at itself and its rulers.

There's a kind of dangerous magic about the whole of this sequence.

But then losing everything in a moment of calamity.

The objects in the Royal Collection have been witness to and part of

500 years of British history,

and I believe there is no better way to get inside the minds

of those who have worn the crown from Henry VIII to Charles I

to Queen Victoria and beyond,

than by looking at the objects they collected,

they wanted to be surrounded by.

The Royal Collection's by no means just painting and decorative arts.

In fact, the crown jewels of the collection are the Crown Jewels.

They embody a fundamental rule,

that to be a monarch you have to look like one.

And you do this by surrounding yourself with rare and storied objects.

St Edward's Crown, weighed down by 5lb of gold, precious stones,

and a nation's history.

Wielding these extraordinary creations,

even the most unremarkable individual can be transformed

into something other -

glorious, dazzling.

Millions of people come to see these objects every year.

The display cases might be modern,

but the regalia's doing what it's always done,

lending an aura of mystery,

of magic, even, to the monarchy.

And when I talk about magic,

I'm talking about objects once invested with supernatural powers.

The most ancient rite in the Coronation service

is performed with holy oil and this 12th century spoon,

an exceptionally-rare survival from the medieval English court.

The anointing symbolises an individual reborn at the moment of coronation

into a new person, filled with divine grace.

-ARCHIVE:

-And here in the most mysterious of the rites of coronation,

the Archbishop anoints her with holy oil

and consecrates her to her great office.

A moment so sacrosanct

but the cameras were shielded back in 1953,

lest they steal a little piece of the monarchy's enchantment.

The Imperial State Crown...

..an object designed to inspire awe and loyalty.

What a fragile, magnificent thing it is.

The setting of this crown might be 20th century,

but several of the gems in it have rich and ancient histories.

The Black Prince's Ruby is said to have been worn by Henry V

at the Battle of Agincourt.

While the sapphire set into the very top of the crown

is reputed to have belonged to Edward the Confessor.

Now, kings and queens have long understood the symbolic significance of the crown.

When this is placed on the head of an individual,

they become other than the rest of mankind.

They become irradiated with a sense of the divine.

These objects don't just impart the intangible aura

that surrounds a monarch.

Embodied in them is a very real element of power.

Charles II certainly understood this.

He had seen his father executed, his crown melted down.

But look at him brandishing his new regalia.

Are these mere objects of state?

Or are they a kind of shield,

protection against the worst thing that ever happened,

ever happening again?

A king or queen can't wear a crown all the time,

but they can surround themselves with great art,

and over time the Royal Collection has come to do much the same job,

reflecting its brilliance back onto its royal owner.

Occasionally, you can also see a different side of the great royal

collectors, a hint of their personalities.

As in this painted terracotta bust of a cheerful royal child.

What are you laughing at?

Meet the Mona Lisa of the Royal Collection.

Except no mysterious smile, just an enigmatic chuckle.

In many ways,

it's a baffling object and it certainly confused the generations.

George IV, when he borrowed the bust to put it in Brighton Pavilion,

referred to it as "the laughing Chinaman".

Other scholars have seen it as a depiction of a dwarf,

or, alternatively, a depiction of a laughing girl.

But I think I know who it really is a portrait of.

We know the sculptor is Guido Mazzoni,

and it's assumed that he presented this bust to his patron Henry VII,

around the end of the 15th century.

So, who would he have portrayed for the King?

Perhaps, I think for sure, his son.

I think that this is young Henry VIII, gold headgear and all,

having a very good time.

I love the idea that the boy in the bust would grow to fill this suit

of Greenwich armour.

Henry VIII's court was a kind of theatre of Renaissance magnificence.

When he met the King of France near Calais in 1520,

6,000 men built a temporary palace

adorned with statues and fountains that flowed with wine.

Henry's idea of a camping trip was certainly extravagant.

Tupperware? No.

He liked to impress with sideboards groaning with gold plate.

At Hampton Court Palace,

Henry's most impressive works of art were prominently placed on the walls

of one of its most public spaces.

The Great Hall.

How better to intimidate visiting dignitaries

on their way to see the King?

Henry VIII can seem

dauntingly remote to us now.

Very little survives of his court,

and there's almost nowhere where you can see one of his great art

possessions hanging in the room for which it was intended.

But there is this magnificent,

astonishingly-expensive set of tapestries created for this space.

We know that they hung here because this is the only room big enough

for them to have been hung.

These are the great tapestries telling the story of Abraham.

They cost an absolute fortune.

Tapestries were far more expensive than paintings.

What magnificent things they still are,

despite the fading of their colours with time.

You can still see the glimmer of gold threads in their surface.

I think that by choosing the story of Abraham,

Henry was making very clear and direct claims about himself.

Especially, I think, in this tapestry,

where God comes down and anoints Abraham as the first patriarch,

the first leader of the Jewish people.

Can we see Henry in that?

Henry as the chosen one,

leading the people out of Catholic darkness

and into the Protestant light.

Here, perhaps most potent of all,

and one of the most beautiful of these tapestries with its rich colours

and beautiful, billowing drapery, it shows the sacrifice of Isaac.

And I think we can get some sense of the allegorical meanings

that the court might have been intended to draw from this

from these figures that we see at the bottom.

Particularly this one, obedience.

Because that's what that rather terrifying tale

of Abraham obeying God's command to sacrifice his own son,

until the angel at the last minute intervenes.

I think it's Henry's way of saying to his people, be obedient.

Be obedient to me.

In other words, within the allegory of that tapestry,

Henry himself is God,

and it's his people who become the Abrahams and the Isaacs.

I rather think of Henry as the founder of the modern

Royal Collection.

He's the earliest king whose acquisitions have survived

in sufficient quantity to reflect his taste and character.

Henry was a canny judge of talent

and he joined forces with an artist of true genius.

In Hans Holbein the Younger,

the King found a superlative draughtsman,

whose painted portraits captured Henry's rule and his court.

As can be seen by a visit to Windsor Castle's print room,

home to the Drawing Collection.

Here, there are over 80 Holbein drawings from Henry's reign,

the first great age of the portrait in Britain.

These are preparatory sketches that were gathered up and, we think,

made into a book that the king himself kept in his study.

A dossier of the obedient and the troublesome.

So, nine of the greatest drawings ever produced by anybody anywhere,

nine Holbeins.

It's as if you're coming face-to-face

with people from the distant past.

They've got their faces pressed up against the glass of history,

and here we've got Thomas More with his five o'clock stubble.

It was the intellectual circle around Sir Thomas More

who first brought the German-born Holbein

to the attention of the Tudor court.

Making the introductions is Royal Collection Trust's

Vanessa Remington,

who knows these individuals almost as well as her own family.

This is Thomas More's daughter?

Yes, this is Cicely Heron, who was his youngest,

third and youngest daughter.

She was very, very well-educated, educated with his son,

which was unusual at that time.

So she read Greek, she read Latin?

She read Greek and Latin, she knew astronomy, mathematics, philosophy,

logic, and some of the intelligence really comes across in the drawing.

Members of More's circle, like Sir Henry Guildford, were humanists,

up-to-date thinkers, who thought of themselves very much as individuals.

They want to know about the insides of each other's minds,

but they also want to have images of each other that they can exchange.

Exactly. You can see where the portrait was important

in all of this, and exchange was a key factor.

And in England, this is the first age of the portrait.

There had not been portraits.

Absolutely not. So when these sitters sat to Holbein,

they would never have seen anything like this.

In an age when mirrors were still an expensive luxury,

a Holbein likeness seemed positively uncanny,

a magical conjuring of human presence.

Small wonder that the magician himself was hired by Henry

to be the King's painter.

I love the selection that you've made,

because we are moving through pretty much every layer

-of the social hierarchy.

-That's right.

We've got royal sitters, we've got every sort of official at court,

poets, the powerful and influential, but also those who are at court,

but lesser figures.

I'm very drawn to...

..Southwell. He's got such a strong character.

He was. He was a henchman of Thomas Cromwell,

and he was involved in the downfall of Sir Thomas More.

And you can see as well,

an interesting example here of attention to detail,

he's even included the tubercular scars,

-which Sir Richard Southwell bore on his chin.

-Oh, that's what that is.

-And up here on the forehead.

-How amazing.

So he's certainly not flattering.

How fantastic.

Do you know, I'd assumed that was a bit of paper damage.

It was thought to be a repaired tear for a while.

How brilliant. Not a repaired tear, it's a skin tear.

Yeah. It's a scar.

That's fantastic.

That's fantastic.

I think, also, Holbein is quite responsive to the sense of the difference

between one sitter and another.

So, Jane Seymour.

It's not one of my favourite Holbein drawings, because I think,

partly because he has armoured her in the impersonality

that he feels is befitting to a queen.

He's really not giving anything away about her.

This is an official picture, to me.

Yes, Holbein knew what was required of him,

and he was portraying a queen,

and a queen with decorum and restraint, and that comes across.

A tight-lipped lady.

For Henry VIII's Palace of Whitehall,

long since destroyed by fire,

Holbein created an enormous mural, propaganda for the Tudor monarchy.

A copy survives in the Royal Collection.

Jane and Henry's long-awaited son had just been born,

hence the King's bullish stance.

Most daring of all, there are no royal trappings.

Henry and Holbein knew the King's physical presence was enough.

Who could ever out-stare this broad-shouldered giant

with his ruthless eyes?

The King's image was copied and copied, haunting the centuries,

until it became not just the definitive picture of Henry,

but of royal power itself.

Henry VIII demonstrated the power of art.

But his children took a very different approach.

At the height of the Reformation, Henry's son,

the deeply-Protestant Edward VI,

ordered that the thousands of paintings and carvings

that had filled English churches for centuries

be smashed or whitewashed over.

A few ghosts survive, but everything else went.

The greatest destruction of art in the history not just of British,

but of all European civilisation.

What Edward began, his sister Elizabeth I continued.

And when it came to secular art,

Elizabeth understood that the royal portrait could now occupy a special

place in the Protestant age as a new kind of icon, an object of devotion.

You can see this in the Royal Collection's

3,000 portrait miniatures,

which include some of the finest examples by masters of the form -

Isaac Oliver and Elizabeth's court artist, Nicholas Hilliard.

So from the portrait, suddenly you get this development,

which becomes a positive obsession in Elizabeth's time

with the notion of the miniature portrait, or keepsake.

Something that can be worn close to the heart,

an image that can be put inside a locket to demonstrate

love, affection, closeness.

This is...

I think this is one of the greatest miniatures ever painted.

We're not sure, we don't know who it's of.

It's a man in a landscape,

and he looks at us with this...

Oh, infinitely soulful, melancholic expression on his face.

He's so miserable.

He really needs someone else to be with him.

But in Elizabeth's case, and these four images are all of Elizabeth...

..it isn't just about love, I think it's also about realpolitik.

Her very canny sense of how to use the image

to promote her political ends.

We see her first of all in this image as a relatively-young lady.

Here she is again, early 30s, determined young woman.

A very fine costume, roses in her hair.

Now, she's in her 50s.

She's a little bit weathered by age,

but you still wouldn't want to cross her.

And the best of all, I think, is this image.

She's now near the end of her reign, it's the 1590s.

I'm going to pick it up, because I think when you pick it up,

you really feel the power of the image.

I'm holding the Queen in my hand.

But if I'm one of her courtiers,

and I've been given this image to wear close to my heart,

I know that it's not really me in control of her,

it's her in control of me.

No monarch policed the royal image more fiercely than Elizabeth.

All likenesses had to adhere to a standard template.

And what she's done, which was

brilliantly clever...

..in this new age in England where no religious images are allowed,

images of the Saints - proscribed,

images of the Virgin Mary - proscribed,

she, the Queen, has taken on to herself all of those ancient,

magical properties of the image.

She has become the Virgin Mary.

This notion of the monarch as semi-divine only grew in strength

after Elizabeth's death in 1603,

not least because the incoming Stuarts truly believed

they had a divine right to the throne.

These long-time kings of Scotland had just inherited the Tudor crown,

lands and palaces.

Had a dynasty ever been so favoured by the Almighty?

And if the present seemed bright, the future seemed brighter still.

The young heir to the throne, Henry, Prince of Wales, was handsome,

dashing, intelligent, a gifted swordsman, a master jouster.

This young man was destined one day for the Crown.

The future Henry IX.

Would he be perhaps the greatest king of all?

Henry's proud father, James I,

instructed his son that he was made a little god to rule over men.

And in portraits, Henry was shown wearing a spectacular exoskeleton,

a suit of Greenwich armour, still kept at Windsor Castle.

It's being shown to me by Simon Metcalf, the Queen's armourer.

So it all clips together,

this fantastically-elaborate piece of military kit?

That's exactly right.

It's completely handmade in about 1608,

and the balance is to protect you

but you also have to be able to fight,

and you have to be able to perform.

You could run in this, you could jump in it.

I mean, I notice the thistle, his father is James VI of Scotland,

James I of England.

So they're emphasising that he's the heir to the throne,

he's the heir to the Scottish throne as well.

But how do they achieve this fantastic golden decoration?

It's been chased and embossed and etched,

and then they've used a mixture of mercury and gold leaf

that's put on in a paste.

And then that's heated up and the mercury's driven away,

very dangerous, but leaves this wonderful gold, contrasting gold colour.

But even more incredible,

this finish can only be achieved by heating the metal to between 285-295

degrees C, and you get this wonderful blue appearance

-appearing on the steel.

-So, it's actually, you know,

although it's spectacular, this contrast, I see black and gold.

-Yes.

-We would have actually been seeing a kind of peacock blue.

Yes. But it only occurs at this very particular heat.

It's something from another world, isn't it?

I mean, what do you imagine people, I don't know,

were he to ride out onto the streets of London one day in the early 17th

century, what on earth would they make of him?

It must have been absolutely amazing.

I believe it's like somebody arriving from Mars, honestly.

Nobody else would have an armour like this on horseback.

Can you imagine it in the daylight, glittering?

-In the sun.

-Gold, blue.

-Amazing.

-With feathers.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that essential part of Stuart kingship was this belief that the king

really is not part of the human race in the same sense as the rest of us.

He has a hotline to God.

He has been anointed by God, he's divinely appointed.

Perhaps armour like this on a sunny day in London makes you...

..really believe it's true.

I think it would.

And then for the person wearing it, if you wear armour,

you feel invincible.

So, it's going both ways.

But the destiny of the Stuarts was to be twisted on fortune's wheel.

In November 1612, Henry, still a teenager,

contracted typhoid and died at St James's Palace.

Heir to the throne was now Henry's younger brother,

the rather less promising Charles, Duke of York.

Charles was just 12 years old, and physically unimpressive.

Slight, short, with weak ankle joints probably caused by rickets,

and a stammer that would afflict him throughout his life.

But now, he had to step into his older brother's boots.

Suddenly, he was destined to be king.

So, here's a question:

how did weedy Charles, Duke of York,

become one of the most glamorous kings ever immortalised in paint?

As Charles I,

he would grow into the greatest royal collector in all of British history...

..releasing royal taste from the stiffness of the Tudor past

into the Baroque sensuality of a new age.

The transformation began when Charles was just 22.

He gained his father's permission to travel to Spain,

and win the hand of the Spanish Infanta.

So, wearing a false beard

and accompanied by the Duke of Buckingham,

Charles set out for the continent.

They travelled incognito, taking the back roads to Dover.

In fact, they got rumbled pretty early on.

Taking the ferry across the river at Gravesend,

Charles had nothing but a single 20 shilling gold coin

to pay the boatman -

the equivalent of trying to pay a cabbie now with a £1,000 note.

The boatman reported him to the authorities,

and Buckingham and Charles were stopped, briefly detained.

You can imagine the scene.

"Oh, I'm so sorry your Highness, proceed."

Proceed they did, and once they reached Madrid's Alcazar Palace,

Charles witnessed the splendour of the Spanish King,

and a Catholic Imperial court, at first hand.

Charles fell in love, but not with a princess.

Few nobles and princes from England had travelled to the continent since

the Reformation,

so they'd never seen the art of the high Renaissance,

they'd never seen Titan, Raphael,

the great painting of the Baroque period.

Charles now experienced that on the Continent in its true context,

and he was entranced, enchanted.

He had to have more of it.

And the greatest legacy of his trip was in fact a whole series of

carriages coming the other way, back from the continent towards London,

carrying the art that he had acquired.

And how strange Charles's Spanish acquisitions must have seemed

when they were unpacked back in rainy London.

Is this really what they get up to on the Continent?

As a souvenir,

Charles gave this sculpture by Giambologna

to his travelling companion, Buckingham...

..who put it in his garden to startle passers-by.

This sculpture was a very adventurous object

for a young royal to bring back to England.

What do we get from it?

The sense that there's something a little bit extreme

about Charles's taste.

Very sensual, very passionate.

He likes art that's got a little taste of danger about it.

Charles was now competing as a collector with the crowned heads of Europe,

and in Madrid he negotiated the purchase of seven enormous

coloured drawings by a master of the Renaissance, Raphael.

The Raphael cartoons are now on long-term loan to the V&A in London.

I think they represented to him the Renaissance

that England had never had, that the Reformation had prevented.

So this was his way

of getting a piece of the Renaissance, seven pieces of it.

But he also had a very straightforward and practical reason

for buying them, because these are the Raphael cartoons,

and they're called cartoons because they are all preparatory designs

for tapestries.

These blueprints were intended to give a boost

to the English tapestry industry,

but Raphael's designs were originally created for the Sistine Chapel -

inner sanctum of the Catholic Church.

Did the young prince just love art so much that he sometimes forgot

its more dangerous meanings?

You have to say that the association of these images in England

in the 1620s is potentially incendiary.

Christ...

..anoints Peter.

And that gesture announces Peter as the first Pope,

and by implication every subsequent Pope is likewise anointed.

But, to a Protestant, to a Puritan, the Pope...

..represents the Antichrist.

In buying works by Raphael, Charles, in his mind,

was showing off his taste.

He was to be England's first connoisseur King.

And in the 17th century,

the most desirable works for any collector were Italian.

But getting hold of the very best Italian art was extremely difficult.

Shortly after he came to the throne,

Charles attempted to persuade the Italian painter Guercino

to come to London to be his artist.

But Guercino said no, London was too far away,

too far north, too cold,

too many heretics lived there.

But despite his disadvantages,

Charles did become one of the greatest collectors of Italian art

in all of history.

And how did he manage it?

The answer is a caper.

He pulled a stunt, and it happened here in Mantua,

the very first Italian Job.

Some people here still think Mantua is the scene of a crime.

The Palazzo Ducale,

principal seat of the family who ruled Mantua for 400 years,

the Gonzaga.

The walls are bare now,

but once these rooms were filled with dazzling works of art.

The Gonzaga court owned one of the greatest collections in the world,

built up steadily since the family's zenith in the 15th century.

DOOR CREAKS

It's taken them centuries to get that creak right.

This is the nerve centre of the Ducal Palace at Mantua,

the Camera Degli Sposi,

once the bedroom and the state apartment of the Gonzaga Princes.

The whole room was decorated by the great Andrea Mantegna.

What did Mantegna give his masters to look at?

Well, images of themselves.

What a watchful, hard-faced clan they are.

And up above, all around,

you have these images of different Roman Caesars...

..very significant.

The Gonzaga at that time saw themselves

as modern versions of the old Roman Emperors, such was their power.

But wind forward to the 17th century,

and the dynasty was in terminal decline.

A conspiracy was hatched...

..between the Gonzaga and Charles's agent in Italy...

..to sell the treasures to the English King.

When word got out, the people of Mantua protested,

even offering to pay to keep the works in their city.

This was their heritage, their culture being purloined by a foreign power.

Nevertheless, a rather complicated deal was done.

At the end of which, Charles had forked out £30,000

in exchange for crate after crate after crate of masterpieces.

Pictures by Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian,

making their way to far-off England.

The Mantua purchases in the present collection show art in England

being taken from 0-60 as fast as a Ferrari.

Poetic, atmospheric, seemingly from another world,

yet miraculously natural.

Remember, art on a grand scale had barely been seen in this country

since the Reformation,

so there'd been no native flowering of the Renaissance or the Baroque.

But here it all was,

arriving from abroad in one job lot.

It was held that the greatest of all the Gonzaga treasures

were nine canvases by Andrea Mantegna,

The Triumphs of Caesar.

Charles placed them on display at Hampton Court,

and here they still are.

These are The Triumphs of Caesar, and there is the man himself.

Caesar on his chariot, stern of face, ruthless.

Before him, a great tide of humanity and possessions.

Everything that he has come back with from his conquests.

Not just objects but people, there are the captives.

They include women and children as well as sullen-faced, defeated men.

There is the armour of the army that his has defeated,

and now we begin to see the spoils of war...

..borne by elephants, by people, by oxen.

There are vases, there's plate, there's...

..precious arrays of sculpture.

More armour.

The booty piles up.

But there's a dark side to it all, too,

a slight feeling of Christian unease,

Christian revulsion.

Look at this figure of a soldier...

..in the middle of the procession, lost in thought.

He's one of the victors, but he, more than anyone else,

seems to be counting the cost.

And I think if you...

If you were to take his expression away with you and apply it,

if you like, to the meaning of this whole vast panorama of triumph...

..I think you might come away with the thought that, yes...

..every great civilisation is founded on a crime.

There's a kind of dangerous magic about the picture.

And in fact I think there's a kind of dangerous magic

about the whole of this sequence of nine great paintings.

And their history is almost part of their message, because...

..as power passes from the Gonzaga to Charles,

he purchases them.

But when Charles falls...

..what happens to his great art collection?

The pictures might almost be a prediction of it,

because this is what Cromwell will do to Charles's paintings.

He will form them into a great caravan and send them away.

For now, the Royal Collection was safe,

carefully guarded behind the walls of Charles's palaces.

Its epicentre was still the Palace of Whitehall.

The only substantial part of which to survive is the banqueting house,

adorned with a ceiling by Rubens.

Is that a Saint ascending to heaven?

No, it's a Stuart King.

Charles's father, James I.

But this is just one fragment of a lost palace

that overflowed with art.

In the cabinet room at Whitehall were no less than 73 paintings...

..including Giorgione's Judith.

A painting of Lucretia thought to be by Titian.

Mantegna's Death of the Virgin.

Raphael's St George and the Dragon.

And, if that wasn't enough,

Leonardo Da Vinci's St John the Baptist.

In 1625, Charles had appointed a Dutch medal maker,

Abraham Van Der Doort,

as surveyor of all our pictures at Whitehall and other houses.

It's a role that still exists,

and is currently held by Desmond Shawe-Taylor.

This is an inventory, a manuscript inventory,

written by Abraham Van Der Doort,

the first holder of my job, the surveyor of the Queen's pictures,

and it's a list of everything in the cabinet room at Whitehall.

He gives the... He says, for example here, it says,

"A Mantua piece done by Titian."

Now, somebody's decided that his spelling of Titian...

..pretty illegible, is not correct, so he's corrected that.

It might even be Charles I correcting his spelling there.

This had a very high value, I think it was even £200.

It's a Lucretia, which is still in the collection.

And it's interesting that it describes it as holding

with her left hand a red veil over her face.

It's not absolutely obvious that that's how to interpret the painting now,

so he's clearly reading the painting and suggesting

she's holding the veil out of shame, I think is the idea.

Goodness. It's quite detailed.

Yeah, very, very detailed indeed.

I mean, it strikes me that he's a king who wants someone to write down

everything that he's got. He is seeking to introduce, perhaps,

a bit more order into the Royal Collection

than has hitherto existed.

Completely, and I think order always starts in a cabinet room

because a cabinet room contains coins, medals, silver, reliefs, precious books.

And the cabinet room for Charles I, it's in Whitehall Palace.

-In Whitehall, yes.

-And it's almost the Fort Knox of the collection.

It's where the very most precious things are kept.

It is completely that,

and there's a lot of discussion in Van Der Doort's manuscripts,

particularly the draft manuscripts,

about arguments with other members of the household

as to whether they've got a key or not,

whether they've been removing a coin or not.

And you can see this man sort of struggling with a household

where people are obviously coming from all sorts of different directions with different agendas.

So, it's sort of the sound of a Dutchman sweating.

It is. I mean it is...

And you really feel for him.

In the end he committed suicide,

and it was said that he did so because he worried

that he had lost a miniature,

which had been personally assigned to him by the King,

-which he in fact had not lost, so it's a sort of tragic...

-Oh, no!

That's one account.

So, he killed himself because he thought he'd lost the miniature,

but in fact he'd just put it in the fridge or something, so to speak.

-I've done that with my car keys!

-It's like losing your glasses.

Exactly! That's terrible!

By the 1630s, Charles was at the apex of his power.

Parliament had been dissolved indefinitely.

The King governed by personal rule...

..or tyranny, depending on your historical perspective.

And in this new political climate,

Charles forged a partnership with a former assistant of Rubens,

whom he lured to England in 1632.

Anthony Van Dyck.

Never had a king and his painter being better matched.

Charles would visit Van Dyck's Thames-side studio to sit for him

and, presumably, discuss art with a like mind.

I've come to Buckingham Palace to see the result of their collaboration,

a glamorous new vision of royal power.

I'm hoping it's here, in the East...

Yes, it is.

This is the painting I've come to see,

Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I on horseback,

with his equerry, Monsieur De St Antoine.

What a masterpiece, and what a shockingly new,

extraordinary type of royal painting.

When it was first created,

no-one in England had seen anything like this before.

Think of Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII.

Impressive, yes, but nonetheless static, frozen,

compared to this swirl of Baroque movement.

This is painted theatre.

And the horse is loaded with symbolism.

In this type of Baroque portraiture, the horse stands for the nation

that Charles, its rider, rules.

If you see, it's raised one fore leg and one hind leg

at the slightest pressure from Charles's kid-booted foot.

But imagine how this picture must have struck those who first saw it,

where they first saw it, hung in St James's Palace...

..a Tudor building, much, much smaller.

And this painting was hung at the far end of the room,

where it filled the wall.

It was like a magnificent illusion.

You would have had the feeling that Charles was actually riding into the

room, to impress you with his mastery of his horse, his nation.

In the Royal Collection,

you can see Van Dyck ripping up the rules of English portraiture.

He plays with light,

comparing the gleam in a jewel to the gleam in a human eye.

And he introduces a new intimacy to British art.

This is a royal family.

Henrietta Maria, the first Queen of England ever painted,

holding a baby.

But Van Dyck's greatest royal portrait was created

for an audience of one,

the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini,

who needed source material for a marble bust of the King.

Van Dyck sent him this,

a study of a man prematurely worn down by power.

I saw it out of its frame at Royal Collection Trust's

conservation studios,

as it was worked on by conservator Nicola Christie.

Nicola, I don't want to break your concentration

but would you mind explaining to me

what you're looking for?

Well, the painting's going out on loan,

so I'm checking it against existing photographs and reports,

to make sure that the condition hasn't changed.

It's a curious object in some ways,

because it's a work of art designed

-to enable another work of art to be created.

-Absolutely.

This painting had a function, yes.

It's a sort of three-dimensional painting, isn't it?

Yes, and possibly also Van Dyck saying to Bernini,

"Well, better that!"

The colours are just superb, and the face, when you put your light on it,

it's interesting, it really comes to light.

-It does.

-The skin tones.

Yes, and the hands, the back of the hand is so colourful too.

Yeah. And you've got your magnifying glasses.

Yes, at my age you need to wear these.

I think I need one of those.

And in fact, I see that there's a pair over there, which I'm going to borrow.

-Welcome to my world.

-No, this is great.

-Oh, this is great.

-Yes.

Goodness me.

The painting of the eye is just...

I mean, they're surprisingly colourful, aren't they,

these sort of rather red-rimmed eyes.

There's a little touch of yellow here.

And the highlights, the catch lights are actually blue.

And tell me about how he's done the lace, because it's very fine.

Well, yes, but if you look at it, it is painted very, very swiftly.

He's actually added these touches of red that you see

of his garment underneath the lace, he's actually added those.

-They're on top of the white.

-They're on top.

-Yes...

He hasn't painted the gaps, he's just...

That seems perverse.

It's almost as if he's painted the lace backwards.

Yes, he has.

It strikes me that of all the pictures of Charles...

..this is the one,

or these are the three, that somehow take you closest to his...

..rather difficult character.

You really feel that you can sense his aloofness.

His determination, his total conviction

that he is right and everyone else is wrong.

This is where Charles's art joins up with the march of great events.

The King spent less on paintings than he did on other forms of display -

clothes, lavish court entertainments.

But they were all part of a gilded bubble into which he would retreat.

Cocooned within, Charles was evermore distant

from the nation that he ruled.

With the country on the brink of civil war,

Van Dyck produced a distillation of Charles's artistic vision.

A single glorious image that I'm going to see at Kensington Palace,

a warning to those who would seek out beauty.

Ah... Here you are.

There are more than a million objects in the Royal Collection.

Over 7,000 paintings.

But if I had to choose my desert island object,

the one thing that I could take home and keep in my house,

hang on my wall, I'd choose this -

Cupid and Psyche.

For my money, the greatest painting in the Royal Collection,

an absolute astonishing masterpiece,

painted just a year before Van Dyck died.

His greatest work.

An image of love painted with immense love.

Such a beautiful thing.

Psyche is a mortal woman, lover of Cupid, god of desire.

She's been asked by Cupid's mother, Venus, to go to the underworld

and come back with a box containing beauty.

Psyche is overcome with curiosity.

Venus has tricked her.

It contains sleep, and not just any kind of sleep.

Stygian sleep, the eternal sleep of death.

Psyche falls down in a dead faint.

And Cupid has come to save her.

He will brush the sleep from her body,

that's the meaning of his outstretched right hand.

At this moment, 1639, 1640, British art suddenly, and for a very,

very short moment,

joins the great traditions of continental post-Renaissance art,

from which it had been severed by the Reformation.

But now, under Charles I, it's back.

British art suddenly has its Titian, he's called Anthony Van Dyck.

That's why this is such a significant painting.

We often think of Stuart art as representing a kind of ending,

as being doom-laden, as having the shadow of death about it.

But this picture, this picture is a fresh start.

It's a dawn. This is where art would have gone in this country

if Charles I had lived.

It would have gone in this direction.

This is what we would have had all over the palaces of the Royal family,

all over our aristocratic homes.

This is what British art would have become, but it didn't.

It didn't.

Shortly after Cupid and Psyche was completed, Van Dyck was dead,

and civil war had broken out.

The paintings and treasures of the Royal Collection gathered dust

in abandoned Royal palaces.

A nation tore itself apart.

In December 1648, a few weeks before going on trial for his life,

Charles was a prisoner at Windsor Castle.

A relic from this time is still part of the Royal Collection.

Despite the King's reduced circumstances,

he was initially afforded a degree of Royal respect.

Then suddenly there's a great change.

Orders are given that Charles is to be treated less like a king

and more like a prisoner.

The days are short and the nights are getting long.

What does he do to console himself during this darkest period of his life?

This is one of the things that he does.

This is Charles's very own copy of Shakespeare,

the second folio edition published in 1632.

And if I turn to...

..the list of the plays which it contains...

..we can see that Charles has actually marked them up.

We can see what he was reading that Christmas, a month before his death.

Much Ado About Nothing.

A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As You Like It.

All's Well That Ends Well.

Twelfth Night.

And not only that,

but Charles has written the names of his favourite characters.

Benedict and Beatrice.

Pyramus and Thisbe.

Rosalind.

Malvolio.

Absurd Malvolio, poor Malvolio.

I think it's very interesting that at this time

what he's reading is the comedies.

He's reading the comedies.

His life is a tragedy.

His life reminds me, at this point, of King Lear.

But, he didn't want to think about that.

He remained remarkably defiant up until the end,

as you can see in this, the most precious inscription

in this very precious book.

On the very first page, his spidery handwriting.

"Dum spiro spero."

"While I breathe, I hope."

Charles's own personal motto.

And he's signed it with his monogram, CR, Carolus Rex.

He's not going to go gently into that good night.

In January 1649, Charles was tried and sentenced to death.

Whitehall Palace, still filled with his works of art,

was the backdrop for the execution.

The whole event was a kind of black mask,

turning the King back from a god to a mortal human being.

But if you want to get rid of a monarchy, you go one step further.

You get rid of the way they'd projected their power,

their specialness.

You get rid of their art.

Fortunately, Charles's collection was too valuable to be destroyed

in an act of righteous fury,

and so it was decided that everything must go.

The sale of the late King's goods, as it was billed,

took place on this site,

Denmark House, as it was in Cromwell's time,

Somerset House as it is now.

The main purpose of it all was to pay back the King's creditors,

and they came clamouring for their money.

The royal plumber, who was owed £903,

got just £403 in cash and £500 worth of paintings -

which he didn't know what to do with -

but they included at least one priceless Titian.

The result was loss, loss, and more loss.

The most magnificent, the most spectacular royal car-boot sale in history.

And so it was that Charles's art collection was disassembled.

The pictures that had projected a divine aura of monarchy,

available to anyone, for the right price.

But I think it's rather telling that Cromwell kept back

The Triumphs of Caesar for himself.

Nothing projects power like the greatest art in the world.

Of course, the Royal Collection would survive.

Indeed, it would be significantly rebuilt

by a succession of later monarchs.

But its character from now on would be fundamentally different.

It would be more earthbound.

Never again would the monarchy use art to project the image of itself

as a force from heaven above.

In the next episode,

the Royal Collection is rebuilt by Charles II...

..and reinvented by a king more interested

in understanding the world than ruling it, George III.