The Knight's Tale Metalworks!

This is the amazing story of a Royal armour workshop.

The tale of how Henry VIII set great craftsmen the task

of transforming him into a dazzling, mythic hero,

of how his daughter Elizabeth

used their remarkable talents to help create a chivalric cult

with herself at its head.

If she'd been a man, this is what Elizabeth would have looked like.

It's the story of a king, a queen, a culture

and the precise manipulation of one image,

an image we all think we know very well,

one of the most powerful images in history,

the image of the knight.

Armour was protection, but it was also high fashion.

It was costume, it was theatre,

it gave the wearer an incredibly imposing presence,

making him seem invincible, superhuman.

Armour has always been there.

It existed in nature long before we caught up.

The name "armadillo" means, essentially, little armoured guy.

Ancient peoples understood that armour had symbolic power,

from the ancient Greeks and Romans, who wore beaten bronze into battle,

to the Normans, who conquered England in long coats of iron mail,

to the knights of King Edward III,

who won that staggering victory against the French at Crecy in 1346,

wearing plates of hardened leather, horn and iron.

Armour had always had great artistic merit,

but it became a kind of wearable sculpture

with the development of full plate armour.

Full armour appeared in the late 14th century,

when it first became possible

to smelt big enough pieces of iron and steel

to make back plates, breastplates

and all the 20 or so parts that make up the complete harness, as it was called.

Full plate armour was an awesome sight.

It was so powerful, in fact, that it came to define an age.

When we think of the medieval past, we think of armoured knights.

In Britain, metal armour had been worn since the Bronze Age.

Records of English armour-makers date back to the early Middle Ages.

But it's impossible to be sure of the origin of the few rare pieces

that survive, like this helmet, found in a field in Warwickshire.

You just look at the way the visor follows the shape of the skull.

All of the curves are matched up so beautifully,

and all of the plates fit so well together.

It's obviously had a long and rough life, but it's a high-quality piece.

This could have seen the Wars of the Roses. Found in the Midlands,

it dates from the second half of the 15th century.

We just don't know the origin of this.

So little English armour survives from before 1500.

If it is English,

it's evidence of a very high level of skill and artistry.

The plasticity of the form, technically, is extremely hard to do.

That's a shape that would be familiar

to a modern-day Olympic cyclist, for example.

But the evidence just isn't there.

We have to say it's possibly English, because of its history, but we don't know.

But there is another way to know

the medieval armour of the British Isles.

It's found in old churches all over England, Wales and Scotland.

Here you find complete, English armours,

beautifully carved in alabaster.

This is the effigy of Richard de Vere, 11th Earl of Oxford,

a great English knight and one of the commanders at Agincourt.

He carries the de Vere star on his breastplate

and the collar of SS at his neck, which identifies him

as a supporter of the Royal House of Lancaster.

The figure records perfectly what plate armour looked like.

Sabatons to protect the feet.

The greaves or lower-leg defences, the cuisses or upper-leg defences,

the breastplate, the vambraces protecting the arms,

the gauntlets and the tall, pointed helmet.

What we're presented with is an incredibly accurate depiction

of armour dating from the early 15th century.

You can take one of these effigies

and build a working armour using it as a reference.

I've done it, it works. This armour would work.

You look very closely and you can see

how carvers placed every rivet in exactly the right place.

The rivets in their locations are crucial because they determine

whether the piece works or not.

Here, you've got the pivot point,

the neck plate opens to allow the head to be inserted

and then locks around the neck.

This is a realistic image of a real, fighting knight.

It's hard to avoid a sense that this is a figure

that could get just right up and walk off.

He could get up and attack the enemies

of England or of Christendom.

Effigies show us that very fine armour

was being made in England long before the 16th century.

Despite that, one man decided to make a conscious break

with the English armour tradition and bring a new, Renaissance style

to the British Isles.

That man was one of the greatest jousters,

the greatest swordsman, the greatest knight of his time -

King Henry VIII.

From an early age, Henry was obsessed with knighthood,

but his father, the anxious King Henry VII,

wouldn't let him joust or fight anyone,

even just for fun.

When he was a boy of three,

he was put on his pony and he rides it without anyone leading him.

He knows that he has to be,

in a sense, the emblem of the virility

and the continuation of his family.

So his sense of his own destiny, and I imagine his sense of his own self-dramatisation,

must have been very intense in these years.

We know he's very sporty, very strong. He's physically robust, he's very handsome.

People called him the handsomest prince in Christendom.

He really is a prince in waiting. He's wanting to spread his wings.

They won't let him joust, they'll only let him run at the quintain,

and that's so frustrating for a young man.

All of his heroes, all of his friends, everyone at court

is jousting within an inch of their lives,

and Henry is kept back by these very dominant guardians.

Then, in 1509, Henry's father died.

From the moment he came to the throne,

King Henry VIII could do as he liked.

And what he liked was jousting.

The joust was about hitting your opponent as hard

and as accurately as possible with a steel-tipped wooden lance.

It's a game that demonstrates strength in body but also in mind.

I've been jousting for 20 years.

Here, the armour is definitely not for show.

In fact, mine has saved my life on more than one occasion.

A perfect strike should shatter the lance,

making the score pretty obvious to anyone.

Here, you see the young King Henry breaking his lance

on his opponent's head in celebration of the birth of a son

by his queen, Catherine of Aragon.

This illustration shows us what Henry looked like in armour

early in his reign.

His clothing may be exceptionally rich

but, actually, his jousting armour is quite plain.

One of the most famous rulers at that time was Maximilian,

Holy Roman Emperor and overlord of the German lands.

Maximilian was a chivalric celebrity,

the self-styled White King,

who constantly presented himself in art as a victorious knight,

clad in resplendent armour of his own design.

Henry idolised him.

He allied himself with Maximilian on the battlefield,

studied how he had created a heroic, public image

and in every way just wanted to BE like him.

On armour of the Maximilian style,

the surfaces are covered with dense fluting,

making the steel ripple like cloth.

Maximilian's armours used the very latest decorative techniques.

Surfaces were often etched with acid and gilded with mercury,

but frequently only in narrow bands,

so that you never lose the brilliance of the pure, polished steel.

And just three years into his reign,

Henry received a spectacular gift armour from Maximilian.

This strange helmet is the only piece of that gift armour known to survive.

It may look bizarre,

and perhaps even frivolous to modern eyes,

but it's actually a mark

of Maximilian's absolute respect for Henry.

This really is a caricature of a portrait of Maximilian.

It has exactly his hooked nose. He hasn't shaved properly.

His chin's covered with stubble.

And the quality of etching's absolutely fantastic.

If you have a look at the little dragons on these hinge brackets,

-they're absolutely wonderful.

-Yeah, really lively.

The helmet reflects the Renaissance obsession with verisimilitude -

to recreate the very image of a living human being

in cold, hard metal.

The smoothness of the surfaces

disguises the thousands of hammer blows required to form the features.

Could there ever have been a clearer demonstration of an armourer's power?

The power to transform a delicate human body

into an invulnerable automaton of tempered steel.

When this armour arrived at Henry's court in 1514,

you only need to look at fragments

to try and imagine how impressive and...

and moving that must have been for him.

He's got these aspirations to be a great Renaissance monarch

and then he's presented with the very best

of what's going on on the continent.

There must have been a little part of him somewhere

that felt a bit small at that point.

Well, do you think that?

Or do you think, "Hey, I've arrived! I'm really at the top table.

"I'm getting presents from the Emperor.

"He's using his own caricature as an armour for me."

Which you'd think was an odd joke

for one king to play on another,

but it's a motif that absolutely

runs centrally through the iconography of the tournament.

People are making themselves out to look fools

and then impressing with their prowess on the tournament field.

At the same time as he received his gift,

Henry bought two other armours from Maximilian's court workshop

but these great works of art have been lost,

except, in the Wallace collection,

there are three fascinating fragments, part of a lost armour

made in Maximilian's court workshop at Innsbruck

at exactly the right time,

in exactly the right style.

You can always tell when an armour or piece of an armour

has great artistic qualities

when you can feel it trying to seduce you.

You know, even though we're just dealing with a pair of legs

and a helmet,

that's not really much of a armour.

Even so, just those three pieces sitting here,

they're just vibrating with energy

and they're trying to tell you something.

These perfectly articulated structures

pulse with the Renaissance fascination

with the mechanics of nature,

but who could they have been made for?

They're very big legs.

They're very muscular, beautifully shaped,

the calves of a skilled horseman,

a great warrior, no doubt.

The helmet is for someone with a big head.

This is a big, muscular guy.

You can see where we're going with this.

I believe that these may be parts of one of Henry's lost armours.

It's not just the shape and the size. It's also the decoration.

There are pomegranates all over this armour.

They're crawling on every part of the decoration.

They're appearing and poking out

of all of the scrolling foliage and twisting vines.

Covered in pomegranates.

And we can't avoid the fact, of course,

that the pomegranate was the personal device of Catherine of Aragon,

Henry's queen.

It's a device that Henry made a point of wearing

at every possible opportunity early in his reign.

Maybe these are parts of one of the armours he received in 1514.

We can't prove it.

We'll never be sure.

But they could be.

Maximilian's gift armour had lit a fire in Henry's heart.

He had to have his own Royal armour workshop.

There, he could create his own high-technology armours

and take his rightful place

alongside the most sophisticated rulers of Europe.

He needed something highly engineered,

beautifully shaped

and exquisitely decorated.

Flemish armourers were famous throughout Europe

so Henry brought Flemings to England

to establish his court workshop.

Within a year, his first armour was complete -

a celebration of his devotion to his queen.

The statement this armour makes

about dynastic marriages is so strong.

The heraldry, you know, the pomegranates,

the portcullises,

the sheaves of arrows, the roses.

That's showing Henry as a continental monarch.

He's marrying into the Spanish royal family,

yet he's at one with the rest of them.

No English armour before had been so extensively decorated.

Every inch of this magnificent equestrian armour

was polished, engraved

and covered in a layer of brightest silver.

And what's so interesting about it - this is engraved decoration.

It's not the new, modern etching and gilding.

This is hand-engraved,

and it's decorated overall with this engraving.

-£200.

-Just for the decoration?

-Just for the decoration.

-That's a lot more than the armour cost.

-Yeah, totally.

£200 is an outrageous sum, just to decorate an armour.

You can't escape a sense,

even at this early stage,

that there's tremendous ambition here.

He doesn't just want to equal his continental colleagues,

he sort of wants to surpass them

-but at this point, he doesn't really know how to do it.

-I'm not sure...

-He's just getting going.

-I'm not sure he's trying to surpass them

at this stage. I think he just wants to be at the same table.

But engraving was a bit primitive

compared to Maximilian's revolutionary acid etching.

What Henry needed now was something that could hold its own

against the very best foreign armours

but which was also totally unique.

What if he could attract the best armour-making talent

from different parts of Europe

and put it all into one place,

forming a crucible of creativity?

Now he recruited armourers from the German Empire

to join his Flemings.

This elite team would soon be working hammer and tongs

to keep up with the King's demands for the very best armour.

This is Greenwich.

Today, it lies in the shadow of London's Canary Wharf

but in the 16th century, it was the location

of one of Henry's favourite Royal palaces,

and most importantly for us,

this is where Henry chose to build his Royal workshop.

It's very, very different to what's down there now.

None of these 18th-century buildings

would have been here in Henry's lifetime.

All we would have seen moving down this walkway

would be the great red-brick structure

of Henry's Palace of Placentia,

quite literally, his pleasure palace.

So...

That's where the Royal workshops were.

There's just a bunch of trees there now.

And looking at the site now,

we get a much better sense, actually,

of the distance between the Royal workshops and the palace itself.

It's close enough for the King to just stroll over

and meet with his armourers if he wished to,

but at the same time, it's far enough away

so that the King and the palace aren't disturbed

by the incredible clamour and noise of the armourers at work.

Not only the noise, but the smell of burning charcoal and fuming mercury.

It would have been a noisy, nasty place.

By 1515, Henry's armour workshop was throbbing with life,

producing custom-made armours for the King himself.

But making armour is a complex, multi-stage process,

requiring the brain of a watchmaker,

the eye of a master builder, and the hand of a virtuoso sculptor.

A lot of the techniques that I'm using are hands. It's all hammering,

it's all hand techniques,

but there are some things, you know,

when it comes to sanding and polishing,

where I use grinders and buffers

and things like that to get the work done.

-You haven't not got a workshop full of apprentices.

-No, I don't.

So, in a way, the power tools take the place of an army of assistants.

Yes, exactly. Can you file this? Can you...you know?

I think that's excusable.

Given the circumstances, that's excusable!

Modern people are so used to science

and measuring things, and this process,

the way these armours were created,

comes from a time when people didn't have those tools

and they depended upon their own senses

and the sense of the artist's craftsmen to create these things.

We really see how difficult it is

and how extraordinary these armours are.

The German armourers at Greenwich -

or Almains, as the English called them -

drew on their past experience,

but they used it to make something truly revolutionary.

The Greenwich style began to evolve.

Do you ever find yourself wondering,

"Why are they doing it in the most difficult way?

"Why has there got to be this hook and latch and pin, you know?"

I think the craftsmen are revelling

in their ability to make something,

even though it is more difficult.

It's a wow factor, it's going to impress people.

The monarch's reputation as a Renaissance king,

as a chivalric hero,

rested on the shoulders of these foreign masters.

What they went on to achieve

was utterly breathtaking.

This is the earliest surviving armour, made in the new

and very distinctive Greenwich style.

It may, at first glance, look quite plain,

but look a little closer and it's impossible

not to be awestruck by it.

ROUSING MUSIC PLAYS

It's a tournament armour, designed to provide the King

with total body protection in friendly sporting combats.

Steel sculpting

meets advanced biomechanics.

It's one of only about three armours surviving in the world

that cover the entire body.

Normally, on almost every armour that you'll see,

there are key gaps -

the area around the groin,

the backs of the legs, the insides of the arms.

All of those areas are usually left open for practical purposes.

But the Greenwich armourers here

have gone to extraordinary lengths

to entirely encase the King's body in steel.

One of the things I love most about armour

is that when you stand next to something like this,

you ARE standing next to the real historical person,

a sense that you just don't get from portraits

or other art forms.

He's a big guy, he's muscular, he's powerful,

he's fit.

There's no sign yet of the corpulence that we associate

with Henry VIII in the popular imagination.

He's a fearsome character,

and his armour exudes that.

But even the most advanced armour

could not stop accidents from happening.

On March 10 1524, Henry ordered a joust

so that he could test one of his new armours.

As he made himself ready, his friend, the Duke of Suffolk, charged.

Henry SHOULD have refused the encounter.

He hadn't closed or locked his visor, but instead,

he also surged forward.

The duke struck Henry a powerful blow to the side of the helmet.

His lance shattered,

and sharp splinters flew into Henry's unprotected face.

But, miraculously, the King was unhurt.

Even with the visor raised,

the helmet had done its job. It had been a narrow escape,

but it didn't blunt Henry's enthusiasm for jousting.

If anything, it cemented his love of armour.

Here in New York City

is the Greenwich armour most like the one that saved Henry' s life,

and it's truly magnificent.

Now that Henry's armourers had perfected their technical style,

it was time to come up with a fabulous ornamentation

to suit Henry's expensive tastes.

Looking at this armour, standing next to it,

I have a very hard time

avoiding the idea that this is one of the King's own armours.

But we don't know that for sure, do we?

You would think that it would be documented somewhere in history.

Curiously, we nothing about it

before the very end of the 19th century,

when it was displayed in Paris.

We CAN be sure that it was made for someone

of very high status.

Its entire surface has been acid-etched and fire-gilded.

It would have blazed like the sun on the tournament field.

This is very rich, very modern

and very expensive Renaissance decoration.

But these are not Royal symbols.

In fact, there are no specifically Royal symbols anywhere.

It's the only armour of its kind. The form, the structure,

the size does compare so closely with Henry's armours.

It's very difficult to argue that it's not his own.

It seems strange to say it about armourers, because it's their job,

but they seem especially concerned with safety and security.

The extreme constructional concerns that the armourers had

with this armour was essentially protecting the man,

making him invincible.

If this were worn by Henry VIII,

imagine a head of state, today, playing rough sports.

It's inconceivable, and yet, the head of state at this time

took such risks.

We know that Henry had several near misses

and was fortunate to survive blows to the visor

that shattered lances against his face,

but here we have an armour that locks securely as a safe.

The man inside is snug and secure,

and I think as much protection is given to the wearer of this armour

as any at any time.

Imagine Barack Obama competing in,

let alone winning, the Indianapolis 500.

His voter approval rating would go through the roof.

All of this still makes sense,

it's just that we no longer practise it.

Princely magnificence in the 16th century was such

that you had to not only look splendid,

but you had to act regal.

Certainly, if this were Henry's armour,

his appearance in the lists of the day

would have created an awe-inspiring presence.

With this armour,

the Greenwich workshops had demonstrated their mastery of the art,

but perhaps, more importantly, the armour points towards the future of the style.

That future lay in the richness of the decoration.

This is the first surviving Greenwich armour to be acid-etched.

Acid-etching had been developed specifically

for the decoration of armour.

The German inventor of the technique - Daniel Hopfer -

also realised its potential for print-making.

It had a huge advantage over engraving,

which in steel was very laborious.

Anyone who could draw could also etch.

A lot of people could draw in the 16th century,

and etching proved revolutionary to the art of armour-making.

It allowed artists to create

very intricate patterns on steel easily

and without weakening the armour plates.

The acid actually

physically cuts into the metal,

so you have areas that are raised

and sunken,

and the sunken areas are kind of eaten away,

so they have their own little texture.

This isn't paint that Jeff's applying.

It's a resist that stops the acid from eating away parts of the metal.

It's really staggering, the complexity of these types of armours

and the decoration

and how all of these little details come together

to make them just extraordinarily complex...

..and have, like, an awe-inspiring effect.

The steel plates were then washed carefully in acid.

Once the acid had eaten into the metal,

the piece was rubbed in a mild alkali to neutralise it.

Now you've only got about

500 more feet of edged strap work to go!

Right!

This perfect combination of intricate surface decoration

and the deceptive simplicity of the armour's construction

is what defines the Greenwich style.

But etching designs into the armour

was only one part of the process.

That decoration had to be

of an artistically high quality,

and that required the skill of a great artist.

The one man we associate more than any other

with images of Henry

is Hans Holbein the Younger - his court artist.

If anyone was going to decorate the King's own person,

it would have to be him.

We know Holbein designed jewellery,

weapons and other metalwork for Henry,

so it's not much of a leap to suggest that he was designing armour decoration as well.

This beautiful and imposing artwork

is the third of Henry's surviving Greenwich armours.

It's dated 1540, so we know it was made at a time

when Henry was getting old

and his body was breaking down.

But he was still commissioning great armour.

This one bears very fine etched and gilt decoration

in the form of bands and borders

which I think were almost certainly designed by Holbein.

MUFFLED HEAVY BREATHING

So, Susan, what's your first impression?

How big he is.

Like a great bear of a man,

especially when you stand to the side and you see that girth.

He's an armoured bear,

-which seems even scarier.

-Yeah, more powerful!

-It just demands respect, don't you think?

-I agree, yeah.

These gloves seem to add to that effect as well.

-He really looks as though he could lay you out with one blow.

-Mm-hm.

And that's quite frightening.

The designer has made it look scary on purpose.

The subtlest feature

that actually is working on us most powerfully,

and a feature I can't recall seeing on any other armour,

is the fact that they've located

these little reinforcing bars in the sight,

right where you'd expect to have an iris.

So the visor forms

a set of staring, predatory eyes

that are unblinking, merciless,

soulless.

That's very interesting,

when you think about how Holbein presented Henry,

how he showed him absolutely frontally,

staring at you in very much the same way.

So I suppose the purpose may have been rather similar,

to intimidate people, to frighten them, and we know that

when visitors came to Whitehall Palace

where they saw a full-length figure of Henry, rather like this,

that we're that told visitors were abashed and annihilated

-by seeing that full-length figure.

-Really? Wow!

So, Susan, now that you've had a chance to look at the armour

in very close detail,

is this Holbein, or not?

I think it's very hard to say.

Parts of this decoration are certainly very similar indeed

to the sort of decorative style of a lot of his metalwork.

All of these details remind me of things that one can see

in his decorative designs.

If this is Holbein,

isn't it a bit like Holbein acting as Henry's tattoo artist, in a way?

He's not designing some other divorced object for the King.

He is transforming the King into an artwork himself.

I mean, doesn't that strike, potentially, at the very heart of what it is to be a court artist?

I think you're right. I think it does.

And I think it's something that one could very well imagine

that Holbein was involved in doing

and absolutely was part of his role as court artist.

So I think this armour

is an elaborate form of early press release.

It's recalling the image of the 20-year-old Henry -

a great heroic warrior, a great martial artist.

And it's saying to us that he could still crush you with a single blow,

and that, for a regime that was founded on images

of the fighting prowess of one man,

was tremendously important.

Since its foundation in 1515,

the Greenwich armour workshop had established Henry's place

amongst the foremost monarchs of Europe.

Henry had brought together the best foreign technologies and talent

and created some of the finest armours ever made

in a new and uniquely English style.

But everything was about to change.

In 1559, Henry's daughter Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England.

Elizabeth would exploit the Greenwich armours in a totally new way.

In the Elizabethan Age,

armour as a courtly tool would be wielded with much greater skill

and cunning, though the monarch herself would never wear it.

In all other things, Elizabeth was the equal of or superior to

her famous father, but she could never be a knight.

Queens did not wear armour,

and that might seem like a problem for a Royal workshop

that made armour exclusively for the monarch,

until you consider this -

under Henry, no-one would've dared wear an armour richer than the King's.

But under Elizabeth, that wasn't a problem any more.

There was no king to offend.

So who is Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign?

I think if you asked every historian in England,

"What is the nature of Elizabeth?", you'd get as many answers.

To me, she's more rounded than people often describe her,

so I think she is a very scholarly girl,

I think she's quite a serious Protestant.

At the same time, she's a young woman, she's beautiful,

she's surrounded by men who tell her she's utterly wonderful,

she's, I think, quite sexually charged.

All the Tudors have quite a high sexual...sex drive,

and in a way that gets sublimated into this pageantry of the court,

in which everybody adores Elizabeth, and that's the ritual.

You have to behave. Even when - bless her - she's a very, very, very old lady,

you have to behave as if you've just fallen in love with her

for her amazing beauty.

And so, just when you might have thought that the days

of the Greenwich workshop were numbered, it entered its golden age.

Where once Henry had been its one main client,

Elizabeth opened the Greenwich workshop to many of her favourite noblemen.

Buying an armour from the Virgin Queen's armoury

became a kind of devotional act.

Elizabeth realised that she could sell armour licences to her courtiers,

who would then compete with each other to devise

the most magnificent armour, with the sole purpose being to catch,

hopefully to keep, the Queen's approving eye.

But we wouldn't know any of this if it wasn't for one extraordinary album of drawings

at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

They were the key to understanding Greenwich armoury in the Elizabethan period.

When they were first discovered at the end of the 19th century,

they opened up a whole new understanding.

The Almain Album contains 30 drawings of armours,

made over three decades.

It is the work of Jacob Halder,

a German, or Almain, armourer,

first mentioned as a hammer man at Greenwich in 1553.

The album allowed historians to match the designs,

and the men who commissioned them, with surviving armours in the real world.

Today, we tend to separate art from violence, and this distinction

didn't exist in the 16th century.

It was perfectly possible

to be maimed or killed with an object

made with absolutely exquisite artistry and beauty.

These armours are decorated with the same sources that inspired

silver-work and tapestries and so forth,

but it's always worth remembering they were designed to save your life.

They don't sit on a shelf in a treasury.

They are working objects,

designed to protect somebody in the most frightening

and traumatic situation.

The violence itself becomes a kind of artistic statement

in a strange way.

Fighting skills are called martial arts.

It's the skill of killing someone in a beautiful way.

That seems strange, but that's the Renaissance mentality,

that the things that modern people might find distasteful,

in the Renaissance go hand in hand with works of the most stunning beauty.

That distinction is one of the things that has separated armour

from mainstream art history.

And this is where this album is absolutely pivotal.

The various poses you see in the album,

the naming of the individuals for whom they were commissioned,

it all lends itself to the seriousness with which the subject was treated

during the 16th century, when the Greenwich armouries were in their heyday.

We've often been asked about the red colour on the album itself,

and so we recently had them tested, and it's shown that the red

is actually an iron oxide, and what we originally wondered was,

is that a case that you colour these in an iron oxide

in order to save costs, because blue would've been more expensive?

It would've come from something like a lapis.

So what we think now is that the red is just a cheap paint

that is meant to stand for the rich blue, purpley,

iridescent colour that these armours generally were given?

Yes. This wasn't once blue

and it's faded or deteriorated into this colour.

-They have always been this red colour.

-Yeah.

In the album, many of the armours are painted red,

but in reality, they would have been a gorgeous, iridescent blue.

Blueing was an important but difficult technique in armour-making

and even today, it's very hard to achieve.

It's all down to very precise temperature control.

A modern blowtorch helps,

but getting an even, vibrant blue is still a pretty tricky business.

Like this kind of thing doesn't happen fast.

It's better for it to happen slow,

and you can watch those colours appear.

When I heated up these plates, I was watching to see

what was changing colour first. I was watching for that straw colour first

and then I watched everything turn this reddishy brown

and then the purple... like very reddy purple,

then getting into the purple blue, and that's where I want to stop it.

Many of the most fashionable armours would have been

an explosion of blue and gold.

In the real world, many of these armours have been lost,

while most of the survivors now look quite different

from what their creators intended.

Many have lost their colour, their gilding, and even essential parts,

but in the album, they are seen as their creator meant them to be seen.

The richness of the later Greenwich style is based around

the flamboyant combination of colour, surface decoration

and pure sculptural form.

This is a period with no king to risk upstaging.

What Elizabeth did was foster an element of competition

among her courtiers, so they would be vying for the grandest armour

to impress her at court pageantry and during tournaments,

so you have someone like Sir Christopher Hatton,

who has several armours in the album,

paying up to £500 a time for a full garniture,

and actually running up enormous debts,

going to his grave owing £42,000,

some chunk of it presumably from his armour commissions.

£500 in the 16th century is an extraordinary amount of money.

We're talking over a million pounds.

Millions of pounds, certainly.

It's probably the second most expensive thing you would buy,

as a nobleman, after commissioning a castle or a palace.

Elizabethan armour was a high fashion statement for the fabulously wealthy,

but these armours mimic not just the stylish silhouette of the day,

they even used metal-working technology

to imitate fashionable tailoring.

So if this was cloth,

if this was textile clothing rather than metal clothing,

there would be a number of different ways you could achieve these visual effects.

That's right, yeah.

There's a few areas, if this was fabric,

that would've been left, unembellished.

And then these crosses here would have been literally slashed,

or cut, into the fabric,

and puffs of another fabric pulled out to contrast.

Then those puffs themselves have been further decorated.

They've done it amazingly well on here.

The minute I look at it, I can see the fabric effects

that they are emulating here.

Robert Dudley's armour, for example, is an amazing example of that

exuberance of surface decoration.

You can see this is where all the money's going,

it's almost like they don't know where to stop.

But they're also buying a moment of the Queen's attention, aren't they?

They spent all this money on this fabulous armour

so they can make an appearance and just for a couple of seconds,

the Queen will go, "Oh, that's quite good.

"Well done, Hatton!"

And then it's on to something else and that's it, that's your moment.

Politically, socially, those moments are enormously important.

Yeah. It might bankrupt you, but it's probably worth it!

Normal. At ease...

So imagine I'm an Elizabethan nobleman, eager to please the Queen.

I've been awarded a royal licence to have an armour made at Greenwich.

I would've been received by Master Jacob,

who would already know quite a lot about me.

He'd know my noble rank and my position at court

and would also have a pretty good idea of how much money I had to spend.

Halder offered three distinct levels of quality.

The lowest level was plain and largely undecorated.

This was obviously the least expensive,

and would typically be worn by lower-ranking nobleman.

It was still a fine Greenwich armour,

with beautiful shapes and lines,

and all the precision fittings and fastenings that we have come expect

from Halder and his staff.

The second level was one quite expensive step up.

This, believe it or not, is a medium-grade Greenwich armour.

You wouldn't necessarily believe it

if you just looked at this armour in isolation.

It's very rich-looking - intentionally so.

Halder's medium-level armours were usually decorated

with etched and gilt strap work bands,

but we know that a number of armours were made for different people,

but with exactly the same decoration.

So although it looks really impressive, it's not unique.

It's a generic pattern.

There are other knights commanding other bodies of soldiers,

elsewhere in the country,

wearing armours that are virtually identical to this one.

Finally, there were the highest-quality armours,

the ones commissioned by special patrons,

for whom money was no object.

Each of these was a totally unique expression

of the identity and personality of the owner.

Not only did they include very rich strap work

but the bands are now filled with unique personalised symbols and motifs.

This was full individualistic body art at its most ostentatious.

These armours tell us a lot, not just about the individual noble owners

but also about the impression that they wanted to make.

You can see this in cases where the most ambitious patrons

have more than one armour illustrated in the album.

One such person was Sir Henry Lee.

Lee was the Queen's champion for many years.

He appeared on her behalf in tournaments

and fought in her honour.

Lee had at least three armours made at Greenwich

for his own personal use.

They are documented in the Almain Album.

This is the armour Lee would have worn on the tournament field

at Whitehall, in the annual jousts to celebrate Elizabeth's coronation.

The Queen and all her court would have been there.

If ever there was a time to look like a superhero, this was it.

But Lee's third and last armour illustrated in the album is much plainer.

Why would the level of decoration have dropped so drastically?

We know that he had at least two other much, much richer armours.

And yet this one is relatively plain.

It does have narrow etched bands, very high quality decoration,

but it's subtle.

The overall effect you get of this armour is of plain, polished steel,

so why is this so plain?

It seems like a bit of a puzzle.

In 1588, England faced one of the greatest threats in its history -

an all-out invasion by the forces of King Philip II of Spain,

the Armada. To understand Lee's plain armour,

I think you have to look at the role he now played.

As one of the country's elite military commanders,

Lee needed to be ready to receive the assault.

The lack of decoration may just have come down to a lack of time,

or perhaps Lee felt that the opulence of his days as a champion jouster

during peace time was utterly inappropriate

in a time of national crisis.

OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS

But even a plainer Greenwich armour

would have looked magnificent on the battlefield.

You have to consider how the troops Lee was supposed to

be commanding would themselves have been armed.

It certainly was not in fantastic Greenwich armour.

Almost none of the armour of common English soldiers survives,

but this medieval church contains a unique little armoury.

So these objects have been here since the 16th century.

They're in the original inventories, but what are we actually seeing?

We're seeing four complete sets of armour

that were worn by ordinary men in Mendlesham.

It's a very...it's a very mixed-up group of objects,

whatever the local people could get together to serve their military.

Yes. I think we have to remember that this is really,

if I can compare it, a sort of dad's army.

They were ordinary people trained for battle.

One of the extraordinary things about the armour here at Mendlesham

is that it's nothing special.

But Lee's Greenwich armour WAS special,

and it was already distinctive enough.

It was one thing to parade like a peacock in front of the Queen,

quite another to command the respect of battle-hardened soldiers.

With the country on a war footing in the 1580s,

the armour workshops began working even faster than ever.

But did this time of war stop the production

of these very rich Greenwich armours?

Not even a little.

For me, this is one of the finest armours in the world.

It's gilded and blued surfaces must have made its wearer

look like a god.

It's monstrously extravagant, even by Greenwich standards,

and although the blueing has now faded,

I think the workmanship remains the finest ever seen

on any armour anywhere.

But instead of being dominated by personal symbolism,

this armour is all about the monogram of the Queen.

Stuart, isn't it unusual to have the Queen's own monogram

on this armour?

The armour's extraordinary in terms of its decoration.

It's a political statement and at the same time,

balanced and harmonious.

The sovereign's initials - the two Es back to back -

that are found throughout the armour's decoration,

they are joined by two rings which are the Clifford badge,

hence the owner of this armour is uniting himself with the sovereign.

Sir George Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland,

was a genuine swashbuckler.

He savaged the Spanish fleet from the deck of his 38-gun warship,

the Scourge of Malice.

It's amazing Errol Flynn never made a film about him.

There was a cult of course of the Virgin Queen,

and here, Clifford is presenting himself as a knight in her service,

bearing her personal emblems,

not only her initial but also the Tudor rose and the fleur-de-lys,

both heraldic emblems of the British Empire.

It's so overt. There's no Christian iconography on this armour.

It almost seems like he's presenting himself in a kind of

religious way, a devotional way,

as Elizabeth's crusader, her foremost defender.

There is no armour like this in the Greenwich workshops.

Clifford had a political motive for this.

We don't know what it was, but the fact he became Queen's champion five years later

may suggest that this was a very smart move on his part.

In the absence of a king, the Queen's champion

was Elizabeth's representative on the field of combat.

The Queen in male form.

And there's a feminine delicacy in this armour.

But also a tremendous flamboyance.

This is the real genius of Clifford.

He had created an armour that the Queen could imagine herself wearing.

If she'd been a man, this is what Elizabeth would've looked like.

Her father, the old King Henry VIII, he would've loved this.

From its foundation by King Henry VIII in 1515,

the Greenwich workshop had taken armour

and forged it into a uniquely powerful English art form.

Armour had helped turn Henry into an modern Renaissance monarch.

It had placed Elizabeth at the heart of the cult of chivalry.

It had led the kingdom's troops into battle.

But now it was the end of the line for plate armour.

Advances in military strategy and technology,

especially firearms,

meant that it had to be made ever thicker.

To remain bulletproof, it had to be made so heavy

that fighting men simply refused to wear it.

The fires in the forges at Greenwich dwindled and died.

In the 16th century, this little park was an incredibly important place.

This is where all of Henry VIII's armours were made.

This is where great Elizabethan nobleman came

to have armours made to be worn in wars and tournaments,

the defence of the Armada, wars with France.

I don't see a blue plaque anywhere, or anything.

Maybe there should be one.

Today, nothing remains of the Royal armour workshop at Greenwich.

What does remain are many of the great masterpieces

of the Greenwich armourers,

which allow us to stand in the presence of great princes and knights long dead.

For those who take the time to look,

they live on in ways their makers could never have imagined.

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