The Elizabethan Code A Very British Renaissance

'In the sixth year of Elizabeth I's reign,

'a young ambassador was summoned to the Queen's palace

'for what turned out to be an unexpectedly intimate encounter.

'The ambassador was led through a series of rooms.

'Each one took him closer to the heart of the palace,

'and to the heart of the Queen.'

First he was led through the public rooms,

where the general court gathered.

Then he passed through into the Presence Chamber,

which was for select courtiers only.

And then the Queen herself emerged and led our man,

astonishingly, into her bedchamber.

Once inside, they talked of politics for a while and then

she led him over to a little cabinet, and opened it.

Inside the cabinet were some mysterious objects

enclosed in paper.

Elizabeth picked out one of these objects.

She carefully unwrapped it.

And then she revealed to the ambassador one of her most

treasured possessions - a tiny, exquisite painting.

What the Queen showed the young man was a miniature -

a small, precious portrait meant for her eyes only.

'Discreet, private, even intimate.

'Like so much in the Elizabethan Renaissance,

'this was an art that looked inwards -

'the art of a people obsessed with secrets.

'This was an age when poets wrote in codes,

'when artists filled paintings with mysterious symbols...

'..and even buildings spoke in riddles.

'In this series, I argue that

'Britain had a renaissance as exciting as anything in Europe.'

A renaissance with its own style...

..sometimes eccentric...

..often dazzling...

..and peculiarly British.

And in the Elizabethan age,

we discovered a new sense of who we were...

..and our place in the world.

'The year 1564, the year the ambassador called on the Queen,

'was a special year in the history of the Renaissance.'

It was the year that Michelangelo -

the last great figure of the Florentine Renaissance - died.

And it was also the year that William Shakespeare -

the greatest figure of the British Renaissance - was born.

Now, it was a coincidence, of course, but it was a revealing

coincidence and, for me, it symbolises a baton being passed -

the moment when the British finally acquired the confidence

to take the Renaissance their own way.

1n 1564, the country was at a crossroads.

Isolated in Catholic Europe,

Protestant England cut its ties with the continent

and turned in on itself.

'And it was not long

'before a distinctive native art form emerged.'

In that year,

a dashing young man was working as an apprentice in London.

His name was Nicholas Hilliard.

He would become the first great British painter...

..although he didn't start out as one.

Nicholas Hilliard was from a family of goldsmiths.

His grandfather was a goldsmith. His father was a goldsmith.

His uncle was a goldsmith. Two of his brothers were goldsmiths.

He married the daughter of a goldsmith.

And not wanting to rock the boat, Hilliard also became a goldsmith.

Hilliard was apprenticed to the Queen's personal jeweller.

And when he began to paint miniatures,

he brought the painstaking precision of the goldsmith to his work.

He set up a small studio in the city,

and before long, the capital's guildsmen, lawyers

and aristocrats were clamouring to have him paint their portraits.

For Hilliard's intricate work was head and shoulders

above the competition, and unlike anything seen on the continent.

He was very skilful, very talented.

He was the first portrait miniaturist to really create

jewels on the painted surface.

No miniaturist had done that before him.

So, Alan, do you want to show us what's in your box?

'Alan Derbyshire at London's Victoria And Albert Museum knows

'Hilliard's techniques like the back of his own hand.'

So this is a portrait miniature by Nicholas Hilliard.

Wow. She's smiling at us.

Unknown woman,

we don't know who the sitter is, and we can place it under

a microscope and have a look at the techniques that Hilliard used.

This is exciting. Oh, and it's coming up there.

I think one of the key things Hilliard did when he was painting

these miniatures, he has almost a three-dimensionality to them.

You can imagine in the 16th century, when someone picked up a miniature,

they would have held it in the hand and turned it

with candlelight or light coming from a window and got

a real sense of the structure and the texture of the miniature.

'What Alan finds most striking about Hilliard's

'pictures are the exquisite painted jewels.'

This is the earring. And that's a pearl, a drop pearl.

And you can see, it's been created using lead white.

The black dot would actually have been a silver highlight.

He must have had incredible eyesight and an incredibly steady hand.

I think so. I mean, sometimes I wonder whether

some of those touches were placed using magnification of some kind.

And here we've got what remains of a ruby.

So do you think you've figured out how he painted his rubies?

We think we've got a good idea, yeah.

The first thing he would have done is take some silver paint.

Why would your foundation be silver?

It's going to act as a reflector.

So it gets the light shimmering through the jewel.

Exactly, yeah. And then we're going to burnish it, using a burnisher

made from a little animal tooth.

So, now we need to take the body of the ruby.

That's made by mixing turpentine resin with the pigments.

Silly me thought that Hilliard's miniatures were painted

-with paintbrushes. He's got a needle as well.

-Yep.

So you're just dropping it on top of the silver.

So what you might see as well is that you're getting a little

tail with the varnish, so that's gone back into a nice, globular shape now.

So can we take a look at your handiwork under the microscope?

We can.

It's not going to be as good as Hilliard's, but we can have a look.

That is incredibly impressive, actually.

And Hilliard was clearly a very clever man.

'Hilliard's miniatures were not intended for public display.

'They were private gifts, exchanged between lovers,

'held close to the heart.

'And Hilliard filled them

'with a secret symbolism that the Elizabethans adored.'

Now, this is one of Hilliard's most perplexing images.

It shows a man, a very elegant young man,

clutching an anonymous hand from the clouds.

Now, we don't know who he is,

although virtually every man in Elizabethan England has been

a candidate, including, actually, the young William Shakespeare.

But we're pretty certain about its meaning, that this

miniature is a gesture of devotion.

There is a Latin inscription on it and it reads,

"Attici amoris ergo."

"Eloquent because of love."

Now, it's probably some kind of in-joke.

It's probably this man saying to the owner of that hand,

"I'm crazy about you and I can't stop talking about it".

'But Hilliard's most recognisable miniature is surely this one -

'Young Man Amongst Roses, painted in 1587.'

Now, I'm going to make a confession. If I could steal any artwork

from any art gallery, it would probably be this one.

Like so many of these images, it is a declaration of love -

this man is clutching his heart.

Now, we don't know for certain who he is,

but we're pretty sure who he's in love with.

You just have to follow the clues.

So he is surrounded by white roses,

and white roses were the flowers of the Queen.

And he is wearing black and white clothes -

a rather fetching black fur jacket, some white tights -

and black and white were the colours of the Queen.

So, this man is in love with Queen Elizabeth.

But there's a problem - he is clearly in his early twenties,

and when this picture was painted, Elizabeth was not only in her

fifties, but, Virgin Queen, famously unavailable.

And that's why, at the top, there's a motto in Latin that reads,

"My praised faith brings suffering."

In short, he's lovesick.

Hilliard's little miniatures are a world away from the extravagant

frescoes and vast statues of the Italian Renaissance.

Intimate, private, coded,

they have a distinctly British discretion.

But not everyone wanted to be discreet.

The Elizabethans didn't just want coded portraits

in their pockets - increasingly, they wanted them on their walls.

Elizabethan portraits have always had a bad press.

Again and again, they've been compared to work by the great

Italian masters, and, again and again, they've been found wanting.

They've repeatedly been branded provincial, primitive,

and second-rate. Yet I think

they were, in their own way, masterpieces of the Renaissance.

We just need to look at them differently.

These were pictures for Britain's newly rich.

And neither artists nor subjects cared if they looked life-like.

Take the Cholmondeley sisters.

They look like they've just been assembled from a flat-pack.

But for the artist, it was pattern, not personality, that counted.

The Elizabethans also crammed their portraits with Latin

inscriptions and arcane symbols.

The results were often very odd.

This picture celebrates the marriage of two devout Christians...

complete with special guest.

'But, above all, Elizabethan portraits told stories -

'the stories of their Renaissance sitters.'

Now, I want to ask you about this one. This is one of the most

unusual Elizabethan paintings that survives.

This is a portrait of Henry Unton, who is an ambassador

and a soldier under Elizabeth I's reign.

-With a very big head.

-A huge great head.

But I think what's lovely about this picture is that it's

commissioned by his wife after this death.

It's a visual obituary, if you like, of Unton's life.

It starts off right down here, and he's being born here

and this is his mother. And then you next see him

when he goes up to Oxford, and there he appears again.

Is this him sitting in the window doing his studies?

Yes, he's at Oriel College in Oxford in the 1570s.

And then he goes to Venice, across the Alps,

but, later on, in the 1580s, he fights in the Low Countries, and

there is an encampment, and a battle fighting with the Earl of Leicester.

And then he becomes ambassador to France, and you see France here.

-So this top bit, this is like his CV?

-It is absolutely.

This is all of the wonderful public work that he's done

in the service of the Crown.

And what you see in this little room here is this tragic scene

of Unton's death, and he's in his deathbed.

And this is the hearse, and the horses,

which are draped in black, as you can see here, and it's coming

into the house, and then you have the funeral procession along here.

All these remarkably haunting figures in black.

This isn't just a painted portrait, it's a painted biography, isn't it?

-Exactly.

-And that's why, when people criticise Elizabethan portraits,

and they say they're not creating great likenesses,

this is... This is a different kind of likeness,

but it's an extraordinary likeness,

because we've got his whole life told in the space of just one panel.

And it's absolutely charming.

When would you get this much detail, visual detail, about someone's life?

You often hear through letters and things what people did,

but actually seeing this is absolutely extraordinary,

because it captures a real flavour of the Elizabethan period.

'But, for me, the most intriguing of all Elizabethan portraits

'is virtually unknown.

'For years, this beguiling Renaissance image has been locked

'away in the stores of the Northampton Art Gallery.'

So this is a portrait of one of Queen Elizabeth's favourite

courtiers, Sir Christopher Hatton.

But it's very much more than a portrait.

Because Hatton, with his marvellous moustache,

of which I'm very jealous,

is surrounded by a complex array of figures, inscriptions and emblems.

So, up here on the right, that is a coat of arms,

and it has, if you look closely, the golden hind - that's where

Francis Drake got the name for his famous ship.

And down here, we have an artist painting a painting of Hatton,

so there's a kind of picture within a picture here.

So, at first sight, this painting seems to be a great big

British Renaissance status symbol.

But it's more than that,

because this painting isn't just a portrait of Hatton's present -

it's also a portrait of his future.

Surrounding Hatton are personifications of the seven

planets, and, outside them, the 12 signs of the zodiac.

So this is essentially Hatton's horoscope.

And his destiny is very promising indeed,

because underneath here, an inscription,

the speech bubble, if you like, reads, "destined for eternity".

But don't be fooled by the optimism,

because this great confident image of a Renaissance man

is completely overturned...

when you look at the other side.

So, here on the back is a figure of Father Time, Tempus,

and underneath him are the three ages of life.

On the left, youth is represented by a dancing couple -

Hatton was a famously good dancer, perhaps the best in England.

Middle age is represented by a woman unrolling the thread of life,

and on the right, death is represented by an urn.

But even more astonishing is the inscription down here,

because at the very end of that inscription,

the painting reveals its true purpose.

"Hoc me vestibulo posuit...debuit hoc pigros sollicitae viros".

"I was put in this room as a lesson to rouse lazy men"!

And this painting would probably have hung in the entrance hall

of Hatton's house, and it would have greeted his visitors

with the message, "Come on, guys, seize the day,

"you haven't got long before you die."

Hatton's portrait proves that British Renaissance painting

was far from primitive and backwards.

It was rich, and clever,

and sophisticated - art for an urbane and educated society.

'But the Elizabethans loved complexity in all art forms.

'They were obsessed with double meanings, treble meanings.

'And they revelled in riddles, puzzles and wordplay.

'Cleverness permeated absolutely everything they did.'

So this is a poem by the celebrated Elizabethan writer Sir John Davies.

And it essentially describes the British Renaissance itself as

a golden age that is healing all the world's problems.

So, who is responsible for this golden age?

Who is responsible for this Renaissance?

There's a code written in this poem that provides us with the answer.

All you have to do is look at the first letters of every single

sentence and they spell "Elisabetha Regina",

Queen Elizabeth.

Davies's code was not just a display of intelligence.

It was a pledge of allegiance.

But Elizabeth's Golden Age had a darker side.

Clever codes began to be used to conceal things from the Queen

and her agents.

And one Elizabethan rebel turned disguise into an art form.

Thomas Tresham was rich, well educated, and well connected.

He was undoubtedly one of the cleverest men in England,

and he could easily have been one of its most powerful.

But there was a catch.

Tresham was also a devout and unwavering Catholic.

And he paid the price for it.

With Catholic Spain threatening to invade Protestant England,

English Catholics became potential enemies of the state.

'For most of his adult life, Tresham lived under surveillance.

'And he spent the best part of 20 years in prison.

'Yet Thomas Tresham's will could not be broken.'

Now, in the many years he spent locked up in prison, away

from his home, away from his family, Thomas Tresham was busy planning,

drawing, and plotting an audacious and dangerous act of defiance.

It was an act that, in my opinion,

would result in some of the most fascinating

and perplexing architecture of the entire Renaissance.

'When Tresham returned home from prison in 1593, he started to

'build this lodge for his rabbit warrener in a secret

'corner of his estate in Northamptonshire.'

But it wasn't really a lodge for his rabbit warrener.

It was a stunningly elaborate architectural code that

spelled out his Catholic defiance.

Now, there's one instantly recognisable thing about this

building. It's obsessed with the number three.

So, it's triangular, so it has three sides.

And each of these sides, each of these walls, is 33 feet long.

There are three sets of windows, and each of these windows is constructed

out of the three-sided triangle and a three-parted trefoil.

There are three storeys, and on top of these storeys is a roof,

constructed of three gables, each of which has three sides.

And in case all of that escaped you, here above the door is

the Latin phrase, "Tres Testimonium Dant," and that means,

"the number three bears witness".

Now why this obsession with the number three?

Well, it could be just a play on words.

Tresham's nickname was Tres. But I think it's more than that,

because three is also the number of the Holy Trinity.

God himself was threefold - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

But this wasn't just a Christian Trinity. It was a Catholic Trinity.

Throughout the building are coded references to Catholic beliefs

and rituals.

The letters beneath the angels are a secret code for Catholic prayers and

the chimney is filled with symbols of the forbidden Catholic mass.

Tresham wrote his Catholic faith deep into the fabric

of this building.

It really is one of the most cryptic structures in Britain.

It is filled with riddles,

secrets, codes, many of which are yet to be deciphered.

But, for Tresham, this was only the beginning.

After yet another spell in prison,

Tresham embarked on an even more ambitious building project

in Northamptonshire, a retreat for himself and his family.

It may well be my favourite building in the country.

It is called Lyveden New Bield.

Now, in many ways, the most remarkable thing about this building

is that Tresham never finished it.

In September 1605, construction work here ceased,

and it never started again.

So, what we're actually looking at is essentially a building site -

a Renaissance masterpiece that's been held in a kind of

suspended animation for more than 400 years.

But despite its incomplete state, Lyveden is still packed with hidden

religious meanings, many of which relate to the Passion of Christ.

So all around this ground floor frieze, there are these emblems and

all of them refer to the Passion of Christ. So, here we have the 30

silver pieces surrounding the money bag - that was the money that Judas

was paid to betray Christ. There are the spears, the lantern -

these were the things that were used to arrest Christ

in the Garden of Gethsemane.

There's the garment that was taken by the Roman soldiers.

Finally, there is the crucifix,

with the ladder, with the nails,

with all those things that were used to kill Christ.

So we have the whole story of the Passion

told around the perimeter of this building.

Above the frieze are inscriptions in Latin

that celebrate Christ's sacrifice.

But this is only to scratch the surface.

As with the Triangular Lodge before it,

the meaning of this building is embedded within its structure.

Now, this building is made up of five equal squares,

and that was for a reason.

Five was the number of wounds that Christ suffered -

two in the hands, two in the feet, one in the abdomen.

But Thomas Tresham took it further. Take a look at this bay window.

There are five sides, and each of these sides is five feet long.

Five times five is 25

and 25th was Christ's birthday.

And from the air, the meaning of Tresham's building is complete.

Based on the form of a cross, its shape reminds the heavens

that its owner is always thinking about the Crucifixion.

Lyveden New Bield would have been one of the great Renaissance

buildings in Europe.

But Tresham's unlucky life came to an unfortunate end.

On 11th September, 1605, he died, in terrible pain, and in huge debt.

And that is why he never finished his masterpiece.

Thomas Tresham had a miserable life, but for me he embodies

everything that's wonderful about the British Renaissance -

its cleverness, its quirkiness, its desire to hide rather than reveal.

And, perhaps above all, its stubborn but brilliant rebelliousness.

Tresham was one of the most ingenious men in Britain,

but he was not the most ingenious.

That prize should surely go to a Welshman called John Dee,

the man who would lead the country out of its isolation.

Dee was what one might call a Renaissance man - mathematician,

astrologer, scientist, secret agent.

And he also liked to dabble in the supernatural.

John Dee is famous today for his magic, for his crystal ball,

and for his apparent ability to communicate with angels.

Now, I personally don't believe a word of all that,

but Dee was a brilliant showman.

'As a young man,

'Dee staged a production of a Greek play at Trinity College, Cambridge.

'His opening scene was unforgettable.'

The seats were packed with students and academics,

all waiting for the show to start.

And, by God, did it start.

The lights revealed an actor climbing on to

the back of a huge mechanical beetle.

And if that wasn't enough,

the beetle then took off and flew around the room.

The audience must have thought it was magic, but Dee had

actually produced the illusion with mirrors, ropes and pulleys.

And Dee's ingenuity would not go unnoticed.

He soon became an advisor to the Queen herself.

And on 28th November, 1577, he brought her an astounding proposal.

Today, it's kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Now, Dee's proposal would be of momentous importance

to British history.

It would come to define our national ambitions as well

as our identity for the best part of 400 years.

And it would prove to be a turning point in the British Renaissance.

Dee outlined his proposal in a book.

And the title page, which Dee himself designed,

cloaked that proposal in yet another fiendish Renaissance code.

And this is it.

And, of course, it's deliberately confusing,

probably because Dee didn't want the Queen's enemies

to decipher its contents.

There is a phrase that translates as

"More is concealed than revealed."

And that may well be a defining

characteristic of the British Renaissance.

So, what does it show?

Well, here is Queen Elizabeth with her courtiers, and above her

is the moon, with a slightly funny face, ten stars and the sun.

And to the right, this thing called the Hebrew Tetragrammaton,

which was the sacred four-letter word of God,

and you can see here that it is filling her sails with wind.

And underneath, this is probably the New World, the Americas.

There's a woman here on her knees with an inscription in Greek

that says, "Send forth an expedition,"

and above her is this semi-naked woman,

a figure of Opportunity beckoning Elizabeth on.

And there are these other symbols,

symbols that, hundreds of years later, we still haven't deciphered,

like this piece of wheat that's upside down,

and this skull that's half out of the image.

So, what is John Dee saying? Well, I think he's telling Elizabeth

to build a navy, to send that navy around the world,

to challenge the French and the Spanish,

to lay claim to the New World,

to bring Protestantism to the uncivilised, to form colonies.

John Dee is telling her to create a British empire.

Dee was, in fact, the very first to use the phrase British Empire.

His idea would be a turning point in British history.

'And a turning point in the British Renaissance.'

Dee's proposal unleashed a wave of exploration.

This was the moment when Britain took the lead

in the discovery of new worlds -

the moment we stopped looking inwards and started looking out.

In 1580, Francis Drake became the first Englishman to sail

around the world. Other explorers voyaged to Africa,

the Arctic and the Americas.

And their travels inspired a new generation of artists,

scientists and craftsmen.

One of the finest was the mathematician and

instrument-maker Emery Molyneux,

who had his workshops in South London.

Emery Molyneux had accompanied Francis Drake on some

of his voyages around the world, so he really knew his stuff.

And after his return,

he secured funding to embark on a remarkable project.

He did years of research. He met with navigators and explorers.

He collaborated with mathematicians, cartographers, artists...

..and, eventually, Emery Molyneux produced something

no Englishman had ever produced before...

..a globe.

'James Bissell-Thomas is a globe-maker who still uses

'the techniques that Molyneux pioneered.'

We know he used papier-mache.

Flour makes a very good glue, so it's something that the Tudors would

have had, and I know that Molyneux on his smaller globes,

which were used on ships,

in order to avoid dampness of the humidity of the areas where

they were - these flour globes he was making actually withstood that.

I've got one here which is actually dry.

It's looking really good, I love the Shakespeare on the front.

There he is.

The next stage is the joining of the globe and applying the plaster.

-Straight on down to the right.

-Down here, OK.

In fact, James, if you can hold that...

-It fits extremely well.

-Right.

-So the world is complete.

-It is.

It is like playing God, isn't it?

You are the master of the universe at this moment, James.

Exactly, just in the space of a minute - northern hemisphere,

southern hemisphere united.

Indeed. It's casting plaster, so it will dry quickly.

It is a very easy way to make a good spherical globe.

Now, once this is fully covered,

if I can take that down a sec, you will then end up with

a beautiful plaster sphere.

Then, once it's dried, you then apply the gauze.

-You stick each one on individually?

-That's right.

And due to the talent of the engraver, they all align beautifully.

So, with Molyneux's globe, with this engraving,

how long would this engraving have taken?

I think the engraving would have taken, yeah, a good year.

And he was doing it with such limited technology at the time,

and yet it's beautiful.

And the most important thing is that they've stood the test of time.

They're still standing today.

In 1592, Emery Molyneux released the first printed English-made

globes and the largest the world had ever seen.

I've come to Petworth House in Sussex to see the earliest

surviving example.

It's believed that this globe once belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh

when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

This is the first British-made globe in history.

And the thought that Walter Raleigh might have pored over this

very object 400 years ago in the Tower of London is enough to

send shivers up the spine.

My very favourite thing about this globe is the fact that

there's virtually no Britain left on it, and I think the reason

for that is that Walter Raleigh's fingers, and many fingers after him,

kept pointing at the bloody country, saying, "That's Britain,

"that's where we are."

But this isn't really a piece of cartography.

What it really is is a piece of propaganda,

and I'll show you why.

Round here are two little lines.

A little blue line, with the initials TC,

and a little red line, with the initials SFD.

TC was Thomas Cavendish, SFD Sir Francis Drake.

So these lines actually chart rather painstakingly

the route that those two men made as they voyaged round the globe.

So this globe is really the perfect opportunity for the British

to show off.

And right round here there is a great big British coat of arms

planted over North America.

So this globe is a symbol of a newly confident nation.

But it's more than that.

For me, this globe also reflects an entirely new Renaissance

world view, a new way of seeing the world -

no longer a world as a mysterious,

boundless place that's so much bigger than us,

but a place that is finite, a place that one can own,

a place that one can manipulate,

and a place that can be traversed...

..with a single finger.

But explorers weren't the only ones out exploring -

artists were globetrotting as well.

And one of them was John White.

He may have had an ordinary name, but what he did was anything but.

Now, John White was given the commission of a lifetime -

perhaps even the commission of a generation.

He was asked to make drawings of the unfamiliar, all the exotic

plants, animals and people that he encountered in the Americas.

Now, the drawings that he made would be of momentous importance

and momentous originality,

but they would almost destroy him in the process.

In July 1587, White landed on the east coast of America

to found the first British colony in the New World.

White wasn't alone. He brought 115 nervous settlers with him.

And among them was his son-in-law and his 20-year-old daughter.

It must have been an exhausting journey for them all,

particularly his daughter, who was heavily pregnant.

But White was convinced this would be a fresh start

for the family - a place to find wealth, to find comfort,

and maybe even to find happiness.

'A month after their arrival in Indian territory,

'White's daughter gave birth to a girl.

'They called her Virginia,

'the first English child to be born in the Americas.'

And John White's drawings of this new world

caused a sensation in the Elizabethan court.

Those drawings are held in the British Museum.

They are not only the first British artworks of the New World,

they may also be the first watercolours in British history.

And they are breathtaking.

Now, there was nothing too small for John White to paint.

This is surely one of my favourites, this most delightful image

of fireflies, and I love the way that John White has arranged them

on the page, three of them just staring at each other.

And in the middle, this inscription, which, to me, reads more like poetry

than anything else.

"A flye which in the night semeth a flame of fyer."

And here we have these exotic creatures that John White

would have encountered...

..the loggerhead turtle...

..the pelican...

..and this unforgettable image of the flamingo.

They are such sensitive portraits of these very unusual animals.

But you shouldn't be too fooled by that,

because pretty much the first thing John White did

after he painted these animals was eat them.

And flamingo was one of his favourites.

He thought the tongues were delicious.

But White's most remarkable images are of the native people

he met there - the Algonquian Indians.

This is probably the most fascinating,

and certainly the most macabre.

It depicts the Algonquian equivalent of a charnel house, and it is filled

with all the dead bodies of chiefs.

But it isn't quite what it looks.

Because these bodies have actually had their skin pulled off,

the flesh taken out,

sun-dried and then put into these little boxes at their feet. Then,

the skeletons were covered with leather and the skin pulled back on.

And what's remarkable about this is this is John White

glimpsing something that no-one from Europe had ever seen before -

looking right into the most private,

intimate parts of the Algonquian lifestyle.

Now, this is a portrait of an Indian chief, and you can tell he's

a chief because he is covered in symbols of his status.

The body paint, the jewellery, the feathers,

and, perhaps best of all, the puma tail.

And it's got so many lovely details.

You can see that the man has shaved one side of his head,

so it doesn't get caught in his bow.

It's an extremely unusual image, of course, but, for me,

this is a great Renaissance portrait.

John White was painting an entirely alien culture, a culture that

must have seemed un-Christian, uncivilised, un-English,

and yet here in these paintings,

there is no judgment, and there is no racism.

John White's little paintings may not look like Michelangelo's

or Leonardo's, but they are just as much

a result of the Renaissance...

..the product of a society looking afresh at the world

with sensitivity and, above all, with curiosity.

'But the story of John White would end in disaster.

'Famine forced him to abandon his family

'and return to England for supplies.

'It would be two frustrating years

'before he was finally able to get a ship to return.'

In 1590 he arrived at the Colony.

But he was horrified by what found.

Nothing.

That's what he found.

The houses were gone.

His possessions were scattered.

And, worst of all, the people were gone too.

There was no sign of anybody...

no settlers, no daughter, no granddaughter.

All John White found were ruins.

And on a tree...

..a mysterious inscription, the three letters "CRO".

Now people have been trying to decipher

that enigmatic code ever since, but they haven't yet succeeded.

And John White certainly didn't.

John White never found his family.

His colony, the very first in the Americas, had vanished.

To this day we have no idea what happened to it.

The ship on which John White first sailed to America

should be as famous as Charles Darwin's Beagle...

..for travelling with White was another genius, of a different sort,

a young scientist called Thomas Harriot.

Today, Harriot is almost forgotten,

but he should be remembered as one of the greatest

minds of the entire Renaissance.

Thomas Harriot's CV is utterly mind-boggling.

He was the country's leading navigator,

he was a brilliant mathematician who pioneered new forms of algebra.

He was the first man to truly understand the science

of rainbows and he may well have been the first

recorded person in history to die as a result of tobacco.

As John White was drawing the Algonquin Indians,

Thomas Harriot was actually speaking to them -

the first Briton to learn a Native American language.

But this was a language without writing

and so Harriot devised a pioneering alphabet of his own.

Now Harriot's alphabet consisted of 36 characters, that's ten more

than in our current alphabet and that is because Harriot's

alphabet was a phonetic alphabet - each character denoting a sound.

So...this one over here, this is an "unng" sound,

the next one is an "ae" sound as in "name"

and I must say it does look like an A and an E squashed together.

And this one over here...this is a "th", a hard "th", as in "thy" or "the".

And Harriot in his papers experimented with

lots of different sentences constructed out of these characters.

And one of his most evocative sentences is this one.

This sentence translates as if I can do it...

"Our Father which...

"..art in..." - you can guess the final word "heaven".

And this word here...

..is "which" and he's produced the beginning...

I mean, it's a very complicated

sound to produce, the beginning of the word "which".

He begins it with an "H" - this is an "H" sound.

And this is a "W" sound.

And that's because Harriot pronounced the word "which" as "hwich".

So this is, "Our father 'hwich' art in heaven."

Harriot was nothing if not ambitious for his new creation.

He dreamed it would become a universal alphabet,

one for the whole world.

In a sense, it was yet another Elizabethan code.

But this one wasn't being used to conceal, but to communicate -

the perfect symbol of a new, expansionist British Renaissance.

Harriot was a shy, retiring figure and never published his alphabet.

In fact, he published hardly anything, not even what was

surely his greatest discovery...

..and Harriot's first step towards that

discovery was taken on 17th September 1607.

That night Harriot, like the rest of Renaissance Europe,

saw Halley's Comet soaring through the night sky.

Now Thomas Harriot was completely inspired by what he saw

and he became convinced that the real New World was

not across the oceans, but beyond the skies

and, to this end, he somehow managed to obtain the most cutting edge

contraption in Renaissance Europe...the telescope.

On the night of 26th July 1609, he did something utterly unprecedented.

It was about nine o'clock when the clouds finally cleared -

this was the British Renaissance, after all.

And Harriot got out his telescope, pointed it at the sky

and looked through it at the moon.

And then he did something no human being had ever done before.

Harriot began to sketch what he could see through the telescope...

..and astonishingly, Harriot's revolutionary little drawing still survives.

And this is it! Harriot's first drawing.

The first time anyone had drawn the moon through a telescope.

This is nearly four months before Galileo did it

and Harriot has been very precise about the labelling.

Top left, "26th July 1609, 9pm" that's exactly

when he made this drawing.

Top right, "five days."

That's how old the moon was when he drew it.

And down here, "6/1", that's the magnification.

Harriot's telescope was very primitive -

he could only make the moon six times larger than it actually was

and that probably explains why, quite frankly, it looks a bit

more like an overused tennis ball than a celestial body.

But my favourite is probably this one over here,

because underneath this delicious drawing of the moon is an apology.

He writes down here, "I could not get done the figure of all

"because I was troubled with the rheum."

Basically he had a cold and, no wonder - he was up on the roof all night.

Harriot, however, tinkered with his telescope,

and his moon drawings became better, and better, and better.

This is surely Harriot's masterpiece?

And it was done with 30 times magnification,

so he'd increased the power of his hardware by five-fold.

It's a staggeringly detailed map, it's a map that holds up even today.

So you've got here the Ocean of Storms,

the largest sea on the moon 1,600 miles across.

And right in this spot, that there, is right at the very edge

of the Sea of Tranquility, and that is exactly where Neil Armstrong

and the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.

Now these drawings may not be masterful works of art

but they do remind me of Leonardo's infinitely more famous drawings

because they are about looking at the world in a fresh way

and about using two eyes, one pen and a piece of paper to do it,

and surely if the Renaissance is about anything, this is it.

By 1610, the country had undergone a cultural revolution.

Only a few generations earlier, it had been isolated and inward-looking.

Now, however, its horizons had expanded beyond its own shores,

beyond Europe, even beyond the Earth.

It was from that surge of exploration, ingenuity

and creativity that a remarkable, well, unique, figure emerged.

He was surely the greatest figure of the British Renaissance.

He was probably the greatest figure of the European Renaissance.

And he may well be one of the great figures in the history of Western culture.

You know his name.

But William Shakespeare was not the isolated genius we often imagine.

He was a man alive to the upheavals and discoveries of his time.

In 1610, as Thomas Harriot was mapping the moon,

William Shakespeare began work on his last, great play.

It was a tale of magic, wonder and anxiety

and it perfectly captured the spirit of the age.

The Tempest begins like a Hollywood action movie.

A ferocious storm engulfs a small ship at sea,

and amid the thunder, amid the lightning,

amid the wailing winds, a terrified crew does all it can to stay alive.

But this is no normal storm.

This has been conjured by a magician called Prospero.

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING

Now I'm convinced that Shakespeare's inspiration for Prospero was

none other than John Dee.

He was, after all, the real magus of Renaissance Britain,

the man who could make beetles fly,

the man who could commune with angels, and the man who

inspired countless ships to sail these seas in search of colonies.

In fact, Prospero's storm is designed to lure the ship's

crew to his own private colony -

an island where he has enslaved the only creature on it.

Shakespeare knew about Britain's colonisation of the New World.

He must have read Thomas Harriot's account of his voyage to Virginia.

He must have seen John White's watercolours of the Algonquin Indians

and he must have heard all those rumours about storms

and shipwrecks and vanished sailors around the seas.

Shakespeare famously pillaged the facts, the fictions,

the tall tales, the anecdotes, and the gossip of this dramatic era.

To my mind, it's impossible not to see The Tempest as a kind of mirror,

however obscured or refracted, of Renaissance England itself.

For like his fictional crew, this tiny little island,

which had once been so insular, was now hurtling into uncharted territory.

Shakespeare was asking, and answering,

the great questions of Renaissance Britain.

In a phrase from the play itself,

"what would this brave New World be like?"

In the 50 years between 1564 and 1611,

something extraordinary happened in Britain -

its artists, writers, architects and scientists embarked on their

own voyages of discovery, and they took the Renaissance their own way.

In doing so, they produced a Renaissance that was wayward,

eccentric often maddeningly complex, but one that was as brilliant as anything in Europe.

All voyages, however, come to an end...

..even the glorious voyage of Elizabethan Britain.

"Our revels now are ended."

"These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air...

"..into thin air.

"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

"the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

"The solemn temples,

"the great globe itself...

"Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

"And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

"leave not a rack behind.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

"And our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Next time, the British Renaissance enters its final phase.

As Britain opens its doors to Europe again, a battle begins...

..a battle for the heart and soul of British culture.