Often as the Bakerloo line train from Oxford Circus to Waterloo stopped at Charing Cross I have looked out through the windows at the posters which line the platform in an impressive display advertising the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. We see Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, a fully clothed woman looking at a naked man, who though beautiful is snoring and is about to be woken up by a goat legged satyr blowing a conch into his ear while others play with his armour; Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, which I remember being fascinated by many years ago in the gallery, the formality with the brutality, the oranges, the geometry of broken lances, the weird fussy hat of the leading figure, the figures of archers in the background seemingly having a break; Leonardo’s drawing of the Virgin Mary and her mother Saint Anne with the infants Christ and Saint John the Baptist, the extraordinary tenderness and humanity of the two women which I saw clearly for the first time; as well as portraits of Byron, Nelson and Shakespeare, an illustration of the Gunpowder Plot and a painting of the Somerset House Conference which was held to negotiate the end of the Anglo-Spanish war in 1604. And then, most noticeably, because of which carriage I tend to sit in on the train there is a series of portraits of English monarchs. Is it the association with renaissance masterpieces which makes them so dull, so lumpen, so malign? When I began to think of them I could only see them as crude stereotypes: the school bully, the fascist thug, the gangster, the cruel capitalist. And these pictures were acceptable to those they portrayed?! And though they seem crude compared to the pictures from the Italian renaissance they were painted much later, strange if you have a notion of progress in culture and civilisation. In the 15th century our status among european nations was similar to that of Albania today.

But yesterday I got off the train to have a better look, and saw that there was more to these monarchs than I had seen before. Here’s Edward – are we doing Latin numerals? ok, yes, but why? – IV, or as the artist has it, IIII:

He looks more like the foolish lad with learning difficulties who’s got caught up in the gang. He has the pub quiz distinction of being the only British monarch to have two coronations, having been deposed and exiled in between his two reigns. He ruled, or tried to, towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, a thirty year period of brutal gang warfare, the rival gangs being members of the same extended family, which has been prettified by the roses metaphor. It is estimated that over 100,000 people were killed, at a time when the population of England was not much bigger than that of Gaza today. But as we also see in Israel-Palestine, spreading a conflict out over the years allows for babies to grow up to take the places of the dead. And in the hundred years war against France which had just finished when the Yorkist-Lancastrian war began several generations were able to contribute.

Here’s another king:

This is Richard the third, best known nowadays in a forgetful nation for the discovery of his skeleton under a carpark in Leicester. And for the last line that Shakespeare gave him: my kingdom for a horse! He was one of the 100,000.

And here is Henry the seventh, first of the Tudors, the man who succeeded in bringing the long civil war to an end. He was powerful and crafty, so the portrait is quite a good likeness. But the term ‘civil war’ isn’t right: in the Spanish civil war and the English civil war of the 17th century there were people with firm beliefs and strong interests on both sides. In dynastic wars the people are forced to fight for their overlords, there is no split in civil society, no victory changed anything for the people, except to impoverish them further, and maybe the turf wars of drug lords provide the best analogy.

One more king:

And this is Laurence Olivier! Henry the fifth, victor at Agincourt, noble hero! Could he have liked this picture? Did he ever see it? Why is there no colour in any of the faces in these portraits? All the artists are described as unknown. Most came from the Netherlands, as builders now come from Poland.

Finally, a queen:

Violence and brutality live longest in our imaginations, and this is Queen Mary, bloody Mary, whom you might remember as a sad princess in Wolf Hall. The daughter of Katherine of Aragon and Henry the eighth, she finally came to the throne, set about changing the newly protestant nation back into a catholic one, and had 300 heretics burnt to death. You see what sadness, victimisation and isolation can lead to.

Just one more, not a monarch, but a man who at one time seemed as powerful as one, also a leading protagonist in Wolf Hall, Cardinal Wolsey, his disgrace and his appetite for good living figured in the litter bin that Transport for London have fixed to his chest:

Then at Oxford Circus I changed onto the Victoria Line and two people offered me a seat! Neither of them was ethnically white British. I often feel grateful to the still civilised nature of this country. The shit stirrers are always at it though: on sunday I glanced at newspaper headlines in a shop. The Express chose to lead with a story they had evidently manufactured, about a 93 year old Jewish man who came here on the Kindertransport just before the war, who was frightened to leave his house because of virulent anti-semitism. No doubt what he knew about how dangerous the streets of Britain had become came straight from the Express. I can report that round here Jews are going about their business as usual, unaccompanied children, women pushing prams, old men, and I have seen no sign of any threats or antagonism towards them. On the contrary, I was told off by a Jewish woman this afternoon because as I was looking the other way my well behaved dog came too close to her. I don’t mean to suggest that she was being antagonistic, just that she was quite unafraid to speak her mind.

So Rishi Sunak says that armistice day – armistice! what a good idea – is a time for national reflection. I had quite enough of that at Charing Cross underground station. And whenever I think about ‘the nation’ as opposed to the people in it, as I experience them in this city, I nearly always feel disgusted. I still remember Bomber Harris, he who burnt Dresden, and learnt his trade between the wars in – guess where – Iraq and Afghanistan. See remembering and forgetting, the bombing of Dresden

The National Gallery website has some very good videos about some of its paintings, including the Uccello and the Botticelli. Numerous websites will give you more confusing details about who killed and betrayed whom in the wars of the roses than you will be able to take in.