This pioneering work, the first serious analysis of the royal household between the middle ages and the eighteenth century, examines the internal workings of the court which was key to politics, and the personnel and organisation of the private royal apartments. It presents radical reinterpretation of the period as a whole, seeing the years from 1460 to 1640 as an essential unity - the age of personal court monarchy undivided by an imaginary 'revolution in government'.