It must be 15 years since I last sat in a room taking notes while David Starkey talked about Tudor history. The rooms couldn’t be more different. The Cambridge History faculty, where Starkey taught some undergraduate seminars in the late ‘90s before giving up teaching to focus on writing and broadcasting, is a bold brick and glass edifice by James Sterling, one of the 20th century’s leading modernists. The room we’re in now, part of Westminster Abbey’s Deanery, is apparently the one in which King Henry IV died, handing his crown to Henry V, though I expect with somewhat fewer words than the epic death-bed reconciliation depicted by Shakespeare.

But there couldn’t be a more appropriate place for Starkey, monarchy’s modern chronicler, to launch his new television series. Called 'Music and Monarchy', it begins in the reign of Henry V, 'one of the most musical kings' he tells us, and along with Henry VIII the only one who composed. Both of these kings feature prominently, Henry V as a man believing he could win God to the English side with the magnificence and sincerity of worship elevated through the finest of music. Henry VIII, we learn, was a man for whom musicality lay at the core of his faith and very vision of himself. Starkey shows viewers the King’s personal Psalter, annotated in his handwriting, which includes an illumination to Psalm 52 of Henry VIII playing the harp as if the Old Testament King David. 

Later episodes offer the bitter iconoclasm of the Civil War (featuring, we’re promised 'organ wars'), the Restoration ('to my relief, otherwise I’d be out of a job', quips Starkey), before more peaceful prosperity brings us Handel, Elgar and Parry. For the latter he’s joined by Gramophone critic Jeremy Dibble to explore the careful choreography of the monumental coronation anthem I was Glad.

There's a sort of exuberant delight to Starkey's presentation – there he is pondering a performance just off centre-stage, or sometimes even standing right next to the conductor, or perhaps midway between the two ranks of choir stalls. He may as well stand in the best acoustic spot I suppose – but I guess the message is that Starkey is on a journey of discovery, and, through him, so are we. It's accessible history in the best tradition: rich in observation, a strong narrative told with conviction and colour, enthusing energetically throughout. The script takes fascinating facets of the story and elevates them with the sort of rhetoric which has made Starkey such a successful communicator of history. Thus, Henry V's French invasions were 'A Holy War to be fought with music'. Henry VIII 'was a master of the politics of splendour, and the brightest jewel and the most effective instrument was his Chapel Royal'. Episode one closes with Elizabeth I's court and the glories of her Chapel Royal: 'Outside it was the cold winter of Protestant austerity, inside it was indeed the warm summer of the Golden age of English Church music'. 

But above all, we get to see some of the most important pieces of music of the past half-millennium performed in the places for which they were written, by the modern musicians who know them best, among them David Skinner, Fretwork, Richard Egarr and the Choirs of King's College Cambridge and Westminster Abbey. The lists of works featuring in the series runs onto four sides of A4. 

Music, argues Starkey's series, was as integral to the image and power of monarchy as were armies and architecture. Nothing embodies the latter quite so well as Westminster Abbey itself of course, built as a shrine to a King-Saint, and later adorned at the east end with its glorious Lady Chapel in the most exquisite Perpendicular Gothic and itself a monument to Tudor prestige. Here, and throughout the Abbey's many chapels, the kings and queens now lie silent beneath austere tombs. The music, of course, lives on. Perhaps it's fitting that of all the memorials in the Abbey, it's one to a musician - Handel, sculpted by Louis-François Roubiliac - that is by far the most full of life. 

David Starkey's Music and Monarchy will be broadcast by BBC Two in July