David Starkey - Monarchy (2006)
History – 360 pages – my copy (paperback) borrowed from Pete
- 3 nods out of 5 -
David Starkey has made a name for himself with his silver, piston tongue and large glasses that sit upon his combed hair. He is, in short, the typical television personality historian: keen to put down others and lavish grand statements upon a public; for the benefit of winning attention.
History – 360 pages – my copy (paperback) borrowed from Pete
- 3 nods out of 5 -
David Starkey has made a name for himself with his silver, piston tongue and large glasses that sit upon his combed hair. He is, in short, the typical television personality historian: keen to put down others and lavish grand statements upon a public; for the benefit of winning attention.
Starkey’s general interest has long been the Tudor period, on which he once acclaimed in a television interview, when things really got interesting in England. Monarchy begins in this period, continuing to the present day, taking in Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s I & II, the beheaded Charles, the mad George III and, of course, Victoria. The book is aimed at the layman and, as such, has become a best-seller, cementing Starkey’s name alongside other media personalities like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson.
However, both Schama and Ferguson do greater justice to their audience. Monarchy may well be an effortless read; but time and again Starkey patronizes his readership, constantly repeating the story, never going in depth, never even threatening to argue fresh insight. This is shown in his lack of concrete referencing and the committing of the ultimate scholarly crime: getting the facts all mixed up. I allude to a particular point (in pages 22-23), when referring to an uprising in Cornwall in the early years of Henry Tudor’s reign. He misses the actual date by a year (1496 rather than 1497) and doesn’t seem to recognise there were in fact two disturbances: one against tax hikes (as led by An Gof) and the one in support of the pretender to the throne (Perkin Warbeck). The revolt led by An Gof succeeded in closing in on London, though it was never a ‘close-run thing’ as Starkey believes (p.23). It was, it appears, to be a rout: the Cornish rebels were easily apprehended, the leaders taken to the capital for quartering and death.
So, if this is wrong, can the remainder of Starkey’s pages be confidently trusted? The answer, in short, is no. But such is the strength of the book’s narrative, that it can certainly be enjoyed. The years of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are featured most prominently, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 onwards. This is when Britain was forged, when the vicious religious disputes were put into the past, and when this small island became a great, world power. Unlike many modern historians, Starkey is unembarrassed about Britain’s empire, never pandering to the critics’ dislike of its grizzly realities (slavery, of bondage; of ruining others to line the pockets of our rich).
Starkey is unabashedly a romantic for monarchy; for King and Queen. The name Windsor, he states, is ‘redolent of all things English. Shakespeare. Pageantry. Sweet, old-fashioned smells’ (p.297). Yet despite his attachment, he warns that the monarchs may yet fade away, ‘having bored us and itself to death’ (p.297). This shows in the last chapter of his work, in glossing over a century of kings and queens of modern Britain in one chapter. But this, in many ways, makes perfect sense. Our monarchs are no longer integral to the nation, not to our day-to-day running of our lives, and nor to our future.
