The difficulty that Skidmore faced in writing the life of a boy, a difficulty not overcome, is demonstrated by the proportion of the book, far in excess of what is usually considered to be reasonable in a biography, given to background material. Edward’s brief reign was eventful: factional struggles at court, a furious Protestant assault on the Roman elements retained by the Henrician church, economic uncertainty and inflation, a battle over enclosures, popular disturbances and rebellion. They are the stuff of Skidmore’s book and, even though Edward played no part in their unfolding, might have saved it (though not the biography), were it not sunk by its language. Disregard for the subjunctive and the unsplit infinitive may be in line with current practice. Other errors, not forgivable, abound. Tenses are improperly aligned; subject and verb are in disagreement; pronouns lack antecedents. ‘How’ is repeatedly used instead of ‘that’ to introduce subordinate clauses that do not say how a thing happened but simply that it happened. Time after time sentences are drowned in participles, as often as not dangling. Things are different to, or different than, or are centred around. And the trouble is not merely grammatical. It is that the unconsidered, undistilled language of everyday conversation is taken to be suitable for scholarly publication. An example is Skidmore’s fondness for ‘all too’. Matters are ‘all too clear’ or ‘all too fresh’ in people’s minds; Henry VIII is an ‘all too absent’ parent; and Mary is ‘all too aware’ of the Council’s intention to forbid her household from hearing mass. Ought Mary to have been less aware?
It is disquieting that a graduate of Oxford who is reading for a D. Phil. should write prose so clogged and so graceless that it exhibits not just carelessness, but imperviousness to the beauty of language. History is literature. Writing, as Sir John Cheke instructed his royal pupil, requires words and sentences to be ‘digested and disposed in good order, and so made significant’.
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