Heads that wore the crown

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with the ability to show us the woods, not the trees. In this second and concluding volume on the English monarchy, which deals principally with the Tudors and Stuarts, he combines compelling narrative and lucid analysis to guide us with a sure hand through two centuries of domestic turmoil unparalleled in any other period of English history. Concentrating attention on the place of religious quarrels in the events that led to and constituted the civil war of 1642-49 may leave constitutional issues — the fight against arbitrary government and royal tyranny and the contest between parliament and the king for control of the sword — a bit in the shadows. (Edward Coke, the stern, tireless advocate of parliamentary monarchy in the medieval tradition, is conspicuous by his absence.) On the other hand, nowhere is there to be found a better short summary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its consequences.

Starkey is little interested in praising or denigrating England’s monarchs (though Charles I is treated rather kindly and Anne comes out on top). He dissects them to reveal the fluctuating fortunes of the institution of monarchy.