He was a mother’s boy, a precocious intellect, a dandy and a tyrant whose
pursuit of fame was obsessive. Uncharitable souls might project these traits
of Henry VIII onto David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster, who has
poured a lifetime of research into a new study of the king that is being
hailed as a triumph.
“This book is Starkey’s masterpiece,” says John Guy, the historian and Tudor
scholar, of Henry: Virtuous Prince, to be published this week. “It combines
the populist touch with deep insights of scholarship. But it is bound to
raise controversy.”
Controversy has been handmaiden to the 63-year-old academic ever since he
ridiculed George Austin, Archdeacon of York, for “his fatness, his smugness,
his pomposity” on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, earning Starkey the epithet “the
rudest man in Britain”.
His reckoning that the title was worth £100,000 a year proved a gross
underestimate. The rewards of playing what he termed an “all-purpose media
tart” would have won Henry VIII’s respect after Starkey signed a £2m
contract with Channel 4 in 2002, paving the way for a career as one of the
highest paid television presenters in Britain.
These days the council estate boy from Cumbria glides in a chauffeured
limousine between his London pied-à-terre in Highbury Hill and his Georgian
house in Barham, near Canterbury in Kent, which he shares with James Brown,
his boyfriend of 15 years. With wisteria over the door and dogs in the
drive, Starkey leads the life of a country squire.
Just to prove that he has not lost his touch, last year Starkey compared the
Queen to an uneducated “housewife” who shared Hermann Goering’s impulse to
reach for his revolver when he heard the word culture. By contrast, he
admires the Prince of Wales as an original thinker who could usher in a new
kingdom “of the mind, the spirit, culture and values”. Starkey was appointed
a CBE in the Queen’s 2007 birthday honours.
Rotund, intense and fastidiously dressed - often sporting a loden coat,
pin-striped suit and silk pocket handkerchief - Starkey peers at the world
through horn-rimmed spectacles with a mixture of irascibility, seriousness
and glee. A parodist’s dream, he can produce withering sarcasm or a bray of
laughter to order. “He’s a roaring snob and has an extremely high sense of
his own worth,” says an acquaintance. “But a little arrogance doesn’t make
him any less good company. At the moment he’s obsessed with matching exactly
the right colours to his stately home.”
According to Starkey, the collective noun for historians is a “malice” - their
jealousy induced by the bestsellers he has written on the back of such
popular television series as Henry VIII, Elizabeth, The Six Wives of Henry
VIII and Monarchy, which chronicled English rulers from Anglo-Saxon times.
His new work on Henry VIII is likely to inflame historians again. Having
delayed publication for almost a decade, Starkey has dealt only with the
king’s first 19 years, leaving the heavy-duty action of the remaining 36
years to be published at a later date. To most historians it seems an
eccentric cutting-off point.
Whereas many scholars view the king’s reign through the prisms of the
constitution, the law and administration, Starkey’s approach is to emphasise
the inner workings of the royal household.
“Starkey is saying, ‘To hell with all that, that’s bollocks’,” says a
sympathetic historian. “He thinks it’s all a matter of personalities - the
inner sanctum of the king and his courtiers, which was run secretively like
a private corporation.”
The result is that Starkey has quoted Tudor bit players to support some of his
theories - for example, a groom’s word that in order to marry Henry,
Catherine of Aragon “lied” in claiming that her former marriage to Arthur,
Henry’s brother, was unconsummated.
As if glorying in this heresy, the book’s introduction recounts an episode in
1970 when Starkey regaled his fellow Cambridge students with tales of
Henry’s “groom of the stool” - or “close-stool” (royal loo). “He certainly
attended the king when he used it,” he writes. “The groom says so. He even
describes the contents, solid as well as liquid. He may well have wiped the
royal bottom. No wonder my dissertation became known as my doctoral faeces.”
This method of research ran completely counter to the views held by Geoffrey
Elton, Starkey’s eminent tutor. “Starkey was the great rebel,” a
contemporary recalls. “It was quite a cosmic falling-out.”
Michael Burleigh, the author and historian, witnessed another serious bust-up
at the London School of Economics in 1988. The row heralded the end of
Starkey’s 16-year tenure as a history lecturer: “They wouldn’t promote him
because he was a Conservative and people were very envious of his success on
television. He hated the LSE, partly because they wanted to make the history
he was doing remorselessly contemporary.”
Burleigh’s overriding recollection is of “an incredibly kind man. He and I
used to interview prospective students. He was very understanding and
encouraging to these kids”.
Starkey was born on January 3, 1945, the only child of poor Quaker parents in
Kendal. His “monstrous but wonderful” mother, Elsie Lyon, worked as a
cleaner and dominated his early life. His “dreamy, poetic” father, Robert, a
foreman at a washing machine factory, was “bottled up”. When he became
emotional “it was like ice cracking”.
Their son had been born with two club feet and, while he had a number of
operations to correct the condition, his mother was encouraging and “hugely
affectionate” to the point of being overprotective. A precocious child, by
the time he was 11 Starkey had read the whole of Dickens and large portions
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The transition to an “intensely male”
grammar school caused him to have a nervous breakdown at 13, but he grew in
confidence and won debating prizes.
His transformation was in part due to two teachers. He credits Edmund Mounsey,
his “sensitive and imaginative” English master, with inculcating a love of
literature and language. Mounsey also nurtured his appearance in school
plays – his first big part was Malvolio in Twelfth Night. George Zair, his
previously stodgy history teacher, became “suddenly wonderful” in the sixth
form, when “I was by far the ablest of the group”.
Early on Starkey had been unaware of his sexuality, recalling that a girl
playing Lady Bracknell in a school play “made a pass at me but I wasn’t as
pleased as I might have been”. After winning a scholarship to Fitzwilliam
college, Cambridge, a male student made “a repellent pass at me over a
bottle of wine” but he did not realise what was going on.
Prompted by the gay lib trend of “coming out”, he told his mother that he was
homo-sexual: “She never forgave me. We maintained the shell of what had been
there before but the topic kept coming up. I regret that we were never
reconciled.”
It was at Cambridge that Starkey became fascinated by the unfashionable
subject of monarchy and decided to write his doctoral thesis about the court
of Henry VIII. “My friends said this was going to be a disastrous mistake. I
went ahead for the simple reason that it interested me.”
When he left Cambridge for London, his sexual inhibitions dissolved: “I
suppose I was an excessively enthusiastic advocate of promiscuity.” He
regarded his escape into a world of “clubbing, Hampstead Heath and God knows
what else” as a form of liberation.
These days he is more sedate, acknowledging that “you come to a stage when
being a 60-year-old leather queen strutting around is slightly silly”.
Similarly, he left The Moral Maze because he became “exceedingly bored with
being Dr Rude”.
The main criticism of Starkey is that he cuts corners and fails to nail down
some of his theories. “He doesn’t always go the extra mile,” says one
critic. “I think he would love to feel that he’s conquered the academic
market as well as TV and popular history. But he’ll never quite make it.”
Andrew Roberts, the historian, sings his praises: “He has the ability to make
difficult concepts easily understandable. He’s just bloody good at it. He
has immensely illiberal views on some things, but overall he’s a
liberal-minded man. He’s a genuine one-off.”
