The English are an odd bunch. Insular, patriotic and fiercely independent, they have usually subcontracted their monarchy to foreigners. After being conquered by Saxons, Vikings and French, they offered the crown successively to Welsh, Scots and, ad infinitum, Germans. They made only two requirements, fecundity and the right religion. They were constantly let down on both scores.

David Starkey tours England’s monarchical horizon with gusto. After his earlier study of medieval kingship, he now traces the modern monarchy from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the present day. The advent of the Tudors gave England a new dynasty and a new sense of nationhood. Henry VIII’s usurping of the Church of Rome left kingly authority supreme but it was soon undermined by the emergence of the engine of Britain’s political and econ omic progress, a middle class.

Inevitably with so encompassing a tale, the book reads in part like the script for the television series that gave it birth. Kings, like events, are declared “good things” or bad things. History will “never be the same again” as monarchs leap out of bed in the morning “as if nothing were to happen” and then, oops. By the end, Starkey is so out of breath he collapses in a heap. Edward VIII gets one sentence and the entire 20th century barely two pages.
This is a pity since, even as the monarchy lost political power, it retained a hold on British social history and on the rise and fall of the Empire that are relics of its earlier strength. Starkey claims that “family monarchy” was born only in 1917, that it took the 1936 abdication crisis “in its stride” and that it was “shipwrecked” by Princess Diana. This is far too glib. The henomenon remains puzzling but is deeply embedded in the British psyche, witness Helen Mirren’s transcendental performance in the film, The Queen.

Starkey is on surer ground the further back he goes. He emphasises the role of religion in the final era of kingly supremacy. The break with Rome in 1536 towers over his story, leading a century later to the crisis of the Ccivil Wwar and the final settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. All the compromising genius of Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth, failed to move the intransigent Stuarts, who sacrificed a dynasty for Rome. If the Welsh saved the monarchy the Scots came near to destroying it.

Whether England would long have held Protestantism at bay is doubtful. But the establishment of the Church of England as a supremacist political and religious institution (other than in Scotland) “ordained by God” meant that the Ccontinental extremes of Lutheranism and Catholicism were mostly avoided. When they were not, chaos ensued. This fusion of monarchy and Anglican divinity served kings and queens well throughout post-Reformation history. The fusion was effortlessly converted in the course of the 18th century into one of church and state.

Starkey has no truck with historians who regard the story of the common man as holding the key to the island story. Until the 19th century, history was that of monarchs struggling with the demons of religion, the succession and a chronic need for money. Kings and queens mattered. They had to be physically strong, or at least cunning. Their bodies were horribly vulnerable to treachery or disease and their ability to command loyalty depended in large part on an expectation of stability after they were gone. When kings died, war threatened. Such was the terror of this that heredity, the most absurd of legitimacies, remained the rock on which monarchy was built.

Henry VIII’s despotic rule, like his religious apostasy, was the product of
his desperation to father a boy. His final insistence that his daughters could succeed him meant that the Stuarts were balked of their wish to undothe Reformation. And rather than risk a return to Rome, the English invited first a Dutchman (William of Orange) and then a German (the future George I) to rule over them. By the time of the Hanoverian succession in 1715, Britain was secure for Protestantism, but by then monarchy was being challenged by a proto-democratic parliament holding tight the purse-strings of the state.

War, especially war with France, united the monarchical kingdom yet made it increasingly subject to democratic constraint. Kings needed money from the people and the City and to get it they had to admit to power a new breed of political grandees such as Walpole, Temple and the Pitts. At one point, George II fled to take refuge in his native Germany complaining, “There are kings enough in England. I am nothing there.”

This evolving concept of crown, church and parliament in a coalition of mutual consent was the genius of Britain. To this day the monarch believes herself “anointed of God” and will not permit the film of the moment of her anointment to be shown. She still declares public policy as if it waswere blessed by God, and does so to an assembly of bishops and peers, some of them sitting by hereditary right.

Starkey’s message is a potent corrective to what was once termed the Whig view of history. Nobody studying the conservatism of modern America can doubt that any secure nation, however democratic, is based on an idealistic compact that extends beyond its constitution. It embraces the people and their institutions, their freedoms and sense of duty, their tradition and their faith.

It was always so. Kings were forced to cut deals with parliament. to raise money.When Henry VIII seized the monasteries he had to disburse their wealth to courtiers and the gentry to maintain support. The Stuarts had to compromise with Protestantism or lose the crown. The Hanoverians had to work with ministers they loathed. William IV in 1832 had to accept a reform act he strongly opposed. Monarchs bent the knee to democracy because they had to. But, equally, each new prime minister bends the knee to monarchy, and knows it is not play acting.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 (including &p) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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