2015 has been a good year for political history books, biographies and memoirs. They have provided most of my reading, often for reviews published in Parliament’s House Magazine, the Conservative History Journal and on the ConservativeHome website as well as on this website (which out of sheer vanity I encourage people to refer to as the Lexden wondersite).
The books that I have reviewed with enjoyment this year include Mr and Mrs Disraeli by Daisy Hay which provides a sharply etched account of an intriguing, unconventional marriage and Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India 1926-31, edited with scrupulous care by Professor Stuart Ball to increase understanding of the constructive and far-reaching contributions to progress in inter-war Britain made by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, two Tory leaders who have so often been the subject of ludicrous caricature.
The year which marked the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo brought the second volume of an extremely well-written new life of the Iron Duke, Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace 1814-1852 by Rory Muir which draws on a vast range of sources in order to deal fully with the great man’s central role in Tory politics after 1815, skimped by all previous biographers. A richer understanding of post-war Tory politics has been made possible by William Waldegrave’s superb memoir, A Different Kind of Weather which is delightfully free of the vainglorious tone which disfigures most autobiographies; it includes a marvellous pen portrait of Ted Heath, one of the most misunderstood of all Tory leaders. Its chapter on the poll tax dovetails neatly with that in Charles Moore’s acclaimed second volume of his life of Margaret Thatcher, Everything She Wants, covering the years 1983 to 1987 in truly riveting detail( which makes very uncomfortable reading for all supporters of Ulster’s Union with Great Britain by revealing the full extent of the machinations of the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert( now Lord) Armstrong, architect of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, who believes that Northern Ireland should be associated as closely as possible with the Irish Republic).
The book which has made the deepest impression on me this year tells the story of our monarchy with immense verve, wit and style. I have revisited the review of it that I wrote in the summer to produce a revised, extended version which follows.
Alistair Lexden
29 December 2015
Gimson’s Kings & Queens: Brief Lives of the Monarchs since 1066
By Andrew Gimson. Illustrated by Martin Rowson
Square Peg, £10.99
It is easy enough to write a very rude book about our monarchs. Even the mightiest of them had their little weaknesses. Incessant publicity blackens every blot. Rupert Murdoch continues what unkindly medieval monks and chroniclers began. It is equally easy to write a sycophantic book about them, the kind that American visitors to the royal palaces will unhesitatingly rush to buy. In such publications every trite detail of birth, upbringing and marriage is placed uncritically before the reader in the hope of fortifying the mystique of the monarchy. It has been the curious misfortune of our kings and queens to inspire two diametrically opposed traditions of writing.
Andrew Gimson, the acclaimed biographer of Boris Johnson, relishes the human frailties with which our monarchs have been so plenteously imbued without ever censuring them on those grounds (he has no hesitation in including in full a particularly obscene poem about Charles II). He records royal successes and triumphs in amiable but astringent terms. In this way he finds a middle path between the two conflicting schools of royal historiography. The result is a stylish, thoroughly good-humoured, sharply etched collection of pen portraits of our forty sovereigns from William the Conqueror to the present day. Huge enjoyment is assured.
The collection is offered to help those not as well versed as they should be in royal history, a subject once considered essential but now sadly neglected in the nation’s schools and widely misrepresented and romanticised on television. This is just the moment for a book of informed but entertaining guidance. On September 9 the Queen’s reign became the longest in British history, surpassing that of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who was on the throne for 63 years and 216 days.
Now the Queen’s 90th birthday approaches. These events strengthen still further the affection and admiration in which she is held. But they also invite increased curiosity about the longevity of our monarchy as an institution and how it has been accomplished. Gimson senses the existence of misunderstanding. “Because the monarchy is seen as a source of stability”, he writes, “it is easy to fall into the error of imagining that its history must be stable”. In under 250 beautifully written pages he counters that error by exhibiting the wide range of upheavals caused by the unsettling vices and sometimes fleeting virtues that his subjects have displayed over the centuries. Almost every kind of good and evil can be found among them.
Among those who earn high marks under Gimson’s courteous but unsparing examination, Elizabeth I and the grossly underestimated warrior-statesman William III are especially prominent. The power of Parliament advanced significantly during the latter’s reign. When as a result of his superb generalship Louis XIV surrendered all his recent territorial gains in 1697 “ Parliament promptly cut the size of the army to a mere 7,000 men leading William to remark: ‘ Parliament did in a day what Louis XIV had been unable to do in eight years’”. It is to the interplay between monarch and Parliament that we owe our tradition of ordered liberty.
The greatest monster among our monarchs was also one of the greatest nation-builders. The chapter on Henry VIII—just ten vivid,compelling pages—is a tale of terror and glory. While heads rolled on the scaffold, the country was being remoulded by the Reformation. “ This realm of England is an empire”, Henry declared through the Act of Parliament that cut our ties with Rome. “ He created the sovereign English nation, living under its own laws and guarded by its own ships”, Gimson reminds us—and in doing so explains the strength of feeling evoked by the prospect of an EU referendum nearly 500 years later. Some people say it is ludicrously old-fashioned to tell the story of our country through the lives of its monarchs. As Gimson shows, it is just about the neatest and most revealing way of summarising nearly everything that matters in our past .
Without the monarchy, there would have been no Tory Party. It came into existence in 1678-9 to put a stop to a dastardly plot designed to remove the right of succession from the heir to the throne because he was a Catholic. Tory success in its first political venture did the country no good. It gave us James II who embarked on “ a course of such conscientious foolhardiness that he united the English nation against himself” though his church nearly canonised him.
Unabashed, the Tories fought all their elections until the 1832 Reform Act with the simple slogan “ King and Constitution”. In Queen Victoria they finally found a monarch who repaid their devotion by giving ardent support in return. Sir Robert Peel won her respect; Disraeli won her love. Victoria was the only monarch to become an unofficial member of the Conservative Party, persecuting its opponents. Gladstone declared: “The queen alone is enough to kill any man”.
Victoria’s successors have held firmly to the wise practice of regarding politicians in both the main parties with equal wariness, leaving them to face triumph and disaster as best they can. It is infinitely safer to be above politics than part of it. In an immensely shrewd afterword, Andrew Gimson concludes: “Politics is a constant repetition, in cycles of varying length, of making kings, and then killing them in order to achieve a kind of rebirth. The survival of the House of Windsor depends on its continuing willingness to surrender this sacrificial role to the politicians”.