The Queen will shortly become Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. A book published last week (and reviewed below) looks back in entertaining fashion at her predecessors and reflects on the position of the monarchy today.
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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. 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 fortifies the mystique and glamour 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,
The collection is offered to help those not well versed in royal history, a subject once considered essential but now sadly neglected in the nation’s schools and widely misrepresented on television. This is just the moment for a book of informed but entertaining guidance. On September 9 the Queen’s reign becomes 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.
It is of course an event that will strengthen still further the affection and admiration in which the Queen is held. But it also invites 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. 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.
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 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 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”.