A cracking royal read

Never judge a book by its cover. To look at, this is a coffee-table book with shiny pages which make it too heavy to take on Ryanair, but that does it a disservice. In reality it is a shrewdly observed and engagingly written account of a neglected subject — the royal household.

Tinniswood takes a long view, beginning with Elizabeth I, and one of the points he makes concerns the unchanging nature of monarchy. Both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II needed to put on a display of magnificence, for example, but both were also aware that out-of-control costs spelt trouble with Parliament.

The chief cause of ballooning costs for the Tudors and Stuarts was that too many people were living at Court at the monarch’s expense. In Charles II’s day, the Palace of Whitehall resembled a vast, sprawling and rather dirty apartment complex. It stank of drink. No one knew exactly who or how many people lived there, and the courtiers took to riotous partying in the private galleries, which annoyed the king who expected them to appear at Court.