Heads that wore the crown

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with the ability to show us the woods, not the trees. In this second and concluding volume on the English monarchy, which deals principally with the Tudors and Stuarts, he combines compelling narrative and lucid analysis to guide us with a sure hand through two centuries of domestic turmoil unparalleled in any other period of English history.