Music & Monarchy, by David Starkey – review

British royalty, considered from a purely mechanistic angle, cannot function adequately without music. Deprived of marching bands, trumpeters and choristers or even of those ever so well-mannered regimental ensembles which dispense selections from favourite musicals at an investiture or a garden party, the royal performance would lose much of its authenticity. Playing the king in this country has always depended on being able to do the whole shtick to the right tunes. If, from time to time, a genuinely gifted or truly inspired composer should become available, so much the better. Dash and panache for parties and parades, decorous gloom for funerals and the occasional wedding anthem or victory Te Deum sound more like the real thing when knocked off by a Purcell, a Handel or an Elgar.

In Music & Monarchy David Starkey and Katie Greening trace the growth of this now indispensable symbiosis across five centuries. Their book is a television tie-in and presumably because the Agincourt Song provides a rumbustious accompaniment to the forthcoming series, they choose to start with King Henry V, ‘the man who was our greatest king and finest general’.