Crown & Country: The Kings & Queens of England by David Starkey (2011)
For those who may not know, I am a big stickler for royal history. The whole idea of the institution of monarchy – its structure, transformation, function – fascinates me to no end. Couple that with court politics and intrigue, and I’m ready to dig into any tome that may come my way.
With that said, this book has been on my reading list for quite some time and only recently was I able to finally crack it open for the first time and indulge in its contents. And not surprisingly, I wholly enjoyed this book through and through. When I first became familiar with this area of history, the first historian I came across, fortuitously, was David Starkey, the author of this very book. I watched many, if not all, of his documentaries and became captivated with his way of presenting the material as well as his often stiff, dry but witty humor.
This book, as the title suggests, presents a history of the monarchy in England from early times of Roman Britain to the present day, highlighting many key events and individuals that contributed to the monarchy’s numerous transformations and crises, be them high or low. It is not merely a recount of the monarch’s lives, in the biographical sense, in their respective time period but rather a canvas of the monarch within a much larger mural. We get a glimpse of what the king or queen had to confront and how they proceeded to execute their duties to empower themselves, the institution, and the people, or to oppress the masses, enforce an unjust way of rule, and sometimes to the instability, degradation, and ultimately destruction of the monarchy as a whole. By the time the reader is through with this book, the reader will gain a good sense of the relationship between the monarchy and its people as the institution transcends through centuries of tumultuous events and what was done in order to maintain this institution and how it persisted through its darkest times in the context of the appropriate time period.
The way in which the material is presented in the book is accessible and the narrative casually strolls along like a lively lecture with each chapter acting as an individual lecture in a series. The book is a total of 520 pages (excluding the index), which may be a length that’s not for everyone, and the font is actually quite small but these shouldn’t deter anyone from having a crack at the book. I assure you, it’ll be worth the time and investment. The author’s rhetoric is authoritative but not dry and absolute and brings about a level of scholarship that any avid reader will be able to sufficiently digest whilst reading. There’s not overly complicated jargon and often times concepts are clearly explained in a clever manner to guide the readers along the path.
I highly recommend this book to anyone with a semblance of interest in court studies since it lays such a solid foundation for learning more about the institution of the monarchy in Britain by becoming familiar with the players involved in its preservation, transformation, and destruction over its entire course, and in the grander sense, the history of the nation.
Rating: 5/5
Your History 