A Short History of England

In the 1950s, I was given a book called Our Island Story, which told the history of England for children. It recounted in affecting detail King Alfred burning the cakes and Robert the Bruce drawing inspiration from a spider, but omitted most of the context of these events. I was left wondering why King Alfred fetched up in that hovel. Its author, H.E. Marshall (whom I have just discovered, to my surprise, was a woman) understood the maxim ‘show not tell’, and knew that you held attention by writing about individual human beings; and she was careful not to upset her young readers with the grislier details of our bloodthirsty history.

But she did cram the whole story into one compact, exciting volume and not many people have done that. Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples is four volumes, and, as Clement Attlee remarked, might have been better called ‘Things in history which have interested me.’

Simon Jenkins has boldly gone where few have gone before, putting the history of England onto 384 thick, glossy, lavishly illustrated pages (though I feel that starting in ad 410 is cheating a little.) It’s a job worth doing. Few people, even historians, know the whole lot even passably well, and English history is a continuum. But it’s a challenging task, and requires someone whose life has been spent in a trade such as journalism, where you learn to squeeze a lot of information into a few words, without yielding to the temptation of writing notes­ and without losing the relaxed, readable style of a writer who has all the space in the world.

I doubt if it could have been done a lot better. Perhaps Jenkins’ book is a little too heavy on the politics and light on society and science. Perhaps some of the judgments about what to include and what to leave out are suspect, but there are so many such judgments to be made that any knowledgeable reader is bound to dislike some of them.

All the old stories get a mention, including Alfred and his cakes, but they are put into their context. Jenkins has a journalist’s eye for the compelling detail that the academic historian might leave out. So we do learn just how horrific was the execution of Edward II’s favourite Hugh Despenser – ‘strung up, castrated, forced to watch his genitals being burned, hanged, and while still (amazingly) conscious, disembowelled and quartered.’ We learn that, after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, her dog had to be extricated, protesting, from under her dress. Despite the rushed schedule, Jenkins, like a good tour guide, has time to stop and point out oddities of interest. Here is Walpole, as the first prime minister, being ‘awarded a modest town house in a speculative housing development just off Whitehall named Downing Street’. Note on your left ‘the transfer to England of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, renamed after the king’s brother, the Duke of York’.

As Jenkins races towards the present, the narrative slows: while the first chapter covers almost 200 years, the last covers just the last 21 years. The final few chapters are the least satisfying. I found Jenkins’ chapter on the Attlee settlement in particular irritating and misleading, with its conclusion that wartime control ‘was harnessed by Labour to the ambitions of utopian socialism.’ It wasn’t and Attlee’s socialism wasn’t utopian. But perhaps everyone is going to dislike Jenkins’ attempt to summarise their own specialist area. Overall I’m glad there is at last a readable and reliable quick guide to the broad sweep of English history.

Francis Beckett is editor of The Prime Ministers Who Never Were (Biteback, 2011).