Does a Focus on Royalty Obscure British History?

‘The risks are acute when we turn to traditional periodisations’

Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter

There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves framing discussions in terms of ruling monarchs and dynasties, even when the subject has little to do with them.

The risks of this become particularly acute when we turn to traditional periodisations, which are almost inevitably marked by dynastic change. In 1066 the Norman Conquest and accession of William the Conqueror marks the point of transition between the ‘early’ and ‘central’ Middle Ages, at least where England is concerned. Yet Norman influence did not first arrive on the shores of this Sceptred Isle with the Conqueror’s henchmen. It had been making itself felt for almost a quarter of a century already under Edward the Confessor (r.1042-66), the half-Norman monarch from whom the Conqueror claimed the throne (as Edward’s second cousin). Norman earls, Continental-style castles, and reform-minded French prelates were all to be found aplenty in Edward’s England. Such objections hold even more strongly for the advent of the Tudors in 1485, which ushers in the ‘early modern’ era. Unlike the Conqueror, Henry Tudor was a native British aristocrat. And his reign and that of his son, Henry VIII, saw a continuation and intensification of trends visible over the previous century, particularly within the ecclesiastical sphere. Reformation came to Britain not thanks to the Battle of Bosworth, but off the back of later dynastic twists and turns. And across all such divides, the lives of the local peasantry – the vast majority of the British population – remained resolutely unaltered by such purportedly epochal changes.

Yet if the lustre of royalty has often skewed our vision, we should not abandon dynastic markers altogether. All periodisations are in some sense arbitrary. And in a world of monarchs – most of the globe till at least the 19th century – reigns still offer a natural fixed point. Or to put it in Churchillian terms, dividing British history into rulers and dynasties is the worst form of periodisation, except for all the others. For better or worse, it’s here to stay.

‘The study of monarchy has been brought up to date’

Susan Doran is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford

Although popular with the public, scholarly research into kings and queens was unfashionable during the 1960s and 70s. Not only did its many critics believe that there was nothing new to discover, they argued that focusing on monarchy was elitist and trivial. Today, however, royal studies are flourishing.

This transformation is largely a result of the new approaches which emerged partly in response to those critics. Historians have expanded their remit to study the whole royal family and to examine political concepts related to power, legitimacy, and succession. Scholars of royalty have embraced issues surrounding gender, political culture, rituals, patronage, and self-fashioning. In brief the study of kings and queens has been brought up to date.

Early modern historians have welcomed these developments, not least because kings and queens are an essential focus of our work. As post-Elton historians have convincingly argued, the person of the monarch, not state institutions, was the fulcrum of governmental activity and political life. Without focusing on the role of monarchs, key events in British history – the Reformation, the plantations in Ireland, the Civil War, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ – would be incomprehensible. These events are important because they affected the lives of ordinary people; the history of monarchs cannot be totally separated from ‘history from below’. Popular protests were often as much ignited by hated royal policies as by economic pressures, while hundreds of thousands of non-elite men and women would turn up to view the public processions accompanying royal occasions. Printers churned out books, pamphlets, and broadsheets describing the events for people of the ‘middling sort’ who had either not attended or chose to purchase them as souvenirs. By exploring how royalty is portrayed in these sources, we can learn much about the language of politics, as well as the attitudes of ordinary people towards authority and their expectations from a ruler.

There are, of course, some types and periods of history where scholarly focus needs to lie elsewhere. Economic historians will have far less to say about royalty, while historians of the 19th century may focus on parliamentary politics. But public interest in the royal family remains strong. It will be for future historians to enquire as to why.

‘Historians should not exaggerate the clout of monarchs as decision makers’ 

Michael  Ledger-Lomas is Author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (Oxford University Press)

I recently saw an extraordinary artefact in Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology: Chief Charley Isipaymilt’s blanket. Decorated with a geometric, brightly coloured fringe, it is an emblem of the respect he enjoyed among the Cowichan people of Vancouver Island. In 1906 Chief Isipaymilt wore his regalia when he and other First Nations leaders from the Canadian province of British Columbia visited King Edward VII in London. They were angry that the provincial and federal governments of Canada had allowed their lands to be seized without compensation and had curbed their hunting rights. They wanted Edward to honour what they believed were his mother Victoria’s promises to recognise their territorial title. The chiefs got an audience: shortly after returning from a regatta on the Isle of Wight, Edward gave them a snatched 15 minutes. But while he promised to send them framed photographs of himself, no written record of other concessions survives.

Isipaymilt’s embassy tells us that a focus on the monarchy can illuminate modern British history, provided we go about it properly. Historians should not exaggerate the clout of monarchs as decision makers. Edward had strong preferences when it came to European diplomacy, but they came second to the wishes of his ministers. Although he had travelled the world as a young man, he was not very interested in how his empire was run.

Yet if Edward wore a hollow crown, no one had told his subjects. ‘I have prayed to be allowed to live long enough to see the Great White King’, Isipaymilt told one journalist, ‘and tell him the wishes of my people. Now I have seen him and my heart beats with joy.’ One reason for his happiness is the still current oral tradition, in which Edward had in fact pledged to honour indigenous title. It allowed First Nations to invoke a benevolent crown in their struggle against settler colonial governments. We should locate the power of the throne less in what monarchs actually think or do but in the manifold ways their subjects have invoked them to affirm and defend their ethnic, religious, and political identities. The continued power of such magical thinking has not been lost on Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney, who flew King Charles III to Ottawa to open Parliament and defend ‘the True North, strong and free’.

‘For most royal women the work has yet to begin’

Nadine Akkerman is Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture at Leiden University

Historians and readers gravitate towards a narrative framework of British history with royalty at its centre – not just because it provides familiarity and order, but because treading over the same sources makes both writing and reading easier. These feasts of recognition, however, tend to favour storytelling over the more demanding aspects of historiography, which can offer a sharper – and sometimes uncomfortable – lens through which we might view the past.

Recent scholarship aimed at recovering the voices of those outside of the corridors of power – secretaries or seamen, laundry maids or lace-makers – is beginning to redress this imbalance. Many of us may feel we have heard enough about kings – unless, perhaps, we get to call them queens. Yet to ignore royal women would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The influence of she-intelligencers and the informal power wielded by ladies-in-waiting, for instance, has too long gone unnoticed. While both are now gradually being written into history, these women were often closely embedded in courtly networks of patronage and power. Their histories are entangled with those of their monarchs.

Even queen-consorts can find themselves marginalised, their stories untold or distorted by entrenched myths and erroneous ‘received wisdom’. My work on Scottish-born princess Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662), sometime queen of Bohemia, has shown her pan-European significance to both the Thirty Years War and English Civil Wars, histories from which she is still largely absent. It took more than two decades and visits to more than 50 archives to find, transcribe, decode, and annotate her voluminous correspondence. For most royal women such time-consuming work has yet to begin. Consider Anna of Denmark, consort of James VI & I: despite the resurgence of interest in James, Anna’s correspondence remains buried in German, Danish, Scottish, and English archives and is yet to be collated, let alone assessed. The examples of Elizabeth and Anna show that debates concerning an over-focus on royalty must be tempered by the basic work of tracing the records of and then writing these women’s histories. Only then can we properly assess whether their stories illuminate – or obscure – our understanding of British history.