The Royal Stuarts is a portrait of one of the most
famous families in British history. It is open to debate whether they were the
family that "shaped Britain" and can be challenged quite easily.
Logically Massie starts at the beginning of the
Stewart's reign. The spelling of the family name was changed to 'Stuart' by
Mary, Queen of Scots, to "stop the French mispronouncing it".
The Stuarts began life as wealthy landowners from
Brittany, France before moving to Scotland where they acquired the hereditary office
of 'steward' to the Scottish kings. Massie book highlights the fact that the
family span a considerable range of British history, from the Middle Ages to
the Napoleonic period.
Massie's book is not an academic account of the
Stuarts and if truth be told it reads more like a novel as Noel Malcolm
poetically writes "he has the novelist's ability to conjure up context and
background in a brief sketch, the journalist's knack of summarising arguments
and issues, and the storyteller's gift for picking out those key actions or
remarks that bring a person's character to life".[1]
Massie's generous and in some cases, sloppy use of
footnotes is annoying but not a game-changer. However, his use of historians is
mainly from an older generation is annoying. His book would be much better with
the use of more modern historians.
One of the biggest gripes against Massie according to
several leading historians is the fact that he is not a professional historian,
and this has led to these historians to bemoan the fact that he has used no
original primary sources or consulted any manuscripts.
Tim Harris is equally scathing in his review of the
book "The footnoting is sloppy. Many quotes are not footnoted at all, and
when they are, often, no page numbers are given. Moreover, Massie appears to be
completely ignorant of much of the relevant historiography. The work of
distinguished scholars at the world's leading universities is ignored: John
Morrill (Cambridge), Clive Holmes (Oxford), Mark Kishlansky (Harvard), Daniel
Szechi (Manchester), Ronald Hutton (Bristol), and John Miller (London), to name
but a few. Massie seems to think the last word on Charles II is the work of
Arthur Bryant and Hester Chapman. Normally when those outside the profession
turn their hand to writing history, it is because they have a deep love of the
field. Massie seems to hold the world of professional historical scholarship in
contempt."[2]
Other mistakes include Massie citing that Charles Ist
did 'find refuge' in Carisbrooke Castle, this is not strictly true as he was in
reality held under armed parliamentary guard. Massie asserts Charles 'almost
certainly' did not read Hobbes's Leviathan. However, this is contradicted by
the fact Hobbes himself gave that a manuscript copy.
Historiography
From a historiography standpoint, Massie's book is
part of a cottage industry of Royalist studies. The book is one dimensional in
that it pays minimal attention if all to the profound economic changes that
covered the reign of the Stuart family. Nothing is learnt of the close
connection of the Stuarts to a section of the growing mercantile class that
grew up in the 15th and 16th centuries and came of age in the 17th century
and played no small role in the English revolution.
Also, a kiss of death of any book is when the
historian appears to have sympathy for his or her subject. Massie indicates
sympathy for Charles. Massie is a very conservative writer, and the book
would not look out of place in the growing revisionist historiography. The main
characteristic of this historiography being hostility to both Whig and Marxist
historiography.
Massie also believes that Charles was not responsible
for the civil war it was nasty parliaments fault. Massie uncritically presents
the counterfactual argument If Charles had not been so stubborn, then things
might not have developed into a civil war.
Massie, as one writer states "is well known for
advocating a Tory viewpoint. Stuarts are meat and drink to conservative
revisionist historians because their complex personalities and the shifting,
pre-modern nature of their kingdoms (plural after 1603) made them unusually
susceptible to interpretative spin. Stuart reputations go up and down like the
stock market".
To conclude, Massie is an excellent writer and his
approach throughout the book is intelligent and does not talk down to the reader.
However, do we need another book on the Stuarts that mostly rehashes previous
work and offers nothing new?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7724980/The-Royal-Stuarts-by-Allan-Massie-review.html
[2] Review
The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family that Shaped Britain by Allan Massie
Review by Tim Harris -The Historian, Vol. 75, No. 2 (SUMMER 2013), pp. 392-393
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