Saturday 15 October 2011

The Royal Stuarts by Allan Massie: Jonathan Cape :A Review


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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