Au contraire, Randy Newman, there is nothing wrong with being short. Brevity is the soul of wit and good old-fashioned narrow-cast political history lends itself to concision. But if your focus is too tight you will miss the gorilla on the basketball court.
Stephen Bates is aware of the constraints and ruefully acknowledges in his introduction that the traditional Whig View of history – that vision of England’s inexorable rise from Viking punching bag to doughty Protestant kingdom to world empire – has its critics. But this does not deter him from embarking on a whistle stop tour of 15 centuries of British royalty.
In The Shortest History of the Crown Bates delivers the bare essentials on each of the dozens of Saxon, Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian (aka the Windsors) monarchs of the last 1500 years – beginning with the English monarch Alfred the Great (who was King of the West-Saxons and of the Anglo-Saxons) to Elizabeth II.
As political history its explanatory power is feeble. The character and preoccupations of the monarch rarely made much difference to what was going on. Henry VIII may be the exception that proves the rule. But as a very long view of a particular institution in a particular place over 1500 years (institutions which have lasted that long are rare – it’s the Papacy first, then daylight, then perhaps the Japanese Imperial house and let’s not forget the Danish Crown) it has a genuine fascination. Bates is a journalist who has covered royalty for much of his career – no republican he. But if you want to put any number of streaming binges in context this is a useful shortcut.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
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