Sceptred Isle

Helen Carr, Sceptred Isle (Hutchinson-Heinemann) 

I shouldn't have done History at school. Certainly not for 'A' level. It was amorphous and didn't know when to stop. At least Hamlet finished with, Go, bid the soldiers shoot. The full story isn't available, we are taught from a certain point of view, reputations shift and what was once thought turns out not to be. Perhaps that's the beauty of it, though. I enjoy the fact that Hamlet is endlessly open to re-reading. Perhaps I tired of the succession of lords, dukes and princes maneouvring and for the most part getting murdered. History as we were taught it was an interminable game of chess about who ruled who and politics always has been such while the people have somewhere to get to and sail on as calmly as they are allowed.

Helen Carr does well to feature the Wheel of Fortune from the Holkham Bible, c. 1320-30, among her illustrations reflecting the recurrent motif of the kings who come to reighn and are subsequent beset with difficulties. Edwards I, II and III, and Richard II, set up a strong/weak, strong weak succession in which 'strong' means successful in war in other lands and 'weak' means unfitted for such a role and soon beleaguered. The away defeat at Bannockburn thus represents a low point in Englan's C14th adventures and Crecy a great triumph.

As reported by Marlowe and Shakespeare in their matching plays, Edward II and Richard II, are prone to favouritism, Edward to the extent that the two coats of arms displayed at his wedding are his own and those of Piers Gaveston rather than his wife, Isabella's. Helen Carr does her best to play down suggestions of carnal relations between Edward and Gaveston and blames that all on Marlowe but after rival aristocracy have dispatched Gaveston, Edward finds a replacement in Hugh Despenser the Younger. Isabella is a long way ahead of Diana Spencer in finding that there are three people in her marriage and for some time provides a formidable challenge with her own, chosen third party, Roger Mortimer. While there are few ostensible reasons to take sides in these unseemly campaigns for crowns, land and riches, I felt some sympathy and admiration for Isabella but later felt John of Gaunt always seemed like a baddie. Robert Bruce played well for Scotland and provided England with an unwelcome challenge to the north while it remains hard to believe that Aquitaine and some small part of North East France came under English rule. Many years ago now, I attended the opening of the refurbished Hampden Park to see world champions, France, put Scotland away 2-0 without breaking sweat, the famously devoted Scottish supports more concerned with singing Flower of Scotland and a less traditional composition, to the tune of Daydream Believer, about 'poor, old Kevin Keegan' while regularly inviting each other to stand up if they hated England. 1314 remained highly relevant news to them.

Of more pressing concern to ost of the population beyond the sport of the war lords was the Black Death, which is what Covid could have become if left to the laissez-faire bravado of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Piers Corbyn. One of the better arguments for the study of History is that we can learn from it but the fact that what goes round comes round suggests that that has a limited effect. What History mostly provides is wondrous tales of sinister plotting and gore with a bleak insight into the downside of human nature. It's easier to make heroes of the artists who reported from their times, like William Langland in Piers Plowman or perhaps the Pearl poet, not so long ago translated by Simon Armitage, which is where this book leads me next. 

I'm regularly disconcerted by journalists, on my choice of Times Radio, saying that it will be 'fascinating' to see what Trump or Putin does next or what happens in Ukraine, Gaza and all the other wars we hear less about. But it isn't chess or a computer game, it is horror of a kind not visited upon a radio sation's studio. We are 700 years on from the C14th's particular episode of ambition, gratuitous abuse and atrocity and they by no means invented it, they were just part of a long tradition.

I've long suspected that Economics wasn't a proper academic subject because its laws only amount to those that apply at a dog track and Portsmouth's rackety stadium closed some years ago now because it eventually proved unviable. It's tempting to apply the same verdict to History. It repeats itself. There can be few dafter pronouncements than that of Fukuyama when he said it was 'over', if that's what he meant. I'm with the poets, or at least the best of them, like Louis MacNeice,

The Sunlight on the Garden