The Lives of the Kings & Queens of England [antikvár]

Introduction IN ONE SENSE A VOLUME OF THE LIVES OF THE kings and queens of England needs no introduction. The popularity of biography among the reading public is a byword of contemporary publishing. Royal biography, if anything, leads the field. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. Most people learn history early on in terms of the reigns - if not the lives- of the sovereigns, for the simple reason that otherwise history to the young can seem all too open-ended. The reigns of the monarchs provide natural frameworks for this vast apparently amorphous mass of material. At the same time there is the perennial appetite for a story provided by the lives. And on one level the biographies of the kings and queens are certainly stories, the stories of great, or at least prominent, men and women. Once again, history told in the form of stories (the German language actually equates the two words in Geschichte) is most palatable to us in childhood . . . the death of Prince William in the White Ship and the King who never smiled again, the rescue of King Richard with the aid of the minstrel Blondel, a girl Queen who vowed T will be good', such tales have a habit of lingering in our imagination. H. A. L. Fisher once said that history is 'one damn thing after another': in the seemingly endless chronicle of events in English history, the reigns of individual kings and queens provide a convenient memorable pattern. It is then the theory of history via biography of royal personages which needs defending, not the practice of it: its perennial popularity will certainly ensure the practice. An early sample of the popular taste is provided by the success, from the 1840s onwards, of the Lives of the Queens ofEnglandhy Agnes Strickland. The series received instantaneous acclaim and ran through many editions. The Lives of the Tudor Princesses, The Stuart Princesses and Lives of the Queens of Scotland followed, with equal public support, even if one reverse should be recorded, when, led on by her enthusiasm, Agnes Strickland embarked on the Lives of the Bachelor Kings of England, only to find that there was a singular dearth of authentically unmarried sovereigns. Yet the lessons of Agnes Strickland's work can still be learned today. She combined sympathy for her subjects with meticulous scholarship and research, praised by such authorities of the time as the historian Guizot. And her zeal for research was particularly commendable in an age when state papers were largely uncaiendared; moreover when the State Paper Room was finally opened, women were at first not admitted, reversal of this decision only being secured by prolonged protests on Miss Strickland's part. It was the measure of her fame that when, as an old lady, Agnes Strickland