A win' ce incomparable

George Gale

Elizabeth I, a study in power and intellect; Paul Johnson (Weicienfeld and Nicolson £5.95) I have long had the opinion that, by and large, quite enough historical facts are known, and that what is required is not the discovery of more of them, but instead the ordering of what we've already got. Ranke's proud boast, that historiography should strive to reproduce a state of affairs wie es etgentlich gewesen as it was, exactly, is now uniformly seen to be vainglorious. But instead of drawing the more sensible conclusion, which is that the chief work of principal historians should be synthetic, the historical profession has tended towards an altogether more .modest assessment of its function and ability, and has insisted that its trainees and professors alike should eschew the broad approach and grand sweep and concentrate instead upon elucidating more and more trivia about matters of less and lqss import. A by-product of this professional parochialism has been to leave the field open to amateurs. Paul Johnson, who has already, in his grotesquely mistitled The Offshore Islanders provided us with his own personal history of England (which is what that book should have been called), has now given us a full-scale biography of our greatest queen and, arguably, our, finest sovereign. He calls his book "a study in power and intellect," referring to his subject; but his book itself is an exercise of power and intellect, at one and the same time a most telling remonstrance against the professional and a most triumphant vindication of the amateur.

Mr Johnson may not thank me for placing him in the amateur's camp — he has, after al1. equipped his book with quite a decent battery of notes and the usual "Select BibtiographY' — but the fact remains that he has spent almost all his working life as a journalist and not as an historian, and, moreover, it is the case that he has knocked off the present work in a matter of a couple of years or so, during which time he did not entirely neglect his journalistic career, nor, come to that, authorship of a more flippant nature. Historians will not like him for doing what they should be doing; nor will they like him for doing it so well. There will be, I suspect, quite a lot of fidgetty, if not carping, criticism. I hope these suspicions prove unfounded, and that the profession records a generous judgment. But in case it doesn't, let me — wno might myself have become a professional historian, but who became, like Johnson, 3 journalist instead — say at once that his Elizabeth is a magnificent piece of work. I'd better declare my interest, in these days made loud and dark with talk and rumour of corruption, and acknowledge that Paul Johnson is a friend of mine. This, as I think those who know us would admit, would not prevent me from saying that he had written a lousy book if that were the case. I hope, therefore, that my praise will not be treated as automatically devalued on .account of friendshia. When I say that this is a magnificent book I mean, apart from anything else, that I would have been very proud indeed to have written it, although I think that, had I attempted it, would have tried to make it easier for the general reader. The book's chief fault, in my view, is that it assumes too much knowledge in the reader's mind of the sixteenth century. From this point of view, it is a pity that Johnson had not written his Elizabeth before, rather than after, his Offshore Islanders, for he would then, not having done so much homework as it were, have been less inclined to assume that everyone likely to read his book was as well up on their history as he has lately become.

This unwarranted assumption of expertise apart, tne work's chief flaw is an attempt,, fortunately largely unsuccessful, to impose, upon events a thematic unity they necessarily.: lack and adventitiously fail to justify.

This is not entirely, or even at all, a quibble. Johnson says that his story is "of how authority is preserVed, and civil peace maintained, by the application of intellect" and, having told us that it is a success story, he continues:

Human societies are always faced by crises, of greater or lesser magnitude. In dealing with thetm the essence of statecraft is to win a breathing space, during which more permanent solutions can evolve through the interplay of many intellects. No more can be asked of any single statesman, or stateswoman. It this is a true definition of the duties of a ruler, Elizabeth may be said to have fulfilled them. What matters about Elizabeth, as of almost any other successful ruler, is will, not intellect. That the brains were there is undoubted. But her brains -= like her femaleness — were the tools she found to hand. I do not understand what a "more permanent solution" is, or could be (and I do not think Johnson 'does either), and therefore I do not think that we have here a 'true' definition of the duties of a ruler, let alone a criterion for judging Elizabeth. In- deed, were any historian — or journalist or moral philosopher, come to that — able to tell

US what the true definition of the duties of a ruler are, he would be better letting us know and forgetting about historiography al

together. The endeavour to generalise is not entirely ignoble, I suppose, particularly from one who has not only not managed entirely to

jettison his schoolboyish neo-Platonism but

has also piled on top of it the impedimenta of an undiscarded Romanist education. But it

does lead Mr Johnson into some

uncharacteristic 'Pseuds corner' sort of stuff_ thus, "The origins of Elizabeth's birth, on Tudor 7, 1533, lay in the fragility of the

the claim to the throne, and the nature of the English monarchy." Presuming (as indeed ,we must, for there is not all that much cer;inty about it) that Elizabeth was Henry

daughter, her origin was a matter 9etween Henry and Ann Boleyn, and although doubtless Henry wanted a son the better to establish the Tudor succession, the discussion of Elizabeth's conception is not usefully advancedby talk of claims, fragile or otherwise, upon a throne extremely solidly occupied. Henry VII, by Edmund Tudor out of his ward, the childPlantagenet heiress Margaret Beaufort, lineage Bosworth rather than this very obscure back to John of Gaunt, to legitimise his claim and his throne; and his son was secure enough, provided he kept the power. There Were plenty of other Plantagenet claimants, but none took up arms seriously or successfully, and this was what mattered, along, of course, with his own royal will. So, too, with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth (and so, too, it _Would most probably have been with his son,

tdward, had he lived long enough). What

the with the three great Tudor monarchs, 'Ile two Henrys and Elizabeth, was their wills and not their blood, which was pretty muddy, or their brains, which were pretty clear. And this is what Paul Johnson establishes in his s work, despite his inauspicious prefaces. I

found myself wishing that he had been even More ambitious than he has been (and is), and that he had attempted to write his history of the Tudor line from Henry VII's birth to Elizabeth's virginal death. That line itself would have given him the theme he mis takenly sought to find in kingship and in ,religious truth. It would also have allowed uhn to establish what he hints of here, the

betrayal of country which Mary's reign represented and which Elizabeth eventually redressed. Johnson writes very much as an

English patriot and he discovers, in Elizabeth, his most perfect heroine. There was a tight , LtPped meanness about the Tudors which Elizabeth possessed; but she had far more sense of the feeling of the country than the Others, not excluding Henry VIII, and her very conscious identification of her own • interests With the country's interest emerges powerfully in these pages. Yet here lies the greatest paradox of her reign: her refusal to do anything about the succession It was all very well for the Virgin Queen td be wedded to her country and to take no husband; but this meant that the Tudor line died with her. It also meant, although she constantly refused any discussion whatever on the matter, that the Stuarts Would succeed, as the younger Cecil realised and arranged. It could be argued (not that Johnson does) that Elizabeth's barrenness was her greatest disservice to the realm rather than the proof of her love for it. This said, it remains that the young Elizabeth came to the throne of a country in great trouble with itself and with its hostile neighbours; that, with a succession of most able ministers and courtiers and sailors, she restored order and resisted England's enemies; that during her reign the beginnings of the first Empire were made; and that, towards the end of her life, the great English renaissance moved towards its Shakespearean culmination.

Any long reign will have its ups and downs, and there are plenty of blemishes on Elizabeth. But on the whole hers is a proud story, and Paul Johnson tells it proudly and with massive accumulation of detail. Elizabeth was a natural conservative, seeking, as her historian points out, quoting Ruskin, "the deep consent of all great men," and seeing to it that her government expressed and maintained the natural hierarchy of society. She made England into a great power, \ she defeated Spain and the Counter-Reformation, and she outlived her enemies and her friends. On her tomb in Westminster Abbey she is described as "the mother of this her country, the nurse of religion and learning; for perfect skill of very many languages, for glorious endowments, as well of mind as of body, a prince incomparable." This fine biography establishes most firmly what, of her very many languages, was the one which, English apart, she spoke best: and this was the language of politics, in which indeed she was "a prince incomparable."

George Gale is a former editor of The Spectator.