The Stuarts
David Williams
A Royal Family Charles I and his family Patrick Morrah (Constable £9,95)
Cmulti-partnership, a gang of four — is ollective biography — of a family, a a tricky business. To make a success of it You need the juggler's art of keeping several balls in the air at once. And you need also a very strong narrative gift. This skill, the Ancient-Mariner-aptitude, is a rare and Precious talent much under-valued by literary pundits at the present time; but without this positive narrative drive, collec- tive biography tends to trail off into hic- coughs and fresh starts. The grand ensem- ble fails to appear. You finish up with a lit- tle gal — lel), of miniatures instead of (if you're very lucky and very good) Rembrandt's Night Watch.
In Charles I and his family Mr Morrah makes a brave march from the beginning to the end of the English 17th Century. He begins with the astute but disgusting James, sixth of Scotland and first of England, and ends with the dull but determined second James who clung on, in second exile, till 170l. For the collective biographer it's a hazardous journey indeed, because in addi- tion to the challenges already set out, there are here additional problems — of emphasis and proportion particularly — which aren't easy to solve. The two principal figures in the composi- tion are Charles I and II, the first tiny but Obstinate the second tall, and flexible as a bulinash which bends as readily as it stands 1.11:1 straight again the moment the squall blows over. The pattern of both lives is familiar to most people. Everybody knows that Charles I lost his head, and most have at least sketchy ideas about how he came to lose it. His eldest son's colourful and cons- !ant excursions outside the marriage-bed have endeared him to succeeding genera- tions so that even Macaulay the arch-Whig is led to talk of a man 'whose faults, great as they Were, had no affinity with insolence and cruelty'.
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How to adjust to all this common Knowledge when dealing with the family a. s a whole — with branches sprouting off in all directions each of them sturdy enough to
hang a story on? How much potted history should go into it? If there's too much précis-writing the book runs the risk of becoming a poshed-up A level history text- book. Yet on the other hand it would be an imprudent author who relied upon his readers' being versed in all the sources from Clarendon to Wedgwood and Plumb. Clarendon particularly shouldn't be taken for granted. He puts people off. No man ever, not even Milton, wrote prose as com- plicated as his. Few modern readers have the staying-power to make the long trip from one of his full-stops to the next. But he is important. No one stood as close to the Stuarts, over as long a period of time, as he did. He is also very mysterious. Why was his fury so extreme when he learnt of the marriage of his daughter, Anne Hyde, to the future James II? Mr Morrah records his outraged demand that his daughter's head should be cut off but backs away from any deep discussion of motive, talking gingerly of 'this distressing business' . Distressing in- deed.
On the whole, though, Mr Morrah's grip on characters and events is firm and sus- tained by dependable scholarship. His nar- rative can't quite be described as absorbing, but he holds the line and is even-handed. This can count as a considerable triumph because the Stuarts, more insistently than most families of note, invite hot-headed partisanship or its opposite. He is able to show that, although scattered and dispersed for 20 years, their family ties remained strong. They had their squabbles of course, but they came together again and shared triumph and disaster with matched whole- heartedness. He is particularly good on the relations between Charles the eldest son and Henrietta Anne ('Minette') the youngest of Charles I's children and 14 years his junior. She married Philippe, odious younger brother of Louis XIV, when she was 21, and was, by speech and upbringing, much more French than English. She had a big hand in engineering the secret Treaty of Dover, and at the end of the negotiations, wrote to Sir Thomas Clifford, one of her
brother's closest cronies, ... this is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. You will eselay see it bi the stile and or- tograf ...' but the earlier correspondence between Charles and Minette, his in English, hers in French, is full of affection and high spirits. She thought all astronomers were mad, or nearly so; he of course, with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society beginning in 1664, thought no such thing — but the exchanges
are immensely entertaining. She died young, having in her closing hours the benefit — if that was how she saw it — of consolation by Bossuet. Charles, in spite of all the Nellies and Madam Carwels, never quite got over her loss.
The balance between the story of inti- mate family relations and the public stuff is for the most part very nicely kept. But the graph of the descending Stuart fortunes is plotted a bit too uniformly: the indecisive early skirmishings of the Civil War could have been scrapped in order to allow space for a fuller account of Strafford's trial and execution — the crucial Stuart betrayal which deservedly damned the clan to penury and humiliation for 20 years. Similarly the Battle of the Dunes (1658) could have been abridged in favour of fuller details of Charles II's escape after Worcester. In the part of the world I come from there are still tales of the Boscobel oak and of how the dark young man against all the odds managed to dish the Roundheads.
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