History David Horspool

Why isn’t there a Historian Laureate?

How Alfred the Great got the best out of his court chronicler david horspool

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has been greeted with a steady thud of books by familiar names: Robert Hardman; Andrew Morton; Joanna Lumley.

Historians have already published interim reports on the Queen – the volume of the Penguin Monarchs series on Elizabeth II has been out for seven years. Doubtless others are readying final verdicts for the dreaded end of the longest reign in British history.

Naturally, we have no idea what the Queen thinks about any of these published opinions, any more than we know what she thinks about her prime ministers (well, you can’t imagine she’s a great fan of Andrew Morton, but we don’t know).

If, as is often reported, the recipients of the Order of Merit are the nearest we can get to a sign of personal royal preferences, then historians as a breed aren’t particularly high on her list. Since the death of the military historian Sir Michael Howard, only Neil MacGregor, formerly of the British Museum, remains as a representative of the profession.

When the Queen came to the throne, the venerable GM Trevelyan was still a member of the Order, along with HAL Fisher. Her first award to a historian went to the now rarely remembered GP Gooch, an authority on the First World War and former Liberal politician. One can’t imagine Her Majesty curling up with his Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy.

There is more of a hint of personal input in the 1960s selections of Veronica Wedgwood, gripping chronicler of the English Civil War and Cromwell; and the great New Zealand biographer of Captain Cook, John Beaglehole.

Another Kiwi, Ronald Syme, was the leading ancient historian of his time and the Reverend Owen Chadwick was a great historian of Christianity, which also sounds like something the Queen might have wanted to read or talk about.

These respectable men chroniclers – monks on (and this woman) are not abbey stools, gleaning in any sense ‘court news from passing historians’. They don’t strangers occasionally, produce equivalents of and digressing at the behind-the-scenes length on disputed revelations of former elections of a new presidents and prime abbot or unusual ministers. Political term weather patterns – isn’t limits make such an wholly inaccurate. assignment feasible. The But there were some who Queen spans historical periods – not mere decades. The fact that there is no Alfred the Great: lured Asser with incense got a bit closer to the seat of power. Probably the best of them was the polymath historian version of the Poet Matthew Paris. He ventured Laureate, Astronomer Royal or Master of from his monastery at St Albans to the Queen’s History, to place alongside Westminster to witness Henry III her Pictures and Music maestri, might dedicating a vial of Holy Blood at the imply the role of court historian is shrine of Edward the Confessor. There he ‘unEnglish’. Alexander the Great records that the king noticed him in the lamented that, unlike Achilles, he had no crowd and called out to him to write a full Homer, though he hardly made potential account of proceedings. Henry and candidates comfortable by having his Matthew met several times, though that own court historian, Callisthenes, didn’t stop Matthew from being frank starved in prison. Such stories make the about royal inadequacies. role sound like a more classical – or He may not have meant the long form oriental – one: Saladin had a life written of his chronicle to be disseminated, as he by a fellow Kurdish courtier. wrote little reminders in the margins of

In fact, the precedent for a chronicler bits to expunge ‘quia offendiculum’ at an English court is very ancient. The – ‘because it [was] a cause of offence’. first secular biography (ie, not of a saint) The arrival of the Tudors saw in England is a Life of Alfred the Great, Henry VII appoint the nearest thing we’ve written by a Welsh bishop, Asser, whom had to a court historian, in Bernard André, Alfred invited to his court. Asser doesn’t a Frenchman who’d probably arrived say Alfred commissioned the work. with him when he invaded. But his Latin

Still, if the king knew he was writing it, life of the king hasn’t been translated. If he must have hoped the various anyone remembers a historian of this appointments and ‘a quantity of incense period, it is the Italian Polydore Vergil, weighing as much as a stout man’ he whom Shakespeare had read. offered Asser would ensure a favourable It would be easy to argue that, later outcome. The result, while little short of on, historians valued their independence hagiography, is also peculiarly revealing too much to apply for the role. But there – for example, about the king’s battle with isn’t an official royal appointment piles. It’s hard to cast it as an ‘official’ someone isn’t willing to fill. It’s more biography, but most later historians have likely that the monarchs decided they been grateful for the light it casts on the could do without these glorified truthwarrior scholar king’s world. tellers, alternately flattering and passing

The popular picture of later medieval judgement on them.