Macaulay once wrote that it was his ambition to 'produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies'. Simon Schama, a Macaulay for the video age, has already achieved this feat with his bestselling history of the French Revolution, Citizens. He has also gone one better than Macaulay with Dead Certainties, a quasi-fiction, and in his spare time he has also been art critic for the New Yorker. In short, he is an ideal host for a BBC television history of Britain in the time of New Labour.
Schama revels in a good story. From a historiographical point of view, the result is an uncharacteristically conventional, but still colourful, account that explores the emergence of 'Great Britain' from an Iron Age twilight that Schama shows to have been rather more complex and a good deal less benighted than generally allowed.
Underlying everything he writes is a searching consideration of that most urgent and vexed of contemporary political questions: has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or at the heart of it? Here, Schama leaves us in no doubt where his sympathies lie: 'The one thing,' he writes, 'a king of England could not afford was insularity.' He is also topically alert to non-English sensitivities. Describing the Plantagenets' enforced recognition of Irish and Scottish grievances, he notes that: 'It had taken the rest of Britain to remind England how to be a nation.'
In his time, Schama has not been afraid to indulge in fundamental revisionism. Not here. Now his iconoclasm is playful and entertaining, for 'young ladies', not fellow professionals. He is, mercifully, no Norman Davies. As he says in his preface, he promises 'not just instruction but pleasure'. I think he succeeds triumphantly, with a well-judged marriage of epigram and aperçu.
So Hadrian's Wall was not a flinty, Pict-busting barricade, but a primitive Romano-British shopping mall. Alfred the Great was a Dark Age Blair, 'half book-worm, half show-off', who picked up most of his ideas about Anglo-Saxon nationhood during a gap year in Rome. The Normans squeaked an away win at Hastings, but made a hash of William's subsequent coronation. Thomas à Becket's fateful irritation with Henry II was exacerbated by 'the chafing of his goat's hair underwear'. And so on.
In his epigraph, another gobbet from Macaulay, Schama heads off the charge of flippancy with: 'I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English a true picture of the life of their ancestors.' This is where Schama's interests lie, in describing the texture of the common-or-garden existence of ordinary people, and it's here that his book takes wing. His chapter on the great plagues of medieval Britain, and their impact on high policy and everyday life, is at once terrifying and moving, sympathetic and suggestive.
From these sombre pages, Schama makes an easy transition to the cruel majesty of Henry VIII, whose destruction of Anne Boleyn was 'one part pornography, one part paranoia'; to the crazed and bloody religious persecutions of Queen Mary; and finally to the accession of Good Queen Bess. The Elizabethan climax to this volume (part two, from 1603-2001, will appear in the new year) shows Schama at his narrative best and thematically most inspired. There's a splendid passage on the cult of the Virgin Queen, a horror movie rendering of Mary Queen of Scots' execution and, perhaps best of all, an exquisite aside on the place of the oak in English history:
'Ancient Britons were thought to have worshipped them; righteous outlaws are sheltered by them; kings on the run hide in them; hearts of oak go to sea and win empires.'
For all that, Schama's Europhile preferences colour his account of that supreme 'hearts of oak' episode: the Spanish Armada. Having described how the Spanish fleet was almost comically vulnerable to Drake's quick-fire fleet and the treacherous waters of the Channel, he concludes that: 'It was in the waters between Scotland and Ireland that the Enterprise of England truly came to grief: the sailors and soldiers were drowned, starved, ravaged by typhus, or picked off by the Irish.'
Schama also writes with witty eloquence about the excesses of 'Bessiemania', but in truth he is not the first historian to be more than half seduced by Elizabeth's extraordinary combination of ice-cool statecraft and hot-blooded chauvinism. Determined to show that it was Elizabeth who gave coherence to the fledgling idea of Great Britain, Schama brings down the curtain on his performance with a fine flourish: 'By remaining unmarried, she had, in the end, brought about a momentous union: that of Scotland and England, not yet in one kingdom, but in one person... she had not been barren then, after all.'
With a bit of luck, this book will remind the Prime Minister that we still enjoy that Elizabethan inheritance, by the skin of our teeth.
