August 30, 2022 • 38 mins
Dr. David Starkey is one of Britain’s leading historians, with a focus on the monarchy’s history and contemporary role. His work includes numerous books and television series covering the English monarchy, particularly the wives of Henry VIII and the reign of Elizabeth I. He’s known for his regular appearances on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze, BBC 1's Question Time and This Week and most recently, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee for GBNews. Starkey was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007 and currently hosts a YouTube Channel, David Starkey Talks. Dr. David Starkey and Alec discuss the House of Windsor's rise to power, mistakes in the era of Princess Diana, and Harry and Meghan’s status with the Royal Family.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is one
of Britain's leading royal historians, Dr David Starkey. Starkey has
lectured at the London School of Economics and authored numerous
books and television series on the English monarchy. He's also
(00:25):
known for his blazingly sharp commentary on BBC four's debate program,
The Moral Maze, BBC one's Question Time, and most recently
covering the Queen's Platinum Jubilee for gb News. Since David
Starkey has written dozens of books and produced hours upon
(00:46):
hours of documentary television. I was curious how he's able
to produce such a large body of work. Well, I'm
I am prolific, actually, Alec, and I'm not if you've noticed,
as there are terrible high atosis. The books tend to
cluster very closely together. There are moments when I churned
(01:07):
stuff out almost unconsciously. I mean, let's deal with the
two polls of how I write and what I've done,
and let's take the one where my late partner James Brown,
who plays a key role in so much of this,
said I should never say, my Elizabeth book, which is
(01:28):
on the life of the not the present Queen Elizabeth,
of course, but the first Queen Elizabeth, who comes to
the throne at the same sort of age, five centuries ago.
In I wrote that book starting in the very end
of August, and I had finished it by the end
(01:52):
of January. And I wrote it and James said, I
should never say this with a sense of dictation of
somebody talking to me, a kind of inner process. And
it's a book that I think is a good piece
of history, but more important than els, it's a kind
(02:12):
of it's it's an attempt at re envisaging historical biography
through a medium of the novel, and through I mean
in terms of style, and through a very very conscious
exercise of how to write. And the chapters are very short.
There are normally very short sentences. There's one chapter which
(02:35):
many reviewers got terribly excited about, which is a page long.
It deals with the death of Elizabeth's great rival and
her cousin, her half sister Mary Tudor, and it says
all that it needs to do, cleverly, succinctly, and above all, finally,
it's about a death. I was writing it much more
(02:58):
as you would have written fiction in terms of the
flow of the sense of the language driving it. On
the other hand, the other poll of my creativity or
lack of it, or productivity or lack of it, is
my biography of Henry the Eighth, which, one way or another,
I suppose I started in seven and have not yet
(03:21):
fully finished an unfinished book. I well, I published the
first volume of the the biography, the the one again
on Henry's youth. It's not it's it's a kind of
deliberate fragment. And my great problem with that book has
(03:41):
been I suppose I know too much. You can know
too much, you can have too much detail. I've also,
because again I know too much, I've been changing my mind.
Give me an example of what you changed your mind about.
I thought I understood the relationship between Henry the Eighth
(04:03):
and his father, Hendry the seventh. I thought I understood
the beginning of the reign, which, of course is is
the moment which a monarch, like a president or a
Napoleon in his first hundred days is when you really
put your impress on things. And then I discovered I
was wrong, And I think one of the most important
things to be aware of is when you are wrong.
(04:25):
So many people persist with an original idea and original
insight even when the evidence tells them that it's wrong.
And I can't do that, and I always right directly
from the historical evidence. Again, one of the things that
people when they're being kind, some people are being very
(04:46):
unkind what people say about my books is this the
sense of the history actually getting up and talking to you.
And the reasons for that is I write directly from
the sources. The basic way I proceed, you know, in
Six Wives or Elizabeth or indeed Henry, I operate from
a chronological in other words, in strict order of events
(05:08):
and list of documents, dates, whatever that act as the
spine of the narrative. I'm a passionate believer in narrative history,
in telling the story. But the evidence is there, So
when you're doing the research, is there a small grouping
of sources for that which when you want to understand
(05:31):
the truth and you want the facts as you recognize
them about Henry the Eighth's childhood and all of the history,
you've given us this thumbnail about us. Now, where do
you typically go? Where does that exist in England? It
exists in various forms, some of them very very well
known annics, and some of them that we hardly know
at all. I mean, the revelations that I came up
(05:53):
with the issue of money is going through the records
of Hender the sevens private finance is. And the reason I,
as it were, rethought them was there was a remarkable project.
The manuscripts exists. They're pretty continuous there, with some rather
large gaps at awkward moments, but there was a project
to transfer a very modern kind of project to edit
(06:16):
the manuscripts and to put them online. And I was
involved in that project as the kind of senior citizen,
if you like, an earlier generation, a scholar and all
the rest of it. So I suddenly started going through
them with a degree of detail that I've never done before. Remember,
you're looking at, effectively a daily record of royal expenditure
(06:40):
on everything from and I have bought what might it be,
a couple of bonnets for one of my pages too,
I am going to send a hundred and thousands odd
thousand pounds right so between everything from tops two hundreds
of thousands of pounds, all of course expressed in Roman numbers,
which doesn't do necessarily make life very easy. But I
(07:03):
did two things with with this set of accounts. And
I looked at them simply in terms of retotaling them
and thinking about what the totals meant. And interestingly, a
generation of earlier scholars came up with with these figures,
but they were using eighteen century transcripts rather than the
(07:24):
original manuscripts. And it was very great German scholar who
did the basic work, and he looked at that figure
of a hundred none thousand pounds and he said, simply,
this is impossible. It must be a miss transcript. It
can't have happened. And then of course I discovered it had.
And his stories simply tend to repeat each other. They
(07:45):
don't question. We take shortcuts because it's much easier. And
also there's a peculiar thing the way modern scholarship works,
which is this emphasis on citation. You cite a source,
but I, of course, once a mistake has actually got
into the process unless you go back right right to
(08:07):
the beginning. And here again, like there's as it's strange
in the sense that your own period can very much
color your approach. And my attitude to scholarship was formed
in two very different ways a very different periods of
my life. The first was when I was a young
man at Cambridge. I had a remarkable teacher, a man
(08:30):
called His name is normally given as Jeffrey Elton. His
real name is Gottfried Uolf Ehlenberg. He is one of
those extraordinary Jewish refugees of the nineteen thirties, totally transformed
intellectual life in Britain and America. And he represented the
high German tradition of rigorous academic scholarship. And I studied
(08:56):
with him in my final year as an undergraduate student,
and then I did my research with him. And I
suppose in retrospect the great moment of my emerging as
an independent scholar was when I was still Diabean. I
had been twenty two, I was in my final year
as an undergraduate. I was doing my special subject with him.
(09:18):
And the special subject was, again, it was on the
fifteen thirties, and you didn't have original documents, but you
had extracts from them. And Jeoffrey had done the work
very carefully, and he transcribed them and he described them.
And I can still remember the moment as a tentative
hand went up and said Professor Elton, I think you've
got this document wrong. As a twenty two year old
(09:43):
to this great match and to know what I was right,
I thought at that point, well, I can probably do
this now you mentioned that Henry the seventh is the
commencement of you will or I'll let you use your
words of the House of Tutor explained to our listeners.
Who are you know? Many Americans have zero knowledge of
(10:04):
the history of the British family, and little to none
of the current British family. They only know scandal and
gossip and so forth. What is the birth of a house?
What is a house? And how does one house take over?
If you will? Or come to the four? Were now
in the period of the House of Windsor, which I
think that was formed in nineteen seventeen, correct, So what
(10:25):
is a house and how does a house come to
the four? If you will? Well, you have the Kennedys,
you have a succession a father son, and then nephews,
niece's grandchildren and whatever. And that's exactly the same. It's
a dynasty again, you know. It was a famous film,
is a famous TV series called Dynasty about the successive
(10:47):
generations of the family. And that is what it is.
The various dynasties that have ruled the English throne take
these names. There are often names that we give them backwards. Now,
how does one dynasty succeed another? Well, in the case
of five, which is the succession between the House of
(11:07):
York and the House of Tudor, you succeed by killing
again very much, I suppose, you know, Like many modern
TV series, one monarch kills another monarch, and aspirant monarch
kills his rival and literally at the Battle of Bosworth
in rich Of the third of the House of York
(11:29):
and Hendra the seventh, he's not yet called hend of
the seventh, he's called Henry, Earl of Richmond. They literally fight.
They don't quite fight face to face, but you know,
it's like something out of a fantastic myth. He charges
down at the head of his knights, mounted on horseback,
wearing full armor. He has got the crown, the actual
gold element of the crown, the band of the crown
(11:52):
put on over his helmet. They charged down with their
great lances towards Hender seventh, Henry Earl of Richmond and
his very small army at the bottom, and Richard is
literally aiming to strike at Henry Earl of Richmond himself.
He aims for his standard. He actually cuts down his
(12:13):
standard bearer, and he's only brought down because again the paradox,
hend of the seventh takes the throne of England. Henry
heard of Richmond takes the throne of England with French help,
and Henry Earl of Richmond emerges triumphant on the field
of Bosworth and is literally crowned with the band of
Richard's crown which had been torn off his helmet and
(12:36):
has put on Henry's and it had been found in
a hawthorn bush. Is quite clear this actually it's a legend,
but it's true. It actually happens, and he's crowned on
the battlefield. So it is the out of medieval fantasy, right,
it's true. Now, how is the House of Winds are invented? Well,
seventeen is quite a long way from and what happens
(12:57):
in nineteen seventeen. It's a pr are exercise, pure pr exercise,
and one of the most brilliant pieces of pr that
ever men carried out. By the early twentieth century, as
it had been since the beginning of the eighteenth century,
as it was when America separates by an act of
rebellion from Great Britain. Britain is ruled by a German
(13:20):
royal house, by the House of Hanover, and it remains
to an extraordinary extent German through the following two centuries,
through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.
Because of their marriage customs, they marry back into Germany. So,
for example, Victoria marries her remote cousin called Albert of
(13:44):
sax Calledbert Guta and Victorian Albert actually converse with each
other in German. They write letters to each other in German.
They discuss the fate of the British Empire in German.
And this continues right through to the beginning of the
twentieth century, when unfortunately, of course, in nineteen fourteen England
and Germany go to war. But of course, if you're
(14:07):
fighting a war in an age of nations and nationhood,
how can you have your ruler being German when you're
fighting the Germans in absolute war? The First World War,
I mean even more than the American Civil War is
the first total war. You can't do it. So what
you do is you reinvent and so you completely reinvent
(14:31):
the monarchy. You rename it. You give it a consciously
English name. You give it this name Windsor Brilliant. You know,
it's Shakespeare. It's the merry Wives of Windsor. It's a
little touch of soft soap, you know, woods of winds
of the kind of nice smell on your hands. It's
the English countryside marketing, the great historic castle. It's musterly.
(14:55):
So you reinvent the name. But you do much more
than reinvent the name. You re invent everything. You reinvent
the marriage custom. You were talking about the fact that
we just know the opera soap opera, the modern soap opera.
Monarchy also goes back to nineteen seventeen because for the
first time they decide their children can marry english men
(15:17):
and English women. So you can present this as romance,
the sort of romance of the marriage of Charles and
Diana that goes so catastrophically wrong. You reinvent royal ceremony.
Before this point, most royal ceremony is private. Royal marriages
take place in tiny little spaces like the Chapel Royal
(15:37):
at St. James's. Now suddenly they go back to the abbey,
or they go to Saint Paul's, they go into splendor.
You do something even more remarkable. You reinvent you know,
we have this funny business in Britain, the honor system,
commanders of the British Empire like me and all this stuff.
All this is invented in seventeen for the very first
(15:59):
time that people who are not part of a narrow
aristocratic circle can be given titles, honors, whatever. And I
suppose what it really amounts to, alex is you consciously
make the monarchy a paradox. You invent democratic royalty, monarchy democratic,
(16:20):
and it's it's a profound paradox because again the English,
because of parliament, because of our limit history of limited government,
going right right back to Magna Carta. People think of
England as having been sort of always democratic. It's not true.
We only become full democracy after the First World War
(16:42):
historian David Starkey. If you enjoy conversations about government and power,
check out my interview with an expert on American history,
Michael Wolfe, author of the book Fire and Fury, on
the Donald Trump presidency. I think one I felt most
of all is that everybody there was tainted by this
(17:06):
and felt tainted by this, and believe that they would
not come out ahead, that this was a net loss
all of the people around Trump. That's what that's the
conclusion that they came to, opposite of what you would
expect people to feel. People come out of the White
House and they make lots of money, and they're famous,
and they have lots of influence and may be proud
(17:28):
of their work. Exactly and literally all of these people
who went in thinking this would happen to them and
came out as the months rolled on, thinking this is
all broke. This is not going to work. This is
not going to end well for anybody. Here more of
my conversation with Michael Wolfe in our archives at Here's
(17:52):
the Thing dot org. After the Break, David Starkey shares
his thoughts on Queen Elizabeth's controversial handling of the death
of Princess Diana. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
(18:15):
Here's the Thing. Since the Royal family has played such
a large role in the life and work of Dr
David Starkey, I wanted to know if the crown loomed
large in his early life very much so, I mean
let's be truthful, not in a particularly enthusiastic way. My
family background was modest. My parents were very definitely working class.
(18:40):
My father had left school at eleven, my mother at thirteen.
He was a manual worker. My father's politics were very radical.
My father wanted to be a pacifist. He finally decided
he couldn't declare his pacifism in the Second World War
because he'd been unemployed for four terrible years in the
(19:03):
nineteen thirties and undergoing terrible poverty. He was a radical
member of the Labor Party. He was a leading local
trade unionist and all that. I first became absolutely aware
of the monarchy at a key moment of my life
and that of many people of my generation, which was
the coronation of Elizabeth the Second in nineteen fifty three.
(19:25):
I'd remember the day in absolute detail. It was the
first time i'd seen television. And then you watched the ceremony,
which is extraordinary. It's magical. This woman, who was then
radiantly beautiful, clad in white, as the center of this
vast ceremony. It's like it's like a Japanese imperial coronation.
(19:46):
It goes on for about six hours, in this huge
space of the abbey, with all these old distinguished gentlemen
wearing scarlet and fur if they're members of the nobility
or in elaborate copes and miters of their clergy, and
this woman at the center of it magically. So that's
(20:06):
a moment I think which I first and as I said,
I engage in a way which which resonates in my
memory to the moment was speaking. What would you say
in her reign? Most people in the States, the scandal
obsessed United States, But in this jubilee now seventy years
(20:28):
of this woman serving as Queen. I listened some of
the retrospectives and commentary of people, and they would all
acknowledge it pretty much the only real meaningful setback for
her was the handling of the death of Lady Diana.
That was the only really raging criticisms she faced in
her reign of so many years. Would you agree that
(20:50):
that was really the only real major setback for her? Yes,
I mean equally, I think that the British public at
the time of Diana, in the same that we did
at the time of the George Floyd incident in with COVID,
we went through one of those things which the great
British historian Lord Macauley said, there is nothing as ridiculous
(21:12):
as the British public in one of its periodical fits
of morality. And what you've got with Diana was a
clash between two completely different views of what monarchy is about.
For the Queen, monarchy is about service, it's about duty.
It's about getting on with things, getting up in the morning,
(21:33):
doing it even if you don't feel very good, never
telling anybody if your feet are hurting or you feel miserable.
For Diana, although Diana, you know, she's the daughter of
a great English family, our English aristocratic family. The Spencer
Churchill's Diana always behaved as though she'd been born in
Orange County, and she was profoundly American in her attitudes
(21:57):
to celebrity. She saw monarchy selebrity. She saw her role
as to be emotionally honest at a time of course,
when the great problem with with monarchy is that it's
an individual and the family that is required to have
its personal life and its family life turned into some
(22:20):
sort of symbol. Now, there's always going to be the
risk of a violent clash between the reality of the
humanity and the enormous hopes which are vested in it.
And one of the ways that the Queen has always
dealt with that is by simply silence. No one really
(22:40):
knows what she thinks about anything, whether with Diana. Diana
decided that the only way and quite understandably, that she
could protect herself in the horrors that it turned out
of her marriage with Charles was by talking about it.
Was by being open about it, by using the media,
as she saw it, to redress the valance of power
(23:01):
against her husband's family and what she saw as the
conspiracy of the media against her. And so you have,
on the one hand, somebody who believes in shutting everything up,
the Queen, and you've got somebody else called Diana, who
believes in letting it all hang out. That the famous
interview with Martin Bashir, which we now know is a
(23:21):
product of the most shady behavior by the BBC, but
that equally the Princess went along with it because she
recognized she was, in fact a most brilliant media operator.
Diana made monarchy and made royalty about celebrity. The Queen
has always she's taken the totally opposite view that monarchy
(23:43):
and celebrity are enemies. They may look the same, they're different.
So it was really it was what happened between the
Queen and Diana was I think a genuine tragedy. It
was a clash of two different views of right and
wrong and it was utterly a reckons sign of And
although that what you're saying, I completely understand, some people
(24:06):
on this side of the pond, if you will, were
also speculating that that family wasn't happy about the fact that.
And you can explain to me the schematics of this,
which is that if she divorces Charles, she's still entitled
to a title herself because she has children with him,
she's the mother of royal blood. And if she had
(24:27):
married Fired, he would be entitled to a title as well.
Having married her, he would not all of all of
that is total fiction. These you are you're quite right
to put your finger on the issue of divorce. There
is a profound struggle as to whether or not divorce
is acceptable. Remember, virtually nobody gets divorced before the nineties.
(24:50):
It's very difficult to get in Britain, it's virtually impossible.
And what happens is the monarchy in Britain is used
as a kind of front in that struggle by the
Church of England. By it's it's astonishingly talented that I
think rather malign Archbishop Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang. It's used
(25:11):
as a kind of battering ram to wait to keep
the lid on divorce. And again, of course there is
the whole trauma in the mind of everybody who is royal,
which is the marriage and the catastrophic marriage which forces
his abdication of the Queen's uncle of Edward the Eighth
(25:33):
to the American Mrs Simpson. And it's this idea of
the monarchy and divorce being fundamentally opposed to each other.
In fact, there was an absolutely no rule against there's
no definite rule against it. It was simply that it
had become a method of symbolizing the monarchy as the
great virtuous British family. And this is why the Queen
(25:55):
has experienced so much trauma she with her marriage with
the Duke of Edam. Whatever really happened, we will not
know for generations, I imagine, because of the close of manuscripts,
But they were always able to present the appearance and
I think the reality of genuinely happy, creative marriage. Unfortunately
(26:20):
her children couldn't. It. Therefore, very quickly becomes at tension
between a myth of the monarchy as a happy royal
family and the reality of them as an unhappy family
characterized by a divorce, and of course the marriage and
of Charles and Diana, and it's hideous dissolution becomes, as
it were, the test case. It becomes the moment at
(26:42):
which that image is finally blown up author and historian
David Starkey. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to
subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we
come back, David Starkey shares his thoughts on where things
(27:06):
went wrong with Prince Harry and Megan Markle. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio.
(27:29):
Since royal historian David Starkey has had such a long
trained I on the monarchy, I was curious if he
foresaw meg'sit, Prince Harry and Megan Markle's exit from the
royal family. No, not at all. I took exactly. I
mean the shows who know that that evidence is everything.
(27:51):
The notion of the historian of profit is dangerously wrong.
I made exactly the wrong guess. I thought that the
marriage to Megan was remarkable. She you know, she's beautiful,
she's intelligent, she's highly disciplined. I mean, he was a
hair and scare and lad. It looked exactly the right thing.
And the fact of course that she she has mixed
(28:13):
race in one it's silly to say even better, but
it expressed a reality of our modern I hate the
word multicultural, but which is which is the wrong word.
But but but our doubt the intense diversity of our societies.
It expressed it beautifully. I in fact, I put the
phrase about that the marriage of the two of them
(28:37):
was in itself a kind of direct modernization of the monarchy.
But then, of course it turned out that Megan and
later on Harry decided they wanted to do it, in
the words of Frank Sinatra, their way. Now. Unfortunately, monarchy
doesn't work like that, and they found themselves in exactly
(28:59):
the same trap as Diana, exactly the same trap as
Edward the eighth, exactly the same trap that Henry the
Eighth was in. And remember Henry the Eighth to escape
from that trap and to do things that were unthinkable.
He had to break with the Roman Church. He'd to
tear his family apart, he to tear the country apart.
(29:19):
It is not even then an easy thing to do.
But of course, because of the power of his personality,
that then power of the monarchy, the inheritance from his
father and so on, he was able to do it.
But of course Megan and Harry found themselves up against
this machinery, and they took the decision, Okay, it won't
change to accommodate us, We'll get out. And I think
(29:41):
it's a profound sadness. But I would also put it
in a more simple way. I think Gallex, I think
Harry married his mother and told lots of men marry
their mothers. And Meg Megan is a kind of version
of Diana. She embodies many of the same instincts, many
of the same disaurs, and it's very easy to see.
I think Harry will eventually find his position a very
(30:04):
lonely one. I mean, he's bought into this boy who
was in the army at this boy who loved Soldiering,
who established a very serious reputation as working for injured
servicemen and injured veterans and whatever he now finds himself
in that I think rather empty world of Californian celebrity,
(30:27):
rootless world, the world of the artificiality of Netflix, steels
and so on. I wonder how long he will last.
I I feel the same exact way. I watched the
whole thing play out, and I thought, my god, I mean,
my glib joke was you gave up all of that
to live in Santa Barbara. I mean, you know, I
(30:48):
mean all your family and history and duty, and you
were in the military. You understood that kind of service
and duty, and you gave all that to go live
over there where. I mean, unlike any other ice I've
ever visited, someone sticking your thermometer in your mouth to
tell you how hot you are every five minutes or
how hot you're not. And if you're at the top
of that game, if you're a winner, if all of
(31:10):
that business is rolling in your direction, what's what's better
than that? But once that cools off, boy, it's lonely.
It's it's the loneliest place in the world. Now, my
last question for you, one would assume that as the
public relations fortunes of the royal family ebb and flow
and go up and down related to scandal and so forth,
(31:30):
or perceived scandal. I should say, I think that they've
been treated very unfairly in some circumstances. So the jubilee comes,
would you say that their stock is up? Would you
say that the stock is up compared to the Because
when when the megan here in the States, the Megan
Markel thing played out like if not a thick stripe
of racism exists among some denizens of Bucking Impalace, there's
(31:54):
at least a tinge of that there. And now with
the jubilee and the focus going back onto the Queen
herself are things would you say that they're more popular
again in the UK? I think, again, we've got to
be really blunt about this. I think that that statement,
which was deliberately vague about your somebody said something about
(32:18):
what the color of the child might have been. I
think that was an indecent thing to do. I think
it was a shocking and disgraceful thing to say because
it was entirely unspecific and untestable, and it was attributed.
It was the merest slur. It was the dirtiest thing
you could do, and frankly I have the lowest opinion
(32:39):
of the woman who did it. I think it's and
indeed the man. So let's say that one of the
things that is most striking about the Royal family is
how absolutely uncontaminated by racism they are. If you go
back and you look at the history of the monarchy.
Really from Victoria, everybody I think is heard of her extraordinary.
(33:02):
It may even have been a marriage, though it's not
quite likely, an extraordinary close relationship with with her Scottish
gamekeeper with John Brown. The man who succeeds John Brown
in Victorious Affections is an Indian servant, the Mucchi. And
the relationship of the Royal family with, of course and
deeply multi ethnic British Empire is one in which there
(33:24):
has been a kind of rejoicing in the diversity. And
the Queen of Doors Africa spent enormous amounts of time there.
No she actually learns that she's queen in Kenya and
so on. So I think that that this charge of
racism is simply a disgraceful slur. I think it also
again it's very important things play out differently on either
(33:45):
side of the Atlantic, Megan and Harry were playing the
American card. They were playing the celebrity, let it all
hang out, victim, hood, Carl and afraid. In Britain, those
cards don't play quite so well. The general sense in Britain,
as Harry and Megan turned up very briefly for the
(34:05):
Jubilee and then disappeared very quickly, was well, they're now
second division. They were first division. They willfully pulled themselves out.
And you know what, they don't much matter because what
you saw on the balcony of Buckingham Palace was the Queen,
the Queen's son, the Prince of Wales, his son, Prince William,
(34:27):
and then Prince William's three children, including two boys. So
you have literally a kind of the famous moment in
Macbeth where Macbeth sees a line of kings stretching out
at the end. Well, there was the line of monarchs
on Buckingham Palace, and there was no Harry and there
was no Megan. And they don't matter except in Hollywood,
(34:48):
So you don't despair about the future of the monarchy.
Will Charles be a good king? I think he probably
will be. I think he's a very serious man, arguably
is a little bit too serious. And again all so
he's espoused what we always used to regard us through
other silly things like ecology. They're now absolutely central. And
my great fear is the opposite that Bibe and Prince
(35:12):
William is even more vocal on these kinds of questions. Suddenly,
of course, the whole question of environmentalism is going to be,
because it's now the forefront of politics, is going to
be a matter of major political dispute, especially now that
net zero visibly carries very much non net cost in
(35:32):
the words, it carries huge costs following the the the
Ukraine War, the rocketing of fuel costs, which is much
greater in Europe than it is in America. So there
is a risk that by espousing what is now a
very popular doctrine of ecology, you do store up the
risk of taking two overt a stance on what is
(35:54):
actually a very very definite issue of current politics. But
I know that's too much to worry about. And you
can see with William and Kate they're like a postcard
for you almost look at William and Kate and it
looks like pictures of Elizabeth and Philip traveling the country.
They seem like they're born to the role and they
(36:14):
completely understand what's expected of them. And I think that's right.
I mean, again, to put it in you know, more
pr sort of terms. I think the point is that
both William and especially Kate, they are agree good looking
young people, but they're profoundly conventional. They're happy in their
skins doing what they're doing. Was of course, poor Harry
(36:38):
was a lost soul. Diana was a lost soul, and
these two are not. They they are comfortable in enacting
the role, which is in a sense, you know, it's
a kind of what I mean. You know, you talk
about what we talk about Middle America, don't we. I
mean their role is to kind of is to enact
(36:58):
a kind of Middle British position. It seems to come
to them naturally comfortably, and they perform it beautifully. My
thanks to you. My my new dream is to come
over there and interview you live in some theater over there.
I could listen to you talk for quite a while.
You are a fascinating man, and you're an incredibly scholarly man,
(37:21):
which I admire. And you've helped me too, because I've
always had this fascination with this history. So thank you
so much, sir for your time, and thanks for coming
on the show, and thank you historian Dr David Starkey.
This episode was recorded at c DM Studios and produced
(37:42):
by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio four four
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is one
of Britain's leading royal historians, Dr David Starkey. Starkey has
lectured at the London School of Economics and authored numerous
books and television series on the English monarchy. He's also
(00:25):
known for his blazingly sharp commentary on BBC four's debate program,
The Moral Maze, BBC one's Question Time, and most recently
covering the Queen's Platinum Jubilee for gb News. Since David
Starkey has written dozens of books and produced hours upon
(00:46):
hours of documentary television. I was curious how he's able
to produce such a large body of work. Well, I'm
I am prolific, actually, Alec, and I'm not if you've noticed,
as there are terrible high atosis. The books tend to
cluster very closely together. There are moments when I churned
(01:07):
stuff out almost unconsciously. I mean, let's deal with the
two polls of how I write and what I've done,
and let's take the one where my late partner James Brown,
who plays a key role in so much of this,
said I should never say, my Elizabeth book, which is
(01:28):
on the life of the not the present Queen Elizabeth,
of course, but the first Queen Elizabeth, who comes to
the throne at the same sort of age, five centuries ago.
In I wrote that book starting in the very end
of August, and I had finished it by the end
(01:52):
of January. And I wrote it and James said, I
should never say this with a sense of dictation of
somebody talking to me, a kind of inner process. And
it's a book that I think is a good piece
of history, but more important than els, it's a kind
(02:12):
of it's it's an attempt at re envisaging historical biography
through a medium of the novel, and through I mean
in terms of style, and through a very very conscious
exercise of how to write. And the chapters are very short.
There are normally very short sentences. There's one chapter which
(02:35):
many reviewers got terribly excited about, which is a page long.
It deals with the death of Elizabeth's great rival and
her cousin, her half sister Mary Tudor, and it says
all that it needs to do, cleverly, succinctly, and above all, finally,
it's about a death. I was writing it much more
(02:58):
as you would have written fiction in terms of the
flow of the sense of the language driving it. On
the other hand, the other poll of my creativity or
lack of it, or productivity or lack of it, is
my biography of Henry the Eighth, which, one way or another,
I suppose I started in seven and have not yet
(03:21):
fully finished an unfinished book. I well, I published the
first volume of the the biography, the the one again
on Henry's youth. It's not it's it's a kind of
deliberate fragment. And my great problem with that book has
(03:41):
been I suppose I know too much. You can know
too much, you can have too much detail. I've also,
because again I know too much, I've been changing my mind.
Give me an example of what you changed your mind about.
I thought I understood the relationship between Henry the Eighth
(04:03):
and his father, Hendry the seventh. I thought I understood
the beginning of the reign, which, of course is is
the moment which a monarch, like a president or a
Napoleon in his first hundred days is when you really
put your impress on things. And then I discovered I
was wrong, And I think one of the most important
things to be aware of is when you are wrong.
(04:25):
So many people persist with an original idea and original
insight even when the evidence tells them that it's wrong.
And I can't do that, and I always right directly
from the historical evidence. Again, one of the things that
people when they're being kind, some people are being very
(04:46):
unkind what people say about my books is this the
sense of the history actually getting up and talking to you.
And the reasons for that is I write directly from
the sources. The basic way I proceed, you know, in
Six Wives or Elizabeth or indeed Henry, I operate from
a chronological in other words, in strict order of events
(05:08):
and list of documents, dates, whatever that act as the
spine of the narrative. I'm a passionate believer in narrative history,
in telling the story. But the evidence is there, So
when you're doing the research, is there a small grouping
of sources for that which when you want to understand
(05:31):
the truth and you want the facts as you recognize
them about Henry the Eighth's childhood and all of the history,
you've given us this thumbnail about us. Now, where do
you typically go? Where does that exist in England? It
exists in various forms, some of them very very well
known annics, and some of them that we hardly know
at all. I mean, the revelations that I came up
(05:53):
with the issue of money is going through the records
of Hender the sevens private finance is. And the reason I,
as it were, rethought them was there was a remarkable project.
The manuscripts exists. They're pretty continuous there, with some rather
large gaps at awkward moments, but there was a project
to transfer a very modern kind of project to edit
(06:16):
the manuscripts and to put them online. And I was
involved in that project as the kind of senior citizen,
if you like, an earlier generation, a scholar and all
the rest of it. So I suddenly started going through
them with a degree of detail that I've never done before. Remember,
you're looking at, effectively a daily record of royal expenditure
(06:40):
on everything from and I have bought what might it be,
a couple of bonnets for one of my pages too,
I am going to send a hundred and thousands odd
thousand pounds right so between everything from tops two hundreds
of thousands of pounds, all of course expressed in Roman numbers,
which doesn't do necessarily make life very easy. But I
(07:03):
did two things with with this set of accounts. And
I looked at them simply in terms of retotaling them
and thinking about what the totals meant. And interestingly, a
generation of earlier scholars came up with with these figures,
but they were using eighteen century transcripts rather than the
(07:24):
original manuscripts. And it was very great German scholar who
did the basic work, and he looked at that figure
of a hundred none thousand pounds and he said, simply,
this is impossible. It must be a miss transcript. It
can't have happened. And then of course I discovered it had.
And his stories simply tend to repeat each other. They
(07:45):
don't question. We take shortcuts because it's much easier. And
also there's a peculiar thing the way modern scholarship works,
which is this emphasis on citation. You cite a source,
but I, of course, once a mistake has actually got
into the process unless you go back right right to
(08:07):
the beginning. And here again, like there's as it's strange
in the sense that your own period can very much
color your approach. And my attitude to scholarship was formed
in two very different ways a very different periods of
my life. The first was when I was a young
man at Cambridge. I had a remarkable teacher, a man
(08:30):
called His name is normally given as Jeffrey Elton. His
real name is Gottfried Uolf Ehlenberg. He is one of
those extraordinary Jewish refugees of the nineteen thirties, totally transformed
intellectual life in Britain and America. And he represented the
high German tradition of rigorous academic scholarship. And I studied
(08:56):
with him in my final year as an undergraduate student,
and then I did my research with him. And I
suppose in retrospect the great moment of my emerging as
an independent scholar was when I was still Diabean. I
had been twenty two, I was in my final year
as an undergraduate. I was doing my special subject with him.
(09:18):
And the special subject was, again, it was on the
fifteen thirties, and you didn't have original documents, but you
had extracts from them. And Jeoffrey had done the work
very carefully, and he transcribed them and he described them.
And I can still remember the moment as a tentative
hand went up and said Professor Elton, I think you've
got this document wrong. As a twenty two year old
(09:43):
to this great match and to know what I was right,
I thought at that point, well, I can probably do
this now you mentioned that Henry the seventh is the
commencement of you will or I'll let you use your
words of the House of Tutor explained to our listeners.
Who are you know? Many Americans have zero knowledge of
(10:04):
the history of the British family, and little to none
of the current British family. They only know scandal and
gossip and so forth. What is the birth of a house?
What is a house? And how does one house take over?
If you will? Or come to the four? Were now
in the period of the House of Windsor, which I
think that was formed in nineteen seventeen, correct, So what
(10:25):
is a house and how does a house come to
the four? If you will? Well, you have the Kennedys,
you have a succession a father son, and then nephews,
niece's grandchildren and whatever. And that's exactly the same. It's
a dynasty again, you know. It was a famous film,
is a famous TV series called Dynasty about the successive
(10:47):
generations of the family. And that is what it is.
The various dynasties that have ruled the English throne take
these names. There are often names that we give them backwards. Now,
how does one dynasty succeed another? Well, in the case
of five, which is the succession between the House of
(11:07):
York and the House of Tudor, you succeed by killing
again very much, I suppose, you know, Like many modern
TV series, one monarch kills another monarch, and aspirant monarch
kills his rival and literally at the Battle of Bosworth
in rich Of the third of the House of York
(11:29):
and Hendra the seventh, he's not yet called hend of
the seventh, he's called Henry, Earl of Richmond. They literally fight.
They don't quite fight face to face, but you know,
it's like something out of a fantastic myth. He charges
down at the head of his knights, mounted on horseback,
wearing full armor. He has got the crown, the actual
gold element of the crown, the band of the crown
(11:52):
put on over his helmet. They charged down with their
great lances towards Hender seventh, Henry Earl of Richmond and
his very small army at the bottom, and Richard is
literally aiming to strike at Henry Earl of Richmond himself.
He aims for his standard. He actually cuts down his
(12:13):
standard bearer, and he's only brought down because again the paradox,
hend of the seventh takes the throne of England. Henry
heard of Richmond takes the throne of England with French help,
and Henry Earl of Richmond emerges triumphant on the field
of Bosworth and is literally crowned with the band of
Richard's crown which had been torn off his helmet and
(12:36):
has put on Henry's and it had been found in
a hawthorn bush. Is quite clear this actually it's a legend,
but it's true. It actually happens, and he's crowned on
the battlefield. So it is the out of medieval fantasy, right,
it's true. Now, how is the House of Winds are invented? Well,
seventeen is quite a long way from and what happens
(12:57):
in nineteen seventeen. It's a pr are exercise, pure pr exercise,
and one of the most brilliant pieces of pr that
ever men carried out. By the early twentieth century, as
it had been since the beginning of the eighteenth century,
as it was when America separates by an act of
rebellion from Great Britain. Britain is ruled by a German
(13:20):
royal house, by the House of Hanover, and it remains
to an extraordinary extent German through the following two centuries,
through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.
Because of their marriage customs, they marry back into Germany. So,
for example, Victoria marries her remote cousin called Albert of
(13:44):
sax Calledbert Guta and Victorian Albert actually converse with each
other in German. They write letters to each other in German.
They discuss the fate of the British Empire in German.
And this continues right through to the beginning of the
twentieth century, when unfortunately, of course, in nineteen fourteen England
and Germany go to war. But of course, if you're
(14:07):
fighting a war in an age of nations and nationhood,
how can you have your ruler being German when you're
fighting the Germans in absolute war? The First World War,
I mean even more than the American Civil War is
the first total war. You can't do it. So what
you do is you reinvent and so you completely reinvent
(14:31):
the monarchy. You rename it. You give it a consciously
English name. You give it this name Windsor Brilliant. You know,
it's Shakespeare. It's the merry Wives of Windsor. It's a
little touch of soft soap, you know, woods of winds
of the kind of nice smell on your hands. It's
the English countryside marketing, the great historic castle. It's musterly.
(14:55):
So you reinvent the name. But you do much more
than reinvent the name. You re invent everything. You reinvent
the marriage custom. You were talking about the fact that
we just know the opera soap opera, the modern soap opera.
Monarchy also goes back to nineteen seventeen because for the
first time they decide their children can marry english men
(15:17):
and English women. So you can present this as romance,
the sort of romance of the marriage of Charles and
Diana that goes so catastrophically wrong. You reinvent royal ceremony.
Before this point, most royal ceremony is private. Royal marriages
take place in tiny little spaces like the Chapel Royal
(15:37):
at St. James's. Now suddenly they go back to the abbey,
or they go to Saint Paul's, they go into splendor.
You do something even more remarkable. You reinvent you know,
we have this funny business in Britain, the honor system,
commanders of the British Empire like me and all this stuff.
All this is invented in seventeen for the very first
(15:59):
time that people who are not part of a narrow
aristocratic circle can be given titles, honors, whatever. And I
suppose what it really amounts to, alex is you consciously
make the monarchy a paradox. You invent democratic royalty, monarchy democratic,
(16:20):
and it's it's a profound paradox because again the English,
because of parliament, because of our limit history of limited government,
going right right back to Magna Carta. People think of
England as having been sort of always democratic. It's not true.
We only become full democracy after the First World War
(16:42):
historian David Starkey. If you enjoy conversations about government and power,
check out my interview with an expert on American history,
Michael Wolfe, author of the book Fire and Fury, on
the Donald Trump presidency. I think one I felt most
of all is that everybody there was tainted by this
(17:06):
and felt tainted by this, and believe that they would
not come out ahead, that this was a net loss
all of the people around Trump. That's what that's the
conclusion that they came to, opposite of what you would
expect people to feel. People come out of the White
House and they make lots of money, and they're famous,
and they have lots of influence and may be proud
(17:28):
of their work. Exactly and literally all of these people
who went in thinking this would happen to them and
came out as the months rolled on, thinking this is
all broke. This is not going to work. This is
not going to end well for anybody. Here more of
my conversation with Michael Wolfe in our archives at Here's
(17:52):
the Thing dot org. After the Break, David Starkey shares
his thoughts on Queen Elizabeth's controversial handling of the death
of Princess Diana. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
(18:15):
Here's the Thing. Since the Royal family has played such
a large role in the life and work of Dr
David Starkey, I wanted to know if the crown loomed
large in his early life very much so, I mean
let's be truthful, not in a particularly enthusiastic way. My
family background was modest. My parents were very definitely working class.
(18:40):
My father had left school at eleven, my mother at thirteen.
He was a manual worker. My father's politics were very radical.
My father wanted to be a pacifist. He finally decided
he couldn't declare his pacifism in the Second World War
because he'd been unemployed for four terrible years in the
(19:03):
nineteen thirties and undergoing terrible poverty. He was a radical
member of the Labor Party. He was a leading local
trade unionist and all that. I first became absolutely aware
of the monarchy at a key moment of my life
and that of many people of my generation, which was
the coronation of Elizabeth the Second in nineteen fifty three.
(19:25):
I'd remember the day in absolute detail. It was the
first time i'd seen television. And then you watched the ceremony,
which is extraordinary. It's magical. This woman, who was then
radiantly beautiful, clad in white, as the center of this
vast ceremony. It's like it's like a Japanese imperial coronation.
(19:46):
It goes on for about six hours, in this huge
space of the abbey, with all these old distinguished gentlemen
wearing scarlet and fur if they're members of the nobility
or in elaborate copes and miters of their clergy, and
this woman at the center of it magically. So that's
(20:06):
a moment I think which I first and as I said,
I engage in a way which which resonates in my
memory to the moment was speaking. What would you say
in her reign? Most people in the States, the scandal
obsessed United States, But in this jubilee now seventy years
(20:28):
of this woman serving as Queen. I listened some of
the retrospectives and commentary of people, and they would all
acknowledge it pretty much the only real meaningful setback for
her was the handling of the death of Lady Diana.
That was the only really raging criticisms she faced in
her reign of so many years. Would you agree that
(20:50):
that was really the only real major setback for her? Yes,
I mean equally, I think that the British public at
the time of Diana, in the same that we did
at the time of the George Floyd incident in with COVID,
we went through one of those things which the great
British historian Lord Macauley said, there is nothing as ridiculous
(21:12):
as the British public in one of its periodical fits
of morality. And what you've got with Diana was a
clash between two completely different views of what monarchy is about.
For the Queen, monarchy is about service, it's about duty.
It's about getting on with things, getting up in the morning,
(21:33):
doing it even if you don't feel very good, never
telling anybody if your feet are hurting or you feel miserable.
For Diana, although Diana, you know, she's the daughter of
a great English family, our English aristocratic family. The Spencer
Churchill's Diana always behaved as though she'd been born in
Orange County, and she was profoundly American in her attitudes
(21:57):
to celebrity. She saw monarchy selebrity. She saw her role
as to be emotionally honest at a time of course,
when the great problem with with monarchy is that it's
an individual and the family that is required to have
its personal life and its family life turned into some
(22:20):
sort of symbol. Now, there's always going to be the
risk of a violent clash between the reality of the
humanity and the enormous hopes which are vested in it.
And one of the ways that the Queen has always
dealt with that is by simply silence. No one really
(22:40):
knows what she thinks about anything, whether with Diana. Diana
decided that the only way and quite understandably, that she
could protect herself in the horrors that it turned out
of her marriage with Charles was by talking about it.
Was by being open about it, by using the media,
as she saw it, to redress the valance of power
(23:01):
against her husband's family and what she saw as the
conspiracy of the media against her. And so you have,
on the one hand, somebody who believes in shutting everything up,
the Queen, and you've got somebody else called Diana, who
believes in letting it all hang out. That the famous
interview with Martin Bashir, which we now know is a
(23:21):
product of the most shady behavior by the BBC, but
that equally the Princess went along with it because she
recognized she was, in fact a most brilliant media operator.
Diana made monarchy and made royalty about celebrity. The Queen
has always she's taken the totally opposite view that monarchy
(23:43):
and celebrity are enemies. They may look the same, they're different.
So it was really it was what happened between the
Queen and Diana was I think a genuine tragedy. It
was a clash of two different views of right and
wrong and it was utterly a reckons sign of And
although that what you're saying, I completely understand, some people
(24:06):
on this side of the pond, if you will, were
also speculating that that family wasn't happy about the fact that.
And you can explain to me the schematics of this,
which is that if she divorces Charles, she's still entitled
to a title herself because she has children with him,
she's the mother of royal blood. And if she had
(24:27):
married Fired, he would be entitled to a title as well.
Having married her, he would not all of all of
that is total fiction. These you are you're quite right
to put your finger on the issue of divorce. There
is a profound struggle as to whether or not divorce
is acceptable. Remember, virtually nobody gets divorced before the nineties.
(24:50):
It's very difficult to get in Britain, it's virtually impossible.
And what happens is the monarchy in Britain is used
as a kind of front in that struggle by the
Church of England. By it's it's astonishingly talented that I
think rather malign Archbishop Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang. It's used
(25:11):
as a kind of battering ram to wait to keep
the lid on divorce. And again, of course there is
the whole trauma in the mind of everybody who is royal,
which is the marriage and the catastrophic marriage which forces
his abdication of the Queen's uncle of Edward the Eighth
(25:33):
to the American Mrs Simpson. And it's this idea of
the monarchy and divorce being fundamentally opposed to each other.
In fact, there was an absolutely no rule against there's
no definite rule against it. It was simply that it
had become a method of symbolizing the monarchy as the
great virtuous British family. And this is why the Queen
(25:55):
has experienced so much trauma she with her marriage with
the Duke of Edam. Whatever really happened, we will not
know for generations, I imagine, because of the close of manuscripts,
But they were always able to present the appearance and
I think the reality of genuinely happy, creative marriage. Unfortunately
(26:20):
her children couldn't. It. Therefore, very quickly becomes at tension
between a myth of the monarchy as a happy royal
family and the reality of them as an unhappy family
characterized by a divorce, and of course the marriage and
of Charles and Diana, and it's hideous dissolution becomes, as
it were, the test case. It becomes the moment at
(26:42):
which that image is finally blown up author and historian
David Starkey. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to
subscribe to Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we
come back, David Starkey shares his thoughts on where things
(27:06):
went wrong with Prince Harry and Megan Markle. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio.
(27:29):
Since royal historian David Starkey has had such a long
trained I on the monarchy, I was curious if he
foresaw meg'sit, Prince Harry and Megan Markle's exit from the
royal family. No, not at all. I took exactly. I
mean the shows who know that that evidence is everything.
(27:51):
The notion of the historian of profit is dangerously wrong.
I made exactly the wrong guess. I thought that the
marriage to Megan was remarkable. She you know, she's beautiful,
she's intelligent, she's highly disciplined. I mean, he was a
hair and scare and lad. It looked exactly the right thing.
And the fact of course that she she has mixed
(28:13):
race in one it's silly to say even better, but
it expressed a reality of our modern I hate the
word multicultural, but which is which is the wrong word.
But but but our doubt the intense diversity of our societies.
It expressed it beautifully. I in fact, I put the
phrase about that the marriage of the two of them
(28:37):
was in itself a kind of direct modernization of the monarchy.
But then, of course it turned out that Megan and
later on Harry decided they wanted to do it, in
the words of Frank Sinatra, their way. Now. Unfortunately, monarchy
doesn't work like that, and they found themselves in exactly
(28:59):
the same trap as Diana, exactly the same trap as
Edward the eighth, exactly the same trap that Henry the
Eighth was in. And remember Henry the Eighth to escape
from that trap and to do things that were unthinkable.
He had to break with the Roman Church. He'd to
tear his family apart, he to tear the country apart.
(29:19):
It is not even then an easy thing to do.
But of course, because of the power of his personality,
that then power of the monarchy, the inheritance from his
father and so on, he was able to do it.
But of course Megan and Harry found themselves up against
this machinery, and they took the decision, Okay, it won't
change to accommodate us, We'll get out. And I think
(29:41):
it's a profound sadness. But I would also put it
in a more simple way. I think Gallex, I think
Harry married his mother and told lots of men marry
their mothers. And Meg Megan is a kind of version
of Diana. She embodies many of the same instincts, many
of the same disaurs, and it's very easy to see.
I think Harry will eventually find his position a very
(30:04):
lonely one. I mean, he's bought into this boy who
was in the army at this boy who loved Soldiering,
who established a very serious reputation as working for injured
servicemen and injured veterans and whatever he now finds himself
in that I think rather empty world of Californian celebrity,
(30:27):
rootless world, the world of the artificiality of Netflix, steels
and so on. I wonder how long he will last.
I I feel the same exact way. I watched the
whole thing play out, and I thought, my god, I mean,
my glib joke was you gave up all of that
to live in Santa Barbara. I mean, you know, I
(30:48):
mean all your family and history and duty, and you
were in the military. You understood that kind of service
and duty, and you gave all that to go live
over there where. I mean, unlike any other ice I've
ever visited, someone sticking your thermometer in your mouth to
tell you how hot you are every five minutes or
how hot you're not. And if you're at the top
of that game, if you're a winner, if all of
(31:10):
that business is rolling in your direction, what's what's better
than that? But once that cools off, boy, it's lonely.
It's it's the loneliest place in the world. Now, my
last question for you, one would assume that as the
public relations fortunes of the royal family ebb and flow
and go up and down related to scandal and so forth,
(31:30):
or perceived scandal. I should say, I think that they've
been treated very unfairly in some circumstances. So the jubilee comes,
would you say that their stock is up? Would you
say that the stock is up compared to the Because
when when the megan here in the States, the Megan
Markel thing played out like if not a thick stripe
of racism exists among some denizens of Bucking Impalace, there's
(31:54):
at least a tinge of that there. And now with
the jubilee and the focus going back onto the Queen
herself are things would you say that they're more popular
again in the UK? I think, again, we've got to
be really blunt about this. I think that that statement,
which was deliberately vague about your somebody said something about
(32:18):
what the color of the child might have been. I
think that was an indecent thing to do. I think
it was a shocking and disgraceful thing to say because
it was entirely unspecific and untestable, and it was attributed.
It was the merest slur. It was the dirtiest thing
you could do, and frankly I have the lowest opinion
(32:39):
of the woman who did it. I think it's and
indeed the man. So let's say that one of the
things that is most striking about the Royal family is
how absolutely uncontaminated by racism they are. If you go
back and you look at the history of the monarchy.
Really from Victoria, everybody I think is heard of her extraordinary.
(33:02):
It may even have been a marriage, though it's not
quite likely, an extraordinary close relationship with with her Scottish
gamekeeper with John Brown. The man who succeeds John Brown
in Victorious Affections is an Indian servant, the Mucchi. And
the relationship of the Royal family with, of course and
deeply multi ethnic British Empire is one in which there
(33:24):
has been a kind of rejoicing in the diversity. And
the Queen of Doors Africa spent enormous amounts of time there.
No she actually learns that she's queen in Kenya and
so on. So I think that that this charge of
racism is simply a disgraceful slur. I think it also
again it's very important things play out differently on either
(33:45):
side of the Atlantic, Megan and Harry were playing the
American card. They were playing the celebrity, let it all
hang out, victim, hood, Carl and afraid. In Britain, those
cards don't play quite so well. The general sense in Britain,
as Harry and Megan turned up very briefly for the
(34:05):
Jubilee and then disappeared very quickly, was well, they're now
second division. They were first division. They willfully pulled themselves out.
And you know what, they don't much matter because what
you saw on the balcony of Buckingham Palace was the Queen,
the Queen's son, the Prince of Wales, his son, Prince William,
(34:27):
and then Prince William's three children, including two boys. So
you have literally a kind of the famous moment in
Macbeth where Macbeth sees a line of kings stretching out
at the end. Well, there was the line of monarchs
on Buckingham Palace, and there was no Harry and there
was no Megan. And they don't matter except in Hollywood,
(34:48):
So you don't despair about the future of the monarchy.
Will Charles be a good king? I think he probably
will be. I think he's a very serious man, arguably
is a little bit too serious. And again all so
he's espoused what we always used to regard us through
other silly things like ecology. They're now absolutely central. And
my great fear is the opposite that Bibe and Prince
(35:12):
William is even more vocal on these kinds of questions. Suddenly,
of course, the whole question of environmentalism is going to be,
because it's now the forefront of politics, is going to
be a matter of major political dispute, especially now that
net zero visibly carries very much non net cost in
(35:32):
the words, it carries huge costs following the the the
Ukraine War, the rocketing of fuel costs, which is much
greater in Europe than it is in America. So there
is a risk that by espousing what is now a
very popular doctrine of ecology, you do store up the
risk of taking two overt a stance on what is
(35:54):
actually a very very definite issue of current politics. But
I know that's too much to worry about. And you
can see with William and Kate they're like a postcard
for you almost look at William and Kate and it
looks like pictures of Elizabeth and Philip traveling the country.
They seem like they're born to the role and they
(36:14):
completely understand what's expected of them. And I think that's right.
I mean, again, to put it in you know, more
pr sort of terms. I think the point is that
both William and especially Kate, they are agree good looking
young people, but they're profoundly conventional. They're happy in their
skins doing what they're doing. Was of course, poor Harry
(36:38):
was a lost soul. Diana was a lost soul, and
these two are not. They they are comfortable in enacting
the role, which is in a sense, you know, it's
a kind of what I mean. You know, you talk
about what we talk about Middle America, don't we. I
mean their role is to kind of is to enact
(36:58):
a kind of Middle British position. It seems to come
to them naturally comfortably, and they perform it beautifully. My
thanks to you. My my new dream is to come
over there and interview you live in some theater over there.
I could listen to you talk for quite a while.
You are a fascinating man, and you're an incredibly scholarly man,
(37:21):
which I admire. And you've helped me too, because I've
always had this fascination with this history. So thank you
so much, sir for your time, and thanks for coming
on the show, and thank you historian Dr David Starkey.
This episode was recorded at c DM Studios and produced
(37:42):
by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio four four
Host
Alec Baldwin
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