Book Review: Rebellion

Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolutionby Peter AckroydThomas Dunne Books, 2014Peter Ackroyd continues his mad, wonderfully anachronistic project, this decade-long Macaulayian endeavor of writing a multi-volume narrative history of England, with Rebellion, a big robust 500-page book covering the rivetingly turbulent 17^th century. Without any Introduction, without even the slimmest pretense of setting out any kind of ideological framework, he just jumps right into the arrival in London in 1603 of England's new king, James I fresh from Scotland:

He was a robust and fluent conversationalist, who rather liked to hear the sound of his own voice, but the effect on his English audience was perhaps impaired by the fact that he retained a broad Scots accent. If he was eager to talk, he was also quick to laugh. He could be witty, but delivered his droll remarks in a grave and serious voice. His manners were not impeccable, and he was said to have slobbered over his food and drink. He paid little attention to his dress, but favoured thickly padded doublets that might impede an assassin's dagger; ever since his childhood he had lived in fear of assault or murder. He was said to have a horror of naked steel. He had a restless, roving eye; he paid particular notice to those at court who were not known to him.

Anyone even lightly familiar with the period, the event, or the man will see something from that description that a glance at Ackroyd's “Further Reading” section will confirm: this is received history, amassed from a relatively short list of what's known in the trade as secondary sources. Underpinning the section of the regicide Oliver Cromwell, for instance, there's a list of 17 biographies of Cromwell by other people; some of those people consulted the primary sources that are our only way of knowing anything about Cromwell, and some of whom didn't. Rebellion has no notes, so the reader has no idea which parts of that furry old 'James the slobberer' caricature are picked from which secondary source, or why Ackroyd picked those parts instead of others. Instead of methodology, we have myth-building; instead of disciplinary rigor, we have late-night yarning over whiskey.Which will by its very nature stand or fall according to the quality not of the whiskey but of the yarn-spinner, and we're lucky, of course: Ackroyd is one hell of a yarn-spinner. The first book in this series, Foundation, was a rich broth of Stonehenge and Lady Godiva; the second book, on the Tudors, was a pageant of their oft-chronicled era that was so Hollywood-ready it lacked only monogrammed towels for Natalie Portman and Daniel Craig. And this volume, taking readers from the accession of codpiece-fondling James I to prim, pious, clueless Charles I, to his louche son Charles II with his tittering, lecherous court:

The rule of the saints had been replaced by the rule of the sinners who seemed to compete with each other in drunkenness and debauchery. When a bishop preached in the royal chapel against 'mistaken jollity' the congregation laughed at him. When the court visited Oxford a scholar, Anthony Wood, observed that 'they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vain, empty, careless.' And of course they took their morals and manners from their royal leader. Other royal courts were no doubt characterized by profligacy and sexual licence – the court of William II comes to mind – but never had they been so widely observed and criticized.

All that profligacy rolls on to rigid Catholic killjoy James II, his ousting, and the accession of William and Mary; it's so comfortable a procession it could easily have come straight out of Dickens' Child's History of England. We get the architectural glories of Christopher Wren, the hilarious private jotting of Samuel Pepys, the mathematical wonders of Sir Isaac Newton, and all the best-known writers of the age, all rendered in smoothed, familiar terms. “Of all the writers of the period Milton is the one most able to embody the seriousness and the determination of the religious cause,” Ackroyd writes, for instance, “In the loftiness of his mind, in the dignity and grandeur of his most stately utterances, we may glimpse the essential nobility of the age.” So: Milton – serious – check.Readers looking for a generous helping of Ackroyd's rolling, friendly prose will love Rebellion. Readers looking for a very simple primer on a very complex period in English history – the most complex, in fact – will find it in these pages. For those looking for a mocking Milton, a raving Newton, a shrewd James I, a not-so-Merry Monarch – for those looking for multiplicity, investigation, or schema, Ackroyd has provided a convenient list of better places to start. And even those readers can stick around to enjoy the whiskey.