Biographers Bring Fresh Insights Into Trials and Triumphs of Three British Royals

Gareth Russell announces in his “Author’s Note” that he is writing a private life of James I, successor to Elizabeth I. In short, Mr. Russell is interested in the “particular man,” so that “politics, foreign policy, religion, economics, and social affairs” only get attention in so far as they shape this individual’s life.James I was a gay king, not a word for homosexuals in his time, even though his preference for male lovers was well known, if not thought a proper subject for the biography of a monarch. In effect, Mr. Russell reverses a biographical tradition in which the personality of a public figure is of no consequence unless private behavior has an impact on public events and people. A different biographical tradition has been headed in Mr. Russell’s direction ever since Plutarch admitted into his narratives anecdotes like the one about Pericles’s son retelling his father’s foibles at the dinner table, and since Samuel Johnson said biography, unlike history, was not so much concerned with “vulgar greatness.”Meryle Secrest portrays Princess Margaret, Elizabeth II’s younger sister, as the doomed daughter of an alcoholic mother, the tragic outcome of a long line of family drinkers. What seemed to an earlier generation to be just the failings of a spoiled princess becomes instead a deeply affecting story.I suppose you have to be of a certain older generation to appreciate fully Ms. Secrest’s groundbreaking biography. When asked about Princess Margaret’s death, the then-Labour Party leader, Michael Foot, told a reporter he didn’t “give a bugger” about such things. To him, this irresponsible royal deserved no respect. “Who is Jack Jones?” she had said when James Callaghan’s government fell. A disgusted Foot told me she had been not able to identify the nation’s most prominent labor movement leader.Ms. Secrest shows that Princess Margaret’s mother drank heavily during her pregnancy, resulting, it is now known, in stunting her daughter’s growth (she was only 5 feet tall) and causing developmental problems that account — at least in part — for an immaturity that subjected this royal to sudden mood swings and rages. Elizabeth II escaped her sister’s fate, Ms. Secrest points out, because their mother, suffering severe bouts of morning sickness, refrained from drinking during her first pregnancy.Sir David Cannadine explores how astutely Elizabeth II brought the monarchy into the television age, beginning with the telecast of her coronation. The event thrilled millions but not those who regarded the royals as superannuated, which is why Mr. Foot gave his ticket to the coronation to his nephew Paul. The nephew was shocked that his uncle preferred to lounge at home, not wanting to be a party to a celebration of what ought no longer to exist.Mr. Cannadine shows that Elizabeth understood such skeptics and set about making herself the exemplar of duty to the nation and head of the Commonwealth, the very embodiment of British continuity in a society that embraced millions of different faiths, cultures, and ethnicities. The queen triumphed by deft employment of discretion, being careful not to express opinions even as she monitored public sentiment. She reminds me of Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, who was asked at a party how he was doing. “I’m not allowed to say,” he replied.Mr. Cannadine, born in 1950, begins his biography with his memory of the coronation — that is “images of her state coach and horses, which I cut out of a souvenir magazine published soon after the event.” His parents did not own a television, and he did not see the “remastered version” until 2012, when he heard “Richard Dimbleby’s reverential commentary, which in its faith and ardour, emotion and optimism belong to another era and an earlier time.”The paradox, Mr. Cannadine might have added, is that television brought into living rooms the state coach and horses of the past to be experienced by a populace that had moved beyond them, and yet wanted to take that past along with them. The point, as Mr. Cannadine states, is that Elizabeth II, celebrating her Platinum Jubilee in 2022, had become, in Lytton Strachey’s words for Queen Victoria, part of the “indissoluble scheme of things.”Books reviewed in this article:‘The Six Loves of James I’By Gareth RussellAtria Books, 496 pages‘Princess Margaret and the Curse: An Inquiry into a Royal Life’By Meryle SecrestSkyhorse, 304 pages‘Queen Elizabeth II: A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign’By Sir David CannadineOxford University Press, 192 pagesMr. Rollyson is the author of “A Private Life of Michael Foot.”

Biographers Bring Fresh Insights Into Trials and Triumphs of Three British Royals

Biographers Bring Fresh Insights Into Trials and Triumphs of Three British Royals

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