Last of the holiday reading: "The Tudors" by Peter Ackroyd

Lots of people have remarked that I seem to have read quite a few books over the summer. Well, folks, that's over.

This is the last of the books started in balmy Pescara, but the first to be completed on a small aeroplane bumping down through the cloud into a ridiculously cold and bleak late August day in Birmingham (whence Nottingham), a trip marking the end of summer as we know it. Expect a reading slowdown, as the grim world of work resumes.

Elizabeth: badass compromiser

Meanwhile, how not to be a fan of Peter Ackroyd? This is a history book bought unashamedly on the strength of the reputation of the author as a writer, rather than as a historian. I imagine it must be frustrating for real historians (perhaps one of whom will let me know if Ackroyd can or cannot be considered a historian), but there's no arguing with this man's ability to tell a story, be it as a novel (Hawksmoor (astounding, by the way - had me prowling the East End of London in my precious lunch hours in distant 1988 just spotting Hawksmoor churches); The House of Doctor Dee), or as non-fiction (London: The Biography; London Under). Moreover, my appetite for the Tudors had been whetted (of course) by two marvellous Hilary Mantel novels (this and this), as well as Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.

All of which to say, like most of the middle-class anglosphere, it seems, I'm currently in a fascinated-by-the-Tudors period and in any case stand a fair chance of buying any book which has "Peter Ackroyd" on the cover.

Cutting edge history, however, I suspect this is not. I recall a reviewer's comment from somewhere saying that this book tells "familiar stories", and that is indeed the case. However, Ackroyd tells these stories exceptionally well, and has the gift of bringing the protagonists to life. That is a key strength of this book, the personalisation of this period of history, in which many great public events seem indeed to have been driven by personal characters and impulses (Marxist historians beware!). This is hugely valuable in itself.

But perhaps more than that, for this reader at least, Ackroyd illuminates the real nature of the English Reformation. Without wanting to sound clichéd, it once again demonstrates that the English are singularly ill-equipped to do revolution. The transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in England, which utterly transformed the country and massively influenced its subsequent trajectory, was anything but driven by religious conviction and matters of principle. It was good, old-fashioned, self-interested state politics, of both the internal and geopolitical variety. Of course this didn't stop unspeakable cruelty and barbarism, with the state sacrificing thousands of genuine martyrs to horrific deaths for their beliefs, but for all the real principle and belief at stake in individual fates, the real reason so many died in religious persecution was purely political - the defence of a regime. A regime which itself fluctuated between diametrically opposite extremes.

In the years of the Tudor monarchs, it was possible to be burnt as a heretic one year for a set of beliefs that the following year were completely sanctioned, and of course the precise opposite. It was, frankly, blatant. The English populace were expected to adapt their deepest religious beliefs from one moment to the next on the basis of state diktat. Yes, of course, there were martyrs and people of high principle, but the English Reformation was ultimately consolidated on the back of a pragmatic survival instinct on the part of its people. 

I'm not saying that, in the broad sweep of history, it wasn't the right way to go, you understand, but you cannot read this book without acknowledging that England's divorce from popery was realpolitik rather than Lutheran conviction, and in fact, for that reason, rather less doctrinally rigorous than elsewhere. 

Is that a bad thing? For all the persecution in evidence over the entire Tudor period, it remains true that England did not go the whole hog and descend into full scale religious war, as occurred elsewhere.  It seems moreover that we may have to thank Elizabeth I for this rather more than I had previously appreciated. She was no soft touch, I think it is safe to agree, but, notwithstanding the odd, politically dictated, bit of religious repression and, shall we say, a rather authoritarian style, she was by instinct a middle way kind of person, sceptical as to the glories of war (too damn expensive) and inclined to fudge and compromise on religious matters as long as people did not step excessively out of line in a manner that would threaten the order of the Tudor state. 

The reign of Elizabeth emerges, in Ackroyd's telling, indeed as a kind of golden age, less because of its supposed military triumphs, but because of her care to keep the country out of unnecessary conflict, her tendency to prevarication and her attentiveness to deniability. One has the impression of her skilfully playing all the glory-bound continental (male) potentates off against each other, while, on the sly and rather by accident, her navigators profitably stole large amounts of Spanish gold (itself plundered from others, of course) and incidentally set about building the foundations of the world's greatest sea-based empire a couple of centuries later.

I may be pushing my historical luck a bit there I suppose, but this is a book which makes history fun, while pulling no punches about how essentially nasty and brutal it all actually was. 

Do I recommend? Well, yes, though if, like most of those who will read this, you are generally well-read and knowledgable about this period of history, you will gain little new in terms of hard fact. But, whatever, it's worth it for the way Ackroyd can tell a story.