WRITING UP THE STUARTS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22319, 5 February 1938, Page 18

WRITING UP THE STUARTS

♦ A LIVELY HISTORIAN The Stuart*. By Sir Charles Petrie, Bt„ M.A., F.R.Hist.Soc. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 359 pp. (12/6 net.) If all histories ware as racy and entertaining as Sir Charles Petrie’s, fewer novels would be read. His account of the Stuarts, 1603-1688, is none the less valuable. The conventional history of political changes, battles, diplomacy, and social and economic developments is all here, but is incidental to the story of the manners of subjects and rulers. The sources that are most obvious are all contemporary and vivacious; broadsheets, lampoons, letters, and the pamphlets that abounded in the seventeenth century. Sir Charles Petrie knows all the more familiar sources, ancient and modern, from Clarendon to Winston Churchill, and he can relate new and old, and will find a parallel to James IPs strange loss of physical courage in Primo de Rivera. James II is rather better treated by this historian than by most. Nearly all the other Stuarts have recently been rehabilitated, and now, with justice, it is the turn of James 11. First it is necessary to point out that his cause received so much support for 50 years after his death that “it was a matter of life and death for the Whig oligarchs to denigrate his memory.” Again, by disposition blunt and direct, he was easily circumvented by subtler minds. His work for the English Navy alone entitles him to respect, while his personal courage did not fail till 1688. His bravery in battle, as in the sea fight with the Dutch off Lowestoft in 1685, was excellent. It also appears that the Bloody Assize did not alienate from him the support of English people; for two years after Sedgemoor, James had a cordial reception during his progress in the west, and in 1715 Somerset, Devon, and Wiltshire were warm with Jacobite enthusiasm.

This is but one example of Sir Charles Petrie’s thoughtful reconsiderations. Every page is interesting. Literature, music, dress, speech, food, and scandal are all anatomised. From the lack of contraceptives and the variety of illegitimate children, the historian deduces that sexual relations were not so generally relaxed as other moralists have reported. His accounts of eating are prodigious. The butcher's bill of one banquet, earlier Indeed than those rendered to the Stuarts, requires payment not only for innumerable birds, beasts, and fishes that are ordinarily eaten, such as 400 harts, bucks, and roes, and 4000 heronshaws, but also for such rarer comestibles as eight seals and four porpoises. Revelations of this kind are as interesting and important as the reminder that in 1603 English music was more famous abroad than English literature, and that music was practised and loved'with an intensity now uncommon by most seventeenth century English people. If this review is a matter of shreds and patches, so is the book criticised; but they make a bright and comely garment which adequately, covers its subject.