Magdalene College Cambridge (2016) by J R Raven Stephen: the Reign of Anarchy (2015) and Piers Brendon,Carl Watkins

CARL WATKINS, Stephen: the Reign of Anarchy PIERS BRENDON, Edward VIII: the Uncrowned King (Penguin Monarch Series, Allen Lane 2015, 2016; 110/128 pp)

This prestigious new series of brief lives covers ‘Every ruler from Athelstan to Elizabeth II portrayed by our finest historians’ – so it is good to see two Magdalene historians among the authors. It is a stylish series, unusual these days in being entirely produced in the UK: there are excellent pictures (some in colour), the typeface is the fashionable Sabon, and the bindings are white, with striking images on the three-quarters jackets. The reigns of Stephen and Edward VIII, 850 years between them, could hardly be more different, although both kings precipitated a crisis within the elite and both nearly wrecked the monarchy. Dr Watkins has a reign of nineteen years to cover, Dr Brendon less than twelve months. The reign of Stephen is formidably complex to describe, but Dr Brendon has a real challenge too: as he puts it, ‘The biographer of King Edward VIII is under more than usual temptation to read the life of his subject backwards’, and assume he was always doomed to ‘ruin himself’ (as George V predicted). Brendon is scrupulously fair, however, in setting out Edward’s better qualities and more positive aspects, but equally unsparing in delineating his failure to understand the demands and duties of modern kingship, a failure compounded by his abject fixation upon a singularly unsuitable woman. In a wholly different way, Stephen too was unable to make the transition from being a promising nobleman to acting as an effective medieval king, controlling his bloodthirsty barons; Watkins shows how the turbulent ‘Anarchy’ stemmed in large measure from a ‘king in eclipse’.

Most readers will have a rough idea of the Abdication, the Edward and Wallis Simpson saga, but of the Stephen and Matilda rivalry and the Anarchy possibly nothing at all. Dr Brendon succeeds in providing fresh detail and new material (especially about the Duke of Windsor’s wartime governorship of the Bahamas), Dr Watkins in skilfully explaining everything for the non-medievalist (such as the frustrating problems of besieging Norman baronial castles). Both authors are accomplished historians and writers, and both may be commended for their readable accounts of two flawed monarchs. R H