Will Charles III appoint Simon Schama or David Starkey to be his court's first Historiographer Royal? It seems strange that the post doesn't already exist. Plantaganets, Tudors, Hanoverians and their heirs have all seen in the writing of history a key to their power, something that will justify their violence and make their rule seem "natural". Which is why there are still, by royal warrant, "Regius" professors of modern history at Oxford and Cambridge. A court historian seems an obvious development.
In circa 2020 the arthritic court of the New Carolingians will be worrying about English history and British schools. New King, Old England will be their motto. A foretaste came last week with the Prince of Wales's specially convened conference on these matters - an occasion at which the usual people said the usual things. The prince bleats that we've lost "an understanding of our national heritage". Which heritage, of course, means his family. Unsurprisingly, "it all goes back to the 1960s, when everything that was tried and tested in architecture, agriculture and education was abandoned". The royal solution to the horrid "it" is a return to grand narrative. "Without chronology," booms Starkey supportively, "history is meaningless". School history, says Schama, should be "about stories" and not "themed learning".
Other voices, too, lend their weight to the princely critique. For Niall Ferguson the French revolution, the Holocaust and the industrial revolution are "colossally boring" as elements in a national curriculum. Children need "a good story" like the English civil war and the second world war - tales which offer "goodies and baddies and a clear result". Robert Harris, a novelistic neo-historian, has moved on from being a new Labour courtier and is obviously now enrolled in the Carolingian order. He thinks that history should "teach us how to live" - and "to spot when our leaders are talking rot". How very true - especially when it comes to this varietal species of noble rot. It's very appropriate that the Aga memorial lecturer herself, Joanna Trollope, should have graced the princely day with her middle English presence.
The readiness of so many literary types to take that egotistic humbug the PoW seriously is one of English life's minor irritations. The invitation from Highgrove is obviously an eagerly awaited event in many a scribbler's den. Scratch the English intelligentsia and too often you'll find a readiness to stroke a royal back, to nod encouragingly when informed that "the funeral of my beloved grandmother seemed to open a dusty box marked 'history' that lay forgotten in the attic".
The convened seers have a case. There is too much boring documentary analysis of sources going on in school history. And Macaulay - to whom they appeal as the granddaddy of English history - was right when he said that: "History has to be burned into the imagination before it can be received by the reason." Assessment is the bureaucratic rock on which that essential gift of the imagination's deliverance has foundered. It is silly to treat 14-year-olds as if they were historical postmodern structuralists at Princeton, all discovering repetitiously that histories are written from different points of view.
But the idea that history is open to interpretation is not a genie that can be put back into the bottle. And there is a dishonesty involved too. As professional historians, these pontificators don't do the Macaulay stuff themselves. Their real work is full of sophisticated source analysis. In their pre-telly careers Schama and Starkey changed profoundly the received understanding of, respectively, the 17th-century Dutch and the early Tudor court. And they didn't get there by chronology alone. But their position now seems to be "not in front of the children, please". What's good for them in grown-up terms as a treat for the study is deemed too unsettling when allowed to roam elsewhere. And what should be exiled from the classroom is clearly not for the cameras either. For what has changed their situation, and that of historical writing at large, is that it is only on television that an historian can make big bucks. And here the kind of history we get remains a top-down view, a dynastic history of dead toffs.
Of course history is story. But the question remains - whose chronology? It's a question for all audiences of whichever age. The viewable, commissioned and supposedly "popular" history of our times is a centre-right and regressive affair. It stresses the "natural" evolution of Britain much as GM Trevelyan did in the 1930s. It does not reflect the work of, say, a Christopher Hill with his passionate analyses of interregnum radicalism. And it finds the internationalist flavour of an Eric Hobsbawm entirely alien. Our new official histories are truly Windsorian in their insularity, anglocentricity and mental primitivism. Respectable and implicitly anti-heretical, they offer the neo-conservative reflection on the screen of new Labour Britain. It is as if the republicanism which, from Milton to Blake, was a powerful English tradition had never existed. Would that television viewers really were treated as children; at least they would be told some different stories.
