For our island story "from the top down", Gove need look no further than David Starkey's Crown and Country. Also the product of TV merchandising, the book in effect replaces Starkey's two previous volumes spun out of his Channel 4 series Monarchy (2004 and 2006). There was a gap between the two books where the Middle Ages should have been: in filling this gap, Starkey offers readers the full sweep, from the fall of Rome to the moral demise of the House of Windsor. The monarchy is the oldest English institution — indeed the two are basically coterminous — and Starkey is a proud guide and advocate.  

He opens with a splendid reaffirmation of the Victorian perspective. In this view, the fall of Rome was a Good Thing, as Sellar and Yeatman would have put it. The Roman Empire was an autocracy, in which British elites had very little investment; in fact, they initially asked the Romans to leave. The Germanic barbarians who invaded Britain in the fifth century were hugely uncivilised — no baths, no roads — but they offered one thing the Romans never did: the rough liberty of group participation. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that took shape after the invasion were based on "a partnership between king and people...the sense of all being in it together." This was what enabled King Alfred, against all the odds, to defeat the Vikings, and to convert his West Saxon kingdom into the realm of England. Whether or not Starkey has in mind a Dark Age Big Society, he is certainly here voicing the 19th-century view of what marked out Britain from the earliest times as a distinctive polity. Bishop Stubbs, who in 1870 instituted the Oxford History syllabus, provided students with a "primary source reader" and an accompanying textbook that laid out the constitutional history of England. In the negotiations between the king and his subjects across the medieval centuries could be plotted the slow but sure growth of English liberty, to be enshrined in the development of Parliament, and to be exported across the world in Stubbs's own era. 

This is, then, Whig history, with its stern faith in the progress of ideas and the amelioration of humankind. It's exhilarating to find it expounded so unapologetically by Starkey, but we should also remember that Whiggery in this form has been unsustainable for 80 years or so, ever since the publication in 1929 (one year before 1066 and All That) of Lewis Namier's The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. The founder of Tory history, Namier showed that, in politics, ideological considerations are much less important than the pursuit of self-interest through the development of patronage networks. The early history of the present coalition government — think of that first press conference in the Downing Street garden or the Lib Dem U-turn on tuition fees — is a textbook illustration of the pertinence of Namier's approach, in Britain or anywhere else. Tory history, then, is awkwardly at odds with the Whiggish narrative championed by Gove, which seeks to connect "the struggles of the past" with "the liberties of the present".

The tension between Whig and Tory perspectives seems to be one experienced by Starkey himself. He made his name as an historian in the Tory mode, bursting onto the scene in the early 1980s. As an A Level student, I heard him speak and still remember the adrenalin rush produced by his gleeful trashing of the verities about the Tudor revolution in government canonised by his own former supervisor, Geoffrey Elton. What Starkey realised was that, for all that historians might talk of institutional change, the Tudor world was still one of personal monarchy and household government. "Control of access [to the king] and the wiping of the royal bottom" went hand in hand. The men, and occasionally women, behind the throne, such as Roger of Salisbury, Cardinal Wolsey or Sarah Marlborough, were the real architects of monarchy. Scratch the surface of Crown and Country, and something of the Tory in Starkey is still there.