In the book's peroration, Starkey nails his colours artfully to the mast. On the one hand, he shows open disdain for the modern monarchy — not only for its feeble pursuit of matrimonial happiness over dynastic duty, but also for the shallowness of its historical sense.
Traditions such as Trooping the Colour are promoted by the Crown as "venerable", when in fact they are but a few decades old. The level of ignorance displayed by the House of Windsor in the face of some 1,500 years of monarchy in England clearly offends Starkey. Then, unexpectedly, a reversal: in Prince Charles's personal sponsorship of the restoration of Dumfries House, when all state mechanisms have failed, Starkey sees a glimmer of respect for the past and so of hope for the future.
Neatly, this conclusion brings Starkey into line with coalition policy on the privatisation of higher education. He cheers on the (enforced) return to Victorian philanthropic values in the funding of arts and humanities teaching. But here one can read Starkey against himself. If it shows one thing, Crown and Country demonstrates that it is the bond between government and people which defines the English polity, and which, in particular, is the base for the extraordinary wealth of England. Some kings — especially William the Conqueror — extracted this wealth by force. Others who betrayed trust and tried to extort — King John, Charles I — met with a bad end. The really successful ones, such as the William of Orange who conquered England in 1688 — found a way to win through collaboration. William came to the throne in a constitutional crisis, where the duty to obedience to King James II was thrown into confusion by his tyrannical insistence on the promotion of his own religion, Catholicism. Within four years, William had not only secured the throne, but managed to broker a power-sharing deal with his subjects, and to raise unprecedented tax revenues of £4 million.
This, Starkey says, was the key to turning England into Britain and Britain into a world power. Tax, not philanthropy, opened on to greatness. Thus spake, in so many words, the 50,000 parents, teachers and students on the streets of London last month.
H. E. Marshall's aspiration for readers of Our Island Story was that "when you grow up, you will want to read for yourselves the beautiful big histories which have helped me write this little book for little people". But there will be no big, shared histories, unless Gove has the courage of his convictions to insist that education, including higher education, is a public good, for which the public purse should be required to pay.
