Simon Schama - A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603 v. 1

History clings tight but it also kicks loose, writes Simon Schama at the outset of this, the first book in his three-volume journey into Britains past. Disruption as much as persistence is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endurance, its counter-point, seen from the twenty-first, must be alteration.

Change sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. At the heart of this history lie questions of compelling importance for Britains future as well as its past: what makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain one country or many? Has British history unfolded at the edge of the world or right at the heart of it?

Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. They are all caught on the rich and teeming canvas on which Schama paints his brilliant portrait of the life of the British people: for in the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness... Nature expects a full grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life we should not enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, The History of England

Those conquered kings pass furiously away; gods die in flesh and spirit and live in print each library a misquoted tyrants home.

ROBERT LOWELL, End of a Year from History

HISTORY CLINGS TIGHT but it also kicks loose. Disruption, as much as persistence, is its proper subject. So although the great theme of British history seen from the twentieth century is endurance, its counter-point, seen from the twenty-first, must be alteration.

Both hanging on and letting go made themselves felt in the two public ceremonies a drizzly coronation and a frost-nipped funeral which spoke most powerfully to my post-war generation about what it meant to be British. Admittedly, in June 1953 a bracing sense of change was not the most obviously dominant mood. Two years before, in the Festival of Britain (a self-consciously centennial commemoration of the Victorian Great Exhibition of 1851), there had been a strenuous official attempt to persuade us eight-year-olds, in our grey flannel shorts and saggy knee-socks, that we should now think of ourselves as New Elizabethans. The heraldic symbol of the coming technological Valhalla was the Skylon Brancusi out of Isambard Kingdom Brunel a slender steel cylinder, tapering to points at both ends like an industrial bobbin and suspended by cables so light that it seemed to float a few feet over the South Bank promenade with no visible means of support. But in the spring of 1953 bewitching visions of a sleekly engineered scientific future did, indeed, weigh nothing beside the vast machinery of reverence being cranked up for the coronation of Elizabeth II. To be sure, fitful efforts had been made to advertise the event as a moment of rejuvenating change. But no one was really fooled. For all the communiqus about an association of free nations, the Commonwealth over which the young queen presided was, transparently, the brave face put on the loss of empire. The parade of pith-helmeted and bush-hatted troops from the loyal dominions along with more exotic detachments from what were still, in 1953, known as British possessions dutifully trotted along the Mall in their allotted order a post-imperial durbar in all but name. And when the queen set off on her post-coronation world tour, primary school children like us followed her progress by sticking little flags in all the many regions of the globe still (no matter what their ostensible status in the modern world) reassuringly tinted the dusty rose-red of the old empire. In William McElwees The Story of England, published in 1954, it was still possible to look forward to the peaceful evolution of backward races throughout the empire made possible under British leadership. And the faces behind the net curtains in Omdurman Gardens and Mafeking Close were still those of the colonizers, not the colonized.

There was one gawky contemporary cuckoo growing apace in the nest of tradition, and that, of course, was television. But although the broadcast of the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, seen by 27 million viewers within Britain and as many as a quarter of the worlds population in all, was an epochal moment in the history of mass communications, it very nearly didnt happen. For months the queen herself and all her principal advisers let it be known that while they were prepared to have the processions to and from the abbey televised (as had also been the case with her wedding in 1947), the ceremony of the crowning itself was to be preserved in its sacrosanct mystery from the common electronic gaze. Eventually swayed, it has been suggested, by the intervention of Richard Dimbleby she relented. But to re-run that television coverage is to see just how completely the latent cheekiness of the medium was subdued by the enfolding stateliness of the coronation rituals. The cameras were put in their place and made to stand up straight where they were told and to pay attention when they were bidden. Anything as intimate as a close-up of the queen herself, needless to say, was strictly prohibited, so that many of the most memorable shots of the ceremony are the remote views from the galleries high above the nave, peering down at the grandeur. And whatever the credits might have read, the real producers of the event were the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Chairman of the Coronation Executive Committee; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who was intent on maximizing the mystical and sacrificial aspects of the rite; the Grand Chamberlain, the Marquess of Cholmondeley; and, most important of all, the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, who was required to rule on matters as critical as whether rabbit-fur was an acceptable substitute for ermine on the trim of aristocratic robes. (It was.) Over the black-and-white pictures (which themselves have the quality of official state photographs) poured, with honeyed smoothness, the deferentially modulated tones of the commentators-royal: the ripely hushed baritone of Richard Dimbleby for the abbey solemnities and the excitable, lilting tenor of Wynford Vaughan Thomas for the street procession. For that matter, the twenty-seven-year-old at the centre of all this seemed herself to have been crystallized, as if in some ceremonial alembic, into the role of monarch, the open, often broadly smiling face of the young woman settling into the impassive mask of royalty. Millions of the loyal, gathered in front rooms, peering at the 9-inch screens that had been magnified with strap-on image enhancers, watched the heavily crowned, massively mantled figure, the train flowing endlessly behind her, as she swayed down the nave of Westminster Abbey to the roar of the choir and the oceanic swell of the organ, the ancient Saxon-Frankish shout May the queen live forever echoing off the columns.