Courtiers: Nine Hundred Years of English Court Life

Hinde is a novelist and author of popular histories, not an academic, but he's also a fan of John Aubrey's Brief Lives. He attempts here, with some success, to compile a similar volume of short biographical sketches of those men and women who gather around any English monarch -- not the military or administrative specialists who actually serve the state rather than the individual, but the persons who used to be regarded as members of the monarch's household. These, he says, are properly "courtiers." Those who were companions of the ruler naturally wielded some reflected political power. Even when the ruler was forced to cede power to Parliament, many parliamentary leaders began their careers in the royal household. His approach is chronological, beginning with Norman and Plantagenet hangers-on like Eudo Dapifer and the Nevilles, and then Yorkists and Lancastrians like Piers Gaveston, Anthony Woodville, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The Tudors had the Boleyns, the Seymours, and the Howards, as well as Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh, and Robert Devereux. The progression continues, with well-known figures like Simon Harcourt, John Churchill, and Fanny Burney alternating with relatively minor players like Anne Vane and the Rev. Francis Willis and his sons. Victoria had John Brown and Henry Ponsonby, of course, and Edward VIII had the son, Frederick Ponsonby. (Hinde declines to discuss the often shadowy figures who surround Elizabeth II.) None of these sketches runs more than a couple of pages, but the effect is cumulative and the reader will gain a feeling for the long-lasting institution of courtiership itself.