Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty

by Alexander Larman

St. Martin’s Press 2024

Alexander Larman concludes the trio of books he began with The Crown in Crisis and continued with The Windsors at War with his latest book, Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty, an enigmatic title, considering that the House of Windsor never possessed any of the former and studiously avoided any of the latter. Since The Crown in Crisis dealt with the Abdication Crisis, when the feckless young Prince of Wales came to the throne as King Edward VIII and promptly abdicated so he could live with his twice-divorced American paramour, and since The Windsors at War dealt with Edward VIII’s unhappy successor, his brother George VI, during the dark years of the Second World War, readers can rightly anticipate that Power and Glory will deal with that strange in-between interval from VE Day in 1945 to the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

No reader of those earlier two volumes will come to this third expecting serious history, and Larman won’t surprise them. True, Larman consults plenty of serious histories, as well as letters and other primary documents, but he waters down the results with banal generalities, tired cliches, and plenty of fiction.  

This is inexcusable but understandable. Tripe about Royals has always done brisk business, and despite having been surrounded by vapid chatterboxes for 100 years, the House of Windsor has usually been so opaque to historical inquiry that writers have precious little to get on with other than tripe. For the most part, the Royals don’t speak unless spoken to, never give interviews, and take a cavalier attitude toward the systematic burning of letters, diaries, memos, account books, and incriminating photos. 

Even so, it is possible to write serious history and biography about them. When it comes to King George VI, for instance, Sarah Bradford produced a mighty strong volume thirty years ago. That volume contained tripe; there’s almost no avoiding that, but it was nevertheless a serious work by a serious biographer. 

Larman, by contrast, is a Court gossip with uppity pretensions. His tone throughout Power and Glory varies between unctuous fake-familiarity, straining attempts at witty wordplay (the Earl of Mountbatten is repeatedly referred to as “Uncle Dickie,” but also as “the ever-mounting Mountbatten”), and smarmy sentimentality so overripe it make BBC Coronation Day commentary sound austere. 

His waspishness occasionally pays off. His dislike of the abdicated Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, simmers and bubbles in Power and Glory, and since in these final years of George VI’s reign the Duke and his appalling Duchess were always making some kind of squabbling trouble for the royal family, there’s plenty of this dislike to go around. The Duke of Windsor deserves every bit of this authorial contempt, and Larman is at his most readable when he’s dishing it out. 

Unfortunately, that same tittering tone trivializes all his other topics. Sometimes the results are unintentionally funny, as when he clarifies that the relationship between the young Elizabeth and her ancient Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “wholly platonic.” But usually the combination of wheedling innuendo and hackneyed pomposity just grates. When George VI dies, Larman writes, “The king was dead. Long live the queen” — and the reader groans. What possible purpose can writing like this serve?

It’s an answerable question, naturally: this kind of writing is both easy to churn out (“the king was dead. Long live the queen” - Lord give us strength) and popular among the Royal-boosters who browse the bookstores. Books for this type ooze their syrup so smoothly and so numbingly that ridiculous enormities just slide right by like Sunday sermons. “During these last months the King walked with death as if death were a friend, an acquaintance whom he recognized and did not fear,” Larman writes about the death of King George VI, echoing (but neither quoting nor crediting) Winston Churchill’s famously overblown encomium. “In the end death came as a friend, and after a happy day of sunshine and sport, and after ‘good night’ to those who loved him best, he fell asleep as every man and woman who strives to fear God and nothing else in the world may hope to do.” 

This is pure courtier-drivel, and although 70 years ago it might have struck a sappy note, in 2024 it’s nearly incomprehensible, since all the most recent surveys demonstrate that atheists outnumber believers in the UK by a whopping margin. It readies the reader for the inevitable use of “the new Elizabethan era” non-ironically, and sure enough, they get it as Larman’s narrative breathlessly heaves and simpers its way to the queen’s coronation. About that era, he fatuously allows, “her reign would not be without controversy, incident, or upset,” (what single day of anyone’s life is without incident?) but goes on to slather on the piety: “… but never would she be regarded by her loyal and adoring subjects as anything other than an inspiration to them all, right up until her death in September 2022.” This is mind-boggling; even readers who know nothing about Queen Elizabeth II will remember, as just one example of her subjects not exactly adoring her, the outrage at her frigidity after the death of Princess Diana. 

By the time the story reaches the Coronation, Larman is in full histrionic mode, utterly useless to any reader seeking actual history. “It was time for the queen to embrace her destiny,” Larman writes. “She looked around art her ladies-in-waiting and smiled reassuringly. ‘Ready girls?’” (Sounds good, doesn’t it? No evidence, of course, but it’s just what you’d want her to say). “Then they stepped forward into the abbey and processed into immortality.” 

Power and Glory is even thinner and chattier than the previous two volumes, and it raises the dismaying prospect of Larman writing three books about Elizabeth’s reign. God save the queen.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News