This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The hearts of patriots will swell at the title of Sceptred Isle, the words of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt ringing in their ears. Gaunt’s speech in Richard II has become familiar as a paean to British exceptionalism: a dying man’s counsel to his king for the good of “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”. In choosing her title, Helen Carr sets the tone of the book well, announcing that this is to be an unabashedly national history, nodding to one of the three monarchs who will dominate her narrative.
Though there are brief forays into France, in the context of dynastic marriages and the hundred years war, the focus never strays far from the “sceptred isle”. Academic historians may cavil at this decision, but they are not the intended audience. There is value in rebalancing the tide of global history — the British public are hungry to learn about their history and most will welcome her pruning the impossibly complex web of medieval trading leagues and alliances.
Even within the academy, the viability of serious reflections on England’s complex identity has been proven by works such as Robert Tombs’s The English and their History. Sceptred Isle is not an ideological project, but its quiet confidence in telling our nation’s story is an implicit rebuff to the view that history must always be transnational or preoccupied with cultural theory.
Carr’s focus falls on the last trio of plantagenet kings — Edward II, Edward III and Richard II — whose reigns held distinctive challenges: “One was corrupted by power, another overexerted his and another demonstrated that power wielded through violence and fear is only ever temporary.” Sweeping generalisations like this are common; and the book tends towards anecdote, often recounting lurid medieval executions: flayings, boilings, castrations, burnings.
This may frustrate specialists, but since Carr wants her readers to “come away from this book feeling they have come to know the characters as human beings and can reflect with empathy upon the world they lived in”, it seems churlish to criticise her for dodging nuance. Sceptred Isle has no pretensions to be an academic work, and those who want to get their head around the fiscal treatment of the wool staple or bury themselves in scholastic arcana are looking in the wrong place.
The book is structured in five sections, each a period of change defined by the politics of state. Overlaid on these divisions are the reigns of the monarchs. Edward II is weak, characterised by his need to rule with a favourite; he repeats the same mistake twice, advancing first Piers Gaviston, then Hugh Despencer.
Here, Carr is thoughtful in questioning claims that Edward II was homosexual, noting the absence of substantive evidence and that the charge of sodomy was a common slander to toss at enemies. Edward III appears as a strong king who enlarges England’s borders, fashioning himself as King Arthur redivivus.
With hindsight, she draws out the futility and cost of these dynastic skirmishes in a world about to be riven by disease. Richard II begins as a weak and distracted boy-king but transfigures into a despot on a collision course with the English nobility.
The strength of the book is its engaging imagining of events and the motivations of its cast of figures, who jump out of the record like characters in the bard’s history plays. Carr has an eye for vivid details, such as the Countess of Buchan dangling from a high tower in a crown-shaped cage as retribution for Robert the Bruce’s coronation or the tragic irony of each of the de Clare sisters being widowed by the other’s husband.
Whilst the title of Sceptred Isle is apposite, its “new history” subtitle seems less wisely chosen. The work breaks no new ground and allusions to “pandemic” do little to disguise the fact that this is a rather old-fashioned history, concerned above all else with the doings of kings and queens.
As Carr’s great-grandfather, historian E. H. Carr, maintained, there is a good deal to recommend the study of high politics and diplomacy in the past, but readers seeking a revisionist take or original source-work will be disappointed. The prologue and epilogue describe moments of exhumation and frame the book with an Arthurian prophesy. Perhaps Carr, too, sees herself as digging up English kings who are but myths to us, then breathing life into them on her pages like a modern-day Malory.
