Cnut: North Sea King by Ryan Lavelle; James I: Phoenix King by Thomas Cogswell; George I: Lucky King by Tim Blanning

MINOO DINSHAW Cnut: The North Sea King by Ryan Lavelle James I: The Phoenix King by Thomas Cogswell George I: The Lucky King by Tim Blanning

Penguin Monarchs – Allen Lane £12.99 each

Oldie price £9.75 inc p&p

Three of the latest Penguin Monarchs to appear first arrived in England as strangers. Cnut (r. 1016-35) – whose father, the Danish warlord Sweyn Forkbeard, had briefly forced obedience upon the English nobility – repeated the trick with greater success. James I (r. Scotland 1567-1625, England 1603-25), though he preferred to be addressed as King of Great Britain, inherited his larger kingdom after half a lifetime of patient scheming. George I (r. 1714-1727), aka Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, was offered the crown on the steely platter of parliamentary statute, over the heads of the legitimist but Catholic Jacobite claimants.

Penguin has supplied all three of these royal cuckoos with respectably professorial chroniclers. Written, with a few exceptions, by academics, the series reads, with a few exceptions, as if accurately aimed at a general audience. Cnut is unfortunately an exception of the second kind. An author straying into the fog of the early middle ages has broadly two approaches: to enjoy the uncertainty of the adventure with the swashbuckling brio represented by Tom Holland (author of the Penguin Monarch Athelstan) or to establish winter quarters by hunkering down with scant and lawyerly certainties.

Lavelle’s professional conscience impels him towards the more cautious technique. His reader is treated to glimpses of bewitching skaldic verse, a discussion whether the patently bigamous Cnut believed himself to be a good Christian, and a postmodern deconstruction of the myth that Cnut commanded the waves, all without a whiff of character anywhere. Rarely has such a dramatic story been so cleverly and lousily narrated.

One of the more merciful omissions from Lavelle’s Cnut is too much information on hunting; the cunning old Viking seems to have preferred relatively sedentary pleasures. The sport of kings provides a wealth of documentary evidence about its crowned devotees but, while reading Cogswell’s James I, I did wonder if the study of the chase sometimes gluts more than it reveals.

But Cogswell offers a master-class in how to capture the essence of a king, making a convincing, engaging and amusing case that, in James’s case, it boiled down to ‘hunting, books, dogs and favourites’. It is the books that make Cogswell’s little biography so enjoyable: this ‘eminently quotable’ king is permitted with generosity and initiative to speak for himself through his forest of writing and reported speeches.

Cogswell mischievously talks up the idea that James’s relationship with the Duke of Buckingham constituted a kind of private marriage, and perpetuates delectable scandal in a judicious murmur by deciding that Buckingham ‘may have inadvertently compromised [James’s] health’ on the king’s deathbed. It is impossible not to sympathise with this

physically and emotionally handicapped all-but-orphan who outmanoeuvred his Scottish enemies, outlived his English benefactress Elizabeth, and out-talked everybody, achieving contentment as ‘a leading public intellectual’.

Handed a dull brief in George I, Blanning more than maintains his own crown as one of the foremost exegetes of Germanity in Britain. He has his readership well in hand from his subtitle, The Lucky King, neither as dull as Lavelle’s nor as fanciful as Cogswell’s, but plain and intriguing. Blanning makes it fascinatingly clear that Jacobites and High Tories lost the war but won the history, largely succeeding in consigning George to oblivion as a monoglot Teuton boor. This traditional disservice gives his account the freshness of the forgotten.

Before he acceded to the British throne, Georg Ludwig was, in 1694, at the centre of an adulterous and murderous intrigue as gripping as any outrage the Tudors or Stuarts could boast of: the probable assassination of his wife’s Swedish lover, masterminded, in a supreme example of art orchestrating life, by his opera-mad father’s favourite librettist. Blanning’s account of the reign itself is epigrammatic, perverse and brilliant. He wastes no time in making George attractive when there is such rewarding work to be done, being both funny and revelatory about his era.

Light-touch allusion to deep learning leaves the reader buoyant with secondhand expertise – as when Blanning laments that the complex theatres of the Great Northern War, ‘sprawled from Norway to the Black Sea’, have brought about ‘some of the great unreadables of European historiography’. The result is arguably the most readable Penguin Monarch yet, where one might have least expected him.