Niall Ferguson: belief

Transcript context

…Aren’t queens better? They’re less likely to do wrong and get themselves into trouble? We had Mary, Queen of Scots, who got herself in more trouble than pretty much any monarch I can think of. I don’t think the sample size is large enough. If you look at monarchs — I did this a while back, found a good paper and worked on the data on how monarchs end. They do come to a lot of sticky ends, the women as well as the men, if you do a large enough sample size and look at not just the English kings and queens. I’ve always been a bit allergic to kings and queens as a subject of study because that’s what historians in England are supposed to do. If it’s not got Henry VIII in it, you’re going to struggle for an audience. I’ve studiously avoided writing about monarchs. I once tried to write a book about the royal families, plural, after I’d done the Rothschild book, which is probably my best book. I wanted to do a similar book about the dynasty, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty. This was the German family who somehow became the rulers of most European countries by the later 19th century. They were all related. I went to considerable lengths to prepare that book, which, of course, Queen Victoria was a big part of because she was the matriarch of the Saxe-Coburgs. The problem with the project was that their letters were so much more boring than the Rothschild letters. I would just fall asleep in the royal archives at Windsor. I gathered an enormous amount of material. I drew a wonderful family tree, which I still have, a genealogy of European royalty, which I have outside my office at Hoover, showing that it’s really one family. They just happened to have nearly all the thrones of Europe by 1900. But the letters — they were just full of gossip and hunting stories. I just got on so much better with the Rothschild correspondence. I realized that I didn’t have a great affinity with royal history and steered clear of it for most of my career. It’s probably why I ended up in the United States because American readers are more interested or ready to read about bankers than British readers, who do like kings and queens. What’s going to happen in Northern Ireland? And how do you, as a Scot, maybe understand that situation differently?…

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