David Starkey facts for kids

Quick facts for kids David Starkey CBE
Starkey when a lecturer at LSE in the early 1980s
Born	David Robert Starkey (1945-01-03) 3 January 1945 (age 79) Kendal, Westmorland, England
Occupation	Historian, television personality
Alma mater	Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (BA, PhD)
Partner	James Brown (from 1994; died 2015)

David Robert Starkey CBE (born 3 January 1945) is an English historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before reading history at Cambridge on a scholarship. There he specialised in Tudor history, writing a thesis on King Henry VIII's household. From Cambridge, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer in history until 1998. He has written several books on the Tudors.

Starkey first appeared on television in 1977. While a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, his acerbic tongue earned him the sobriquet of "rudest man in Britain"; his frequent appearances on Question Time have been received with criticism and applause. Starkey has presented several historical documentaries. In 2002, he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 for 25 hours of programming, and in 2011 was a contributor on the Channel 4 series Jamie's Dream School.

Starkey was widely censured for a comment he made during a podcast interview with Darren Grimes in June 2020, for which he later apologised. Immediately afterwards, he resigned as an honorary fellow of his alma mater, Fitzwilliam College, had several honorary doctorates and fellowships revoked, book contracts and memberships of learned societies cancelled, and his Medlicott Medal withdrawn.

Early years and education

Starkey was born on 3 January 1945 in Kendal, Westmorland. He is the only child of Robert Starkey and Elsie Lyon, Quakers who had married 10 years previously in Bolton, at a Friends meeting house. His father, the son of a cotton spinner, was a foreman in a washing-machine factory, while his mother followed in her father's footsteps and became a cotton weaver and later a cleaner. They were both born in Oldham and moved to Kendal in the 1930s during the Great Depression. He was raised in an austere and frugal environment of near-poverty, with his parents often unemployed for long periods of time; an environment which, he later stated, taught him "the value of money". Starkey is equivocal about his mother, describing her as both "wonderful", in that she helped develop his ambition, and "monstrous", intellectually frustrated and living through her son. "She was a wonderful but also very frightening parent. Finally, she was a Pygmalion. She wanted a creature, she wanted something she had made." Her dominance contrasted sharply to his father, who was "poetic, reflective, rather solitary...as a father he was weak." Their relationship was "distant", but improved after his mother's death in 1977.

Starkey was born with two club feet. One was fixed early, while the other had to be operated on several times. He also suffered from polio. He suffered a nervous breakdown at secondary school, aged 13, and was taken by his mother to a boarding house in Southport, where he spent several months recovering. Starkey blamed the episode on the unfamiliar experience of being in a "highly competitive environment". He ultimately excelled at Kendal Grammar School, winning debating prizes and appearing in school plays.

Although he showed an early inclination towards science, he chose instead to study history. A scholarship enabled his entry into Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he gained a first-class degree, a PhD and a fellowship.

Starkey was fascinated by King Henry VIII, and his doctoral thesis focused on the Tudor monarch's inner household. His supervisor was Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, an expert on the Tudor period. Starkey claimed that with age his mentor became "tetchy" and "arrogant". In 1983, when Elton was awarded a knighthood, Starkey derided one of his essays, Cromwell Redivivus, and Elton responded by writing an "absolutely shocking" review of a collection of essays Starkey had edited. Starkey later expressed his remorse over the spat: "I regret that the thing happened at all."

Career

Starkey was a fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge from 1970 to 1972. Bored at Cambridge, he secured a position as a lecturer in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics in 1972. He ended his 30-year career as a university teacher in 1998. Having already written and presented the 1984 Channel 4 documentary series This Land of England, he began to write and present several history documentaries for BBC television, beginning with the Indie Award winning Henry VIII (1998).

From 1995, he spent three years at Talk Radio UK, presenting Starkey on Saturday, later Starkey on Sunday.

Starkey is well known for his historical analyses of Henry VIII and his Court

His first television appearance was in 1977, on Granada Television's Behave Yourself with Russell Harty.

In 2002, he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 to produce 25 hours of television, including Monarchy, a chronicle of the history of English kings and queens from Anglo-Saxon times onward. He presented the 2009 series Henry: Mind of a Tyrant, which Brian Viner, a reviewer for the Independent, called "highly fascinating". In an interview about the series for the Radio Times, Starkey complained that too many historians had focused not on Henry, but on his wives.

In 1984, Starkey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 1994 a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was also made an Honorary Fellow by his Cambridge College, Fitzwilliam College in 2006. From 2007 to 2015 he was Honorary Visiting Professor of History at the University of Kent and subsequently Lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College (2017), Visiting Professor of History of Canterbury Christ Church University (2018–20) and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Buckingham (2019–20). He has worked as curator on several exhibitions, including an exhibit in 2003 on Elizabeth I, following which he had lunch with her namesake, Elizabeth II. Several years later he told a reporter that the monarch had no interest in her predecessors, other than those who followed her great-grandfather, Edward VII. "I don't think she's at all comfortable with anybody – I would hesitate to use the word intellectual – but it's useful. I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture – you remember: 'every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' I think the queen reaches for her mask." His remarks were criticised by Penny Junor, a royal biographer, and Robert Lacey, a royal historian.

On 25 June 2012, Starkey gave his lecture 'Head of Our Morality: why the twentieth-century British monarchy matters' at The Marc Fitch Lectures.

Personal life

Starkey lived for many years with his partner, James Brown, a publisher and book designer, until the latter's death in 2015. The couple had three homes: a house in Highbury, a manor house in Kent, and another in Chestertown, Maryland, US. Starkey previously lived at John Spencer Square in Canonbury, Islington.

Honours

Starkey was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2007 Birthday Honours for services to history.

Commonwealth honours

Commonwealth honours

Country	Date	Appointment	Post-nominal letters
United Kingdom	2007	Commander of the Order of the British Empire	CBE

Scholastic

University degrees

Location	Date	School	Degree
England		Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	First-class honours Bachelor of Arts (BA) in History
England		Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in History

Chancellorships, visitorships, governorships, rectorships and fellowships

Location	Date	School	Position
England	until 2015	University of Kent	Honorary Visiting Professor of History
England	2006 – 3 July 2020	Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	Honorary Fellow
England	until 3 July 2020	Canterbury Christ Church University	Visiting Professor of History

Honorary degrees

Location	Date	School	Degree	Status
England	21 July 2004	University of Lancaster	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)	Revoked on 24 July 2020
England	11 July 2006	University of Kent	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)	Revoked in 2020
England	March 2019	University of Buckingham	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)	Revoked on 3 July 2020

Memberships and fellowships

Learned societies

Location	Date	Organisation	Position
United Kingdom	1984 – 13 July 2020	Royal Historical Society	Fellow (FRHistS)
United Kingdom	1994 – 6 July 2020	Society of Antiquaries of London	Fellow (FSA)
United Kingdom	1996 – 2005	The Society for Court Studies	President

Museums and trusts

Location	Date	Organisation	Position
United Kingdom	2008 – 3 July 2020	Mary Rose Museum	Trustee and Hon. Commodore
United Kingdom	2005 – 2020'	National Maritime Museum	Hon. Commodore

Awards

Location	Date	Institution	Award
United Kingdom	2001; withdrawn on 3 July 2020	The Historical Association	The Medlicott Medal

Work

Television

• Henry VIII (1998, revised 2001)
• Elizabeth (2000)
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2001)
• Edward and Mary: The Unknown Tudors (2002)
• David Starkey: Reinventing the Royals (2002)
• Monarchy by David Starkey (2004–2007)
• Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant (2009)
• Kate and William: Romance and the Royals (2011)
• Jamie's Dream School (2011)
• The Churchills (2012)
• David Starkey's Music and Monarchy (2013)
• Britain's Tudor Treasure: A Night at Hampton Court, co-presented with Lucy Worsley (2015)
• David Starkey's Magna Carta (2015)
• Reformation: Europe's Holy War (2017)

Applications

• Kings and Queens by David Starkey for iPhone and iPad (2011)