David Starkey - Early Years and Education

Early Years and Education

David Starkey was born on 3 January 1945 in Kendal. 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. Robert, the son of a cotton spinner, was a foreman in a washing-machine factory, while Elsie followed in her father's footsteps and became a cotton weaver, and later a cleaner. 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. The classic weak father, if you like. He wasn't a weak man, but 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 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".

The Tudors simply is this - it is a most glorious and wonderful soap opera. It makes the House of Windsor look like a dolls house tea party, it really does. And so these huge personalities, you know, the whole future of countries turn on what one man feels like when he gets out of bed in the morning - just a wonderful, wonderful personalisation of politics.

He excelled during his time at Kendal Grammar School, winning debating prizes and appearing in school plays. Although he showed an early inclination toward science, he chose instead to study history. A scholarship enabled his entry into Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he gained a first, a PhD and a Fellowship. Starkey was fascinated by King Henry VIII, and his thesis centred around the Tudor monarch's inner household. His doctoral supervisor was Professor Geoffrey Elton, an expert in Tudor studies. 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. The professor 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."