History – fact or fiction? By Mary Hoffman

 

Most of us in this group, since it started in 2011, have been writers of historical fiction. We’ve had “straight” historians, like John Guy, as guests and some of our number, like Clare Mulley have written non-fiction, Some people do both – and it can be quite confusing.



Take Alison Weir, for example. She, who has also been a guest on The History Girls blog, is a prolific writer on historical subjects such as the Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry Vlll and the Boleyn sisters. But she also writes novels about some of the same characters, notably her Six Tudor Queens sequence about Henry’s notorious marriages.



So how do they differ, since they inevitably share the same events and characters? I’ve had an opportunity to compare two books that cover some of the same period to see how a novelist chooses to write about the same plots that appear in a historian’s account of the identical events. The novelist is Alison Weir herself, in her new novel, published last May by Headline, Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose. The non-fiction writer is Michèle Schindler, whose De la Pole Father and Son: the Duke, the Earl and the Struggle for Power, was published by Amberley last December.



So, two books about Plantagenet history and those famous roses, partly invented by Shakespeare, who was more a writer of fiction than he was a historian. Elizabeth of York was the daughter of Edward lV and his wife, Elizabeth Wydeville and was destined to become the wife of Henry Vll and Queen of England, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. Weir’s novel about her is the first in a trilogy.



John de la Pole did not feature in a play by Shakespeare, although his father did. But it’s not that father and son combo Schindler writes about. That was William, the duke of Suffolk who stood proxy for Henry Vl at his wedding to Margaret of Anjou. No, it is John who inherited his murdered father’s title and married another Elizabeth, not Edward iV’s daughter but his sister. Are you muddled enough yet? John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, became Elizabeth of York’s uncle when he married her aunt.



The titles don’t really help: Weir’s doesn’t sound like a novel, although “The Last White Rose” does. Schindler’s might have been “The de la Pole dynasty,” since it begins with William, goes on to John and ends with John Junior, who was Richard lll’s named heir. Those de la Poles continued to be a thorn in the side of Henry Tudor for many years.



But if we look at 1470, we can see how different a novel is from a work of history. In this year, the Earl of Warwick (the “kingmaker”), conspired with George, Duke of Clarence to overthrow Edward lV, with a long-term view of putting George on the throne. In the short term, they made do with releasing the previous king, Henry Vl, from the Tower of London and parading him through the streets as the true king. Edward had fled to Burgundy with his younger brother Richard and Queen Elizabeth, heavily pregnant, had sought sanctuary with her mother and daughters in Westminster. 

Elizabeth Wydeville

 
These events come 130 pages in to Schindler’s book and are described thus: “This must have been a tense time for John and Elizabeth. Since the party seeking exile in Burgundy included two of Elizabeth’s brothers, she must have been very worried about their fate…[T]hey would have learnt that Edward’s heavily pregnant wife, Elizabeth Woodville [sic], and their three daughters had fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, that Elizabeth gave birth to a son shortly afterwards and that Henry Vl had been released from confinement in the Tower after five long years and reinstalled on the throne.”

This paragraph in the de la Pole book summarises twenty pages and more of the opening chapter of Weir’s novel, where the reader is thrust in medias res, as the princess Elizabeth and her sisters are bundled into a wherry and taken down the river, where they are warmly welcomed by the Abbot and given shelter. The long-awaited son and heir is born at the beginning of the second chapter.

But, since Elizabeth is only rising five, a lot of the history that has gone before can by explained to her by her grandmother and Weir can take the reader through recent events by this device, which she does very skilfully.

The elder Suffolk is barely mentioned in Weir’s novel, unsurprisingly since Schindler tells us how he kept himself out of politics and was not often at court. But there are occasional references in the novel to “Aunt Suffolk and her son Lincoln” and the younger John assumes an ever more important role. He was the Earl of Lincoln and would have inherited his father’s title if he had not come to a sticky end. 

Coat of Arms of John, 2nd Duke of Suffolk

 

One thing that emerges both from the history book and the novel is the sheer number of children born to noble and royal women and the number of babies and children lost. John Senior and his wife Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, had thirteen children. Elizabeth of York’s parents had ten together and Elizabeth Wydevile had already had two sons by her first husband, Lord Grey.

What the novelist does is show you that a factual history can’t (and mustn’t): the emotions stirred by every birth and death. Even, or perhaps especially, the loss of an older child, is a cause for great grief. Here is Weir describing the death of Elizabeth’s closest sister, Mary, at fifteen:

“Elizabeth slept in her chair that night. She woke to find Mother rocking a corpse in her arms, keening softly, her cheeks streaked with tears. She burst out wailing.

Father came running, summoned by the doctor. He folded Elizabeth in his arms and held her tightly. ‘She is with God now. You must be glad for her.’ His voice broke, and he turned to the bed. ‘Our sweet angel is at peace, Beth.’ He embraced both the Queen and his lost child, then gave way to the most piteous weeping.”

There are many such losses described in the novel - siblings, infants, young adults - and it is touching to read in the Autor’s Note that Weir herself lost a son in 2020, which must have informed her accounts of royal grief.

Back to John Junior, Earl of Lincoln, who in 1480 married Margaret FitzAlan, a union arranged by the King, Edward lV. His wife was much younger than his eighteen years and they did not live together. Indeed his marriage doesn’t seem to have affected the Earl’s life at all and his star was rising at court. He played a part in the baptism ceremony for Bridget, the youngest child of the King and Queen. 

Edward lV

 

Then came the shock of the unexpected death of the King in 1483. “The King’s eyes had closed. His face looked grey; his lips were blue. Gradually, his rasping breath slowed – and then there was silence.” Or, as Schindler succinctly puts it, “Edward’s death was sudden and shocking.” He was forty-one.

John Junior was chief mourner at the King’s funeral and soon came out in support of his uncle Richard of Gloucester as the new king. One of the new king’s closest friends, Francis Lovell, had been John’s foster brother and they were both part of the new court.

Elizabeth of York, however, was back in sanctuary at Westminster with her mother and siblings. In Weir’s novel, Richard is referred to as “the Usurper” and Elizabeth is stunned that her kindly “Uncle Gloucester” could have behaved so badly towards her family. 

 

So we come to the most crucial events in Richard’s brief reign: the disappearance of “the Princes in the Tower” and Richard’s plan to marry his niece. The princes, Edward’s heir and his younger brother, the Duke of York, were kept in the Tower of London while, in justification of his seizing the throne, Richard claimed they were bastards, as King Edward had made an earlier, secret, marriage, before wedding Elizabeth Wydeville.

Weir’s novel is divided into sections: Princess, Bastard, Queen and Matriarch, the second section set during her uncle’s reign. Her mother is convinced that Richard has had her sons murdered and is prostrate with grief. Their old life has disappeared and everything is uncertain.

In Schindler’s book, John Junior “chose to remain loyal to his uncle,” as did his parents. In Weir’s novel, Elizabeth embraces all the different theories that have been put forward about the princes’ fate, beginning by sharing her mother’s belief. Then, when she has returned to court, Richard convinces her that the boys were put to death on the orders of Buckingham and he knew nothing about it.

Later, after Richard’s death, she suspects that her husband to be, Henry Tudor, or his mother might have been responsible for removing such strong claimants to the throne, smoothing the way for his accession. Towards the end of the novel, she hears evidence from relatives of Sir James Tyrell that he commissioned two named thugs to carry out Richard’s orders.

When Richard’s heir, the Prince of Wales, dies in 1484 he makes John Junior his heir. John is heir presumptive anyway, as the oldest son of Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. (He is also the eldest living grandson of Richard Duke of York).

Soon after their son died, Anne Neville, the King’s wife, also succumbed, probably to tuberculosis. But before she died, rumours were flying around that Richard planned to marry his own niece, Elizabeth of York.

This is a major plotline in Weir’s novel. Quite apart from what seems to us like incest and the need for a Papal dispensation, how could Elizabeth even consider marrying the man who usurped her young brother’s throne and probably killed him and his younger brother? And yet the historical Elizabeth did write a letter to the Duke of Norfolk to advance her marriage to the king, vowing she was “his in heart and in thoughts, in [body] and in all.” 

Elizabeth of York

 

Weir’s explanation is reasonably convincing: Richard had been a favourite uncle when he was Duke of Gloucester and Elizabeth couldn’t rid herself of the idea that he was kind and loving. He had explained away the absence of her brothers by blaming Buckingham and he implied in his proposal to her that his wife, her cousin Anne Neville, knowing she was dying, had virtually blessed the match, encouraging him to take another wife, one young and healthy, to give him more heirs. It works, more or less.

Schindler barely mentions this part of the story, dismissing it as rumour. And anyway, in January 1485, Richard let it be known he was pursuing a marriage with a Portuguese princess. Shortly after Anne’s funeral he made a public announcement that he had never intended to marry his niece. It looks remarkably as if he had flown a kite and been deterred by the negative public reaction. 

Richard 111

 

Richard was famously defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor claimed the throne by might and right. His claim was pretty tenuous, as, with the deaths of the princes and the impossibility of the young Earl of Warwick inheriting, since his father Clarence had been attainted as a traitor, the rightful heir was Elizabeth of York. Weir is excellent on this angle, with Elizabeth wanting to reign jointly with Henry and not just to strengthen his claim by their marriage. And marry him she did, though her coronation was put off for some years.

And what of John de la Pole, Richard’s heir presumptive as long as the Yorks were excluded by the parliament ruling that they were illegitimate? Although the new king imprisoned several Yorkists, he seems, as Schindler informs us to have taken rather a shine to John Jnr and given him positions at court. His trust soon proved misplaced, as Lincoln and his foster brother Francis Lovell were fiercely loyal to the dead Richard and were plotting Henry’s overthrow.

Some embryonic rebellions fizzled out but then the opportunity came with the claims of Lambert Simnel. Simnel was a Pretender from Ireland, who claimed to be the young Earl of Warwick. The problem was that Warwick was still imprisoned in the Tower. But the boy had been so well coached that Henry suspected another Yorkist was behind the plot and his eye fell on John Junior. 

Henry Vll

 

Indeed, Weir does not buy Schindler’s notion that Henry found Lincoln trustworthy: “He means to be king, Bessy. I have suspected it all along.” Lincoln had fled to Burgundy under protection of the Duchess, Margaret, Elizabeth’s aunt, who seems to have been convinced by Simnel’s imposture. Simnel was crowned in Dublin as “King Edward” and Lincoln and Lovell’s forces joined and fought the king’s army at Stoke in June 1487.

It was to be fatal for Lincoln, who died fighting bravely, thwarting Henry of the chance to have him executed. The king took no revenge on John Senior but when he died and his son Edmund inherited the dukedom, Henry took back all John Junior’s possessions. Edmund was so short of funds that Henry demoted him from Duke to Earl and turned the whole family against him.

First Elizabeth John’s widow and then her sons Edmund and Richard fled to the Duchess of Burgundy. The unfortunate William was imprisoned in the Tower where he stayed till his death in 1539. Both his brothers continued to make attempts on the English thrones until their deaths. 

Both books are handsomely produced, especially Alison Weir’s novel and both have the family trees, which are so essential to histories and, increasingly, to Historical novels. I think there is room for both for anyone as obsessed with the Plantagenets as I am.

Scripting Hampton Court by Imogen Robertson

I wrote this:

OK - I know that statement needs a bit of unpacking. You see, what this photograph of Base Court at Hampton Court doesn’t show is a series of speakers cunningly hidden under the cobbles alongside the central path and in the wine fountain (out of the picture). It also doesn’t show what they are playing: a rich soundscape of passing carts and horses, the yapping of a lap-dog and the conversations of courtiers, ladies and servants going about their business one morning in 1536.

Eustace Chapuys is extracting gossip from Elizabeth Somerset by the fountain, and later locking horns with the Duke of Norfolk over the refusal of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth to recognise Anne Boleyn as Queen. Thomas Cromwell is interrogating the kitchen boys about the fancies to be served later that day, and the Lord Chamberlain is assigning rooms and chivvying the servants to get on with the unloading of their master’s goods. 

When the team at Hampton Court decided they wanted to recreate in sound the bustle and business of Base Court they turned to design agency Chomko & Rosier, who have already come up with some technologically advanced and sympathetically imagined ways of engaging the public with the context of a particular place, including work for Historic Royal Palaces. They've won awards. So Matt Rosier found a brilliant sound artist called James Bulley, and me.

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a sixteenth century specialist, at all, but before I was a full-time writer I was a TV, film and radio director working on such classics as The Shiny Show and The Numberjacks. Hang on ‘Numberjacks Seaside Adventure’ which I directed between getting the deal for Instruments of Darkness and publication has had 15 MILLION views. Please stand by while I hyperventilate for a bit. 

Just imagine if one in ten of those viewers grew up and bought one of my novels. I’d be J.K. Rowling.

....and I’m back in the room. 

Anyway, I’m still on a number of mailing lists from my TV days, so I saw Matt’s search for potential writers and sold him on my experience working in production to get myself the gig writing for the Base Court project. 

It’s been fascinating. This is a continuous loop of action where visitors might pause for a few seconds, just absorb the atmosphere as they wander by in search of an audio guide, or spend time seeking out bits of gossip and conversation. That means that any conventional ideas of storytelling are out of the window. On the other hand, it all needs to make sense as a coherent whole as invisible characters (Norfolk, Cromwell, the lap-dog) move around the space over the twenty minutes or so the piece runs. 

One of the speaker trenches. Glad I'm not involved in that bit.
Or the specifications for the speakers which I hear were very complicated.

In the end I thought of it like the staging of a ball scene in an opera on a grand stage. Lots of characters and individual members of the chorus have their own sequence of actions around the space, all happening at once, and the viewer decides which bits to focus on, or they let the whole thing wash over them.  In this case what they get to focus on will depend on where they are.

Because the scene is set at a particularly gossipy time (everyone is waiting to see if Anne will produce a son and wondering about Henry’s wandering eye), coming up with the conversations was relatively straight forward. I plunged into the notes from Hampton Court and, of course into the works of some great historians, such as the lovely Alison Weir. I also freely admit that my ideas of the personalities are deeply influenced by Hilary Mantel. Interestingly, I would find that a problem were I writing a novel about the Court, but not on this project. This project is nothing to do with what I think of the period, so it’s wonderfully ego-less compared with the business of writing novels. Also I know Mantel really, really does her research. 

I had, of course, the usual fears about accuracy, but not too badly, because everything I wrote was checked by Tracey Borman. (God, I wish I could get Amanda Vickery to go through my Crowther and Westerman novels. Or maybe not.).

The real joy of the process comes after the writing though. Working with actors again is such a pleasure, they bring so much to the text and convey with an inflection, a breath what would take you forever to get across on the page.

Then there's the edit. The sound I’ve been involved with in the past is designed to come out as a stereo mix from your TV while you sit and watch the pictures. This is a world you can walk around in, and which will sound completely different depending on where you are in the space and when.

Mixing on the move

James did most of the work of putting the piece together, and creating the underlying atmosphere, then we gathered to listen, discuss, move things about, add space, swap lines, find lute music and decide what a goblet being chucked on the cobbles sounds like. The back and forth is great. With novels, after months working in isolation, the whole process of waiting for comments, responding to them, working out the ramifications of changes through a text of 120K words is slow and painstaking. Here decisions are quick, the effects immediate, and the ownership shared. It’s…enlivening.

As with novel editing though, a lot depends on the relationships you have with the people you are working with and at the moment I’ve lucked into working with people I thoroughly like and admire. Which is nice. 

I'm sure I just said something really useful to James about the mix here.
By the way, this is a corner of Hampton Court, not James's studio which is much more comfortable.

I don’t seem to have put them off with my helpful comments yet either. Since recording Base Court, we’ve also been working on both sound and vision elements for the Tudor Kitchens. 

The research and writing has been more of a challenge this time, as it involves delving deep into the specifics and practicalities of this huge operation rather than the skim of gossip, but the same pleasures pertain - having the experts on hand to consult throughout including Richard Fitch and his team, the collaboration with Matt, James and now Kyle Waters on images, and the practical, hands on elements of filming. 

Oi!! You scum.#BoilingHouse pic.twitter.com/RPWJLPCGsE

— Richard Fitch (@tudorcook) February 15, 2018

I still love the megalomaniac’s paradise of world-building in novels, but it is a great and particular pleasure to get out into the world and be part of a team.

Oh and as I have a longstanding and almost Trumpain tendency to try and rope family members into things wherever possible, I just thought I’d point out that the cute little voice of ‘0’ and ‘1’ in that Numberjacks video is now one of the teenaged servant boys being quizzed by Cromwell in Hampton Court. Thank you, Dylan.   

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, the Base Court soundscape is now live, and the Tudor Kitchens should be ready for inspection by early May.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Happy Birthday to Us! By Mary Hoffman and various History Girls

Today is the fifth birthday of the History Girls blog and we want you to celebrate with us, so pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of virtual bubbles:

Grab a slice of virtual cake:

and join us in celebrating the highlights since 1st July 2011.

A few stats first:

We have recently passed the 2 million mark as far as pageviews go! Most of our page views are now from the US, followed by the UK, Germany, France, Russia ... But some are from Ukraine and China.


The most popular post ever has been Leslie Wilson's on Maria von Maltzen, in our second year, which has had an incredible more than 92K hits. I keep telling Leslie she should write a book about this German Resistance heroine.


The History Girls are a shifting group and we have retained only twelve of the original twenty-eight members. We have lost Linda Buckley-Archer, Eve Edwards, Nicky Matthews Browne, Katherine Roberts, Teresa Flavin, Barbara Mitchelhill, Mary Hooper, Harriet Castor, Mary Hooper, Theresa Breslin, Louise Berridge, Emma Darwin, Essie Fox, Eleanor Updale, Dianne Hofmeyr, Louisa Young and Katie Grant, all to the demands of their writing schedules.


In the last five years others have come and gone, like Manda Scott, Kate Lord Brown, Laurie Graham and Tanya Landman. For a current list, see the About Us page.


We have had a stellar list of Guests (always the 29th of the month): Tracy Chevalier (twice), Hilary Mantel, Alison Weir, Helen Castor, Frances Hardinge and a bunch of History Boys including Kevin Crossley-Holland (our first), John Guy, Ian Mortimer and Dan Jones.


We have produced one book, Daughters of Time (Templar 2014) and I've lost count of the number of grandchildren. I'm hoping to put together further collections of essays and publishing them at my new independent house, The Greystones Press.


To celebrate our anniversary, some of the HGs are going to talk about a recently read or favourite historical novel or history book. This is mine:

Not a favourite in the sense I think I'll ever read it again but An Instance of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears is a novel I read recently. It's a long book and saw me through a coach trip, a plane journey, several bedtimes, the return plane and bus and as many bedtimes as it took to finish it.

In a sense, it's a murder mystery. It's set in Oxford in 1663, or rather that is when the events of the plot take place but they are told in four different accounts some twenty years later. They concern the death by poisoning of a don, Robert Grove, the investigation of his murder and the subsequent conviction and execution of a suspect.

With each new account we learn that almost nothing is as we at first believed. It is a masterpiece or convoluted storytelling and erudition, with 17th century post Restoration Oxford perfectly conjured up.

I could say more but it's time to hand over to the next History Girl. When you read this I will be sunning myself on the Island of Rhodes. I may or may not have WiFi and access to the site but I'll certainly raise a glass or cup of something in honour of our fifth birthday.


Catherine Hokin talks about …. Legacy by Susan Kay

I recently rediscovered my copy of this wonderful book which came out in 1985 - it was and, following the re-read, remains one of my favourite historical novels and I don't think it has been surpassed for its characterisation of Elizabeth I. The novel tells the story of Elizabeth and her relationships with the Earls of Leicester and Essex and William Cecil - three men whose destinies, as Kay puts it, belonged to her. These relationships, particularly the one with Leicester, are brilliantly drawn but it is the psychological study of Elizabeth and the impact of her mother's death that really elevate the story into something both gripping and terribly poignant. If you haven't read it, I urge you to - it's one of those rich, multi-layered books that will stay with you for many years


Adele Geras says of Broderick's Report by Philippe Claudel (also well-known as a film director)

[It] is a most unusual novel and completely unputdownable. A stranger arrives in a village, some time after the end of the Second World War. The whole village unravels around him, revealing secrets, horrors committed during the War, dreadful things happening in families and in the world. The setting is deliberately vague and this lends the book some of the atmosphere of a fairy tale, or a myth. It's an unforgettable (and now quite a timely) novel and you will thank me for having drawn it to your attention. I hope it's still in print!

Carol Drinkwater suggests: Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea

It is a sweeping saga of love, betrayal slavery and politics set in New Orleans, the Caribbean.

Allende is captivating. Her breadth of research and story-writing skills are on top form here. I read it while staying on the island of La Réunion which remains a part of France and was once an island of sugar plantations and slavery. So, the location added to the very evocative story.


Michelle Lovric says...

This is not my usual period (which is 18th century Italy) but I was enchanted by the new Chris Cleave novel set in Blitz London and on Malta during World War II. It’s called Everyone Brave is Forgiven. Everything about this book reeks of authenticity – the characters, the conversations and the preoccupations. The emotional engagement is searing. It’s not trying to impose anything on the era but has the effect of pulling the reader into the breathless vortex of the nightly destruction of London and her citizens.


We hope you enjoy these and many more wonderful books and much more history with us over the next five years! Thank you to all our readers and contributors for making the blog what it is.  We'll leave the final word to some of our guests:

Happy 5th Birthday, History Girls! I hope you will have jelly and ice cream. Probably port jelly, and ice cream made using a sorbetière and a spaddle...  Best wishes, Frances Hardinge

 Congratulations to all of you and well done. Charles Palliser

Sending very happy birthday wishes to the History Girls' Blog on your fifth birthday. Five years of bringing history alive and making it rock! All the best for the next five years and more, Alison Weir.

April competition

To win one of five copies of Alison Weir's new book, just answer this question in the Comments section below:

"Which of Henry VIII's wives would you most like to meet, and why?"

Then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

Closing date: 7th May

We are afraid our competitions are open to UK Followers only.

Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen? by Alison Weir

Our April guest is Alison Weir, a prolific historian and novelist. We welcome her warmly to The History Girls.

Alison Weir is the top-selling female historian (and the fifth best-selling historian overall) in the United Kingdom, and has sold over 2.7 million books worldwide. She has published seventeen history books, including The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Princes in the Tower, Elizabeth the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry VIII: King and Court, Katherine Swynford, The Lady in the Tower and Elizabeth of York. Alison has also published five historical novels, including Innocent Traitor and The Lady Elizabeth. Her latest biography is The Lost Tudor Princess, about Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. She is soon to publish Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen, the first in a series of novels about the wives of Henry VIII. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Life Patron of Historic Royal Palaces, and is married with two adult children. 
http://www.alisonweir.org.uk


Katherine of Aragon was the first of Henry VIII’s celebrated wives, but he was not her first husband. In 1501, at sixteen, she had been married to his elder brother, Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, who was nine months younger. The marriage lasted just six months, and the young couple shared a bed on only six or seven occasions, because Arthur was dying.

Katherine’s physician, Dr Alcaraz, later explained that she had emerged from her marriage a virgin because ‘the Prince had been denied the strength necessary to know a woman, as if he was a cold piece of stone, because he was in the final stages of phthisis [consumption]. [Alcaraz] said his limbs were weak and that he had never seen a man whose legs and other bits of his body were so thin.’ In this period tuberculosis was common and Dr Alcaraz would easily have recognised it, so his diagnosis is almost certainly reliable.

It has often been asserted that the traditional view of Arthur being sickly from birth is incorrect, but the historical evidence would appear to support it. Arthur had been a premature baby, born at eight months, and the accounts of the bishops of Winchester for 1486-7 show that his nursery household was established for at least the first six months of his life at Farnham, Surrey, not far from Winchester, where he was born. This was probably because he was weak and needed careful nursing until he was strong enough to be moved elsewhere.

There is no evidence to suggest that Arthur experienced the learning difficulties that can affect premature children, but new research, based on a study of a million births, shows that prematurity can have consequences into adulthood, and that such children have an increased risk of dying in late childhood compared with babies delivered at full term; in late childhood, boys in particular have a seven-fold increased risk of dying. That may not impact greatly on today’s low mortality rates, but it would have had serious implications five hundred years ago. Thus it is likely that Arthur had a lifetime risk of poor health because he was premature.

In the summer of 1500, his father, Henry VII, expressed concern about Arthur and Katherine living together, because of Arthur’s weak constitution. The King was then in favour of them consummating the marriage but living apart thereafter until Arthur was older. In 1497 Katherine’s brother, the Infante Juan, had died at nineteen – disastrously for the Spanish succession. The cause was perhaps tuberculosis, but it was generally held that over-indulgence in the marriage bed had proved fatal, which no doubt informed Henry VII’s decision.

Paul Workman, owned by the author 

(The above portrait, supposedly of Katherine during her first marraige, is now thought to be based on one of the first Mary Tudor, Henry Vlll's younger sister)

Katherine remained a widow for seven years, until Arthur’s brother succeeded to the throne as Henry VIII and married her. Some churchmen feared that the marriage was uncanonical and forbidden by Scripture. The Book of Leviticus warned: 'If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.' But Katherine’s duenna had been adamant that the couple had not had intercourse, and her mother, Queen Isabella had informed Henry VII that her daughter remained a virgin. The Pope had accordingly issued a dispensation for the marriage.

Years later, when it became clear that Katherine would never bear him a son, and he was pursuing Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII began to have doubts that his marriage was lawful. He had even discovered that, in the original Hebrew, Leviticus warned that a man would be without sons, rather than childless. But Katherine swore publicly that she had come to him ‘a true maid, without touch of man’, but he was determined to divorce her. To achieve that, he wrangled with an unaccommodating Pope for seven years, and in the process severed the English Church from Rome, establishing himself as Supreme Head of the Church of England and bringing about the Reformation. Through all this, Katherine remained adamant that she was the King’s true wife, and to defend her position she was prepared to endure exile from court, house arrest and separation from her beloved daughter, the future Mary I.

In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s new Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the union of Henry and Katherine incestuous and unlawful, and confirmed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Still Katherine refused to be called by any title other than queen, and she was vindicated in 1534, when, at long last, the Pope ruled that her marriage to Henry was valid. But it was too late. Henry refused to take her back. She died in 1536, signing herself to the last ‘Katherine the Queen’.

So was she the true Queen of England? The new evidence we now have shows that it is highly unlikely that her marriage to Arthur was consummated. That being the case, Henry had never gone so far as to ‘uncover his brother’s nakedness’.

Furthermore, there was a counterweight to Leviticus in the Book of Deuteronomy: ‘Where brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed to his brother.’ These conflicting texts were the subject of much debate at the time, but for all Henry’s arguments that Deueteronomy did not apply to Christians, passages in Genesis, Ruth and Matthew give weight to it, showing that it was customary in Biblical times, and seen as ordained by God, for a man to marry his brother’s childless widow. Even Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, was the offspring of such a union.

This was not incompatible with the ban in Leviticus, which did not apply when the brother had died childless, as Arthur had; and this was understood by many theologians, notably Juan Luis Vives and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, two of Katherine’s great champions. Thus Henry’s argument was flawed, whether Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated or not.

Even so, that marriage had created an affinity, or close kinship, between Katherine and Henry, which constituted an impediment to their marriage, by virtue of the fact that she had become his sister. This was why Henry claimed his marriage to her was incestuous. However, such an impediment was not seen as contravening divine law, so the Pope could very properly issue a dispensation. Henry challenged this, insisting that his marriage was prohibited under divine law, in Scripture rather than by canon law, but there were many precedents, and the King’s interpretation of Leviticus, as we have seen, did not stand up to close scrutiny. It was Henry who insisted that Leviticus applied to a marriage that had been consummated, erroneously concentrating the whole focus of the case on what had actually passed between Katherine and Arthur in their marriage bed.

The conclusion is inescapable: the grounds put forward by Henry VIII to secure an annulment were baseless and weak, the marriage was valid, and Katherine was the true Queen of England.



For excellent and much fuller discussions of Henry VIII’s annulment, see J. J. Scarisbrick’s Henry VIII (London, 1968) and Philip Campbell: The Canon Law of the Divorce Case (2009, www.medievalists.net/files/11010101.pdf)

 

Elizabeth I’s Virginity, the Fate of the Princes in the Tower and Other Things We Know We Don’t Know in Historical Fiction – By Elizabeth Fremantle

It is rare that a definitive truth emerges from history, like that of Richard III’s remains, proving that he did indeed suffer from scoliosis. But he also suffered from Tudor propaganda that, through writers like More and Shakespeare, sought to depict him as monstrous. As sixteenth century beliefs regarded deformity as the Devil’s work a crooked shape must have been a convenient way to describe his inner wickedness.  But much recent fiction has attempted to rehabilitate Richard of York. Philippa Gregory in her Cousins’ War series is clear: Richard is the good guy (give or take a little ruthlessness) without even the slightest crookedness about the spine – the antithesis of Shakespeare’s black-hearted crookback. Gregory’s agenda is, I suppose, to articulate an opposing story to the one that has endured for five hundred years – the York story – as a way to illuminate the lives of the women of the period and her straight-backed Richard is an intrinsic part of this. Fiction gives us license to explore the possibilities thrown up by fragments in the historical record. But the king in the car park is an undeniable truth, creating a shift of knowledge, which perhaps works to devalue Gregory’s fictional perspective – make it seem incomplete or less based in truth.

                                     Anthony Sher as Richard III – Royal Shakespeare Company 

What Richard III’s bones cannot tell us though, is whether the princes in the tower died at his hand or by his order. This story is perhaps the most enduring of the historical mysteries and has been explored endlessly in fiction. Emma Darwin in the excellent A Secret Alchemy cleverly creates a fictional scheme wherein both the Richard III camp and the Lancastrians are equally culpable, whereas Gregory’s villain is unequivocally a Margaret Beaufort driven by a combination of blind ambition and religious fervour. But her story has a further complication, which leaves one son alive to reappear later as the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Weir however, in A Dangerous Inheritance, keeps us in the dark, something that Amazon reviewers found frustrating, as if somehow they were expecting a definitive truth to emerge from her fictional story. Even genetic tests on the boys’ suspected remains would not shed light on the murderer. We would however, learn where and at what age they died and whether one of them did survive to potentially return as Warbeck.

                                                             The Princes in the Tower

There are many truths we will never know. I have been asked surprisingly often whether the Virgin Queen was truly a virgin and I’m always surprised that people think I might know something that historians have not got to the bottom of in hundreds of years of poring through the historical record. Such a question was even posed during Elizabeth’s lifetime when rumour and scandal ran rife and many sought to discredit her by destroying her reputation. As she plays a large part in my Tudor trilogy, which covers her life from girlhood to old age I had to engage with the problem of how to convey an unknown in a convincing way in my fiction. Had Elizabeth been a central character I would have been compelled to take a position on the question of her love life, but as she inhabits the margins of my novels and is only seen through the eyes of other characters it was possible to show her from a perspective of partial view.

When, as a fourteen year old, and living in the household of the dowager Queen Katherine Parr, Elizabeth had something on the spectrum between a flirtation and a full blown affair with the man in the position of stepfather to her, Parr’s fourth husband Thomas Seymour. We know a certain amount about this ‘affair’ thanks to Elizabeth’s close companion and mother figure Katherine Astley’s testimony at Seymour’s subsequent treason trial. Astley describes in detail the mornings when Seymour would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber in which a certain amount of slap and tickle took place, sufficient for Astley to have words with Seymour. It is also suggested that Parr joined in some of these ‘games,’ in particular a puzzling scene in which Parr is said to have held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress into ‘a hundred pieces’. Finally we learn that Parr discovered Elizabeth and Seymour in ‘an embrace’, which precipitated the girl being sent away from the household.

                                                  Elizabeth I as a girl – the Royal Collection

In describing this episode in Queen’s Gambit I chose to take the liberty of setting it in a bed with the guilty couple naked, but deliberately held back from showing the sexual act as I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide what had really happened. The only evidence we have from the horse’s mouth, as it were, is in a reported conversation in which Elizabeth confesses to Jane Grey that she ‘lay with’ Seymour, another statement that remains open to interpretation by the reader.  Alison Weir, however, in The Lady Elizabeth trod an entirely different path, fully exploiting contemporary rumour, and depicting the Seymour affair as ending in a secret pregnancy. Interestingly, as Anna Whitelock points out in Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, Elizabeth left strict instructions that she was not to be disembowelled or examined after death, fuelling notions that she had something to hide, and most sources agree that her wishes were obeyed. I occasionally wonder whether, if some evidence should emerge of an early pregnancy, my own interpretation in Queen’s Gambit might seem incomplete.

                                                      A depiction of Amy Robsart's death

The death of Amy Robsart, who was discovered with a broken neck at the foot of a flight of steps in 1560, is another Elizabethan story riven with uncertainties: was it suicide, was it an accident, was it murder and, if so, by who’s hand? Fingers at the time pointed towards her husband, Elizabeth’s favourite, Leicester, who, people believed, had his sights set on marrying the Queen; but then all sorts of dreadful deeds were blamed on Leicester, who was deeply resented in court circles. A TV mini series has an ailing and beleaguered Emilia Fox, playing Amy Robsart, throwing herself into a stairwell – so suicide. In my second novel Sisters of Treason I have forwarded the possibility that perhaps it was the Queen’s loyal statesman William Cecil, Leicester’s enemy, who had the most to gain from Amy Robsart’s death – so perhaps murder. It is only a suggestion mind, and born of gossip and speculation amongst my characters, because I firmly believe that, though readers often hope for the satisfaction of finding the loose ends of history neatly tied, there is certainly a place for ambiguity in historical fiction.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr is out in hardback now and paperback early 2014. Sister's of Treason will be out in spring 2014.