Show not tell by Mary Hoffman

I have never liked this piece of advice to writers. Sometimes you just need to tell. It can be something small or trivial that you don’t want to spend time developing into a full-scale scene with dialogue, just a little throwaway so you can get back to your main plot. But how does this fit when writing historical fiction?


The facts are known and can’t be changed. So you go back to “what did X think about this?” or “How did it affect Y?” “Surely, this would have thrown the whole court into an uproar?” 

Tomb of Katherine Swynford and Joan Neville, Lincoln

 

I recently discovered that another HG is writing about the same person that I am. It’s OK; this happens. And it was pretty much bound to happen with regard to this character – a significant female figure in fourteenth century England, who had been the main character in a romantic novel of the 1950s. I made sure not to read that novel until I had written the sixth draft of mine.

I was surprised when I did. Anya Seton made the woman far more of a peasant than I had, with her coming to court in London when she was already fifteen. In my version, she has been brought up there by the king and queen of the time, alongside a bevy of princes and princesses. (Can you have a “bevy” of males? Must check for future reference). 

Anyway, how do you “show not tell” the events of historical characters’ lives? And I had chosen to depict almost the whole of my main character’s life, from the age of about two to her death bed fifty-one years later. Maybe this was a bad idea? I hadn’t done it before. I needed to establish her as having been raised at the English court, with all the advantages of a noble upbringing but no fortune. So she could speak French, go hunting and hawking, do embroidery, read the popular romances of the time and behave with elegance and decorum whether dancing or singing. 

Joan Neville and her ladies

 

Put like that, it does sound a bit dull. But her life was actually full of adventures. Imagine what it must have been like to grow up as a virtual orphan, with no memory of the mother who had given birth to you and little information about your father. Your foster parents were the king and queen of England and you were raised in their lavish court settings of palaces and castles, doing as you were instructed, brought up like a little princess yourself. Your one constant was your older sister, who one day told you that she was being sent away to serve the second prince and his wife in Ireland. And you were only seven.

Then you would certainly know what it was like to be alone. I invented bedfellows for her, my little girl, and friends too. Always having to remember that the fork and handkerchief had not yet been invented. Her exquisite manners had to take this into account. Her clothes were hand-me-downs but of the greatest quality, as they had previously been worn by princesses. 

John of Gaunt feasting in Portugal

 

Her favourite prince, the king and queen’s third son, John, was ten years older than her but he said her name properly, as they had in Hainault. He lived with his oldest brother, the Prince of Wales, though my heroine didn’t know what that meant. Prince Edward was heir to the English throne and did not marry until he was thirty. And then he chose a woman older than him, his father’s cousin, who had been married twice before. Imagine! The most eligible bachelor in Europe, a great soldier and charismatic leader, eventually settled for a woman he had known since they were children. A Papal dispensation had to be sought, not for the first time in Joan’s case.

And when Prince John, at the age of nineteen, married a great heiress, he asked nine-year-old Katherine to go with him and serve his beautiful wife. Of course, she went. There were many women serving the great countess, as she was then, and my Katherine was proud to be one of them, once released from the English court, even in the lowly role of the girl who rocked the wooden cradle. 

The marriage of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster

 

An awful lot here to show and not tell and we are hardly into Katherine’s eventful life. Before long, she has the task of rocking the new princess, Philippa, named after the queen. Prince John is happy. His lovely wife has given him a healthy daughter and there would surely be more to come, male heirs among them. Against this background of court life and princely behaviour, Katherine muses about her life and destiny. As she grows older and the Lancaster nursery is filled with more boy and girl babies – not all of whom survive – Katherine becomes closer to her mistress and is given more responsibility.

You see? I am telling, not showing you. But the novel does both. Through their pregnancies, childbirths and experiences, the two women become friends. Katherine is tall and strong for a girl of fifteen and her employers think it is time for her to have a husband. She fears it might be a warty old man but it is in fact a sturdy knight, Sir Hugh Swynford, who is the same age as her lord. She goes with him to his Manor in Kettlethorpe, but is often needed back in the Lancaster household, whenever her husband has to follow Duke John overseas.

Of course, their marriage is consummated and Katherine is already pregnant when Sir Hugh has to go abroad. She and the duchess both give birth within a month, Blanche to the healthy little boy, who will one day be Henry IV and Katherine to a little girl called Blanche. Such a lot to cover by showing not telling. But the feelings of women for their children, not knowing if their babies will live or die, can’t have been a million miles away from how mothers feel now, whether in grand courts or humble cottages. 

Henry IV

 

That’s what I had to show. Women labouring to bring forth babies, who might be heirs to a great destiny, or brides to European monarchs, or simply the children of a humble knight and his lady. Katherine herself ponders on this: “Men donned armour and rode off to battle, where they might catch an arrow in their face or have an arm lopped off. They seemed extraordinarily brave to me. And yet women did something harder. How could Bess know about the pains of childbed, when she had no children of her own?”

Both genders have to face painful difficulties. To fight or to give birth, to risk marriage or enter a religious house. Of course the men could do both. And occasionally the women too. Think of Margaret Beaufort, who helped her only child become king, was married four times and yet became a “femme sole” while her last husband still lived. 

Margaret Beaufort

 

My subject, Katherine Swynford, née Roet, was a wife and a widow, a person of great piety, who bore four children out of wedlock to Prince John, while he was married to another woman. Is it a remarkable medieval love story, since the couple do marry in 1396 and their children – the Beauforts – are legitimated and go on to be the ancestors of several English monarchs? Katherine’s son by her first husband is the boon companion of Henry Bolingbroke, raised with him in the same nursery, born only a year later. He is no aristocrat but his half-brothers and half-sister are, through their father. That half-sister, Joan, gives birth to Cecily, who marries Richard of York and is mother to Edward IV and Richard III. 

 

Henry VII’s claim to the throne came from his mother Margaret (see above), whose father was descended from John and Katherine’s union. And hence Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor; the line ends with Elizabeth I. Six English monarchs is not bad for the line of a woman whose father was a humble knight at the court of Edward III.



Oh, and Katherine's sister Philippa married Geoffrey Chaucer. Thereby hangs another story, to tell or show.