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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
