HISTORY SISTERS by H.M. Castor

As Christmas draws closer and, with it, the prospect for many of family gatherings, I hope no one will mind if my post today has a family-related theme. This site has featured lovely posts by other History Girls about their first history teachers. Mine was my older sister Helen.

(above: The Writing Lesson by Albert Anker, 1865)

We are the youngest two of four children in our family, and are separated in age by just under two years. Whilst we argued and squabbled (and even on occasion fought) as much as the next pair of siblings, I formed the firm and unshakeable conviction at an early age that my sister was, well, where it was at. Her friends, effortlessly, seemed cooler than mine. Her talents were obviously the most worthwhile ones to have. And whatever Helen was doing or was interested in was, by definition, The Right Thing.

I have a distinct memory of Helen asking me – at the tender age when one ponders such questions – whether I liked gold or silver best (I think it was around Christmas time and we were contemplating sparkly pens). Gold, was my reply. Helen then revealed that she preferred silver. I remember quietly trying, really trying, to hang on to my liking for gold, even as the manifestly superior qualities of silver began to make themselves plain as day – its elegance, its sophistication…

You get the picture. So when I say that Helen was interested in history from an early age you will instantly understand how I came to find history fascinating too. I later followed in her footsteps by taking a degree in history, and now – though we have done some other, very different things in the last couple of decades – it is perhaps no surprise to find we’re both writing history books, albeit of very different types, since she writes non-fiction for the adult market. (No direct competition – which is both a relief and just as it should be: we are, at bottom, very different personalities.)

Feeling as I do that if it weren’t for Helen I might very well not have learnt to love history as early and as fervently as I did, nor perhaps have become a writer of historical fiction at all (since she introduced me to the authors who were my histfic heroines), I very much wanted to ask Helen what it was that drew her to history as a child, and what role historical fiction has played and continues to play in her love of the subject. I have therefore conducted a sibling interview, which you can read below.

But first, here’s my proud sister bit:

After studying for both her BA (in which she was awarded a starred First) and her PhD at Cambridge University, Helen spent several years as an academic historian (latterly as Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, of which she is still a Fellow). Now, however, she concentrates on writing non-fiction history books for a broader audience. She has been described by Saul David in BBC History magazine as ‘that rarity: a professionally trained historian who can write.’

(photograph © Chris Gibbions)

Her latest book She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, has won great critical acclaim both here and in the US, being described by Hilary Mantel in The Guardian as 'Highly readable, exciting and thought-provoking,' and by Kathryn Hughes in the mail on Sunday as 'Combining top-notch scholarship with fizzing storytelling ... a fascinating account of a group of women who refused to do what they were told and, in the process, paved the way for England's great female rulers.'

Her previous book Blood & Roses is a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, whose remarkable letters are the earliest surviving collection of private correspondence in the English language. Blood & Roses was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005, and was awarded the Beatrice White Prize by the English Association in 2006.

Helen is one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 4 series Making History. This year she made her debut as a presenter for BBC4 with a film entitled A Renaissance Education: The Schooling of Sir Thomas More’s Daughter. She has recently finished filming a set of three documentaries based on She-Wolves, which are due to be broadcast by BBC4 next year.

I must point out that, were Helen here with me as I’ve been writing all this, she would have been blushing and cringing in equal measure – she is one of the most unassuming and genuinely modest people I know! But now, without further ado, I will present the questions I sent her and her answers.

Do you remember how and when you first became interested in history?

Helen: I must have been about five, I think, when I read Jean Plaidy’s two books for children – The Young Elizabeth and The Young Mary, Queen of Scots. And I absolutely fell in love with history: the sixteenth century, to start with – there’s no one more charismatic than the Tudors – but then later I found my way back into the middle ages.

Why do you think history particularly grabbed you at that age?

What I always loved – and still do – is the combination of human experience with an alien-yet-recognisable world. That’s also why I love science fiction – but history’s even better, because it really happened… In those two Jean Plaidy books, I could immediately identify with Elizabeth and Mary, fascinatingly different characters though they were, but then the world in which they lived was so strange and glamorous and frightening and thrilling. I can still see every one of the illustrations in my mind’s eye…

Did you enjoy studying history at school or was history, for you, an outside-school interest?

I loved history at school. I would have loved it anyway, but I was lucky enough to have two wonderful history teachers who opened up the whole subject in the most exciting way. What history as an academic discipline has to offer is the forensic exploration of complex evidence – but because it’s complex evidence with human beings at its heart, that forensic exploration has to be infused with psychological understanding and intuition about individual behaviour and group dynamics.

And, because conclusions have to be expressed in written form, studying history is also a training in how to write clearly, coherently and precisely. Language is at the heart of the subject – which is why I think the process of studying languages is crucial for historians. Translating from one language to another is the best possible way of understanding a text from the inside – what’s unsaid as well as what’s said, and where the disjunctions come between different cultures. You couldn’t get a better training for reading a historical text than that.

Would you say that historical fiction played a role in fostering your enthusiasm for history as a child and teenager? (And if so did it do anything in particular in that regard?)

Without a doubt. Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time conveys an overwhelming sense of the excitement of the detective-work (literally, in her hero’s case) involved in historical research. And, given that a lot of academic writing is more concerned with analysing the past from a distance than reinhabiting it from the inside (if that makes sense), it was Dorothy Dunnett’s fiction that provided me with experience, rather than simply intellectual understanding, of the complexity, sophistication and unpredictability of the medieval and Tudor world.

Do you still read historical fiction now?

Yes, though selectively rather than omnivorously. I regularly re-read Dorothy Dunnett. Your book is wonderful! And Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety are extraordinary and utterly inspiring. I know I’m not alone in counting the days till Bring Up The Bodies is published.

Historical fiction has something of a bad name among some academic historians. David Starkey famously never reads it, Niall Ferguson has argued that it “contaminates historical understanding” and Anthony Beevor has expressed deep concern about novelists using real historical characters in their writing. What are your thoughts on this?

I’m a great admirer of some of David Starkey’s books, but I hardly think it’s a good idea to take everything he or Niall Ferguson says seriously…

Clearly, a lot of professional historians feel uneasy about (or actively hostile to) historical novels. I don’t, though. I think the presence of historical fiction can help keep academic historians honest – because, for all the care and rigour with which we need to treat our sources, we still do have to join the dots, to produce an interpretation of the past (and especially of human behaviour in the past) that we find convincing. The past is gone, and in attempting to summon it up in our own words historians are engaged in a process of creative writing – creative writing according to different rules from writers of historical fiction, of course, but creative writing all the same. And I think that the explicitness of the process of creation in historical fiction can be a useful point of comparison and contrast with what we’re doing; and also a reminder that it won’t do to treat our own protagonists as pieces on a chessboard rather than three-dimensional human beings living in a three-dimensional world.

Maybe that reminder is more necessary to someone like me, writing pre-modern history where it’s much harder to find the evidence on which to base three-dimensional characterisation. But I was very struck by reading responses to Wolf Hall that said, for example, that Hilary Mantel had got Thomas More ‘wrong’. That wasn’t at all how I’d seen it; I tend to think that human beings are extremely good at living in contradiction, which is why one person can summon up such contrasting responses in others. It seems to me that a reminder that the evidence for Thomas More’s life can be read in a multiplicity of ways from a multiplicity of perspectives can only be historically helpful.

Much more problematic, in fact, for me, are books which purport to be history, written for a general readership (and therefore not subject to the kind of academic reviews which would pick up on what I’m about to say), which contain glaring historical errors and pages full of footnotes (to give that sense of ‘referenciness’) that on closer scrutiny are meaningless because they’re so non-specific that they can’t be followed up. I’m all in favour of writing for a general readership; and I’m entirely conscious that we all make mistakes; and I don’t think you have to have footnotes at all, so long as you offer a gateway to the sources you’ve used through some kind of bibliographical discussion (as many popular history books and academic textbooks do) – but, whatever gateway you offer, if you’re writing history it does need to be possible to interrogate your evidence one way or another, rather than being led up a blind alley…

Do you think that the work of your favourite historical novelist/s has in any way shaped or influenced your own approach to writing?

Yes, I do. The history I write now is narrative history – storytelling – because that, for me, is the way to put human experience at the centre of my work. I try as hard as I can to see the worlds I write about through the eyes of my protagonists, without hindsight in so far as that’s humanly possible. (One of my self-imposed rules is never to use the phrase ‘little did he know that…’) I weigh up my sources as best I can and then tell the story as it makes sense to me, rather than laying out the details of historiographical debate, because – valuable though that is in other contexts – it immediately jolts me out of the historical moment and into the distant present. And I try to give a physical and psychological sense of the world in which my protagonists lived.

The best historical fiction, of course, is based on rigorous historical research; and the works of history I love most allow me to explore the worlds of the past from the inside – Thomas Penn’s Winter King being a wonderful recent example. There’s an utterly distinct but relatively narrow dividing line between the two.

What are you working on now?

I’m working at getting back to writing after the exhilarating and fascinating but very different experience of making some documentaries based on She-Wolves. And I’m afraid I’d rather not say out loud what I’m trying to write about – it’s still at too early a stage of gestation…

Completely understood! And many thanks.

She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, and Blood and Roses are both published in the UK by Faber, & in the US by HarperCollins.

Helen Castor's website is here.

H.M. (Harriet) Castor's website is here.

COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY (3) or APOLOGIES, MR PRESIDENT

by Linda Buckley-Archer

I kept a cheap reproduction of George Washington on my desk while writing the denouement of my time-travelling trilogy. I’d bought it on a book tour during a visit to the city named after him and the object gradually accrued a bizarre emotional charge. What sad and ludicrous creatures novelists can be. As I plotted to sabotage his success in turning around the Revolutionary War around against considerable odds, the (miniature resin statue of a) great man would make me feel guilty. There was a certain masochistic satisfaction to be found in this. I would think about his courage, the terrible problems he had with his wooden false teeth, how his men wept when he took his final leave of them. General Washington, on the other hand, just stared back me and would elicit pangs of shame as I ruled out one strategy after another until I concluded that cowardly assassination by twenty-first century revolver (with the help of night-vision glasses) was the only way to go. For months I was not certain whether, when it came to it, I would have the conviction to actually kill Washington or downgrade the crime to a near miss scenario. This was reflected in my writing: Lord Luxon’s minion bottles out of doing the deed, a dog gets in the way, the timing goes wrong. It was less a case of cranking up the dramatic tension than a symptom of a storyteller’s procrastination. But I woke up one morning, grabbed my pen and I seemed to have made a decision: Lord Luxon squeezed the trigger. It weighed so little the bullet that sped across the stormy night to lodge in a human heart, and yet it had gathered enough momentum to topple a nation.

In the last days of 1776 the Patriot cause hung in the balance. Washington and the Continental Army were in retreat and were gathered on the banks of Delaware River with as many boats, large and small, as they could lay their hands on. The veterans of a long campaign were exhausted and poorly equipped. It had a been a severe winter and the weather on Christmas Eve was truly appalling. Icebergs floated on the turbulent waters, heavy snow fell, and a north-easterly gale blasted the riverbanks. Many of the men were without shoes, their feet bleeding, frostbitten, bandaged against the freezing cold. To attempt to cross the river in such conditions was madness – which was precisely why Washington elected to make the attempt. If he succeeded he could mount a surprise attack on the mercenaries in the pay of the British who were camped at Trenton. Downstream from Washington, General Ewing and Colonel Cadwalader both tried – and failed – to cross the Delaware. Washington, with his grim determination and his watchword of Death or Victory! succeeded where his comrades had failed: he ferried his army across the river from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, claimed an easy victory at Trenton and went on to gain a second victory at Princeton. These victories breathed new life into the Patriots’ cause. If Washington had failed to cross the Delaware at that moment, it is possible that the British would have won the war and kept hold of their colony – at least for a while longer. And one can only speculate if there would ever again have been the will, the opportunity, or the precise mix of circumstances to grant the Patriots the independence they desired.

I wrote the trilogy for children. One thing I wanted to get across to a young audience is that history is not predetermined: it is not a neat demonstration of cause and effect, even if, in hindsight, historical events might sometimes appear to have been writ in stone. I wanted to highlight the precariousness of Washington’s position in late December 1776, I wanted to give a sense of how the Patriot cause – and the imminent birth of a modern superpower - was balanced on a knife edge. Ironically, in order to subvert history, you need to pay very careful attention to what actually did happen. How easily that Patriot victory could have slipped away – even without a time-travelling intervention. If the weather had not been so severe (the mercenaries were caught off their guard ), if Thomas Paine’s rousing pamphlet had not been circulated to the exhausted men (These are the times that try men’s souls...Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph...), if Colonel Henry Knox, with his booming tenor voice, had not been there to shout orders to his men over the deafening storm, would the revolution have failed?

Encouraging my readers to imagine the aftermath of a counterfactual historical event was another aim. Predicting the consequences of different actions and modes of behaviour is, after all, an essential life skill - and it’s one which has to be learned. ‘What if?’ is an important game. I knew, for instance, that the ill-fated Louis XVI had emptied his coffers helping the Patriots oppose Britain. The Patriots’ victory, as well as the strain it put on France’s finances, were contributing factors in the 1789 revolution. What if the American Revolution had failed in 1776? What if Louis XVI’s finances were, as a consequence, in a much healthier state? Would the failure of the American Revolution have made the French Revolution less likely?

I recall having dinner with friends and discussing what America might have become under British rule. Some of that conversation found its way into my book. We talked of New York as a provincial backwater where the architecture was boring and where it was impossible to get a good cup of coffee. We imagined Canada gaining control of large tracts of the country including California. In truth I found picturing recent world history without a powerful USA a very tall order. Writing Time Quake sensitised me to the fragility and randomness of things: it also reminded me not to count my chickens. I’ll end with a quotation from the historian Niall Ferguson. He argues: “the best answer to the question ‘Why bother asking counterfactual questions?’ is simply: What if we don’t? Virtual history is a necessary antidote to determinism.”

The Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster (UK and US)

In Search of a Tipping Point

Counterfactual History (2)

by

Linda Buckley-Archer

At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like the stem of a tree putting forth twin branches.

A fork in the road, the breaking out of a branch from the main trunk, the opening and closing of a door. All these images conjure up an aspect of the human condition: we are caught in an eternal now with limited access to a window on the past which has, at best, a restricted view. And as we move forward into an unknowable future there are some things we can control and some things that we cannot. We are perpetually obliged to make choices or have others’ choices thrust upon us. And in choosing this path over another we will never truly know what might have happened had we turned right instead of left. There are, of course, places to escape these draconian laws: the world of the imagination and a world where time travel is possible.

Niall Ferguson uses André Maurois’s powerful image, above, in his introduction to Virtual History, a selection of academic essays that pose questions such as: what would England have become without Cromwell? or what would have been the consequences if Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940? Asking What If? is a core pastime of the novelist but not necessarily one of the historian. Ferguson writes persuasively in defence of counterfactual history whilst admitting that there are those who, to put it bluntly, judge this branch of history to be a total waste of time and not terribly respectable into the bargain. The first time I came across the term ‘counterfactual’ was in an email from a Princeton historian. He was generously giving me some advice about my time-travelling trilogy. “Your counterfactual question is a good one,” he wrote, and went on to point me in the right direction to write accurately about something which had not happened. This writing about something which had not happened gave me enormous pleasure and also taught me a huge amount. So it was good to come across Niall Ferguson lucidly articulate what was at the back of mind when I took it into my head to ride roughshod over the Ethics of Time Travel.

Perhaps it will be best to start with my example and comment later.

The year is 1763 and a time-travelling twelve-year old from the 21^st century cannot restrain himself from spilling the beans that Britain will lose her American colony and that the USA will also go to become the most powerful nation on the planet.

“No, I cannot believe it!” exclaimed the Parson becoming very red in the face. “More powerful than England!”

“Much”

“More powerful than France?”

“Oh, yes. Much more.”

“Ah well. That is some small comfort. Upon my word…America!”

This transgression is from the first volume when my characters were (mostly) sticking to the rules and were trying to make as few ripples as possible as they swam through the waters of history. The act of going back in time was reckless enough without actually setting out to alter the past. However, once the trilogy got going and my two villains (an eighteenth-century henchman and his corrupt aristocratic master) started to assert themselves in the plot, time tourism began – reluctantly at first - to evolve into counterfactual history. My villains did not share their author’s scruples. They had needs which clamoured to be satisfied and by volume three these became impossible to resist. For several months I remember considering this counterfactual possibility and deciding no, I can’t possibly go there. My American publishers were charming people and it did not seem polite in the circumstances. In the end, however, I caved in and decided to allow Lord Luxon to attempt to win back the US for the British.

My first challenge was how and when to do it. I recall that my son, for whom I put pen to paper in the first place, was all for transporting crack armies from across the centuries so that they could fight epic battles on the island of Manhattan with helicopters and laser guns. This would, I admit, have been very exciting, not to mention a crowd pleaser, and, who knows, perhaps I should have taken that path. But I was not too keen on the idea. I wanted something on a smaller scale, something which would emphasise that there are rare and pivotal moments in history when the lines of fate all seem to converge on one spot at one time and sometimes on one person. What I really wanted was a Tipping Point of monumental proportions.

My grasp of American history was inadequate at best. I soon realised that even if I carried on reading for a year I still might not trust my historical judgement. Then fate, via a Radio 4 Afternoon Play I had written, threw into my path a new American friend whose husband happened to be an eminent historian. A colleague of his also just happened to be precisely the expert I would have been looking for had I had the sense to seek one out earlier. By this time I had, at least, decided that Lord Luxon should start his campaign as early as possible in America’s history. So the question I asked my expert historian was this: If you wanted to sabotage the American War of Independence (Revolutionary War), how would you go about it? Within half an hour the kind man replied in gratifying detail and recommended one military option in particular.

Realistically, he told me, Britain had only two chances to win a decisive victory. The first was during the 1776-77 campaign when Washington frustrated the British with his victories at Trenton and Princeton. The second was during the 1780 campaign when Clinton took Charleston, left Cornwallis to overrun the rest of South Carolina and then move on to North Carolina, while he (Clinton) returned to New Jersey to take on Washington's army, still in winter quarters at Morristown. The option he recommended was the former. I did an image search (I have to have pictures) and instantly recognised Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River. If that isn’t my Tipping Point, I thought, I don’t know what is. And the rest, at least as far as I was concerned, was counterfactual history.

As I seem to find it impossible not to write in three parts, in September’s post I’ll conclude with the nitty-gritty of plotting to assassinate one of America’s Founding Fathers, the associated writerly guilt and why a counterfactual approach can be a good thing.

The Gideon Trilogy (aka The Time Quake Trilogy) is published by Simon & Schuster (UK and US)