The Lady on the Cup - Celia Rees

What's yours? Tall Latte Extra Shot To Go? Or De-Caff Skinny Cappuccino?  We all know what it is. What it means. Whether you like the coffee or not, the brand is so powerful that is has spawned its own language. It's trade marked logo has become ubiquitous, instantly recognisable, like Coca Cola but even more potent because there are no words. It is one of those signs, accepted and recognised without anyone thinking too much about what is actually depicted.

It is a bicaudal, a melusine, a mermaid holding her tails. In legend, the fairy Melusina married Guy De Lusignan, Count of Poitou under condition that he would never intrude upon her privacy. She brought him great wealth and happinesss and bore him many children but, inevitably, he broke the taboo, spied on her while she was bathing and discovered her secret. She transformed into a dragon and was never seen again, although she is supposed to act as the protectress of her descendants.

Melusine's secret discovered, from Le Roman de Mélusine by Jean d'Arras, ca 1450-1500. Bibliothèque nationale de France

This legend of a creature, half woman, half fish,  sometimes with one tail, sometimes with two, occurs in different parts of France, Germany and the Low Countries and was used to some effect by Philippa Gregory in The Lady of the Rivers and The White Queen. These versions all have a roughly similar story, one of secrets and the breaking of prohibitions, and are medieval in origin. Images of the two tailed mermaid, however, are far older. She can be found in churches all over Italy and France - on marble pavements, above doorways, up pediments and pillars. Some of the oldest are Byzantine and date to the 6th Century A.D.

Byzantine Floor Mosaic (c. 500) Cathedrale de Pesaro (le Marche)

Cathedrale di santa Maria Annunciata, Otranto (Puglia)

And she's here in Britain, too, frequently under seats as misericord carvings, often holding a looking glass and comb, which are also the essential props of her sister, the mermaid.

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon

Zennor Mermaid

Seeing a mermaid, one tail or two, was not good news for any mariner. They were creatures of intense ill omen. 

Then up there came a mermaiden, 
a comb and glass all in her hand
"Here's to you my merry young men 
for you'll not see dry land again"

Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens

The mermaid, her two tailed sister and their feathered Greek cousin, the Siren, were associated with the death and destruction of men. Their origins are almost certainly pre-Christian, rooted in the worship of water spirits and goddesses associated with rivers, lakes and the sea. Their presence in Christian places of worship could suggest that they still needed to be propitiated. The churches that contain examples of these strange and fascinating images are often, although not always, near the sea. The mermaids were also probably there to offer a different kind of warning: against women in general (they're all like that down there really - look at that Melusine), lust in particular and sins of the flesh.

The two tailed mermaid is the subject of differing legends and has a fascinating history. Her most modern incarnation continues the tradition: 

'Let’s go all the way back to 1971, to when Starbucks was first coming to be. In a search for a way to capture the seafaring history of coffee and Seattle’s strong seaport roots, there was a lot of poring over old marine books going on. Suddenly, there she was: a 16th century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid, or Siren. There was something about her – a seductive mystery mixed with a nautical theme that was exactly what the founders were looking for. A logo was designed around her, and our long relationship with the Siren began.'

(Starbucks Website)

Over the last 40 years we’ve made some changes to that identity...' they continue.  How very true. 

Here's the first Starbucks logo from 'way back in 1971'.

Starbucks logo 1971

A bold statement and very much in keeping with the time honoured and age old depictions of our bicaudal mermaids. I mean, why would they wear bikinis? This was changed, however, and pretty quickly. There were complaints. Not everyone was ready for such a full frontal celebration of the female form, it was putting them off their coffee, so the logo was changed to:

1987 Logo

She was given longer hair, her waves falling to  cover her breasts and preserve her modesty. But there were further problems, this time it was her belly button (I'd say that was the least of it) so the image was changed yet again. 

1992 Logo

Her tails have almost disappeared. It is now very difficult to detect her exotic and evocative origins. In 2011 the logo was changed once more. The lettering was removed, leaving an image recognised by everyone, everywhere, thus allowing Starbucks to reach advertising Nirvana. 

I owe what I recognise could turn into a bit of an obsession with bicaudal mermaids to my friend Ismay Barwell. Thanks to her, I'll never look at a Starbucks cup in the same way again. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT KATHERINE PARR – Elizabeth Fremantle

We all know that you can wait a hour for a bus and then three come along at once, but this seems to also apply to characters in historical novels. The particular character I have in mind, due to a personal interest, is Tudor Queen Katherine Parr, about whom there have been three very different fictional explorations in as many years.

In 2013 I published my novel QUEEN'S GAMBIT, which focuses on Parr's role as not only a royal wife but a political operator and flawed but canny survivor, last year there was CJ Sansom's acclaimed LAMENTATION, a thriller which places Parr's controversial and dangerous text, Lamentation of a Sinner, at the heart of a mystery and this year Philippa Gregory's THE TAMING OF THE QUEEN explores Parr's marriage to Henry VIII.

There are probably many reasons for a single figure to become the focus of such attention and in this case it is likely that some very good recent historical scholarship such as Linda Porter's excellent biography of 2010, KATHERINE THE QUEEN: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF KATHERINE PARR, has played a part in bringing Parr's extraordinary life to our attention. Porter's  research has worked to rid Parr of the reputation of the dull nursemaid of popular belief and show her as an intelligent and ambitious woman who strove to further religious reform during the upheaval of the Reformation.

This portrayal of Parr as an intellectual who was prepared to  forward her beliefs at great personal risk and engage in political power-play in a man's world, casts her, in my mind, as rounded and interesting subject likely to engage modern readers. As Parr was not born into royalty, yet rose to be the most powerful woman in England, she serves in some ways to prefigure ideas of social mobility and as a woman (indeed one of the first) to publish an original work in English she was trying to circumvent contemporary notions of female silence and obedience in her resolute determination to be heard. This refusal to be silent is another decidedly modern trait.

Yet Parr was no po-faced scholar; she was a passionate and headstrong woman – her ill-advised fourth marriage, a mistake that would ultimately be her undoing, serves as testimony to this. It is her flaws as much as her strengths, the contradictions in her character, that made her appeal so greatly to me as a writer of fiction.  I think what lies at the heart of Parr's recent popularity is that, as an individual and, to use a Gladwellism, an 'outlier', she seems somehow less distant than other Tudor women – more like us.


Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of a trilogy of Tudor novels all focusing on notable women: QUEEN'S GAMBIT on Katherine Parr, SISTERS OF TREASON on the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey and WATCH THE LADY on Penelope Devereux, the controversial sister of the Earl of Essex. Her next book, about Arbella Stuart, will be published by Penguin next year. Find more information about Elizabeth's work on elizabethfremantle.com

TUDOR FICTION: is it all sex and scandal?

I thought I’d run out of things to say about Wolf Hall when my attention was drawn to Laura Miller’s article in Salon, in which she responds to the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall in the context of other Tudor texts. In it Miller sings the praises of Mantel’s serious approach to a period that she scathingly describes as ‘for chicks,’ applauding the way the author draws out the idea of the Tudor period marking the break from Medieval feudalism and the beginning of the modern world, with the increase of social mobility in figures like Cromwell.

This is all well and good and cogently argued, but Miller also takes an opportunity to serve a crushing and sweeping blow to pretty much all other fictional material set in the period. She compares Mantel’s ‘high-brow’ approach with what she disparagingly terms ‘princess novels’ or Tudor set fiction that is focused on women’s lives. Her main point being that such fiction foregrounds lascivious sex and scandal and in so doing makes it no different to schlocky high-school teen dramas.

Philippa Gregory comes in for a particularly contemptuous drubbing, accused of digging out uninteresting female figures from the past and padding out their stories with romance that has no historical validity. Though Miller makes her point well and there is legitimacy to some of what she says, certainly about the gratuitous soft-porn elements of the Showtime series The Tudors, and the wilful manipulation of history in the teen drama Reign, what she overlooks is the serious nature of some of the themes of much Tudor set fiction.

Even the more commercial, romance led, Tudor novels have a profound darkness that makes them a poor comparison to the teen dramas cited. Yes, there are parallels to situations in which young women are living at close quarters and competing for prestige. Miller correctly points out that in such novels much is made of clothing but refrains from exploring the value and symbolic resonance of women’s clothing in these texts. For the Tudors, an upstart family with a tenuous grip on the throne, clothing was a crucial indication of status and thus merits description. Indeed Mantle also employs, to great effect, descriptions of clothing to create a sense of the importance of the outward representation of rank and affiliation through apparel within the courtly arena, where position and allegiance were of primary significance.

The cumbersome clothing women were laced into was also a part of the broader denial of female freedom in much the same way 21st century women living in fundamentalist Islamic communities are required to cover and restrict their bodies. The early modern female body was a precious commodity and was at once expected to be a site of allure and yet also to be contained and kept out of sight to guard its value.

To view such narratives as inconsequential refuses to acknowledge that for these Tudor ‘princesses’ the stakes were vertiginously high. They describe a world in which young women were brutally murdered for political ends and had to negotiate a dangerous path through a male power structure that gave them no agency.

Surely any woman who can gain even a modicum of power in an oppressively misogynist system merits having her story told, and many of the generation of serious historians who are rediscovering such stories would agree. It is unhelpful to regard all such fiction as romantic clap-trap that uses sex as its narrative drive, when marriage was the primary route to power for women. What is noteworthy about these stories is that it becomes impossible to separate sexual and state policy. Princesses are interesting because of, rather than in spite of, the power that was invested in their bodies, and how they used that power makes for fascinating reading.

By comparing a novel about Anne Boleyn to Gossip Girl, Miller is refusing to acknowledge that these privileged young women are unlike their contemporary counterparts because their stories are inherently tragic – real tragedy that ends in brutal death – when he worst outcome in teen drama is social ostracisation. What could be more pitiful than the execution of of Catherine Howard. Yes, she may have been a shallow girl preoccupied with love (she was seventeen, for goodness' sake) but her life was caught up in a political vortex over which she had no control and as such it is worth inspecting as a means to understand the extraordinary lack of power such women – even queen consorts – had in those days. These women were rendered shallow and infantalised by the paternal hegemony to which they belonged. To compare them with modern women who have sexual and professional freedom, who are educated and, importantly, choose to be largely concerned with superficial matters is missing the point.

Early modern women had no freedom, yet they found ways to make themselves heard. For the first time the humanist project, led in England by Thomas More, encouraged education for women, albeit for a limited and privileged cohort, which was surely an important social change that merits our attention. Take Katherine Parr for example, a minor queen of apparently little political importance, but few are aware that she was one of the first women to publish an original text in the English language. At a time when women were obliged to be silent and submissive, to publish religious political texts was an audacious and dangerous act. Indeed these educated females laid the ground for an unprecedented half-century of female rule in England. To say such lives are not worth examining and reduce them to little more than titillating tales, plays into the hands of the misogyny that sought to silence them in the first place.

Because Cromwell’s story is essentially one of social mobility and money, doesn’t automatically invest it with greater legitimacy, as Miller suggests, indeed it could be said that as women’s bodies were a currency traded at the highest level their stories have equal importance from a socio-economic perspective. Social mobility too was mediated through the bodies of women. Consider how the minor landed gentry such as the Seymours and the Parrs became elevated in such a way. These women’s lives provide a vital key in understanding the period, so please let’s not do as David Starkey has long done, and dismiss them as trivial.

For Miller's article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/our_enduring_tudor_obsession_sex_ambition_wealth_and_power_never_go_out_of_style/

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor trilogy: Queen's Gambit, Sisters of Treason and Watch the Lady. ElizabethFremantle.com

Queen's Gambit, about the life of Katherine Parr, has been chosen for World Book Night.

The Alfred Jewel comes home: Sue Purkiss

The Alfred Jewel

There is great excitement in Somerset at the moment (no, it's true; in the hills and on the levels, they speak of little else!) because for just one month, a great treasure has come home. It's the Alfred Jewel, and it must be one of the most exquisite works of art ever to have been found in a field after having been lost for centuries.

It's surprisingly small - a mere 6.4 cm long. It consists of an enamelled picture of a man who holds a flowering plant in each hand. This image is set under a piece of rock crystal, which is encased in the most exquisitely chased gold setting. It's shaped like a tear drop, and the apex of this is 'carved' into an animal's head - maybe a boar or a dragon? - in whose jaws is an empty socket. The gold back plate is engraved  with a stylised plant design, while the reverse of the animal head is patterned with overlapping scales.

And very significantly, there is an inscription, worked into the framework in open letterwork. It says: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN - 'Alfred ordered me to be made.'

The Alfred in question was almost certainly Alfred the Great - so this jewel is a direct link with him. We know this because it was found on the Somerset Levels in 1693, in a field near North Petherton, only a few miles from Athelney, where Alfred fled in 878 from the Viking leader Guthrum - and from which he emerged to fight a decisive battle at Edington. After this, for the rest of his reign Alfred had the upper hand, and so was able to get on with rebuilding Wessex and making life better for his people. He later founded a monastery at Athelney.

No-one knows for certain what the purpose of the jewel was. But that socket looks as if it was made as an attachment to something. Perhaps it was fixed onto a crown - but the smart money is on the theory that this was an aestel - a pointer: used to follow the writing in a book. It is known that Alfred gave copies of Pope Gregory's 9th century best-seller Pastoral Care to bishoprics throughout his kingdom, and that with each book he sent a precious aestel. Perhaps this was the one he gave to Athelney.

Who was the man in the picture? It has been suggested it's Alfred himself. This doesn't seem likely to me. So far as I know, there wasn't a tradition of portraiture at the time - and if you were going to make a portrait, there would be easier media to use than enamel. Perhaps it's a saint - we don't know. More questions: how and when was it lost? How did it survive, under the surface of a field, without harm, for hundreds of years? If it had been found today, the site would have been minutely investigated for clues - but of course none of that happened in the 17th century.

What did happen was that the jewel was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 by the antiquarian Thomas Palmer, the son of Nathaniel, who had been the owner of the land where the jewel was found. Not long after that, it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, and there it's been ever since.

The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the first university museum in the world, and it was built to house the 'Cabinet of Curiosities' of Elias Ashmole. Philippa Gregory has a very interesting account of its founding in her novel Virgin Earth (which, by the way, along with its predecessor, Earthly Joys, is a really excellent read), which concerns the fortunes pf plant collectors and explorers John Tradescant and his son. She suggests that the core of the collection was that of the Tradescants, which had been tricked out of them by Ashmole. Whatever the truth of that - and the Tradescants' collection was certainly the foundation of Ashmole's - the Ashmolean was and is a treasure trove. I went there to see the Alfred Jewel some years ago, when I was researching my novel about Alfred, Warrior King. It took me ages to find it, and eventually I spotted it tucked a way in a dim corner of a crowded display case.

But since then the Ashmolean has been re-fashioned into a glorious space, and the Alfred Jewel, far from being hidden away, is a striking focal point with a display case that sets it off beautifully.

Only not this month, because we've got it - it's only on loan, but for these few weeks, it's home.

I went to see it the other day, and I marvelled over how tiny it is. How on earth could the maker even see to create such exquisite detail? And just to think, that Alfred (I have to admit, I think of him as 'my Alfred') actually held this in his hand! (Because I'm sure he did. He ordered it to be made, so he would certainly have inspected it when it was done.)

Seeing the Jewel was the purpose of my visit, but I can't finish without a word about the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. Like the Ashmolean, it has been recently remodelled, and it's gorgeous. In fact, it's so gorgeous that it deserves more than a skimpy paragraph. So on second thoughts, I'll give it a post of its own next month. When the Alfred Jewel will have left us again, and we will be bereft...

THE MARMITE TENSE: Pondering on the Present Historic – Elizabeth Fremantle

There are lots of people who don't like stories from the past retold in the present tense and they can be very vocal about this aversion, especially on Radio 4. But the present tense is the mode of drama, it is the mode of conversation, so why not too, the mode of story telling? Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion but as an historical novelist, I tend to seek the best possible way to recount a particular story depends on many factors, not least, and particularly with first person accounts, the fate of the narrating character. Often in historical fiction the reader is aware of the protagonist's outcome but even if the reader knows that, say, Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard are going to end up on the block, the fact that the character does not have the benefit of hindsight creates an effect that is filled with dramatic irony and tension.

Hilary Mantel employs this to spectacular effect in Bring Up the Bodies, a novel that is tightly plotted, like a thriller, and written in a third person that is so close to protagonist Thomas Cromwell that it creates the illusion of the world seen through his eyes alone. We watch in horror as Cromwell unravels the Queen's world and even though we all know what will become of Anne Boleyn and the five men she is accused of adultery with, neither she nor they know and somehow we, as readers, are drawn into their world so completely we forget what we know about the outcome and are shocked when it comes. 

Another example, though one much more straightforward and written in the first person, is from Philippa Gregory in The Boleyn Inheritance.  The teenaged narrator Catherine Howard is about to be carted off to the Tower. She still believes she will be pardoned when her uncle Norfolk comes to tell her she is to die. 

'You should acknowledge your sins, and ask forgiveness,' he says promptly.

I am so relieved I could almost weep. Of course I will be forgiven if I say I am sorry.

We are entirely drawn into this poor child's world watching her articulate the belief that a simple apology will suffice, when we know that nothing can save her. It is a powerful device. This moment simply wouldn't have the impact or poignance if written with hindsight. And indeed, how does one write a first person past tense account of someone who is about to die, and get away with it? But then again, anything is possible in fiction if you can make it work. 

Other writers use the present historic to create layers of meaning in a text. Take Sarah Waters for example:

I do not know who cries it, she or I: I reel away unnerved. But in the second I have her skin between my fingers, my own flesh leaps in a kind of relief. I shake horribly for almost an hour. 'Oh, God!' I say, hiding my face. 'I'm afraid, for my own mind! Do you think me mad? Do you think me wicked, Sue?' 'Wicked?' she answers, wringing her hands. and I can see her thinking: A simple girl like you?

This quote from Fingersmith, illustrates the intensity and immediacy of the present. We inhabit the flesh of narrator Maud as it 'leaps' and 'shakes', and we are able to observe her watching Sue, who is not party to what the reader and narrator know. We are drawn right into the plot because we are on the inside of Maud's narration. Waters has used both present and past tenses to tell this story. Sue, the sly cockney girl relates her part in the past. This seems to be an inversion of our expectations; wouldn't a girl like Sue employ the more casual tense of the raconteur? But the past is the knowing tense, and Sue knows, or thinks she knows, exactly what is going on. Maud's narration is told in the moment, as if without hindsight. Again there is an oddness to it; Maud is a refined girl employed to read to her uncle and surely more suited to the formality of the tense of literature. 
This quote from 

Waters's subterfuge is clever here because, as it turns out, neither girl is what we first think and so the tense they narrate their stories in works as a key to our overall understanding. But the action is almost subliminal because, if the writing is good enough, the reader, lulled into the voice and world of the novel, loses awareness of the tricks perpetrated by the author.

Viennese author from the early twentieth century, Stephan Zweig, uses tense in a very particular way moving between present and past like a conjurer. In Beware of Pity he introduces his story in the voice of a kind of faux author; a writer who encounters a man, a so called, 'historically authentic hero,' Hofmiller, in a cafe. The story is then told as if from Hofmiller's mouth, going back in time twenty years, and shifting in an apparently casually conversational manner between past and present tense: 

So one afternoon – it must have been the middle of May 1914 – I was sitting in the cake shop with one of my occasional partners...We had long ago finished playing our usual three games, and were just idly talking about this or that... but the conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down. At this point the door suddenly opens, and a pretty girl in a fulll-skirted dress is swept in on a gust of fresh air...

This is exactly what happens when people tell stories, they slip back and forth from the now to the then. But beneath this appearance of veracity lies a device that manipulates the tone of the piece. We are with the narrator in his provincial town, in his state of lassitude and boredom and something happens. The girl is characterised as a breath of fresh air, which is the function she performs in the story, bringing the excitement of possibility with her, we are jolted out of our torpor into the moment. Indeed the appearance of this girl heralds the true beginning of Hofmiller's story. Zweig is using this mode of story telling to enhance our experience of the atmosphere in which our narrator exists. It is a beautifully conceived trick, hidden behind the guise of an 'authentic' raconteur's voice.

Fiction is, by its very nature, a deceptive art and writers have only a limited number of tools at their disposal: mostly grammatical; so the use of tense is crucial to the crafting of a novel. To simply use the past tense because we are recounting past events is missing the point. after all, any narration is necessarily describing past events, even if they happened only a few moments ago. Novelists are creating an artificial world and how better to bring the distant past, its sounds, smells, textures, the inner worlds of its inhabitants, to life, than to speak of it as if it's happening now. It is sometimes said that the 'fashion' for the present tense is the result of the ubiquitous Creative Writing MA, with the suggestion that it is the preferred tense of such courses. This is nonsense of course, the use of the present tense is more a natural progression of Modernism, via authors like Zweig, in which writers strive to build ever more convincing worlds and climb further into the minds of their characters. So it could be seen as a contemporary style, and let's not forget that even historical fiction is contemporary fiction.

Find out about Elizabeth Fremantle's novels Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr, and Sisters of Treason, about the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey, on ElizabethFremantle.com

Shelve under Venus - or Mars? - Celia Rees

Imagine my surprise and delight when I opened my copy of the Sunday Times and found a double page spread in the Culture section devoted to historical fiction. Not only that, but our very own Mary Hoffman was quoted along with  fellow History Girl, Louise Berridge. Our History Girls blog got a mention, too. I was pleased and proud, although not so happy about the theme of the piece.

I dislike gender divides in fiction. I dislike gender divides anywhere. I understand why female writers hide behind the anonymity of initials or an androgynous first name and I certainly wouldn't want to offend or upset fellow History Girls, A.L. Berridge and H.M. Castor. I don't feel I'm 'outing' them, by the way, any lingering doubts as to gender should be dispelled by the fact that they are both History GIRLS. I know it is often not a writer's choice but pressure from her publisher which makes her adopt the initials, but is it really necessary? The pretence is tissue thin. As A.L. Berridge points out, all the reader has to do is open the cover to find that Louise lives in St Albans with her husband. Maybe I'm just jealous because I don't have a middle name, and there's not much to be done with Celia, so I'm destined to stay in the Girlie Ghetto, but we don't have an H.M. Mantel, E. L. Catton, or a Phil Gregory for that matter, and as the Sunday Times article goes on to point out, having a recognisably female first name does not prevent a writer from winning literary prizes or topping the best seller list.

As a writer of Young Adult fiction, where this kind of gender discrimination is rife - if someone mentions a writer by way of a double initial my first reaction is what does she write? - I guess I should be used to this, but it continues to annoy me that women have to don this nomenclatural disguise to even think of appealing to male readers.  What is it with these boys and men, anyway? Do they think that picking up a book written by a woman with a woman on the cover will cause some diminution of their masculinity? Or do they think the book will be per se girlie, all frocks and romance and not for them? Are they incapable of reading the blurb on the back? There is the implicit implication that women writers are somehow unable to take a male point of view, or write about things (war and gore) that might interest men. Setting aside the crude and insulting assumption that male readers are only interested in said topics, there are a legion of examples that prove women writers can shoot a bow and wield a broadsword with the best of them. Oddly, the opposite is never mooted, I guess because it is assumed that no red blooded male writer would possibly want to write from a woman's of view.

What I find most disturbing are the prejudices and assumptions swirling around this perceived gender divide. There is a faint feeling of outrage that, at the moment, female writers are outselling men, that more girls and women read than boys and men. Rather in the way of girls gaining better exam results, this is not seen as a cause for celebration, but rather a reason for hand wringing: the answer obviously being to downplay the female and pander to the male.

Genderisation diminishes us all, writer and reader alike. This tightening straightjacket is being imposed by market driven publishers panicked by the general decline of reading as a whole. It is up to us to resist, to buck the trend. No part or period of history, no human activity, is all male or all female and to suggest otherwise is just ridiculous. As Philippa Gregory has demonstrated, the bloody Wars of the Roses was not an entirely male affair, there were powerful women there who had more on their minds than what kind of head gear they should be wearing. Hilary Mantel has written two Booker Prize winners from the point of view of one of the most powerful and ruthless men in English History.  The publishers should be supporting and encouraging novels which break gender lines, rather than re-enforcing them.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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.

The Cabinet of Curiosities - Celia Rees

This engraving in Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale (Naples 1599) is the earliest pictorial record of a Cabinet of Curiosities. The original Cabinets were not cabinets at all but rooms and this one  is full, floor to ceiling, with books, stuffed animals, horns, tusks, skulls, skeletons, shells, different kinds of man-made instruments. On the walls there are shelves and built in cabinets holding fossils, mineral samples, specimen boxes and covered jars.  The visitors are pointing, looking round in awe and wonder at the fantastic display. Indeed, in Germany, such collections were called Wunderkammer, wonder rooms.

These rooms might contain all sorts of other things, too. Mixed in with the natural history specimens might be small sculptures, clockwork automata, ethnographic specimens (beads, masks, clothing, weapons, everyday objects) from faraway locations. There was no division between fact and fiction. Among the stuffed fish and birds there might be a unicorn's horn (generally the tusk from a narwhal) or the purported remains of some other mythical creature.  These cabinets brought together specimens from all over the known world: Ming porcelain from China, artefacts from the Americas, Japanese footwear. 

It is no coincidence that many of the classic collections were made in the 16th and 17th Centuries at the time of European expansion and exploration. The cabinet might also contain articles from different periods of history: from pre-historic flint axes to Roman, Greek and Egyptian artefacts. Different belief systems were displayed together: religious icons and relics were placed alongside pagan images and amulets, instruments used in alchemy, objects associated with witchcraft. There was no real attempt to categorise. Some of the specimens were genuine, others undoubtedly fake, but this didn't seem to matter. These were collections of the strange, the unusual, the exotic, the curious; collected by the curious, to entertain, stimulate, intrigue the curious mind.  

These collections were the foundations of our modern museums. The jumble of objects would be teased apart and categorised to become the basis of modern branches of study: natural history, natural sciences, zoology, ornithology, geology, palaeontology, archaeology, ethnography, anthropology, and so on. 

John Tradescant the Elder

John Tradescant the Younger

The Musaeum Tradescantianum, established in Vauxhall, in London held the collection of curiosities assembled by the John Tradescants,  Elder and Younger: travellers, explorers and collectors. The collection was eventually acquired by Elias Asmole and in 1691, it became the nucleus for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Some of the original exhibits are still on display.  

John Tradescant the Younger described the collection thus:

‘Now for the materialls themselves, I reduce them unto two sorts; one Naturall, of which some are more familiarly known & named amongst us, as divers sorts of Birds, foure-footed Beasts and Fishes, to whom I have given usual English names. Others are lesse familiar, and as yet unfitted with apt English termes, as the shell-Creatures, Insects, Mineralls, Outlandish-Fruits, and the like, which are part of the Materia Medica; (Encroachers upon this faculty, may try how they can crack such shels) The other sort is Artificialls, as Utensills, House-holdstuffe, Habits, Instruments of Warre used by severall Nations, rare curiosities of Art, &c. These are also expressed in English, (saving the Coynes, which would vary but little if Translated) for the ready satisfying whomsoever may desire a view thereof'.

Philippa Gregory's novels Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth give an excellent fictionalised account of the lives of the Tradescants. 

Sir Hans Sloane's extensive collection formed the foundation of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum. The British Museum was first opened to the public on its Bloomsbury site in 1759. It has changed a great deal since then, but my favourite area is the Enlightenment Gallery installed in the former Kings Library which re-creates the variety of objects, from  the Magician John Dee's skrying mirror to sea shells, that characterised the museum in the mid 18th Century. 

British Museum

British Museum

In the 18th Century collecting was what a gentleman with any pretensions to learning and culture did. I made sure when I was writing Sovay, that Sovay's father, Sir John, had his own Cabinet of Curiosities. In his case, his Library. 

The shelves were stocked from floor to ceiling with books on every possible subject. The walls were studded with chronometers and barometers. Globes and astrolabes stood about on the floor. Cabinets held stuffed birds and animals, samples of rocks, minerals and fossils. Every surface was crowded with bits of machinery, brass-crafted devices for generating this, measuring that. 

His collection was based on Matthew Boulton's at Soho House, Birmingham. What collections contained, reflected the pre-occupations and passions of the time. 

My favourite museums are the ones that still retain some of this eclectic flavour, whose collections still have the feeling that these things have been brought together by one man's curiosity.  I can spend hours in the Pitt Rivers in Oxford or the Wellcome Collection in London.

Wellcome Collection

Pitt Rivers Museum

Every time I go, I see something different. Both contain an extensive collection of the weird and grotesque which give something of the feeling of wonder, fascination, even horror, that the first Cabinets of Curiosity must have evoked. 

The Cabinets did not just give rise to some of our greatest  museums, the bizarre, freakish, exotic and grotesque would be exhibited in fairground sideshows and commercial freak shows.

Peter Blake: Museum For Myself

Cabinets of Curiosities, Wunderkammer, were also seen as 'memory theatres'. They contained 'found' objects that the collector had acquired while excavating, exploring, or travelling, on the Grand Tour, for example, souvenirs in other words. Things that had attracted that individual's attention for some reason, ignited their curiosity. I like Peter Blake's idea of a Museum For Myself, of creating one's own museum, full of items of some personal significance or importance, objects of interest or fascination, or simply ones that one can't quite part with, can't bear to throw away.

Peter Blake's Museum of the Colour White

This is a gift to the compulsive collector. It gives us permission to do something that other people think is utterly pointless, and something to do with the useless objects that we collect. It is also very creative. Collections can be made and unmade, arranged and re-arranged.

As you can probably guess, I do have my own Cabinet of Curiosities. I also have a printers' block that contains smaller objects.

My Cabinet of Curiosities

Printers' Block with Smaller Objects

It's not just me, my friend Barbara has one, too.

Barbara's Cabinet

I wonder if anyone else has a similar collection and where it is housed?

This is part of a History Girls Project where we will be collecting our own virtual Cabinet of Curiosities. I can't wait to see what it will contain. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com