Remembering The Battle of Bosworth by Catherine Hokin

The first of these Welsh kings was Henry who defeated all the other kings at the Battle of Boswell and took away all their roses. After the battle the crown was found hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill. This is memorable as being the only occasion on which the crown has been found after a battle hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill.

With thanks to 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman



As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That - probably still my favourite historical book of all time which may explain a lot - History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. One of the things many people are pretty certain they can remember is the Wars of the Roses, which ended (or didn't but we'll get to that) 533 years ago today on the 22nd August 1485 with the Battle of Bosworth. History buffs or not, ask a sample of your friends about this time period and I guarantee they'll all have some sense of it. Whether it's the lost princes in the Tower, the ill-fittingly romantic name, Richard and his hunch-back, or his car-park discovery, the Wars of the Roses and its characters still resonate. They also inspire great passion. My father was a member of the Ricardian Society and a war-gamer whose sand-table battles (ask your parents) re-enacted every twist of that August day. As I said many times when my novel about Margaret of Anjou came out, he was so obsessed with the conflict that, as a child, I was fairly certain that it was still going on. And who can forget the Channel 4 documentary after the discovery of Richard III's body and Philippa Langley's face when she looked at that re-created head.

 Bosworth Memorial

Perhaps one of the reasons the Battle of Bosworth still attracts such attention (apart from the fact that a king died) is that it still courts controversy. We have no eye-witness accounts - all our knowledge of the day's events is derived from documents written after the fact and under a regime with a need to remember history in its own particular way if it was going to have any kind of a future. Some sources in fact come even later - for example there was no real attempt to analyse the use, type and position of troops  for nearly another 200 years. The site itself has long been a matter of dispute - the stone marking the spot of Richard's death is at Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. In 2010, after a major archaeological project, the actual site of the battle was announced as being 3km away from the memorial. Part of the evidence which relocated the battle site were 22 pieces of lead shot, ranging from gunshot to grapefruit-sized canonballs. Not only did this discovery change the location, it also dispelled a myth that the armies fought each other with bows and arrows rather than firepower.

 Stanley Coat of Arms

Controversies over the site are one thing but the issue of treachery - and that of Lord Stanley in particular - is quite another blood-boiler. Listen to my father and William Stanley made Attila the Hun sound like Winnie the Pooh. The version he subscribes to has the hitherto loyal Stanley turning his coat at the last minute, swooping his troops down the hill behind Richard in a shock move that ensured the king was butchered. That Stanley declared for Henry at the last minute is as certain as anything in this battle can be but the idea of the attack having no deeper roots than a self-serving decision on the day as been re-examined by historians such as David Hipshon. He cites Stanley's failure to support Richard not as a sudden change in loyalty but as coming out of a 20 year power-struggle in Lancashire; a personal score being settled in a bigger political arena. And I can already hear the cry - "tomaytoes/tomatoes: it's still treachery!"

Reconstructed head of Richard III

The site, the type of weapons used, who turned coat and who didn't: it all disappears into the mist when we get to what happened to Richard himself. Oh the ire it used to raise. The stories of his removal from the battlefield are told in a number of the chronicles which later reported the battle. According to Vergil, the body was ‘nakyd of all clothing, and layd uppon an horse bake with the armes and legges hanginge downe on both sides’, a scene the Crowland Chronicle described as a ‘miserable spectacle in good sooth’. His body was then taken back to Leicester, his head supposedly hitting the stones of Bow Bridge as it was carried across. Most accounts agree that the body was put on public display for two days at Greyfriars church. Some then have the corpse interred in a plain unmarked tomb inside the church, others talk about an alabaster tomb, with an effigy of Richard on top, being erected at a later date on the orders of Henry VII. If that ever existed it was lost, as was the King with the most commonly believed story having him tipped unceremoniously into the River Soar.

 Leicester Council Sign

Except, of course, he wasn't. In 2012, an archaeological excavation discovered a battle-damaged skeleton in a Leicester City Council car park, believed to be the site once occupied by Greyfriars Priory Church. The body showed that the skeleton had 10 wounds, eight of them to the head, inflicted in battle and suggesting the soldier had lost his helmet. A blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. In 2013 DNA testing identified ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the remains as those of Richard. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of Richard’s eldest sister, Anne of York. So we had Richard but we didn't have an end to the arguing with both York and Leicester campaigning to host his remains - a battle Leicester's tourism department won.

Was 1485 the end of the Wars of the Roses? Not for Henry VII who lived under the shadow of pretenders and resurrected dead princes throughout his reign and probably never sat that comfortably on his throne. And, beyond a categorisation date of the here ends/here starts type, not for historians who still have so much of the battle left to pick over. And don't forget there's another controversy to come: the lost princes, one of history's ultimate cold cases. There's bones, they've never been tested and Philippa Langley is on the case...

"Here lyeth Quene Kateryn" by Ann Turnbull

From Cleeve Hill in the Cotswolds you can look down and see Sudeley Castle, close to the small town of Winchcombe.

Sudeley has been restored, but some of the ruins of earlier buildings remain - notably the walls and tall Gothic windows of Richard III's banqueting hall, and the shell of a 15th century tithe barn, which now houses an enchanting garden of roses, hollyhocks, clematis and wisteria.

Sudeley - a stronghold since Anglo-Saxon times - was slighted after the Civil Wars and left uninhabitable. For two centuries it was used by tenant farmers for sheltering animals, and some of its stones were carried away. King Charles I's campaign bed - a great demountable four-poster of solid carved oak - lay forgotten in a barn on the estate. And the body of Queen Katherine Parr lay buried beneath a wall in the ruined chapel and was not rediscovered for more than two hundred years.

Katherine Parr? Well, when Henry VIII died in 1547, Sudeley passed to Thomas Seymour, who went on to marry the king's widow, Katherine Parr. So Katherine came to live at Sudeley, along with Thomas's ward, the eleven-year-old Lady Jane Grey. Sadly, Katherine's time at Sudeley was short - little more than a year. She became pregnant and died of puerperal fever a week after the birth, aged thirty-six. When her lead coffin was discovered and opened in 1782, her body was found to be wrapped in six layers of linen cerecloth, which had kept it perfectly preserved (though later openings eventually reduced it to dust.)  In the 19th century the chapel was rebuilt and re-dedicated as St Mary's Church, and Katherine was laid in a marble tomb inscribed with the words found on her coffin, "Here lyeth Quene Kateryn, wife to Kyng Henry VIII..."

The castle was sensitively restored by John and William Dent, wealthy glove-makers, who bought it in 1837. Since then, the present owners have built up some fascinating collections and exhibitions. Emma Dent, the Victorian chatelaine, was a great collector, and there is a room full of antique lace and embroidery, including a 16th century lace canopy said to have been made by Anne Boleyn for the christening of Princess Elizabeth. Emma also devoted energy to both buildings and gardens, and can be seen below, in topiary, sitting in her herb garden, reading a book - though she was so busy with good works around Winchcombe (providing almshouses, a school, a new church, a piped water supply, teaching at a night school and running sewing classes) that it's hard to imagine she had much time to sit and read.

Some highlights of the exhibitions for me were:

Katherine Parr's privy, curtained and upholstered in crimson velvet.

The Vertue drawings - copies of thirty-three portraits by Holbein of members of the Tudor court.

Charles I's despatch box, in which he kept all his correspondence during the Civil War - one of the spoils of the battle of Naseby.

Charles I's campaign bed - now restored and refurnished.

Katherine Parr's books and her letter to Thomas Seymour accepting his marriage proposal.

Oh, and the Roman mosaic - another thing for which we have to thank Emma Dent. But that will be the subject of a separate blog...

A Medieval Frame of Mind, by Laurie Graham

Three weeks ago I was in Leicester for the re-interment of King Richard III. Amidst the modest but beautiful ceremonies and the sincerity of the thousands who lined the streets and queued for hours to pay their respects at his coffin, there was something else: the television imperative to keep talking in excited voices even when there was nothing new to say.



Richard III, by Graham Turner

‘Why?’ asked presenter Jon Snow, so forcefully I thought he might levitate clean out of his chair, ‘Why on earth would a King risk his own neck by going into battle?’ 

Granted, the Royal Health & Safety Directorate would advise against it these days, but seriously, it was a question that encapsulates our difficulty of getting into a medieval frame of mind. It’s too easy for us to think of the 15^th century as being like the 21^st century but without indoor plumbing.

Why would a King risk his life leading a cavalry charge? Because he was a warrior, that's why, trained from childhood in military skills, and because in the 15^th century might was right. There was no arbitration. Battlefields were where crowns were won or lost.  

Did Richard fear for his life that August morning at Bosworth Field? Like every other soldier mustered there he knew how flimsy the veil is that separates life from death. Death was a fact of daily life. Richard’s wife, whom he apparently loved, had died, but he was already thinking of the Plantagenet succession and shopping for another bride.  His only child had died too. There was nothing remarkable about that either.

Richard’s personal Book of Hours shows us that like all his contemporaries he lived in the fear of God and the hope of salvation, and if Jon Snow had been around on the eve of the battle to ask him why he insisted on riding forth the next morning, you can be sure that King Richard would have been baffled by the question. His world view was not the same as ours.

It’s a problem every historical novelist faces, to get beneath the sallet and the wimple and into the minds of people who saw the world very differently than we see it today. Tudor historian David Starkey misses no opportunity to sneer at historical novelists but here’s the thing: ‘Serious’ historians aren’t so very different from us.  There are facts and figures, verifiable to a certain extent. Interpretation of them is a matter of joining the dots.  A novelist aims to join the dots in an engaging and entertaining way. When they succeed they may whet a reader’s appetite to know more and to read to read more widely and even more deeply. Nothing wrong with that, Dr Starkey.   

History, fiction and Josephine Tey by Imogen Robertson

I’m writer in residence at Plymouth University at the moment and am thoroughly enjoying myself. Mostly I’m there to try and give students some insight into writing as a profession and supplement their already excellent teaching of creative writing. I’ve done talks such as ‘How to write a prize winning short story and why you should’, and ‘A writer’s year’ for instance. Tomorrow though, I’m going to talk about researching historical fiction with particular reference to 'The Daughter of Time' by Josephine Tey. This is for a module that some of the English students are doing on Historical Fiction. I rather wish I was doing the course - it looks like a fascinating opportunity to study the interplay between fiction and recorded history. 

For those that don’t know the novel, ‘The Daughter of Time’ is about a policeman, Tey’s regular detective Alan Grant, who is stuck in hospital after breaking his leg during a chase and is very, very bored. His friend, the actress Marta Hallard, who knows his love of faces and mysteries brings him a collection of prints - portraits of individuals concerned with unsolved historical crimes - to distract him. After rejecting a few he lights upon the portrait of Richard III. When he looks at the portrait, he sees no sign of the villainous, and is disturbed to discover who it is. He begins asking his visitors, the nurses and his doctor what they think of the portrait, what they know of Richard and his crimes, and sending them out on research errands works his way through the standard accounts of the Princes in the Tower. Soon he recruits an available and amiable researcher, and is able to probe the sources a little further.  He ends up convinced that the accepted story is a lie, and that Henry VII was the real villain of the piece. As a wider point he also learns to question a lot of accepted historical truths. 

Tey, and through her Grant, are so persuasive that many of her readers joined and reinvigorated what is now The Richard III Society. 

What strikes me as a writer of historical fiction and of crime when reading the novel, is how Tey manages to have her cake and eat it. Several cakes. This is a detective story without threat, action or suspects - not ones alive at the time is story is set anyway. It is a work of historical revisionism without being a history book, and it is a piece of historical fiction (well, it has bits of historical fiction in it), without having to create a convincing portrait of 15thc characters and their world. Hardly seems fair. Nevertheless it is an excellent and thought provoking novel. 

It works, I think, for two reasons. One is the considerable charm of the writing. Someone is always coming in to talk to Grant and his discoveries are dramatised in his conversations. Tey manages to show not tell, while telling. These cameos are neatly and amusingly drawn as are the politics of floral gifts, Grant's boredom and the shock of his guests when they realise the accepted facts of history are not as sacrosanct as they thought. The text is also studded with arch references - Marta is annoyed because the author she wants to write a play for her is doing ‘one of her awful little detective stories’ instead. Grant knows about Richard II because he saw the play Richard of Bordeux several times. It is a play Tey wrote herself under her other pen name, Gordon Daviot. There are various casual, caustic asides about different popular fiction genres.

The second reason the novel works is that it does do the one essential thing quality detective novels and historical fiction should do. It makes you question your beliefs and look again at the evidence. There is always an element of sleight of hand in detective fiction, you want the reader to think one thing, then find out they were wrong. Tey is reminding us that many of the individuals who created the story of history were as unreliable as the distraught fiancée in an Agatha Christie. Equally the best historical fiction is there to remind us any period is made of of the experiences of individuals, and those individuals and experiences have always been a lot more varied and complex than the flattened history of school books has room to allow.  She’s also reminding us of of the importance of approaching any received wisdom with both sympathy and scepticism. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Remembrance: a Game of Bones by Mary Hoffman

Starting off November in this centenary year of the outbreak of World War One, inevitably leads to thoughts of Remembrance. Just how do we honour the dead, particularly those fallen in war?

Hugely successful has been the idea of artist Paul Cummins to fill the moat of the Tower of London with ceramic poppies. This has proved a very successful installation, with crowds flocking to see the growing "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red" artwork, while volunteers plant the poppies. The last of the 888,246 flowers, each representing "a military fatality during WW1"will be set in the moat on November 11th, Remembrance Day.

From Tower of London website

I can't be there then, as it's midweek, but hope to go on Remembrance Sunday, November 9th and attend a service in the Tower Chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, where the bones of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and so many other names from English history lie under the stones.

I always buy and wear a red poppy, alongside one of the Peace Union's white poppies. Leslie Wilson wrote about the poppy's symbolism here on 23rd October. Jonathan Jones, the Guardian's Art critic hates the sea of them at the Tower, calling it "a deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless war memorial."

Both feel, with good reason, that we are prone to honour only the British dead and those who were combatants. We are of course free to think of whom we wish in the two minutes' silence: men and women, Allies and Germans, military and civilian deaths, the "Great" war or any other conflict.

We need to honour the dead; it is hard to think of any culture where this is not important. Antigone needed to bury her brothers, Achilles had to retrieve Patroclus' body from the battlefield where he had been killed and Priam in his turn had to beg Achilles for Hector's desecrated corpse.

Where we don't have an identified body to bury, we take one unknown to stand for all:

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey

The British soldier buried here in 1920 represents all those who fell in France but whose families were unable to retrieve their mortal remains and give them their funeral rites.

Which brings me to Richard the Third.  I'm sure you are aware of the latest on the funeral arrangements to inter appropriately the skeleton found in the Leicester car park, which was proved to be that of England's most notorious king (just pipping Henry the Eighth to that title)

National Portrait Gallery Wikimedia Commons

 (All photographs of the skeleton are copyright of the University of Leicester but you can see one here).

Anyway, I'm sure you all remember the excavation in the car park which revealed the remains later identified as those of Richard, under a parking spot conveniently marked "R" and the subsequent TV programmes, press conferences and so on. And then the fascinating court case about where those remains were to be interred.

The Plantagenet Alliance, consisting of  "collateral descendants" of the king was formed by Stephen Nicolay, the 16th great-grandson of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York (father of Richard III). They were granted a judicial review of the burial place, wanting the king to be interred in York rather than Leicester. But in May of this year Lady Justice Hallett, sitting with Mr Justice Ouseley and Mr Justice Haddon-Cave, ruled there were no public law grounds for interfering with the plans for reburial at Leicester Cathedral.

The re-interment will cost £2.5m and will take place in Leicester cathedral as planned. It will receive the King’s remains on March 22, 2015 and they will then lie there for three days. The king will then be reburied during a ceremony on March 26, likely to be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. And from March 28, the area of Richard III’s tomb will be open to the public.

There has been controversy throughout - were these Richard's bones? Where should they be buried? Should a king with his record be honoured at all? What was that record?

One thing is clear. A million pounds has already been raised towards the cost of the funeral of the last English king to die in battle. There are many people who want to see this thing done properly. Dr Alexandra Buckle of Oxford University has reconstructed the form of a medieval re-burial service.

I do hope they use it. In includes this prayer:


"Let us pray. Omnipotent and eternal God, creator and redeemer of souls, who through the prophecy of Ezechiel are worthy to bind together truly dry bones with sinews, to cover them with skin and flesh, and to put into them the breath of life, we suppliants pray to you for the soul of our dear [INSERT NAME] whose bones we now place in the grave."

We can all "insert name" this month, whether it is that of King Richard or not.

LADY CROOKBACK – on disability and invisibility in historical fiction. By Elizabeth Fremantle

Lady Mary Grey

Lady Mary Grey, youngest sister of the tragic Lady Jane was described by a contemporary ambassador as 'small, crookbacked and very ugly.' It is thought by some historians that she was born with the congenital scoliosis of her ancestor Richard III (possibly also suffered by her cousin Edward VI) and there is more than one reference to her diminutive stature, suggesting that she was, aside from her spinal distortion, remarkably small. It would seem that Lady Mary then was a woman with significant disabilities and yet one who inhabited the highest echelons of the court. It was this intriguing figure that inspired my novel Sisters of Treason.

My own daughter was paralysed as a baby and for many months we believed she would never walk. Happily she did, but that experience fuelled my desire to give a voice to one of history's invisible women and to articulate something of the kind of life she might have led as both court insider and outsider. One comes across the occasional  man with physical differences in historical fiction: Bucino the dwarf of Sarah Dunant's In the company of the Courtesan, George RR Martin's Tyrian Lannister and polio victim Tomas Ashton of Rosie Allison's The Very Thought of You. All these characters play a pivotal part in their respective narratives, with Ashton as a damaged romantic lead in the mould of Jojo Moyes's quadriplegic hero in Me Before You, Lannister as a key character and Bucino as the protagonist of Dunant's novel. But there is a distinct absence of women with disabilities at the heart of historical fiction. It seems that women are allowed flaws of character, and a prevalence of women with psychological challenges can be found, but bodily flaws seem to be taboo. Looking to the past for literary examples offers little. There is the wheelchair-bound Edith in Stephan Zweig's wonderful Beware of Pity and a number of tragic girls like Beth in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Love For Lydia Springs to mind too, who are defined by debilitating illness but it is hard to find empowered women who do not conform to the physical norm. It is for this reason that I chose to take that ambassador's grim appraisal at face value when creating the character of Mary Grey. I didn't want to tone down her disabilities or blur them in any way and felt it was important for her to live on the page as she was in life and allow her, in some small way, speak for all the invisible women of her time.

The Infanta of Spain with her dwarf

In Early Modern Europe the Medieval belief still held sway, that physical flaws equated to sin, demonstrated effectively in Shakespeare's evil characterisation of that 'lump of foul deformity' Richard III. But Mary wasn't a child hidden away like a shameful secret, on the contrary she was educated alongside her sisters and is thought to have been something of a scholar like her eldest sister Jane. She spent many years at court, a place where dwarfs held special status as royal playthings. But Mary was different: she was full of royal blood herself and so I imagined her position as complex, treated as a kind of pet by dint of her stature but also holding a position in line to the throne. Mary inhabiting a place of ambivalence offered me opportunities to make her party to information others would not, as being infantalised or dehumanised in the eyes of others, her presence was not considered a threat. I show her sitting on the lap of Mary Tudor and overhearing political discussions of great secrecy. Thus she is empowered by her intelligence. But her life is a hard one, as roles for aristocratic women of the period were limited and always involved marriage and the bearing of children, something impossible for Mary. She envisages an endless life lived out in limbo at court where, as the daughter and sister of traitors, she is watched closely. But the most remarkable thing about the real Mary Grey, which truly demonstrates her extraordinary character, is that she refused to be bound by the expectations of her situation and made a break for personal freedom and happiness. A true heroine for our times.


Here's a short extract from Mary Grey's story. In it she is only nine-years-old and reeling from the execution of her beloved sister Jane.

   I hand my gown to Magdalen, who holds it up, saying with a smirk, 'How does this fit?' She dangles it from the tips of her fingers away from her body.
   'This part,' I explain, pointing at the high collar that has been specially tailored to fit my shape, 'goes up around here.'
   'Over your hump?' Magdalen says with a snort of laughter.
   I must not cry. What would my sister Jane have done, I ask myself. Be stoic, Mouse, she would have said. Let no one see what you are truly feeling.
   'I don't know why the Queen would want such a creature at her wedding,' Magdalen whispers to Cousin Margaret, not so quiet that I can't hear.
   I fear I will cry and make things worse, so I think up a picture of Jane. I remember her saying once: God has chosen to make you a certain way and it cannot be without reason. In his eyes you are perfect – in mine too. But I know I am not perfect; I am so hunched about the shoulders and crooked at the spine, I look as if I have been hung by the scruff on a hook for too long. And I am small as an infant of five, despite being almost twice that age. Besides it is what is in here that matters; in my mind's eye Jane presses a fist to her heart.

Sisters of Treason will be published on 22nd May

ElizabethFremantle.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.

Frail Tenements of Clay, by Laurie Graham

I was present recently at the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s branch of the Richard III Society and one of the questions before us was, what are we going to do?  We need, it was agreed, a crackingly good programme for our first year  -  a couple of accredited speakers and perhaps a study event  -  to catch the eye of potential new members. What would interest people? Overwhelmingly the topics suggested dwelt on that body in the car park. The King’s now verified scoliosis, for instance; how would it have affected him as a warrior? Or how about the recently disclosed evidence of his ringworm infestation; what did it tell us about his life and times? And those battle wounds, so clearly visible on his bones after more than 500 years; which of them would have been the actual death blow? 

Now I’m not squeamish about death and disease. Medical sciences were my subject long before I was a novelist. And yet I find myself slightly uneasy about this taste for recreational autopsies. Are we maybe watching too many television forensic investigator shows?

When King Richard’s remains were found last year I felt enormous gratitude to all those from Philippa Langley onwards, who had made it happen, and also for the science that made identification a certainty. I have mixed feelings about the facial reconstruction but on balance I welcome the reminder it has given us, if nothing else, that Richard was a young man.  Thirty three. The wounds to his skull and pelvis bear witness to the violence of hand to hand combat. Do we need to analyse his death any further than that? He went to Bosworth Field understanding perfectly well that he might not survive the day, and perhaps he didn’t much care. His wife was dead, his son was dead, and the Cousins’ War was a nest of vipers.

There are instances in history where there might be some justification for breaching the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room. Did Henry VIII have syphilis, or diabetes, or McLeod Syndrome? Would one or any of those diagnoses explain his destructive nature and his frequent recourse to the axe? Would it make him a more forgivable figure?
 

Haemophilia in Queen Victoria’s numerous descendants certainly had profound consequences for the Romanov dynasty. If the Tsesarevich Alexis hadn’t been haemophiliac the Tsarina wouldn’t have fallen under the thrall of Rasputin and Russia might have learned to love its German Empress. Perhaps, perhaps.   

And if we know why haemophilia has apparently disappeared from the remnants of Europe’s royal houses  -  monarchs now know better than to marry off their daughters to first cousins  -  it would still be interesting to know where the gene sprang from.  Could Victoria’s mother have been a carrier? Or was Queen Victoria the unfortunate source of a spontaneous mutation? Such things do happen.  

George III’s porphyria, a diagnosis that is still debated, led to the Regency, but the life of the nation wasn’t greatly affected. Life went on. Revolution didn’t come to our shores and eventually political reform did.  Yes, it would be interesting to have a firm diagnosis, but it would hardly change our view of George’s reign.  A more interesting point would be whether his porphyria (or whatever else it was) has now been bred out of the Royal Family? But actually it’s none of our business.

As for King Richard, my thoughts are that he should be laid quickly and finally to rest. A Catholic funeral mass and a tomb worthy of an anointed King.  No more picking over his bones, no judicial reviews, no soi disant descendants bickering about his resting place. And no more forensics. He died a violent and horrible death along with many others, on Bosworth Field. Time to close the autopsy file.