Elizabeth I, Richard II and Dr Who

 ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that,’ is what Elizabeth I is recorded as saying in 1601, with reference to Shakespeare’s play of that name, demonstrating the extent to which such a drama, written in the late years of her reign was as much about the present as the past. The most recent production of Richard II from the RSC is running at the Barbican with David Tennant in the title role. Most well known, judging by the queues of fans at the stage door, for his stint as Dr Who, Tennant takes us on another sort of time travel with a rendition of the beleaguered king that manages to combine both Elizabeth and Richard, visiting at once two distinct periods in history, each turbulent in its own way. In the late sixteenth century the deposition of Richard II, within such a dramatic context, articulated the suggestion that there were circumstances under which justification could be found to go against the divine right of Kings and be rid of a flawed ruler. This would have resonated with an Elizabethan audience aware that Richard’s demise allowed for the rise of two legendary monarchs (Henry IV and V) known for their great martial victories over France. Indeed, the deposition scene was sufficiently controversial in its time, drawing dangerous parallels between Richard and Elizabeth, as to have been left out of most performances and printed versions of the play.

We tend to think of the long reign of Gloriana as a great triumph from start to finish, with the Spanish threat defeated and the violent religious polarisation of her sibling’s reigns solved. But as the Queen aged she relied increasingly on unpopular advisors and her vacillating temperament, which had worked in her favour for so long (playing off the rulers of Europe one against the other with indecision over which she would marry) crystallised into a stubbornness that was ruled by fear. Elizabeth’s refusal to name a successor, for fear of people’s tendency to look, as she described it, ‘to the rising than to the setting sun,’ and having passed the age when she might realistically be able to bear an heir of her body, had by the 1590s created a problematic instability in an England that was increasingly perturbed.  For years after the great defeat of the Armada the country was in a state of jitters, fearing Spanish reprisals and, despite Elizabeth’s policy of religious toleration, the threat of Catholic rebellion within England’s shores had become a permanent concern, added to that four consecutive years of failed harvests meant people were starving. It is no wonder then that plays such as Richard II, with a weak and vacillating king at its heart, emerged at this moment in time, to hold up a mirror to the Elizabethan court. It was an oblique way to criticise the status quo without ending up on the scaffold. Shakespeare’s Richard, a man clearly demonstrated as being overly dependent on the advice of suspect favourites, is deposed by the decisive and assertive Bolingbroke who stands to represent just the safe pair of hands late Elizabethan England might have wished for.

Tennant brings to the role of Richard less of the fay girlishness of some interpretations and more of a regal stiffness and distance, a rigidity of mind and body that articulates an entrenchment of stubbornness and an inability to change. He has long hair, white wafting robes, a ghoulishly pale face and, as he is lowered into view to sit motionless in his throne above the action, he is both a sexless image of the saviour and also the doll-like Elizabeth of her famous coronation portrait. At a distance it is easy to forget, given the many successes and the length of Elizabeth’s reign, the extent to which it was difficult for England to accept a woman at the helm. These difficulties are articulated in the figure of Richard who displays many of the negative tropes considered to be the essence of femininity in the period: weakness, mutability and so on. Elizabeth had successfully rebranded herself, from the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII and the loathed Anne Boleyn, into the Virgin Queen, mother to the nation, an untouchable icon of perfect ethereal womanhood, as if she were an Athena born from her father’s helmet. However as her body began to decay, forcing people to think of the uncertainty beyond her reign, her status as icon became increasingly difficult to pull off, requiring increasing artifice as each year passed.

In the play’s final scene when the enthroned Bolingbroke is lowered down onto the elevated set, as was his predecessor at the play’s beginning, we see an entirely different figure. As Henry IV he has discarded his chainmail for something altogether more regal, but beneath the purple silk sits a warrior ready to take on his enemies, an ideal the beleaguered English could only hope for. In 1661, on the eve of the Essex rebellion – in which the disaffected Earl of Essex, the popular warrior with the common touch, hoped to raise the people up to depose Elizabeth in favour of her Scottish cousin James – Essex’s steward bribed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to put on a performance Richard II including the deposition scene. The intention was that it would encourage people, girded by the sight of a weak king deposed in favour of a strong one and the dangerously subversive notion that there are times when divine right is wrong, to join the cause. The plot failed, Essex lost his head and two years later James Stuart came to the throne anyway.

What then is the political relevance of such a play for the twenty-first century audience? Is it possible to see echoes of post-Iraq Tony Blair pushed off his perch by Gordon Brown – not really, because we no longer live under the tyranny of absolute rule or divine right. Richard II does not have the contemporary parallels of a play like Hamlet, with its focus on surveillance and political paranoia. Its lessons are more personal and intimately psychological, allowing us to see the problems of intractability and the reliance on dubious advice writ large. What it also tells us is that history always remains relevant – I feel sure the Time Lord would approve.

The RSC production of Richard II runs at the Barbican until 25^thJanuary and is being screened at cinemas nationwide.

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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 Elizabethtrod 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.