SEEKING THE TRUTH IN A 'BOGUS' HISTORY – Elizabeth Fremantle

A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context.

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more.

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present.

Take, for example Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a fiction which used the Salem witch-trials of the 1660s as a way to speak about the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities that swept through Hollywood during Miller’s time. The parallels of these two events, and Miller’s fictional account of the former, allowed those living through the McCarthy witch-hunts to scrutinise a contemporary event through the lens of a historical parallel.There are many such stories from the past, which could be used to shed light on the present. The recent US election brought to my mind the vilification and downfall of Anne Boleyn – a woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking to operate in a misogynist political arena. Hillary Clinton, like Boleyn, was labelled a ‘witch’, crooked, corrupt, unwomanly, unfit and even as having committed treason. This, for me, makes Anne Boleyn’s story potentially relevant as a feminist narrative. And it is fiction that would have the power and license to put it to work as a mirror to contemporary political misogyny. In this way fiction can be a means to access another, different kind of truth.

The late great Lisa Jardine discussed the role of fiction in history in Radio 4’s A Point of View (2014) in which she talks about her response to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between two scientists who each played a role in the development of the atom bomb. She said, ‘Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically, in order to give us emotional access to the past.’ So, where the ‘proper’ historical author might be seeking an empirical truth the fiction writer might in turn be seeking an emotional truth; but there is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between these apparently opposing positions. Facts and events do not occur in a vacuum without a human response. It is the feelings that events inspire that many fiction writers aim to access.

Fiction is simply another mode through which we can understand history. Take Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell, which go against the prevailing historical narrative of Thomas More as a ‘good’ person and Cromwell as ‘bad.’ Mantel does what a biographer cannot, she depicts Cromwell (a man about whom relatively little is known, given the enormity of his legacy) as a rounded individual, a vengeful and ambitious man who oversaw despicable acts yet also was capable of fierce loyalty and tenderness, who loved his wife and children. She places him as an entire person in her fictional world, extrapolating his love for his daughter from a touching line in his will. This view is assumption – plausible, yet not fact.

But Mantel’s choice of Cromwell as protagonist in her fiction allows us to look at ideas about social mobility, both then and now. The authorial admiration for a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from obscurity to high office bubbles up through the text but it doesn't make it any less relevant or useful as a narrative describing both the past and the present. This is not history in the conventional sense but it shines a light into the dark crannies of history making a valid and interesting depiction of an inaccessible past.

We can’t help but regard the past through the prism of our own particular time. So the Cromwell of Robert Bolt’s mid 1960s play and film A Man For all Seasons is different to the Cromwell of Wolf Hall, more than forty years later, precisely because they are speaking to different generations. So when fiction is historical it is also necessarily contemporary. Fiction exists to ask questions and it is a valid enquiry to ask about how we regard the past and how the past impacts on the present.

Many writers now look to the past to tease out the stories of those who lacked a voice in, or were deemed insignificant by, mainstream history. Often the historical record is partial when it comes to such narratives so fiction serves to fill in the gaps. Previous generations have focused on women’s stories almost exclusively from a romantic perspective, as this upheld the prevailing narrative of the time that women were politically unimportant. You only have to look at the way the Victorians chose to see a figure like Katherine Parr as an obedient nursemaid to a tyrannical husband when contemporary narratives see her as a highly intelligent political activist and author. It is possible she was both of these things but we reject the story of obedience now, as it doesn’t fit with our view of how women should behave in the twenty-first century. We increasingly seek out women from the past who sought to define their own existence in a world that denied them that right, as this chimes with our prevailing ideals of feminism. Using fiction to look between the lines of history urges us to scrutinise our present attitudes and better understand them.

The invisible stories are important. The fact that Homosexuals (even the term is only a century old) and ethnic minority groups barely existed in the received western historical narrative doesn't mean they weren't there. And it becomes the role of fiction to imagine a plausible narrative and fill in the empty spaces as authors like Sarah Waters and Toni Morrison have done to great effect. At this moment in our cultural history we are preoccupied with issues about gender identity and multi-culturism so it seems natural that we might also look to the past even if only to see how far we have progressed but also to ensure we don’t return there.

If we are to learn from the past then we must first seek to understand it and fiction is another tool by which we can do this. Jardine quotes Michael Frayn, to make her point. ‘The great challenge is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions, The only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’ For me this goes some way to demonstrate that though the term historical fiction may seem oxymoronic there is deception in history just as there is truth in fiction and both serve a useful purpose in helping us to understand the present.

References:

Litt, Toby – Against Historical Fiction – Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No 1. Language and Languages (2008), pp 111-115

Jardine, Lisa – A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact, BBC 2014

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four novels set in the Tudor and Elizabethan period. For information about Elizabeth Fremantle's fiction see elizabethfremantle.com

BONES

The last few days have been skeleton-heavy. Royal tombs and dinosaur bones have marked my over-enthusiastic start to the school holidays, which has left us all exhausted.

First was a trip to Windsor Castle, which, I am ashamed to admit, I have never visited. Fascinating, but so busy! I should be delighted that so many people are interested in our Royal story. But the visit was marred by the sense of being on an historical conveyor belt, with bored teens ticking off the Van Dycks and the codpieces. Besides, going with a hyperactive two year old was always going to take the sheen off things. I remember little about the State Rooms beyond my own plaintive shrieking: "Don't touch the armour! Don't sit on that chair! Don't go under rope. Do not go under..  Ok. Come back from under the rope. Please?"

One moment stands out. Traipsing through St George's Chapel, hemmed in like a disgruntled herring, I happened to look down at my feet.

And there was this:

In a Vault

Beneath this marble slab

Are deposited the remains 

of 

Jane Seymour Queen of Henry V111

1537

King Henry V11

1547

King Charles 1

1648

and

An Infant child of Queen Anne

I have blogged before about the shivering breath of history - those moments in modern life when we feel the past rising. I am reminded of The Subtle Knife - the Philip Pullman novel in which the knife of the title has the power to slice between worlds.

Bones are a powerful subtle knife. A plain marble slab, and beneath it, the bones of some of the greatest protagonists in our island story - and the tiny skeleton of a stillborn baby who could have been monarch. As my three healthy, beyond-exuberant kids skipped over the slab, I thought of Queen Anne and her 17 pregnancies and no surviving children.

Did she find comfort in the thought of her child's tiny bones lying with Henry and Charles the Martyr? 

As writers of historical fiction, we wield our own subtle knives. We put the flesh on bones. Joanne Limburg's A Want of Kindness, did a wonderful job of recreating Anne, in all her plump, pregnant vacuity. 

Jane Seymour is a bit of an enigma - a footnote in Tudor history, a successful Royal womb. Even Hilary Mantel can't quite capture her - she's eclipsed by her Boleyn nemesis in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

According to the sources, Henry V111 asked to be buried alongside Jane - the mother of his longed for son. She was in a temporary, plain tomb, Henry's will stipulated that they would both be rehomed in a magnificent new tomb - one he claimed as his own, but was actually started by Cardinal Wolsley. It was never completed, and Henry, that lover of pomp and magnificence, remains in his plain and unadorned tomb.

I cannot find any references to why Henry's will was never completed; does anyone know? Please comment if so. Was the failure to complete the tomb an accidental oversight during the political turmoil that followed? Or a deliberate snub by his unloved daughter Elizabeth, to her father and the wife who took her mother's crown? 

Charles 1 body presented a problem for the Commonwealth. The civil wars' victors understood religious symbolism. What could be more powerful to the King's Catholic-sympathising followers than a martyr's relics? And yet the regicides were not Republicans as we would later come to understand the term. Charles' bones deserved respect. He was shuffled quietly into Henry's temporary tomb - after the Commonwealth had sold off pieces of Henry's unfinished grand tomb to fill its depleted coffers. The thinking was that Windsor Castle's relative distance from London would limit the number of Royalist worshippers at Charles' bones.

(Incidentally, the date on the slab in the Chapel implies Charles died in 1648 - this is due to the old method of dating the turn of the numerical year on 25 March.)

Here's another question - why do we venerate the bones of dead protagonists in the history play? Why did my atheist self quiver in the presence of the remains? Why did I pause and feel a sense of awe at the resonating presence of Jane and Henry, Charles and the nameless progeny of Anne?

Is it the God gene, pushing me towards the mystical? Is there a catholicism bred in the bone from my Irish relic-worshipping ancestors?

My head believes that when we die, our self dies with us. Skeletons are empty of all the things that make up a life - love and blood and laughter. They are meaningless in themselves. So why does the thing that I cannot quite call a soul answer to the call of the bones?

Antonia Senior is the author of Treason's Daughter, a novel of the English Civil War and The Winter Isles, a novel of Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles. 

 "Passionate, wonderful, windswept writing," Manda Scott

 "Senior's fresh, forceful writing breathes new life and relevance into the most destructive dangerous era in English History," The Times

It's Wolf hall - again!

I know it's been over for some time and we've probably all watched Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell since then. But I wanted to consider what a TV series does differently from a play, from a book. It doesn't have to be historical fiction but perhaps it illustrates the point best when it comes to visualising the scene.

I've read both Hilary Mantel's books about Thomas Cromwell twice, seen both the plays twice and seen the TV series twice (the last two episodes three times). I can't get enough of Hilary Mantel's creation but it does make me ponder on what the different media do for it.

First on TV the setting, costumes and props - these were all utterly convincing: the interior lighting by candles or fires, mullioned windows, all goods in chests, an illuminated prayer book dazzling in its colours because new. There was great attention to detail. (But see Liz Fremantle's February post for more on that and some reservations).

It's obvious that TV can do some things the stage plays couldn't do, giving us flashbacks to the boy Thomas Cromwell's brutal beating  by his thug of a blacksmith father - the motive to run away to the continent, with which the first book opens.

The TV series opened with the splendidly cast Bernard Hill as the Duke of Norfolk telling Cardinal Wolsey he is done for. The trouble with this excellent start was that we then had to go back to a period when Wolsey was still in the ascendant and could order Harry Percy and Thomas Boleyn around and tell them that Anne Boleyn had to go and marry someone in Ireland.

There was a bit too much of this "non-linear" narrative going on: the captions would have been more useful if they'd had actual dates rather than 'Four years before Wolsey's fall" and suchlike. No such problems with the books or the stage plays.

Wolsey himself was superb. Jonathan Pryce was not an obvious piece of casting: one thinks of him as tall and cadaverous rather than fat and jowly like a cleric who indulged too much in earthly pleasures. But he was very good indeed.

Then so was Paul Jesson on stage. But this is not an argument about who gives the better representation, pitting Mark Rylance against Ben Miles or Damien Lewis against Nathaniel Parker (the last another example of successful casting against type).

What interests me is what the different media can do with the same story. To take just one example - the masque pillorying Wolsey after his death. Hilary Mantel has taken "Cardinal Wolsey Going down to Hell," performed at the house of Thomas Boleyn (Anne's father) and transposed it to Hampton Court. The farce, presumably commissioned by Boleyn, was put on as an entertainment in January 1531, for the new French Ambassador, Claude de la Guiche. "The Duke," whom Mantel reasonably takes to be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, called for it to be printed.

The Ambassador was evidently not amused and according to Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, "much blamed the earl, and still more the Duke for ordering this fare to be printed." (quoted in Greg Walker's Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry Vlll (Cambridge University Press 1991)). Not surprisingly, since it portrayed a Cardinal tormented by devils and burning in hell.

Hilary Mantel takes this reasonably well known fact and makes of it something crucial to the plot of both her novels and one that offers an explanation for Cromwell's implacable persecution of the five men executed with Anne Boleyn. Each of the four "devils" is a nobleman (somewhat unlikely as actors in a farce, perhaps, but no matter). Cromwell watches them unmask and reveal themselves to be George Boleyn (Anne's brother), Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton.

In the novel of Wolf Hall this scene comes less than halfway through and the person taking the part of Wolsey himself is Master Patch, the jester whom the Cardinal gave to the king. In the play it's Mark Smeaton, neatly linking all five executed men to the farce.  Here in the novel  Mantel describes the reactions of the audience to the farce:

"Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid."

Crucially there is one dissenting voice at the "entertainment" - "Someone calls out 'Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.' Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who had spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt?"

In Mike Poulton's playscript it is definitively Wyatt, who cries, "Shame! Shame on you, Norfolk! Shame!" But Wyatt is a major linking character in the plays and gets a more prominent role than in the books.

In the TV version, no-one cries "Shame!" at all. And that's a shame. It seems no-one at court is brave enough to stand up for the Cardinal, to whom Cromwell's intense loyalty is a constant motif, explanation and motive. In fact it turns into a bit of a Revenge drama, with Cromwell avenging his father-figure Wolsey, who was more benevolent to him than his own flesh and blood parent.

There is a scene where Cromwell watches the four "devils" take off their masks but it is somewhat wasted because of the casting. George Boleyn looks too like Brereton - or is it Weston? The point gets lost and has to be brought out in a later episode where Cromwell is interrogating the accused men in the Tower. If you hadn't read the books, I don't know if you would have "got" it. The whole scene is very brief on TV and there is no sign of Mark Smeaton.

But now we have three ways of "knowing" that at least four of the five men executed before Anne Boleyn took part in the Wolsey farce, does it matter that Hilary Mantel made this up? Surely, only if we come to believe this really is what happened?

Which brings us to the question of how we know our history; is it thorough reading historians or historical fiction. Do we believe that Elizabeth Woodville saved her son from Richard the Third, as Philippa Gregory tells us she did?

As Hilary Mantel says in the Author's Note to Bring up the Bodies, " I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer."

As you may have gathered, although I enjoyed it, I liked the TV version less than the other two manifestations of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell stories. It may not be surprising that for me the books come first. There were a couple of show-offy moments on Tv which I positively disliked: Thomas stroking Anne Boleyn's breasts in a scene it took a moment or two to realise was in his imagination and the ridiculous dragging of her body along his dining-table with him about to stick the knife in. It was evidently too much of a temptation to make a metaphor literal.

And it lost a lot of the humour of the books and the plays; in the theatre everyone laughed when Leah Brotherhead said, "Oh, I'm nobody. I'm only Jane Seymour." There were many such touches, replaced on TV by Cromwell's sardonic remarks and occasional swearing.

Still, there was much to enjoy in the minor performances, such as Charity Wakefield's spirited and saucy Mary Boleyn - though it was hard to believe this one would have let Henry walk over her so. And one of my favourite characters, Eustache Chapuys was perfectly rendered by Matthieu Almaric. There was even an effort at his "startling hat" with which Hilary Mantel had such fun in Bring up the Bodies. Sadly, I could not find a picture of him wearing it.

I can't wait for the third book, The Mirror and the Light; the third play, with, please, Ben Miles and Nathaniel Parker, the third TV series, with Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis. I like Hilary Mantel's "offer" very much, in whatever form it comes. But best of all in the books.

What do you all think?

Nazi Germany: The Nightmare Begins, by Leslie Wilson

photo: German Federal Archive

Here are Hitler's Storm Troopers, marching triumphantly after he was made Chancellor of Germany on the 30th January, 1933. That evening, the young man who became the distinguished writer Sebastian Haffner, (his real name was Raimund Pretzel), read the headline: 'Cabinet of National Unity formed - Hitler Reichschancellor.'

His first reaction was 'icy horror'. Then he sat down with his father to discuss it. 'We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long.. Even with the Nazis, this government would not have a majority in the Reichstag.'
In fact, only three members of the cabinet were Nazis, and Hitler could be dismissed at any time by the Reich President. So though opponents of Hitler were dismayed, they could see reasons for optimism.

Hilary Mantel has observed that we tend to see history backwards, ie, we know how the story ends, and cannot imagine how the people concerned could fail to see it. But history at the point of unfolding (if you can call it a point, since it is always unfolding) is murky, confusing, and uncertain.This observation is particularly relevant when people look at the Third Reich, an area of history where the desire to exhibit moral correctness frequently trumps objectivity.

What I mean by that is that there is an emotionally-motivated tendency to simplistically divide people into goodies and baddies, even now. I am the last person to dismiss the reality of feeling when looking at the Nazi period and its crimes. My family was too deeply involved and scarred. At the same time, the desire to apportion blame (and therefore somehow to achieve the moral high ground onesself) can distort one's comprehension of those events - and even historians all too often exhibit this tendency.

Looking back now, it seems to me that the four weeks following the 30th January represented a tiny window of opportunity (maybe more of a cat-flap of opportunity) when Germany could have averted Nazi rule. The normal judicial processes were still technically intact; Hitler did not have a majority in the Reichstag, as Haffner and his father observed. Goering had yet to perfect the apparatus of repression, and leftist leaders were still (just) alive and free.

Nor did Hitler have the majority of Germans on his side. The Nazi share of the vote had actually fallen, from 37% to 33% in the November 1932 election. In fact, the Social Democrats and Communists together had 37% of the vote, and could easily have trumped the Nazis, if they could have worked together. But the Communists had their own aims and parliamentary democracy was not one of them.
To the right-wing, aristocratic and elitist parties, typified by the Reich President, the ageing Paul von Hindenburg, the Communists were a horror, and so they plumped for Hitler, believing they could neutralise him. It has to be said that, looking at the near future, civil war was a very alarming possibility; the Nazis and the Communists were already fighting it out on the streets, and so the right wing decided that to take the Nazi leader into the government, under their control (as they believed), was far the safest option.

Sebastian Haffner: Wikimedia Commons

'How could things turn out so completely differently?' Sebastian Haffner reflected, writing in 1939, when the catastrophe of war was already on the doorstep. 'Perhaps it was just because we were all so certain that they could not do so' (ie turn out as they did) '-and relied on that with far too much confidence.'

This is not to say there weren't signs of what was to come. In what the Nazis called 'the national uprising' the storm troopers attacked their opponents, in particular the Left and Jews, and this began on the night of the 30th January, after the torchlight procession.

Berndt Roesel, 1925

I wonder what my grandfather, a young policeman in Silesia, felt on the 30th January 1933? I'd have thought that 'icy horror' would be about right. He belonged to a Social Democratic police association and had refused to join a Nazi one; he had freely said that he couldn't understand how anyone could belong to the Nazi party, least of all a policeman. He knew exactly what the Nazis were, and what they were capable of; brutal thugs, whose riots he'd had to try and keep in order, and if he stopped his men from joining in and beating them up, it was only because of his respect for the law. Immediately post 30th January, though, he still had enough faith in the law to argue with a Nazi-inclined colleague  that a Communist demonstration that had happened locally had been authorised and legal, and should not have been stopped just because there was now a Nazi chancellor.

The issue of legality is maybe why there was no effective resistance to Hitler during those weeks between the 30th of January and the Reichstag fire of the 27th of February, after which terror was unleashed. Hitler was in power as part of Parliamentary process; he had been appointed by the President. To take up arms against him, if you weren't an extremist, would have meant civil war. Ordinary, law-abiding people had had enough of the pitched battles on the streets, the attacks on passers-by, the smashed windows and flying bullets. The last thing they wanted was to escalate the disorder.

Also, nothing quite like Nazi rule had happened before - or not for a long time, at least.The monarchical Prussian/German state, whatever criticisms one may make of it, was largely a state of legality, and even the monarchs were subject to the law. Many Germans - including many Jewish Germans - felt that Hitler would be tamed, his excesses muted, by the responsibility of government and the sheer weight of state structures.


And during those all-too short four weeks between Hitler's rise to chancellorship and the Reichstag fire, people had their own lives to get on with, that tangle of private worries, personal exhaustion, busyness, confusion, and often powerlessness. They had no idea of how short the time was, perhaps never even knew what the opportunity was that they were losing.
I think history is the slow movement forwards of trillions of moments in the lives of the human race: babies are born, fed, cleaned up and winded, washing is done and hung out to dry; a million men and women come home from work, having spent a day servicing the machinery of a world that is maybe heading for disaster; documents are signed that will put thousands of people off their traditional lands (or expedite the deaths of six million Jews), and then the cleaners move in and exhaustedly mop up behind the 'important' people. . You remember something you need for tonight's dinner and get in the car, thus adding your mite to the carbon already in the atmosphere. Or, on a more cheerful note, you decide to walk or bike instead, and thus you don't.
The history of the world is the story of real life in all its mundanity and unclarity, when what is happening to you, what you hear on the news has happened to other people, has not yet got its name and been assigned a page in the history books. It is raw and new. I think novelists and biographers have a unique opportunity to portray this, since we write about how individual humans live history.It's certainly what I tried to do, when I was writing Last Train from Kummersdorf.

 

This is a first instalment; next month I'll be writing about what happened after the Reichstag fire.



 

(HOW) DARE WE WRITE HISTORICAL NOVELS? by Leslie Wilson

David Starkey has announced in various media that Wolf Hall is a 'deliberate perversion of history', (though he has neither read the books nor seen the television adaptation so I do wonder how he can assert this). Someone, however, has told him that Mark Rylance, playing Thomas Cromwell, is portrayed as showing grief when his wife and daughters are carried off in a day by the sweating sickness. 'I gather Hilary Mantel has imagined this wonderful tender experience of Thomas Cromwell losing wife and children,' he says, and 'there is not a scrap of evidence for it at all.'


Not all historians hate historical fiction, and many of them are hugely generous towards fiction writers  - I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Michael Biddiss, for one, who referred me to several useful texts on Nazi Germany and particularly to the invaluable documentary history of Nazism by J Noakes and G Pridham - so helpful, particularly when I was writing Saving Rafael. However, much as I respect and value historians, I do not need their permission to write my fictions.
The thing is (Doctor Starkey), that a novel set in the past is not an easy-read alternative to a history book (however carefully we do our research, and some of us, notably Dame Hilary, do it very carefully indeed. Indeed Hilary Mantel's work is widely respected by historians). The term historical fiction may perhaps be a tripwire here. We are writers of fiction, and some of us choose to write about historical subjects.That means that we apply our imagination to those subjects, which is what writers do, and of course we go to places (like someone's probable response to a bereavement) that historians must in honesty hold back from.
In exactly the same way, I might write a story about someone, say, who is a teacher in a North of England town. There is no evidence that such a character exists or that any given human being ever behaved exactly as this character did. If I cannot find it, it is not incumbent in me to leave it out, because the job of a writer is to say: 'What if? Supposing?' It is to write a story.

My grandmother in the '30s

Actually, I researched the novels I set in Nazi Germany very carefully, but this was because my enterprise was to understand what it was like to be a person who had to live in Nazi Germany. That is - as readers of my blogs here will readily understand - something very important to me. The enormous amount of reading I have done about the period, as well as watching videos, talking to people who remembered those times, reflecting on the things that came to me from my own family, was not directed at making my works good textbooks for Year 9s. Some people have found them so, but what drove me was that need to open a window for myself on twelve dreadful years that marked and scarred my immediate family as well as damaging and bereaving millions of others.

In the end, though, it came down to 'What if? Supposing?' Supposing one of the boy soldiers who were drafted into the German Home Guard in 1945 was the sole survivor of his unit; supposing he met a girl on the run from Berlin, who had a very different background; supposing the interaction and relationship between them changed both of them as they trod the refugee road with the fighting going on round them? Supposing  the girl was jazz-crazy, and could play the harmonica, and supposing a fantasy grew legs and desperate people started to believe it? Then you get Last Train from Kummersdorf.

There's another idea about historical fiction that is popular among the chattering classes, even post Wolf Hall. It is that it is somehow tacky, chocolate-boxy, that the proper enterprise of novelists is to describe the present day (preferably grittily). Now I have no objection to grit, but there was just as much of it around in the past - and indeed there is a whole generation of excellent novels that deal with the undersides of history, some written by fellow-contributors to this blog. 

One of my history teachers at school took this line: she said we should avoid historical fictions, which were always misleading and trashy, and concentrate on fiction written at the time we were studying. Maybe she would have liked to have a go at the English literature syllabus and excise such trashy works as Henry IV Part One, (which I studied for A Level). Also, she must have despised such trivial works as War and Peace, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Vanity Fair, all of Shakespeare's History plays, Büchner's Danton's Death, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (which I first saw, incidentally, at Kendal Grammar School with my brother as one of the Women of Canterbury and David Starkey in the star role. The poetry blew me away.)

If the past is another country, it's one that is part of our present. Humans have many means of visiting it and trying to inhabit it; through histories, biography, visiting historical sites, and drama, in which I include the novel. To talk about, mythologise, and speculate on the past is part of what it means to be human, and that makes it a valid subject for literature.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT WOLF HALL, AUTHENTICITY AND KNICKERS? – Elizabeth Fremantle

The airing of Wolf Hall’s small screen cousin has provoked a good deal of discussion: is it too slow; is it too confusing; is it too dark; wasn’t Henry fatter; wasn’t Cromwell more of a monster; is it accurate?

Mark Rylance with director, Peter Kosminsky (Radio Times)

The question of historical truth comes around again and again. The Imitation Game ruffled feathers for, amongst other things depicting Turing as possibly involved in (or knew about and turned a blind eye to) treachery when there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this might have been the case. People have complained that there wasn’t enough science in The Theory of Everything, without stopping to think that the film is an adaptation of Jane Hawking’s book – it is her version of events not his. Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner provoked tumultuous critical delight over Timothy Spall’s snorting, grunting performance, which I personally found grotesquely over-played. ‘But he was supposed to be just like that,’ people cried in response to my criticism. ‘Based on what exactly?’ I asked. 

Anne Boleyn plus PA (Daily Mail)

We can get so wrapped up in the idea of accuracy that it is easy to forget such a thing is impossible. With Wolf Hall it’s all been about the authenticity, with costume designers talking about how they only used fabrics of the period and correct fastenings – mostly pins, in case you were wondering and not zips, which was the accusation levelled (hotly denied, I might add) at the recent White Queen adaptation. But, I ask myself are they all going commando because as all self-respecting Tudorphiles will know, knickers hadn’t been invented in the sixteenth century.

The ‘authentic’ lighting (mainly candlelight for interiors and nothing outside) has meant a good deal of viewers grumbling about not being able to see anything. ‘Ah but that is how it would have been,’ come the replies. That may be so but to our twenty-first century eyes, used to the brightness of the present, our response to it is jarring and confusing. A Tudor would not have responded in such a way; it would have been the norm, their eyes would have been accustomed to a dimmer world, more in tune with the seasons and fluctuating hours of daylight. What I’m trying to get at is that absolute authenticity remains out of reach, like Plato’s perfect forms, and to try so hard at it can be a futile project.

Rylance as Cromwell

Holbein's Cromwell

I like the gloom of Wolf Hall, not because of its historical veracity, but mainly because it works with the shadiness of its protagonist. Though unfortunately in some of the exterior scenes, shot in the gloaming it looks, on my brand new super-duper-HD TV, rather than atmospherically shadowy, depressingly redolent of low-tech BBC costume drama from the 1970s. But I sympathise with the intention even if the outcome is not necessarily wholly successful because I find myself noticing other things, like the puzzling absence of mud in the exterior scenes and the manicured gravel driveways and the dog that looked suspiciously like a cockapoo and Anne pronouncing his name (Purcoy) phonetically rather than the French way (Pur-cwa) as she would have. Now I'm just being a pedant and the point I'm trying to make is that none of it really matters; what matters is the effect it has.

Lewis's Henry VIII

Then of course there’s the question of Cromwell and his character. Views on this are polarised. A historian friend of mine believes Mantel’s Cromwell is too modern in sensibility. It seems to be Mantel’s project to explore the possibility that Cromwell was a remarkable self-made man, and yes, darkly complex and Machiavellian but not just, to borrow Dairmud MacCulloch’s term, ‘a thug in a doublet’; whereas revisionist historians seek to expose the Reformation, the promotion of which was Cromwell’s life’s work, as an act of monstrous destruction akin to the acts of fundamentalists in North Africa today. We will never find a definitive truth but what is good is that texts such as this open up discussion.

Rhys Meyer's Henry VIII

What a TV show like Wolf Hall is attempting to do is to set itself above the usual costume drama. It’s narrative is convoluted, it refuses to spoon feed us, makes us work hard, makes us think. It says ‘I am authentic,’ suggesting that Jonathan Ryhs Meyers in his hopelessly anachronistic, yet very fetching, faux-Tudor gear, is not – I couldn’t possibly comment. But when we watch TV we know that only a few feet away is a fellow with a big camera and that we’ve seen these actors in other roles, that they’re all pretending. We want to suspend our disbelief, we’re in on the sleight of hand, and do we care if they are wearing knickers? I suspect not.

Elizabeth Fremantle's Tudor novels Queen's Gambit about Katherine Parr and Sisters of Treason about the sisters of Lady Jane Grey are published by Penguin.

Find out more about Elizabeth and her books on elizabethfremantle.com