here for the moment: reflection mostly on Bring up the Bodies. Spoiler alert for the Mirror and the Light

Both the recent Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel have, rightly, received particular credit for portraying a history that is felt to be, peculiarly, this country’s common heritage. Bluff King Hal and his Harem are as widely as unnecessarily taught, and, often despite such lessons, still resonate in the echo chamber of folk memory. Mantel has among other things rehung an old tapestry, and stitched into it a protagonist new to historical fiction, if not to the loving eulogies of GR Elton.

Yet her very success risks overshadowing her greatest achievement: the independent historical scheme her novels live in and by. Certainly Mantel operates by ‘novelistic intelligence’, as James Wood has said; but Wood is wrong to go on to suggest that ‘Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.’ No such parlour-game switch, comparable to the shifting of the TV map’s colours after an election, is required by Mantel’s technique, which is simpler and more effective. Her history is absolutely authentic because she has reared it all up herself.

Picture three trees, resembling each other in their interspersing leaves, their windblown shapes, even their ageing rings, but freestanding for all that. One old ash is recorded history, some of its boughs irreparably scorched by storms, much of its sap long since dried up, but impressive in age and stature. The tree of our contemporary preconceptions, our expectations, is probably a sycamore. It is green and hearty, but its seeds have helicoptered to inconvenient spots and it gets in the way of the light, as if our first tree didn’t have enough trouble already. Out of the way of either, the youngest tree stands, enjoying the best of the sun for now, a silver birch, the envy of the orchard, its sequin-leaves stirring. This last tree stands in Mantel’s relation to the ash boughs and sycamore saplings, whether represented by Eric Ives, Philippa Gregory, or Jonathan Rhys-Meyers – benevolent alliance, but sovereign independence.

Wolf Hall is horizontal and immersive, Bring Up the Bodies frenetically ordered, so the lines of Mantel’s alternative historical structure are more urgent, easier to spot, in the latter. In Wolf Hall there was a tendency to let such lines be mistaken for mere researched evidence and historical fact – that autentico cafe in the past’s foreign land. Not nearly enough attention, for example, was accorded to the passage that begins the section entitled ‘An Occult History of Britain’ –

Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who had thirty-three daughters…they landed on an island shrouded in mist…The giants were defeated, and their leader thrown into the sea. Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter…Before London was called Lud’s Town, it was called New Troy. And we were Trojans…

Arthur…married three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only waiting his time to come again.

His blessed descendant, Prince Arthur of England, was born in the year 1486…If he were alive now, he would be King of England. His younger brother Henry would likely be Archbishop of Canterbury…

Beneath every history, another history.

It is vital to observe that, in the world where Mantel asks us to reside for a time, none of these assertions is deniable. Some of them are even verifiable. The unchanged British mist, the lost prince’s birthdate, the potential and entirely feasible Archbishopric, all these lend their weight to the rest, as the rest lends its mythical essence to them in return. Readers are inclined, it is true, to leave Mantel’s dozens of references to Galfridian, Arthurian fancy in the back of their minds. But there is a good reason for this, for that is the very approach taken by their companion and guide. Startlingly familiar to our contemporary world in his tastes, prejudices, and, perhaps, weaknesses, Cromwell regards these skeins of folklore as the housewife does the cobwebs, with proactive tetchiness or weary tolerance. But spiders spin straightest through empty cupboards, and the indifference of Mantel’s Cromwell to Mantel-England’s magical foundation may yet be his undoing.

By Bring Up the Bodies Cromwell is the King’s vice gerent in Church affairs. At first this seems ironical for the man Wolf Hall cast in a recognisable mould of 21^st century secular thought; impatient, for example, even with the Protestant ideologues in his own presumed camp. But Cromwell’s attitude and policy towards the Church in the new novel is as principled as it is consistent. In church and state alike, he is the scourge of superstition. Compare his internal scorn for the common people’s nostalgia for their dethroned queen –

If the king would take back his lawful wife Katherine, the rain would stop. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends…

- to his quizzically amused view of a country church’s traditional decoration:

                        ‘Is that a mermaid?’

‘Yes, my lord. Must she come down? Is she forbidden?’

‘I just think she’s a long way from the sea.’

In such strokes Mantel reveals Cromwell as a man who does not even condescend to hate the past. He sees himself, indeed, as its overmastering despot, later inwardly telling Queen Anne ‘If need be, I can separate you from history.’ But history tells us in turn that of course he could not do that, anymore than he could liberate himself from her constraints. If we submit to Cromwell’s creator’s tempting proximity in full, step too unmodulatedly into his consciousness, we risk missing many truths about the universe Cromwell inhabits. Yet Mantel surely intends for us to fall into this trap of too much affinity with her protagonist, to share Cromwell’s blindness as well as his percipience. Many readers and critics have commented on Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies’s curious power to produce suspense, despite the fact that its plot’s denouement is theoretically available in the classroom, or on Wikipedia. This supposed mystery has a ready answer. The really alluring query in historical fiction of this calibre, just as in the plays of Shakespeare, or even well-written history itself, is not what happens, but how, and why. Mantel aims, by cocooning the reader inside Cromwell, disdainful of and impatient with England’s folkloric past, to preserve inviolate her secret plot development, the nemesis of the supernatural upon GR Elton’s rational hero.

The new novel differentiates itself most obviously from its predecessor in its almost breathlessly compressed and quite precise length of time. We know that Wolf Hall ushered in problems of space for Mantel; she has confided that she had to rely on cue cards, as screenwriters do, to remind herself where her many characters were at any given moment. Conversely, Bring Up the Bodies’s logistical challenges must have manifested themselves about time - not where, but when characters might be, in relation to their beginnings and their fast approaching ends – the hero’s included.

There is a third temporal phase which this novel begins to consider more explicitly, the future. Diane Purkiss has some historically grounded objections to Mantel’s Tudor corpus, calling her ‘an extraordinary novelist, a remarkable stylist, and rather a commonplace historian: a careful 2.1 and not a daring First.’ The university tutor terminology grates, and it should: Mantel is, after all, part of that majority of important English stylists who evaded English literature degrees. Purkiss’s specific examples are worth addressing, but more important is what she does not say. She finds fault with Mantel, and Mantel’s Cromwell, for conspiring with historical royal oppressors, and their deceptive, ‘fictional’ documentation, to libel monastic life – for example, by coarsening homoerotic breaches of the Rule to paedophiliac ones. Purkiss here does not accept the truth that Mantel is writing a more undivided kind of fiction, which must be accepted in full, just as we accept Macbeth, the stealthy murderer, or Crookback Dick. But more surprisingly, for a scholar and writer of the 17^th century, she fails to mention Mantel’s awareness of the near future of her characters’ country, namely the English Civil War.

‘This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer.’ Mantel’s cast are naturally traumatised by the hangover of the War of the Roses, the tragedy of the 15^th century English nobility and gentry. Geoffrey Hill’s Funeral Music is perhaps the most haunting modern re-imagining of that conflict’s scars, but even its livid lines can hardly excel, for shock value, its stark epigraph:

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483

Several characters Mantel shows us are left over from the pre-Tudor ancien regime; haughty Norfolk, so proud of his ancient duchy, and his equally self-important poet son Surrey; chivalric relics like Nicholas Carew and Harry Norris; half-mad, over-bred Harry Percy; the scheming ‘old families’ of Pole and Courtenay in whose blood sweeps the strain of Plantagenet.

One of Mantel’s most affecting evocations takes place within Cromwell’s imagination, as he invites this whole faction, ‘the flower of England’, to a banquet of metaphor. Though he uses them to break the Boleyns, ‘the old families’ are Cromwell’s natural enemies, and Mantel, too, pays short shrift to their glamour in decline – hereditary magic is not her preferred branch; she recently ruled out ever writing about Elizabeth I on account of an aversion to princesses and privilege. The Wars of the Roses were of this class’s making, and to new men like Cromwell, as to modern readers, Henry VIII’s increasingly infantile caprices are preferable by far to the divisive rights claimed by the old nobility. But even Thomas Cromwell’s solutions cannot hold off a recurrence forever:

We still have, every Englishman and woman, some drops of giant blood in our veins…Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil. War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.

Cromwell has some drops of that giant’s blood too, after all. Even after Mantel’s heroic restoration of his reputation to the foreground, he is still only the second most famous Cromwell in British history. The future fate of the House of Cromwell’s distinct strands is only hinted at in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, but that menace is nonetheless quietly present throughout. Mantel refers the Civil War of the future in the same low-key, consistent way as she does to the fate of the younger Cromwells – the very posterity that Thomas thinks he has rescued from the aristocratic wars of the past.

Thomas’s son Gregory is such a dim figure that Mantel can count on our relative ignorance to hang suspense about him. The suggestion in Wolf Hall that Thomas Cromwell may seek to marry Jane Seymour works entirely through dramatic irony – most readers will be aware it cannot happen. When, in the opening of the newer novel, it seems Jane will be sought for Gregory instead, this has more drama – we know it will be thwarted, but not quite how, as Gregory is probably still terra incognita. And when Bess, the Other Seymour Girl, is introduced, there are enough esoterica in play to make the reader actually, factually, speculative. Thomas Cromwell appears to fall for Bess swiftly and understandably, with a pragmatism that is almost romantic:

He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for précis that eludes most of his clerks.

Like all her highly-sexed hero’s aristocratic tendresses, though, this attraction is an example of Mantel’s skill with fata morgana. Most readers would only find out for sure by looking it up, but Thomas Cromwell did not remarry; throughout the two novels, Mary Boleyn, Mary Shelton, Lady Worcester, and both Seymour girls exist to tease Cromwell (and us), quite as Anne Boleyn does the King. It is for dim, gentle Gregory that clever Bess is destined. But in a second stroke of Mantel’s legerdemain, this direct line – who inherited Cromwell’s barony and estate, granted at the end of Bring Up the Bodies – are themselves doomed to irrelevance and defeat, at their hands of their cousins. Thomas can already tell that his Welsh nephew, Richard Cromwell (né Williams) is his true successor in ruthless ability:

Richard is a solid boy with the Cromwell eye, direct and brutal, and the Cromwell voice that can caress or contradict. He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it…

Richard, Gregory, and Rafe Sadler, another surrogate son, are constantly compared in Thomas’s paternal but impartial sight. He is stern about maintaining the boys’ upward mobility: ‘Cromwells do not exhaust themselves on menial work. If they ever did, that day has passed.’ This conviction appears to contradict our impression of Richard’s natural physical strength, and to suggest that Cromwell’s rise has trapped his descendants in the same decadent structure as any Courtenay or Pole. In the end, Oliver Cromwell, Richard’s direct descendant, would exact a ruinous fine from his cousin the Earl of Ardglass, Gregory and Bess’s direct descendant and a defeated Royalist. Presumably Mantel’s intimations of this outcome will continue to be understated in The Mirror and the Light, as her reader’s eye will not stretch so much further past her hero’s downfall; but they are none the less present as a prophetic mood, and an ominous moral.

We have already seen Cromwell making mock of the superstition around Katherine’s quasi-magical status as ‘rightful queen’, and in this respect, Katherine becomes united with her supplanter, Anne (for whom Cromwell develops an instinctive, misogynistic loathing beside which his pitiful, professional antagonism to the Spanish wife quite pales). Both queens deploy the last desperate rituals of the cornered noblewoman, exerting themselves in stereotypically feminine and irrational spheres, in direct apposition to Cromwell’s alpha-male reason. More instinctively than consciously, they seem to reach for the matriarchal power of anthropology rather than history, The White Goddess or The Golden Bough. Are the common people after all so mistaken when they claim in their cups that the rain will fall till Katherine is restored? Anne doesn’t seem to think so; she uses the same trope, though as ever she seeks to invert Catherine’s position –

‘I am the queen and if you do me harm, then a curse will come on you. No rain will fall until I am released.’

Still fixated on her potential for fertility, Anne develops Katherine’s cruder, more atavistic magical repute. Katherine’s rain has a brutal threat, like her nephew the Emperor’s armies; to pound the land and destroy the crops. Anne’s subtler drought identifies that land with her womb; it presents a longer-term menace, of poverty and heirlessness, barrenness in a clincher of a pun. It also reflects her Englishness; unlike Katherine, she knows better than to curse her people with that everyday nuisance, English weather, but holds out the far more sinister prospect of its withdrawal, potent to this day when our rare heat waves plunge us into suspicion of unnatural global heating.

But of course the most important difference between the two queens is that Katherine is a passive, and therefore effective, promoter of her myth, a suffering queen; Anne’s railings form an active and so ineffective publicity campaign by a suspected witch. It is the difference between the enchantment of a Hermione and that of a Lady Macbeth. Anne’s shrillness has tired the king, the people, and soon palls on her gaoler’s wife; Lady Kingston wearily fails to recall by the end whether Anne calls down rain, drought, or both. Another exasperating over-interpreter of meteorology is Anne’s ghastly sister-in-law Lady Rochford, who will survive even Cromwell to fall with Katherine Howard:

If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.

This is of course arguably a sly joke by Mantel, as much as Cromwell, against readers who would place too much trust in queenly maunderings about precipitation. But at the same time, it seems rash and over-simple to dismiss feminine magic from the pen that produced Beyond Black as wholly satirical in intent. This is doubly true when one compares Katherine’s mortal illness and Anne’s terrifying position to that of Mantel suffering, still at university, from undiagnosed endometriosis; a complaint dismissed by her doctors as some psychological and feminine ill, for which they prescribed tranquillisers and a complete halt to writing. Cromwell’s equally masculine prejudice against the queens may not have any tighter a monopoly on the truth. For what it’s worth, Henry VIII himself can’t shake off his nagging belief in this kind of thing, for instance in his veneration for the Glastonbury Thorn.

Cromwell’s nemesis is most conclusively signalled by the way in which, like it or not – and, fatally, he begins to – he too is on the way to becoming a Golden Bough archetype. The rule of ‘the King must die’ is well known; the ancient matriarchal society (Mary Renault’s Eleusis, for example) accepts its queen’s favoured consort as king, war-leader, hero, stern father, golden son – for a year – then, after his twelfth month of the best of the meat, the clothes, the women, it sacrifices him. Cromwell falls into the fatal position of the year-King, without even noticing. Henry, ‘the Book Called Henry’, draws so much of his attention. After all, Henry is in his outer attributes so like a golden year-King; like Dryden’s David/Charles II in Absalom and Achitophel, he aspires to people the land while being thwarted in the marriage bed:

Then Israel's monarch after heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,
Scattered his Maker's image through the land.
Michal, of royal blood, the crown did wear,
A soil ungrateful to the tiller's care:
Not so the rest; for several mothers bore
To godlike David several sons before.
But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,
No true succession could their seed attend.

And when Henry apparently dies for two hours after being unhorsed, it seems that the terrible, kingly price has been paid.

…still laced in his tournament jacket of wadded black, as if in mourning for himself…

King Arthur of blessed memory could not have a son. And what happened after Arthur? We don’t know. But we know his glory vanished from the world.

But Henry recovers, to return to his destined catalogue of gross appetites and quotidian old age, showing himself, unlike his elder brother the lost Prince of Wales, to be after all no Arthur; unlike Cromwell, to be after all no sacrifice. Possessed in Wolf Hall of a barbarous vitality (who could forget the rubies gleaming like drops of blood on his huge hands?), by the very beginning of Bring Up the Bodies Bluff King Hal is already shown up as more Bluff than King. He surrounds himself with frivolous young water-flies, Osrics like Francis Weston and George Boleyn, on the grounds that ‘he thinks they keep him young’; and when he falls asleep at the Seymour luncheon, the water-flies laugh aside into their courtly beards. Cromwell eloquently exalts his master’s reputation when musing on the Book Called Henry, but we can see this is a deception and even a self-deception – the Book in question is a matter of managing a coincidentally despotic baby.

Cromwell, on the other hand, is the intermediary and the absorber of royal power, even for the high aristocracy. No one can breeze through him and survive. At critical moments King Henry goes into seclusion, almost house arrest, while Cromwell runs everything. He can rebuke the Duke of Norfolk about his marriage, or thrust about the Duke of Suffolk’s massive bulk. Henry’s own bastard son Richmond pretends to visit the King when he actually wants to ask Cromwell for permission to consummate his marriage – a fatherly matter if ever there was one. Naturally, the court imagines Lady Worcester is carrying Cromwell’s child. Indeed nearly every noblewoman at court seems to treat him to a speculative glance of comehitherliness. Anne Boleyn only stays away because she knows, to her intense annoyance, that her wiles would do no good:

He is not indifferent to women, God knows, just indifferent to Anne Boleyn. It galls her. He should have pretended.

Cromwell is not very ironically credited with sorcerous omnipotence, of the kind that the Stuarts would claim for the touch of Kings -

‘Look.’ He shows his turquoise ring. ‘You see this? The late cardinal gave it me, and I am known to wear it.’

‘Is that it, the magic one?’ Grace Bedingfield takes his hand. ‘Melts stone walls, makes princesses fall in love with you?’

‘This is the one.’

And an early statement exceptionally hard to identify for sure as the authorial voice or his own transmutes Cromwell, not his master, into Henry V:

If you would defend England, and he would – for he would take the field himself, his sword in his hand – you must know what England is.

While this does again seem to beckon to Thomas’s collateral and spiritual descendant, Old Noll, Our Chief of Men, it also – by anointing him in the ultimately unenviable role of King of England – lays seal to his doom.

On Spellcheck

Microsoft Word has not known a tendresse
(developed in quite some grim office);
sandy mirage indeed is the fatwa morgana.
Now that brace of Men Bookers must give way to Grey
as we labour to Bring up the Bodice.

probably not enveigling its way into the Spectator

The apparent discovery of the remains of King Richard III in a Leicester car park has already set several majestic funeral plans in motion. Chris Skidmore, a Tory MP and historian of Richard’s downfall, has put forward a resonant, if vague, proposal, which ‘calls upon the government to arrange a full state funeral for the deceased monarch, and for his remains to be interred appropriately.’ The Labour member for Leicester South, Jon Ashworth, plays to the local gallery with the more pragmatic and specific observation that a burial at Leicester Cathedral ‘has the potential to hugely benefit the city of Leicester in terms of tourism’. And Westminster Abbey possesses claims both on grounds of tradition and of compassion: it is already the resting place of Richard’s Queen Anne, at whose death the King is said to have wept openly (though on the other hand Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare say he had her poisoned).

But Richard III happens to be one of the few Kings of England who still commands a considerable personal cult, the movement the BBC once called the ‘Ricardian lobby’, and they are tempted by a third location – York Minster. The Leicester dig was supported by the most high-profile group of these enthusiasts, the Richard III Society. Their spokeswoman said: ‘I hope we do find him because I want to give him a proper resting place and also to explode a lot of myths around Richard III.’ By myths, the Society means the More/Shakespeare details – that Richard was hunchbacked, born with teeth, and so on – but also the mainstream historical account that pins upon Richard the murder of his nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’.

The Richard III Society point to evidence that the King arranged for a chantry to be established at York for his final repose, but their spokesman judiciously recognises that the decision does not lie in their hands, that the authorities may well prefer Leicester, or the public and press Westminster. Not so the Society’s fierier breakaway American rivals, Richard III Foundation Inc. They are driving full-throttle for York Minster; as their chief executive has announced:

…we have the opportunity to right the many wrongs that have been done to him, and one is to bring his remains to Yorkshire, and to York.

Fundamental to this position is the idea that Richard III is a regional hero, a King in, of, from, or for the North. Richard as Northerner is a package that pleases almost everyone except historians. Since William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North, northern England has been precious short of Kings with whom it can identify; almost all are irredeemably ‘London-centric’. The idea of the ‘last English king’ also being the first and the last Northern king, a glint of heroic potential into whose downfall subsequent sufferings can be sublimated, is attractive for many camps – whether Northern regionalists, Tories seeking to woo their votes, or anti-monarchists looking for a narrative of decline. In fact the House of York was if anything rather less northern than the House of Lancaster (English titles are rarely what they seem; Yorkshire itself was usually under Lancastrian control in the Wars of the Roses, and most of York’s possessions were Irish). Richard was powerful in the North, but only in right of his wife Anne Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker’s daughter, plunged from a bloodstained widowhood into a mercenary marriage. Betrayed on his last battlefield by a northern magnate, the Earl of Northumberland, Richard died without any great reason for gratitude or affinity with the North.

That anyone should want to honour Richard’s bones at all would astonish his contemporaries. Some late-blooming Ricardophilia can no doubt be put down to a very British distrust of victors’ history, of Party Lines and Black Legends alike; but there is plenty of objective fact behind Richard III’s dark repute. His nephews, the ‘Princes in the Tower’ – actually a King and a Prince, Richard’s brief predecessor Edward V and his younger brother the Duke of York – vanished from history while under his care. In the matter of their disappearance or death the burden of proof falls on Richard’s defenders. Behind all the alternative scenarios deployed by the ‘Ricardians’ – reminiscent of the various ‘anti-Stratfordian’ candidates for the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare – can be traced a single, animating, rather Agatha Christie belief – Richard can’t have done it; that would be too obvious. But Richard had, after all, already had his nephews declared bastards and usurped the throne. The French diplomat Philippe de Commines recalls the view from across the channel in 1483; to him Richard is:

…the Duke of Gloucester, who had made himself King, styled himself Richard III, and barbarously murdered his two nephews.

It was thus widely and naturally assumed, at the time and throughout Europe, that a man ambitious enough to usurp his nephew’s throne would as a matter of course take the job to its logical conclusion, just as an earlier King, John, had done with his nephew Arthur. Nor is this crime the only reason to count Richard an unsavoury figure; there remains his marital history. By the fratricidal standards of his period, it’s perhaps forgivable that he married Anne Neville, the very rich widow of a murdered cousin, the Lancastrian Prince Edward, who may have been executed on Richard’s orders after the Battle of Tewkesbury. Even so, the reports that he later wanted to marry his brother’s daughter – the sister of the murdered Princes – to gain her stronger claim on the throne are unavoidably distasteful, and they gathered so much credence that Richard had to deny them in Parliament. The King was then warned that the North would rebel if he married his niece – another motive for Richard to regard his supposedly most beloved region with less than entire affection.

The Ricardian party is not mistaken in insisting that the evidence against Richard is (though strong) circumstantial. But it is still enough to make the idea of a state funeral, and especially a Westminster burial, unsettling, especially in light of an earlier royal discovery. In 1674, builders renovating the Tower of London at the behest of Charles II discovered what were thought to be the bones of the murdered Princes. Sadly these bones were granted only limited pomp. The pathetic fragments were put in a marble urn in Westminster Abbey and blessed by the Bishop of London, while Charles read an address that gave Richard III no quarter:

It is right and meet that we commend the bones of these young princes to a place of final rest. Their fates at the order of Richard III grieves us, and though almost two centuries have passed, the vile deeds of that villain shall never be forgotten.

Three and a half centuries after that, Charles’s collateral relation the Queen seems to agree. The putative Princes were disturbed in 1934 out of a mixture of scientific and historical curiosity that produced no clear results, but since Elizabeth II’s accession all further requests for tampering with the bones have been declined. In the same spirit of respect for the victims, word has recently percolated from the Palace that the Princes’ uncle Richard is not welcome in Westminster or Windsor, and just as well. Mr Skidmore may well argue that anointed Kings of England are entitled to state funerals, but the hole-in-corner affair little Edward V and his brother got does not merit that term, and the man probably responsible should not have one.

Yet Richard’s story has two points in its favour: it is memorable, for better or worse, and it is the tale of an underdog. A Shakespearean villain, complete with telling curvature of the spine, makes for a better story than some straight-backed, martial Harry or Edward. To such post-modern perversity is added a more romantic element: that Richard lost. For Simon Heffer writing in the Daily Mail, this is enough to canonise Richard Plantagenet as ‘the last English king’, on the doubtful grounds that Richard III’s French ancestry is somehow more English than Henry VIII’s Welsh ancestry or Charles II’s Scottish ancestry: all three vocally identified themselves as English. Even better for Heffer, Richard ‘died like a hero in battle’. ‘The case against Richard III is far from proven, but there is much that we know of the good he did in a turbulent age, he deserves, with due ceremony, a decent burial.’

A decent burial is a decent aim, even for an indecent man, and Leicester Cathedral without overmuch fuss sounds like a sensible solution, a worthy reward for that city’s archaeologists and a delicious touristic prize for Mr Ashworth’s constituents. But perhaps another contender should be mentioned, if briefly. In the forgotten parish church of Sheriff Hutton, Ryedale, was buried Richard and Anne’s only son and heir, the short-lived consumptive Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales. The exact location of the boy’s remains is no longer known, but here would be a fitting place for Richard, somewhere near his dynasty’s failed hope, learning, like another allegedly defamed Shakespearean monarch, the bitter lesson of a fruitless crown.

scorned by Slightly Foxed

Reading can be like dressing. Some people like camouflage, others prefer to stand out. Holiday reading, in particular, is a matter of taste. I enjoy allowing the sympathetic surroundings of a pleasant holiday to be reflected in the books I take.

In the case of The Sicilian Vespers, by Steven Runciman, I did not take the book, but was taken. I was staying for the first time at the chateau of old friends in south-west France. Or so I had expressed it to myself before arriving, and had accordingly brought a stash of Nancy Mitford biographies. But my destination confounded this amiable but irredeemably eighteenth-century selection. It was perhaps the idea of a ‘chateau’ that had misled me. The house turned out to be not the expected classically prettified, politically gelded arrangement, but a medieval Archbishop’s seat that added to the grandeur of a palace the integrity of a stronghold. When not enjoying a local aperitif, Floc – like the sky, earth, wheat, cows, tans, and slugs, it was a heady yellow-gold – I gulped down Nancy as amuse-gueule and found myself still in need of a plat principal. I mounted a tolerantly winding escalier, stencilled with articulated griffons gules, to the bibliotheque.

That bibliotheque was the most comprehensible as well as the most beautiful library I had seen. So it remains, for though university was then ahead for me, on this score if on few others it would provide me with only anticlimax. I hurried to the history of Western Europe; and within that, France – and within that, it was almost disappointing to realise, not feudal demesnes or revolutionary departments, but the alphabet. My hosts’ spoken, written, and, evidently, read English was some way ahead of mine, and it was not long before I spied a familiar name – that of Steven Runciman.

My knowledge of Runciman’s life was about equivalent to what is perhaps still remembered – that he wrote A History of the Crusades. When I was a small child, my mother pointed out a dapper figure with the reptilian neck of fabulous old age, in the lobby of the Roxburgh Hotel, Edinburgh, as Sir Steven Runciman, the great medievalist. On that basis he was hardly distinguishable from a neighbour of ours in Oxford, Sir Richard Southern, who, his wife explained, no longer cared to recall facts beyond the fourteenth century (I have since discovered that both gallant knights would probably have been appalled at this juxtaposition – Southern thought Runciman a populist charlatan, Runciman Southern a parochial bore).

At school I became more aware of Runciman’s oddity and quality. When set reading for History purported to be a couple of hours of Geoffrey Barraclough, it was as well to find three spare hours for stolid digestion. With Runciman’s History of the Crusades, you could count on a carefree evening; the set chapters would speed by in minutes. Unless, that is, you were tempted to read ahead; and though only Runciman’s first volume was required for our curriculum (strictly First Crusade only), I soon found myself requisitioning its successors.

While working on a biography of Runciman, I have interviewed various scholars who shared this fervour as schoolboys. Christopher Tyerman, author of God’s War, remembered that ‘if as a sixteen year old you were reading Elton and then you came across Runciman, you thought, gosh, this is actually rather exciting.’ A relative of Runciman’s shamefacedly dissented, complaining that the History of the Crusades ‘has too many people called Baldwin’. I couldn’t have disagreed more, and tore through Kings Baldwin I-V of Jerusalem, Baldwin of Alost who went astray at sea, the hapless Emperors Baldwin of Constantinople and many another Baldwin besides.

I had come to see any Runciman index as a compendium of implicit historical dramas. Runciman does indeed abound in proper names, and the reader who accepts them as bounty rather than burden is sure to profit. In his preface to The Sicilian Vespers, Sir Steven advises his audience that

The canvas is wide; it has to stretch from England to Palestine, from Constantinople to Tunis. It is also crowded with characters; but a historical canvas is necessarily crowded, and readers who are afraid of crowds should keep to the better-ordered lanes of fiction.

The principle Runciman expresses here – that there is something fishily neat about fictional as opposed to historical narrative – has lately found support from a surprising source. Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna, of Coventry University’s Maths department, produced a study that purports to distinguish between myth (the Iliad, Beowulf) and fiction (Shakespeare, Tolkien), and to claim more historicity for myth, on the grounds that its casts link up in a less convenient manner; Mac Carron summarises, ‘In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have sub-communities who do not know anybody else. In fiction, everyone tends to be completely connected with each other.’ By this criterion, Runciman himself could be condemned to fictional status. Throughout the twentieth century, he knew everybody.

I hope to enlarge elsewhere on Steven Runciman’s congenial but contradictory existence, his combination of frenetic social activity with feline distance. For now it suffices to say that his preface’s stern warning, categorising The Sicilian Vespers as messy truth rather than tidy artifice, is characteristically disingenuous. For Runciman also liked to say the opposite, that good history relies on the same imaginative power that sustains great fiction.

The Sicilian Vespers, when first published in 1958, attracted some scholarly criticism. Helene Wieruszowski, an expert in medieval Germany and Italy justly furious at being elided from Sir Steven’s snappy bibliography, nonetheless missed the point of his technique - ‘It would have helped the reader if Runciman had concentrated on the results rather than every phase and detail of earlier developments.’ It is obvious that Wieruszowski was a better scholar than storyteller. Every narrator since Homer has known that epic – which, rather than history or fiction, was Runciman’s true genre – concerns itself with the journey, not the harbour, the argument, not the conclusion. As Constantine Cafavy in his great poem Ithaka has it:

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years…

Sicily and its Vespers, the massacre of 1282 that triggered the island’s rebellion against the French prince Charles of Anjou, serves Sir Steven admirably as such an Ithaka, and his approach to the conspiracy and the uprising is just as leisurely and rich as Cafavy prescribes. The book is properly a mini-epic; if A History of the Crusades was Runciman’s Paradise Lost, then The Sicilian Vespers can be interpreted as Paradise Regained, a compact, enigmatic coda full of independent charm. In epic style, Runciman employs stock epithets. His favourite terms of praise are ‘brilliant’ and ‘glamorous’. By ‘brilliance’ he refers to intellectual ability, by ‘glamour’ to beauty and elemental attractiveness (only men possess glamour in Runciman’s view; female beauties must content themselves with being ‘lovely’). Unlike Milton but like Homer, Sir Steven possesses an underrated and powerful sense of humour:

[King Peter of Aragon] had had some disquieting personal experiences. While he was halting at Milazzo, there came to him by night a ragged old man…who told him to beware of Alaimo of Lentini, the gallant Captain of Messina, who had already betrayed King Manfred and King Charles in turn. And worse than Alaimo was his wife, Machalda…

…Next evening he remembered the old man. He intended to spend the night at the village of Santa Lucia…there he found the Lady Machalda waiting for him…She had decided that the post of Royal Mistress would suit her and now tried to put her scheme into effect. King Peter had an acutely embarrassing evening. He only escaped by talking at immense length of his loyalty to Queen Constance. It was not an argument that the Lady Machalda found attractive.

Sir Steven does not fail to satisfy his readers as to the fates of such piquant minor characters. We are later permitted a final glimpse of the flirtatious Machalda –

The emir, Margam ibn Sebir, was imprisoned in the castle of Mategriffon at Messina, where he soon had the Lady Machalda for company. She shocked her gaolers by her gay and immodest dress when she went to play chess with him.

Returning to the library where I first found the Vespers, I was unable to find it, and realised with some embarrassment that I had probably filched it years before. As a medieval Sicilian proverb quoted by Runciman goes – ‘If someone tells you that your nose has gone, put up your hand to see.’

Prothalamion for Paz and Schneider (fabled by the poets as MARIA and IAMES)

Decrepit waft the waning afternoon
By DEVON-tide, where lang'rous I repaired
A ftagnant mere befide; and, fullen, ftared
As earlier enditers, dead too foon
- Alack! the faerie loon -
Had erftwhile ftared - juft e'en fo - I fared,
When in my grafp declaimed the penfive phone;
And, by no raucous fong its note impaired
Pronouncèd an inimitable tone -
And lo! 'tis gentil IAMES, till latterly fo lone.
To iollie OXENFORD am I forefent
By PRINCES word, whereto all men be bent.
There once had I, a fcholar doubly vile
As by a Brooke I wounden and fo went,
In lo degree, and like in baftard ftile,
By IAMES and MARIES felves been held in guile.
Hail to the Peace! and to he whom her keepes,
Along the Banke where Ifis coolly fleepes.

Ere, in a Chaumbre yond the Bridges gate,
Whither reforted a full flirte of fylphes,
From Maides Parthenical to curvefome milfs
Lockes feateoufly dyed there did gyrate,
Enforcelling many a Mate,
Where Salinaceous Noftrils fpread fo merrie,
And a fair Balconette in fumes was wreathed,
There MARIAS felf, full lufcious as the Cherrie
The good knight IAMES by fate was then bequeathed,
Fie on Lovebars and Filthes!
That eve the gallant Bridgemen mettle fhowed,
E'en as the Aftromane, his Science owed
Unto his fcope, conjoins fome brave Eclipfe
Juft fo, in cavalierly loyal mode
Did IAMES pay homage to MARIAS lips -
Engirdles her, and in ftrong armes her clippes -
Hail to the Peace! and to he whom her keepes,
Along the Banke where Ifis coolly weepes.

So, that fere eve when I from DEVON fped
The Iacobean bidding for t'address,
Full fondly then I maundered, I confefs,
Another foetid fwimme within my head -
For yond the heart be led!
And, that the pain, homecoming, not be lefs
Felt to the quicke, behold, to Iffley Village
Am I now bade - once fung of for a Tavern
And yet, methinks, a fief beftad by pilllage,
Where chariots fear to teft the dweller's raven.
A parfonage be feen,
Or Rectorie, to guide aright the law,
An hermitage certes of welcoming mien,
Within, yet, hofts who utter welcomes more.
Vpon my ladyes hande acquamarine
Reflective fheene beholdes recumbent fhore -
Hail to the Peace! and to he whom her ferves,
As Ifis into Themmes curles and fwerves.

Congratulatory Horatian Ode to a Friend, on his Forthcoming Employment

Our youth by now appears, at last
Forward, in musing on the past,
And for his shady song
A fee recoups ere long.

His time at hand to sheathe his blade
To daub the dusty pages, paid,
By flying from retreat,
Onto some fiscal street.

So lang’rous Samuel ceased to stay
The darling of that pixelled fray
But prowess stooped to shirk
Essaying actual work.

And like the pitiless awlpike,
Skewering the bold if unclad tyke,
Did past his own sworn knight
His steely path endite.

For there’s a difference to be found
‘Twixt mercenary and vassal sound
Which is – the one doth charge
A bill, but not a targe.

And hurling thus through Holland Park
For Lannister abandoning Stark
The shud’ring Moors he leaves
Gasping at their reprieves.

‘Tis all too sane to sway and praise
In Mammon’s mines, Munera’s days,
But if you’d have me lie
I’ll undertake to try.

He left a garden, be it said –
A mossy hut, a feateous bed,
Where, from this calm redoubt
Swayed realms and crowns in bout –

He left it now, he left it then
For laddered slavery, but when
Set in some harder shape
He stayed true to escape.

If fate feels cheated of her due,
- That’s called coincidence, to you –
She should yet call to mind
Her minion left behind.

Labour’s envy of otherness
Her each intrinsic new duress
Passes indifferent by
What I mean when I sigh.

Was there a time we did not laugh
On each and every lost behalf
In resignation and
Contumely to command?

When, dull, or not so dull, indeed,
You’d too much gaiety to heed
An arbitrary list
Of whom I hadn’t kissed –

This is King Charles’s time to strut,
A sentiment I’d thought to cut,
As what is in my heart
Is not a speaking part.

But I must let you (plural, now)
Know what I think about and how
She is the sort of broad
Eight lines can hardly hoard.

It seems she brings the comic vein
Out in this work – but then again
The hour I waste on this
I’d so much rather miss -

‘She stormed and conquered by assault
And I surrendered by default’
A couplet with some wit
And nothing else to it –

She makes me staccato with care
Of every sort; a mental stare
Wears down my mind’s eyelid
Compels my (I s’pose) id.

Where was I? Harrington’s? Ah, quite -
- if not to be confused at night –
A most congenial mob
If one must have a job.

No doubt of it, they’ll take to you;
A not so unexpected coup -
Blanche’s English disease
Your charm will let you please.

You might even get good at things
Which margin sticks, which cover clings
And if you don’t, you’ve luck
And make mother hens cluck.

And should you meet the baronet
(Ass’nance just passes banneret)
You’ll know to tell him what
Destiny you have got.

Then when his bored neighbour enquires
‘Those dreamy Jays from dreaming spires
Still on the bloody dole?’
Sir Charles regards the prole,

(A stockbroker, or worse still, banks,
Who thinks the gentry owe him thanks –
(Though Charles once wrote accounts,
It’s Ponsonby what counts.))

And takes up that abandoned gage
To succour his now slandered page –
‘The tall one without tact
Now works in books, in fact.’

‘Oh? Publishing? They take ‘em young,
To help hold Kindle’s flamey tongue…’
‘No, not that sort of place,
Nothing so very base.’

‘A book dealer’s you know, old ones,
First eds, signatures, rare print runs,
Where you might take your aunt
More Heywood Hill than Daunt.’

There’s something in Horatian schemes
That tends towards Caroline themes.
As Marvell’s King and Martyr
Made Cromwell a non-starter –

Just so, perhaps, you have been swept
Out of the frame, while she is kept
Encased among the knives,
Where only Sir Charles thrives.

We shared an immaterial horse,
You leave me to tangible force.
Between the spur and hood,
I pick the hawk for good.

Frostbite

That they were warm once, those feet
That carry you off in the other direction –
Cold, clean, foreshortened kisses (and now you) confirm.

That I have known shivers at hand –
The fear of false judgment, of yet being dulled
I hid from you, uniquely, them, sometimes, me.

That I have alarmed every beacon I had
For less than an acquaintance I will not regret;
There was pleasure there too, every pent upon languish.

That they take you away from the most kindly omens
And prove you to be unidentical with
Some heartening love line – I can’t grudge such feet.

Knowing them to have been warm, once,
With tentative heat.

After Sidney Again

Distracted Nature, idly discontent,
Now minded to undo as to regret,
Tracked down her own back catalogue’s extent,
Her pair of voids still in their fading set.
And as she wondered what she might have meant,
Despite occluded sight, her puzzling let
A watery ray fly from its wonderment:
An indecisive, though a worthy get.
A realisation to reproach the past -
An art to turn the easel, blur the line -
Now animates that accidental cast,
That flighting colour that pens in all mine.
When my thin prism breaks up Sidney’s black,
BELLA’s eyes alter, and then falter back.

Lilac Bicycle

There is a melody among the spheres
A modest and untraceable refrain
That furls itself behind accreting years
And waits to watch morn’s mantle blush again.

There is an elegy beside the grate,
A sense of passing bound up with the heat,
That, all the same, vouchsafes another’s life,
And knows its own rekindling in defeat.

This is a threnody for what there was,
A jubilee for what’s to be instilled,
The memory of some once treasured cause,
E’en now not lost, as much as freshly tilled.

This is the hymn for her who wields the dawn
As her conveyance through a land once lorn.