The Muslim Council of Britain’s
recent decision to attack Michael Gove’s proposed draft for a new history
curriculum is not a surprising one. In isolation, it wouldn’t even be very
worrying. As it is, though, it’s the latest in a series of disavowals, some
more serious than others. Simon Schama, who had previously worked on the
proposals, at once ostentatiously disowned the published form – the draft, he
said, bore ‘no resemblance’ to the one he had helped to develop a month
earlier. Then, on 13th March, came an extended criticism in the TLS from David Cannadine. Cannadine is
both a serious historian, and untainted by association with the Richard J.
Evans types who are determined to block any emphasis on narrative history. At
first his criticisms seemed sensible enough, but pessimistic and unexciting;
even small-c conservative. Without extra time in schools, he argued, history
cannot gain ground significantly; the curriculum is neither here nor there. It
was when he began to specify the problems with the draft that my disagreement
turned inexorably into disbelief.
Surely Cannadine had somehow got
the wrong end of the ruler? How could it be that six year olds were to be
introduced to the subject of history in the form of abstract, worthy-sounding
but in fact debatable concepts – ‘civilisation, monarchy, parliament,
democracy’ – rather than simple and effective stories? And surely Gove – that William
Wilberforce, that Olaudah Equiano of the Academies – believed in letting
teachers determine which stories to tell, and pupils decide which to hear, and
when? How could it be right – how could it be practicable – that, as Cannadine claimed, the draft’s slavish
adherence to the dreaded Key Stages allowed children only to learn once,
fleetingly, at some particular and arbitrary age, about ancient Greece, or the
Crusades? Had Cannadine been assimilated by the opposing lobby the Education
Secretary refers to without compromise as ‘The Blob’? But when I dug out the
draft to check all was well, it proved all that Cannadine had warned, and
worse.
The ‘narrative’ versus ‘themes’
history curriculum debate is probably as much about entertainment as politics –
which is why I still think Gove’s policy, imaginatively implemented, has
potential to be transformative, vote-winning as well as genuinely beneficial to
the vital cause of interesting schoolchildren in history. The consistent
success of stories, from the Bible to Rowling to Mantel, by way of any number
of boxed set DVDs, indicates to me that there is a solid majority, otherwise
without political allegiance, in favour of narrative history. Nevertheless, its
opponents’ favourite line of attack is to slam it as ‘boring’, ‘rote-learning’.
Gove’s most important task was to show them why they were wrong, and, on the
basis of the deadly draft, he has failed in that task.
Hugh Trevor-Roper – inarguably one
of the least boring of historians – once, like Disraeli and C.P. Snow before
him, described this country as one made up of two worlds –
...on the one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times-reading world, which hates
elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the
experts, the professionals, themselves; and, on the other hand, the gay,
irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the
world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from
political matters because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual
matters because they are not scholars…
The Coalition – that unexpected
offspring of a loveless Establishment marriage – has always risked looking as
if it belonged to the first camp. It is to Gove’s advantage and credit that he
generally sounds like he comes from the second; the changeling child of
Aberdonian fisherfolk, now turned journalistic swashbuckler. So why has he
approved a plan so bereft of narrative excitement, a draft that struggles to
placate and fails to persuade?
Let us take it stage by dreary Key
Stage. KS 1 (for ages 5-7) is a peculiar cocktail of the patronising, the overweening
and the inexact. A bullet point earnestly presses the importance of teaching
what ‘before’ and ‘after’ mean. There follows the forbidding clutch of abstract
ideas excoriated by Cannadine, the most totalitarian of which is probably ‘the
concept of a nation’. Then there’s the SISA section – ‘Significant Individuals
Such As.’ Various pairs of famous and virtuous beings follow, but nothing defines
why precisely they qualify as famous or virtuous enough for the under-7s – and
not once is their entertainment value considered of importance. The only good
idea here is that places, events and worthies local to the school should be
prioritised – though it does get one wondering about catchment areas for the
glorious dead.
KS 2 (for ages 7-11) is, by contrast,
exhaustingly full. It has evoked a universal cry of ‘How’ – how to teach and
how to learn so much so fast. Some emphasis is a little odd – the Stone Age to
the Celtic settlement is almost all pre-history. Isn’t the lesson that history,
that stories, begin with and rely on written accounts important in itself? Neither
are those, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, who complain of insularity
and Anglocentrism mistaken; even France only staggers in once or
twice, let alone Saladin or Averroes. But the main problem is that this incalculably
rich and exciting saga – Roman Britain to Queen Anne – is under the current
scheme snatched away, like Narnia or Philip Pullman’s shape-shifting daemons,
with the onset of puberty.
KS 3 (11-14) is where the Goveite rigour
really stiffens into rigor mortis. It
reads in fact as if written during some unsteady collusion between Gove’s loyal
henchmen and his sworn foes, veering about between Clive of India and the
Tolpuddle Martyrs. This conveys not so much political neutrality as narrative
incoherence. Again, there’s too much too fast, but with two centuries rather
than two millennia under discussion, much of it is unlikely to be very gripping
(‘the impact of mass literacy and the Elementary Education Act’, dully post-modern;
‘Lloyd-George’s coalition’, worthy of Hansard.) A sense that Gove is for some
reason banking on Scottish independence permeates these hurried plans; how
otherwise would he expect to get away with blandly ascribing Adam Smith to ‘the
Enlightenment in England’?
The draft adds insult to its self-inflicted injuries by fetishizing 1989 as a
stop-date, precisely as 1066 and All That
– in jest – mummified 1918 as the End of History.
But I still believe in Gove – in
what he is doing, and that it can be done. He must start by pulling a repeat
trick – consigning this draft to educational history rather than historical
education. When the curriculum emerges, poor Simon Schama must again be
startled. The transformation will be entire. For early history will now be
taught somewhat like early science. First will come long years of stories,
lovingly and luxuriously told. It hardly matters what they are; the Trojan War
and King Arthur will do very nicely, as long as they are well told. Then,
fewer, swifter and still more exciting, will be the years of revelation – that
all these stories, that all stories, are lies, though they contain truths. That
despite and because of being lies, they are all-important. And that historians,
teachers, pupils, and politicians are all entitled to engage in the humanising
habit of confecting their own stories.
‘Somewhat mechanical,’ comments Montague Beckwith, the
shell-shocked officer in Andrew Cowan’s First World War novel Worthless Men, of his suffragist
sisters’ minds, ‘though exceptionally well-oiled.’ The same faint praise might
be applied to the story at large. Cowan confides in an afterword that ‘the
origins of this novel lie in some interviews I conducted in my mid-twenties
while setting up an oral history archive in Norwich’, and this daunting ancestry can show.
Details and observations emerge with more insistence than sprezzatura.
The novel’s structure is meticulous, its apparatus
unstartling. The present, apparently become the natural tense of government for
historical fiction, stays on. The old modernist vogue for Aristotelian unities
keeps us in one market day and one town, waiting for the Tommies (and cows) to
come home. Restrictions of grammar, time and place are relieved by the freewheeling
recollections of five characters; three members of the younger generation, and
(featuring more occasionally) two of their parents. At one point we meet a
factory-hand called, plausibly enough, Mr. Rivett, and Worthless Men is indeed a thing of bolts and rivets. In wartime,
after all, every component matters.
The first and last mind’s eye the reader experiences in Worthless Men is that of Walter Barley,
a small, plucky, industrious lad, enlisted much too young (we find out why,
slowly). Cowan can be maddeningly close with information, but he’s relatively free
with Walter’s situational USP. From the moment Walter, missing in action,
witnesses his mother and sister discussing his (just) possible return, it’s
fairly clear that, as they can’t see him or hear his interruptions, he must already
be beyond this life. Yet Cowan is teasingly physical in describing this ghost,
‘lice-ridden’ from the moment of his materialisation, his pockets full of ‘fluff
and tobacco strands’, his fingers wincing at the still-sharp quill of a
carefully preserved white feather.
Walter is a kind of everyman’s Hamlet, his tragedy already
run. His father is an absent drunk, and he believes his mother to be carrying
on with the local butcher. Cowan convinces us through the son to (mis)judge the
mother accordingly, while the butcher’s trade permits reiterative echoes of
Wilfred Owen. One notion neither Walter nor the novel channels is spiritualism,
the craze that was to riddle the post-war bereaved. Although Worthless Men is a work of social
history quite as much as it is of fiction, Cowan offers the presence of ghosts
as an exclusively literary device, rather than a socio-historical phenomenon.
Perhaps he felt his novel had space to examine only one discredited
pseudo-science, for both its plot and characters are steeped in discussion of
eugenics. The title Worthless Men itself
comes from a monograph by Gerard Oram, which makes the point that First World
War private soldiers were executed overwhelmingly more often than officers
because of institutional military disdain for ‘working-class stock’. Cowan’s
two eugenic theorists are the officer, Beckwith, and the pharmacist, Dobson.
Beckwith is a particularly articulate voice but also the least nuanced
character; a rapist and murderer, a proto-fascist, and, of course, a gentleman.
The closest thing he has to a positive human quality is despair. Dobson, domestically
a pathetic and pompous tyrant, but an indispensable, informed medical resort
for the city’s poor, is more interesting. His inseparable enthusiasms for
contraception, abortion, and eugenics provide an unsettling comparison to contemporary
orthodoxies and heresies.
The story’s real battlefield is Gertie Dobson, who acts both
as Walter’s belle dame sans merci and
Beckwith’s would-be Tess Durbeyfield. Brought up as the Dobson marriage’s
daughter, her heritage proves to be more complicated, in a twist that crossbreeds
romance and eugenics. Her first name would appear to be borrowed from Joyce’s lovely
cripple, desirable and repellent, perfect and flawed. This Gertie’s flaw is
backwardness, indeed near-imbecility by Dobson’s and Beckwith’s standards. But
her moral innocence, which allows her, for example, to treat her father’s
theories as harmless peculiarities, comes as an attractive relief.
Cowan keeps the Beckwith family, the area’s
seigneurial dynasty, mainly in the background, while getting them just right.
They are new money, chapel, Liberal, suffragist and insufferable, providing
employment for all, and - in a gradual unspooling with gruesome consequences
for the denouement - barbed wire for the trenches.
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 21st 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 17th
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 15th 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.
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.
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.
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.’
