The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)

A story of Elizabethan Cornwall

Who was it who once said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? Not so long ago, I came across a very tatty paperback (spine cracked, cover page rather faded and held on with Sellotape, original UK retail price 80p) by Winston Graham, best known as the author of the Poldark books. This, though, was one of his other ones, an historical novel called The Grove of Eagles which was first published in 1963. The blurb was very complimentary indeed, and despite having never previously read anything by Winston Graham (or even bothered with Poldark, for that matter) I decided to go for it.

The Grove of Eagles is about the Killigrews, an influential Cornish family who were governors of Pendennis Castle in Tudor times and who were later responsible for founding and developing the port and town of Falmouth (being a semi-regular visitor to Falmouth as part of my work, I already knew a little bit about this family, who as well as being the local landowners were also heavily involved in smuggling and piracy in that part of the world; their memorial, a granite pyramid erected by the last of them, stands in Falmouth today opposite Arwenack House, the old family home which was destroyed during the Civil War and rebuilt in the eighteenth century). In the historical notes at the end, Graham describes them as “a not unimportant Cornish family whose history appears and disappears tantalisingly among the records of the time”. Which, I suppose, makes them an ideal canvas for an historical novelist.

Several of the Killigrews of Arwenack House were called John (it seems to have been a family tradition that this was the name given to the eldest son) and there has been some confusion among historians not only about the various John Killigrews but also their wives; due to knighthoods, history records more than one Lady Killigrew and one such – a woman who was born Mary Wolverston – has been confused with both her mother-in-law and her grand-daughter-in-law, in addition to which we know neither the year in which she was born nor the year in which she died! What we do know is that this particular Lady K. often received stolen or smuggled goods at Arwenack House, and that furthermore she was charged with piracy in 1582 when the crew of a Spanish ship that had sheltered from a storm nearby were murdered and their cargo stolen; she was actually sentenced to death for this but was pardoned by Elizabeth I.

At the hands of Winston Graham, Lady Killigrew became one of the more influential characters in The Grove of Eagles, she being the formidable widowed mother of the master of Arwenack House, John Killigrew (who in real life was born in c.1557 and died in 1605). At the time in which the novel is set, the last years of the sixteenth century, this John Killigrew was in a key position. As well as being the local landowner, and a rather ruthless and unpopular one at that, he was also the governor of Pendennis Castle and as such responsible for the defence of the mouth of the river Fal, “a great natural anchorage, one of the finest in the world”, which could have been of great strategic importance in the event of a Spanish invasion. Alas, the defences as organised by John Killigrew were found wanting at the times of both the Spanish raid on Cornwall in 1595 and the invasion threat of 1597 (of which more later). Although his excuse was that he couldn’t afford to properly garrison the castle (something of which he had informed the government on several occasions), there were inevitably rumours about how loyal he actually was to Elizabeth I – was he, perhaps, secretly in cahoots with the Spanish via intermediaries such as the pirate captains with whom he associated? Although allegations of treason on his part were unproven, in 1598 he was nevertheless deprived of the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and he died in poverty seven years later.

In real life, he had a large family by his wife (herself a member of the Monck family); to this brood Winston Graham added an illegitimate son, a boy unaware of his mother’s identity but nevertheless acknowledged by John Killigrew as his son and brought up with that surname. It is this boy, Maugan Killigrew, who narrates The Grove of Eagles (which refers to the meaning of the name Killigrew, the family coat-of-arms being a double-headed eagle which of course hints at all sorts of duplicity on the grounds that it faces both ways), and what a tale his creator has him tell!

This story of Elizabethan Cornwall, told from the point of view of someone who is of gentry blood yet expected to have to make his own way in the world, is a very good one. Graham, who in the novel’s postscript makes much of having drawn on manuscripts from the time, shows a really good understanding for the period. Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you realise the extent to which The Grove of Eagles is not only populated by real people but based very much on real events, most notably events from the war between England and Spain which lasted from the mid-1580s until the 1604 Treaty of London. Maugan is caught up in the resistance to the 1595 Spanish raid on Cornwall in which troops from four galleys landed in Mount’s Bay and sacked Mousehole, Newlyn and Penzance, beating back a local militia under Sir Francis Goldolphin (whose first wife was a Killigrew; when not trying to defend England, he is shown to be warning his in-laws about how their reputation for lawlessness will lead them to ruin) before withdrawing. Later, Maugan is taken on as a secretary to no less a person than Sir Walter Raleigh – for some reason, Graham makes a point of spelling his surname ‘Ralegh’ – and as such he gets to participate in the English capture of Cadiz in 1596 which allows Graham to provide a fantastic description of this event.

Much is made in The Grove of Eagles of the Killigrews’ misfortune; what with the fate of one of the John Killigrews (see above) it is a running theme in the book, with the set-piece hearing before the Queen herself coming towards the novel’s end. Early on, Graham gives an explanation of this via Maugan. Having referred to the rebuilding of Arwenack House in the mid-sixteenth century on a grander scale than before by another John Killigrew (this one being the grandfather of Maugan’s father), it is noted that the Killigrew family, “for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself; each generation failed in greater measure than the last.” It is this which becomes key to both the family’s apparent lack of regard for the law (any ship that uses the Fal estuary as a haven is fair game, it seems) and the question of John Killigrew’s supposed treachery.

Maugan seems to be particularly unlucky. Captured by the Spanish in a raid on Pendennis Castle, he’s assumed to be dead and as a result his love interest – a young lady whose family has been evicted from their house by the Killigrews for defaulting on the rent – marries someone else (a circumstance that Winston Graham also bestowed on his more famous creation, Ross Poldark; apparently he got this particular idea from hearing the story of a pilot who he met during the Second World War). Later on, our narrator (a bit of a rogue, but one with a conscience of sorts – no Flashman, he) manages to get captured by the Spanish again when returning from Cadiz – he gets put on a ship home by Raleigh after getting injured in a fight while attempting to loot a church, and after being imprisoned for several months he finds himself sailing on the ill-fated Spanish Armada of 1597, the plan being that he will liaise with his father once the invaders have landed in Cornwall. Fortunately for England but not for Maugan Killigrew, this little-known attempt to invade founders thanks to the weather, the result being that Maugan actually gets to go home by way of being shipwrecked off the Cornish coast (the failure of this invasion attempt, which happened in October 1597, really did owe much to a storm that wrecked and scattered the Spanish ships; England was at the time very poorly defended, not just because of John Killigrew but also because most of its ships were absent on the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated expedition to the Azores). For anyone wondering about who Maugan’s mother is, rest assured that this gets revealed at the end although you could probably make an educated guess before then.

Having finished The Grove of Eagles, I’m rather disappointed that Graham didn’t write a sequel; even after more than 500 pages I found myself wanting more. Towards the end, Maugan starts to work (against his better judgement) for Lord Henry Howard, a courtier who would in a few years play a key role in putting James VI of Scotland on the English throne after Elizabeth I’s death (for which he was ennobled as the Earl of Northampton) and turning said king against Raleigh, a man whom Maugan admires. It would have been fascinating to have Graham relate the story of how this played out. As it is, The Grove of Eagles ends with a pensive Maugan getting married, following which there’s a ‘postscript for purists’ which begins with Graham asserting that “bibliographies in the historical novel are pretentious” – this at a time (1963) before the likes of George MacDonald Fraser and Bernard Cornwell made historical notes a standard practice for the historical novelist.

After revealing where he got the ideas for some of the events of his novel from (for example: “the extent to which John Killigrew became committed to the Spanish cause is perhaps arguable, but the evidence which exists does seem to me conclusive … the conclusive testimony comes from the Spanish side … I have no evidence that Ralegh [sic] spoke up for John Killigrew when he was brought to London to answer for his behaviour, but it is not out of keeping with his character that he should have done so”), he explains what happened to some of the characters in the novel who were actually real people (“the mystery of Jane Fermor’s dowry has never been cleared up”, “Jack Arundell of Trerice became Sir John Arundell and was governor of Pendennis Castle in 1646”, etc) before mentioning that Maugan was inspired in part by one Robert Killigrew, a friend of Raleigh’s “who was later innocently involved in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury”. I found myself wanting to know more about this, and also wondering about what might have been had Winston Graham decided to give Maugan another outing; here, alas, a character whose slender luck sadly didn’t extend to a second novel.

But the first and only adventure of Maugan Killigrew, though, is definitely worth reading. I just hope that, should you decide to do so, you can find a copy that’s in better condition than the one I found!

Fools and Mortals: on and off the stage with Shakespeare's brother

Bernard Cornwell’s got a new book out, and I’m not taking about the latest instalment in the Saxon saga (or, as it’s now being billed thanks to the TV series, the Last Kingdom saga). It’s a stand-alone adventure set in Elizabethan England, and the protagonist is a brother of one William Shakespeare.

He’s not a soldier or a government agent or anything like that. The world of historical fiction does have a Shakespeare brother who’s a government agent, though – John Shakespeare, an entirely fictional older brother of the Bard who’s working for Sir Francis Walsingham to make sure that Elizabeth I is safe from assorted Catholic plotters who’d rather have her Scottish cousin on the throne. He is the creation of Rory Clements, who has set out to do for Elizabeth I’s reign what C.J. Sansom’s excellent Shardlake novels have done for that of Henry VIII – provide a series of thrillers (Revenger, The Queen’s Man, etc) that explore the more dangerous side of Tudor England. They’re not bad but there are a lot of Tudor-era thrillers around these days, and if you try to compare any of them with the Shardlake books then there’s only going to be one winner.

Bernard Cornwell’s latest is not about threats against the crown. It’s set on the stage, or rather in and around the world of the theatre, and the Shakespeare brother who leads the action does at least have the merit of being a real person. Well, based on a real person at least. Richard Shakespeare is the narrator of Fools and Mortals which is set in London in 1595. Little is known of the real-life Richard Shakespeare, a younger brother of the Bard who is thought to have spent most of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon and who predeceased his famous brother by three years. This, in a way, makes him an ideal candidate for being a character in a Bernard Cornwell novel as the author has a more or less blank canvas to play with. At Cornwell’s hands, he’s a bit of a tearaway who, rather than be apprenticed to a brutal Stratford merchant, ran away to London to become a ‘player’ like his brother, who was less than pleased to see him show up in the big city. He’s shown some talent for acting but he is in a bit of a rut; although a boy no longer, he’s only considered for the female roles in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. What with having to resort to the occasional act of petty theft to supplement his meagre pay, he is growing ever more resentful of his big brother (who, as is the case of William Shakespeare as depicted in Upstart Crow, is on the cusp of fame here).

Despite being disapproved of by Puritans, going to the theatre is very popular in Elizabethan London (theatre-goers come from all walks of life and seem surprisingly willing to suspend their disbelief for the duration of a play, which can last for several hours although Cornwell reckons that they would have been edited for performances in order to get them down to the two-hour mark). As audiences get bored with repeat performances of plays they’ve seen before, the playing companies are always in need of new material. Play manuscripts are therefore jealously guarded by the company (not the playwright) that owns them; other than getting closed down by the Pursuivants (quasi-official ruffians on the look-out for the merest hint of sedition against the Queen, this being less than a decade after the defeat of the Spanish Armada), the worst thing that can happen to a theatre company is a manuscript going missing.

One such company is the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – named for their patron, Lord Hunsdon (who, being a son of Mary Boleyn, is a cousin of Elizabeth I as well as being the Lord Chamberlain). Will Shakespeare originally joined them as an actor but has since become a partner of the company; he may not be the most handsome chap (as his better-looking brother often tells the reader), but he’s definitely the brains of the operation. He’s recently written a new comedy which will be performed indoors at his lordship’s grand-daughter’s wedding which, it is thought, will be attended by none other than Good Queen Bess herself. Funnily, he uses this play – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – to mock his fellow-actors, having written parts for them that allude to some of their foibles; brother Richard finally gets a male part, but it’s that of Francis Flute – the ‘mechanical’ who is disappointed to learn that he’s been given a female part in the play-within-a-play.

His resentment towards his brother is therefore higher than ever when the manuscript of Will’s recently-completed tragedy about two star-crossed lovers in Italy gets stolen, thus driving the plot of Fools and Mortals. This happens at around the half-way point, the first half having set the scene with plenty of detail about Elizabethan society and the politics of the time, with emphasis on theatres (which have to be outside the City of London; as the Globe won’t be built until 1599, the theatre where the on-stage action takes place is the, ah, Theatre, located off Bishopsgate) as well as sufficient background concerning how Richard ended up in London and why he resents his brother. He’s even been tapped up by a rival acting company, offering him male roles provided he steals his brother’s manuscripts, but has turned them down. But the very fact that he was approached means that the finger of suspicion points towards Richard, who must prove his innocence by figuring out who’s actually nicked it and then getting it back. The former is fairly straightforward, the latter considerably less so.

This is a pretty interesting departure for Cornwell, probably the best living historical novelist at the moment but one more associated with military adventures (in various historical periods). Fools and Mortals is more of a slow-burner than your usual Bernard Cornwell novel, and when the action does come there’s not actually a lot of it; those expecting a Tudor-era version of Sharpe or Uhtred will be disappointed. I liked it, though. There was plenty of historical detail (Cornwell, as ever, is second to none in this regard) and Richard Shakespeare made for an interesting and multi-layered character. William Shakespeare himself remains somewhat elusive, even a bit dislikeable – there’s little on why he has acted the way he has done to cause his brother’s resentment, and his domestic life is merely hinted at (he seems to have a mistress or two in London, while Anne Hathaway is back in Warwickshire with the kids). Perhaps it’s better that way. At least Cornwell is depicting William Shakespeare as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays; on top of having produced an engaging historical novel, he is fully deserving of top marks for refusing to buy into that ‘Shakespeare was written by someone else’ conspiracy nonsense.

Whig history and fake news (with Lucy Worsley)

Lucy Worsley has clearly been busy recently. The historian, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces and TV presenter (who has brought us such documentaries as The First Georges and Empire of the Tsars) was on Beeb One in December with Six Wives, and is now on Beeb Four with British History’s Biggest Fibs which re-examines certain aspects of our history. The latter is the more interesting, and it shows that there is nothing new about what we now call fake news.

If you haven’t seen it, there are no prizes for guessing who Six Wives is about and if you didn’t catch it you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were costumes (it wouldn’t be a Lucy Worsley documentary if she didn’t don at least one historical costume; this irritates some but I see it as a visual sign of an enthusiastic presenter getting underneath the surface of her subject), dramatic reconstructions that inevitably looked like low-budget imitations of A Man for All Seasons or Wolf Hall, and Dr Worsley telling the story in her usual engaging, light and energetic manner that’s a refreshing change from the affected bitchiness of (say) David Starkey. Of particular note were her insights into Anne of Cleves although these were pretty much the same as the impression of her that was given in the 1970 drama series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. To be fair, the saga that was Henry VIII’s marital history (all that, ahem, chopping and changing) is is one of the best-known stories from English history and as such I’d’ve been amazed if Dr Worsley had come up with anything new; to her credit she let the wives rather than Henry take centre-stage, but such an approach has nevertheless been done before and in this instance it could’ve been condensed into a single hour.

Meanwhile, Henry VIII’s dad was key to the first episode of British History’s Biggest Fibs which is a much more interesting and thought-provoking programme. It was Henry VII who, after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, embarked on a major propaganda campaign to assert the legitimacy of his claim to the throne (which was rather questionable, he being the grandson of Henry V’s wife by her second husband). He managed to convince people that he had been declared King before the battle, and set about demonising Richard with a vengeance. He asserted his legitimacy with symbols too. The Tudor rose, combining the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York, was created and adopted as his symbol, showing how he had unified the two rival royal houses (he’d strengthened his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, Richard’s niece). But the red rose hadn’t really been used as an emblem by the Lancastrians, and contemporaries had never used the term ‘Wars of the Roses’ to describe the ongoing (yet surprisingly sporadic) conflict between the two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty between 1455 and 1485. Indeed, the idea of their supporters using roses to identify their allegiance owes more to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 (specifically, the scene where the supporters pick red or white roses in the garden of Temple Church) than anything else; at Bosworth, Richard’s banner was adorned by a boar, while Henry used a dragon. Sticking with Shakespeare, who was writing during the reign of Henry VII’s grand-daughter Elizabeth I, the Bard drew heavily on the works of Henry’s chroniclers when writing Richard III, which presents said king as an out-and-out villain who is beaten by good in the form of the Earl of Richmond (Henry).

Aside from detailing the rewriting of history that Henry VII and his chroniclers embarked on, there’s a good point from Dr Worsley (as well as waving a sword in a field in Leicestershire, she gets to dress up as a Tudor-era Yeoman of the Guard in this one) about linking this to the Whig interpretation of history, which is an approach that seeks to present the past as an inevitable progression, with things always getting better and better; if used by a ruler (and throughout history, it often has been) then I guess it’s an approach that is not dissimilar from what we would now call fake news. As Dr Worsley herself points out, some elements of our history are a “carefully edited and deceitful version of events”. ‘Fake news’ may be a new phrase, but it is not a new phenomenon.

More overtly related to the Whigs was the second part of British History’s Biggest Fibs which looked at the Glorious Revolution. For many years this event was presented as a key to Britain’s subsequent prosperity by, for example, the Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay whose History of England exemplified the Whig interpretation; the advances of British power in the eighteenth century owed much to the sovereignty of Parliament that had been enshrined by the Glorious Revolution. But how did the Glorious Revolution come about? Was it a peaceful transfer of power following the tyranny of James II, or a foreign invasion? Certainly James was suspected of aspiring to be an absolutist ruler and his Catholicism didn’t help. James’s enemies, who came to be called the Whigs, were not above the use of fake news to discredit him, for example with the rumours that his son born in June 1688 (the future Old Pretender) was actually an illegitimate imposter who had been smuggled into his wife’s bed in a warming-pan. James’s response, engaging with this craziness by publishing statements from those who had witnessed the birth (apparently, the number of witnesses was well into double figures), only made matters worse – the Whigs produced pamphlets discrediting the witnesses and their statements, and someone even came up with a map of St James’s Palace which showed the route that had supposedly been taken by the servant with the warming-pan, from the convent next door (where, the story went, the imposter-baby had been born) to the Queen’s bed!

Using propaganda to discredit a tyrannical ruler is all very well (it evidently works even better if his attempts to refute it can themselves be refuted), but how do you go about getting rid of him without risking civil war? The solution, as revealed in the cellars of a long-demolished Buckinghamshire mansion called Ladye Place (owned by an MP who indulged in publicity-seeking behaviour like using a court summons to wipe his bottom in public), was to invite someone else to invade England – that someone else being the Dutch prince William of Orange. Such an invitation was treason – the seven senior politicians who signed it didn’t use their own names (those were added later) – but in the light of what happened next this invitation came to be seen not as a treacherous act but as a plea from a desperate nation. Those seven politicians would be remembered not as traitors but as heroes, the ‘Immortal Seven’.

There’s more to it than that – the situation in England was linked to that in Europe, where the Protestant William was locked in a struggle with Louis XIV, the Catholic King of France. By looking at things from the Dutch side, it’s evident that William – who was married to Mary, James’s daughter – had considered invading England even before he was invited to do so; with the resources of England (and Scotland and Ireland) behind him, he would be much better placed to fight against his rival Louis. When he did invade (after sailing along the Channel, he landed at Brixham in November 1688), he was shrewd enough not to present it as an invasion, with his weapons of war including a printing-press which was used to print multiple copies of the declaration which presented his reasons for arriving in England; this propaganda campaign was clearly a success, for by the time he got to Exeter he was greeted not as an invader but as a liberator (even the colour of his horse – white – was symbolic, referring to a passage from Revelation which Dr Worsley quotes, while wearing a suit of armour of course). James fled; the Whigs said he’d abdicated.

There followed the reign of William III and Mary II, the only joint monarchy in our history – and it was enshrined by the Bill of Rights which barred Catholics from the line of succession and gave the Whigs the constrained, or rather constitutional, monarchy that they’d wanted. As Henry VII and his supporters had done unto Richard III, so William and Mary and their supporters did unto James II by denouncing him as a tyrant. Getting rid of a king and asserting the sovereignty of Parliament; revolutionary this undoubtedly was, and to a Whig it was indeed glorious; “if you win a conflict,” as Dr Worsley points out, “you get to pick its name”. You also get to ensure that your version of said conflict is the version is the one that gets the most publicity to the point where it can even be seen as fact rather than interpretation; William III knew this as well as Henry VII had done.

Some at the time called the Glorious Revolution a bloodless revolution, which wasn’t the case if one considers subsequent resistance to William in Ireland. In 1690 he met his father-in-law on the battlefield for the first time at the Boyne, and easily defeated him. This has been commemorated by Northern Irish Protestants every 12^th July ever since – or has it? In actual fact, the subsequent battle of Aughrim, which took place the following year, was seen as more significant at the time and that was the one that took place on 12^th July and was commemorated, but in 1752 the Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain and Ireland. This led to the commemorations focussing on the Boyne (which had taken place on 1^st July, that date becoming 11^th July under the new calendar) instead; to this day, these commemorations continue to be an incendiary subject in Northern Ireland (William III – King Billy – is still very much either a hero or a villain depending on one’s perspective).

Perceptions change with time; in recent years the relative merits of Richard III and Henry VII have been re-evaluated (with the discovery of the former’s remains underneath a Leicester cark park sparking much re-thinking), while the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution faded somewhat in the twentieth century (and yes, in the light of various revolutions that have taken place since the late seventeenth century some historians have queried the extent to which it really counts as a revolution). History, or rather the evidence that has survived, is always open to questioning and reinterpretation. Much like some of what we read and hear in the news today, said evidence is usually biased in one way or another and may well be exaggerated (or even in some cases factually inaccurate and/or intentionally misleading); one thing we can say for certain is that it was ever thus.

Of palaces and castles

What with being the capital city, London has a lot of palaces and castles but there is more to them than present-day Royal residences (although admittedly that does factor in quite a bit); there are also long-gone medieval fortifications and Tudor palaces, a Georgian folly and even a pub (of London’s many pubs and former pubs with the word ‘castle’ in their names, one made it onto the list). But how did they get their names? I looked into this for Londonist, and found that the answers are varied; as well as English place-names, London’s various castles and palaces owe their names to a Danish princess, French and Scottish nobility, an Indian fortress, the Latin language, a rebel leader and even one of the Disciples. Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/2016/07/how-london-s-castles-and-palaces-got-their-names

Upstart Crow

I’ve really enjoyed watching the new sitcom Upstart Crow on the BBC iPlayer recently. It’s written by Ben Elton, a man who, although he’s been responsible for some remarkably bad sitcoms (and, let’s be honest, some pretty ropey stand-up as well), has always had one redeeming feature – the fact that, back in the Eighties, he co-wrote Blackadder with Richard Curtis. He’s (finally) returned to Blackadder territory for his new one, which has been done as part of the BBC’s desire to commemorate the quadricentenary (I think that’s the right word) of William Shakespeare’s death. Set in the 1590s, Upstart Crow depicts William Shakespeare as a writer on the cusp of fame – he’s made a bit of a name for himself with some long-winded plays about Henry VI and some poetry – who’s struggling to balance his professional life in London with his home life back in Stratford. He’s played – in a brilliant piece of casting – by David Mitchell. The Bard of Stratford in the style of Mark from Peep Show? Oh yes – and it really works.

Will, as he is called here, is a genius who’s conscious of his humble origins as he tries to break into a profession in which most people went to university. He’s struggling with the first draft of his teenage romance, particularly the meaning of the word ‘wherefore’ when it’s used in the balcony scene, and toys with the idea of killing the main characters off rather than letting them live happily ever after (which is how everyone assumes it’s going to end). This leads into a running gag where his landlady’s daughter keeps badgering him to let her play the female lead, in breach of the laws of the time which only allowed men on the stage (“you know very well that it is illegal for girls to do anything interesting”). It came as no surprise to this Blackadder fan that said landlady’s daughter is called Kate, for this is the name of the young lady who pretends to be a boy in order to get gainful employment under the pseudonym ‘Bob’ in both the Elizabethan and First World War incarnations of that sitcom; brilliantly, Gabrielle Glaister, the actress who played Kate/Bob in Blackadder, makes a brief appearance in Upstart Crow as a judge called ‘Robert Roberts’ who turns out to be a woman.

Like Edmund Blackadder, the Will of Upstart Crow is a man with upward ambition surrounded by fools and enemies. His servant, Bottom, may be a bit smarter than Baldrick but Brian from Spaced goes full panto-villain as the Lord Melchett equivalent Robert Greene – a real person, best known today for his pamphlet in which he complained about an actor from the provinces who thought he could write just as well as the university-educated playwrights (widely perceived as an attack on Shakespeare himself, this is where the phrase ‘upstart crow’ comes from); as with all the best British sitcoms, there’s class conflict and snobbery a-plenty here. Over at the theatre, there’s an actor whose lines all point to a send-up of Ricky Gervais that eventually gets a bit tiresome (how, one wonders, has he offended Mr Elton?). There’s a good turn from Tim Downie as Will’s better-connected and slightly Flashheart-esque friend Kit Marlowe, while Liza Tarbuck and Harry Enfield are on top supporting form as Will’s wife and father back in Stratford (Will’s constantly travelling back and forth between London and his home town; the sixteenth-century spin on commuting jokes does wear a bit thin by the fourth or fifth episode).

There’s so much Shakespeare-related stuff that gets touched on given that this is a six-part series. Did people at the time find those laboured jokes funny? Apparently not (“don’t do comedy, it’s not your strong point”), and they’re not keen on the overly flowery language either. An actor who does the female parts complains about the lack of good lines for men who play women. If you’ve ever wondered, as many an English Lit student probably has, what Shakespeare’s wife thought of all those sonnets which were lovingly dedicated to either another woman or a man, or whether people at the time might have wondered about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation due to the latter (“God’s naughty etchings! Why does everyone presume that just because I wrote 126 love poems to an attractive boy that I must be some kind of bechambered hugger-tugger?”), we have a scenario where this plays out; the same episode has a lovely gag in which it is predicted that, in the future, hardly anyone’s going to bother reading the sonnets in their entirety anyway, although one of them could be popular at weddings.

Cleverly, each episode title is a quote from a Shakespeare play or poem, and each episode ends with Mr and Mrs Shakespeare discussing the events that have just occurred and wondering about whether the sometimes ridiculous scenarios in which Will found himself (writing a play to catch someone’s conscience, getting tricked into wearing silly hose with cross-garters, etc) can be used for future plays. There are Shakespeare-style asides to the audience (although this is only really done to good effect in the later episodes). Elsewhere, the usually ludicrous ‘Shakespeare authorship’ question, always deserving of a good take-down (see Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare for a good one), gets wonderfully turned on its head – for here, Will is secretly writing his mate Kit’s plays for him on the side as well as his own.

There may be a few bits that need ironing out (a couple of running gags that go on for too long, mainly), but for the most part there is much to like about Upstart Crow. Apparently there’s to be a second series. Hooray!

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel wrote the excellent Wolf Hall as the first part of a trilogy about the rise and fall of the Tudor-era politician Thomas Cromwell; it and its sequel, Bring up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize so the pressure is really on for Mantel to deliver a belter for the final instalment which will, if the historical record is anything to go by, portray the downfall of the King’s most faithful servant.

In the meantime, while Mantel has been courting publicity by publishing a short story about murdering Mrs Thatcher, fans of Wolf Hall have been treated to a theatre adaptation (which I didn’t go and see) and now a TV adaptation with Mark Rylance as Cromwell and the brainwashed Marine from Homeland as Henry VIII.

Turning books into TV shows can be a tricky business; with this one, the writers had to take the action from two not particularly short novels (between them, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies top 1000 pages) and condense that into six one-hour episodes (although, this being a BBC drama, an hour really did mean an hour). The result was damned good – a slow-burner of a series that refused to treat the viewer like an imbecile while taking a story we thought we all knew, and retelling it from the perspective of someone who is usually a supporting character.

The son of a blacksmith who rose to become one of the most powerful men in England, Thomas Cromwell’s a fascinating character; in TV dramas about Henry VIII he’s usually portrayed as an unprincipled politician on the make, the man behind the scenes who’s overseeing all those confessions obtained through torture. This is in contrast to the apparently saintly Thomas More (indeed, Cromwell is very much the villain of that classic play-turned-film A Man for All Seasons).

One thing I really like about Wolf Hall is how Mantel did a spectacular piece of revisionism and turned this on its head, with More being shown in a more villainous light than is usual and Cromwell getting the sympathetic treatment. Perhaps a more neutral way of putting it would be to say that the two were contrasting politicians – More was an idealist, whereby Cromwell was a pragmatist (and, as is so often the case, pragmatism won out over idealism). Allowing Cromwell to shine may have upset the historians – David Starkey is not a fan – but it does make for a really good political story (I hesitate to use the word ‘thriller’, what with the ending being widely known), especially at a time when the third series of the American remake of House of Cards has just come out on the Netflix. And especially with a quality actor like Rylance in the lead (when he’s on form like this, I’m prepared to momentarily overlook his support for the ever-odd Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare conspiracy theory).

But then, all this debate about Cromwell versus More obscures who the real villain of the piece is – the man who, ultimately, would send both of them to the block. Claire Foy may have stolen the limelight as Anne Boleyn – always the most fascinating of Henry VIII’s wives – in the final episode, but the power was always with the King, portrayed superbly in this series by Damian Lewis (the sinister man-hug at the end was particularly well done and summed things up brilliantly without any need for dialogue). The whole thing played out like the best sort of political thriller, even though everyone (well, everyone who went to school in this country) knows how this story was going to end. Turns out that it’s still possible to make an old story exciting.

Sansom and Scarrow

In terms of novels, I am all for thrillers and murder mysteries. Two very good ones that I’ve read recently happen to be set in Tudor times – although, as is usually the case with historical novels, there are quite a few nods to the present day.

First up is Sword & Scimitar by Simon Scarrow, a standalone novel about the 1565 Great Siege of Malta – when the island fortress of the Knights of St John was besieged by the Ottoman Turks. At stake was the future not just of Malta – then as in the Second World War, a key strategic position in the Mediterranean – but of Christian Europe. Quite frankly, this is a key event in European history that should be more widely known about than it is.

Even so, there is of course more to Sword & Scimitar than the defence of what would become The West. The novel’s protagonist, an English knight called Sir Thomas Barrett, is a disgraced former member of the Order of St John who is summoned from rural Hertfordshire to return to help defend Malta. In addition to risking life and limb for a cause he has tried to forget about, he is given a secret mission to carry out on Malta by Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth I. There’s a certain document in the Order’s archive on Malta that needs to be recovered at all costs, and to help with this task Sir Thomas is given an assistant who has a few secrets of his own.

In a sense, then, this is a spy novel that happens to be set against the backdrop of one of the most significant battles of the sixteenth century. There are dire consequences for England if the document falls into the wrong hands (far be it from me to spoil things by saying what the document is, as Sir Thomas is as much in the dark as the reader for the best part of the novel), although for much of the novel this is of secondary importance to the battle for control of the island – and should the Turks win, the consequences for all of Europe would in themselves be catastrophic.

Thanks to his ‘Eagle’ series of Roman-era novels, Simon Scarrow has a proven track record when it comes to describing historical fight scenes and he’s clearly in his element as the Knights’ situation becomes ever more dire in the face of unrelenting attacks by the numerically superior Turks.

This being a modern novel, blind faith is treated with some degree of scepticism by the main protagonist who, having seen at first hand the destructive power of religion – both in terms of the all-out war between Christianity and Islam and the persecution of Catholics in England – has lost his faith, something which enables the modern reader to identify with him.

Secrets concerning the stability of Tudor-era England are key to another recently-read novel, Sovereign by C.J. Sansom.

Unlike Sword & Scimitar, Sovereign is part of a series of novels – to be precise, the third in the Shardlake series of detective novels set during the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign. The protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, is a hunchbacked London-based lawyer who, rather like Sir Thomas, has come to privately doubt his faith and this, combined with having to endure endless mockery for his physical stature,  causes him to regard the sixteenth-century world he inhabits from a cynical viewpoint – thus allowing us readers to identify with him as an outsider.

Sovereign sees Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak (the brawn to Shardlake’s brain), in York. Henry VIII’s 1541 progress to the North – a region still seething with discontent following the Pilgrimage of Grace – is about to arrive in the city but Shardlake is actually on a secret mission to ensure that a key anti-Henry prisoner in York Castle gets taken to the Tower of London for questioning (obtaining information by torture being nothing new under the sun). Things start to become rather complicated when a local glazier is found dead, and Shardlake stumbles across a cache of documents that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Tudor claim to the throne (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s based on an historical rumour that’s been given TV airtime before now).

It’s always interesting to see how famous people from history are represented in the pages of historical novels. In Sword & Scimitar, Walsingham is shown as a sixteenth-century version of M, a role that Archbishop Cranmer appears to fulfil in Sovereign (in the first two novels of the Shardlake series, Dissolution and Dark Fire, this role was played by Thomas Cromwell, himself the subject of a recent Tudor-era novel, Wolf Hall). But where Sovereign takes things to a new level is with the appearance in its pages of the larger-than-life man whose personality and actions dominated the Tudor era.

I refer, of course, to Henry VIII. Even as an unseen character in the first two Shardlake novels, he cast a long shadow and left the reader with the impression that getting close to his royal personage was inherently dangerous (Dark Fire, of course, ended with the execution of Thomas Cromwell). I’d previously though that Samson was doing well to resist drawing him into the story, but for his third novel he takes the plunge, and brings out the big man – but only for a walk-on part at the gates of York, with the stench from his infected leg (if nothing else, the Shardlake books convey the smell of Tudor England to an unsurpassable extent) hitting the nose before he deigns to ridicule the man who is in fact working to save his realm.

Accompanying him is wife number five, the doomed teenager Katherine Howard (not so much young enough to be Henry’s daughter as actually several years younger than his eldest) who gets an unusually sympathetic portrayal here, and the impression we are given via Shardlake of her fall from grace is that she was a naive girl who was more sinned against than sinning (this is made more explicit in the afterword – all good works of historical fiction have one of these – where Sansom does his best to clear her name of the charge of adultery that is usually thrown at her). Sovereign is a well-written and well-researched novel (Sansom holds a PhD in History), but his obvious erudition never stifles the plot – as, for example, the author’s learning does in The Name of the Rose and to a lesser extent Wolf Hall.

Sovereign and Sword & Scimitar are both worth reading. They have timeless themes running through them that are as valid today as they were in the sixteenth century: The uses and abuses of power, clashes between civilisations and religious conflict all feature. They also pose some very modern questions. Can the state be trusted? How far do you go to defend what you believe in? Is information obtained by torture valid? Does the end really justify the means? And finally, if you have information that will probably plunge your country into chaos if it’s released, what do you do with it?