Peter CostelloThe World of Books by the books editor
The debate over the historical accuracy of Wolf Hall, as both book and drama, has touched even the pages of The Irish Catholic. But this debate about history and fiction is an old one. And this has always been the case since the creation of the historical novel as a genre.
The great popular master of the form was Alexander Dumas, whose novels still provide movie makers with fodder for swashbuckling spectaculars. But we need to keep in mind that these novels are romances.
For instance, in The Four Musketeers, and its associated volumes, Dumas managed to transform in the memory of the general public the reputation of the great Cardinal Richelieu from that of a brilliant servant of the King of France into a demonical political conniver. The novel presents the romance of the past, not the reality of history.
Tudor lies
In the Wolf Hall case, much the same is being done. It has been suggested that the historical characters of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More have been switched. Some are upset by this because of course Thomas More is a saint. Or rather he is a martyr. For there are aspects of his life, as about the lives of many saints, that are unsaintly.
But Thomas More, too, could dramatise a mood or a memory. It is to him that we largely owe the legends about Richard III.
Now that Richard’s remains, which have been recovered, are to be reinterred – with Catholic rites many have argued – his character is being re-assessed. Certainly the ogre of Shakespeare’s play is very far from the truth. The historian Paul Murray Kendal argued for such a reassessment of the king in a distinguished book. But he was not the first, many earlier writers had too, including Horace Walpole.
Past relieved
But for the ordinary reader the most interesting book, certainly the most accessible, might be Josephine Tey’s detective novel The Daughter of Time (1951; available from Arrow Books, £7.99)
In this novel (voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1990) her series detective Inspector Grant is confined to bed in hospital with back injury. He is bored with what his friends bring to read. Then a new tack is tried by a friend, a set of pictures for him to puzzle over. One of these is of Richard III. This begins then a sort of investigation such as a bed-bound detective could carry out through books of various kinds, from school texts to solid tomes by eminent historians.
But the real effect of the book is not whether Richard III was a monster or a much maligned hero. No; it is the exploration by Grant of the actual sources of history, those jagged fragments of the past from which historians attempt to construct a narrative.
The ordinary reader does not always appreciate how the polished prose they admire – and which critics praise – is very often as much conjecture as fact. In just what sense history is ‘true’ is a philosophical question.
This is the case with all aspects of the Tudors era, especially as nearly every presentation of these villainous tyrants manages to misrepresent them as well the Catholic aspects of the period.
Exploring history
The Daughter of Time is to be recommended to all those who would like to explore just how history is researched, defined, developed and narrated. Reading it is quite enough to make one cautions about all historical claims. And rightly so. For what is called ‘history’ is often manipulated for power, as by the Tudors in the case of King Richard, or for profit as it is by the film makers and many novelists.
We should be wary of all claims to historical truth. We should be especially wary of film about Irish history. See how the reputation of de Valera was demonised for the young generation by the Michael Collins film. When that came out I asked a friend of mine who was then toiling over the espionage aspect of the Troubles what he thought of it. “Why,” he exclaimed, “there are six historical errors in the trailer alone!”
And who is “the daughter of Time”? She, of course, is truth.