Historical Fiction is Fiction

Historical Fiction:  Truth in Labeling

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

 

A loyal viewer of dramas based on or at least vaguely inspired by history, I temper my enjoyment with moderate anxiety about distortions of the historical record. I understand that screenwriters take creative license with the facts, but I feel bothered by many dramatic untruths because viewers often confuse these dramatizations with actual history or biography. Films or TV series about the Tudors and their predecessors, the Plantagenets, are a case in point. The train wreck of Henry VIII's matrimonial career has inspired numerous movies and shows that always attract attention. Some recent treatments of the material include "Wolf Hall" and "The Tudors." 

Watching "Wolf Hall," I had the feeling that everyone had just stepped off a canvas by Hans Holbein. Henry VIII is the usual oddly sympathetic but ruthless psychopath-in-waiting. The lead character, Thomas Cromwell, is portrayed favorably as a loyal-in-adversity counselor for the deposed Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey. Anne Boleyn is the schemer waiting for the fall of Henry's Queen Catherine of Aragon, beloved of the people. I have seen Cromwell played as a grubby, tubby, heartless little man [in "Six Wives of Henry VIII" with Keith Michell] and as a cynical Machiavellian [in "A Man for All Seasons"], so a pro-Cromwell portrayal is a good corrective. Less good is the Johnny-one-note characterization of Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor after Wolsey, as a hypocritical Christian and a savage hunter of heretics--as unbalanced a portrayal as the nasty ones of Cromwell. Both men were far more complicated.

 

Henry VIII slaughters indiscriminately on "The Tudors." It is true that the real Henry turned on everyone, eventually. I trashed him in my book "Royals of England"; he's the only royal who didn't get any kind word from me. When I looked at the fabulous Holbein portrait of Henry in Rome's Palazzo Barberini, I thought, "Mean little pigs' eyes"!  So I thought that "The Tudors" portrays his viciousness quite accurately. But I felt less than happy with the nonsensical liberties taken with Henry's sisters, Queen Margaret of Scotland and Queen Mary of France. "The Tudors" merges them into one royal sister, transfers some of Mary's biography to Margaret, and introduces some alarmingly absurd conspiracies and murders.

Historical fiction is fine, so long as it is presented as fiction, not history; as fun, not facts. We binged on "The White Queen," a British mini-series based on the Wars of the Roses between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. Gorgeously produced and fun to watch, this entertaining series does a good job of presenting a fiendishly complicated series of events, with kings being switched on and off thrones like rag dolls thrown about by children. Plantagenets all, Lancaster [the red rose] and York [the white rose] managed to kill off almost all of the adult male members of their families by the middle 1480s. Vengeance, lust, true love, as well as piety that masks obsession, madness, and cruelty--what's not to like? As historical fiction, the series takes great liberties with the facts but no more so than "The Tudors."

"The White Queen," by the way, is Elizabeth Woodville, whose second marriage to Edward IV turned her from a Lancastrian widow to a Yorkist queen consort. These are the grandparents of Henry VIII through their daughter Elizabeth of York, who married the first Tudor king, the Lancastrian claimant Henry, Earl of Richmond, who became Henry VII. Less famous than his gaudy son, Henry VIII, Henry VII actually was a far more interesting person—resourceful in surmounting the dangers of the Wars of the Roses, ruthless in preserving the very dubious legitimacy of his new Tudor dynasty against all threats posed by his and his queen's Yorkist relatives.

Continuing his father's murderous policies towards Yorkists with better claims to the throne, Henry VIII whacked (judicially, of course) Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the loved former governess of his daughter Mary. This poor woman, terrified by the executioner's ax, shrank from him and ran away. Chasing after this elderly prisoner, the executioner hacked her to death. He needed 11 blows to kill an old lady. Henry VIII also executed both Catholic and Protestant heretics with cheerful impartiality.  Fancying himself as an expert theologian, Henry VIII remained a conservative--though heretical--Catholic, the pope of his own island Church.

While I agree with fictional depictions of Henry's self-obsessed viciousness, any dramatization of Henry as sex-crazed is false. Despite the six wives and the occasional mistress, Henry was no sex-crazed libertine but a narcissist terrified that his God would hold him to account if he committed any wrongs. So, in Henry's mind, God and Henry always agreed on the complete propriety of Henry's ridding himself of his women through church annulments, show trials, and judicial murders referred to as executions.

His second queen, Anne Boleyn, noted of his first queen, Catherine of Aragon, "She is my death, and I am hers." Catherine's nemesis, Anne met no kinder a fate at their husband's hands. Henry was hard on wives. Even when Catherine is portrayed more sympathetically than Anne, the portrayal covertly, carelessly, and unfairly blames Catherine, for "Henry's Queen Catherine had failed to give him a son." A modern person should know that fathers, not mothers, determine the gender of offspring. In addition, Catherine actually did give birth to male babies who survived for a while; the fact that they died young is hardly her fault. At least three sons of hers, all named Henry, Duke of Cornwall, were born: one was born in 1511 and lived for almost 2 months; the other two sons, born in 1513 and 1514, lived for a few hours. Please explain to me how "Queen Catherine had failed to give him a son."

first published in The Woodstock Independent