sarah eve kelly

Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you?

The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad.

It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the knack of it eventually. It poses a bigger problem in fiction. For a reader to truly engage in (for example) a novel, there must be a character to whom we can hitch our wagons - someone we feel sympathy or empathy for, someone we admire, someone whose fate we invest in. This is only a general rule, not an absolute one - plenty of novels reflect ideas instead of characters, and others read like a slow-motion car crash: every character is detestable, but you can’t take your eyes away. Still, though: the swiftest route to home base is with a sympathetic main character, and the easiest way to make a character sympathetic is for that character to share the reader’s values.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. Yes, I know, I’m coming late to the party. I always do: it means I can go on binges and watch an entire season in three days. And Mad Men got me thinking about values. Its critical acclaim has been almost universal: a gritty, unsparing look at the corporate world of the 1960s. As far as I know there’s only one really loud guy speaking out against it, and that’s Mark Greif in the London Review of Books. Of Mad Men he has this to say:

I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged.

I have to say I like the show. It’s engaging in that chocolate box, ‘just-one-more-and-then-I’ll-go-to-bed’ kind of way. But because I agree completely with Greif, I’m trying to figure out why I like it.

Admittedly it’s tough not to be present-centred about the 1960s, a decade that suffers from a mountain of misinterpretation owing to the patina that the US poured all over the American Family after the Second World War. The people who thought they were conservative weren’t, in fact, conservative at all: the suburb was a very new thing, and a wife being stuck there was a very new place for her to be stuck. In this particular decade, though, it’s true that there was one generation trying to keep the world in 1952, and another generation - my parents’ generation - standing upside down in a corner on LSD, representing the kind of anarchic change that would destabilise and eventually alter the world.

So how do you make the 1952 guys the good guys? Why are we watching this show? On some level, of course, it’s because we’re mesmerised - in the second episode Paul Kinsey tells Peggy Olson that copywriters’ desks are furthest from the elevators ’so we can’t sneak out’, and I’m left wondering, with Scotch and cigarettes right at your desk, why you’d ever want to sneak out. It speaks (on one level, anyway) to a kind of permissive society that feels about as realistic to me as the underwater world in The Little Mermaid. I’ve certainly never been there.

(There is a post, by the way, to be written about how cigarettes have become a historical tag. Show where, what, and how often people were smoking, and I could probably tell you which decade you’re talking about.)

In a way, though, it’s like watching reality television: gazing into someone else’s office or living room and being able to feel smug. We’re more civilised than that; we’re more enlightened than that. It’s present-centred: the show invites us to view these lives from the point of view of our own lives in a way that The Tudors avoids by a country mile. There is something about the recent past that makes us long to believe that progress has been made, or what we call progress, because the very concept of progress is newer than you think. Greif is right when he says the smugness we feel is unearned. Being a woman in the workplace, for example, is still a tax - it’s just an invisible one now, like VAT. Tot up the numbers and you’ll see how little women are still being paid, and it’s remarkable how few women today are aware of that.

Anyway. Off the point.

Do you watch this show? Do you like the characters? Is there one you’ve hitched your wagon to? Or are they, as Greif asserts, a ‘toybox of tin stereotypes’? For my own part, I haven’t found one that I’m really able to like (always excepting Joan, of course, but she’s not in the show nearly enough) - the overwhelming feeling is one of pity. The wives are trapped, but so too are the husbands; the junior execs are trapped, but so too are the seniors. There is a constant undercurrent of being trapped, and that is present-centred. It’s not possible that everyone was that miserable in postwar middle America; if they were, they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to keep it exactly the way it was.

The setting of the more distant past seems, on some level, to sidestep this fascination with how They are not like Us. There are the little things - we’re tickled by the idea of women using white lead in their makeup in the same way we’re tickled by seeing secretaries smoking at their desks - but by and large, in the world of historical drama (as opposed to history), we’re able to take these characters and their worlds on their own terms. Or is that true? We cheer on the women in the past who jump out of their moulds (there is a reason that Anne Boleyn has been done and done again and can never be done enough: everybody loves her, or loves to hate her), and we scowl at the ones who say anything of duty or restraint. We want to hear all about the wife’s petty rebellions, and we don’t pause to consider that the sisterhood, such as it was, did not self-identify as oppressed until the eighteenth century or better - and certainly didn’t do it with any kind of consensus until the turn of the twentieth century. This wasn’t because they were betraying themselves, or because they didn’t believe in themselves. It was because they didn’t share our values. How could they? They didn’t live in our world. They had vocation, and more often than not (believe it or not) took pride in it. They were three-dimensional human beings, and we don’t realise that by only liking the mould-cracking ones - by feeling pity or contempt for the ones who lived according to the values and traditions of their own time and place - we do them a disservice, and offer them staggering disrespect.

Hilary Mantel speaks of hitching the camera of a story onto the shoulder of one character: it is through that character’s lens that you see the world while you’re reading (or watching). It is the author’s job to make you comfortable enough in that world that you stop thinking like yourself for a little while and start thinking like that person. More often than not we ascribe bigotry or ignorance to the behaviour of historical figures - the best we can say for them is that they didn’t know any better. Is it possible to step off our plinths and truly understand them, or are the best-loved historical novels always going to be about the people in the past who thought most like us?

I ask because I don’t know. I think it would be a tremendously difficult exercise to make any main character of mine pro-life or pro-eugenics or anti-Semitic or any of those things while still making readers love her. It would mean first loving her myself, and I think I could probably do that if I were more of an artist and less a creature of my own time and circumstance. This isn’t a rant; I don’t really have a point of view here. But I still wonder why I want to watch more of Mad Men - who am I invested in? Do I want them to learn something? Do I want to feel superior? Maybe I want to see what things might have been like for my grandmother - who knows. Until the show can make me root for someone (regardless of his or her values), I can’t help thinking it hasn’t done its job.

But now guess what I’m off to do. It’s been a harrowing day, readers, a harrowing day. I spent seven and a half hours fixing my computer (which is to say I yelled at it and pointed threatening cigarettes at it), and even now I’m not sure if it’s OK, and bloody hell, it’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

It is an oft-repeated truism that two people independently invented the radio. If something so unique and intricate can be imagined by two different people, what hope does a book idea have? When you get a book idea, you develop a bit of an eye twitch when you walk past displays in bookshops, your semi-conscious always on the prowl for that author who got there before you did, for that dustjacket that will nullify the magnificent octopus in your word processor that you’re going to finish just-any-minute-now. (Redouble this eye twitch if you’ve dared to believe that you’ve a new take on as obscure a figure as Anne Boleyn, by the way.)

My eye twitch was set off in a whole new way a couple of weeks back. It was by Tracy Borman’s new narrative history, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen. This is not fiction, and neither is it about Anne Boleyn. Reader, it is my Master’s thesis.

My MA thesis is called ‘The Other Elizabethan Settlement: the Virgin Queen as materfamilias, 1548-1603′, and dudes, it is a corker. I took up the topic because of an increasing irritation at the lack of imagination displayed by historians when writing of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber. In her father’s reign, the privy chamber became a political locus, and the staff of that chamber was little different from the staff of the Privy Council. In short: the guys who got the King dressed in the morning also managed the government of the kingdom. In Elizabeth’s reign this was of course impossible: an earthly queen cannot be dressed by men. So on one hand, there was the privy chamber, staffed with women; on the other, the Privy Council, staffed by men.

It is, naturally, the men who get all the attention. Not only because they held the more overtly powerful positions, but because Elizabeth was on some level a man’s woman, and the prevailing notion is that she developed closer relationships with the power-brokers in her kingdom than she did with the folks who starched her ruffs. But this assumption lacks nuance, obliterates the (many and important) women who surrounded her from her childhood to her death, and to top all, is largely untrue. So when I saw the Elizabethan privy chamber described as ‘a glorified domestic staff’, I decided, in my own tiny postgraduate way, to correct the record.

You can understand, then, that when I saw the Borman book my heart stuck in my throat a little. Yes, my thesis is sitting bound in red leatherette in my living room, and yes, I hadn’t thought about it for a while. Still, though. Another idea gone up in smoke. Worse yet, when I asked the salesman at Foyles where I could find a copy, he told me - get this - that it was sold out.

I eventually found a copy and bought it. I don’t, you see, have a cargo of sour grapes that I carry around with me, and if someone else gets a royalty for my idea, more power to them. People writing about history is important, and such a little-understood corner of history deserves especial attention.

Unfortunately - and I mean this - the book disappoints. (John Guy agrees, but for entirely different reasons from my own, about which another opus may be coming.) I’m here to tell you that while our current understanding of feminism could only be applied in the worst, demeaning, disrespectful and distorted way to sixteenth-century England, it remains eminently possible for historians to take a sexist tack with Elizabeth, and many of them have. Borman’s book promises a ‘hidden story’, but instead it presents a rehearsal of many of the worst generalizations about Elizabeth’s character: that she was embittered, pathologically vain, jealous of other women, possibly barren or otherwise sexually defective; that she was violent with her women; that she was unreasonable about their marriages - essentially, that she treated them unfairly and that life at court as a gentlewoman or maid of honour in the privy chamber was indentured servitude.

What follows is what I believe to be true of Elizabeth’s character and and her relationship to her women. Like all history, it is open to interpretation, new understanding, and rigorous debate. I don’t object to Borman’s book because I disagree with her conclusions so much as because I’m disappointed that nothing new is offered, either in fact or interpretation - or, indeed, imagination. So bear with me: these are my conclusions and I’m willing to fight for them, but I believe in debate and will take all comers.

First off: of course Elizabeth was vain. Of course she was. She had to be. She was the bloody Queen of England.

Observe her evolution from her teenage years to the last months of her life. She grew up wanting nothing more than to foster the image of a demure Protestant princess. This meant simple gowns in dull colours, unadorned hair loose down her back (as befitted a maiden), and the overall bookish look of a young woman who will never inherit the crown and doesn’t want any attention. It was natural, at this juncture, that she not covet attention, because she got plenty enough, and most of it unpleasant. The wooing of a much older (and married) man would have seen her arrested for treason during her brother’s reign in 1549 had she not been so extraordinarily clever as to save not only herself, but her arguably guiltier servants. During her sister Mary’s reign, she was raised up as a Protestant figurehead, possibly the most dangerous position in the kingdom at that time. Rebellions were raised in her name; it was all she could do to keep her head down low enough that it wasn’t cut off.

When she became Queen, it was a different story, and that’s that. She was a queen, and had to look like one. The England she inherited remained a largely Catholic one, despite the Protestant martyrs of the previous reign, and for months Elizabeth’s Council found itself in the terrifying quandary that no English bishop would crown her. There is such a thing as establishing legitimacy, and that’s what Elizabeth had to do, and fast. She had to convince the theatre of the world that the crown was her inheritance, that she intended to exercise sovereignty, with or without a husband. Can you do that in yoga pants and a ponytail (this is why I will never be a queen)? No ma’am. So she got herself decked out, and rightly so.

I mentioned that she got herself and her servants out of some serious soup in 1549. One of these servants was her governess, Katherine Ashley, an important figure in the world of a girl who is, on every practical level, an orphan. She wrote the following in Mrs Ashley’s defence during this difficult time:

First, because that she [Ashley] hath been with me a long time, and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing me up in learning and honesty; and, therefore, I ought of very duty to speak for her; for Saint Gregorie sayeth, ‘that we are more bound to them that bringeth up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them that bringeth us into the world, but our bringers up are a cause to make us live well in it.’

This is only the loudest and most obvious example of Elizabeth’s love for a diverse number of women over the course of her lifetime. They weren’t only mother figures, either: her peers as well as much younger women stand out as favourites and confidantes over the course of her lifetime. If she cuffed them, she mimicked the age - and also, as Paul Johnson says, her father: she inherited the ‘unfortunate tendency’ of nipping and slapping those who displeased her (men and women alike, I should say, loudly).

As she got older, she changed. Don’t we all? The era of her marriageability came and went. Look at the apoplexy on the web and on television and over drinks after work today when any woman over the age of thirty-five isn’t in a committed relationship of some kind - it’s never her decision, right? ‘That poor girl, I bet no one ever even looked at her.’ People today - in our enlightened epoch - continually attach a red letter S-for-Single on any woman past a given age who hasn’t a proper outlet for her fertility and her Inner Housekeeper. Now. Today. Imagine what this was like for a bloody queen in the bloody sixteenth century - especially in a kingdom that had just finished kicking out all the nuns. There was no contemporary wisdom - none - to suggest that a woman should remain unmarried unless she was defective in some way. And yet Elizabeth elected not to for the sanest reason in the world: a husband would pull the rug out from under her. A husband would try to take her job away. The story of Elizabeth’s life is one riddled with the playing out of miserable marriages. What woman would want to marry, given Elizabeth’s kickline of stepmothers?

And so the time came and went, and after a certain point she couldn’t marry. The people were fussy - couldn’t abide foreigners, couldn’t abide Catholics, couldn’t abide seeing a subject raised up - and she was past her Change of Life. And I’m all for women deciding not to have children, but Elizabeth was faced with a very unique problem: because she had no children, no younger siblings - because she had, in fact, no close relatives at all - she was continually faced with the question of who would come after her. If all anyone wanted to talk about was what happened after you were dead, that would make you a little cranky, no? Especially if you didn’t have an answer. So she developed an answer: while delaying the inevitable, she set out to make herself immortal.

Or at least to look that way. The governing motto of the last years of her life was ex illo tempore: above, beyond, and outside time. I quote myself:

It was an open secret during this period that Elizabeth was, in reality, an old woman who had left an irredeemable vacuum in the succession. Her people hid their anxiety gamely enough: a presentation to Elizabeth … in 1602 [when she was 68] … featured Time ‘with clipped wings and a stopped hourglass’ in deference to her putative immortality. Before the court, her appearance took on a compensatory superhuman quality as agelessness became a necessary feature of her self-presentation.

You see why it was important? At the turn of the seventeenth century people were worried; Elizabeth was worried. Who came next? We know it was James I, and at the time people thought it would probably be him, but they weren’t sure - they weren’t sure about rival claimants and civil wars. Elizabeth had to behave and appear as though she was never going to die. That’s not vanity: that’s expediency. And it worked.

Was she irritable? Of course; all her life she was notoriously irritable. Does this mean she didn’t form close relationships with women, that her women didn’t serve an irreplaceable and unconventionally political role? No, a thousand times no. Does this mean that to be a maid of honour to Elizabeth was a prison sentence, that young women and their parents didn’t fight tooth and nail to secure a place? Hell’s no. Competition for those spots was stiff. And why? On top of all the other advantages it presented, women went to the Elizabethan court to find husbands. To get married. And with very few exceptions, all of them did. So enough of this backchat that Elizabeth didn’t let her women marry. All she did was a) encourage deep circumspection about marriage; and b) lose her shit a little bit when her maids - for whom she was as responsible as a parent - did it behind her back.

Borman’s book is a bestseller, and rightly so: it’s an excellent story, written in an engaging, accessible way. But I had hoped that it would do something novel to the conventional wisdom surrounding Elizabeth’s relationships with the women around her - in short, that someone would stand up and defend her behaviour and her decisions as eminently sane, governed by insight and careful thought in the face of extraordinary circumstances. That the human face painted on Elizabeth by historians could be one of both flaw and virtue, not a caricature of cattiness, jealousy, and violence. After all, who could fail to love a woman who, at the age of sixty-six, was caught ‘dancing a Spanish Panic to a whistle and tabor, none being with her but [one of her closest friends] my lady Warwick’?

(Careful not to ask me about this whilst putting a drink in my hand. I’m stone sober at the moment and look how I’ve gone on. I am geeky to the point of alienation on this subject.)

Till next time, &c &c.

So I’ve been tagged by CarmaSez to articulate six things that make me happy. I had to think about this for a day before I could get to it, because I didn’t want ‘When Graboid works’ to be one of them. And for any of you who have braved my 100 Random Things About Me meme, you know that a list isn’t just a list with me. It has many semicolons and parentheses. So let’s see what I can come up with.

1. See, the problem is that most of my happinesses are in the past tense. I like having eaten well; I like having gone for a walk. I like having met my writing goals, my school goals. OK, maybe my happinesses are pluperfect. But I’m not really an ‘in the moment’ kind of girl, and I’m done punishing myself for that. But, hm, the first of six things is probably baths. The kind with oil and good smells that makes your skin red all over. The kind that makes you sweat. The kind with a book that’s so good that after you’ve gotten out and wrapped up in a huge bath sheet, you go to airdry on your bed and keep reading. Preferably falling asleep at some point.

2. Happiness the second (and no, these are not in any particular order) is kissing. Who cares who’s reading this: I like it. A lot. It’s one of those happinesses that can be present, past, and pluperfect.

3. Reading out loud. I’ve never read to anyone - or if I have, I can’t remember - but I love to read out loud. The first audiobook I ever listened to was A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and the man was a master reader. I’ve tried ever since to imitate him, probably failed parlously, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the only time I like the sound of my own voice. And the best place to read out loud? In the bath. The acoustics are great.

4. Cows. Cows make me very happy. Watching them, talking to them (I don’t often have the occasion, sadly), contemplating them. Cows are beautiful creatures, so slow and peaceful. We could all chew a page out of a cow’s book.

5. Pub nights. Not clubs, not bars. Pubs. Preferably a patio of a summer’s evening with a double for everyone (followed by another and another) and a big ashtray in the middle of the table. Quiet nights that aren’t quiet, when you’re not required to be clever but it’s fun if you are, when you’re allowed to shriek with laughter and fall on people’s shoulders and grasp their hands and give them kisses. Strange happiness for a misanthrope, but there you are.

6. Finally: people asking me questions about English history. I really, really do like that. It gives me something more than pride. It’s permission to elaborate on something I love, when generally this is what makes me strange and shitty at conversation. Usually this takes the form of friends asking me to annotate epic dramas. I remember one day years ago when a friend called and asked, ‘Hey, do you still have that Anne of the Thousand Days rental?’ I told her I had, and get this: she asked if she could come over and watch it, ‘… and if I have any questions, can we pause it while you answer them?’ I fell in love that day.

That’s it: six things. I think I broke a sweat; I think it’s time for a bath. But first, I tag:

Gretchen McNeil
Marsha Moore
Colleen Lindsay
Liz Medwid
Amy Bai
Kim Bewick

The rules are as follows: link to the person who gave you the award; write down six things that make you happy; post the rules; tag six others and let them know you’ve done it; tell the person who tagged you when your entry is up.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c

I’m a coward, I admit it.

If you look at the vital stats of my life right now, you might not think so, but it’s true. Not only being unemployed, but having guaranteed unemployment for the next two years might seem brave. It isn’t really. A lot of people hide in grad school during a recession.

I’m a cautious reader, a cautious viewer, and a cautious writer. For a disorganized procrastinator (does anyone else think ‘procrastinate’ should be a noun, like ‘advocate’?), I’m very cagey about my time. I follow the same authors, the same actors, the same directors, and I will by no means follow them anywhere. This is why writers blow me away.

Yes, I’m going to ‘other’ writers for the moment, because Jesus, look at them. They’ll try anything.

Fantasy writers especially scare the shit out of me. In a good way, mind, for the most part. They are world-builders. Imagine building a world. Some of the more philosophical amongst you will say that all fiction writers build worlds, but these people actually build worlds. I can’t even build a bathroom shelf.

I write historical fiction, and tonight I experienced one of the singular joys of writing what I do: meeting someone you thought you knew, on as viable a social networking website as the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Tonight I met Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambassador to the English court from 1529 to 1545, canon lawyer and renowned defender of Katherine of Aragon. His name is one that I’ve tripped past hundreds of times, but tonight I sat and actually read about him for the first time.

Chapuys is a minor character in The Fidelity Trial. It was enough, I thought once upon a time, to know where he came from, what he was doing, and what side he was on. Right now I’m doing battle with Structural Issues on about nine thousand fronts (by the way this post is going, I’m sure you’ll be staggered to know that my writing has structural problems), all patiently pointed out to me by my very kind agent and her very kind assistants. Today, in order to tackle them, I thought the best course was to learn a little something about hawking.

Yeah, I know.

In the course of my hunt-and-peck research about hawking, I learned the following things about Eustace Chapuys. First: I spent fifteen years thinking this dude was Spanish. Why? ‘Cause I never looked it up. Bad Sarah. The man is actually French (not French-French - 16th-century Savoy French). He enjoyed hawking. He doesn’t seem, in fact, ever to have lived in the Strand.

These facts helped me resolve a square half-dozen of my Structural Problems. Turns out looking up hawking was a good idea.

My point is this: you can do that in historical fiction. You can look things up in any genre, sure, but in historical fiction you’re not building a world; you’re recreating one from scraps. If the facts about Chapuys hadn’t been there, I’d like to think that I would have made them up, or something similar. But they were there, waiting for me on the trusty ODNB.

I didn’t come to historical fiction because it has corners. (I actually woke up one night with an image in my head of a woman with long, black hair who had fallen asleep at a desk on which a candle was about to gutter and go out. Conjuring that image, to date, has been the easiest part of this novel.) By ‘corners’ I mean rules, a governing system, dates and traits and silver plates that keep you on your path. A lot is still left to the brainbox, but the facts can give you ideas.

That Eustace Chapuys was a hawking enthusiast, for example, gave me a very good idea.

I’ve been stalled on this novel more times than I care to count. When I’m working on it full-time I have a score of tiny stalls in a day. I have to do everything that a novelist does - digging through characters, braiding subplots, perfecting prose, tension-on-every-goddamned-page - but I can’t help the feeling that I have a bit more help than others.

This is where I come back to the borrowed wisdom of a few posts back, because I’m very tempted to say that the work I’m doing on my PhD has more corners, even, than my novel. Facts are facts, after all, and when you’re researching a dissertation you can’t bend facts to make them more interesting (luckily, in my line of work, you rarely have to). I’ve now gotten the same advice from two different people on these two different things, The Fidelity Trial and my dissertation: embrace the anarchy; make things a little crazy. If you don’t have a bit of the crazy, what are you doing? Why are you bothering? Bring the chaos!

Still, you gotta know what you’re talking about if you want to put in a scene about hawking.

Anyway. I tip my top hat to fantasy writers, I really do. The more I read history books and the ODNB, the more I think, ‘You couldn’t make this shit up.’ And then I think, ‘No, you couldn’t, so it’s a good thing it happened.’ (Most of it, anyway.)

This ridiculous post is dedicated to the crazy folks at Absolute Write Water Cooler, who helped me stick my neck out and be a little less cowardly.

Back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

… or art for history’s sake?

On This Spot, I have provided deservedly derisive reviews of the brainchildren of writer Michael Hirst and director Shekhar Kapur, Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I hated the 1998 film, hated it not only as a scholar (and I was only a scholar in the very meanest sense of the term back then) but as a sentient human being, that others might think to trick me into thinking that Elizabeth represented the truth, or even a fiction that was more captivating than the truth.

The Golden Age got decidedly worse reviews, oddly, because I thought it was better. Indefensible for the most part but sensorily better, a marginally superior screencap of that time and that court.

I remember directing right-thinking people to Elizabeth R, the 1971 BBC masterpiece starring Glenda Jackson. After having seen the first season of The Tudors (also a Michael Hirst accomplishment), I similarly pointed everyone I could find to Elizabeth R’s predecessor, the BBC’s 1969 six-hour production The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Caught in the knot between repacing my novel (about the destruction of Anne Boleyn, found in magnificently erroneous technicolor on Showtime this past spring) and culling together sources for my dissertation (about the spectacle of pregnancy in early modern England - two subjects not terribly far apart), I don’t know if I could now as earnestly ask anyone to watch the flourescent-lit and badly-fit BBC productions over the salacity and car-crashery of The Tudors.

Part of this shift in opinion is scholarly - historiography has entered a post-Eltonian age, and many of the truths espoused in the 1969 and 1971 productions are now being called into question. But that’s not the whole reason, or even the real one: it’s a fig leaf I hide behind because in two years I’m going to be Dr Sarah, if all goes well. The real reason is that art serves history just as history serves art - anyone who doesn’t believe this is ignorant or delusional - and, whatever I might say about Michael Hirst (and I have a lot to say), The Tudors is art.

There are a few different kinds of people who are drawn to history through the medium of film, television, or novels, and there are a few different stages they go through.

1. Wow, history is exciting! Look at all that blood! Look at those tans! I wish I could eat by candlelight and wear pretty dresses (or pretty breeches, as the case may be).

2. Hey, that doesn’t seem to be what really happened, but Natalie Dormer’s still pretty hot.

3. Wow, that’s really not what happened.

4. I can’t believe this fraud is being perpetuated on the people! I’m going to write a book to set the record straight.

5. Hey, how did I get interested in this in the first place?

OK, so it’s not the Five Stages of Grief. It’s not even applicable to the vast majority of people who are attracted to historical fiction. All right, fine, it’s just me. And I only reached Stage Five about a month ago.

I first became interested in early modern English history because of a 1986 movie starring Helena Bonham Carter and Cary Elwes called Lady Jane. It was about Jane Grey, and man, was it a barnburner, and man, was it ever wild, wild fiction. I was fourteen (not in 1986 - I watched the movie in a friend’s basement in 1993). When I reached Stage Three above, I denounced the film high and low, claimed that my historical interest was piqued in some book or other, and tried to develop a reputation for myself as a Serious Person. I later managed to maintain the facade of Serious whilst still getting my flashy movie fix: watching The Tudors, I yelled at the television whenever something wrong or simply incomprehensible happened - friends claim to have enjoyed my ex tempore annotations.

I still hate Elizabeth, mind, because it’s so jumpy and arbitrary as to be completely unenjoyable even on a sensory level.

There are now three days between me and my thirtieth birthday. The time has come to face some Inconvenient Truths. If I get to be Dr Sarah, it will be because a friend made me watch Lady Jane in 1993. I don’t care that Guildford Dudley was, in fact, a whiny little bitch constantly hiding behind his mother’s skirts; I don’t care that Jane Grey was about as bigoted and short-sighted a Puritan as existed in the sixteenth century (although, really, poor girl). Admit it, admit it, admit it: the movie was well done. It took the fragile skein of a love story and turned it into a bona fide love story, which is what all good historical fiction can do: it shapes the boundaries of what might have been possible. It sparks interest. It turns history into a story - you can catch up on the facts later.

I’ve discovered that what I truly object to is this refashioning being badly or sloppily done. Elizabeth was hopelessly slipshod, and it is only amongst the worst of a whole pantheon of shitty movies exploiting the preconception of bygone gore to ratchet up box office returns. It failed entirely to consult the boundaries of the possible.

People forget that most of history is not written down (believe me, when you’re trying to gather sources for something as nebulous as pregnancy, you remember this in a hurry). History is never finished: historical study is constant salvos of interpretation and anyone with any talent can take the possibilities of a given historical situation and imbue it with flash and modern meaning, exploiting history’s twin powers of continuity and change to hold a mirror up to who we really are. The Lion in Winter is not a study of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, not a treatise on the Angevin succession crisis: it’s a wickedly tragicomic rendering of a dysfunctional family. Do we have those now, or is that strictly a 12th-century thing? And yet, although history tells us that there was no Christmas gathering at Chinon in 1183, what James Goldman (older, horribly-overlooked brother of William, of The Princess Bride fame) has written is a perfect rendering of the political and familial mise-en-scene of that time. Was it historically accurate in every particular? Certainly not (dudes, it had a Christmas tree). Does that matter? Not really.

When my agent told me that I was writing historical fiction, not history, and that I’d better start thinking that way in a hurry, my first reaction was fear: didn’t she understand? Doesn’t she know that I want to wrest this ersatz, shiteous “truth” that other authors have been throwing around about Anne Boleyn for centuries and set the record straight? After some thought I realized I was thinking like a zealot, like an evangelical, and started looking again to the boundaries of the possible, to shaping what is historically real and meaningful into something that could move my twenty-first-century compatriots and make them think about the world we live in. I told myself: it is OK to have a historical imagination. In fact, it’s the first requirement of any historical novelist - or any historian, for that matter.

I think Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is pretty boring as Henry VIII, but you won’t hear me objecting to The Tudors again (although really, Gabrielle Anwar’s tan is a bit much). It fiddles with dates and amalgamates sisters and invents uncles and posits a Puritan ascendancy at least twenty years before it actually happened, but it’s good TV. It gets people interested - maybe in 15 years, some 29-year-old having an existential crisis will be hopelessly mired in a doctorate degree because of it.

Besides, who’s to say that The Tudors is wrong? Or Elizabeth R? Or The Fidelity Trial, for that matter? History is never finished: no one version of events is ever going to be irrefutably right.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Not enough? Find Sarah’s entire weblog archive here.

I absolutely must add my puff to the others with respect to this movie The Golden Age. I’m sure there are only a handful of people who a) have a postgraduate qualification in Elizabethan history and b) deigned to see this film. But among those like me, who have a morbid fascination with seeing this remarkable era ripped sideways by people who think that stabbing and hand-wringing are more interesting than the actual fornication and bloody murder that the age furnished us with, there seems to be a curious consensus that this film is somehow inferior to the first one, Elizabeth, released some ten years ago.

I don’t want to go on record defending this movie; let’s get that out of the way first. I thought that most of it was appalling. I could only sit with my jaw dropping into my popcorn -and not for the usual reasons - when the Queen (who apparently had a loose, waist-length wig and Seven-of-Nine armour created just in case), astride her white charger before her brave troops, hollered ‘MY LOVING PEOPLE - ‘ and then went on to recite something other than the Tilbury speech. I mean, come on, Michael Hirst. That was the easy part! This speech - read it for yourself here - has the multiple advantages of being short, ringing true to our twenty-first-century ears, and being one of the greatest speeches ever given by a commander-in-chief. John Prebble didn’t think he could best it; probably Winston Churchill didn’t think he could best it. But Michael Hirst - the guy who came up with the great idea of having Jonathan Rhys-Meyers yell ‘I’m the King of England!’ at the front of every line - this guy thinks he can best it.

Boy, was he wrong.

Anyway, End of Aside. Back to the rest of it.

As I say, I don’t want to come out on the defensive. My point is this: the only historical drama that The Golden Age could possibly look good next to is Elizabeth. Did anyone who called Elizabeth a ‘clever, intellectual intrigue’ actually see it? It’s not just the inaccuracy and anachronism that bothers me about it. I’ve said this before: The Lion in Winter, which chronicles a fictitious Christmas in 1183 - a Christmas with trees - is my favourite movie in all the world. It was the chaos of Elizabeth that got me, the pointlessness, frankly the shame of slandering real historical figures without the excuse of art. Unlike The Lion in Winter, Elizabeth revealed no great truths and failed even to provide a good story, paling against the cracking good true story that lay beneath Hirst’s hands.

The Golden Age, on the other hand, got a few mise-en-scene matters right. What the reviewers called ‘over the top’ - the wigs (the loose one with the weird plaits excepted), the gowns - that was the stuff that hit home. That Cate Blanchett is now meant to be playing an old woman (Elizabeth turned 55 in 1588, a number that is skirted in the film) and barely looks 30 to her own 38 can’t, I suppose, be helped. But the effort is there: doffing the wig at the end of the day, examining lines, providing a binary between public and private appearances. The woman is old and lonely; they got that right.

The other bit that reviewers found unbelievable was that a strong character, a queen and a good one, could possibly give vent to crushes or violent fits of jealousy. These characteristics, I say for the benefit of the many-headed, are not mutually exclusive and are, in my estimation, almost predictable as a set. True to form, too: during the remarkable scene in which Elizabeth finds out about Bess and Raleigh’s affair and proceeds to beat Bess up, shrieking ‘My bitches wear my collars’, I wanted to jump for joy. They got that right. Was this jealousy and possessiveness Elizabeth’s only characteristic? No. Was it even a dominant one? No. Did it affect her rule over her court and her people? Not as much as people think (for more, consult my published works, hurrah). Did it co-exist with the voices of her better angels? Yes, by God.

Those are the last of my defences of this more or less full-on piece of garbage. The Elizabeth screenplay backed this one into a corner by eliminating both Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester as principal characters - which they were - and an enormous vacuum exists where they should be. The military history is baffling, the battle scenes equally so. They fail completely to catalogue any of the circumstances that made an English victory so amazing; they get the personnel wrong; they suggest that Elizabeth was cooperative in the war effort from the start; and are almost offensive in depicting the Spanish, equating piety with ignorance and coming close to suggesting that they were defeated because they were just really, really stupid. The idea of Elizabeth and Walsingham running the show in tandem like good buddies is laughable, but we won’t fault them for that. Almost everyone seems to love Geoffrey Rush’s Walsingham. Personally I adore the awkward, paranoid guy who actually existed and who Elizabeth almost never liked, but hey. That’s just me.

A lot of movies have been made about the Spanish Armada from the English point of view. At least one of them focuses in, as this one does, on the relationship between Walter Raleigh and Bess Throckmorton (Fire Over England, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Bess). Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get my few London buddies together and put them in my living room and make them endure the best Armada depiction ever made, the negligibly-budgeted, flourescent-lighted TV special called The Enterprise of England. It’s appalling to look at but wonderfully written and acted, and I’m not puffing myself up by referring to it, because it is classic and just about everyone with an interest in the period has either seen it or heard of it. And it shows - as if her record in the Commons hasn’t done so amply enough - why Glenda Jackson should never have quit acting to become an MP.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

It appears I arrived in London at precisely the wrong time. If I stay in my own sleepy neighbourhood perhaps I can escape it, but if I venture any further infield, I’m inundated with the apparently heart-stopping news that it’s been ten years since Diana Spencer’s death.

This is the one thing, for me, that turns England into (as Miss King put it) “this sceptr’d loony bin, this U.K. of Utter Kitsch”. Editorial pages are rife with complaints that London isn’t what it used to be, that English people are fat and stupid, that Red Ken (”London Was Made for Cycling”) is ruining everything, that telephone boxes are all that’s left, that the bowler hat is dead, replaced by iPod oblivion. Personally, I don’t see it. Perhaps it needs viewing through fresh eyes, which I certainly have, but London is still an old city, still looks the part. It’s still got game.

The one thing I don’t like about being here is the tendency towards bad American imitation, and that’s where Diana really hacks me off. Who needs a “people’s princess”, anyway? And is that really what she was? (A streeter on “Richard & Judy” said that Diana’s allure was and is all about physical attractiveness: “If she looked like the back end of a bus I don’t think anyone would be especially bothered.”) I can smell at least four more covers on People magazine coming from this, and it makes me especially glad not to be in North America, but I can only imagine what’s in store for me here.

A page from the BBC News website is full of the sort of phraseology that sends me grappling for my benzos: “The Windsors were greeted warmly by the Spencers” at the unveiling of the new memorial in Hyde Park in July 2004. I’m sure “the Windsors” were really relieved. Diana’s mother complained that the new fountain lacks sufficient grandeur. I should say so: it’s described as a “700-tonne memorial”.

700 seems to be a small number no matter which way you slice Diana: 700 guests for her ten-years-dead memorial service is considered “small” and “intimate”, and there is fury in the streets that “Mrs Parker-Bowles” is attending. There is no way for this woman to win. It reminds me of public treatment of Anne Boleyn, called “The Concubine”, “The Great Goggle-Eyed Whore”, and - most charitably - the Marquess of Pembroke, when she ought rightfully to have been referred to as the Queen. When Katherine of Aragon died, the public were horrified that Anne wore yellow, when in the event yellow was the Spanish colour of mourning. The only occasion on which Anne got any good press was three days before her execution, when Henry VIII’s ostentatious visits to Jane Seymour began an outcry against his bad taste.

It seems that the only thing Camilla can do to get people to like her is be supplanted by another woman.

According to the Daily Express 88% of Britons are outraged at the possibility of Camilla being crowned Queen. I can’t wait to become a Briton myself so that someone fucking well consults me. There wasn’t anything singular about Diana except her hysteria. Camilla has endured a set of circumstances largely beyond her control with a dignity that Diana wouldn’t have recognized if it jumped onto her yacht.

Queen Elizabeth has seven years left to go if she wants to break Queen Victoria’s record. Charles will break Prince Bertie’s record in the wings as Prince of Wales quite a bit sooner than that. But when the time comes, God save Queen Camilla. And poo to a twenty-years-dead memorial, with knobs on.