Historical Novels by Philippa Gregory
The Cousins’ War
The White Queen
The Red Queen
The Lady of the Rivers
The Tudor Court
The Constant Princess
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Queen’s Fool
The Virgin’s Lover
The Other Queen
The Wideacre Trilogy
The Wise Woman
Fallen Skies
A Respectable Trade
Earthly Joys
Virgin Earth
Books by David Baldwin
Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower
The Kingmaker’s Sisters: Six Powerful Women in the Wars of the Roses
The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York
Stoke Field: The Last Battle of the Wars of the Roses
Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked
Books by Michael Jones
The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby
Bosworth 1485: The Psychology of a Battle
Agincourt 1415
Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin
Leningrad: State of Siege
The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat
Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
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Copyright © Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, 2011
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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CONTENTS
Family Tree: The Duchess, the Queen and the King’s Mother
Battles in the Cousins’ War: timeline and map
INTRODUCTION Philippa Gregory
JACQUETTA OF LUXEMBOURG Philippa Gregory
ELIZABETH WOODVILLE David Baldwin
MARGARET BEAUFORT Michael Jones
Illustration acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
Philippa Gregory
This is a new sort of book for me; a collection, written by myself and two other historians, of three short ‘lives’ of three extraordinary women: Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford, Margaret Beaufort, and Elizabeth Woodville. This book came about because so many readers ask me for the ‘true’ stories on which I base my novels, and there is nothing readily available for these three: The Lady of the Rivers (2011), The Red Queen (2010), and The White Queen (2009). The existing biographies of Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville were out of print when I started my research, and so I worked from rare second-hand copies. I invited the authors, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, to each write a short essay on their subject for us to jointly publish here.
There was no biography at all of Jacquetta, and I realised that if I wanted to find out about her life I would have to do my own original research from the early documents, and trace the brief references to her that occur throughout other histories. As a woman who was present at many great events, and a kinswoman of both royal houses of England, she is often mentioned in the histories of her time; but her story has never before been told. To trace her life I had to read accounts of the lives of her contemporaries and of her times, forever looking out for a reference to her, her husbands or her family. This way I have managed to trace her from her childhood in English-held France, to her family home of Luxembourg, through her first marriage into the royal House of Lancaster, into her second marriage, when she lived at the royal courts of Lancaster and York and to her country house in England. If she was present at a great event she was sometimes mentioned by name; once or twice she was one of the primary actors. Most of the time the record does not speak of her and I can only speculate as to what she was doing.
In the course of writing the biography of a woman who was present at the events but all-but missing from the record, a woman who is ‘hidden from history’, I had to think about what it means to write the different forms of history-based writing. In one week I wrote some of this non-fiction biography, some pages of the novel, and a synopsis for a drama screenplay that is based on the novels. All of these are grounded on the few known facts of Jacquetta’s life, and all of them (including the history) are works of speculation, imagination and creativity.
WHY WRITE A HISTORY OF THESE WOMEN?
Why should one bother to write the history of a woman such as Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford? Or of Elizabeth Woodville? Or of Margaret Beaufort? Does Jacquetta’s absence from the records of her own time indicate that she is no great loss to the history books of today? Of course not. Jacquetta is absent from the records of her time because the letters, chronicles and journals written then mostly told of public events, and as a woman, excluded from formal political power and military service, Jacquetta was not a primary actor. Occasionally, she was at the forefront, and then we find her recorded, for instance accused of witchcraft, or kidnapped to Calais; sometimes she was an actor representing the queen or king, sometimes she was in a conspiracy and her work is still secret. So she does have a presence in the historical records if they are carefully examined.
But the interests of medieval chroniclers were not the same as ours. Historians today are interested in women, in the dispossessed, in the marginal, in the powerless. In particular we are interested in women’s history – women as a group, and individual women. Historians would now agree that an account of a society which does not look at the lives of half of the population is only half an account. Jacquetta’s life, as a prominent medieval woman, can tell us much about the queen’s court, about elite life, about marriage, loyalty, social mobility, sex, childbirth and survival. She is interesting as a representative of her time and class as well as her gender. The medieval historians do not record such things; we have to look for them through the records, reading between the lines.
The histories of the other two women of this book are little better known; but Elizabeth Woodville’s life story has been told largely in terms of her second husband Edward IV, and the tragedy of her son Edward V. She is often slandered – as a social climber, as an abuser of power and as morally corrupt – on a biased reading of very little evidence. Margaret Beaufort, on the other hand, has been made into a stereotype of virtue. There is very little written about her, and even less that sounds realistic. We can read about her piety and self-sacrifice, almost nothing about her ambition, conspiracy and passion. Much of the work she undertook for her son was done in secret,
the collaborators sworn to silence and any documents destroyed. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the history of her life’s work: it was a secret she kept to the grave.
And finally, to me these women are interesting as individuals. They are my heroines, they are my foremothers. To paraphrase Ecclesiasticus 44:1, ‘Let us now praise famous women, and our mothers that begat us . . .’ If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.
WHAT IS HISTORY?
History is not a simple factual record though it depends on the facts. There are sciences underpinning the making of history; for instance, the sciences of archaeology, forensics, genetics or geography; but history itself is not a science. There may be historical explanations which can be expressed in forms other than prose: in formulae, in statistics, or in maps. But most history is written in prose; and the selection of the material, the organisation into narrative and the choice of language show that it is a created form, an art.
Selection is inevitable. No history can include all the known facts of any event, even a single small limited event. There is simply too much material for one description. This is now so thoroughly agreed that the very idea of a total history – a History of the English-Speaking Peoples sort of history – is regarded by historians as impossible. We all understand that under such inclusive titles there were massive exclusions by the historian, sometimes unstated, sometimes unconscious. These days we understand that only a partial story can ever be told, and there is no longer any expectation that a historian will tell the whole of history, or even explain the full context. Historians select what story they are going to tell, then they select what facts they are going to use to illustrate and prove this story. They make this selection on the basis of what they think is most relevant to their subject, and on what is most interesting to themselves. Just because it is factual does not mean it is innocent of artifice. It is structured: the process of selection, assembly, description, consideration and ranking of facts shows that. There is no such thing as an unbiased unprejudiced history. The very act of selection of the subject introduces a bias. The author’s preferences and opinions are the basis of the history that he or she writes, though sometimes readers – reading only one account or perhaps watching only one historian on television – think that this single view represents the totality of the subject. It does not, it cannot. It only ever represents the totality of the view of one historian. Someone else, even someone looking at exactly the same facts, might read them differently to a different conclusion, or start with a different view.
The writing of a history book is a personal process, a creative process, undertaken inside the strict innate rules of a craft form. Historians only rarely explain their process and their prejudices; these are rightly concealed under the smooth narrative of the story they have chosen to tell. They almost never discuss their writing style. Reviewers and readers tend to look at the content, but hardly ever question the narrative technique of a history. It is interesting that the convention of how histories are written is almost never challenged; though it is a powerful unstated convention, almost universally applied. Almost all histories are almost always written in the third person. Very occasionally, histories are written in third-person present tense – a device to give the illusion of intimacy. You will often see this in promotional material trying to entice readers into studying a history which the publicist secretly fears is too old and too dull: ‘Mary Queen of Scots is in flight from rebels in Scotland and puts her trust in her cousin Elizabeth.’
Most histories are written in third-person past tense with a concealed narrator – the magisterial voice, a tone most powerful in conveying information without inviting challenge: ‘For Elizabeth, Robert Dudley had one supreme advantage over all her other male admirers. He could not offer her marriage.’
As readers we are accustomed to accepting information from a concealed narrator. It is also the form used to convey instruction in everyday life: ‘During rapid heat-up, do not place any food in the cooking compartment.’ And, of course, it is the form usually used for orders: ‘Jews will not be permitted to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood as domestic servants.’
In short, the concealed narrator is the one who reassures the reader that he is an authority to be trusted, or whose commands should be obeyed. The historian, fallible, biased, prejudiced, sometimes ignorant – above all, singular with a singular point of view – writes in a form which sounds universal, authoritative, certain. And – significantly – the form conceals his or her very presence. How much less powerful is the phrase ‘I think that, for Elizabeth, Robert Dudley had one supreme advantage over all her other male admirers. He could not offer her marriage . . .’ than the authority of the sentence when the historian’s thought process is unstated, and the historian herself is invisible.
History is a personal creative craft, not a science; it is an account made by each historian, not a body of facts which exists independently of them. Indeed, there is no such thing as a ‘body’ of accepted facts – it is more like an ‘amorphous flock’ of accepted facts of which the individuals come and go. E.H. Carr, answering this very question, discusses how a fact discovered by one historian might become an accepted ‘historical’ fact, and be admitted to the general body of known historical facts, changing the narrative. He suggests a fair admission policy would be when a fact has been cited by three different historians.
Equally, I suppose, a historical fact might fall out of the historical record. Perhaps Anne Boleyn’s vestigial finger (almost certainly a fallacy invented by her detractors) may disappear in time. It was ‘common knowledge’ when I was at school; it has now disappeared from reputable scholarly histories, lingering only in popular belief. Perhaps another decade will see it disappear altogether. History is a created narrative which tells a story stepping from one agreed fact to another, with gulfs of unknown between each step, bridged only by speculation and imagination.
WHAT IS FICTION?
Fiction is not wholly the creation of an imaginary world, any more than history is the total description of a real one. Even the most unrealistic and fantasy-like fictional creations have a lineage which often stretches back to a reality. The extraordinary creations of science fiction are often rooted in science research, as the work of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein demonstrates. Their fiction is rooted in science fact, research or possibility and is called ‘hard science fiction’ as a result. Other novel forms are also based on reality. Some great classics have even been written to expose a reality of life and stimulate change. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is a novel set in the northern manufacturing towns as an appeal for better treatment of the workers. Other novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, use a real childhood experience as the starting point for the fiction. Some novels are firmly based in the real present world of the author, with fictional characters and story. Jane Austen’s Persuasion accurately describes Bath and Lyme. Some novels go even further into reality, taking their setting, characters and, even, events from everyday life; and some tell stories of the historical past.
HISTORY AND FICTION
It is odd that – even though history is not purely fact, nor fiction purely imaginary – historical fiction, which openly declares itself to be both fact and fiction, should be denied serious attention. Too many critics think of historical fiction as flawed and unreliable history, written by authors too lazy to check the facts. Others condemn it for being insufficiently imaginative, written by authors too lazy to invent. Some readers want to know the proportion of fact to fiction – as if fact and fiction were not combined in every form of writing, as if historical fiction were a recipe. Some readers want to identify the facts from the fiction; but this is to deny the very form
of the novel: something that combines fact and fiction.
As a writer who prefers to read history to fiction – but loves to write history, journalism and fiction – I choose to write historical fiction for love of the form. I find it uniquely satisfying to be able to research real characters in the real past and then speculate about their emotions, motives and unconscious desires, which cannot be discovered from the records they left, but have to be imagined.
There are differences between historians and novelists, of course. But perhaps fewer differences than readers think. Historians, like novelists, have to make things up – make up their view of the character, theorise about the character, imagine the character’s inner life. As any biographer will confirm, the subject of a history is created in the mind of the author, built up from anecdotes and facts and snippets and portraits, in just the same way as a fictional character is made in the mind of a novelist. Both writers use their imagination to flesh out and animate their subject. The process of imagining someone who no longer exists is very like the process of imagining someone who has never existed.
Historians have to speculate. There are simply not enough certain facts available to write an unbroken historical account in which everything is known. Historians have to speculate about how one character arrives at a conclusion, who has advised him, how events are caused. When historians speculate, they make it clear they are doing so (at any rate the good ones do!). You will find the essays in this book are full of ‘probably’s, ‘maybe’s, and ‘likely’s. It is frustrating for the historian; but in many instances, when there is no record of what exactly a historical character was doing, the historian has to fall back on what was most likely, what people of the same sort were doing, what would be typical behaviour at this particular time.
Novelists writing historical fiction do the same (at any rate the good ones do!). A nonsensical novelist will make up whatever he likes – but I am not concerned here with what should really be called historical fantasy – when an imagined historical period offers little more than the costume and the excuse for the story, a creation more like a pantomime than a realistic drama. Here I am discussing the serious historical novel in which the author takes the history seriously, researches like a historian, but chooses to write as a novelist. The historical novelist who is serious about his craft will speculate just like the historian, falling back on the most likely of the facts available. The job of the historian is to select the facts, speculate, and then declare the speculation and acknowledge other possibilities. The job of the novelist is to take the facts, speculate, and make such a convincing story-path of the speculation that the reader does not wonder if there was any other route. The novelist cannot allow the reader to escape from the spell of the novel; the reader cannot be allowed to unpick the history from the fiction until the book is closed at the very end of the story. To write a successful novel, the historical fact, the history-based speculation and the pure fiction have to blend.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 1
