And I thought I didn't like history. What a pity I didn't have you as a history teacher in school!

One minor point, though: Heidi (the cat in the icon) very possibly is a firearm. Do not be fooled by her sweet and pretty appearance. She is Daughter of Greebo.

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Hah! I know cats like that. Not so much firearms as landmines, specifically Claymores (Terry said as much about Greebo...)

The "cat as firearm" comment is something I encountered years ago and have since lost my source: however, the story refers to (I think) either Shelley or Byron as college undergrads. Regulations forbade the keeping of pets, but sporting guns were permitted, so "for the purposes of college records, your cat is deemed to be a firearm." I think it's true; I hope it's true, and even if it isn't, it should be true.

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It should indeed!

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Yup.

My main quarrel with Tey is that she goes on and on about not ignoring evidence and then ignores the most important contemporary evidence in the Manchini letters - which had been available for some years before the publication of A Daughter of Time.

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That was rather naughty of her, but

(a) Daughter of Time is a semi-historical whodunnit rather than a historical text (not much of an excuse for deliberately leaving stuff out...)

(b) I can't really blame her for loading the dice a bit. She probably regarded it as justified, considering how much the Richard III story tends to slant the other way.

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considering how much the Richard III story tends to slant the other way.

Possibly because most of the evidence is for the other way...

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Not evidence firm enough to swing a guilty verdict in a courtroom, though, even with David Starkey as a prosecution witness.

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Unfortunately, that could be said about most of history. It is not until we reach the 19th Century that there are enough reasonably impartial eyewitness accounts for us to be reasonably sure that something actually happened, let alone how it happened and what day it occurred on.

"Beyond reasonable doubt" is very different from "the balance of the evidence suggests" but most history is on the latter rather than the former basis.

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And even well-documented history starts to fall apart when it's translated to the screen as either pop-history or a background for drama.

Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor was made within 60 years of the real event, yet is riddled with inaccuracies, because of artistic license (understandable) because original equipment wasn't available (less acceptable when so much was CGI) or because the film-makers just didn't care.

That was just a piece of entertainment. History made inaccurate by the requirements or demands of superiors with their own reasons for the inaccuracy is something else again.

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I agree absolutely. It's why I can't read historical fiction. My objection to Tey was the dishonesty of insisting that "all the evidence" needs to be considered, then leaving out the parts that historians of the period had been deeply excited about just a few years before - and that did not support her case. In fact, she took almost everything from a single revisionist book.

I've seen far worse, both on screen and on the page, but Tey's book started the whole Richardian cult, which does not add an awful lot to scholarship. And it's the quote about the evidence, which I have seen twice recently on various blogs, cited as if that was just what she had actually done, that sticks in my craw.

You know, rather like those films that insist they are based on true stories, yet get everything wrong. King Arthur springs immediately to mind, but history_spork is a favourite of mine for laughing at everything from The Sound of Music to The Patriot.

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Any mention of WW2 movies always brings back memories of my Dad (who landed on Sword beach) and his friend Armand (French resistance) watching The Longest Day on French TV with subtitles and every now and then shouting at the TV stuff along the lines of 'the bloody Americans weren't there / didn't do that. I know because I WAS THERE!'

I learned quite a few new words my French teacher would never teach us that way...

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So TV can be educational - at least where language lessons are concerned!

The trouble with US domination of the movie industry is that they can present "history" just the way they want - U-571 is an infuriating example.

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...They actually made a pseudo-documentary on that? I would have expected it to have made an appearance at the Societas fontibus historiae Medii Aevi inveniendis, not Channel 4.

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Ah, but Channel 4 probably paid better.

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invariably. We tend to not pay anything...And I hate to think of the poor professor who was writing their psuedo-society paper on just this topic! Think of their CV!

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the German from Hanover was descended on his mother's side from a Stuart from Scotland, and the Stuarts from Scotland were already close kin of the Tudors from England anyway. (the Orange was the joker in the pack)

Anyway, had the alternative line taken the throne you can pretty much guess that none of the marriages of the descendents have happened as they happened so the final scion of the line would NOT have been the Australian.

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Oh yeah, the whole thing is so speculative as to be "alternate history" a la Harry Turtledove, but with fewer firearms. Or perhaps that should be fewer cats, which would be a mistake.

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never mind "survival of the fittest" - the rule should be "survival of the cutest"

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Cue Andy Robertson's "The Cat" from "The Old Grey Wassail Test" (a.k.a. the Yellow Hymnal): "survival of the cuddliest"...

(What is cuter than a basket of kittens? Anything?)

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The Orange wasn't the joker in the pack. The order of succession (post the Act that prevented Catholics from becoming King or Queen), the order of succession went: Mary, Anne, William (of Orange). William married Mary and was persuaded to be the Great Protestant Hope by becoming co-monarch rather than prince consort, which meant he continued as King when Mary died. However, had he remarried as King and produced children, those children would have been behind Anne in the succession.

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I did some genealogy a few years back and discovered that I'm descended from Edward I's thirteenth child, Elizabeth of Rhuddlan. By that logic, I have just as much claim. (Not that I'd want it, honestly ...)

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Yeah, because it probably had some odd nickname or epithet to help Daddy remember which one of the soccer-team-plus-reserves Elizabeth was.

Edward I was Longshanks, The Hammer of the Scots, so what were all the others called? Let me see:

Shortarse, The Tackdriver of the Welsh; Knockknees, The Ballpeen of the Spalpeens; Bandylegs, the Mallet of the Manx; Curtnose, the Gavel of the Cornish... and so on.

You run out of hammers fairly fast, and being Hammertoes, the Staplegun of the Normans, somehow lacks pizzazz.

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Baha. I think I'll stick it in the list of "Cute but unverified stories to tell the kids", along with my husband's "probably the illegitimate son of one of the Sex Pistols" gem. ;)

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I think it all boils down to whether you were a 'good King' or a 'bad King' in the eyes of the Historians, who were after all, always paid by the victors.

Edited at 2009-11-04 09:53 pm (UTC)

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Right but Repulsive, or Wrong yet Wromantic, as the Good Book says.

Also, per my comments about deliberate inaccuracies: More was writing during the reign of Henry VIII, Shakespeare during the reign of Elizabeth I: neither would look kindly on their father/grandfather being represented as anything but Right and Romantic (though where Henry VII was concerned, that had to be a bit of a stretch.)

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"Which means that two World Wars – the first one in particular – began as something of a family squabble."

I have long regarded the First World War as Victoria's fault: populating the royal families of Europe with her descendants in the horribly mistaken belief that they would all get along.

And then Willy had a spat with Nicolas and George; and George left Nicholas and his family in the lurch to be murdered. Oh, and a few million died but they didn't count.

Nasty bunch, the lot of 'em.

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Royal families or ordinary families, when somebody says the wrong thing about our Maisie, or who really owns our Mum's silver teapot, there'll be trouble. Bad language, broken crockery - or barbed wire and bombardment.

The first couple of chapters of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August describes it very well; I can guarantee that the horrible domino inevitability of each blinkered, or bad-tempered, or arrogant move will make you want to thump the book in the hope you can make somebody, anybody, just stop and think...

Tuchman's writing really is that good.

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The thing that persuades me of Richard III's innocence is that it was such a *stupid* thing to do. And the man was not stupid - except for a bit of a tendency to believe people when they gave him their word. Had he had them murdered, it would have been so easy to cover it up - as Tey points out but also as others have pointed out.

I don't think Henry VII killed the Princes in the Tower - if they were murdered (as opposed to dying of illness during Henry's invasion), the person I'd finger as most likely is Margaret Beaufort.

An LA entertainment lawyer - Bertram Fields - did a rather good legal analysis (as in, could we bring anything to court and make it stick) called Royal Blood. Nicely done, since he seems to have got into it from curiosity, and IIRC, had no particular agenda to trumpet.

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Just so: a formal, deep-mourning display of what Tey calls "the poor lambs dead of fever" would stop the are they?/aren't they? muttering, and might even put paid to the pretender problem Henry VII had to deal with. It probably wouldn't shut up the did he/didn't he do it? speculation, but the open admission that they were dead would stand well against any lack of mystery, and there's always the pragmatic "it's happened, they're gone, he's still King so anything for a quiet life" approach.

This is the first time I've heard Margaret Beaufort suggested as a potential Prince-murderer (your own theory, or have I been reading the wrong books?)

It certainly makes sense: providing propaganda for her son's ambitions, leaving the cordially-hated Richard in a cleft stick - damned if he admits they're dead, damned if he denies it - and giving reasons besides filial affection for all the goodies she accrued after Henry won at Bosworth.

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I did come to it pretty independently, but I'm not the only person to have thought of her. A truly formidable woman and it's very telling that Elizabeth of York - the Queen of England - never ran her own household - it was run by her Majesty, the King's Mother. That was an unprecedented situation in England - moreover, it was a situation that was not repeated until George I became King, but in that case, poor Sophia Dorothea was locked up in prison by her husband and was never crowned queen. Even Henry VIII's assorted queens were in charge of their own households, even if only nominally.

Not that this means that Elizabeth was not trusted and loved by her husband, but she really did have the mother in law from hell. (And it also suggests strongly that Henry listened to his mother always - probably a sensible move on his part, if only for his own safety.) And everything I've read about Margaret suggests she would have no compunction about removing anything that got in her son's way.

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The documentary also ignores other blips that mean "descent by Blood Royal" is hypothetical at best.

Um… No. James VI and I was a great-grandson of Margaret Tudor. George I was a great-grandson of James VI & I, via his eldest child, Elizabeth 'the Winter Queen' of Bohemia.

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There has to be some point where dilution or admixture starts raising eyebrows about claims of "rightful descent" - though as usual, possession backed by political and/or military support carries a lot more weight than pedigree!

I made the following note about Charles II as background for Blood's Ruby: Sir George Downing is insisting that Colonel Blood, being Irish, is an unreliable agent for a mission concerning the English Crown, and I wanted King Charles, who'd personally chosen Blood, to have a put-down ready.

Charles II married the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza.
His father Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France, who was half French, half Italian.
His grandfather James I married Anne of Denmark who was half Danish, half German.
His great-grandfather Henry Stuart, Duke of Albany, married Mary, Queen of Scots, who was half Scottish, half French.
By my calculation this means that Charles II, the King of England, was at best 1/4 Scottish, with no English blood at all for at least three generations, and gives Charles his response to Downing's objection that only "proper Englishmen" make reliable agents.

Of course I may have got my genealogical proportions wrong, but then I was always better at history than maths - and I have the O-level grades to prove it. :-)

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Yes, but all those descents are the next direct descendant from the most recent monarch who still has heirs (and allowing for the Catholics to be excluded post James II - the current direct Catholic descendants are a German Prince and his daughter who is Crown Princess of Lichtenstein.

The Aussie theory is a bit out since that branch were under attainder, and in fact Richard was not considering reversing the attainder; instead he named - or was in the process of naming - the son of his sister, the Duchess of Burgundy, as his heir.

Why yes, I have been reading up on this period recently. And for what is hopefully a seriously good idea.

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Also, once one becomes King (or Queen) of England, one is automatically English. Even if everyone then sniggers about you being German.

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If you are going to ignore all claims that are made "by right of battle" then the only true line stems from Haralds two sons and their descendants. Good luck finding them!

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Surely the only true claim comes from Boudicaa's descendants *g*.

That's the trouble, when you go back you find that everyone has been taking land from each other by force since the race began and there are no 'natural' rulers (or owners).

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